The Lance Thrower

VIII

BISHOP ENOS

I HAD NEVER SEEN such an inhospitable place. Britain, the vaunted land of riches famed by Julius Caesar and the Emperors Claudius, Hadrian, and Trajan, was a hole without any redeeming features that I could discern. For the first seven days after our arrival on its coastline, heavy, driving rain fell incessantly and left us chilled to the bone, shivering in our armor and unable to escape the damp, appalling misery of the place. The moist, cold air contaminated every place we found during that time that might conceivably have offered us anything resembling accommodation or comfort and left us sniffling with discomfort and close to despair over the sheer foulness of the climate.

Perceval expressed best what we were all feeling late one soggy afternoon, after we had been vainly trying for the better part of an hour to light a fire using sodden wood. “I hate this damnable place,” he said, “and I resent having to live in constant motion, afraid to stand still for more than a few moments lest my armor rust up and lock solid and I be stuck here forever.” It was an inept attempt at humor, but we were in sore need of humor by that time.

We had made to land at Dubris, originally, that being the easiest access point in the long line of high, white chalk cliffs that formed much of the southernmost coast of the island. An entire stretch of coast there, several miles in length, offered long, shallow beaches and safe havens set into vales and niches along the great white cliffs and had provided the landing place for Caesar’s legions on his earliest exploratory expedition to Britain. But even before we had begun to sail in toward the land we had been aware of large numbers of armed warriors lining the clifftops and watching us with intense, unmoving hostility, evincing absolutely no signs of welcoming activity. Joachim, our ship’s captain, held back, eyeing the spectacle warily and looking distinctly unhappy, and I moved to stand beside him.

“You look displeased, my friend. What’s wrong?”

He shook his head without looking at me, his gaze fixed on the distant clifftops. “I don’t know,” he growled, “but something’s far from right.”

“How so?”

Now he glanced at me, sharply. “I told you, I don’t know. All I know is something’s wrong. If I knew what it was I wouldn’t have to say I don’t know, would I? But that’s new.” He waved a pointing finger toward the men lining the cliffs. “I never seen that before, and I’ve landed here a hundred times and more. This is a port, a trading town, and I’ve always been welcomed here no matter who was in command of the place … and it’s changed hands more times than a copper coin. But I’m not welcome here this time … a blind man could see that. I’m going to stand away and change course for a safer berth.”

He swung around and started shouting orders, all of which were unintelligible to me, and within moments his men were swarming up ropes and doing things with the enormous sail.

“Where are you going to go? We have to land there, don’t we?”

He looked at me with a grimace, baring his teeth. “You might have to,” he growled. “I don’t. This is the only ship I own, and I owe it to my crew to keep it afloat. They rely on me to keep them alive and safe from getting drowned or murdered by pirates, and that’s what I intend to do. If you’re determined to be foolish I’ll drop you ashore farther along the coast, if that’s what you really want, but I’m not going any closer to land right now, not until I’ve made sure they’ve got no swift battle boats lying in wait behind some headland, waiting for me to sail into a trap.”

The words had barely left his mouth when two swift-moving vessels came into view upwind to the right of us, the spray from their sweeps catching the rays of the midday sun and sending up rainbow showers of drops as the ships drove straight toward us, plainly intent on overhauling us. Fortunately for us, however, they had made their opening move too soon. Joachim wasted no time in congratulating himself on his caution. He simply rapped out more orders to his crew and we swung away westward, our ship lying over on her left side with the steepness of the turn. We had the advantage of a fair wind at our back and soon left our pursuers behind.

From then on, the weather began to deteriorate, and so did Joachim’s good humor. He had been fretting for hours before that, eyeing the gathering cloud masses to the north and west and anticipating the onset of the winds as he muttered to himself, invoking the ancient gods of the sea to hold back their displeasure and not to send the winter storms too soon. But they were either deaf or angry with him, because all his pleading was in vain. The wind came fitfully at the outset, blowing in short-lived, uneven gusts for the first hour or so, with long gaps of stillness between gusts, but as the day wore on the gaps grew shorter and the gusts more violent, whipping streamers of stinging spray from the curling tops of the waves that had suddenly taken on an appearance more coldly hostile than any we had seen before.

Long before sunset we had lost all sense of sunlight. The wrack of clouds overhead was low and roiling, the masses of vapor churning upon themselves as the air grew darker. And then the first rain squall struck us and abruptly we were all blind, in a world of utter blackness filled with howling winds, hissing sheets of rain, and terrifying, chaotic motion that annihilated all the rules by which we had been taught to live and move on land. Above and beyond all of those things, however, were the appalling noises made by the ship itself under the stresses of the storm, when the threat-filled, menacing creaks and groans and screams of tortured ropes and planks made it sound as though the vessel were about to rip itself asunder and disintegrate under the hammering of wind and water.

All four of us passengers, who had believed ourselves to be ill until then, immediately plunged to the bottom of an abyss of despair and abject, inhuman sickness. I know not how the sailors fared during all that transpired that first night—I have to presume that they continued doing what they were employed to do, since we survived the tempest—but we four, embarked upon an adventure, suffered beyond description. For several days one hammering storm rolled over us and passed by only to be replaced by another, even more violent upheaval. None of us could recall having been that sick, or that helpless, or that frightened at any time in our lives.

I often talked to people about that voyage in the years that followed, and I was always amazed at the unworldliness and the indescribably profound ignorance of people who have never been aboard a ship in foul weather. They simply cannot conceive of the difference between a storm on land and a storm at sea, and the most common question I encountered whenever I told the tale was, “Why didn’t you go ashore and get out of it?”

Why indeed? It was a question I might have asked myself, the day before we set sail upon that voyage. But experience taught me very quickly that it was a question with no simple, clear-cut answer. In the first place, and most particularly at night, we could not even see the shore, and all we knew was the terrifying truth told to us by our captain and his crew—that we had to hold the ship in safety far away from the land in order to prevent its being hurled against the rocks and crushed like an egg. So great was the power of the breaking waves, we were told, that our bodies would be destroyed by its savagery, pounded into unrecognizable, bloodless meat against the rocks along the shoreline. That was a comforting vision to sustain us in our terror. Then, too, we were prohibited from any simple act of “going ashore” by the size and shape of our vessel. It was a trading craft, broad and deep-keeled, designed to carry large volumes of cargo, which meant that it could not simply be rowed up into the shallows fronting a beach and grounded there.

In order to bring our large ship to land and unload his goods in safety, Joachim required the presence of a pier at which he could moor the vessel, or, failing that—a situation the captain described with no great enthusiasm—he needed to find a straight-edged shoreline or a riverbank along which the water was deep and calm and its surface no more than half the height of a man below the land’s. Neither one of these could be achieved with anything resembling safety in stormy conditions, and one or the other of them was necessary for us to unload our eight horses and all the goods we carried with us. We ourselves might leap over the side in relatively calm waters and swim to safety, but we would do so at great cost, since we would have to leave everything, including our armor and weapons, behind us aboard ship and would thus be stranded in a strange land without any means of surviving or even defending ourselves.

Shortly before dawn on the morning of our second day at sea, we felt the wind abating and the motion of the ship became less violent, sufficiently so for me to bestir myself to find the captain and ask him what was happening. He told me we were in the lee of Wight, which left me squinting painfully, wondering if I had lost the proper use of my ears. Wight, he told me then, is an island off the south coast of Britain, and we were now sheltered between it and the mainland, enjoying the respite that its bulk provided from the winds. We would stay there, he told me, in the hope of riding out the remainder of the storm.

Day broke, and even from afar we could see the fury of the waves that pounded the coastline of the mainland to the north of us. To our left, however, the coast of Wight seemed benign and placid, and I mentioned to Joachim that we might be able to land there. He gazed at me with what seemed like pity, and so long did he take to respond that I began to think he was going to say nothing at all.

“Aye, you could,” he said, eventually, a half smile quirking at his lips. “No difficulty about that, if you want to. But you might have some trouble after that, once you’re ashore.”

I frowned. “Why is that? Are the people hostile there?”

“No, they’re not. But that’s Wight, over there. It’s an island. If I land you there, then sail back to Gaul, you might not be able to get your people off again. There’s four of you, remember, and eight horses. I doubt if you’d find a boat on the whole island big enough to carry off all of you at one time, and even although it may not look like a great distance from there to the mainland, this stretch of water is miles wide, so you couldn’t swim.”

I felt my face flush at my own obvious stupidity, but Joachim laughed. “Hey,” he said, sweeping his hand across the horizon in front of us, “you’re a landsman. How could you be expected to know about the shortage of ships on Wight? There’s no way to tell from here that it’s deserted, but it’s true. Most of the people who once lived there now live ashore, on the mainland. But the only reason I know that is because I’ve sailed this way before, more times than I can recall. My livelihood depends on knowing things like that when I go to sea. I dare say, were we among your woods in Gaul, you’d be leading me by the hand, because I can’t stand being hemmed in. I like to feel empty distances around me … nothing but me, my ship, and my crew between the water below me and the sky above.”

“But you could have dropped us ashore there anyway and made your way directly home, and had anyone asked, you could have said that I requested to be set down there.”

He looked at me sideways and smiled more broadly now, although still with an element of ruefulness, as though he were wondering about my lack of wits. “Think you so? Really?” He shook his head. “I have your gold in my chest, that’s true, but there’s also the fact that you have come to me from Germanus, and that’s worth more to me than gold. If I did anything as stupid as you suggest, I would lose his friendship, and I don’t care to do that.”

I nodded slowly, acknowledging the wisdom of what he had said. “Then what should we do?”

“Exactly what we are doing. We stay here in reasonable safety, riding at anchor, and we watch for wind shifts while we wait out the storm.”

We remained in the shelter of the island for the rest of that day and the night that followed, and by dawn the following day the weather had become calm and the skies clear. The storm had blown itself out.

We struck out once more to the westward immediately, and for the space of several hours we had blue skies and only scattered clouds overhead, although the waves pounding the beaches had scarcely lessened in their fury. Once again, however, by the middle of the afternoon the clouds were blowing in from the northwest in marshaled ranks. Hoping to evade this new storm, we swung in sharply toward the coast, but we could see from a long way out that the coastline here was one of high, unbroken cliffs fronted by ragged lines of rocks against which angry breakers smashed themselves into towers of spuming whiteness. There might have been inlets there where we could shelter, Joachim said, but he was unfamiliar with the coastline here and by the time we approached close enough to search for suitable havens, we would be too late to make our way back out to safety against the incoming storm if we found none. So once again we remained far out at sea, at the mercy of the winds and the waves, and our misery deepened.

The hardened mariners had regained their seagoing constitutions by that time and they ate contentedly despite the motion of the seas, chewing dried meat and hard bread and washing that down with beer or watered wine. The mere sight of them eating and drinking made the four of us landsmen sicker than we had been before.

In due time, we rounded the point of Cornwall, gazing despairingly at the towering cliffs that offered us nothing in the way of moorage, and made our way forlornly back to the northeast, the wind now blowing directly toward us so that our passage became even slower and more difficult than it had been until then. Glastonbury was our destination now, Joachim told us, although if a safe harbor appeared between now and our arrival there, we would take advantage of it.

We clawed our way slowly and with enormous effort up along the coastline, rowing into the teeth of the wind, with all four of us passengers contributing our efforts for the common good until we were barely able to keep ourselves from collapsing into unconsciousness. And as we went, having lost all awareness of day fading into night on several occasions, the storms continued to fall upon us in an apparently endless succession, each new one following closely after the passing of its predecessor. Eventually, however, we entered the estuary of a large river, and the waters quickly began to grow calmer. I had begun to regain control of my bodily functions two days before that and had been improving steadily if slowly, so that I noticed the lessening of the turmoil under our keel immediately and lost no time in asking Joachim for an explanation. He pointed with his thumb toward the distant shoreline that was barely discernible through the curtains of rain on our left.

“We’re heading directly eastward now, entering the river channel the local people call the Severn. That shoreline over there, that’s Cambria. Never been there but I’ve heard much about it. Hostile to everyone, the people there, although nobody seems to know why they should be. They have nothing much to be jealous of. Country’s mountainous and mostly impenetrable, once you strike inland from the sea. Romans never really made much of an attempt to conquer it, although they say the biggest gold mine in the Empire’s in there somewhere … some place called Dolaucothi, or something like that.”

He pointed again, this time to the closer, low-lying land on our right. “That’s your destination, over there. It’s mainly flat inland, but boggy and treacherous close to the sea. Glastonbury lies farther down the coast. We passed by it early this morning. Didn’t wake you because there was nothing to see and we didn’t even approach it—no hope of landing there in weather like this. It’s too flat. Too shallow and muddy. And the approaches—there’s only a few navigable channels that let you get in there—have probably been destroyed by now, churned up and fouled by these storms. I wasn’t prepared to sail into a bog to put that to the test.

“I decided to keep moving up to the estuary here. There’s an old river port about thirty miles upstream. Romans called it Glevum. It’s deserted now. Or it was last time I came this way, about three years ago. But the wharves were still serviceable then, and if no one’s been along to tear them down or burn them up, they should still be usable. Good enough for us to land you on, certainly.

“From there you should be able to make your way easily. There’s a main road goes close by there, and once you’re on that, you can go anywhere. The road network connects all parts of Britain. At least, I’ve been told it does. Never was interested enough to go and find out for myself. Roads make me nervous. Too narrow and predictable and too many people use them. Nowhere to escape to, on a road. Give me the sea any day, even in weather like this. A man who knows what he’s doing can escape from anyone, anytime, at sea, providing he’s got a fast ship and an able crew.

“Anyway, if nothing else we’re off the open sea and out of the storms, with calm water under our keel from now on. Pass on my felicitations to your friends on surviving the crossing.”

He grinned and left me standing watching him as he returned to the business of captaining his vessel, and within a matter of hours we were drifting slowly into the river port at Glevum, gazing at the spectacle of a ruined and uninhabited town as we glided slowly toward an abandoned wharf that was lined with warehouses and appeared to be in perfect condition. For the first time in days, not a breath of wind stirred from any direction, and beneath us the surface of the river would have been mirror calm had it not been for the slashing rain.

The ship’s side bumped against the wharf and two seamen leaped ashore with ropes that they quickly secured to massive, oaken bollards. Others rushed to lower the side of the ship, creating a gateway to the deck, while yet more of the crew manned the block-and-tackle cargo hoist and struggled to extract the gangway from its resting place along the center line of the ship and swing it outboard to the wharf. A sudden grunt and a scuffling noise was followed by a panicked curse, and then came a bump and a splash as one of the crew slipped on the rain-slick boards and fell overboard between the wharf and the ship.

All movement stopped instantly as men watched and waited for the screams of the man being crushed between ship and wharf. For long moments nothing happened at all, and then the fallen man splashed to the surface on the other side of the vessel, having dived deep and swum beneath it. With a roar of relief, his shipmates hurried to pull him safely aboard again, and then they all returned to the work of preparing to unload.

Tristan looked at his brother Perceval—I had already stopped thinking of him as Ursus—who stared quietly back at him, his mouth quirked up to one side, then turned to me. “Well,” he said quietly, “he didn’t die, so let’s hope we can accept that as a good omen.” He glanced back at Bors and Tristan, who stood watching. “Welcome to Britain, lads. It’s wet, and it’s dark, and it’s none too pleasant, and there’s nothing yet to like about it, that I’ve seen. But at least it looks as though it’s solid underfoot. Who’s to be first ashore?”

I was, and as soon as my feet landed on the wharf I immediately threw out my arms and lurched forward ludicrously, fighting for balance and trying not to fall headlong as the ship’s crew, who had been waiting for me to do just that, roared with laughter and jeers. The others followed me more cautiously, all three of them frowning intently with concentration as they moved, but they had no notion of why I had behaved the way I had, and so were equally unprepared and fell about the same way I had, to be greeted with equally loud jeers from the crew.

It took less than an hour for us to unload our animals and provisions, and we all set out for the town, in search of a roof to keep the rain away from us while we lit a fire and cooked the sole remaining joint of venison that we had brought with us from Gaul—a fine haunch that held enough meat to feed all twelve of us in the last meal we would share with our seafaring friends for some time. Sound roofs were few and far between in Glevum, we discovered, although the ruins of the fallen ones offered a wealth of dry firewood, but we found a whole roof eventually, at the extreme end of one of the warehouse blocks lining the wharf next to the one on which we had landed, and all of us moved in gratefully, happy to be out of the incessant rain and within sight of the leaping flames of a real fire.

As we waited for the spitted haunch of salted venison to roast, we salivated over the savory smells of baking bannock and of garlic and onions bubbling in a pot with greens of some kind provided by the ship’s cook.

I handed Joachim a small package containing ten more gold coins than we had agreed upon. He looked at it askance.

“What’s this? You paid me already.”

I shrugged. “I know, but Bishop Germanus told me to spend the funds judiciously, according to my conscience and to what you, in particular, did for us. I believe you did far more than we asked of you and so I think of this, a token of our gratitude, as money well spent. Besides, you still have to win home. And now you and I need to make another tryst. In six months’ time, I would like you to return to this same wharf, seeking us. If we are not here, it will be for good and sufficient reason, although I will try to send word to you of why we are not here, and possibly to arrange another meeting at another time. Will you agree to that?”

Joachim tucked the small package into a decorated pouch at his belt. “In six months? Aye, I’ll be here, providing I am still alive by then. And I will stay for ten days, should no one be waiting here to meet me. And look you here, come with me.” He rose, and I followed him outside. He pointed to the ground where an old, flat, badly rusted piece of iron lay at an angle against the base of the wall. “I saw that as I entered. It’s worth nothing and it looks as though it’s been lying there for years. If I have to leave with no word from you after the ten days I spoke of, I’ll leave you written word of when I will next return, and I’ll stuff it under there. That way, if you can’t meet me at the appointed time, you can at least leave word of what your plans are. Agreed?” He paused. “You can read and write, can’t you?”

I smiled. “Aye. I was surprised to find you can, too, that’s all.”

He smiled back at me. “Aye, well, I had a clever teacher when I was a boy. A crazed man who thought it would be worthwhile for me to know how to read and write when none of my friends could. Afterward, when I found myself living among people who could do neither, I thought he must have been insane, for nothing is more useless than being the only person able to read and write. But he was right, of course, and it has served me well.” He reached out a hand and I shook it gladly. “Go with God, young Clothar of Benwick,” he said, “and may He watch over you and those you love. We’ll bid each other farewell again later, but this one is between you and me alone.”

Four days later it was still raining heavily as we headed westward across the first cultivated fields we had seen since landing in Britain. We had been proceeding cautiously, taking all the time we needed and being careful to run no unnecessary risks in this alien land.

We had headed due south from our landing place, following the road that stretched for miles on end with barely a bend or a curve in the length of it, but remembering what Joachim had had to say about there being no escape on a road, I kept us off the road surface and safely to one side, concealed among the trees. Only once in four days had we seen other travelers, and that had been in an area of gently rolling hills that concealed the people approaching us until they crested the brow of a rise in the road and passed us swiftly, riding north, a tight-knit, highly disciplined band of armed men, perhaps forty strong and moving with determination.

I remembered then what Germanus had told me: that in all of Britain, only Merlyn Britannicus’s Camulod had cavalry.

Knowing the newcomers then to be friendly to our cause, I spurred my horse out onto the road, ignoring the dismayed cries of my friends and riding hard after the moving column, shouting at the top of my voice.

The rearmost riders heard me and turned in their saddles to look back, then reacted predictably, shouting to their companions and turning their mounts rapidly to face me. I saw the tight ranks ahead of me eddy and break apart, then reform swiftly to present a solid line of men and horses, all awaiting my arrival. Behind me, I knew, Perceval, Tristan, and Bors were spurring to catch up to me, and I raised my arm and waved them back and away as I slowed my horse to a walk and slowly approached the faceless men ahead of me. And faceless they were, because each of them wore a fully closed helmet, the side flaps pulled together and fastened over their faces, leaving only a black slash of a hole across their eyes.

I pulled my mount to a stop less than thirty paces from their front rank and sat there motionless, waiting for someone to come forward to greet me or challenge me. None of them spoke at all, and I was conscious of their eyes taking in every detail of my appearance. My fine armor was securely wrapped and slung on Bors’s packhorse, and I knew that I did not appear to be armored at all, although I was wearing Germanus’s supple tunic of ring mail beneath my heavy, sodden military cloak of waxed wool. On my head I wore only a knitted woolen cap, soaked through and through, with a long, brightly colored but bedraggled feather thrust into it. The ranks facing me stirred and parted, and a man who was evidently their commander came forward to confront me. He paused briefly, reining his horse in tightly, then kneed it forward again and approached to within a few paces of where I sat waiting, where he stopped and sat staring at me, saying nothing.

I knew this was a test, designed to make me speak first out of fear and uncertainty, and so I sat still, determined not to be the first to break the silence, and finally the stranger spoke, his voice sounding hollow and reverberating as it emerged from the cavern of his helmet.

“Who are you, whence come you, and what is your business here in Camulod?”

So, I thought, we are within Camulod at last. I nodded and sat straighter, forcing myself to speak slowly and clearly. “My name is Clothar of Benwick in Gaul, and I come bearing messages and gifts for Merlyn Britannicus of Camulod from his friend Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre, also in Gaul. Behind me are my traveling companions, Perceval and Tristan of Montenegra, and my attendant, Bors. To whom am I speaking?”

“To one who has met Germanus and heard him promise to return here in person.” The helmeted head with its high crest tilted slightly to one side. “Tell me, if you will, why I should believe you have come here from Gaul. Did you swim here, horses and all?”

“No, we came by sea, hoping to land at Glastonbury, but we were blown beyond it by the storms.” My mind was racing, searching for information that I could present to this man that would assure him of our amity yet reveal nothing of our true business here. I knew he was not really suspicious of us. Our very openness in approaching him from behind must have made it clear to him we had no wish to conceal ourselves. But I knew, too, that I had to say something to justify our presence and to establish our bona fides.

“You have met Germanus. Are you then familiar with the name of Enos?”

“Aye, Enos of Verulamium. Another bishop.”

“But a Britannian bishop, is he not?”

“Britannian? If by that you mean he is a Briton then aye, he is.”

“Well, I bear dispatches in the form of letters from Germanus in Auxerre to Enos in Verulamium, concerning matters which the two of them discussed last year in conjunction with Merlyn Britannicus when last they met—in Verulamium, just before Merlyn had to leave in haste because of the word that Horsa’s Danes had sailed for Cornwall.”

The man facing me reached up slowly to his chin with one hand and pulled upward on the end of a short cord that hung there, releasing a metal pin that held the flaps of his helmet together, and as they fell apart he reached higher and pulled the helmet from his head, revealing a strong, evenly featured face, dark haired and dark browed, with a long nose, a wide, square jaw and a mouth that suggested strength of will and good humor. It was the face of a veteran soldier, secure and confident of his own abilities. He flicked a drip of rainwater from the end of his nose with the tip of a forefinger and inclined his head slightly in a grave and courteous acknowledgment that he accepted what I had said.

“Philip,” he said. “Philip Rider, they call me, commander of the Fourth Wing of the cavalry forces of Camulod. Welcome to our lands. Where did you land, the river port?”

“Aye, the place called Glevum. Can you tell me where I might find Merlyn Britannicus?”

“No, Master Clothar, I cannot. I can tell you where you will not find him, however, and that is in Camulod. He was there for a few months, but he left some time ago and told no one where he was going. He told some of his closest friends that he will be away for some time—for as long as it may take’ was what he actually said, although no one knows what ‘it’ is—and he could, or he would, give them no idea of when he might return.”

He hesitated, then added, “As to where he went, he could have gone anywhere. Merlyn prefers his own company nowadays, would rather be alone, they say, since his misfortunes in Cambria last year.”

“What misfortunes are those?”

The man called Philip frowned. “He almost died in Cambria, was thrown into a fire there and badly burned.”

“Thrown into a fire? By whom?”

Philip almost smiled. “A mad whoreson called Carthac, big and ugly and evil and as strong as ten good men. They thought he was unkillable, invincible. He thought so, too, until Merlyn killed him. But before he died he threw Merlyn into a fire. Arthur arrived shortly after that, leading us, and we were able to save Merlyn’s life. Took him home on a wagon and nursed him back to health. But as soon as he could move freely, he left again, and as I say, no one knows where he went.”

“Are your wars over?”

That earned me a quizzical look that told me Philip found it difficult to accept that anyone would have to ask such a thing. “For this year, you mean? Aye, they seem to be. There’s peace in Cambria, to the north of here—Carthac was the festering thorn there, and with his death things soon died down. And in Cornwall to the south, the troublemaker was a man called Ironhair. But he seems to have fallen out with his henchman, Horsa, who hanged him for his troubles.” A tiny smile flickered at the edges of his mouth. “So there’s peace in these parts, at least. But then there is continuing war against the Saxons to the east, although some won’t come out and call it that. The Saxons are a permanent curse and the confrontation out there is more of a chronic condition than a state of war. North and south, though, Camulod is at peace for the moment.

“Our leader, Arthur, is on a grand sweep to the north and east, far beyond our lands, showing the banners and the cavalry of Camulod in other parts of the land in the hope of rallying people to stand up together and confront the Oudanders—Saxons and Jutes and Danes and all the other hordes swarming on the eastern side of Britain.” He waved a hand to indicate the men behind him. “We are but the advance party of a full cavalry wing of a thousand mounted troopers, coming less than a mile behind us. A strong force, but our mission is peaceable. We ride merely to show our strength, patrolling our territories.”

I nodded, thinking rapidly. “I see. And Arthur Pendragon rides to the north and east, you say. Where is he now, exactly, do you know?”

Philip made a wry mouth. “No one will be able to answer that question until Arthur himself returns with the word of it. He has been gone for two months and more. He could be anywhere by now.”

“And Merlyn would not be with him?”

Now the man looked puzzled. “Why would Merlyn be with him? Arthur’s no longer a student. He’s a commander of cavalry in his own right, commander of the First Wing. He looks after his responsibilities and Merlyn looks after his own. Besides, Merlyn could not have known which way Arthur went, other than north, because Arthur left from Cambria, while Merlyn was still abed in Camulod, recovering from his wounds.”

“Hmm,” I grunted, thinking deeply about what we should do next. “Thank you, Philip Rider. Can you show me the shortest way to Camulod from here? And this damnable rain, does it ever stop?”

Philip flashed a smile. “Why, man, it seldom starts at all. It will blow by within the next day or two, and the weather will turn fine again before winter sets in, you wait and see. And as for, the route to Camulod, that’s easy. Simply follow this road south from here until you reach a garrisoned town called Ilchester. They’re our people there, and they’ll point you in the right direction. You should stay here, however, until our thousand pass you by. I’ll leave a decurion with you to explain your presence to Commander Rufio, and after that you can proceed. Now, if you will permit me, I have to make up time and distance.”

He slipped his helmet back onto his head and saluted me, bringing his clenched fist to his left breast, then turned his horse around and gave the signal to the men in front of him. In a matter of moments they had regrouped, leaving only one of their number with us, and were cantering away from us.

The decurion greeted us with a courteous nod and then sat silently beside us, and within a short time we heard the approaching cavalry squadrons. Their leaders, riding in the vanguard, drew rein on our side of the road as they neared us, and the decurion rode forward to explain our presence. They listened and nodded, then rode on by us with the decurion, nodding courteously but otherwise paying us no attention. When the last of the thousand had passed us by, their remounts, several hundreds in number, followed after them, herded by a large number of boys below fighting age, and we sat watching until the last of the animals had disappeared from view along the road behind the shrouds of falling rain.

Only then did Perceval turn to me with an admiring grunt. “I can’t believe that the only thing in this godforsaken country that I haven’t hated on sight is one and a half thousand of the finest horses I’ve ever seen. Where do they find beasts like that? I can’t believe they breed them here in such an unholy climate.”

“Believe it,” I told him. “They breed them all here now, according to Germanus, but their origins were Empire-wide. Let’s be off. It’s not far now to Camulod and I would like a roof over my head as soon as it can be arranged. I’ll tell you what Germanus told me about their cavalry as we ride.”

We kicked our horses into motion, and Perceval and Tristan ranged themselves on either side of me while young Bors rode close behind us, straining to hear.

I raised my voice until I was almost shouting over the noise of the rain. “The story goes that seventy-one years ago, in the year 376, in a place called Adrianopolis in Asia Minor beyond the eastern edges of the Middle Sea, a Roman consular army of forty thousand men, commanded by the Co-emperor Valens, was overrun and wiped out by a mounted force of Ostrogoths. It was a freakish accident and it should never have happened, but it did. The Goths were migrating from one region to another. They even had their women and children with them. But they were all mounted, on small, shaggy ponies, and they crested a mountain ridge to see an entire Roman army below them, marching in extended order along the edge of a lake. They charged immediately and caught the legions before they could form up in battle order, then rolled them up like a carpet. Forty thousand Romans died that afternoon, including Valens and his entire staff, and the word went out that the Romans were vulnerable to attack by massed formations of horsemen.” I glanced from side to side and saw that both my friends were listening closely, so I kept talking.

“Theodosius was still Emperor at that time, and Flavius Stilicho, who was half Roman and half Vandal, was his most brilliant legatus., Stilicho had been appointed commander in chief of the Imperial Household Troops—in other words, commander in chief of all Rome’s legions and the most powerful soldier in the world—at the age of twenty-two. They say he was the greatest natural military genius since Alexander the Great of Macedon. Anyway, Stilicho launched an immediate-priority program to reequip and retrain all the legions of Rome in order to counteract this new threat of mounted attack, and within the space of twenty-five years he had increased each legion’s cavalry strength from the traditional five percent of light, skirmishing cavalry—mounted archers whose sole duty was to form a mobile defensive screen while the legion was forming its battle lines—to twenty-five percent heavy, disciplined cavalry that operated in the manner of Alexander’s heavy cavalry of six hundred years earlier, riding in tightly packed, disciplined formations and carrying heavy spears.” I paused, allowing them to absorb what I had said before continuing. “Now that might not sound like much of a feat when you hear someone say it as quickly and plainly as I have just said it, but don’t let that mislead you. Think about what was involved in those changes.” I paused again.

“It was an enormous undertaking, according to everything the Bishop told me, and he had made a study of all it involved. That Stilicho was able to achieve such a transformation at all was astonishing, Germanus says, for in order to succeed he had first to confront and defeat the opinions and the plotting of the stubborn, old-guard traditionalists who didn’t want anything to change and who believed that the old ways were always and would always be the best ways. And the fact that most of them resented him for his youth and his brilliance did not make his task any easier. Stilicho simply never quit, never wavered in his resolve, and eventually he won. But that he was able to achieve what he did within twenty-five short years was nothing short of miraculous … .” I stopped talking and looked from one to the other of them and they stared back at me, waiting. “I know the Bishop likes to talk of miracles and miraculous occurrences. He is a bishop, after all is said and done. But it really is astounding, if you but think on it even for a few moments. Imagine, for a start, the sheer size, the scope of the program that was required, throughout the whole world, to breed the number of horses they would require to equip every single legion in the armies with that many horses, including remounts and pack animals. Then think about the size of the animals involved. Light skirmishing cavalry needed only small, light horses, and Rome had always had plenty of those. But for heavy cavalry you need big, heavy horses. Those they did not have, and they needed thousands of them. So where did they find them? Where did those big horses come from?

“Well, I’ll tell you where they came from. They created them; bred them out of what they had available. Once again, they launched a new, specially-designed program all across the Empire: a cross-breeding program, to mate the largest, strongest animals they could find with the best they had that were smaller, in order to breed larger offspring. By the end of twenty-five years, the results were astounding.

“But then they discovered, too, that the new ‘heavy’ cavalry, mounted on huge horses, was poorly equipped. The riders were armored heavily on top, as Roman troops had always been, but now their legs were vulnerable, hanging down among the enemy, who were on foot. So new armor had to be designed to protect the riders’ legs, and that required new techniques of metal crafting for making such armor. And swords had to be lengthened and strengthened, for even the traditional cavalry spatha was too short to be effective from the back of a large, tall horse. And so a new study of metal crafting and smithing was launched in order to find new ways of working iron and steel to make longer, stronger weapons. It goes on and on, each problem giving rise to new solutions that led in turn to other problems in a never-ending cycle.

“Eventually, however, after only twenty years, from 396 until 398, when Stilicho was Regent to the infant emperor Honorius, he brought the central corps of his new cavalry forces to train them here in Britain, in secrecy, against seaborne invasions of Picts, Saxons, and Hibernian Scots. They were extremely successful.” I paused, purely to emphasize the effect of my next words.

“Barely three years after that, however, when Stilicho had to summon the legions home in haste from Britain to defend Italia and Rome itself against invasion by Alaric and his Visigoths, they had to leave those cavalry mounts behind, simply because they couldn’t take them with them. It’s impossible to ship hundreds of large animals by sea unless you spend months and even years planning how to achieve it, and unless you have specialized ships in which to carry them. Stilicho had no time to do either one of those things. He was faced with an emergency situation … the first threat in a thousand years from foreigners against the City of Rome, and he needed his armies home immediately. And so he had to make arrangements to have his horses cared for until his armies returned to Britain.

“A man called Caius Britannicus, grandsire to Merlyn and the founder of the place now called Camulod, had become a friend to Flavius Stilicho during the Regent’s campaign here. The Regent named this man Legatus emeritus and granted him temporary ownership of all the abandoned Roman cavalry mounts, charging him with keeping them safe and secure pending the return of the legions to Britain. But the legions never returned, and those Roman horses became the foundation of the cavalry of Camulod and triggered the ascendancy of Merlyn’s colony.”

I fell silent then, and it felt as though I had been talking for a very long time, but neither of my companions made any comment on anything I had said. We proceeded for almost a mile before Tristan broke the silence.

“It has not stopped raining in seven days,” he said. “Not once. I forget what the sky looks like without clouds. I can barely remember sunshine. I think we may die here in Britain, drowned in rainwater. Most of all, though, I’m longing for the warmth and dryness of that filthy old warehouse in Glevum. I think God must have forgotten we’re here.”

I sat gazing at him for long moments, slightly stunned by the obliqueness of what he had said. And then it occurred to me that he had offered an apt, valid, and pertinent comment on the importance of my impromptu history lesson and its relevance here and now. I nodded my head, accepting that I had been talking about something that was of absolutely no value today, and glanced up at the sky.

“Sweet Jesus!” As the others swung to face me I pointed upward. “Look!”

To the east, a golden beam of sunlight had sprung blazing, clean edged and brilliant from a narrow, bright blue gap in the clouds.

From that moment when I saw the first ray of sunshine breaking through the rain clouds, Britain seemed to change its mind and welcome us, showing us warmth and beauty and hospitality where before we had know only dankness, gloom, and despondency.

The memory of my first sight of the distant fortress of Camulod, sitting high on its wooded hill overlooking the rich and fertile plain beneath, has remained with me ever since. Strangely enough, looking back upon it across the distance of years, I realize now that I did not think of the place as a fortress at all when I first saw it. I saw Camulod from afar as a place of great and exciting beauty, rather than as a defensive bastion. I saw and accepted immediately that the place had none of the grandeur or magnificence of the great, castellated fortresses of Gaul, and in the years to come I would see many finer and stronger buildings and fortifications along the southeast coastline of Britain itself, the so-called Forts of the Saxon Shore, built by the Roman occupying forces hundreds of years earlier and abandoned when the legions left.

What I saw in the distance that first day, for reasons I have never known or sought to understand, was a symbol of hope and, most surprisingly in retrospect, of peace, because it had become obvious by the time we came within sight of Camulod that day that, despite what Philip had told us about Britain being at peace, we were in a land fully prepared for war. There were parties of soldiers moving everywhere we looked, mainly cavalry but with a substantial leavening of infantry, and we were challenged constantly by people demanding to know who we were and what we were about. Fortunately, the fact that we were all well-dressed and well-mounted worked in our favor, for it quickly became apparent to us that the enemy, whoever they might be, went largely afoot and owned little of the sophisticated weaponry carried by the troopers of Camulod. That word, troopers, was a new word to me, but one that was easy enough to understand, and I added it to my vocabulary instinctively. Close to the hilltop fort itself, at the bottom of the winding road that swept up to the main gates concealed behind the curtain wall, a vast training ground, of hard-packed earth that showed no single blade of grass, was filled to apparent capacity with constantly moving groups of training troopers.

That close to the castle walls, no one paid us any attention and we mounted all the way to the main gates before we were challenged again, this time by the senior member of a vigilant band of guards who stood before the gates, eyeing everyone who came and went, and from time to time questioning anyone who excited their curiosity or caution. I remained mounted and stated our business, saying that I knew Merlyn Britannicus was not available, but asking to meet with someone who could speak on his behalf.

That someone turned out to be a giant of a man, perhaps twice my own age, who strode out from the gates sometime later and stood looking down at us without speaking for several moments, his arms crossed upon his enormously broad chest as he examined each of us from head to foot. The guards had told us to dismount while we were waiting for this fellow to be summoned, and now that he had come I found myself wishing I had remained on horseback. Even unarmored and wearing only a simple tunic, the fellow was hugely tall and intimidating, even larger and stronger looking than my cousin Brach, the biggest, most muscular and imposing man I had ever known.

The giant made no effort to speak to us at first, more concerned with assessing any threat that we might represent to him or to his people. His eyes moved over each of us meticulously, missing nothing and even examining the harness and trappings of our horses. Finally, however, he seemed satisfied and nodded very slightly, the set of shoulders relaxing visibly. He introduced himself, in a voice that was pleasantly deep and surprisingly gentle, as Donuil Mac Athol, adjutant to Merlyn Britannicus. I heard the name at first as Donnel, and it was only months later, once I had come to know him and his speech, that I was able to identify the soft “oo” vowel that changed the pronunciation of his name from “Donnel” to “Donul.” He spoke in Latin, as did we all, but with an intonation I had never heard before. Knowing him to be a local of some description merely from his name—Mac Athol meant “son of Athol” in the Gallic tongue—I assumed he was a northerner, from the mountains, perhaps a Cambrian. It transpired that I was wrong. He was a Scot, from the island of Hibernia across the western sea. He called his homeland Eire, disdaining Hibernia as a Roman name, but that, too, I would only learn later.

I had said nothing to him until then and had no way of knowing whether or not he had been told who we were or what we wanted with Merlyn, but he addressed me first, ignoring my two older companions.

“You come from Auxerre? From Germanus?” I nodded, and he continued before I could say anything. “Well, I hope there’s no great urgency to your mission. Merlyn is gone, where and for how long no one knows, not even my wife, and that’s a wonder, for she knows everything. Tell me your names.”

I introduced myself first, and then Perceval, Tristan, and Bors. Donuil stood silently as I did so, his eyes moving to each person as I said their names, and when I had finished he nodded again. “Good, then. I have them. Perceval, Tristan, and Bors. Be welcome in Camulod. Come inside now and we’ll find someone to look after your things for you, your gear, and your horses … although I imagine you, young fellow, will want to stay with your beasts and make sure no one touches anything without your say-so, am I right?” When Bors nodded, Donuil grinned in response. “Aye, I’d have been disappointed had you said otherwise. So be it. We’ll come back and find you in a while. But you three, are you thirsty? We have some fine brewers of beer here in Camulod. Come you and let’s see if we can find some of their best.”

After dinner that night, on what was merely the first of many long, pleasant evenings by the fire in the quarters belonging to Donuil and his lustrous and beautiful wife, Shelagh, we received our first lessons in the intimate, family tale of the development of Camulod and the two families, Britannicus and Varrus, that had brought it into being and shaped it into the self-contained and practically self-sufficient society it had become.

We talked about Bishop Enos, too, and about the mission I had been charged with regarding him, because I now believed that I must talk to Enos without delay. No one in Camulod knew how or where to find Merlyn, or even where to start searching, but my own experiences at the Bishop’s School in Auxerre had taught me that few organizations were more adept and well-qualified at communicating among themselves and finding people than was the Church itself. Bishop Enos had work to do, both with and for Merlyn, on behalf of his friend and colleague, Germanus of Auxerre, and I, too, had information to communicate to Merlyn. It seemed to me there was a far better chance of reaching him through Verulamium and the ecclesiastical contacts of Bishop Enos than there was of finding him through the offices of anyone in Camulod.

Donuil listened to all this, impatiently I thought, and would have demurred had not his wife, Shelagh, forestalled him, agreeing with my viewpoint. After that—and it was plain that the giant Donuil had not the slightest desire to challenge Shelagh’s judgment—the only objection he could think to raise was that Enos might not be in Verulamium when we arrived there.

That was a risk I was willing to incur, I responded. The odds as I saw them were better than acceptable that even if Enos were absent on our arrival he would soon return, since Verulamium was not merely his home but the center of his Episcopal duties and responsibilities, and therefore it made sense that he would not remain absent for too long at any one time. Even the constantly traveling Germanus, I pointed out, was very seldom absent from his own jurisdiction for as long as a month at a time.

It was arranged then that my friends and I should continue our journey without delay, heading north and west, following the route Merlyn himself had taken with his party at various times on the way to, and back from, Verulamium. Donuil would provide us with all the instructions we would need to find the town itself, and he generously offered us an escort of Camulodian troopers. We would have declined that, at first, believing rightly or wrongly that we would be less conspicuous traveling as a small group, but Donuil and Shelagh were both adamantly opposed to our going unescorted. We had no notions of the dangers we might have to face, they told us, repeating and reiterating their warnings until we threw up our hands and complied with their wishes.

I asked them then about the assistance we had been assured we would find provided by Cuthric and Cayena, influential leaders of the Anglian community. Germanus had told me much about these two and the power and respect they commanded among their own people, many of whom were practicing Christians despite the fact that the traditional residents of Britain regarded them as invaders and barbarians. Husband and wife, Cuthric and Cayena were Christians of long standing and had established themselves and their people widely in the lands surrounding and to the south and west of Enos’s seat of Verulamium. Cuthric was what Germanus . termed both a sage and a Mage—a wise man and a devout Christian by nature and education, but also a man learned in the mysteries and esoterica of his people’s ancient beliefs and rituals. Cuthric was held in great honor by his people, and his wife, Cayena, was the perfect consort to his presence. Even Merlyn and his party, Germanus had told me, had accepted the couple’s beneficent influence on the Anglian community, and the fact that Merlyn and the forces of Camulod would recognize such people as a community rather than a nest of invading Outlanders went a long way toward explaining the kind of people these newcomers must be.

Donuil and Shelagh, however, could offer us no realistic hope of finding support among the Anglians, simply because they had no evidence to suggest that the Anglians were even out there anymore. No word had been heard from Cuthric and Cayena since Germanus had left to return to Gaul, and that entire eastern half of Britain had been sinking into a quagmire of escalating warfare and invasions. Beyond the boundaries of Camulod itself, which was not large, they told us, the entire land was in the grip of anarchy, a condition which they swore we could not begin to understand, having lived our entire lives under the benign influence—no matter how weak or tawdry that might now be—of the Pax Romana, the rule of Roman Law.

They were correct; we were to discover that very quickly and be forever grateful that they had made us heed them and accept their judgment, for had we ridden out of Camulod as we had first intended, four of us with eight horses, secure in the hubris of knowing our own prowess as fighters and warriors, we would not have survived the first five days of travel. Until we experienced the lawless condition of the country for ourselves, assessing and evaluating it with our own eyes against the standards we had been taught to apply to life in all its aspects, we could not possibly have anticipated the immense and frightening differences that now existed between life at its worst in Roman Gaul and what passed as “normal” life in Britain. And all of those differences that we were to discover in such a short time, the utter lawlessness, the disregard for human life and dignity, and the rampant hostility, violence, and brutality that we found everywhere, had all sprung into existence in the mere two score of years that had elapsed since the legions left, taking with them the power of the State to sustain and enforce justice.

That was a consideration that had never occurred to me or to any of my companions, because even in the worst of situations at home in Gaul—in the midst of Gunthar’s War, for example—all of us, combatants on both sides of the struggle, had known that were we to take our domestic disputes beyond our own boundaries of Benwick and into the realm of Gaul, the full weight of Rome’s remaining military might in Gaul would have been mobilized against us, and both sides would have borne the brunt of imperial displeasure, for weakened . though the Empire might be today, it could still be formidable and frighteningly potent when angered and aroused.

Here in Britain, however, that was emphatically not the case. Rome and its armies had had no presence here in decades, and a score of years had passed since the Emperor Honorius had sent word that Britain should look after its own affairs and expect no assistance or cooperation from Rome. That dictate had plunged Britain into anarchy and chaos, because it killed the last, lingering hope that Rome, with its armies and its guarantees of peace and prosperity, might return. And with the dying hope, it also killed any fear of punishment for transgression against one’s neighbors.

The results of that, we were about to discover, would be plainly evident everywhere around us, and although at first we found it hard to credit the atrocious things we saw being enacted on all sides, we very soon became resigned to the truth that armed might and the strength to withstand attack could be used to justify anything and everything. The sole arbiter of whether or not an outrage could be perpetrated with impunity was the array of strength that might be brought against the transgressor by an opponent. Because there was no state, and no state-backed army to enforce its will and its laws, miscreants had nothing to fear and they could, and did, behave as they wished.

Arthur Pendragon—and the truth of this would very soon be brought home to me as we moved through the blighted landscape of Britain—had already begun, even before his coronation as Riothamus, to challenge that situation boldly and to work to change it. He was already launched on a sweeping circuit of Britain, riding at the head of a heavy concentration of his victorious troopers and making himself known to his peers, proclaiming himself as Camulod’s Commander and introducing his name and his armed strength to the regional kingdoms and the clan territories that together made up Britain. When he returned to the southwest, having established his presence in the land beyond question, if not beyond dispute, his self-appointed task would be to bring back the rule of law, at least as he and the governing Council of Camulod envisioned the law. And in order to do all of that, to be successful, he faced the task of having to confront, and thereafter win over or defeat, every local warlord, every jealous tribal king, and every petty, self-serving war chief in the land of Britain.

It seemed to me that he had set himself an impossible task, as I visualized it in the course of the days that followed, and I wondered if the future, yet-uncrowned Riothamus himself had ever stopped to think consciously about what he had undertaken to achieve. I doubted that he could have, but of course I could not be sure. His seat of Camulod, and the numbers of his troopers who swarmed there so confidently, betrayed no hint or slightest sign of doubt or insecurity. And thinking such thoughts, I applied myself increasingly to taking careful note of all that was going on beyond the boundaries of Arthur’s realm of Camulod.

We were less than ten miles beyond the outer boundaries of Merlyn’s colony, guarded as it was by vigilant horse troopers and infantry manning an outer ring of defenses day and night, when we saw the first evidence of the lawlessness that would be all around us from then on: a sullen, heavy column of black smoke twisting upon itself and rising straight up into the afternoon sky. We veered off the road to investigate at my insistence, for the Camulodian troopers who escorted us would have ridden on by, too inured to what they would find even to bother looking for a cause, and soon we came to a clearing that had contained a squalid, rudimentary farm.

The burning buildings were already falling in upon themselves, their walls made of bare sapling trunks, rather than clay and wattle, and their roofs unthatched, mere racks of crossed poles layered with filthy straw that burned greasily. The farmer still spun slowly at the end of a rope and had been disemboweled after hanging. The naked, broken body of his wife lay under his dangling feet, partially covered by his trailing intestines. Two dead children lay nearby, one of them killed by an ax or sword stroke that had split the tiny skull asunder, and the other had been thrown into the inferno of the burning hut, leaving only a thin pair of legs and feet protruding into the farmyard.

I swung down from my saddle, expecting to do I know not what, but as the visual impressions swarmed upon me in quick succession, each of them worse than what had gone before, I was unable to contain the violent retching that swept over me. I staggered to one side, clutching for something to hold on to and finding nothing as I fell to my knees and vomited.

I was not alone, I saw as I straightened up. Young Bors had offered his sacrifice along with mine, and Tristan, although he had apparently retained his morning meal, sat stone-faced and ashen, staring into the trees and obviously unwilling to look at the carnage around us. Perceval was the only one of our four who appeared unmoved, although I knew him well enough by now to be able to see that he was deeply angry. Beside him, the young tribune whom Donuil had assigned to head our escort sat gazing at me, his expression unreadable. I spat to clear my mouth of the sour taste of vomit, and Perceval wordlessly tossed me the water bottle that he always kept hanging on his saddle. I rinsed my mouth thoroughly before crossing to the young tribune.

“Who would have done this, Cyrus?”

The young man shrugged, his mouth twisting downward. “Anyone,” he said. “Bandits, thieves, envious neighbors, perhaps even Saxon raiders.”

“Envious neighbors? How can you find humor in a thing like this? And Saxons, this close to Camulod? Are you sure?”

He shook his head. “I see no humor here and I am sure of nothing, Lord Clothar, although I doubt this would be the work of Saxons. It’s too small a thing—despite its immensity for those who died here. If there were Saxons in this region, there would have to be large numbers of them and we would soon find out.” He was looking about him as he spoke, his eyes on the ground. “There were no large numbers here, no swarming footprints that I can see. This was probably done by a small group of bandits. There could have been nothing here worth stealing, save for a few skinny animals.” He waved toward an empty sty and a trampled pile of filthy straw. “A pig, perhaps a cow.”

“And they killed for that? A pig and a cow?”

Cyrus looked at me strangely. “That could be a rich haul for starving men, Lord Clothar. Well worth killing for, nowadays.”

“Sweet Jesus! What kind of a place is this Britain?”

Cyrus sniffed loudly, managing to sound disdainful and condescending at once, and his choice of honorific when he named me again conveyed something of the depths of his contempt for me as an Outlander who knew nothing yet disparaged everything.

“It is a place without leadership, Master Clothar. A land without law, where the only right to life that a man has is the one he holds in his hand to defend himself and to enable him to take what he needs in order to keep himself and his family alive. There is no state-run civitas in Britain now, no government granaries, no public relief in time of famine. No bread and circuses to keep the mob happy and fed. There is no food here at all, other than what a man may hunt or grow and defend for himself. That ensures a harsh, cruel existence for those who cannot fight or claw their way to the top of the ruck of despair. This is only the first sight you have had of it, but you will see more, believe me. Of course, things are different in Camulod. Camulod has law. But Camulod is no more than one small colony. It is not large enough for its laws to cover all men. And by that I mean our army is not large enough. You cannot uphold or support the rule of law unless you have the means to enforce that rule. Someday, and soon, we will expand from Camulod and govern more widely, but not yet. We are close to the time, but it is not yet right.”

That was the first real indication I had had that I needed to think deeply about all the things, concerning the law and justice and retribution for crimes, that I had taken for granted prior to that point, and listening to his words, I found myself looking now with dawning respect at this young officer, seeing beyond his outward condescension to the mettle of the man underneath. I had only been in his company since dawn that day and other than a casual nod of greeting when we were first introduced to each other I had paid him little heed. I had noticed that he kept to himself, content to ride alone at the head of his men, followed by his two decurions, and that he seemed completely comfortable with himself and with his relationship to the thirty men in his charge. This young man Cyrus, I had thought, was a typical young squadron commander of Camulod where thirty-man squadrons, each with two decurions and a squadron commander, were the norm according to Donuil, and the term turma, normally used in Gaul to denote a sixty-man squadron, was unknown, not used at all.

Now, however, it appeared that I had been in error yet again and that there was more to young Cyrus than first met the eye. Either that, or the typical young squadron commanders being trained in Camulod were several orders of magnitude ahead of their counterparts in Roman Gaul, for over there no encouragement or incentive was ever offered to young officers to develop either philosophical opinions or moral platforms, both of which this young man appeared to possess and value. Cyrus the tribune might have been three, or perhaps four years older than I was, but I accepted after having listened to him for mere moments that he might be twice my age in terms of self-possession and analytical prowess. I decided then and there to say nothing about either his tone of voice or his offhand treatment of me. I could see plainly that, in his eyes, I had laid solid claim to deserving both.

I gazed up at him now, noting the way he stared back at me clear-eyed, his face devoid of expression, and then I turned to look again at the hanged farmer and the ruins of his little family.

“This happens often, then.” I did not intend it to be a question, and Cyrus made no response. I glanced back at him. “The people who did this can’t be far away. They haven’t had time to travel far, encumbered by cattle.”

He shook his head gently. “No, they have not. They must be close by. Would you like us to hunt them?”

Now it was my turn to quirk my brow, alerted by his tone. “You don’t want to. Why not?”

“Because if we hunt them we will find them and then we will have to hang them and they will die in utter misery and great pain, and what will we have achieved, for all that pain and misery?”

“Justice, for these people!”

Cyrus glanced toward the hanged farmer and shook his head. “I think not, Master Clothar. Vengeance, perhaps. Revenge. But justice? By whose criteria? Justice in your eyes, perhaps. But who are you, in the absence of any and all laws, to judge what might have happened to reduce the people who did this to such a condition? Or do you believe they might have been born as monstrous as they were today when they did this? Something, probably a number of contributing factors must have combined to make these people behave like this, and many of those factors might be things the like of which you could never imagine: starvation; suffering; deprivation; cruelty at the hands of other, stronger folk. But even if that is not the case, and they are simply monsters, I would still say no to hunting them. There are too many thousands like them between us and Verulamium, and our task is to find Bishop Enos, not to right the wrongs of a godless world.”

I nodded, a single, abrupt dip of my head. “You are right, Tribune. Inarguably. And I am an ignorant Outlander with too many questions and no appropriate answers. Ride with me, if you will, and educate me further.”

I pulled myself up into my saddle and wheeled away without another glance at the charnel house in the small clearing to ride with Cyrus at the head of our column as we trotted back toward the high roadway that cut across the horizon in a perfectly level slash of blackness.

We talked together at great length thereafter, Cyrus and I, and I learned much from him about the rule of law in Camulod, as devised and laid down by Merlyn Britannicus and his forebears: his father, Picus Britannicus, his grandsire Caius Britannicus, and his great-uncle Publius Varrus.

Cyrus, it transpired, was a student of law, not merely the laws of Camulod but those of Rome itself. His grandsire’s father had been a lawyer in the days before Camulod was founded and had later worked with Caius Britannicus to establish the colony, which at that time had no name, and to draft the first of what would become Camulod’s own laws in later years. Since then, Cyrus told me with pride, his family had been involved in governing the colony, as members of the Council of Camulod and custodians of the justiciary of the colony. It was their right and privilege to guard and maintain the written annals and records of the Camulodian law and its tribunals, and they had steadfastly upheld that responsibility since it was entrusted to them by Caius Britannicus himself, the founder of Camulod.

Cyrus himself was now fully prepared to assume the burden of his family responsibility whenever it should be passed on to him. For the time being, however, he served the colony, as all its men did, in a military capacity.

At one point while he and I were talking I noticed a trio of horsemen watching us from high above, on the side of a hill, and when I mentioned it to Cyrus he merely glanced up at them, then returned his gaze to the road ahead.

“They’re bandits. They won’t bother us because we’re too strong for them. And we won’t bother them, because they’re too far away and we would have to work too hard to come in reach of them, with no guarantee that we ever would. The fellow in the red cloak is notorious in these parts. They call him the Ghost, because he seems to have the ability to be in more than one place at the same time. He’s instantly recognizable by the red cloak, of course, but it doesn’t seem to have occurred yet to the people in these parts that he might own more than one cloak, and that he might perhaps issue them to certain friends of his for specific purposes. It’s always the cloak that’s seen; seldom the man’s face.”

“How many men does he have?”

“Altogether about a hundred, perhaps a score or so more, plus all their women and camp followers. That’s a lot of mouths to feed, for a bandit chief, so he has to keep traveling and raiding.”

I was looking up to where the so-called Ghost sat on his horse, watching us. He seemed utterly unperturbed by our presence.

“If he has a hundred and more men, why do you say we’re too strong for. him?”

Cyrus chuckled. “Because we’re cavalry. He might have twenty horsemen, at most, and none of them are trained in anything except staying on a horse’s back. The rest of his men are all leg-mounted. We would crush them like a rotten nut, in one charge.”

“He doesn’t seem worried about being caught.”

“Nor need he be. He knows he is not at risk, not today. One of these days, though, we’ll catch him and his marauding will be ended.”

“What will you do to him then? Hang him?”

Again the young tribune almost smiled, his face sobering just before his amusement could break out. “We might, although we have yet to hang anyone merely for being in disagreement with us. If he were to do something truly heinous, something completely outrageous that cried out for punishment, we might hang him and put an end to it. One of the men with whom we were at war in Cambria was such a creature—Carthac. He was a real devil, utterly incapable of mercy or compassion, and he received none from us when his time came. Merlyn killed him without compunction because there was no other option. There is simply no way to deal with, or to control, someone like that.”

He sniffed and glanced back to where the Ghost yet stood on the hillside. “Simple banditry, though, as carried out by the Ghost up there, really boils down to feeding and providing for his people, and although admittedly he does it wantonly and at the dire expense of others, we have heard no reports of gross atrocities being laid at his feet. For that, and all his other crimes, we would probably simply disarm him and turn him loose afoot and weaponless, with a warning of what he can look forward to should we ever encounter him again at the same game.”

Cyrus turned in his saddle then and gave the arm signal for our column to increase speed to a trot, and for a while after that there was no opportunity to talk further.

The network of magnificent roads that stretched all over Britain was, in my opinion, the single greatest marvel in the entire land, particularly so since it had existed for hundreds pf years and was now barely used. That lack of use allowed an observer such as me to appreciate the complexity of all the work and planning that had gone into the construction of the network in the first place, but it was disconcerting to see such roads so deserted, because the traffic on the main roads of Gaul was so often dense and frantic. I had discussed the matter of road use at length with Donuil and Shelagh the night before we left for Verulamium, and what they had told me was fresh in my mind.

Donuil had said that the roads had fallen into disuse simply because they provided a focus for all the disruptive forces that existed to prey upon travelers. Bandits and thieves knew well that if they positioned themselves properly along a road they would, sooner or later, be easily able to intercept and rob any travelers who came along and were unequipped to fight strongly in their own defense. We, being who we were, were safe from any such threat, but few other people could afford to travel in the company of guardians strong enough to discourage attack, and so the roads had lain largely unused since the departure of the legions who had built, used, and maintained them.

The roads represented the pragmatism of Rome’s military genius. Knowing the shortest distance between two points to be a straight line, the ancient Romans had made it their first priority, from the earliest days of their military expansion, to construct roads for the convenience and the provisioning of their ubiquitous armies. The Roman legions, moving at the forced march pace along these magnificently straight causeways, could cover greater distances in less time than any other armies in history.

But mobility and ease of transportation were merely the most obvious aspects of the genius underlying Rome’s road-building program. Another aspect, equally important, solved the ages-old problem of how to keep soldiers disciplined and usefully occupied during those times when they were not involved in war or preparing for war. In the ancient days of Republican Rome, the answer to that problem had been twofold: at the end of each day, after marching all day and eating on the move, the soldiers of each individual unit had been required to build an entire camp, fortified and defended on all four sides by a ditch and a defensive wall, to a specific plan that remained unchanged for hundreds of years. Only after the camp had been built and occupied were they permitted to relax and enjoy their only hot meal of the day. Then, the following morning before they resumed their march, they had to break down the camp they had built so painstakingly the night before. Thus the moving units of the armies were kept occupied, and effectively tired, with little time for dreaming up mischief and mayhem.

Their stationary counterparts, soldiers on garrison duty or those not currently marching over long distances, had their time filled for them by their superiors, too, all day, every day. They were kept hard at work building new roads or expanding and maintaining existing roads and buildings.

Over time, of course, what was temporary became permanent, and many of the overnight marching camps became permanent outposts, positioned at strategic road junctions or along particular stretches of road that had been identified as being in need of close supervision. And over the course of years and decades of the same efforts to keep soldiers busy and hard at work, the palisaded earthen ramparts of the original camps gave way to permanent walls of quarried, hand-dressed stone.

Meanwhile, outside the walls of these selfsame camps, the stalls and lean-to shelters of the tradesmen and merchants whose livelihood depended upon supplying the garrisons with all their needs were gradually replaced by solid, substantial buildings containing shops and manufactories for all kinds of commodities. And as these premises grew larger and required more and more support, they attracted workers and gave rise to towns.

Looking at those wondrous, unused roads in Britain, so different from the great, bustling highways of Gaul, I remembered clearly my own wonder and awestruck fascination when I first heard, at the Bishop’s School, about the saga of the Roman roads and how they had transformed Rome’s world. Because once the Empire had been pacified and the Pax Romana established, what remained was an open network of beautiful, publicly maintained roads connecting thriving towns everywhere, and that reality, combined with the ease and swiftness of transportation and communication, gave rise to commerce, so that eventually the hurrying bodies of troops for whom the roads had been originally built were supplanted by the caravans and wagon trains of trading merchants who bought and sold goods and commodities from all parts of the Empire and beyond its boundaries. And as the merchants prospered, so, too, did their society. But then had come the beginnings of the dissolution of the Empire and the weakening of the Pax Romana, and what had since happened here in Britain was a microcosm of what was happening to a greater or lesser degree in the rest of the Roman world. The roads were no longer safe because they could not be protected, and so almost overnight they had been transformed from avenues of opportunity and growth into long, inimical, tree-shrouded lanes filled with the threats of imminent violence and the constant fear of invasion and enslavement. Cyrus’s words about Camulod’s army not being big enough gained more and more relevance as I thought about what he had meant, and although the notion seemed strange to me at first, I soon began to accept that much of the rule of law might be restored here by the simple expedient of having bands of armed and dedicated men patrolling the roads to safeguard travelers and discourage thieves and bandits.

It took us nearly two weeks to travel from Camulod to Verulamium. That was several days longer than it ought to have taken us, yet the journey across the belly of Britain was largely uneventful, and in fact highly enjoyable once we had reached the truly uninhabited uplands, and when we finally reached Verulamium we found Bishop Enos in residence.

Verulamium was a shell of a place that could barely lay title to the name of town any longer, and the bishop’s residence was a plain, unimpressive building, long and low and purely functional, with no single element of beauty to distinguish it. But it was built of stone and it boasted a solid and enduring roof made of tiles imported many years earlier from Gaul. The town had once been a thriving regional center, and the evidence of that was plain to be seen everywhere and most particularly in the surviving public buildings of the old administrative center, many of which were imposing and spacious. With the departure of the legions, however, and the subsequent eruption of anarchy over the ensuing decade when people lost all fear of being punished for anything they chose to do, Verulamium became, like most of the other towns in Britain, too dangerous a place in which to live, because it attracted plunderers and looters the way a carcass attracts flies. And so most of it had been abandoned, left to the mercy of the elements.

One thing had saved the place from being completely abandoned to neglect and decay, however, and that single thing was the reason for the continuing presence of Bishop Enos and the long line of bishops who had lived and worshiped there before his time. Verulamium had been the home of Britain’s first Christian martyr, a saint called Alban. Alban had been executed by the Roman authorities two hundred years earlier, in the third century of the new, Christian calendar, for saving the life of a proscribed Christian priest during one of the periodic persecutions of the sect in the days before the Emperor Constantine had emancipated them and their religion by taking up the Cross himself. When arrested and challenged for his so-called crime—providing aid and sustenance to an enemy of the state—Alban had steadfastly refused to recant his newfound belief in’the one true God and had been decapitated for his faith.

After that, the town had quickly become widely revered as the home of the blessed Saint Alban, and a shrine had been erected there in his honor, in response to the occurrence of several miraculous and unexplainable wonders. Even to the present time, according to Bishop Enos, miracles continued to occur as the result of the saint’s blessed presence, and the shrine continued to attract more and more visitors with every year that passed. The town of Verulamium might be as dead as its Roman past, Enos remarked to me, but Saint Alban’s shrine would never know oblivion, and in recent years people had stopped talking of the town as Verulamium, referring to it nowadays simply as Saint Alban’s Shrine.

There was a gathering of some kind going on when we arrived there, and the unexpected appearance of a large band of disciplined horsemen caused no small amount of consternation among the participants. Bishop Enos himself, who was a much older man than I had expected him to be, was the first to recognize the armor and trappings of our Camulodian troopers and he quickly brought his flock to order, explaining to them who we were and promising that no one had any reason to be afraid of us.

Listening to the bishop as he called for the attention of the panic-stricken assembly, and carefully observing the unfolding activities in the meadow outside the town walls where the gathering was being conducted, I was impressed to see—and there was no possibility of it being other than it appeared—that the mere mention of the name of Camulod had an immediate calming effect on the crowd. As soon as they heard Bishop Enos mention the name, people began repeating it and they turned to stare inquisitively at the mounted representatives of the distant colony where, rumor had it, the rule of law was still in force and men and women could live in freedom from threat and fear.

Sitting as I was, however, slightly apart from the main body of the troopers, I saw something else. There was one small band of men among the crowd whose behavior was greatly different from that of the people surrounding them. When we first swept into sight of the gathering, the assembly had scattered in panic, reassembling only very slowly after they had seen for themselves that we were not poised to murder them. But one band of men had refused to scatter and had indeed closed in upon themselves, grouping tightly around one man and what appeared to be his family: a woman and two children. The man at the center of this group stood taller than all the others, dominating all of them by at least half a head, and he was carefully coiffed, his hair and beard meticulously trimmed. His eyes were moving even as I noted him, cataloguing our contingent of troopers and flitting from Cyrus to his decurions and finally to me and my small group. I heard Perceval’s voice.

“The tall fellow over there, Clothar, surrounded by the bodyguard. He looks like a chief of some kind—a leader, certainly, whatever rank these people give their headmen. Wonder who he is.”

“I noticed him, too. He could be a king, judging from his bearing, but he might just as easily be some kind of champion or chieftain, as you say. We will find out about him later, from Bishop Enos. Cyrus, put your men at ease and take me to meet the bishop, if you will.”

Enos, however, was not to be idly diverted from his responsibilities. Our arrival had interrupted a prayer gathering in celebration of the anniversary of the martyrdom of Saint Alban, and the bishop invited us to step down and join with him and his congregation in the final prayers of the ceremony. Only when it was over and he had blessed the participants and sent them on their way did he approach me and acknowledge that he had heard me say earlier that I had messages and missives for him from Germanus. He was most hospitable, graciously accepting the leather pouch of writings that I had for him and betraying not the slightest indication that he might be impatient to sit down somewhere and start reading them. Instead, he went out of his way to arrange accommodations for all of us, quartering the troopers in the central hall of the town’s basilica, the administrative hub of the former Roman military government. Germanus, he told us, had cleaned out this and many similar large rooms years earlier, setting his followers to sweeping away the detritus of decades of neglect and turning the refurbished premises over for use by the hundreds of pilgrims who had flocked to Verulamium to attend the great debate he staged here between the orthodox adherents of the Church in Rome and the misguided bishops of Britain who had chosen to follow the teachings of the apostate Pelagius.

Bishop Enos, aware of the ongoing needs of the legions of pilgrims who visited the shrine of Saint Alban each year, and anticipating that the steady increase in their numbers might lead to the town’s having need again of spacious accommodations in the future, had seen the wisdom of maintaining the public rooms in good condition for use as dormitories. The main hall was perfect for our uses, featuring two great stone fireplaces, one at each end of the long room. Wooden cots were already in place at one end, strung with rope netting, and an ample supply of straw-filled palliasses set up on end on some of them, to allow the air to circulate between them and keep them dry, while at the other end of the hall someone had arranged rows of tables and benches. A large courtyard at the rear of the building, paved with cobbles and covered with straw, was easily capable of accommodating all our horses, and the yard itself lay but a few moments’ walk from the grazing meadows beyond the town walls.

Only when he was absolutely satisfied that our needs had all been attended to did the bishop leave us to our own devices while he retired to read the material that I had brought with me from Gaul.

I rose early the following morning, well before dawn, knowing that Enos would be sending for me sooner rather than later, and I had already completed my morning toilet and broken my fast by the time his summons arrived. I followed my guide to the dayroom from which the elderly bishop conducted his episcopal affairs, and Enos came to meet me and make me welcome immediately, ushering me to a comfortably padded armchair and asking me if I would join him in breaking his fast.

I assured him that I had already eaten, but then I had to insist that he eat his own meal, for he immediately signaled to a hovering priest to take the untouched food away. Eventually, however, accepting my protests, he acceded to my wishes and waved the priest away, then began to eat sparingly from a bowl of chopped nuts and fruit which he augmented with small pieces of bread ripped from a crusty, fresh-looking loaf. I talked to him as he ate, telling him about our journey and our adventures along the road, and he soon pushed away his bowl, cleaned his mouth with a draught of plain water, and began the main part of our meeting by asking me how much I knew concerning the information I had brought to him.

His question was more direct than I had expected and I sat blinking at him for several moments before I could collect my thoughts. “I know much of what is involved, sir,” I said eventually. “Bishop Germanus discussed the matter with me at some length.”

The old bishop nodded, then held up his hand, forestalling me. “Forgive me, Master Clothar, but to which matter do you refer?”

“The matter of the Riothamus coronation,” I replied, hearing the surprise in my own voice. What other matter was there? But the bishop was already nodding, plainly satisfied with my answer.

“I see,” he said. “Go on, if you please. What did my brother Germanus hope to achieve in this matter?”

I was becoming confused, beginning to wonder whether or not Enos had actually read the missives I had brought him, but I decided to say nothing and simply to answer the question as posed.

“He is hoping that you will lend him your unqualified support and substitute your presence and your dignitas for his in presiding over the crowning of Merlyn’s ward, Arthur Pendragon, as the new High King of Britain.”

“Riothamus …” He paused, as though savoring the sound of the title before continuing. “There has never been a Riothamus within living memory, you know. At least, not a real one. Vortigern laid claim to the title, some years ago—did you hear tell of Vortigern, in Gaul? I know Germanus met him here in Britain on several occasions, but I have no knowledge of the regard, if any, he formed for him. Are you aware of who he was?”

“Vortigern? No, sir.” I shook my head in a negative and Enos nodded, unsurprised.

“He was a king, in Northumbria, far to the northeast, close by the great wall the Romans built to keep invaders out hundreds of years ago. And by many reports he was a good king, concerned above all with the welfare of his people—there are not many kings, anywhere, of whom that can be said, as I am sure you are aware. Anyway, it was Vortigern who found and resurrected the name Riothamus, for it had not existed, nor had the rank been spoken of, since the Romans came to Britain. Vortigern recalled the name somehow and, as I said, laid claim to it. High King of all Britain. It sounds very grand, does it not? No one knows who the last one was.” The old man laughed, a gentle cackle that surprised me greatly. “No one knows who any of them were, for that matter. The High Kings, all of them nameless, all of them forgotten beyond recall, their very existence open to doubt and question … . And yet there must have been at least one such, or else the name and its ranking would not exist.”

He stopped, plainly waiting for me to respond, and I nodded wordlessly, hoping to convey an impression of gravity and deep thought that would belie my utter ignorance of what he was talking about, but the bishop was already speaking again.

“So Vortigern claimed the title, and I have heard from several of my brethren that he might have made a noble Riothamus, had he but lived. But then again, I know others who say he was too close to the Pelagians and thus would have stood condemned by the Church. You know who the Pelagians are, I presume?”

“No, sir, I do not. Forgive my ignorance.”

He waved my comment away. “No need for forgiveness, Master Clothar. They were heretics, condemned and banned.”

“You say Vortigern did not live, sir … .”

“No, he didn’t. The Danes killed him, and only recently. He brought about his own undoing, I fear, when first he invited the Danes to live within his bourne.”

“He invited them into his domain and then they killed him?”

“Aye, they did, but not immediately and the tale is much more complex than can be easily explained. But Vortigern sowed the seeds of his own overthrow when he invited the Danes into his domain. He had befriended Hengist, a Danish warrior and leader, when they were both young, and when Vortigern came to rule in Northumbria, still young and hale, he found his kingdom sore beset by raiders who attacked from all directions, both by land and sea. And so he invited his friend Hengist to come and live in Britain, in his kingdom of Northumbria, where Vortigern would give grants of land to Hengist’s followers in return for their services in withstanding threats from outsiders of all kinds.”

Enos shrugged his shoulders, pursing his lips as though to indicate that he would make no judgments. “It worked,” he continued. “It worked for many years and everyone appeared to be well pleased, until the Danes began inviting relatives and family to come and restore their ranks, which had been badly eroded after years of warfare. All at once, it appeared, there was no longer a sufficiency of land, and rivalries began to emerge among neighbors who had been friends for years, but were now reduced to being Danes and Northumbrians—Oudanders and natives, competing for what land there was. And then Hengist died and his son Horsa came into power, and Horsa was a very different creature from his father. He still is, and grows worse every passing day. He led a rebellion to overthrow Vortigern several months ago, and word has recently arrived that Vortigern was killed in the fighting and that his kingdom is now completely in the power of Hengist’s Danes.” He paused again, then smiled at me.

“Of course, there is no reason for you to know or understand any of this at all. I merely speak of it because I have an ill sensation somewhere at the back of my mind that tells me we here in the south of Britain will have to reckon with Horsa the Dane, one of these days. I have no solid reason for suspecting so, but the feeling, a premonition if you will, refuses to quit my mind. Anyway, where were we?”

“We were speaking of Bishop Germanus’s hopes for the coronation of the Riothamus, sir.”

“Ah, yes, of course we were, and then I digressed, as usual. Forgive me. Now, please-tell me again, what were Germanus’s wishes on this matter?”

I cleared my throat, then spoke out boldly. “Well, sir, he hopes, as I have said, that you will agree to stand in his place at the crowning, thereby lending your authority—the Church’s authority—to the naming of the Riothamus. But lord Germanus also voiced the hope that, in addition, you would use your episcopal authority and your powers of persuasion to convince your fellow bishops throughout Britain to unite with you in supporting Merlyn’s initiative, since the Church itself stands to benefit directly and substantially from having the backing and support of the military strength of Camulod as Defenders of the Faith and of the Faithful in Britain.”

Enos sat silent while I said all this, nodding his head only occasionally as I approached the end of what I had to say, and when I was finished he sat frowning into the distance for a spell before nodding his head once more, this time emphatically, and rising to his feet.

“Good,” he said, almost to himself. “Excellent. So be it.” He looked directly at me then, and dipped his head in a determined nod again, his lips compressed into a thin line. “I agree,” he said. “I will do everything my brother Germanus asks of me. The bishops of Britain will stand united behind the young man from Camulod. We will crown him King and name him Riothamus. But it will be the responsibility of Merlyn, and young Pendragon himself, to ensure that he becomes High King in more than name alone. I doubt, however, that that will be much of a concern. I have counted Merlyn Britannicus among my friends for many years now and I have met Arthur Pendragon on several occasions throughout that time. He is a very fine young man—a boy, really—grave when gravity is called for, and naturally and spontaneously pious without being sanctimonious. I found him to be abstemious, which surprised me in one so young, and self-restrained, and yet I know that among his friends he is fun-loving and normal in every normal, boyish way. His friends think highly of him, and he appears to have many friends, perhaps more than one might normally expect.” He hesitated for a moment, his brows furrowing briefly, then went on. “On the matter of the young man’s military prowess, mind you, I am not qualified to judge, but I stand completely prepared to be guided by Merlyn’s expertise in that area.”

He smiled at me at that point, apparently quite confident that I would agree with him, and again I said nothing, merely nodding my head.

“On the matter of finding Merlyn, I foresee no difficulty other than the passing of time. We have none of that to waste. Merlyn must be told about all of this immediately. I will send out priests in search of him within the next few days. They will carry the word to the West, into Cambria and Cornwall and wherever Merlyn is, he will be quickly found. What will you do, now that you have delivered your messages to me?”

“I shall return to Camulod, as quickly as I may, to await Arthur Pendragon’s return from his sweep of the north. I have not yet met him.”

“Aye, I can see why you would be anxious to do that,” he acknowledged. “But would you consider instead remaining here in Verulamium?”

I gaped at him, astonished that he would even ask such a thing, but he was in no way put out by my obvious reluctance, for he kept right on speaking as though I had told him that I would be happy to remain close to Saint Alban’s Shrine forever. “I have the feeling that as time goes by and the arrangements for the coronation progress, it will be a benefit to everyone to have you right here at hand.”

“How so, Bishop?”

“Because the process of finding Merlyn might be a slow one. My messengers have to cross the breadth of Britain before they can start spreading the word of their quest with any hope of success. From then on, every priest and bishop that they meet will join the search and spread the word, and sooner or later one of them will find Merlyn. From that moment, a copy of a letter from me will be brought to Merlyn, and his response will be quickly brought back here to me.”

“Your pardon, but did you say, a letter? Will you write but one?”

“I will.” But then he smiled at me. “And I will write it tonight and have three score copies of it prepared tomorrow, so that each of the twenty priests I intend to dispatch will carry three copies with him to distribute when he arrives in Cambria or Cornwall. Thus there should be at least one copy of the letter within easy reach, no matter where Merlyn may prove to be.

“But once Merlyn’s response is brought back here to me it would be well, I think, were you here to witness it and my reaction to it … including whatever decisions might necessarily be attached to that. Thereafter, once you are apprised of all that is happening and aware of what remains to be done by the various parties involved, you may return to Camulod with all speed, carrying that information and knowing that you have saved time by removing the need for someone to come from there to here and back for the same purpose. And in the meantime, knowing you have borne the tidings ahead of us, my fellow bishops and I will be able to follow at a pace more suited to our age and dignitas. Do you agree?”

Listening to the old man’s logic as he explained his thoughts, I could find no grounds for disagreeing with him, but since he was talking in terms of months of waiting, I immediately began to feel guilt over the prospect of keeping Cyrus and his thirty troopers here, and consequently absent from their duties in time of war, for such an extended period. I spoke with Perceval and Tristan about my concerns on that and they agreed with me, so I immediately sent for Cyrus and thanked him for his company on our outward journey. As soon as he heard me say those words, he raised an inquiring eyebrow and began to fidget with his helmet, which he had been holding in the crook of one arm, its rim against his hipbone. He and I had become good friends over time, and now he looked at me as a friend.

“Can I sit down?”

“Of course. Sit by the brazier there, and I’ll join you. Throw me your helmet.” He tossed it to me and I laid it on the table at my back, then moved to sit across the brazier from him. “You have something to say, so say it.”

He slouched in the chair, his feet outstretched toward the brazier’s heat, and crossed his arms, resting his chin in the crotch of his right thumb and forefinger. “You’re sending me back to Camulod.”

“Yes.”

“Why? And what are you going to do once my men and I are gone?” .

“We’ll be staying here, probably for a few months, until word arrives from Merlyn. Then we’ll return to Camulod with messages from Enos.”

“Hmm. You believe that is the best thing you can do at this stage?”

“At this stage, yes.”

“Good, then my men and I will stay with you, because you’ll need us on your way back to Camulod.”

“No, that’s going to be too long for you to be absent from your duties in Camulod. There’s a war going on there, is there not?”

“No, that’s over. My duty is to see to your safety. That’s what I was ordered to do. That is what I will do.”

I shook my head. “I cannot allow you to do that, Cyrus. Your place and your primary duty is in Camulod. You and your men are wasted here and it’s easy to see the effect this idleness is having on them. They have nothing to do here, and there’s nothing worse for any soldier than being stuck in a boring place with nothing to do. You need to get them back on the road and back into shape, as quickly as you can. We really don’t need you now. We are perfectly safe here in Verulamium and we will be equally safe on the route home, now that we’ve traveled it once. We’re aware of the dangers we might face, and we will be on guard against them when the time comes. We are no longer the four green tyros who landed here from Gaul.”

Cyrus sat silent, staring at me through narrowed eyes for what seemed to me like a very long time, and then he nodded and snorted loudly. “Right. You obviously mean what you have said.”

“I do.”

“Aye, well, I’d best start making ready for the road. You’re right, my men are growing fat and lazy and fractious. But I’ll have them whipped back into condition within five days of leaving here.” He stood up and went to collect his helmet, running his fingers around the surface of the leather headband before settling the casque firmly on his head. “We’ll probably leave the day after tomorrow. It will take a full day, I expect, to provision ourselves and make our gear ready for use again. I’ll see you before I go, and then I’ll look forward to seeing you again when you reach Camulod.”

I stood up and nodded to him and he snapped me a perfect salute before whirling and marching from my quarters.

We settled down to pass the winter peacefully in Verulamium.

It snowed heavily toward the middle of the month, and that snowfall turned out to be merely the first of many as the temperature plummeted to depths that everyone swore were unprecedented. The snowstorms were accompanied by strong winds that whipped the snow into strange and wondrous drifts that served to isolate the countryside, so that travel became impossible and supplies of food and fuel were used up in those places where people were stranded. We were bored beyond belief, although our boredom was alleviated by the need to seek out new supplies of fuel and food.

Neither I nor my three companions had experienced a winter to compare to this before. It snowed only infrequently in central Gaul, even in the deepest winter, and when snow did occasionally fall, it seldom remained on the ground for longer than a day or two. It never fell and froze and remained for weeks and months as it had this year in Britain. Consequently none of us had ever hunted in the snow before, and we discovered it to be an entirely different kind of science, calling for skills that we had never learned. Fortunately, however, we found excellent teachers among the group surrounding Symmachus, the tall, distinguished-looking man we had noticed when we first rode into Verulamium.

Symmachus was a Roman name, but the man who bore it, although he carried it proudly enough, was a Briton through and through. He claimed direct descent from the ancient Cornovii, the warrior people of northern Cambria whose indomitable strength and refusal to succumb to the Roman invaders in the time of the Emperor Claudius had necessitated the building of the giant legionary fortress of Deva that had housed the ten-thousand-strong complement of the Twentieth Legion, the Valeria Victrix, for upward of three hundred years. Sometime in the course of that three hundred years, Symmachus maintained, a Roman officer had managed to bypass the disapproving frowns and scowling menace of the Cornovii elders and wed himself to one of their daughters, adding his bloodlines and his Roman name to the annals of the clan. The Valeria Victrix was gone now, with all the other legions, Symmachus told us on the first night we spent in his company, but their enormous fortress was still there in Deva—it was Deva, he declared—and so were the Cornovii, although they had fallen out of the habit of calling themselves by any special name and simply called themselves the People of the Hills in their own dialect and Cambrians in the common Coastal Tongue. Symmachus was their king, and he and his people, numbering in the region of five thousand men, women, and children, now made their home in the ancient fortress, which they called Chester.

He was a strange man, Symmachus, and for reasons of his own he never liked me and never acknowledged me as the leader of my small group. Instead, he addressed himself to Perceval, as the eldest of our group, at all times, thereby steadfastly refusing me the legitimacy of place that would have been accorded by his addressing me in person. Tristan in particular was highly offended by Symmachus’s attitude toward me, but I went out of my way to make light of the situation because I knew what it was about me that the king resented most of all.

Symmachus was accompanied by his wife and two daughters. The wife, a lady called Demea, was still young and exceptionally beautiful, a radiant, laughing creature with bright yellow hair and wondrous green eyes. All the men in the town were at least half in love with her, and the recognition of that truth afforded the king much amusement and enjoyment. After all, he was a strong and well set up man in the prime of life, and his young wife was most obviously besotted with him. And indeed, as we had quickly discovered, his wife’s love for Symmachus was the reason he was here in Verulamium, so many miles from home. They had been married now for eight years and were without children of their own, the two daughters being the progeny of Symmachus’s first marriage.

The Lady Demea, a devout Christian, had heard about the miracles attributed to Saint Alban, all of them centered around his shrine in Verulamium, and had prevailed upon her doting husband to bring her here, where she could beg the saint in person to intercede for her in Heaven and bless her with a pregnancy. That Demea was fully confident her prayers would be answered was evident to anyone with eyes to see, and the manner in which she and her husband conducted themselves made it plain that they were giving Heaven every opportunity to bless their endeavors. Thus, it was evidently not his beautiful young wife who was the cause of Symmachus’s distemper.

It was his daughters, I believed—or one of them, the elder of the two—who cost him sleepless nights and justified, in his mind at least, his continuing disapproval of me. The daughter’s name was Cynthia—again a Roman name, or perhaps even Hellenic—but she was obviously not, by her very coloring, the daughter of Demea. Cynthia’s real mother, a black-haired, blue-eyed woman from the far northern lands beyond Hadrian’s great wall, had died years earlier, giving birth to her second daughter when Cynthia was only four years old. Cynthia was now almost sixteen, breathtakingly lovely and desirable and making not the slightest attempt to conceal her attraction to me.

It made no difference to Symmachus that I went to great pains to distance myself from his daughter and avoid her company. He saw nothing of that. In truth, while I acknowledged Cynthia’s great physical and facial beauty, I experienced no attraction to her beyond the first few days of knowing her, and she herself had given me the reason to feel the way I did.

Young Bors had fallen in love with her from the moment he set eyes on her, and he was utterly incapable of hiding his infatuation. I know how true that is because I was there when he saw her for the first time and I almost laughed aloud at the spectacular transformation that came over him: his eyes went wide and then almost glazed over and his mouth fell agape and it seemed to me that he forgot how to move. He simply stood there, gazing at her slack jawed and openmouthed, incapable of speech or movement.

Of course, Cynthia saw it immediately. Unfortunately, however, her recognition of his stunned submission to her beauty brought out her worst attributes. Where I took pains immediately to dissemble and conceal my delight in my young servant’s reaction to her beauty, Cynthia proceeded from the first to exploit it ruthlessly, treating Bors shamefully and using him imperiously and cruelly, keeping him dancing attendance on her and accepting his every adoring look as no more than her due while she deliberately spurned him, belittling him and insulting him.

Her behavior, uncalled for and excessive as it was, upset me deeply because it impressed me as being quite natural and unfeigned. I found it repellent that she should be so quick to cause my young associate pain, for no reason other than his natural attraction to her beauty. Bors was my servant, and although I strove to keep our relationship as one of master to apprentice, I had found him to be a willing worker and a conscientious student, as well as a naturally friendly and enthusiastic soul—his truculence and sullen behavior had vanished within hours of our setting foot upon the road to Britain. He had done absolutely nothing to earn Cynthia’s displeasure, but she poured wrath and disdain about his head in equal and unstinting measure, treating him far less kindly than most people treat animals, and I soon found myself harboring a deep feeling of dislike for her that I was never able to disguise completely.

Cynthia, of course, believing entirely in her own allure and fascination, was never able to bring herself to believe that I could be genuinely immune to her attractions, so that the more I attempted to avoid her and discourage her, the more determined she became to enslave me with her charms and to bend me to her will. Unfortunately, thanks to my education and my many talks with Bishop Germanus concerning women and the rules governing a decent man’s behavior toward them, I was never quite able to bring myself to tell her how deeply she had taught me to dislike her, or how her treatment of Bors repulsed me. That would have been too cruel, by my own assessment at that time, although it occurred to me not long afterward that had she been male and my own age I would have thrashed her soundly for her hectoring cruelty and ordered her to stay well clear of me until she had learned how to control the baseness of her nature.

This, then, was the reason for the tension between the two of us all the time, and that was what her father reacted to with such hostility. His reading of the situation was wrong, of course, but I could hardly come right out and add insult to his imagined injuries by telling him that I found his firstborn daughter ill natured, morally unattractive, and generally unpleasant and that I would far rather spend time with her quieter, far less aggressive and offensive twelve-year-old sister, whom she called the Brat. And so Symmachus distrusted me because he felt I lusted for his daughter, and I resigned myself to being spoken to through Perceval at every turn.

Symmachus was a warrior, however, and he had heard tales of Camulod, and he wanted to know if it was feasible that Merlyn Britannicus and Camulod might consider an alliance with himself and his people in Deva. His question caused a long, uncomfortable silence because none of us was qualified to answer it with anything resembling authority, although I felt that the distance between the two locations alone—almost two hundred miles—would render impossible the kind of arrangement that the king was thinking of. I said as much, and although he seemed to accept the logic of my explanation after examining it for a short time, I could tell that Symmachus was not too happy with me for having stated the obvious and created difficulties for whatever it was he had been considering. Once again, however, I kept silent, venturing no more opinions and showing no more signs of curiosity.

Symmachus and his party had been on the point of leaving for home when the weather broke in mid-December, effectively stranding them in Verulamium for several more months, and so it was that we came to know him to the extent that we did. Although I found him less than comfortable to be around, I had no such difficulties with his companions, who were in fact his family’s bodyguard. I came to know several of them very well, and my friends and I spent many pleasant hours with them among the woods, learning to hunt as they did in deep snow. They, in their turn, were fascinated with the spears given to me by Tiberias Cato. The Cambrians had never seen their like, but were unimpressed by the information that no one else had, either. They were quite convinced that somewhere along the edges of one of their northern mountain lakes they would soon find reeds long enough and strong enough to dry and shape into light, strong, durable spear shafts like mine. I made no effort to convince them otherwise, for they simply would not have believed that people had already scoured the reaches of the Empire looking for such things.

They were particularly fascinated by the technique I used to throw the weapons, and by the accuracy I managed to achieve, although they pretended to be overly concerned about the amount of time I spent practicing. They were correct in that. I did spend inordinately large amounts of time practicing that winter, but there was little else to do most of the time. When the weather was too cold and the snow too deep to do much outside, I converted the largest hall in the basilica into a practice arena, piling all the cots and tables and benches up against one long wall and throwing my spears from one end of the vast hall to the other. The distance was slightly less than forty paces, which was ample room for practicing throwing with accuracy, and I had ranged a series of tables and benches of differing heights across one end of the room so that I could make my way from one side to the other, jumping or stepping from one level to another and throwing from any of them as I went. At the far end, I had mounted a series of five boards to serve as targets, each of them painted with pitch in approximately the size and shape of a man. My watchers were amazed that I could announce my targets from any throwing height, specifying the area I would hit—head, chest, thigh, and the like—and then hit accurately from thirty to forty paces distant eight times out of any ten. That, to them, was magical. To me, it was the result of incessant hours of brutal, unrelenting work.

As time passed the weather eventually grew more pleasant, and as the worst of the snow began to melt and disappear, I was able to move outside to practice on horseback. Everyone else did the same, of course, happy to be able to ride out again after having spent such a long time immured by the heavy snow. The others rode abroad, however. I was more than content to ride by myself most of the time, exercising constantly in the courtyard that Enos had originally allocated to the cavalry mounts from Camulod. It was not a large space, but it was suitable for my needs, offering me sufficient room to wheel and weave and to accustom myself again to the rhythm and disciplines of casting a spear with accuracy from the back of a moving horse. Again, watching me at work, my new companions from Cambria, who rode small, sturdy mountain ponies and were not at all familiar with large horses, merely shook their heads and looked at each other in rueful recognition of my interminable folly. All of them, at some time over the winter, had taken their turn at trying to throw my spears, and some had tried much harder than others. None of them, however, had had the slightest success in mastering even the basic elements of the throw.

The only person I ever knew who showed a natural skill with my throwing spears from the very outset was, astonishingly, Cynthia’s younger sister. The child would often come to watch me as I practiced, and so unobtrusive was she that I quickly grew accustomed to her presence and eventually lost all awareness of it. She never spoke to me and never interrupted me in any way, but simply sat watching me out of wide, bright blue eyes beneath the thick, black fringe of hair that framed her forehead. Her cheekbones were magnificent, high and slanted, and combined with her long, slender neck they gave her a swanlike, regal look. I had only ever seen her smile on two occasions, neither of them inspired by me, and in consequence I always thought of her as a solemn, humorless child who took little pleasure in anything, although I was quite aware that there was precious little in her twelve-year-old life to give her pleasure. There were few children of her own age in Verulamium but even so she was forbidden to mingle with them. She spent her entire life surrounded by her elders, and her sole sources of enjoyment were the things they deemed enjoyable.

One morning toward the end of that long winter, when I had chosen to work indoors, Bishop Enos summoned me while I was in the middle of my practicing, and when I returned from speaking to him I found the tall, almost painfully thin child standing alone in the hall, hefting one of my spears speculatively in her right hand and eyeing the target closest to her, which I estimated at a glance to be somewhere in the region of twenty paces from where she stood. I had stopped short in the doorway and she was unaware of my presence, and I remained silent, waiting to see what she would do next.

Then I realized she already held the weapon in the throwing grip, the thong wrapped around her fist. She whipped up her arm, glided forward effortlessly and fluidly onto the ball of her left foot, and executed what appeared to me to be a perfect cast. The weapon hurtled out of her grasp, the tip of its tail spinning only slightly out of true, and shot toward the target, where it passed so close to the edge of the board that its whirling tail clipped the wood. Knocked off its true flight then, the spear clattered to the ground and slid across the floor to come to rest against the great fireplace. I muttered an involuntary exclamation of amazement.

At the sound, the girl spun to face me, her hands flying up to her mouth and her eyes flaring wide in panic. And then, before I could do anything to stop her or reassure her, she fled, throwing the great doors open and dashing out into the courtyard. I ran after her, calling to her to wait, but she paid me no attention and only ran the harder until she vanished from view around the corner of one of the outer buildings.

Annoyed and more than slightly exasperated, I returned to the long hall and picked up the spear. I was interested in my memory of how the child had thrown the thing. Admittedly the weapon was extremely light, and the probability was high that only by a fluke had she managed to combine the angle of her throw with the speed and pressure necessary to whip the spear forward with anything resembling accuracy, but nonetheless it had been an astonishing performance. None of the grown men who had attempted to throw these weapons over the previous months had even come close to doing what the Brat had done at first attempt.

In the ten days that followed I never once set eyes on her again. No doubt afraid that I must be enraged at her, she took the greatest of pains to stay well beyond the reach of my displeasure. Early in that period, I had thought of asking her father where I might find her, but, remembering that Symmachus had shown almost as much apparently ingrained disapproval of the child as he had of me, I thought better of it and sought out his wife, Demea, instead.

Demea greeted me courteously when I approached her that evening before dinner, making my way through the throng of her admirers and waiting patiently until she found the time to turn to me. The child, being a child, was not among the diners. She ate all her meals in the kitchens with the junior servants and the children of the serving staff, which was the custom. Children seldom ate with the adults at the main meal of the day, and most particularly so when the evening gathering was large and could become unruly and boisterous. Gaining a seat at the household table was one of the distinguishing rites of passage from childhood to adult status for people of both sexes.

Demea turned to me eventually with a gracious smile and asked after my health, plainly wondering what could have brought me to seek her out on this occasion, since in the normal way of things I would have contented myself to acknowledge her from a distance with a courteous nod of greeting and a pleasant smile. I cleared my throat uncertainly, suddenly uncomfortable and almost embarrassed by the remembrance of what this woman’s husband believed to be my motivation concerning his elder daughter. Demea cocked her head slightly, waiting for me to speak, a vaguely uncertain smile hovering about her lips. I cleared my throat again, then begged her pardon for imposing upon her in this way and asked her what her younger daughter’s name was.

The lady’s face almost froze in puzzlement, mixed with the slightest hint of consternation, and it was plain to see that she had expected me to say something about her other daughter, Cynthia. Fortunately, that realization alone permitted me to overcome my own uncertainty and speak more easily. Managing to smile without a hint of strain, I told her that I had encountered the child a few days earlier and had realized only after she left to go on her way that I had forgotten her name, if I had ever known it at all.

She stared at me, her eyes wide and troubled. “Is it important that you should remember the name of a child so young, Master Clothar?”

I grinned at her then, suddenly enjoying this situation. “No, Lady Demea, I doubt that anyone could think such a thing important. I merely found it unfortunate because, after I had seen the child and passed her by, I suddenly remembered being ten years old myself, and I recalled clearly how convinced I had been on my tenth birthday, of my own importance in this world. It was a short-lived feeling, because almost as soon as it had occurred to me, I was crushed to discover that a close friend of my father’s, whom I had known most of my life, had absolutely no idea of who I was or what my name was.”

Demea sat blinking at me, a tiny, vertical frown visible between her brows, and I found myself growing aware that, beautiful as she might be, Symmachus’s young wife was not a creature of great intellect.

“I was greatly hurt by that,” I told her, saving her the pain of wondering about what I really meant. “So hurt, in fact, that I promised myself I would never hurt any child that cruelly when I became a man. And until now, I never have … although I fear I may have caused your daughter to suffer exactly as I did myself, and that has made me bold enough to come and ask for your assistance.”

The lady’s face blossomed suddenly into a wide smile as understanding dawned upon her.

“Her name is Maia. She was born in the month of May, and although she is not my own daughter, her father and I first met in the month of May.”

I bowed deeply, thanking the lady for the information, then excused myself and made my way to my own table, planning how I would seek out young Maia the following day and settle our imagined differences. I wanted to see how she would handle a spear on a second attempt.

The next day, the weather changed again for the better, and I decided to ride out hunting with Perceval and Tristan. Young Bors would carry our tents and hunting paraphernalia in the body of a light, high-wheeled, single-axle cart drawn by two horses. There was still a deal of snow on the ground in many places, and the combined strength of the animals together with the high, narrow wheels of the cart would allow us to take the vehicle almost anywhere we wished to go.

Unfortunately, it enabled us to take the cart to where we had no wish to go. Tristan shot a large hind in a dark, barely accessible spot at the base of a cliff late that afternoon, and after we had gutted and cleaned the carcass we experienced some difficulty in getting the meat to where we could transport it easily.

Perceval took the measure of the cliff above us. It was perhaps as high as the height of five tall men standing on one another’s shoulders, and he estimated—accurately, as it turned out—that we could save ourselves a great deal of grief by pulling the wagon to the edge of the cliff up there and lowering ropes by which we could haul up the meat.

Everything proceeded smoothly until we were raising the last hindquarter of meat, when something startled one of the horses. The beast shied and its harness mate reacted in equal panic, leaping away from its companion as far as it could and causing the wheels of the cart to shift slightly. It was enough to cause Perceval to overbalance. He fell out of the cart and over the edge of the cliff, where he crashed solidly to the ground as all of us watched in horror, too stunned to move.

He was alive and conscious, we knew, as we made our way down to him, because we could hear him cursing savagely, using language that one seldom heard coming from his lips. But his left leg was twisted violently up behind him so that it lay beneath his back.

Fortunately, Tristan’s days of service as a mercenary had exposed him to the harsh realities of military life, and now it appeared that he had learned how to deal with such things in the field. As soon as he reached his brother he knelt behind Perceval, ostensibly to support his back but in reality to conceal his hand as he unclipped his large dagger from his belt and grasped it by the sheathed blade before bringing the heavy metal handle down solidly across the back of his brother’s neck, knocking him unconscious on the instant.

He wasted no time after that. Perceval’s body slumped to the ground as Tristan shifted rapidly around toward his brother’s legs. He grasped him about the waist, then squatted there above him, gulping in great breaths of air.

“Right,” he grunted. “I’m going to lift him as high as I can. You two take hold of his leg and pull it around to where it should lie naturally. Then pull it straight. Quickly now, and be careful but don’t be timid. Haul back on that leg with all your strength and straighten it until the ends of the bone are back together, or as close as you can get them. If you don’t do it properly the first time, he won’t thank you later for attempting to be gentle! I don’t know how long he’ll stay unconscious, but he’ll never be able to stand the pain of trying to straighten that leg out if he’s awake, so on the count of three, I’ll lift and you pull. Ready? Now, one, two, three!”

Tristan thrust upward with all the strength of his thighs and legs and managed to hoist his larger brother clear of the ground while Bors and I, not daring to look at each other or reflect upon what we were doing, seized the broken leg and pulled it around into its normal position, or as close to it as we could manage. The break appeared to be high on the thigh, and Perceval’s breeches were doused with thick, fresh blood. The ends of his splintered bones grated audibly as I pulled on the leg, which was amazingly heavy, and my stormach lurched as nausea swept over me. Remembering what Tristan had told us to do, however, I gritted my teeth, fought down my revulsion, and threw all of my weight backward, pulling with all my strength until I felt the leg I was gripping flex and almost seem to stretch.

“Do you have it?” Tristan’s voice was close to breaking with the strain of holding up his brother’s body, and as soon as he heard my affirmative shout he allowed Perceval to drop heavily. He spun around to look at what I had managed to achieve.

“Good,” he hissed. “That looks excellent. Bors! Quick as you can, break me two long boards from the tailgate of the cart—I need them to splint his leg. Be quick, and bring rope, too, the thinnest rope we have, to tie the boards in place. Move, now!”

As Bors scuttled away to do his bidding, Tristan was already turning back to me, looking at my legs. “Yours are longer than mine. That’s good, because I need to be doing other things. Sit here, and take his leg between your own. Lodge your left foot securely in his crotch, making sure his balls are on the outside of it.” I wriggled myself into position. “Right, now wrap your right elbow around his foot—the left one—and lock it in place with your other hand. Get as strong a grip as possible. Good, that’s good. Now here’s what we’re going to do. When I give you the word you’re going to lean back, pulling against his leg as hard as you can and bracing yourself with that straight left leg of yours. You understand? What we’re trying to do is stretch his leg … farther than it ought to be stretched.” He scrambled away as he was speaking and took up a kneeling position ahead of me and on my right, facing his brother’s broken leg. “What’s happened is that the bone is splintered, like a tree struck by lightning, and the ends are too jagged to come together again on their own.”

He pulled out his dagger and slit his brother’s woolen breeches lengthwise, peeling back the cut cloth to expose the flesh beneath it. The skin there, where it was not slick with blood, was white and pallid, and the flesh bulged out in an ugly swelling just below the point where jagged ends of bone protruded through the shredded flesh of the awful wound, which oozed blood sluggishly. Tristan kept talking to me, his eyes moving ceaselessly over the damages beneath his hands, and in a vain effort to keep my mind from dwelling on what I was looking at, I fought to concentrate upon the swirling, drifting snowflakes that filled the air around us, falling in utter silence, those of them that landed on Perceval’s bared leg changing from white to crimson in an instant. Tristan was oblivious to the weather and the cold.

“Well at least he hasn’t severed any major bleeders. So, young Clothar, you are going to use every iota of your strength to pull that leg straight out until it’s so long that the jagged bone ends pull apart from each other. Once you’ve done that, I’ll guide the ends of the bones back into where they should be, and then we’ll splint everything up and it’ll be in the hands of God.” He bellowed up to Bors, whom we could hear banging on the cart above our heads. “There’s an ax in the toolbox by the driver’s bench. Use it.” He turned back to me. “Right, Perceval might be coming back to life at any moment, so let’s get this over and done with, if we can. Are you ready?” I nodded that I was. “Good. Do it, then. Pull, and don’t stop until I tell you to stop. Go!”

I threw myself backward, my eyes screwed tightly shut against all distractions as I concentrated upon keeping my body at full stretch, pulling at Perceval’s leg, which felt heavy and lifeless. Once, twice, I felt as though something shifted and then I felt a lateral movement and heard Tristan grunt.

“Right,” he said. “That’s it. You can stop pulling now. I can’t do any more. That’s as close as I can bring it to being where it was before.”

I relaxed and immediately felt myself on the verge of total collapse, exhausted by the effort I had been sustaining. Above our heads, Bors was now chopping hard, but even as I grew aware of that the noises stopped, and moments later we heard the sounds of him scrambling down to join us again. He brought four long, narrow boards with him, and a long coil of thin hempen rope.

“I brought some water, too.”

“Good lad,” Tristan said. “Do you have any clean cloth? I’ll need one piece to wash his wound and another to use as a bandage.”

“I’ve got cloth,” I said, remembering that I was wearing an extra tunic of plain white cloth beneath my quilted one, for additional warmth. I quickly stripped it off and shrugged back into my outer clothes before the cold could even penetrate. Tristan ripped it into two pieces, one much larger than the other, and used the smaller piece to wash away the blood that was now crusting on his brother’s thigh. He used a corner of the larger piece to dry the skin, after which he folded the remainder into a pad that he placed directly over the wound, binding it in place with strips of the wet cloth. I had noticed that the bleeding had lessened perceptibly since Tristan’s ministrations, and apparently that was a good thing, because Tristan mentioned it, too, in an approving murmur.

He then splinted the leg, cutting the rope into lengths before calling on Bors and me to hold the boards in place along the limb while he tied them into place. He worked swiftly and with great confidence, and I was much impressed with his self-possession and the competence with which he had managed the entire affair, from the first moment of his looking at his brother, assessing the situation and what had to be done.

“Where did you learn to do all that?” I asked when the last ties were in place and he sighed and slouched back against the bole of a tree.

“Hmm. I didn’t learn. I saw it done once, though, after an action against the Burgundians, not far south of Lutetia. One of our senior centurions, an old sweat called Lucius, fell into a ravine, from horseback. The situation was quite similar to this one, in fact, except that Lucius had an arrow in him, too. That’s what caused him to fall in the first place. Anyway, an old friend of his, who had been a medic decades earlier, before becoming a centurion, knew what to do. I was in the situation you were in today, so I wasn’t nearly as sure about what I needed me to do. But I remembered the old medic talking about how we needed to stretch the leg and bring the broken bone ends back together.”

“You’ve never done that before, ever?”

Tristan heard the wonder in my voice and frowned slightly. “No, and I’d feel a lot better about it if my beloved brother there would just wake up, or grunt, or puke or something.” He stooped forward and placed the flat of his hand against Perceval’s brow. “Well, he’s still breathing, at any rate, so I suppose there’s nothing more for us to do but wait.” He glanced up at the cliff above us and shook his head in rueful wonder. “I have absolutely no idea how we’re ever going to get him out of here.”

“I have, sir.”

Both of us turned to look at Bors. He shrugged and held up both hands in a curiously helpless gesture.

“I found a set of pulley blocks in the toolbox with the ax.” He looked from one to the other of us, but when neither of us showed any reaction he continued. “There’s no poles, but we have an ax and we’re surrounded by trees, and we’ve lots and lots of rope.”

“So?” Tristan was clearly not understanding what Bors was telling him, and neither was I. “What are you talking about, Bors?”

He blinked at us both in astonishment, and then he grew suddenly confident. “We can build a hoist, like the ones the sailors used to load the feed for our horses when we left Gaul. It only needs four stout poles, a few ropes, and a set of pulleys, and we have all of those. Once it’s assembled, we need simply strap Master Perceval to a board and hoist him up directly to the cart, straight up the face of the cliff.”

I remembered seeing the device he was describing, swinging heavy sacks from the wharf and delivering them safely to the ship’s deck, but I had paid it no great amount of attention and now my memory of its workings was clouded, to say the least.

“Straight up the face of the cliff. Can you build such a device, Bors?”

He looked at me wide-eyed. “Aye, sir, I can.”

“Where did you learn to do such a thing?”

His face went blank with astonishment. “Nowhere, Master Clothar. I simply watched what the mariners did, and paid attention to the way the device worked. It was very simple. And then I remembered having seen a similar thing, but much larger, on my father’s farm when I was a boy. One of the workers there, a foreman, taught me about pulleys and tackle and the way they work. He showed me how a single man can lift many times his own weight simply by using ropes threaded through pulleys.”

“And so you now believe you can build such a device and use it to haul Perceval to safety up there on the clifftop?”

“Aye, sir, I do.”

“And the first step toward doing it is what? Cutting down four trees?”

“Four, aye, Master.”

I looked at him one last time, setting my chin and pursing my lips before I spoke. “You are absolutely sure you can do this?”

I saw the determination in his eyes. “Aye, Master, I’m sure.”

“Well, then, let’s go and select our trees.”

Twenty-four hours after that—having found our trees and felled them, then dragged them close to the top of the cliff, cut them to size, and harnessed them together to form a tripod and a hoisting arm—Tristan and I had learned how to thread a rope through a set of pulley blocks and how to set up a simple gin pole hoist.

Perceval had regained consciousness about the time we set off to hunt for suitable trees, and he had been suffering unimaginable pain ever since, so that lines newly stamped into his face appeared to have been etched there years earlier. We fed him rich, blood-thickened venison broth spiced with wild garlic and onions that grew in profusion close by where we were camped at the cliff base, but he had little appetite, too badly in need of rest to care about eating and in too much pain to be capable of resting. By the time we had erected the hoist, however, he had lapsed into unconsciousness, and although that would make our task of raising him easier, it also worried us deeply. We strapped him securely to a stretcher made of wrist-thick sapling stems and raised him quickly, straight up the cliff as Bors had promised. Once we had him safely there, we transferred him to the bed of the cart, which we had loaded with dried bracken from the sheltered bottom of the cliff to cushion him as much as possible.

By that time, however, it was growing dark, and after a hurried discussion, weighing the pros and contras of attempting to travel through unknown woodland in the dark of night, we decided we had no other choice but to remain where we were for another night and set off for Verulamium early in the morning. So we lit a cooking fire and set about cooking more of Tristan’s venison, which we ate with the last of the bread we had brought with us.

We retired early that night, looking to be astir and ready to move off before dawn broke, but I for one could find no rest, fretting over the health of our helpless friend. Bishop Enos had some wonderful healers and physicians among his priests, I knew, and I would not be satisfied until Perceval was safely delivered into their hands.

We arrived back in Verulamium before noon the next day, having been absent for five days, and we were traveling very slowly, painfully aware of the agonized sounds coming from the rear of the cart at every bump in the surface of the ground. Once within the town, however, it was the work of mere moments to deliver Perceval to the building that Bishop Enos had dedicated to permanent use as a hospital. There, a tall and gaunt old priest called Marcus, who had once served as a military surgeon with the legions in Africa before the invasion of the Vandals in 429, took Perceval off our hands and promised he would have the finest care anyone could have. Father Marcus stripped off the splints Tristan had applied and examined the work that we had done to repair the leg, and was lavish with his praise for Tristan. We were grateful to be able to leave our friend and brother in his care.

I made my way directly to Bishop Enos’s quarters to inform him of what had happened to Perceval, only to find that the Lady Demea was there, deep in conversation with the bishop. I slipped away without either of them having seen me and went outside, where I found young Maia sitting on a concrete water conduit, her long shadow stretched out before her, her slender feet bare in the gutter by the side of the road. She was completely unaware of my presence as I walked up behind her.

“Maia,” I said, “I’m not angry at you, so there’s no need to run away from me.”

She jumped to her feet as I spoke and spun around to face me, her face flushing hotly, and after a few moments when she was plainly searching for words, she said, “I’m not afraid and I’m not running anywhere.”

“Good, I am glad to hear that, because I need to talk with you. I would like you to come by the basilica tomorrow when I am practicing with my spears and show me how you threw that one. I am not at all upset about that, I promise you. In fact the opposite is true. So will you do that? Will you come tomorrow?”

“I can’t. I won’t be here.”

“What do you mean? You won’t come to the basilica?”

She shrugged, her face regaining its normal color. “No, I mean I won’t be here in Verulamium tomorrow. We are leaving for home in the morning, returning to Chester.”

“You are? That’s very sudden, isn’t it? Why?”

She shrugged her shoulders, the movement emphasizing how thin and insubstantial she appeared to be, and yet I knew she was as strong and lithe as a whip, despite the impression she conveyed of being like a young deer or a newborn foal, all eyes and long, unsteady legs. “Because the King and Queen’s prayers have been answered,” she replied. She spoke without inflection, and nothing in her demeanor indicated that she might hold any opinion of any kind on what she was reporting, but there was something impossibly subtle about her words that made me look at her more closely, wondering if there was really cynicism in her speech. She paid me no attention, however, and was already continuing. “Saint Alban has interceded in Heaven on their behalf and Queen Demea is now with child and so we must go home now. That is why I am here. I’m waiting for the Queen. She is talking with Bishop Enos.”

I continued to stare at her for the space of a few more heartbeats, then told myself not to be so silly. The child was only twelve, after all. That was a marriageable age, certainly, but only for rare unions between young girls and very old men whose mortality was questionable. It was no indicator of either womanhood or intellect.

“I see,” I said, nodding slowly. “Has she been there long, with the bishop?”

“No, not long. Why?”

“Oh, no reason. I’m sorry you are leaving so soon. I shall miss you.”

“I’m not. I can’t wait to go home.”

“I don’t suppose you would care to show me how you threw that spear right now, would you?”

She cocked her head and looked at me strangely, her elfin face with its enormous piercing blue eyes unreadable. “Now? But you have no spears.”

“True, but they’re nearby. I can have them here in moments. What say you, would you like to try for that target again?”

Her eyes sparkled, and as she straightened her back I noticed again how tall she was, unusually tall for a girl her age, and thin as a sapling tree. She smiled, very slightly, white teeth gleaming briefly behind wide red lips. “I don’t know if there’s enough time.”

“Of course there is. There’s always time for what we love to do. Stay here until you see me cross the street over there, then follow me into the basilica. It won’t take long for you to show me how you throw.”

I had been right the first time I saw her. She threw naturally and without thought, uncoiling into the cast reflexively and following through perfectly and simply because she had that kind of grace in her normal range of motion. She threw three spears, and two of them hit their targets. I was full of praise and I could see she was delighted with her own prowess. But she never lost sight of the fact that she ought to be sitting outside the bishop’s house, waiting for the Lady Demea, and so I thanked her for her demonstration and allowed her to go on her way. She flashed me a dazzling smile and darted away like a deer toward the door, where she hesitated and looked back at me, lingering.

“What? Say it.”

“Where did you learn to throw spears like that?”

I shrugged and grinned at her. “Like what?” I was being facetious, but she took me seriously.

“Like magic, the way you do, with the cord wrapped around the shaft. I’ve never seen that here.”

“No, you wouldn’t, not in Britain. I learned to do it in Gaul, across the sea.”

“I’ve never seen anyone who throws better than you. I have never seen spears like those, either.”

“That’s because there are none. These spears have no equal.”

“I shall call you Hastatus,” she said then, sounding very grown up and sure of herself. “It means a spearman. Do you mind having a new name?”

“No,” I said, smiling again. “Not at all. Not if it is bestowed by someone as skilled and gracious as you are, Lady Maia.”

A flicker of something that might have been annoyance crossed her face, and I thought I had offended her with my levity, but then she nodded. “So be it, then. You shall be my Hastatus. And I’m glad you don’t like Cynthia. I don’t either, but most people simply can’t see beyond her face.” She flicked a hand in farewell and was gone, leaving me somewhat astonished by her last words and even more so by her unexpected percipience. I had been sure that no one suspected my dislike of her sister, Cynthia, because I had gone to great lengths to conceal it, for reasons that I could not define even to myself. And yet this Maia, a mere child, had seen through all my dissembling and had clearly identified my dislike of her sibling. That, in itself, was surprising enough, but upon further thought I began to perceive for myself that young Maia was much wiser than I would ever have suspected, and mature far beyond her years. At an age when most girls were besotted with outward appearances of beauty and attractiveness, this child was astute enough to know, to her own satisfaction, that physical, facial beauty is a mere façade, an external coating, and one that few people ever try to see through or beyond. I found myself smiling in admiration and wonderment as I followed her out of the building, hoping to speak with her again, but she had long since vanished.

In the morning we turned out to bid farewell to Symmachus and his party, and I was surprisingly reluctant to see them go. Cynthia, I noticed, had apparently changed her mind about me, for she did not address a single word to me, and she left for home without deigning to glance in my direction. Maia the Brat sat beside her, and although she did not smile upon me either, she at least rewarded me with a tiny, private flip of the hand as her carriage pulled away.

Tristan nudged me as the wagons left and nodded toward Bors, who stood forlorn, gazing hopelessly after his disappearing love.

“Look at him, poor fellow. I remember how that feels, to watch your first love ride away forever. But he’ll get over it quickly. We all do.” He looked back at the retreating wagons. “That’s quite the young lady. I don’t think I have ever seen anything quite like her.”

I managed to find a smile to mask my disagreement. “Cynthia? She’s unique, I’ll grant you, but I think I may not die of grief if I never see her again.”

He grunted, a single, muffled bark of amusement and agreement. “I believe you there, but I wasn’t talking about the beautiful Cynthia. It was her sister I meant.”

“Who, Maia the Brat?” I laughed aloud. “She is a delight, I’ll not begrudge her that. And she’s quick, and clever, and has a mind of her own. But she’s just a child, for all that, a little girl.”

“A little girl … aye, right. You come back and tell me that in three or four years, if we ever run into her again. I guarantee she’ll be the loveliest creature you’ll ever have seen. She’ll bewitch you, just as her sister bewitched Bors.”

I laughed again. “Not me, Tristan. I’m unbewitchable.”

“She doesn’t think so now, not that one, believe me. She likes you very much, and not in the way you obviously expect of a twelve-year-old.”

“Maia? Come on, man, I’ve barely spoken to the child, and when I did we talked of throwing spears.”

He shrugged elaborately and held up his hands. “Your pardon then, forget I mentioned it, but I know more about that young woman than you do.”

I looked at him in surprise. “You do? How can you?”

He grinned at me and danced away, his arms raised defensively as though he expected me to pummel him with my fists. “I ask questions, and I listen to the answers, and so I learn much more than those who never ask and far, far more than those who ask but never listen.” Knowing he was baiting me, I refused to rise to his goad, but he kept going anyway. “The young woman has a mind of her own … but she has secrets, too. And she would rather be a boy, at this stage in her life, so she trains with weapons when she is at home in Chester, where all her people love her. And her name is not Maia, although she wouldn’t tell you that.”

Suddenly I found that I had lost patience with his bantering. “Don’t play the fool, Tristan, of course her name is Maia. I had it directly from her mother.”

He sobered instantly, looking at me eye to eye, the smile on his face fading as swiftly as the humor left his tone. “Stepmother, Clothar. Demea is her stepmother. The child was born on the first day of May—hence the name, Maia. And Demea and Symmachus met and fell in love in the month of May when the child was three, and they were wed the following May. But only after that did Symmachus start calling the child Maia, to please his new wife and to ingratiate her to the child. Little Maia’s name had been the same as her real mother’s prior to that, and the Lady Demea preferred not to be reminded of that name or to have her husband reminded of it. The child’s real name is Gwinnifer. Mind you, she seldom uses it, save among friends.”

Gwinnifer. I had never heard the name before but it resonated, somehow, in my breast. I swung around on my heel to look after the cavalcade, but they had long since passed out of view, and the road lay empty.