The Eagles' Brood

XXXIX

On leaving Camulod, I rode directly east along our own well-used roadway until it intersected the great north-east to south-west road built four hundred years earlier by the soldiers of Julius Agricola. From there I headed directly southwest. Uther had led out his two thousand men by the same route, although all signs of their passing had been blotted out months earlier, long before the fury unleashed by the lashing rain that had begun the day before I left and poured without respite for the next three days. As night was falling, I approached the tiny town the native Celts were now calling Ilchester. Apart from its unmistakable layout, nowadays the town bore little resemblance to anything Roman, and the original fortifications were almost completely obliterated already. It was a dismal, squalid little place where nothing ever happened, and yet no one I asked there showed any awareness of Uther's having passed through three months earlier, which led me to infer that he had skirted the town, preferring to keep his movements secret from the citizenry. I spent the night there, despite the threat of verminous bedding, determined to enjoy the dryness of a roof over my head for what might well be the last time for several nights. I pressed south again in the morning, making only slow headway, however, against the driving rain.

I slept beneath the dripping trees the second night, no more than twenty miles south-west of Ilchester, having given up all hope of reaching Isca that day, and was surprised to find I slept quite well, wrapped more or less warmly in my blanket-like cloak, which was lined with softer wool than the coarse nap that formed its exterior. Everything was wet, however, even far in from the road in the depths of the forest, and I had no hope of lighting a fire. As I rode on the following day, the unrelenting cold finally began to penetrate the warmth of my heavy, weatherproof clothing and I felt myself becoming chilled, bone deep, until I began to shiver uncontrollably. I knew I had to find shelter, a dry place where I could light a fire and dry out my damp, cold clothes. The rain blew endlessly into my face in icy spikes, chilled by a blustery wind that swirled around me and my horse as though determined to obliterate us, the last two living creatures in this grey, sodden world. I had not met a living soul on the road since leaving Camulod— only mad people and soldiers on urgent duty would brave weather like this without dire need.

By mid-afternoon, my self-absorbed misery had become so all-encompassing that I nearly passed by an old, dilapidated road house, set so far back from the roadside that I had almost not seen it. I reined in my horse and peered at the place through the curtain of driving rain that obscured it. It looked unprepossessing; neither clean nor friendly, and normally I would not have considered stopping there, but I was cold, wet and miserable, and I told myself that the dismal weather would have made even Camulod look dingy and uninviting.

I tethered my horse in the yard, removed my bow, quiver and pack roll, and entered the building without seeing one person. The mansio was small. Its atrium had been roofed over, creating a central hall two storeys high, with covered stairs leading to the second floor where a passageway protected by a waist-high wooden wall ran around the sides of the enclosure, giving access to a number of rooms that were presumably for the guests. The large, roofed space was warm and dry at least, if very dark, and from the ground floor area passages and doorways radiated in all directions. A countered space against the west wall was obviously intended to serve as some kind of porter's or receiver's station, but it was untenanted, although it was lit by two small tripods, each holding the dwindling, messy stubs of four fat, sputtering tallow candles.

I called for attention and eventually the proprietor came striding from the rear of the place to greet me, appearing surprised that anyone should be travelling on such a night. He was a heavy-set, red-faced fellow with a wispy beard and a truculent, ill-tempered look about him.

"Good day to you. I need a room. One with a warm bed and a door that locks."

He eyed me, taking me in from the top of my dripping head to the soles of my chilled feet, and nodded. "Aye," he grunted, "you do, and towels and a large fire and hot food. I'll have my wife prepare them for you. How long will you stay with us?"

I grinned at him through chattering teeth, relieved by the warmth of his greeting, which his initial expression had not led me to expect. "Perhaps forever; at least until I'm warm again and the rain abates, but probably only until tomorrow."

He nodded and, beckoning me to follow him, led me directly upstairs to a pleasant, clean-smelling room where, during the next quarter-hour, I unpacked my belongings and spread them out to air, having carried all of them in from the yard in three journeys, leaving my horses in the care of a groom who seemed to know what he was doing.

Later, I went downstairs to eat a simple but large and nourishing meal that I had been savouring for some time thanks to the delicious smells of roasting meat that drifted up from the kitchens towards my room on the second level. Since I was the only guest in the hostelry, my host and his wife, whom I discovered were named Lars and Brunna, invited me to eat with them, making a fourth with Brunna's brother Eric. I was glad to accept their invitation and the warmth of their company. The food was excellent, and accompanied by a delicious, full-bodied red wine, and I found myself thoroughly enjoying the companionship of these strangers whose comportment bore little of the normal attitude of mansio keepers towards their guests. When the meal was over, there was still wine in the great jug, so we lingered at the table, comfortable and friendly in the ample light of a dozen candles and a huge, roaring fire, while the deluge continued outside with an energy that kept the sound of water pouring from the roof a constant accompaniment to our talk.

Brunna's brother Eric, I discovered, was a trader who travelled the length and breadth of the southern region, operating from his home close to the town of Isca. He was a droll fellow who kept all of us entertained with tales of his adventures on the roads. I asked him eventually whether the growing Saxon presence in the south-east was injuring his ventures, and he looked at me and laughed.

"Injuring them? From what viewpoint, my friend?"

I was perplexed by both his answer and his humour. "From the point of view of interfering with your livelihood, I suppose," was the only response I could summon. And at that he laughed again, even more loudly than he had at first.

"Interfering with it? May the god of travellers protect you, friend, they are my livelihood."

I was astounded. "What do you mean?" I asked him, spluttering in my confusion. "They are Outlanders, savages. They come here with no purpose other than to kill and plunder and pillage. How can you trade with them and hope to continue living? They are alien, without honour."

The smile disappeared from his face at my words. "No, sir. they are none of those things to me. I have never received any ill at their hands. In the communities they have set up along the Saxon Shore they live as well, and as peacefully, as any in this land—more so, indeed, than most. They are mere people—men and women like any others— who have come here seeking a place to live and prosper, and they have need of my goods, so I trade with them as I would with anyone else who has the wherewithal to trade."

Neither his sister nor her husband spoke at this, and"! looked at them for support against his ravings. They sat content, however, not put out at all, and Lars looked at me and shrugged and smiled as if to say, "I agree with him. How can I then gainsay him?"

I sat there in amazement, pondering Eric's words and the reactions of his kinfolk, and realizing I had nothing more to say. Upon hearing his opinion stated so simply, I had no other choice than to believe him, although my training would not permit that.

"Nonsense," I continued eventually, trying to keep my voice even. "What you say is self-serving, Eric. Admit that, at least. You are fortunate in that they need what you have, otherwise you would not be here this night. These people are invaders. The most vicious of their kind in all the Western Empire. They have been terrorizing the whole country for decades."

He shook his head, completely unabashed by my words, and as I listened to his response I felt myself grudgingly acknowledging the truth of what he had to say, although I found it unpalatable.

"No, friend Merlyn, you are selecting your truth to make your own point. You said it yourself. They have been coming here for decades, but for how many decades? How long has the Saxon Shore been called the Saxon Shore? A hundred years? More? Are we to believe these people, these Saxons, have been coming and going constantly through all that time, raiding and leaving?" He smiled and shook his head again. "I know Saxon settlements not fifty miles from here, to the eastward, where there are children being born to Saxons who were born right there.

"They fought when they first came. Of course they did. They were unwelcome, and the land was disputed. But now the land is theirs, and they maintain it better, in most cases, than the people who were there before them did. The Romans fought when first they came here, too. They came as conquerors, remember. Only after all the fighting was done did this land of ours settle down to prosperity."

His eloquence in front of me, a stranger, was probably due, I decided, to the quality and quantity of the wine we had been drinking, but I was unhappy with the way he had demolished my objections.

"The Romans came here for a purpose," I said, hearing the wine and truculence in my own voice. "And they were good for Britain. I myself am of Roman descent."

Eric was grinning widely now, his eyes dancing with mischief. "Of course the Romans came here for a purpose. They came to conquer and to pillage. They came in search of tin and gold and precious treasures. And then they stayed." He shrugged his shoulders, spreading his palms. "But that was centuries ago. I am not decrying them—neither them nor your Roman blood, Merlyn—but who is to say the Roman purpose was more noble than the Saxons' is? Is it impossible that some of your future children may bear the blood of Saxons mingled with your Roman blood?"

"By God, I hope it is!"

Lars cleared his throat loudly, drawing my eyes to him. He had decided it was time to change the subject. I watched him now looking at my clothing, noting the style of it. "You're Roman, you say? Forgive me if you think I'm being inquisitive, but Merlyn sounds like no Roman name I've ever come across."

I felt a smile tugging at my lips in the face of his obvious desire to lead our conversation into quieter paths. "That's true. I am half Celt, and Merlyn marks me, but my name is Britannicus—Caius Merlyn Britannicus."

"Britannicus?" His expression quickened. "Are you from up Aquae Sulis way?"

"Close by. About thirty-five miles south-west of there. Why?"

"It's an unusual name. A friend of my father's had a friend from Aquae Sulis called Britannicus, a long time ago. He went to live there. Name of Varrus. He was a smith, walked with a limp. Why are you smiling?"

My smile had become a huge grin and I leaned towards him now, across the table. "Because I can hardly credit what I'm hearing. Varrus! The friend you speak of was my grandfather, Caius Britannicus. Publius Varrus married his sister, my great-aunt Luceiia."

"Get away! Well I'm damned!" He was staring at me, wide-eyed. "Did you ever know his friend Equus? That was my father."

I could hardly contain my astonishment and delight. "Equus was your father? I knew him well, when I was a small boy. He lived with us. But why don't I know you? I've known your brothers from my infancy."

"Joseph and Carol. Well I'm damned!" He reached across the table and picked up the wine jug to give himself time to absorb what he was hearing, pouring another cup for all of us. "You knew Joseph and Carol? I was the eldest. Ran away and joined the legions when I was just a younker living in Colchester. Didn't want to waste my life in a dirty old smithy. Wasted it in the dirty old army, instead. Got back years later to find they'd all moved away to the west somewhere. So you knew Joseph and Carol? Well I'm damned."

"Knew? Lars, I still know them! They're in Camulod, our colony. They operate our smithies nowadays."

He looked at me strangely and I sensed a sudden stillness in the others who had been hanging on our every word. "Camulod? Uther Pendragon's place? They live there? You live there?"

I was taken aback. His tone said quite clearly, unmistakably, that he had thought only monsters and outlaws lived in Camulod.

"Well, yes, they live there, and so do I, but I would hardly call it 'Uther Pendragon's place.' Uther lives there, part of the time, and commands our forces for the time being, in the war against Lot of Cornwall, but his kingdom—his 'place' as you call it—is in the mountains of Cambria, several days' ride to the north-west. Believe me, Camulod is far from being Uther Pendragon's place, or anyone else's. It's a thriving community, held and maintained by its colonists. You've obviously never been there."

He made a derisive sound in his throat and shook his head in a brief, abrupt negative. I frowned, unable to believe what I was hearing.

"Why not?" I continued. "It's not that far from here, no more than fifty miles." I was even more disconcerted now to see hostility and fear in his face and I glanced at the others, to see it mirrored in theirs. I rushed on, eager to find the source of it. "Good God, Lars, you all look as though you're afraid of the place and all it contains! Why? Your two brothers are there, and I live there, and it was founded and built by people like your own father and his friends. Why should anyone—and you of all people—be afraid of the very name of it?" It was evident that he was not going to answer me, and I had a sudden revelation. "Or is it Uther Pendragon you fear?"

His face darkened, rigid with hostility at the very mention of Uther's name, and I knew I was correct. "Why, Lars?" I was insistent. "Why should you fear Uther Pendragon? Tell me."

He cleared his throat. "Ask Eric. And Brunna."

I turned to them, to include them in what had suddenly become a very personal matter.

An hour later, I had heard more than I ever sought to hear. Lars and his wife Brunna, and their extensive family in and around Isca and the surrounding villages and hamlets, were the ordinary people of this region. In their minds "there was no difference between Uther of Camulod—how that name galled me!—and Lot of Cornwall. They thought of both men as demons incarnate. The armies of both had ravaged this entire countryside over the past three years, looting and killing and raping as they pleased. The local people had far less fear of Saxons than they had of their own kind.

Lars told me he had returned from his service with the legions almost twenty years earlier and had met and wed Brunna shortly after that. He had fought with Magnus Maximus, and then with Stilicho's legions after Magnus was killed. When the Emperor Honorius killed Stilicho, his own deputy and former Regent, Lars deserted and made for home, and the journey as a fugitive, ending finally in the quiet backwater of Isca, had taken him three years. Brunna's family had been merchants of some stature in Isca, and her father had set them up fifteen years ago in this hostelry. They had prospered for twelve years, until Lot of Cornwall decided to extend his territories by conquest.

The previous year, while I had been relearning how to live, both of their sons, aged fourteen and twelve, had been taken in a sweep by Uther's soldiers and hanged out of hand along with twenty other men suspected of giving aid and sustenance to the enemy. Two months after that, at harvest time, Brunna's youngest sister, a fifteen-year-old girl, had been ravished and killed, with three of her friends, by a party of Lot's people. The father and brother of the girl whose home they had been visiting were butchered while attempting to protect the girls.

The picture these simple people drew for me was clear. The "enemy," in their eyes, was anyone who was armed and rode a horse or marched carrying weapons. Uther Pendragon and Gulrhys Lot were monsters, and any trees beneath which they rode were likely to bear dangling, human fruit. Their very names carried with them the stench of rotting flesh and burning homesteads, and evoked chaos, screams of despair, and long, starving winters.

Their story drove the wine-fed euphoria from my head and I slept heavily that night. The following morning, I was on the road again, driving my horses hard along the road to and beyond Isca to the south-west. Lars and all his family would make their way as quickly as they could now to Camulod, bearing a letter from me to my aunt that would place them under my official protection. In the meantime, I rode hard, with my gaze focused on the road ahead of me, and on the confrontation with my cousin that lay at the end of it. I rode seething with a fury so great that it had almost displaced my personal grudge against Uther. To hear the name of Camulod spoken in fear and loathing had outraged all within me and made me rage at my own former, self- inflicted blindness. We had heard tales in Camulod of atrocities and vicious acts of terror being committed by our own, but had discounted them, choosing, in what I could now identify with ease as smug complacency, to attribute such tales to the lies and rumour-mongering of Lot and his creatures—fictitious calumnies concocted for the purpose of turning the people of our own lands against us. Now, shaken by the revelations of the previous night, I saw the Dream of Caius Britannicus and Publius Varrus reduced to smoking cinders in the terror of the people of this land around me. Where had the vision of my people gone? What had happened to their ideals of freedom and justice and dignity and worth; of free men, living and working in freedom, having the right to bear arms to protect that freedom against all usurpation, even by their own kind? I cursed the fate that had left me senseless of what was happening around me for two crucial years, and spurred my mount harder.

And as I rode further and further west after leaving the great road, I began to see signs of depredation all around me: burned farmsteads; charred and shattered houses; dangling, withered corpses in the trees; meadows strewn with the skeletal remains of soldiers and horses. And no people. None at all. The land lay empty and devastated, and my anger grew, feeding upon itself.

And then, on a morning bright with sun and the song of larks, I breasted a hill and found fresh corpses sprawled in the autumn grass in my path. I reined in immediately, scanning ahead for possible danger, but whatever peril there might have been earlier had moved on.

Satisfied that the dead and I were alone, I dismounted and went to examine them more closely. They were strangers all, but very newly dead, their flesh still warm, their blood yet liquid, and I left them where they lay.

A short time later, seen only by a pair of eagles circling high above, I stopped by the side of a small, swift-running freshet, stripped and bathed, shivering with the cold, and then allowed the sun's warmth to dry me. I pulled on a fresh, light, clean tunic, then unpacked and shrugged into the ring armour I had adapted from the Saxon devices of the same kind. Mine was designed for a horseman—a heavy coat with a wide-skirted tail ample enough to spread when I was mounted to cover my own and my horse's haunches, and long, loose-legged trousers. The suit was made from well-worked, supple, black-dyed leather and covered with many thousands of tiny, overlapping rings of iron, brass and copper wire that would stop a hard-swung sword, a thrown spear, or an arrow fired from any but a long, Celtic bow. It covered me from neck to ankle and, while it was cumbersome to wear afoot, it served its purpose magnificently when I was mounted.

When I was fully armoured, my long surcoat securely buckled down the side, I repacked and restowed all my gear, then donned my great black cloak with its emblazoned silver bear. I still wore my silvered Roman helmet with its black plume and full cheek-plates—I had not yet been able to improve on that design—and now I strung the great, horned African bow of Publius Varrus and slung it across my shoulders with a full quiver of long arrows. The black war cloak was heavy on such a hot day—it drew the heat of the sun into itself immediately—but I wanted Uther to know who was coming long before I reached him; and the discomfort involved in wearing it was unimportant. By my right knee, slung through three rings attached to a long, flat piece of toughened leather hide, hung my cross-hilted cavalry sword. On the other side, the hook attached to hold my iron flail glittered, unused. I dug in my spurs and my big black surged forward, leading its consorts.

I had crossed the highest ground in Cornwall, it appeared, for from that point onward the land fell away beneath me, each successive hilltop lower than the one that had preceded it, until eventually I approached the sea coast, seeing from afar the sunlight glittering on the sparkling surface of the waters that stretched beyond the horizon. There, in the valley bottom beneath the last upsurge of coastal hillside, I found the massive track of a passing army, coming from the highlands to my right and proceeding westward, along the coastline. The debris they had left behind lay scattered everywhere and the scene of their passing was a broad riverbed of bruised and flattened grass the width of the valley bottom, winding away from sight to disappear into the south-eastern hills. They had passed by perhaps the day before, no more than that. The grass, I knew, would show little sign of their passing by this time tomorrow.

Without pausing, I put the spurs to the black's flank, heading downhill and cross-slope to find and follow the broad swath. My way was clearly marked and my apprehension grew with every mile. I found the first corpses within four miles of joining the wide track. There had been a skirmish, probably a rearguard action, and Uther's people had not been victorious. All of the dead wore Uther's red dragon blazon, and there was a heap of them, some twenty in number, who lay piled together without weapons. They had been wounded earlier, dragged together, and killed out of hand. All their throats were cut.

From that point onward, I was seldom out of sight of death in one form or another. Several of the bodies I found wore the black boar of Cornwall, but the great majority wore the red Pendragon mark, and too many wore the armour of Camulod. I stopped counting when I had reached several hundred. After that, I simply rode and looked, goading my horses to move more and more quickly through a landscape littered with slain men who had died fighting, and hanged men who had not, and butchered men who had been bound and then casually slaughtered, and among and around all of them were the carrion crows and other loathsome creatures that far outnumbered their silent hosts and feasted on the fruits of men's hatred of one another.

And then I found a living man, who caught my eye by moving. He was above me on a steep hillside, and I pulled my horse up sharply, dropping the reins and whipping my bow into readiness and taking aim before I realized he wore my own uniform: the black and silver Roman-styled armour of Caius Merlyn Britannicus of Camulod. I lowered my weapon and started up the hillside towards him as he began to walk downhill, lurching and staggering. When less than thirty paces separated us, he fell forward onto his face and rolled down almost beneath my horse's feet. Even as he fell I recognized the face beneath the crusted blood that obscured it. It was young Marcus Bassus, one of my most promising junior commanders and the fourth consecutive member of his family to serve loyally in the forces of our Colony.

I was off my horse before Bassus stopped rolling down the hillside, and I cradled him as gently as I could while I looked around for some spot where I could lodge him without further danger. I thought at first he was already dead, but he was only deeply unconscious and I took advantage of that to drag him across the slope to a spot that was grassy and almost flat. There I undid his breastplate, cutting the blood-slick leather straps, and examined his wounds, seeing at once that he was far, far gone. An arrow had pierced deeply beneath his armpit, striking downward from behind and freakishly finding a path between his ribs and deep into his chest. He must have had his arm extended above his head when he was shot. The arrow had broken off at some time—I could not remember having seen it as he approached me—and only a broken stub, less than the length of my thumb, projected from the wound, greasy with partially congealed blood and crusted with dirt. The jagged end of it had torn the inside of his arm, ripping the muscles there and leaving a gristly mess. I had time to bathe his face and pad the inside of his arm against the splintered arrow- stem with a piece of cloth before his eyelids fluttered open.

He knew me, and he was in control of his senses, and in the quarter-hour before I left him there he told me, speaking in a thin, pain-filled voice and breathing in fast, agonizing but shallow gasps, something of what had happened in the previous few days.

Uther, he said, had blundered badly, miscalculating several elements like a man under a curse. He had a spy within Lot's camp, it appeared, who had provided him with a detailed report convincing him that Lot's main force had been committed in the south-east, prior to Uther's arrival in the west, against the incursion of a large Saxon army. Lot had as usual, the story went, sent his army off without him, and had immured himself to await reinforcements in one of his northern strongholds. Once told of this, and believing his source implicitly, Uther had determined to march northward quickly to the coast, there finally to bring Lot to battle before his expected allies could arrive. Thus determined, Uther had refused to listen to the advice of his senior officers, basing everything on the gamble that Lot's main army was safely committed in the south-east against the Saxons and would await Lot's arrival. In the meantime, Uther believed he had the advantage of surprise, with Lot safely bottled up in a minor stronghold that would not be able to withstand a siege. He had ignored the misgivings of his advisers, who had urged him to protect his back against attack from the north-west where, according to other rumours they had heard, a new army of Hibernian Scots mercenaries, the ferocious warriors who were becoming known as galloglas, was on its way to join Lot's summer war.

Uther had chosen to believe otherwise. If the galloglas came, he said, they would come by sea, to anchor at the closest point to Lot's stronghold. Should that come to pass before his business with Lot was complete, he believed he could withhold their advance from the coast by using his bowmen to decimate the Ersemen as they attempted to scale the Cornish cliffs.

What he could not have known, however, was the degree of error in his expectations. He had invested Lot's ditched and dyked stronghold according to plan, but even before his engineers could start constructing their siege engines, word had come with the dawn from his unknown spy that the southern army was returning, having failed to bring the Saxons to battle.

That word was followed within hours by a belated warning that a fleet had landed to the north two days earlier, spilling an army that was short of food and was now thrusting southward to join Lot, replenishing its larders as it came. And then, early that same afternoon, another fleet of more than a hundred galleys had come into view from the north-west, converging on the single stretch of beach, not far from Uther's camp, that was not begirt by towering cliffs.

In the space of a few short hours, although through no real fault of his own, Uther had been outnumbered and outmanoeuvred. Immediately upon sighting the relieving fleet, he had summoned his bowmen back from the cliffs and called an immediate council of war, drawing up quick plans to strike south and surprise Lot's main army on the road along the coast, leaving Cornwall's deplorable king safe for the moment in the hands of his rescuers.

They had struck out for the south immediately, and Bassus had drawn the honour of commanding the rearguard. It was one of his own scouts, ranging far behind to spy on the enemy's progress, who had brought Bassus the news of the final blow to Uther's plans. This man, at great risk to himself, had approached Lot's stronghold again and remained hidden among the rocks on the hillside far above, to watch what might develop in the aftermath of Uther's departure. He had seen Lot ride to meet his new reinforcements from the sea, to join them and make off around the coast southward at great speed, the massive Erse galleys surging along under full oar power and sails spread to a following wind, forewarned and fully aware of Uther's strength and his line of march.

Shortly after receiving this information, and before the messenger could eat and ride on to warn Uther, Bassus's rearguard had been attacked and overrun by a heavy, fast- moving concentration of Hibernians. The news of Lot's escape by sea had" gone no further. The scout had been killed along with everyone else save Bassus, who had fallen apart from the main slaughter and had been left for dead.

He had lain unconscious all night long, and had struggled in and out of awareness for most of the following day. Only a short time before my arrival had he managed to pull himself out of the hollow where he lay and to attempt to find someone to help him. He had seen me coming, and had recognized me, but had been unable to call to me. Fortunately I had noticed him moving, and now he had passed on the warning, making it my responsibility: Uther Pendragon was headed blindly southward, through rough and roadless terrain that made for heavy, slow going, into a confrontation that he thought would give him the advantage of surprise. Instead, he would find Lot waiting for him with two armies and the sea at his back, while a third army followed hot on Uther's own heels. Uther and his entire force would be annihilated.

Even as I listened, hearing the tortured frailty of his voice and the shallowness of his breathing, I was deciding that I would have to leave young Bassus there alone. He was dying, and rapidly—of that I had not the slightest doubt. But I had to be on my way immediately. I could not afford the luxury of waiting with him even for a short time, and both of us knew that. He would die, and I would—I must—leave him to handle it alone. My personal feelings for Uther were of no importance now, beside the imperative need to find him in time to warn him to turn his army and the men of Camulod around and away from the fate that awaited them.

Bassus finished speaking and fell backward, his eyes closed. I knelt above him, the fingers of one hand grasping his wrist, feeling the still-beating pulse. Sighing, and feeling wretched, I began to rise to my feet and as I did so a cloud of fluttering, fighting crows and gulls swept along the hillside, their jarring voices tearing at my ears. The eyes beneath me snapped open and the dying man followed me flight of the birds with wide, horror-filled eyes. I bent forward and laid my hand on his forehead. It was cold and clammy. I felt his head move in a negative, his eyes still staring. He tried to say something else and I bent closer to hear. And then, in a voice so weak that I could barely make it out, he told me to go, but begged me to kill him first, not to let the crows at him while he still lived. A chilling rush of fear and revulsion swept over me. How could I kill him? He was my friend and had given me nothing but loyalty and obedience. How could I reward him by killing him?

And then, of course, the answer came to me in terms that I could not refute. I could not save him, nor could I remain with him until he died. The lives of too many others depended upon my speed and every moment was too precious now. But neither could I abandon him, leaving him to await, in terror, the arrival of the first filthy carrion crow to alight on his face and pluck out an eye while he was still alive. I wrestled with the truth of that for what seemed an eternity before I nodded silently to him. He read my expression correctly, nodding his own thanks in return. I stood erect, telling him to close his eyes. He did so, and I drew my long cavalry sword, placing its point carefully beneath the arch of his ribs, angling it upward. He drew one last, deep breath and held it, and I dropped, throwing my full weight onto the hilt of the sword, driving it deep into his heart. He convulsed, his legs kicked wildly once and then he was still.

I turned him on his face to hide his brown eyes from the crows, and then I piled what rocks I could find around him in a symbolic gesture of burial. Only then did I clean my blade, before transferring my saddle to my spare mount and riding off quickly without looking back, leading the black and the pack-horse. It was mid-afternoon.

Towards nightfall, I almost rode into disaster, coming upon a group of five mounted men riding towards me. Fortune dictated I should be almost completely screened from their sight at first, however, hidden by a fringe of branches on the last trees of a small copse of stunted hawthorn through which I had been riding, following a narrow, well-worn path. They were approaching the copse, talking among themselves and clearly expecting to meet no one. All five wore brown tunics with a black boar painted or embroidered on their chests. I knew after only the quickest glance around me that I had no chance of hiding from them. There was nowhere to hide, and if I tried to run they would hear me. They were close enough to see me plainly already, if they had but looked. I had no choice.

The first man was flung from his horse's back by the force of my arrow before his closest companion realized anything had happened. Stunned by the suddenness of his friend's death, the fellow made the mistake of turning in his saddle to see what had happened to him. My second arrow struck him in the neck, piercing the stretched skin beneath the point of his backward-craning jaw and knocking him, too, over his horse's rump. I killed a third man before the two remaining cursed and broke apart, to right and left, only one of them having seen me, finally, among the branches ahead of them. I snapped a shot at him but missed, and then they were away from me, galloping their horses at top speed. I swung my own mount around and headed back the way I had come, pulling off the path eventually and heading deeper into the copse, to my right. I heard voices behind me, and then a horn blowing. They would be close behind me, I knew, for one of them had seen, even in his fright, that I was alone.

They chased me for hours, higher and higher into the low hills, and only when night fell did I feel safe enough to dismount in a bush-filled hollow and feed my beasts before trying to snatch some sleep, rolling myself in my cloak and stretching out almost under the hooves of my three horses.

I had lost my pursuers. The following morning, creeping cautiously through the mists of early dawn on the hillside, straining my eyes and ears, I could see or hear no signs of them. I saddled up and moved out slowly, taking care to move in silence and to stay well clear of higher ground where I might be seen from below. Towards mid-morning I headed downhill again and angled my search once more in the direction of the broad path trampled by the armies moving ahead of me. All that day and the next I rode, seeing signs of death all around me, but hearing no human voice and seeing no signs of life.

Then, towards the middle of the afternoon of the third day after my encounter with the Cornishmen, I came on the aftermath of an extensive battle and rode slowly into a landscape that threatened to shrivel the mind. The killing ground was an enormous meadow, scattered with stunted trees and spread out at the base of a hollow formed by the sides of four shallow hills. Bodies lay everywhere, strewn in windrows and stacked in formations, scattered at random and heaped in piles, men and animals together. The fighting was over, but it had ended only very shortly before my arrival. The screams and moans of wounded men and horses were deafening, and the stink of blood and offal was a tangible presence. Hundreds of men and women moved through the chaos, drawn from I knew not where. Many of them were helping the wounded, although I knew that many others were plundering friend and foe, living and dead alike. Others, soldiers of both armies, were killing wounded horses, silencing their awful screams. No one approached me or sought to hinder me as I rode through the madness. Here and there I could see pairs of men, running in tandem, carrying stretchers. Other pairs moved more slowly, their stretchers loaded with wounded. I traced the centre of their activity and made my way to where they gathered, recognizing first one and then several of our own medics as I approached.

Mucius Quinto was in charge of the assembly ground. He was a grey-haired veteran almost as old as Lucanus, to whom he was second in command. I found him, flanked by two strong young soldiers, kneeling beside a young man whose breast was thick with blood. Quinto and his people had cleared an area on the eastern side of the great field, and had assembled rows and rows of wounded and dying men from both armies, dozens of rows and hundreds of men, more being brought in all the time. His helpers were our own soldiers, for the most part, although I saw many wearing the brown and black tunics of Lot's Cornishmen. There were no soldiers here in this field now, no enemies; only tired and grateful survivors. There were Druids there, too, moving among the wounded, and a scattering of women here and there, camp followers, I supposed, too stunned to really care. No matter who they were, they were working to appease the pain of the men who had been soldiers and were now men again, broken and bleeding.

Quinto did not even look up at me when I drew rein beside him. I climbed down from my saddle and stood watching as the young man at his knees, no more than a boy in truth, shuddered, convulsed and died, his blank and empty eyes staring up into mine. Quinto paused, his hand outstretched where it had frozen at the sound of the boy's death rattle, then his shoulders seemed to slump and his hand moved again, changing direction to close the staring eyes gently. He paused again, as though collecting himself, and then he was up and moving to the next man, while his two companions picked up the dead youth by the wrists and ankles and carried him away to make room for another. Before they had moved out of his sight Quinto was leaning over the new man, checking for a pulse, then flipping the man's tunic up to cover his dead face. He moved on again as two other men removed that body, and I moved with him. He still had not looked at me.

An ear-shattering scream erupted suddenly from a nearby knot of men clustered tightly around a table, all of them soaked in blood and hunched in a tense struggle to restrain someone beneath them, and I heard the distinctive rasp of a saw going through living bone. Quinto glanced towards the sounds, half checked his step, and then moved on to examine the next man in line. I stepped close to him.

"Quinto."

He turned on me, prepared to savage me for my interruption, then gaped in recognition and I saw his eyes move wonderingly the length of my clean, unbloodied, armoured body.

"Merlyn." His voice was lifeless, belying the surprise in his eyes. "-Where did you come from? A rescue? You're too late."

I shook my head, holding his gaze. "No, Quinto, I'm alone. What happened?"

"What happened?" His face twitched into an abrupt laugh that was chilling in its bitterness. "What happened? Can't you see? We had a war. A whole war in the space of two or three hours, and we lost." He looked away from me, his voice dropping as his eyes moved around the ranks of dead and dying. "God, how we lost! And what we've lost! A generation, Merlyn...an entire generation.... There'll be no quick recovery from this..." His voice died away completely, then resumed, his tone now hard and angry. "We weren't vanquished, Merlyn. We were utterly and completely crushed.. shattered and scattered.. .There must have been ten of them for every one of us. Outlanders, mostly. Ersemen. We didn't have a chance, and Uther led us in here blindly to this... this slaughter ground."

"How, Quinto? What happened? And where's Uther now?"

Quinto sniffed and wiped his nose wearily with his sleeve. "I haven't got time to talk. There's too much to do and I should be cutting. Some of my assistants are very young, and untrained—untrained for carnage on this scale, at any rate." He moved away and I followed him and three of the next four men he looked at were already dead. The fourth, a Cornishman, had a shattered leg. Quinto sent him to the cutting table. The next man, one of our own, was also dead, his chest crushed into a large, ball-shaped depression. Quinto shook his head.

"Your cousin's toy," Quinto grunted. "I wonder if he ever thought, when he came up with that bright idea, to see it used against his own people? And look at this." He had stooped to kneel beside another man, whose entire jaw had been shattered and torn away from his upper face. "Tell me, Caius Merlyn, what in the face of the sweet Christ's mercy can ever justify this kind of savagery by one man to another?

Or any of this madness?" I barely heard what he said. My mind was still on the wound the previous man had borne, made by what Quinto had called my cousin's toy.

"Quinto, what did you mean by my cousin's toy?"

He didn't look at me as he answered, intent as he was on attempting to repair the shattered face beneath him. "Just what I said..." He shook his head. "This is hopeless. Nothing I can do. At least he's not conscious..." Now he looked up at me and began rising to his feet again. "Your cousin Uther's toy. The flail he made; the ball on a chain. It's been—what—three years since then? Now the damn things are everywhere. I suppose you just can't keep a good idea secret."

My head was reeling. What was he telling me? He had moved on again and I had to step quickly to catch up to him, clutching at his sleeve.

"What do you mean, they're everywhere? I haven't seen any."

He frowned, angry at such trivial talk in the face of so much need. "Then you must be blind. What else do you think could make a wound like that, crushing bones to jelly?" He jerked his thumb savagely towards the man with the crushed chest. "Half the men in Camulod have them, and more than half the men in Lot's damned army, it appears. Now leave me alone. I've got work to do."

But I had not been blind. I had been oblivious and without memory. I still clutched his sleeve, recognizing his impatience. "I'll leave you alone, I promise, but I must know. Where is Uther? And where is Lot of Cornwall?"

He wrenched his arm free, turning away from me, then stopped and looked back at me with a granting sigh.

"They're together, wherever they are. Where else would they be? When he saw we were beaten, Uther escaped with his reserves to the south—there, between those two hills. I saw them go. So did Lot. He was up on that hill, over there to the east. We had been in a running fight with an army of Ersemen who'd been chewing at our heels for days. I was with Uther and the leading party when we came out into this valley and he saw a chance to turn and fight them. He led us up there, onto the flank of that hill, and as we began to climb it, getting ready to turn and face the enemy, Lot led an army over the top above us, and another entire army, thousands of men, came through the two passes on either side of us. We were trapped from the outset. They'd been waiting for us to do exactly what we did. From then on, it was pure slaughter. Uther managed to cut his way sideways, across the hill and down across the field here and up the eastern flank, but he had less than a thousand men with him. Once there, there was nothing he could do to help anyone. It was all over too quickly. Lot had the advantage from the outset and it kicked the guts out of our men. And when some of our people tried to surrender, they were cut down anyway, so the rest of us prepared to die fighting.

"That's when Uther decided to run..." A long pause. "Uther's no coward. I know why he ran. He knew that if he escaped, with the women, Lot would follow him forever and the rest of us left here might have a chance."

"With the women? What women?"

He looked at me as though I should have no need to ask such a simple question. "Lot's women. The queen and her people... Any way, that's what happened. Lot and his savages took off after Uther's group and left us fighting. But all his people followed him, even the ones who were engaged with us. When they saw the others leave, they left us and followed them, and the fighting was over. That was about three hours ago. The rest you know."

"How did Uther come by Lot's queen?"

He shook his head, dismissing my question as trivial. "I can't tell you that, Commander. I do not enjoy your cousin's confidence. I only know that we collected her in passing from one of Lot's strongholds, after we started our march south."

I did not know what to make of this information, but I dismissed it as unimportant beside the urgency of my pursuit of Uther.

"I have to find them."

"Then God go with you, Caius Merlyn. You'll need His help."

"Which way should I go from here?"

He nodded towards the south. 'They left by that southern valley. Be cautious, Merlyn."

"I will, my friend. Farewell."

I left him to his work and remounted my horse, closing my eyes and ears to the miserable sights and sounds around me, and for the next quarter-hour I picked my way carefully through that awful field.

I had almost won clear of the battlefield when I heard my name being called. I drew rein and looked in the direction of the voice, and there was Popilius, our senior centurion, sitting against the bole of a small tree less than thirty paces from me. I was shocked at almost failing to recognize him at first glance. Popilius had always been my exemplar of military propriety, polished and shorn and brightly armoured, upright and solid and thoroughly dependable in every circumstance. The man at whom I found myself gaping now was different from the image I carried of him in almost every respect.

He was without armour, for one thing, and his right thigh was swathed in bandages crusted with dried blood and dirt. His left arm was cradled in a sling made of coarse, grey woollen cloth torn from a blanket, and the fingers of the hand that protruded from its cradle were curled and clawlike, also wrapped in blood-stained bandages. The entire left side of his face was bruised into a blackened mass, and his hair, which I suddenly noticed for the first time was long and" white, hung unkempt and matted over his forehead, which bore the striations of pain like horizontal bars above his eyes. His chin was coated in grizzled, grey-white stubble. Popilius had grown old, very suddenly.

I leaped from my horse and made my way to where he lay sprawled, almost supine, against his tree trunk. An empty wineskin lay beside him and I smelled its harsh, sour vinum on his clothes and on his breath. He was lucid, however, and his forehead was cool to my touch, and I quickly assured myself that his injuries were not life threatening. He told me he had taken a sword slash to the thigh and an arrow through the forearm in the running fight the day before they blundered into Lot's trap. He had been a non- combatant this day, helpless to influence anything, watching the entire, catastrophic battle in frustrated rage from the deck of a wagon Quinto's people had been using to transport the wounded. No one had paid him any attention, either during or after the battle. He had not eaten anything since the night before, and had drunk all his wine, finishing it gluttonously hours earlier in hope of finding oblivion from the horror that surrounded him. He had thought he was dreaming when he recognized me riding by, a vision in my cleanliness and wholeness.

I could not simply leave him there as I had found him. He was Popilius Cirro, one of the last of my father's most trusted friends, and he deserved some show of care from me. Forcing myself to stifle my restlessness and the urging that prompted me to rush on callously in my pursuit of Uther, I fed him from my own supplies and spent some time changing the dressings on his wounds, using strips torn from a spare, clean tunic from my saddle bags. That done, I found some water on a nearby wagon, probably the one he had occupied, and washed him as well as I could, before helping him to move and arranging him as comfortably as possible on a grassy knoll.

I had done as much as I could for him, and it was time for me to move on. I told him so, and he nodded, accepting that, but then he asked me about regaining my memory and we talked for some time of that, and how it had affected me. I told him also about finding young Bassus, and how I had had to kill him. He listened in silence, fingering the stubble on his chin. When I had finished he sighed.

"I'd give anything in this world, Commander, to undo the last three years; to be back in Camulod, with your father alive and the world unfolding peacefully about us. But of course, that's nonsense—women's wishes. You'd best be on your way, if you're to find Uther, though I don't know what you'll be able to do to change anything."

I had nodded and risen to my feet, prepared to leave, when something in his voice, in the tone of it, alerted me. I could not identify what I had heard, but for some reason it made me think of what Quinto had said about Lot's women. I stopped and cleared my throat, looking down at him. "Tell me about the women, Popilius, about Lot's queen. What's going on? How did Uther capture her?"

He, too, cleared his throat, but he looked away, avoiding my eyes. "The Lady Ygraine."

"Sweet Jesus!" As he uttered it, the name flashed across my mind like Publius Varrus's Skystone blazing across the sky. Ygraine! The daughter of the Erse king who was Donuil's father! I remembered Donuil telling me the first time we met that his father and Lot were to be allied by marriage. His sister Ygraine had been betrothed to Lot mere months before. But that meant—and this thought was crushingly, overwhelmingly new to me—that she was also Deirdre's sister... my Cassandra's sister... The bitter, tragic irony of it almost buckled my knees, and I had to turn my back and walk away from Popilius to master my thoughts before he read the despair in my eyes.

My mind was screaming at me. Uther could have no idea, of course, who Ygraine truly was. He had killed her sister, bringing me after him, ravening for vengeance, and now when I found him he would be with yet another of this strange Erse family to which, it seemed, I was inextricably bound. I had a flashing image of Cassandra biting down on his swollen manhood and I felt my sanity withdrawing from me like a whirling wind. I pushed my fist, hard, into my mouth and bit down on my own knuckles. The sudden pain enabled me to regain control of my thoughts and force myself to remain rational. When I thought I had myself under control again I turned back to Popilius, clutching my bitten knuckles in my other hand. He was staring at me, wide-eyed, obviously wondering what my next reaction might be. I made myself walk back to him, and when I spoke, my voice sounded calm and reasonable even to me.

"When did this happen? What has happened? Tell me now, and leave nothing out."

One moment longer he hesitated, and then he began to speak in a flat, rough monotone. Much of what he would tell me, he was careful to point out at the start, was conjecture, but it was based solidly upon his own observations and upon comments made—or tactfully omitted—by other officers who were closer to the source of the truth than he was. In matters of fieldcraft, discipline, training, deployment and logistics, Uther consulted Popilius before committing himself or his forces to anything. Otherwise, Uther kept his own counsel and Popilius was normally content to have it that way. On this campaign, however, the veteran Popilius had been gravely troubled. His prime responsibility, as he saw it, was the defence and welfare of our Colony. If those twin priorities entailed a pre-emptive expedition into territories beyond our own, he would prosecute that campaign without question or pause, but his primary motivation was always to achieve the objective, deal with the threat and danger, and then withdraw homeward without delay. For more than a year now, he told me, that imperative had been neglected.

In the late summer of my first year of convalescence, Uther's advance party, with Uther himself in command, had surprised and captured a heavily escorted supply train on its way to the south coast, where the supplies were to be loaded onto ships and taken around by sea to Lot's stronghold on the northern coast of the long, Cornish peninsula. Among the personnel accompanying that train been a contingent of high-born ladies.

Uther, ever the dashing, dazzling heroic figure, had never warred on women and was at pains to point this out to his gentle prisoners. He had commiserated with them about the deaths of their escort and companions—the fortunes of war, over which he could have no control other than by ensuring victory for his own men. That done, and all courteously explained, he had entertained them lavishly as honoured guests for three days, during which his army had consolidated their own security and spirited the stolen spoils of the supply train into their own safe custody. Then, when he was sure that their reports could do nothing to hinder either his progress or his safety, he had released the women, sending them southward to their original destination under heavy guard.

No time had been lost on that occasion, Popilius assured me. Little had been risked, and a valuable prize had been gained. It was only months later that Popilius had begun to suspect that Uther himself had gained a valuable prize that day, quite apart from the captured supplies. Prior to that, Popilius had neither known nor cared about the identities of the women. He had found out only by accident one night, around the campfire with some of Uther's young staff officers who had drunk a little too much wine, that one of the women—the loveliest, of course—had been Lot's queen, Ygraine.

His soldier's mind had been outraged by this information, for here had been a legitimate spoil of war, a hostage and a bargaining tool of great power. Why, then, had Uther, who must have been well aware of who she was and what she would have been worth in the war against her husband, allowed the woman to go free? As I listened to his recounting of his misgivings, I was wondering the same thing myself. She was Lot's queen. She should never have been released!

Had she been anyone else, however, no matter who, Popilius's report would neither have bothered nor surprised me. I would have expected nothing less from my charming and mercurial cousin. But why in God's name would he have released Ygraine the queen? It made no sense at all, even had he been besotted by her, for merely by holding her prisoner he could have pursued his own designs and seduced her at his leisure, and with pleasure, knowing whose wife she was. And then it did make sense, in a bizarre, illogical way over which I had no control. The answer sprang into my mind completely formed and I accepted it immediately and instinctively as being true.

All that I knew of Lot, although I had not set eyes on him since that one time in boyhood, indicated that he was in many ways abnormal, almost inhuman, in his tastes and desires. Not that I had any cause to suspect him of being deviate or homosexual; far from it, his heterosexual lusts were notorious, as was his cruelty. It simply came to me that the man must be incapable of love—ordinary, human love—and it followed inevitably that his wife, as a bargaining piece in enemy hands, would have been less than useless to that enemy.

As a spy, however, angry in her Celtic pride and her sense of betrayal and abandonment by the man to whom she had been given like a sacrificial cow, she could be recruited to the cause of his enemies, would become an invaluable asset to them, even if her regal husband never shared a thought with her. From the way my heart swelled with excitement, I knew I was right. Ygraine was Uther's spy, the one of whom I had already heard! She and Uther had met, had quickly become enamoured of each other, and had conspired somehow, in the brief space of three short days, to undo Lot.

In the moments it took for all of this to explode in my mind, Popilius had continued speaking. Nothing had come of the events surrounding the supply train incident, he said, and apart from his outrage and puzzlement over the release of the woman, the whole thing had faded from his mind until about a year after the original encounter. Popilius had been personally inspecting the guards around a night camp when an exhausted rider had come in—a stranger wearing the blazon of the boar of Cornwall, Lot's own emblem— bearing urgent word for Uther.

Within the hour, Uther had ridden out, accompanied by only two of his closest circle, leaving his army under the control of Popilius. Nothing untoward had occurred and Popilius had not been unduly concerned at first. Only when the second consecutive day of Uther's absence dawned had Popilius begun to grow concerned. His concern mushroomed when he made specific inquiries and discovered that no one, including the remaining members of Uther's inner circle, knew where the king had gone. Even his Celts had no idea of Uther's whereabouts, but they at least were unconcerned. To them, their king was inviolable and invincible. He would come back safely.

As it transpired, Popilius had been forced to sit in agonized inactivity for two more days before Uther returned late in the afternoon, just before nightfall, galloping into camp as though he had not a care in the world. He had called a meeting of his senior officers immediately, and told them they would be moving out at dawn. Few slept for more than an hour that night, because long before dawn began to lighten the sky the camp had been broken down and stowed, and the troops were in formation, ready to ride out. They had marched for a day and a half, and then prepared an elaborate ambush above a narrow, mile-long gorge, where the only road ran narrow and serpentine alongside a fast-flowing stream. Every trooper had been turned to work lining the lip of the gorge with massive boulders, assembling an avalanche of rocks that would decimate the forces caught below. Uther's bowmen, in the meantime, were busy digging themselves in on the peat-covered hillsides on the exit side of the gorge, where the emerging road turned left to pass along the bottom of a gentle slope.

In the fight that ensued, Popilius experienced for the first time the destructive power of massed Celtic longbows as used by Uther's people. He had fought several times with contingents of Celts using the bows, but nothing he had ever seen had prepared him for what transpired that day. They had dug themselves four pairs of trenches ascending the hillside, and there were fifty men in each trench. Now, responding to voice signals from a leader in each trench, they began to fire in volleys; fifty long, lethal, deadly accurate arrows aimed and launched at a time from either side of the slope, and each flight followed so quickly by another that each rank had barely time to re-nock and pull before its time came round again. It looked, Popilius whispered, as though it were raining arrows.

Each man, he told me, fired ten arrows into a dense- packed target area that was so close it was impossible to miss. Four thousand arrows aimed at fewer than one thousand close-packed men who had nowhere to run in search of cover. It was over in almost less time than it takes to describe. Not one cavalryman went forward to meet an enemy that morning.

When Popilius had finished speaking, I allowed his silence to hang in the air for long moments before I broke it. "Where did Uther's information come from?"

"You tell me."

"Ygraine."

"That's my guess, too." He sighed deeply. "But it's still only a guess, Commander."

"No, it had to be Ygraine. There's no other explanation."

Popilius nodded. "I agree. That first messenger who came that night I was inspecting the guards, the one who wore Lot's boar...he was her man, sent to fetch Uther. I have seen him since, and he was with her when she joined us four days ago."

"She came willingly?"

He grunted. "Aye, and quickly. She had a child with her, too, new born. Lot thinks it's his, apparently, so she must have lain with him at least once in the past year."

"Is it?"

Again came the shake of his white head and a grunt of discomfort as he sought to ease his position. "Your guess is as good as mine. But Uther walks with an extra spring in his step nowadays, it seems to me."

I scrubbed my face with my hands, as though to wash away the need for sleep, although what I was trying to dislodge was a growing need to scream out my outrage. "You've given me much to think about, old friend," I told Popilius, fighting to keep my voice level. "I feel I've slept away two important years and I've much to do to catch up with all that has happened."

He smiled, a brief, wintry grin. "Well, at least you're back, Commander. 'Thank God,' is all I can say. What will you do now?"

"Find Uther immediately. In the meantime, you have your duty to attend to, and it consists of recovering and returning safe to Camulod. We need you, Popilius Cirro. Try to sleep for an hour or so and then send someone to report your presence to Mucius Quinto over on the far side of the field. No point in doing it now, your wounds are dressed and he's too busy to attend to you. As quickly as you can thereafter, get you home again, and don't let Quinto stop until you get there. I have to leave now, but I'll see you back in Camulod."

He grunted again and nodded, looking at me with fondness. "Watch yourself, Commander. Be careful. There's whole armies of dangerous people out there."

I grinned at him. "Didn't anyone ever tell you how dangerous Caius Merlyn Britannicus can be?" I clapped him on the shoulder. "Sleep a while, old friend. Then make enough noise to draw yourself to the attention of our surgeon. Farewell."