The Eagles' Brood

III

How does a boy find out about his father? About the man himself, I mean? The fact is, he does not. At least, not the truth about the things the world holds to be important, for when a boy is still a boy, such things truly do not matter. I only discovered my father after I became a man myself, and much of what I have discovered since his death has been made available to me, as I have already said, simply because I am Merlyn. As a boy, I found my father to be a mystical, almost mythical presence on the periphery of my life. He was constantly at war throughout my childhood and my boyhood and I saw him only briefly and occasionally, on his infrequent visits home.

Broad-shouldered, deep-chested and heavily muscled, Picus Britannicus was more than simply a big man. In a world where normal men were five and a half feet tall, he towered more than six. Fully half a head taller than his tallest subordinate, he was a soldier from head to toe, inside and out. He was magnificent to look at, with his unusual golden hair, a splendid tunic of white wool bordered with a thick, black stripe, and his gleaming, highly polished black leather armour and equipment. Even the crest on his helmet was striking, composed of alternate clumps of black and white horsehair. The only part of his dress that did not fit his strict colour scheme was the bronze hilt of the short-sword that hung by his right side, the sword given to him by Uncle Varrus when he first joined the legions. His horses, too— always jet black—were specially selected for their height, so that he was prominent no matter where he went, drawing men's eyes by his size, and by the flashing whiteness of the soft, white wool that lined his great black war cloak. My father was every man's vision of a Commander, and his soldiers loved him.

To his small son, however, he was a daunting, intimidating figure. He spoke little, for an arrow had torn his throat before I was born and had left him with a terrible affliction, so that when he did speak his words were laboured and guttural. He was determined to overcome this failing, however, and as he grew older he did defeat it to a very great extent. He wore his golden hair long, an affectation to cover the hideous scar where the arrow that pierced his mouth had emerged through the back of his neck, and that also marked him as singular among the short-haired Romans whom he led.

On that first day I met him, he awed me completely. The first thing he did after looking me over in silent, wide-eyed surprise was to pick me up by the elbows and lift me like a feather, up into the air until I came eye to eye with him. Then he grinned a huge grin, full of white teeth, and shook me, gently, and placed me back on the ground, growling something I couldn't understand. His men all stepped to meet me, shaking hands with me solemnly, as though I were a man, while the one who had saved me recounted my adventure almost word for word the way I had told him it happened.

This man was Titus, it turned out, one of my father's friends of whom I had heard and read. Another, Quintus Flavius, knelt by the fire, tending the rabbit stew Titus had been savouring on his scouting patrol around the camp before he found me.

As soon as Titus had finished recounting my story, my father looked at me. "Uther?" he growled. "Where is he?"

I shrugged, aware of my own confusion. "I don't know where he went, sir."

"Was he followed?"

Again I shrugged. "I don't know."

"Right. Mount up!"

We left the fire burning. Flavius upended the cooking pot into the coals and a hissing cloud of smoke and ashes whirled into the air. In a matter of seconds we were all mounted and heading back the way Titus and I had come. I rode in front of my father this time, my nakedness covered by his long cloak, and I felt fine, although I was worried about what we might discover on reaching the scene of the attack.

We emerged from the forest almost at the point where I had entered it, and the first person I saw was Uther, fully dressed, riding towards us with four of his father's men. He saw us at the same time and hauled his pony back in a rearing stop, but even as he prepared to run from this new threat, he saw me mounted in front of my father, and I heard the gladness in his voice as he yelled my name and waved my tunic above his head.

"That's Uther!" I said. "He has my clothes."

Two of the men with Uther recognized my father and they came with us as we approached the rest of the survivors. One of my father's men let. out a low whistle of wonder. "Will you look at that!"

For the first time, we saw the effect of Ullic Pendragon's long, yew bows when they were wielded by trained and determined men. There were Saxon bodies everywhere. I tallied fourteen before losing count. Some of our Celts were out among them, pulling their arrows from the dead and wounded bodies. It turned out that our party had lost four men, killed in the first attack, which had caught them by surprise. Not one had been lost after the bowmen began to light, and the surviving Saxons had fled in terror from the arrows against which they had no defence.

One of the hillmen laughed as he described what had happened. 'They thought they were safe, you know, inside their fancy ring shirts, until they started falling, pierced through, fancy shirts and all. They've fought against bowmen before, but they've never come up against anything that bites as hard as our new arrows do. Huw, there, hit one of them smack in the head and pierced him through, helmet and all!"

"How far away was he?" my father asked.

"No more than twenty paces. These arrows will go through an oaken board a handsbreadth thick at a hundred and sixty."

My father grunted, an impatient sound, and looked around at the corpses littering the grass. By this time, all of them had been stripped of weapons and of armour, and these had been dumped into a pile close to one of the cooking fires. Huw, the leader of our party of Celts, noticed the Legate's seeming lack of patience and shouted to his men in their native tongue, telling them to get ready to move out, and ordering that the bodies of our four slain men be thrown across their horses for burial later.

Titus nodded towards the pile of weapons and armour. "What will you do with those? Do you have a wagon to load them into?"

"No," growled Huw. "And we can't carry them. I'd thought to bury them. Can't leave them lying around."

Uther interrupted, his voice sounding out of place among the men. "Offer them to the goddess of the tarn, there, where Caius and I went swimming. It's very deep."

"Now there's an idea, boy!" Huw took him up on it and immediately detailed four men to carry the booty over and throw it into the pool. "Breaks my heart to see such waste, but a proper sacrifice in thanks for victory never hurt anyone nor went amiss."

"What about the bodies? The Saxons?" This was Titus again.

Huw's look of contempt was eloquent as he answered. "What about them then? Let the whoresons rot where they lie. The wolves and crows will not take long to clean them up." Something had caught his attention and he raised his voice to a yell. "Come on, you people! Get a move on, will you? It's twenty miles to Camulod from here! We want to get there during damn daylight! Move your arses!"

Flavius was frowning slightly, his face showing puzzlement. "Camulod? Where's that?"

"That's what we call the fort, sir," I answered him. "Camulod."

He looked at my father, who raised one eyebrow and shrugged, saying nothing.

We left the body-strewn field as it was and set a good pace for the Colony. I had pulled on my clothes again and my body was a mass of pain from all the welts, bruises, scratches and cuts I had taken. My right eye was swollen shut and I wanted to cry, but I dared not show myself to be so weak.

Titus reined close to me. "How are you feeling, young Merlyn? Tired?" I tried to smile at him, nodding my head. "I thought so," he continued. "You had a long run there." I nodded again. "Why don't you come and ride with me? Then, if you fall asleep, at least you won't fall off the horse."

He must have read the gratitude in my face, for he brought his horse right alongside my pony and lifted me up in front of him. I looked around me to see if any of the others were laughing at me, but no one was paying any attention at all, and I fell asleep almost immediately, cradled in the grip of Titus, my protector.

I awoke a long time later to the sound of horns, and there in the distance were the walls of Camulod, crowning their hill and overlooking all the valley below. I was a very stiff and sore little boy by then, and I remember it took all of my determination not to cry out in pain as Titus handed me down to the willing hands that reached for me in the courtyard of my uncle's villa. I had a hot bath, and my tiredness overcame me in the course of it. I have no memory of being . put to bed. The next morning, however, I awoke with all my normal vigour, remembering that my father, the Legate Picus, had come home, and hoping that he would stay. He did. He was home this time for good.

Stilicho, my father's Commander-in-Chief, had been recalled from campaigning against the Ostrogoths by his former ward, the Emperor Honorius, and had returned to do his master's bidding, only to be summarily executed for an alleged plot to usurp the Empire for himself. My father had remained behind, facing the Ostrogoths with Stilicho's. army, completely unaware that the same schemers who had brought down Stilicho had condemned him, too, so that Picus Britannicus was a Legate one day and a hunted outlaw the next.

Thanks only to a timely warning and the loyalty of his own veterans, he had been able to make his escape ahead of the men sent to kill him. He had then crossed the continent with a small band of officers and men, and returned to Britain, where he was now safe from the displeasure of the Imperial Court.

Any hopes I had in my small boy's heart of being with my father from that time on were doomed, however. From the time he returned to Camulod, the military activities of the entire Colony increased. Uncle Varrus gave up supreme command of our forces to my father, who immediately set out to upgrade and improve the standard of everything we were involved in, from strengthening the Colony's defences and intensifying the ongoing building activity on the walls, to a major increase in the frequency, and the thoroughness, of mounted patrols around our outlying territories.

In the spring of that year of 409, the realities of large- scale invasion were becoming inescapable. All parts of the coast around our Colony were reporting heavy raids, and rumours abounded of strong parties of raiders—armies composed of many shiploads of warriors—pillaging towns, killing the men and keeping the women for their casual use, and then fortifying the towns themselves as bases for sorties into other parts of the country. Word came that one such base camp had been established to the south-east of us, in a village protected from surprise attack by its location on the upper rise of a low hill. According to the report that reached us via a wandering priest, three raiding groups had combined their strength and had occupied and fortified this place. Now, from the security it offered, they were terrorizing the land for miles around.

I was in the Armoury, listening to a conversation between my father and my uncle, when this news arrived. My father had been talking in his slow, laborious way of the need to build turrets in the walls of the fort to hold ballista, scorpions and other artillery pieces of the kind used by Stilicho's armies. Siege warfare had progressed considerably since the days of Caesar's campaigns in Gaul and Iberia, he said, but most of the brilliant innovations were being developed in defence against siege engines. Castellations at intervals along a wall, jutting out in front of the main line, allowed defenders to pour down murderous fire on their attackers, and the effectiveness of these castellations increased with the concentration of them in any stretch of wall.

Look at the forts of the Saxon Shore, he was saying. They were impregnable simply because of the way they were built. Siege engines could not get near them: That was what we needed to do with Camulod. We must add towers to jut out—far out—along the front, where they could protect the weakest spots in our defences; towers that would allow our soldiers to maintain supremacy, no matter what an attacker might bring up against them; towers that were strategically placed at the salient peaks of the hill of Camulod, and from which defenders could look down and in, towards the shallower gradients.

It was at this point in the discourse that Titus interrupted the meeting, bringing in a messenger with news of the raiders and their fortified base to the south-east. I knew as soon as I saw him that he was one of the wandering priests who spread the Gospel of the Christ throughout the countryside to all who would listen. He was a tall, skinny, bearded man dressed in a simple homespun robe and clutching a shepherd's crook,- the symbol of his calling. He stared in awe at the splendour of the room as he came forward to greet the two occupants, for he was unaware of my tiny presence on the floor behind my father's chair. Both Uncle Varrus and my father listened without interrupting while he told his tale. My father had only two questions: "How far to this place? And how many Saxons?"

The man was unsure of the distance, estimating it at between twenty and thirty miles, but he had himself counted no less than two hundred men in and around the village in the space of two days. My father thanked him and nodded to Titus, who took the priest to find someone who could show him the way to the kitchens. When the doors had closed behind them Uncle Varrus spoke.

"Twenty to thirty miles. That's not too close. They're nowhere near our lands."

"No, Publius, you're wrong. They're far too close. A hundred miles would be too close."

"How do you mean? That's three days' march for that rabble, maybe four or five! A boatload landing to the north or south of us tomorrow could get here sooner."

My father shrugged. "Granted. But they wouldn't. Not unless they were desperate. They'd be too far from their ship, their base. Don't you see it? That's what's important, Publius! These animals have made themselves a base camp on solid ground. You heard the priest. It's fortified. That means it's solid. They don't have to worry about somebody finding it and sinking it. And they have women, too. With enough food and sex, they'll be in no hurry to go back to where they came from. Enough time to relax and enjoy it, and they might decide to stay. Enough time to grow strong and plunder all the countryside around them, and they'll start striking out for new hunting grounds." He stopped and shook his head, then continued. "I don't like this at all. Not one little bit of it."

The door opened and Titus came back into the room.

"Well, what do you think, Titus?"

Titus nodded and spoke.

"Alaric's Visigoths, General. I was thinking of the time they jumped us in Thrace. Once burned, I tend to be wary of fires." .

"Good man. Exactly what occurred to me. Tell Publius. Sit down."

Titus turned to my uncle, seating himself as he did so. "The Visigoths were doing the same thing in Thrace, Commander. They'd storm a town, kill the men, keep the women, and keep them in order by threatening the children. Then they'd pretend to be citizens—changed their clothes and their weapons. We rode right through one of those towns without suspecting a damned thing. Two days later, we met Alaric head on, and just when we needed and expected it least, these people hit us from behind. Damn near cost us the battle and it could have cost us a lot more in men and horses than it did. We thought we had cleaned out ' all the lands behind us, but they were there all the time. An expensive error." '

My father spoke up again, his voice very guttural and almost unintelligible. "Safe base, Publius. Never had one there before. Used it like a catapult. Almost destroyed us."

"So what are you suggesting?" Uncle Varrus asked.

"An expedition. Burn the whoresons out!"

My uncle looked upset. "That's easy to suggest, but how would we go about it? The village is fortified, the priest says. What can your cavalry do against fortified positions?"

"Bowmen."

"What bowmen?"

My father nodded emphatically. "Ullic's people. Those bows of theirs. Pick these people off like pigeons."

"But how, Picus? I don't follow your logic."

Uncle Varrus was at a loss and I could see my father becoming more and more frustrated by his inability to speak clearly. Finally, however, he spat out one word. "Trickery!"

"Trickery? Trick them, you mean? The Saxons? How?"

"Get them out into the open. Alexander's tactics. Surprise them. Draw them out. Damn this throat! Get me a drink, Titus. Something to write with, too."

He wrote for what seemed to me to be hours, with the others reading over his shoulders, and I could see the excitement growing in them as they read. Uncle Varrus clapped him on the shoulder at one point, his voice pitched high with excitement.

"By God, Picus, that might just work! It'll frighten them to death at first and then tempt them to death afterwards! It's brilliant! We have to get word to Ullic and Uric immediately. I wonder how many bowmen they have now? Well, we'll soon find out. This will be our first chance to try both sets of troops together."

My father spoke again, his voice much clearer now. 'Tell them, lots of arrows."

King Ullic himself came, with my uncle Uric and fifty- four bowmen. It took them ten days to reach us, for they had to be summoned, and then they had preparations to make before they could set out. Titus was the messenger who rode to them with word of what was afoot. He took three horses and rode practically without rest, covering the journey of four days in three, over mountainous terrain all the way, and then he rode straight back again with the word that my grandfather's people were coming at his back. By the time they arrived, the plan of campaign had been made and all the arrangements were in place. A council of war was held on the night of their arrival, from which Uther and I were banned, and the expedition set out early the next morning.

Two hundred and eighty men rode out from Camulod that day, mounted on the pick of our herds. Uther and I watched them go, the first formal military expedition to be sent out from Camulod; the first manifestation of a new force in the land of Britain.

My father rode at their head with Uther's father and Titus. King Ullic rode further back, with his contingent of bowmen, who were mounted for this expedition on our large horses. Used as they were to their small mountain ponies, many of them would be suffering by the end of the forty-mile ride. Each of them carried two quivers of arrows, with the exception of their king himself, who was now too old to pull his own mighty bow.

At the very back of the contingent rode a party of men who looked very different from the others. Uncle Varrus had spent much time experimenting with a new shield suitable for mounted men to carry, ever since the weight of his own shield had bruised his thigh in the charge at Vegetius Sulla's villa years before. Now most of our cavalry carried circular or oval shields slung across their shoulders as they rode. The men at the back of the column, however, all carried the great, heavy scutum of the Roman legionary, and each scutum had a selection of throwing spears and javelins fitted into the leather slings at the back. They made an incongruous addition to the group, but they were there for a purpose.

Uther and I climbed to the top of the walls and watched them until they disappeared among the trees in the distance. We were sick with disappointment at being left behind, but we assured each other that the day would come when we would not only ride out, but would ride out at the head of such parties.