The Eagles' Brood

XL

The following day, I found Gulrhys Lot, King of Cornwall, hanging from a tree, his hands and feet severed at the wrists and ankles and stuffed into a bag that was tied around his waist. The bag was made of gold brocade and bore the embroidered crimson emblem of Pendragon. The ring finger of his severed right hand still bore his signet: a massive golden ring set with the black boar of Cornwall and proof that the monster was dead.

Ignoring the mystery of my find, I cut the body down and burned it, but I kept the golden signet. I never discovered the truth of how Lot came to die, hanged ignominiously and left to dangle alone and unmourned in a forest glade, his royal seal intact upon his finger in a bag of meat.

I slept that night within a mile of where his ashes smouldered. The smell of his burning was in my clothes and in my hair, and I dreamed dreadful dreams. Sections of armies, bands of fighting men, mounted and afoot, swept and swirled around me in awful silence, though their mouths were wide with screams and their faces harrowed with agony. I saw Lot of Cornwall, mounted on a silver horse, being hit and borne down into a press of bodies, which scattered suddenly to show me Uther, naked and bloodied, his manhood erect with lust, holding Lot's severed, dripping head above his own and laughing in dementia, weeping blood-red tears while I ran towards him, a dagger in my hand, my eyes fixed on the bloodied flail that dangled from his wrist. And suddenly the severed head above Uther was Deirdre's—my Cassandra's—and it was screaming at me, wide-eyed and wide-mouthed, to stay away, to beware, beware, beware; and then came a clanging, echoing blow to my head, a stabbing, crushing pain in my back beneath my ribs and a hideous tearing wrench that started me awake in terror, my heart thudding in my chest. It was morning and the sun was already high.

I lay awake for a long time, unmoving, my mind reeling with the reality of my terror and the unreality of my dream. My back ached agonizingly, just where the dream-blow had struck me, and I knew I had slept upon a surfaced root. Presently, when my heart had slowed down and my breathing returned to normal, I rolled away from it and sat up, rubbing my aching spine. As I rose painfully to my feet, I "looked ruefully for the cause of my discomfort, ashamed of myself for having made a boy's mistake in lying down in such a spot. But there was nothing there. The turf on which I had lain was thick and springy. I knelt again and dug in the grass with my fingertips, clearly seeing the imprint of my body. There was nothing: no root, no stone, no projection of any kind. The mossy turf was smooth and soft and yielding. I stood up hastily, aware of a stirring of superstitious fear, and set about saddling my spare mount, leaving the big black unburdened.

I ate as I travelled, on horseback, chewing dried nuts and chopped, dried apples mixed with roasted grain, and as I progressed the pain in my body receded palpably, drawing back slowly from a point beneath my ribs in front, until it seemed to exit from its starting point low in my back. Within an hour of leaving my campsite, it had vanished completely.

Sometime later, when I dismounted to drink from a swift-flowing stream, I saw my own reflection in a sheltered eddy beneath the bank. The sun was high behind me as I stooped to the surface of the water, its light diffused through my long, yellow hair, and I thought again, with a chill of horror, of Deirdre's severed head in my dream. Uther had held it by the hair, but the hair had been red-gold, and Deirdre's eyes had not been hers but the bright green eyes of someone else. Not Deirdre of the Violet Eyes, for green was never violet, and as Donuil had told me, her hair in girlhood had been deep red, the red of day-old chestnuts, not the golden hue I had seen in my dream. When I knew her, as Cassandra, she had been fair-haired and grey-eyed. This was the stuff of dreams, but the hairs along my spine stiffened in awe. I scooped up some water quickly and was about to drink when something struck me as wrong. I looked more closely, and saw the discoloration. It looked muddy. Silt in the water, I told myself, but I had seen such mud before, too many times.

Less than twenty paces upstream, I found five of my own men of Camulod starting to bloat in the stream bed. I vomited up the thought of what I had almost drunk, and when I had recovered, I went in and pulled them out, laying them side by side along the bank. I knew all five of them and it was all I could do for them.

Throughout the remainder of that morning, I became inured to the sight of my own men lying dead. They had taken many of the enemy with them, but I ignored those completely, my eyes attracted only to the colours of Camulod and the red dragon of Pendragon. My route lay directly to the south, to the sea, and I knew I would wade through the debris of a running fight for the entire journey. I met five living men of Uther's force, all wounded badly; none able to tell me anything coherent. I left each of them with food and drink and moved on. I also found eight of Lot's men alive, five of them dying. The other three tried to unhorse me all at once, but I had seen the one crouched in the tree above me and was forewarned. I killed him as he leaped at me, catching him on my sword point and thrusting him away and down so that he almost tore the weapon from my grasp. One of the others seized me by the ankle, but my horse turned on him, striking him with its shoulder, and he fell away as I slashed at him, catching him high on the side of the head. The third man fled and I did not have the heart to follow him.

I stopped to eat and change horses at noon in an open meadow that seemed miraculously free of corpses and signs of conflict, and less than half an hour after that I came across a scene that harrowed me far more than the carnage of battle through which I had been riding all morning.

I emerged from a small valley between two low, swelling hills to find myself in a devastated farmstead. The farmhouse itself had been no more than a hovel, but it had been burned and its walls had collapsed upon themselves. The bodies of the farmer and three children, one of them a newborn child, lay sprawled in a pathetic, huddled group close by the gutted building. Beside them knelt the mother, alive and, as far as I could tell, unharmed. She knelt erect, her dry eyes staring into the surrounding hills with the haunted blankness of dementia. I dismounted and approached her with the idea of offering to help in some way, but she was unaware of me or my existence. Even when I took her hand she offered no response, but when I stooped towards the slaughtered baby at her knees she turned on me like a wild thing and tried to bite me. I withdrew hastily and she subsided immediately, ignoring me thereafter, resuming her empty-eyed watch over her dead family and I stood there uncomfortably, my stomach roiling with unwarranted guilt and sickness, until I convinced myself that I could do nothing for her. I backed away in silence and left her there with her grief. Moments later, I found the sea.

Because of the angle from which I had made my unwitting approach, it took me some time to realize at first that the slope I was ascending had an unnatural-looking edge against the sky, but as I drew closer, it became plain that there was no more land ahead of me, that I was ascending a hill that had been sheared off at some time. I ended my ascent on the edge of a cliff that dropped straight down" to a rock-strewn beach far below. The tide was out, exposing a long, narrow belt of steeply shelving sand beyond which the sea stretched empty and endless, but after the first wondering glance at the enormity of the vista, my eyes were drawn to a broad swath of hoofprints churned into the wet sand far below and disappearing into the distance to my right. A large party of horsemen had passed below this point only a short time before. Their passage was plain, but the evidence of it in the sand was chaotic, and I was too far away to discern with any certainty the direction in which they had travelled. Individual tracks flanked the main body of the passage on both sides, and I could clearly see in these where flying hooves had thrown scatterings of sand behind them as they went, but it was equally clear that these individual riders, whoever they were, had ridden hard in both directions. I could see for several miles westward, and there was nothing except the broad path dwindling into the distance. I felt instinctively that the signs led east, to my left, but my view in that direction was blocked by the swell of the next headland, and beyond that I could see the crest of another, this one set back so that its top rose above the flank of the one between us. The coastline obviously curved inland to form a bay, and as the coast receded the height of the cliffs dwindled drastically.

I cast one last glance westward, seeing nothing there but the empty shoreline, then I touched my spurs to the big black and rode downhill, angling my descent to take the straightest line to the eastern inlet.

As I regained the edge of the escarpment by the sea I saw bright colours in the far distance, three or more miles away on the beach on the far side of the sweeping bay that now came into view. A band of horsemen—I estimated about a score at first glance—milled in confusion there, almost at the water's edge. The cliff below me was still perilous, although not one-quarter as high as it had been before, and my view to the left was still obstructed by the lie of the land, but the ground was shelving rapidly downhill to my left, the terrain changing from rocky cliffs to enormous, grass-crowned dunes, and I saw that I would soon find a way down. I swung left again, this time keeping to the edge of the clifftop, and as I rode the scene below unfolded. A second party of riders, half again as large as the first and hidden from me previously, now streamed into view, from beneath the cliffs that had hidden them from me. They made their way ponderously through the yielding sand, struggling inexorably towards the first party. Uther's great red war cloak with its blazoned dragon was unmistakable at the head of this second group, even from this distance. Pursuers and pursued.

My heart in my mouth from the excitement of my discovery, I reined in briefly to consider my options. My horse was still fresh—I had not been aboard him for an hour and he had not been exerted. I could see even from where I was that Uther's horses were exhausted. He and his men were only now beginning to approach the first curve of the bay's end. Slightly more than a mile, I guessed, Separated them from their quarry across the water, but they would have to ride more than twice that far to reach them. And now I could see that the far party were fighting to drag a boat to the water's edge. It was & big, cumbersome vessel and the ebb tide had left it stranded high on the sand. They seemed to be making little headway.

Again I looked to Uther's group. Their progress, too, was painfully slow. The sand where they were now was deep and dry. I was a good mile behind them. I could descend to the beach soon, but the yielding sand would hamper me, too, whereas the ground here, above the beach, was firm. By staying high, I could make far better time, but would have further to ride to catch up. I let go the lead reins of my two extra horses and sank my spurs into the big black, keeping him on the high ground and letting him find his own way at his own speed. He was ready to run, and his great hooves devoured the distance along the clifftop. As I overhauled Uther's party and passed them on my right, my mind was working frantically, trying to determine who the people in the other group might be. From the bright colours of their clothes, I already suspected that some of them might be women, although many of the Celts I had seen, especially the Hibernian Scots, loved bright, patterned clothing. But if there were women among this group, who were they? Lot was dead, and his wife was Uther's mistress, so she would not be attempting to escape him.

I had arrived, very quickly I thought, at the point beyond which geometry negated speed. Riding further on my present path would take me further away from my target with every stride, so I swung hard to the right and my horse slithered and slid its way to the bottom of the cliff, which was now no more than a steep, sandy shelf above the beach. Now I found myself galloping between high dunes of sand that hid the activity ahead of me, but grateful that the ground was still firm enough to present no problem to my wonderful horse.

It seemed to take me an age to emerge from the dunes by the water's edge, and long before I arrived there I had heard the sound of baying voices announcing the beginnings of a fight. The deepest point of the bay now lay to my right and I was still more than a mile from the brawl ahead of me. I saw a scattering of riderless horses that told me immediately how the struggle would go. The heavy boat lay abandoned at the end of a deep score in the sand, its bows awash, but the men who had been struggling to launch it had been caught before they could either free the boat or remount to meet their attackers. Now Uther's men swirled around them, some of their horses actually in the water so that light flashed from the splashes they made and from their sweeping blades as they hacked and slashed at their quarry.

And yet the fight was far from over. The men afoot were fighting well although barely holding their own. Armed with the bravery of desperation they had formed a line of defence in front of the brightly clothed members of the group who, as I had suspected, were women, and were now huddled in and around the boat. A new core of resistance formed even as I watched, however, and it was an amazing sight to my distant eyes. Half a score of men, seeing the inevitable failure of their efforts to launch the boat, had scattered and apparently fled from the main action, but only to reform in a tight group, ranked in a close formation on the side of a low dune. Now, armed with what looked to me to be Pendragon bows, this group began pouring a concerted, lethal stream of well-aimed volleys into Uther's mounted troops, smashing them from their horses like straw mannikins.

What nonsense was this? And where were Uther's own bowmen? As these questions sprang into my mind I felt my great horse falter and check beneath me and I knew he could not continue much longer at this speed, fetlock-deep in yielding, clogging sand. And even as I leaned forward to. encourage him, everything changed in the fight in front of me.

In response to a summons from Uther, many of his men broke away from their individual struggles and reformed into a solid wall of horses that they used to smash their way through the defenders, trampling them underfoot, to reach the women in and around the boat. In moments after that each mounted man had hauled a struggling, fighting woman up in front of him, holding her close around the waist or the neck and using her as a living shield against the bowmen. As soon as the last woman—there were eight of them—had been subdued, Uther himself led the group in a concerted charge against the bowmen on the dune. I watched in disbelief, seeing all of this unfolding the way a sleeping man watches a scene of horror engulf him in a nightmare, powerless to change a detail of his dream and knowing that it will only grow worse as it progresses. My horse was barely moving now, and I was still four hundred paces from the boat, five hundred from the dune. I screamed Uther's name, feeling my voice break at the peak, but no one heard me.

The bowmen on the dune had stopped shooting now. It takes a certain kind of inhumanity to commit callous murder on a living, helpless woman, even when she embodies your own death. Frozen, the bowmen stood and watched, arrows nocked, as Uther's men swept towards them. And then finally, when less than fifty paces separated the two groups, one aimed and fired and drew and fired again and one rider went down, his shield and he both dead. Three more aimed and fired and Uther's group was cut to half its size, but Uther was almost at the foot of the dune by then and the bowmen broke and scattered, casting aside their useless weapons and drawing their swords. Uther threw his helpless shield to the ground and charged after one of the disarmed bowmen. I watched the slaughter in agony, still approaching. I could feel the strength draining away from my body like water pouring from a broken vase, and despair , threatened to overwhelm me. I did not know what was happening here, or who these victims were, but I had seen more callous slaughter from my cousin here than I would ever have believed him capable of.

I reined in my mount and sat there, staring. Apart from Uther and his three remaining riders by the dune, there was barely a movement on the beach. One of the women thrown from the backs of the horses got up slowly and stood swaying for a time, then began moving among the others, checking each of them for signs of life. She stooped quickly and helped another to her feet, this one swathed in an enveloping yellow garment that covered her completely except for her arms and one long, slender leg that shone from a large tear in the fabric. The two women clung to each other. Three more of Uther's men were still alive, and now mounted their horses again and began to converge, with Uther and the others, upon the two women. No one had seen me yet, sitting my horse some two hundred paces distant. Now I urged my mount forward again, but even as it began to walk, I reined in and waited.

Uther had dismounted and was approaching the women, who stood side by side, facing him. I waited for him to remove his helmet, but he did not. He merely stopped a few paces from them and stooped quickly to grasp a handful of cloth adorning one of the dead women lying by his feet. He wiped the blood from his sword blade on the cloth and straightened up, slipping the sword back into its sheath. He then flipped the edges of his cloak back across his shoulders. Puzzled, I watched him fumbling at the front of his clothing. I realized his purpose at the same time the women did, for they both turned to run. He closed the distance between them in one leap and grasped the yellow-clad woman by the shoulder, spinning and pushing her so that she fell heavily. The other woman attacked him immediately, and he thrust her aside, throwing her as casually and as easily as if she had no substance. Then he grasped the woman on the ground and, with a great heave, ripped the yellow covering from her body, tumbling her through the air so that I saw naked flesh and long, red hair as the other woman attacked him yet again, leaping this time on to his back. Now I kicked my horse into movement, and as I did so I saw Uther bend and heave and dislodge his assailant, throwing her over his shoulder so that she fell in front of him. He held her with one hand around her wrist and then pulled her erect before jerking her close to him. I knew from the way she stiffened, rigid, that he had stabbed her, pulling her onto a dagger, and I watched her sink to her knees and then fall away to the side. And now Uther was tugging at his clothes again, loosening his belt and tearing at his trousers to expose his loins. I watched him fall to his knees and drag the red-haired woman towards him, grasping her and pulling at her so that he held one of her knees in the crook of each elbow, I was very close, little more than a hundred paces away, still moving like a man in a dream. All eyes were on Uther and his sport. My mind was reciting a litany...

Deirdre of the Violet Eyes. Cassandra of the Valley. Deirdre of the Weeping Sighs. Cassandra in the Valley. Deep the grave where Deirdre lies. Cassandra, Merlyn's Folly...

I had been unaware of unslinging Publius Varrus's great bow from where it lay across my back; unaware of fitting an arrow; unaware of anything except my own criminally irresponsible naivety, All the pathetic human weakness and frailty of my doubts and agonizing over Uther's capacity to sink to the level of brutality involved in the savage beating and the murder of my beloved now writhed in my scornful awareness. How could I ever have doubted it? I had always known that Uther had a blackness in him I could never plumb. And today, here, I had seen more of it than I had suspected in thirty years of knowing him intimately. And now I found my voice again.

His head jerked up at the sound of my shout, and the six men behind him immediately broke from their admiring huddle and began to spread out, moving towards me. I ignored them.

Uther disengaged himself almost casually from the woman's body and stood up, his male organ gleaming wetly as he stuffed it into his clothing and began to rebuckle his belt. I knew I could kill him from where I sat, but I lusted to confront him, to tell him why he was dying by my hand. Instead, I shot the man closest to me, driving my first arrow through his head, between his eyes, and stringing a second arrow almost before the first struck home. As the dead man's companions began to react, and to spur their horses, I shot a second and then a third, aiming almost casually and without either compunction or excitement. They were merely an annoyance, coming as they did between me and my task that day. Two of the surviving three made the mistake of trying to break away and flee; the third kept coming at me. Had they come together, they would have had me, but as it was, I shot the man approaching me through the breastplate of his armour when he was less than ten paces from me. With the hollow but solid, slightly metallic thunk of his death loud in my ears, I turned after his two companions. One I brought down at the edge of the water. He fell into the waves of the returning tide. The last of them, far off by now, presented the first challenge I had yet had. I sighted carefully, leading him as he rode across my left side, and loosed my arrow. It arced and hummed in a perfect trajectory and he watched it seek him, throwing up an arm as though to fend it off, so that it sank to the feathers into his exposed armpit.

My cousin had mounted his horse by this time and sat watching me, waiting. The body of the red-haired woman lay almost beneath his horse's feet. I leaned from the saddle and gently dropped my bow to the sand, and then shrugged the quiver strap over my shoulder and let that fall, too. That done, I nudged my horse slowly towards him. He sat motionless, his helmeted head cocked to one side, watching me and waiting for my next move. When only ten paces separated us, I halted and stared at him. When I spoke, I was amazed at the calmness of my own voice, for I wanted to scream.

"Bloody business, killing women, Cousin." I nodded at the woman's body. "But not your first time, eh?"

I began counting my heartbeats during the silence that followed. At twelve, he said, "'Cousin?' Who are you?" I felt as though I had been struck, and I actually felt myself reel. This was not Uther! "Are you deaf? Who are you?"

Slowly, my hand shaking, I reached up and undid the chin strap of my helmet. He sat watching as I took it off and held it in the crook of my left arm and now I saw him react, although his reaction stunned me more than his first words had. I saw his eyes narrow beneath the front plate of his helmet as he stiffened with surprise, and then he spoke again, hesitantly on the first word, and then with complete conviction.

"Ambrose...Ambrose of Lindum! I thought you went home."

Now it was he who undid his helmet and removed it to show me a face I had not thought ever to see again. He was Derek, the king from Ravenglass, whom I had met and befriended briefly on the road two years before.

"You're with us," he said. "At least you were.. .with Lot. Why did you kill my men?"

I ignored the question. "Where's Uther?"

"Uther?" I could hear the mystification in his voice. "How would I know?"

"You're wearing his armour."

"Oh, him!" He stopped and looked at me wonderingly. "That was Uther Pendragon?"

I nodded. "It was. You killed him?"

"Well, yes, but I didn't know who he was. Never seen him before, not that it would have made a difference."

"Personally? You yourself?"

"Personally. Me myself. I killed him." He seemed to be challenging me to do something about it.

"When?" My voice was no more than a croak and my heart was thundering in my ears as I asked this question, for I suddenly dreaded to hear the answer.

"This morning." The words I was hearing echoed in my head as though emerging from a deep well. "Just before daybreak. We'd been chasing them for days and caught them just as they were breaking camp. Knew it was Uther's army, but they were all scattered and chewed up. Didn't know it was Uther himself."

"Why did you take his armour?" I asked the question knowing it was a vain attempt to avoid what was to follow.

He looked at me as though I were crazed. "Why wouldn't I? He didn't need it any more. I haven't been home in more than two years. He was the only man I've met in months—years, because the last one was you—whose armour was big enough to fit me. Even his helmet fits me."

"How.. .exactly how did you kill him?" It was a question I had to ask, to quell my own sudden certainty.

He shook his head in wonder at my stubborn pertinacity. "What does it matter? With this, same as I kill most men I fight against." He reached down and produced a fearsome weapon from where it hung at his saddle bow. It looked like a reaper's hook fixed to the handle of a battle axe. It had a broad blade three handspans long, both sharpened edges of which were wickedly serrated. The sight of it chilled my gut and brought a cataract of teeming memories.

"In the back. You caught him low in the back.. .here." I pointed to where I had felt the agony.

He nodded, his brow wrinkled in puzzlement. "That's right, just below the edge of his backplate. He was trying to mount his horse when I reached him...one foot in the stirrup, but the horse was shying. Couldn't get a clear swing at his head or neck because of his helmet, tried twice, but couldn't, so I took him low, backhanded. How did you know that?"

"I dreamed it, twice. I felt it this morning, when it happened." His eyes grew wide as he stared at me.

"What are you talking about?"

I shook my head, bemused, trying to shake off the feelings that assaulted me, but he kept talking.

"What d'you mean you felt it? Felt what? What madness is this?"

"Your weapon...that thing you have there. Did you have it with you when last we met?"

"No." He shook his head. "No, I took it from a Saxon in the north about a year ago. Best thing I ever came across for swinging from a saddle. Why?"

"I saw it in a dream, the night after I first met you. I saw you standing over a dead man...someone I couldn't see...but I was saddened by his death. And in my dream you turned on me, with that.. .thing in your hand."

He drew himself erect, settling himself in his saddle and blowing out his breath with an explosive sound. "What are you, some kind of sorcerer?"

I was asking myself the same question, for I could no longer deny, as I had been denying all my life, the strangeness of the power that sometimes stirred within me, frightening me with its potency. In a grim, silent parade of mockery, the memories of all the dreams of all the times before passed before my mind's new and all-seeing eye: a hundred and more shadowy events, but prime among them the death of my father; my vision of Ambrose before we met; and the death of Uther at the hands of Derek of Ravenglass. I knew the word for what I had conceived. It was prescience, but prescience was sorcery, and I had abjured all things magical throughout my life, discrediting their existence unless they involved human, manipulative trickery and the underlying wish to win power, to whatever degree, over men's minds. If what were there within me lay beyond my knowledge, let alone my control...I could not face the consequences of that line of thought and so I banished it, turning elsewhere for salvation.

I looked down again at the woman. "Who is she?"

Derek of Ravenglass shrugged. "Lot's whore. I'd heard tell she was fornicating with one of the Camulod bastards. When I saw her with them, I knew it was true."

"But you still didn't know it was Uther?"

"No." He was vehement. "How could I know that? I've been up in the north-west for the past two years. Only came back south this spring, three weeks ago."

"Why did you permit her to escape from Uther's camp?"

He gave a wolfish grin full of sharp canines. "No one 'permitted' her. They closed ranks against us and fought to the last man to give her and her escort time to get away. We've been after them ever since."

I felt a vast calm flowing through me. "What do you know of Camulod?"

He grunted. "Nothing, except that they're hard bastards. They fight hard and they die hard. Why d'you ask that?"

"Because I'm one of them. Now you're going to have to kill me, too, before I kill you."

He settled back in his saddle, his eyes narrowing, hefting his fearsome, hooked weapon, and I heard him sigh before putting his, Uther's, helmet back on his head again.

"You said you were from Lindum, in the north," he said, sounding disappointed. "I believed you. I even liked you."

I nodded. "I can be likable enough, I'm told. But I lied to you. We were caught unawares on the road that day, among Lot's gathering army. We had to lie our way out. I am Merlyn Britannicus, of Camulod. Uther's grandmother and my grandfather were brother and sister." I would fight and kill this man, I knew, or be killed by him, but in spite of all I had seen, I could find no anger in my soul against him. I searched for more fuel. "Why rape the woman and kill the others?"

He was genuinely surprised by my question. "What? Why not, by all the gods? We're at war. Spoils to the victor, death to the vanquished. That's the way life is."

He was right. I unsheathed my long cavalry sword. He looked at it, and then back into my eyes. "You think you can kill me, Merlyn Britannicus?" I did not respond and he went on, "Tell me, you said you dreamed of how I killed Pendragon?"

I nodded. "I awoke with the pain through my bowels, but I didn't know what had caused it until I saw your hook there. That reminded me."

"What time was this?"

"Just at daybreak."

"When I killed him."

"Apparently."

He shook his head in apparent wonderment, clearly at a loss as to what to make of me and my behaviour, then sighed again, a deep, dull, barking sound, and pulled back hard on his reins, dancing his horse around to face me on its other side. "Look, I don't want to fight you, man, but I will if I have to, whether you be Ambrose of Lindum or Merlyn of Camulod. In either case, I have no fear of you, sorcerer though it seems you may be, but neither have I any wish to kill you. So why don't we both simply ride away from here? I'll tell you where your cousin is and you can bury him."

His words did not surprise me. Perhaps they should have, but I barely heard them. I was too busy looking at his saddle bow, at the red-leather-handled, iron-balled flail that hung there, suspended by a leather loop on the side his horse had exposed to me in turning. His eyes followed my gaze and he looked down to where the weapon hung.

"What are you looking at?"

"That flail, is it yours?"

"Aye, mine by possession. It was hanging there when I claimed the horse."

I kneed my own mount towards him. "Then it was my cousin's. May I have it?"

He looked askance at me, one eyebrow raised high, then, seeing that I still held my helmet cradled in my arm, he sighed a third time, dropped his reins on his horse's neck and shifted his hooked weapon to his other hand. I leaned towards him and took Uther's flail when he held it towards me, feeling the familiar weight of it tug at my shoulder.

"My thanks." I raised it high in my right hand, pointing the junction of the chain and handle skyward until the ball dangled before my eyes. Was it the one Uther had made so long ago, or was it another, made to replace the first after that one had been thrown into the mere in my small valley? I knew that I would never know, but now I found myself grateful for the doubt that had again replaced my former certainty. I blinked away the sudden tears that had filled my eyes and hung the weapon gently from my own saddle bow. The northern king had watched me in silence throughout all of this. I looked at him again. "Where will you go now?"

He shrugged. "Find Lot, perhaps, or go home. All my men are gone. Some home, most dead."

"Lot is dead, too. I found his body hanging from a tree." I reached into my scrip and drew out the ring. "See? I took his boar seal."

Derek of Ravenglass sniffed. "Hmm! That's that, then. I'm going home. I've a desire to see my children again."

"Where will I find Uther?"

He shrugged and hung his hook axe again on the side of his saddle, plainly convinced that we had no fight with each other. "Back the way we came. Follow our tracks along the beach. It must be twelve miles or more. You'll see where our tracks enter along a wide stream bed with a great, white gleaming boulder standing in the middle of it. Can't miss it, it's huge and bright white. Your cousin and his people are lying in a clearing three more miles upstream. A lot of mine are lying there too."

We sat gazing at each other in silence for several moments longer, then Derek of Ravenglass cleared his throat. "Well then," he growled, "I wish you well, Ambrose called Merlyn. We were never friends, but we've never really been enemies, either, have we? We've got a saying among our people that only those touched by the gods feel the pain of others. Me, I've never believed in the gods, any of 'em, but there's not a doubt in my mind that you felt your cousin's death. So I think you really might be touched by the gods in spite of what I've always thought. That's why I have no wish to fight you. Farewell."

He spun his horse and moved away and I watched him silently until he disappeared among the distant dunes. Neither of us had considered sharing the company of the other and that was as it should be. When he had gone from view, I looked again at the naked woman lying by my horse's feet and as I did so, she coughed weakly.

Only when I was kneeling by her side, cradling her in my bent arm, did I become aware of how familiar she appeared, and then I knew beyond a doubt that this was Ygraine, sister to Donuil and Deirdre. The resemblance to both of them was there, unmistakable, in her face, and when she opened her great, green eyes, I knew her as the woman from my dreams of the previous night and my skin chilled again with goose bumps. She was unaware of me, or of herself or where she was. Uther's was the first name that sprang to her lips, and then she repeated it, this time less distinctly, slurring the vowels so that it sounded like "Ather."

As I knelt there beside her, a wavelet rippled up the beach and soaked my knee. The tide was flowing fast now, and I thought to move her, but as soon as I began to lift her I stopped again. She was dying and my entire sleeve was soaked with blood. When I looked, I saw that the back of her head was matted with blood that welled slowly, but far too freely to staunch, and her head was crushed. I knew without looking further that she had been kicked by Derek's horse, probably while he was mounting to face my approach.

Presently her eyes focused on my face and she seemed to know me as she asked, "Where is my baby?"

"Baby, Lady? There is no baby here."

"Yes, my baby. My baby bear. I promised Uther I would keep him safe and take him..."

"Take him where, Lady?"

"To Camulod! My baby! To Uther in Camulod.""

"Ygraine," I whispered, "Uther is gone."

"Uther? Ather...My son is Arthur. Pendragon's baby bear, his father call—" Her eyes went wide, startled, and she stiffened in my arms. "Uther?" she cried, and slumped dead.

I laid her gently on the sand and closed her eyes, seeing in my mind the eyes of her sister and her brother. How long I knelt there, my fingers on her eyelids, I have no idea, but I was grieving for her and for all of us who lived in this sad land of Britain. And then I heard, from behind me, clear and distinct as a cockerel's crow, the sound of a baby crying. Incredulous, I swung around to find myself kneeling almost in the sea and hearing the wailing of a baby coming from the great, clumsy, heavy boat that now rode gracefully upon the waves.

Starting to my feet, I flung myself towards it, feeling the water tugging at my armoured legs as I progressed. Deeper and deeper the water grew as the boat bobbed just beyond my reach, until I knew that one more step would take me under. Then, drawing a mighty breath, I launched myself with all my strength and felt the fingers of my right hand grasp the tailboard of the vessel. I scrambled and clawed and soon had both hands firmly in place, knowing that if I let go now I would drown, sinking straight to the bottom in all my armour. I waited and drew several deep breaths, gathering my strength, and then heaved myself up, swinging my right leg up and around to hook my heel over the side. It lodged on the wrong side, hampered by the spur on my heel, and it took great effort to twist it sidewise and inboard so the spur hooked instead on the safe side, holding me firmly. Moments later I had dragged myself up and fallen gasping into the safety of the boat, coughing and spewing bitter salt water, but enjoying the sheer pleasure of lying still, warm and wet, but safe.

I found the baby lying against the single mast, swathed in, and tied into, a black bear skin. A beautiful boy, no more than eight or nine weeks old, his tiny, chubby face was wrinkled in rage, eyes tightly closed as he protested against the hunger he was feeling.

I have never been able, nor am I able now, to describe the emotions that swept over me in those first moments of looking at the child who was to be my ward and this land's too brief-lived glory. I recall the feeling akin to reverence that filled me as I undid the bindings around the bear skin and peeled it away to look at him. He was swaddled in a long, white cloth that was stained and wet with the signs of his discomfort, and as I picked him up and loosened it his howls of outrage grew louder. Shortly thereafter, I held him naked, save for a soiled loincloth, and marvelled at the sturdy strength of him. This tiny, squalling mite was Uther's son, the fact attested to not by his red-gold hair, but by the red dragon crest of Pendragon on the signet ring fastened by a gold chain around his tiny neck. This was my nephew of a kind, blood nephew of my dear, dead wife Cassandra and nephew equally of my faithful friend Donuil, and in his veins, surging in virile potency, ran the pure Roman blood of the families of Publius Varrus and of my own grandfather Caius Britannicus, mingled with the royal Celtic blood of Ullic Pendragon, and of Athol, High King of the Scotii, the Scots of Hibernia. Here, in these minuscule, clenched fists, red face and squalling lungs, was a potential giant, distilled of a truly powerful concoction. A Leader, perhaps, to weld together the strongest elements of the people of this land of Britain. A King, perhaps, to wield Excalibur. In my mind, I clearly heard again the words Publius Varrus had spoken to me upon his deathbed: You'll know the day, and you'll know the man. If he hasn't come before you die, pass the Sword on to someone you can trust. Your own son. You'll know. You've been well taught. And you have learned well. You found the secret of the Lady, Cay, and then the secret of the saddle. You'll find the secret of the King, someday. You'll know him as soon as you set eyes on him. I looked at this small prince and I knew him and I shivered with foreknowledge, recalling another dream of a shining, silver sword piercing a stone.

As though conscious of my awe, the child stopped screaming and looked directly up at me with wide eyes and my breath caught in my throat. He was well haired, his skull covered with thick, red, curling locks, the kind of curling hair that reminded me of my great-uncle Publius Varrus. But it was his eyes that gave me pause. I had never seen anything like them, yet I had read of them in Varrus's books. They were the deep, golden eyes of a raptor, a mighty bird of prey, an eagle. I had never heard of or seen a baby with golden eyes, but I knew that this baby's great- grand-uncle Caius Britannicus had had such eyes. I drew him close to me, smelling the baby smells of him and knowing I would have to clean him soon, knowing also that I knew not how. And then I raised my eyes for the first time since boarding this craft, and looked towards the shore.

There, shockingly distant and far to my right, I saw my black horse standing on the beach, watching me, his head tilted to one side as though he wondered where I was going. He was the only living thing on all that long stretch of sand, and behind him the land rose rapidly to form a line of cliffs against the sky. We had already drifted almost to the mouth of the bay, and the broad, deep stretch of water between the boat and the beach told me that we would not be returning there today. The breeze that had sprung up, blowing from the land, was gentle on my face, but it was strong enough to drive our boat further from the land with every heartbeat. For a long, long time I knelt there, holding the now quiet child protectively against my breast as we drifted out to sea. Together we watched the shores of South Britain fall further and further behind us.

THE END