Camulod Chronicles Book 5 - The Sorcer part 1: The Fort at River's Bend

by Whyte, Jack

  Ambrose listened closely to all I had to say, and when I had finished he reined in his horse and kicked one foot free of the stirrup, hooking his knee over the front of his saddle as he turned to peer at me.

  "You think this place is too isolated for the task you've set yourself? And yet you brought him here precisely because of that, and you have effectively achieved a complete disappearance, from Camulod, from your previous life and from all danger to the boy."

  "Damnation, I know that, Ambrose, and for months I believed that I had done the right thing. But as I watch the boy shoot upward, growing like a young tree, I grow increasingly afraid that too much of the time he spends here will be time wasted when he could be learning other things, necessary things, elsewhere, in similar safety."

  "How so? What could he learn about better elsewhere that he cannot learn here?"

  "Life, and the living of it among men of all kinds, venal and noble!" I realized how that sounded and hurried on to negate the insult implied to my friends. "Our people here are good and fine, noble and gracious enough, God knows, and among Derek's Celts the lad will come to no harm. But he is not a normal boy, and that is the crux of all my concerns. We are not raising Arthur Pendragon to be a normal man, Ambrose. Our purpose is to breed a warrior and an enlightened leader. It sounds grandiose and overstated, phrased thus baldly, but it is, nonetheless, the truth.

  If the lad is to rule, in Camulod or Cambria or Cornwall, he must learn to be a king—a warrior and a leader, greater than a Vortigern and free of such errors as Vortigern has made—and I believe he will not learn such things stuck here in isolation. To learn, he needs examples—of the weaknesses of men as much as of their strengths—and to find those he must look abroad, in the world of men, where ambition and greed and ruthlessness and petty, thieving treachery are daily things, exposed and shown for what they are by nobility and honour and integrity. Only by seeing such things will he learn how to deal with them and rise above them. I learned them by riding on patrols with Uther, keeping the peace in Camulod and dealing with the people beyond our domain. You learned them by riding to war with your guardian uncle, in Lindum, and with Vortigern, keeping the peace and guarding your king's affairs. Arthur may learn the theories behind such things up here, but he will lack the practical aspect of training. We have no venal traitors in our little group—no monsters like Lot of Cornwall or the demented, deformed Carthac. We lack even a Peter Ironhair."

  "I think you are overwrought, Cay." The level tone of Ambrose's voice brought home to me the stridency that had been present in my own. "I can see clearly why you are so concerned. This is a lonely life you lead, up here, and I have no doubt its shortcomings loom more starkly in the winter months, but I think you are worrying unnecessarily. Arthur will come home eventually to Camulod, as planned, when he and his friends are old enough to ride with our troopers. That has already been discussed and agreed upon, and should take place within the next three or four years—perhaps even sooner if the lad continues to shoot up the way he's going. In the meantime, our concern must be to keep him safe, to provide him with a stable, wholesome home, and to teach him all he is capable of learning. Although after what he taught us both a few nights ago, it might be more accurate to say we should teach him all that we are capable of teaching, for I suspect he'll learn much more than that, eventually.

  "Here in these mountains you can teach him to fight like a warrior, on horseback and on foot, and to live like a man, in self-sufficiency. You can teach him the lessons learned and taught to you by those who learned them years before young Arthur's father saw the light of day. You can give him enlightenment: the power to read and write, both of them sadly lacking in this land today. The people with whom you have surrounded him are the best teachers he could have, and the boy is highly gifted. He will waste nothing, learning from such as these. So let him learn from them, but expose him to other sources, too.

  "Think about taking him away, to Gaul, to spend some time with your friend Bishop Germanus, and let him see how others live in other climes. Maybe take him to Eire, where there are no roads, and to the northern islands his grandfather holds, and let him see how primitive life is in such remote and hostile places. You could take him abroad in Britain, too ... not to Cambria or to Cornwall, or even to Camulod, yet. But across the brow of the country, following the Roman roads you spoke of, to Vortigern for a certainty, I should think, providing the king's peace lasts there, in the north-east. Why not? The boy has no enemies there, nor do you, and Vortigern is kindly disposed to you, as is Hengist. Remember, you are no longer Merlyn of Camulod; you'll travel as a common traveller, in company with others and a boy or two, perhaps even four. You'll both be better for it. His Uncle Connor would be happy to escort you anywhere by sea, even to Gaul, I would imagine."

  Listening, I heard the truth and wisdom of my brother's counsel, and sat straighter in my saddle, the cares caused by my thoughts on this over the past months falling away like leaves in autumn. I nodded my thanks wordlessly, and he returned my nod and kicked his horse forward again, towards the woods that loomed a short distance ahead. From then on, we rode in silence, appreciating the beauty of the day and little considering how the Fates themselves would dictate the tempo of Arthur's progress and education.

  Not everyone in the hillside forest clearing to which we eventually came was sawing wood. Long before we reached the spot, we could hear the rapid and unmistakable sound of practice swords hammering at each other with the solid, ringing, concussive authority that bespoke a number of mature men belabouring each other mightily. It soon became clear, however, that others were working. Now we could hear the hollow-sounding thock of hard- swung axes and, farther off, the asthmatic rasping of saw blades chewing at green wood.

  When we emerged from the woods, we saw that Dedalus and Rufio were the two swordsmen, as I had known they would be, simply from the rattling rhythm of their "blades." Behind them, almost beyond our sight, I could see Mark, our master carpenter, whose skills and knowledge placed him in command of this work group. A team of four harnessed horses was pulling and straining on his right under the urging of one of Derek's men, while the burden with which they were struggling lay somewhere beyond my sight. The man handling the horses turned slightly towards us, and I was surprised to recognize him as Longinus, Derek's artillery commander, who evidently worked as a teamster when not called upon to practise his skills with heavy weaponry.

  Off to my left, along the bottom of the slope on which we sat, I could see Joseph and Hector, smith and farmer, working together as a team, driving their axe heads with perfect, flawless rhythm into the solid heartwood of a great oak tree. Lars and Jonathan would be somewhere close by, I knew, working in or around the saw-pit, with a handful of other men, some of them new arrivals, others brought in this morning from Ravenglass to aid with this task of felling and dressing enough trees to keep us supplied with strong, well-seasoned lumber for the next few years.

  Dedalus and Rufio had not seen us arrive, so total was their concentration on what they were doing. A moment's carelessness in their pastime could bring great pain. The thick ash dowels from which the wooden practice swords were made were as heavy and unyielding as iron, and both men were wearing only light leather armour. A rap with a hard-swung dowel on an exposed arm could break a bone, so both men were rapt in what they were about. Ambrose sat staring at them in amazement, for there was something here he had never seen before, something completely new that had emerged during the winter past. Neither Dedalus nor Rufio held a shield; instead, each held an ash practice sword in either hand. The swinging, swaying play of the "blades," underlined by the brilliant, rhythmical clattering as they glanced off each other—four sounds instead of two—turned what the two men were doing into an elaborate, bedazzling ritual-like dance.

  Dedalus had begun this thing, two summers earlier. He had always been equally gifted with both hands, to the confusion, envy and disgust of his friends, enemies and competitors. After seeing and admiring
the dazzling skills of an itinerant juggler in Camulod several years before, Dedalus had developed a game he played by himself, revelling in his mastery of the skills of hand and eye coordination it required. He would control a third sword with the blades of two others, holding it between them and juggling it astoundingly, sending it into great leaps and spinning bounds, throwing it high in the air, spinning end over end, to fall back and be recaptured by the other blades.

  Rufio had been impressed, at first, then cynical. But then, never one to lie back and allow another to win all the laurels, he had eventually begun to practise the same game on his own, in secret, until he had become almost as adept at it as was Dedalus. At that point he stepped forward and issued a challenge to Ded. No one could guess how long or how hard Rufio had been working to acquire his skills, but his progress had been astounding. The contest between the two men for championship status was long, close, hard fought and never settled. Many wagers had been won and lost by the time the contest had moved on to its next stage.

  Asked about it afterward, neither man could pinpoint the occasion when the next degree of challenge actually emerged. It simply turned out that one day, instead of spinning their third blades, the two men had begun matching their twin blades against each other, testing each other's defensive and offensive skills. From that time on, they never played three blades again; they pitted their skills against each other, and those skills became formidable. No other would have dreamed of standing against either of them.

  Sitting beside Ambrose, I told him how the contest had evolved. "That's what gave me the idea for the new sticks." Ambrose merely glanced at me, wide eyed. "The forward leap," I continued, knowing that he had not understood me. "The leap from one sword to two, then to a third, and then to this. For more than a thousand years, men learned to use those wooden swords to perfection. Their weight—twice that of their real, iron swords—meant that the men's arm muscles were huge and agile. Their real swords felt like feathers in their hands, and with them, they conquered the entire world. Gladium and scutum—short-sword and shield. Nothing in the world withstood them for a thousand years. With your gladium in your right hand, your scutum in your left, defending your squad-mate on your right while the man on your left defended you, you were invincible— a Roman legionary. That lasted for longer than a millennium. And now they're obsolete, within the space of our lifetime. The legions are all gone. Their troops are scattered, their techniques abandoned, and their short-swords useless without that man defending on your left, without the legion's hierarchy, traditions and discipline.

  "Now men use longer swords, but they don't use them well, because there is no discipline for using them. There's no way of training to fight consistently with them, because there's no consistency in the swords themselves. They're long, but they're all of different lengths and weights, and even shapes. The old techniques of training—one man facing a wooden post, practising cut, thrust and stab—won't work with these long swords. The longer blades demand a wider swing, and therefore they deliver less precision in attack. There is no organized technique for them, no ritual defence, no skilled, detailed procedure of attack.

  "And then one day I saw Ded and Rufio using two swords each, two hands, flashing and displaying skills the like of which had never been seen before, by me or anyone. Two hands, two blades—twice the speed, twice the weight and twice the skill. And in my mind I saw, all at once and without warning, a longer stick—a staff—twice as heavy as Excalibur, requiring twice the effort to control its arc and thrust and stab."

  Ambrose was staring at me now, paying no heed to the men below, who had stopped fighting and were laughing now together, bent over and wheezing for breath, still unaware of our presence above them. "And?" he prodded.

  "And I spoke of it to Dedalus and Rufio." I shrugged. "We made some practice pieces, from some unseasoned wood, then dried some others in a kiln, experimented with the length and weight, trial and error, and evolved the prototypes you saw and used today."

  A shout of raucous greeting from beneath told us our presence had been discovered. Ambrose glanced down and waved, smiling, but then turned back to me. "But you used two hands on the stick. You would not do that with a keen- edged sword, not without losing your fingers."

  "No, I would not, but a stick is not a sword. These staves of ours are weapons in their own right, as well as practice swords. And as weapons, they have advantages that swords don't have—weight, heft and bluntness. They are clubs, bludgeons as well as swords. Let's go down. We can talk more of this later, with Ded and Rufio. I promise you, you will find great pleasure and great usefulness in this. The simple fact of working consistently with these new things—we have no name for them, we call them simply staves— improves everything in which a fighting man might seek improvement, afoot or mounted: balance, dexterity, weight distribution, strength of arm and leg and wind."

  Much good did come of what Ambrose would learn that day, but that day itself was not the time best suited for the learning of it. Ambrose and I ended up, stripped to our loincloths and "assisted" by a highly jocular quartet of sawyers from Ravenglass, working in the saw-pit, occasioning great merriment to all who came to watch, as everyone made sure to do. The saw-pit, as we princes of Camulod discovered, was a humbling place, constituting a rite of passage all on its own.

  I know that saws have been around forever, ever since the first men learned how to shape and sharpen metal and make it do what they required of it. The story of the making of the first saw blade is one long lost to history, but, once discovered, the secret swept across the world. Saws earned their place among the most widely used of tools and implements: first they were used on wood, to shape round tree trunks into straight-sided beams, and then eventually, with the development of stronger metals, they were used for cutting certain kinds of stone. Saws became so commonplace that people who were not sawyers seldom took note of them. It must have been similar, therefore, it seemed to me, with saw-pits: they were common things, but seldom noted and widely ignored. Most men might live their lives in ignorance that such things even existed. I know now, however, from my own experience, that no man who has worked in a saw-pit could ever forget or ignore the existence of such places.

  Consider the felling of a tree. It has grown to maturity in its own place, while endless generations of men have lived and died, and its heartwood is sound and solid, the finest, strongest material available to men for building their constructions, from huts to barns to houses and great halls, and from wagons and wains to galleys and the great biremes, triremes and quadriremes of the now vanished Roman trading fleets. The time arrives for the tree to be felled, trimmed and fashioned into lumber, squared and planed and shaped to men's requirements. The axes bite and chew, and after time has passed and sweat and toil and keen-edged blades have done their work, the tree falls crashing to the ground. Now the limbs and branches are removed, and the great tree is sawn into log lengths. That part is easy. The difficulty comes in transforming the logs, which are cylindrical, into squared beams or planks.

  Thus was the saw-pit created, and it is among the simplest, most functional workplaces in the world: a pit beneath a system of cradles and pulleys for holding logs. Each log is laid above the pit and sawn lengthwise, by teams of men using long, heavy, double-handed saws. One man stands above the log, the other in the pit beneath, and they change places frequently, since the man on top must work harder than the man beneath, pushing downward on the cutting stroke and pulling up on the return. Nevertheless, the man below spends all his time waiting for the moment when he can climb above, because below, he is constantly enveloped in the sawdust from the cutting above. His entire body is a seething mass of relentless itching caused by the sawdust, and the sap it contains, adhering to his sweat-covered skin, clogging his eyes, ears and nostrils, and clinging densely to every hair on his tortured body.

  Sawyers love to see a novice approach the pit, and they take intense delight in pointing out how much less work there is in being be
neath, and then in gulling the raw newcomer into a rash commitment to remain below for longer than a normal man can stand. Hence the jocularity of our quartet of assistants and the hilarity with which the others all came to watch as Ambrose and I laboured mightily, and sweatily, beneath the constant, clinging, aromatic cascade that blinded us and blocked our nostrils and our mouths and drove us to our knees, coughing and spluttering among the mounds of yielding, treacherous, foot-fouling and sweet-smelling oaken sawdust.

  By the time they relented and allowed us to alternate and work above the pit, as well as in it, my brother and I had learned a new analogy to apply to the high and low fluctuations of life and fortune. The effort of grappling with green wood for one short, but seemingly endless day had bred in us a lasting appreciation of well-seasoned timber. That very night, sitting exhausted by the cooking fire outside the fort's front gates, I found myself gazing at the carving on my two-handed staff with more appreciation than I had ever felt before, and testing its strength and resilience in my hands, trying in vain to make it bend or even flex.

  Dedalus and Rufio had talked at length with Ambrose and me, in the bathhouse and afterwards, at dinner, about some of the things they had already discovered about fighting and training with the new staves. Both men were very enthusiastic about the potential of this new form of training—for they saw it as training in a new technique, plain and simple—and had no difficulty visualizing armies being trained using the new method to learn the skills that had to be applied to fighting with long swords.

  Ambrose, however, was sceptical of that. He believed that widespread use of the long sword would be curtailed by the technological and logistical difficulties of large- scale production. Iron ore was no longer being widely mined and smelted in Britain, he pointed out. With the legions now gone for more than four decades, the industry of forging swords had dwindled to a local skill. We had forges in Camulod capable of smelting ore, could we but procure it, and of turning out long swords by the hundred, but Camulod was unique in that. Ambrose believed that warriors henceforth would carry motley weapons and armour, garnered, bought or stolen from wherever they could be found. Few of those weapons, he felt, would be swords of any description. He believed that clubs and axes would once again become more common than swords, and that the spears of ordinary men would soon degenerate again into long poles with fire-hardened, wooden points.