The Lance Thrower

IV

URSUS

I DO NOT KNOW where I was on the day my boyhood came to an end, but I remember the occasion very well because the horror of it never left me and still has the power today to stir the hairs on the nape of my neck and make me shudder with dread. I can recall every aspect of the countryside that surrounded me that day, and most particularly I can remember with absolute clarity the last scene I saw before my world was suddenly changed for all time.

I never have known, however, exactly where we were that day. It was our fourth day out of Auxerre, heading south at a leisurely pace. We were riding two abreast, twelve of us and one two-horse wagon. Our party was strung out along a surprisingly hard-packed path that followed the osier-lined left bank of a broad, muddy-brown river that eddied sluggishly, its waters looking thick and viscous beneath a sun that was too bright and too hot for the time of the year, even in southern Gaul. It had been raining heavily to the north and east of us for two entire days; although we ourselves had not seen as much as a storm cloud in the skies around us, there was no mistaking the signs in the river. We had watched the water level rise alarmingly these past two days, swelling and filling up the channel until the banks had entirely vanished and the sullen waters spilled over in several low-lying places to flood the fields on either side. We had managed to remain on slightly higher ground at all times, however, and nothing untoward had happened to us. The river was swollen to the point of threat, but yet the ground around us and ahead of us was firm and almost drought-dry.

Paralleling our path on the left, some distance away but easily discernible, was the wide, dusty swath carved by the small army of Duke Phillipus Lorco as it passed by earlier that morning. We were a hunting party, dispatched the previous afternoon to harvest fresh meat for the troopers, and we had done well that morning, so that now, approaching midday, we were riding to rejoin the main body of our party, avoiding the dusty track stirred up by the earlier troops and staying on the narrow, hard-packed riverside path. The light four-wheeled wagon we had with us was loaded with six large deer carcasses—enough meat to keep everyone in the one-hundred-and-twenty-strong main force smiling and well fed for several days.

Lorco and I were riding together at the very rear of the loose column, close behind the wagon with the butchered deer, and although it was an unpleasant place to be, what with the swarming flies and the thick stink of the fresh, congealing blood that attracted them, it was nonetheless a spot that kept us safely out of sight of our two current nemeses, Harga, the Sergeant-at-Arms, and Dirk the Huntsman, both of whom had been charged by Lorco’s father to watch us closely and keep us out of mischief. They were an ill-matched and foul-tempered pair, and neither of them even tried to like us or to tolerate us. To them we were nothing more than an imposition, an accursed nuisance to be frowned upon, shouted at, and generally held in subjection. And so we naturally set about immediately finding ways of thwarting them and doing as we wished. To that end, we were hiding from them at the rear of the meat wagon as we plotted our escape from their supervision.

Harga and Dirk lent themselves easily, albeit unknowingly, to our mischief. No one with eyes to see would ever describe either one of them as comely, and so we had named them Castor and Pollux, the heavenly twins, thinking ourselves extremely witty. We were now out of their direct line of sight, safe behind the tailgate of the wagon as we enjoyed a laugh at their expense. For their part, the two jailers rode on side by side, unaware of us or of our disdain.

Disturbed by our passage, an enormous flock of crows rose up with a clatter of flapping wings from a recently plowed field to our left and then wheeled away from us, cawing and screaming raucously as only crows know how. Mildly surprised at their number, I watched them go, following the dense cloud of them easily with my eyes until they disappeared into the leafy masses of a trio of huge old conical trees that stood like tapered, towering candles in the distance, close by a distant stretch of river that caught the afternoon sun’s light in a silvery dazzle of reflected brightness.

Lorco had fallen behind me by half a length, his horse stomping and cavorting, protesting at the cloud of horseflies that swarmed around us, and as I turned in my saddle to speak to him one of the flies landed on my nose and began crawling down, toward my mouth. I brought up my hand to brush it away as Lorco said, “That’s the biggest flock of crows I ev—”

My life changed at that instant, blasted by a sight I should never have seen.

I saw what happened because I was looking directly at Lorco’s mouth as his lips formed the words. I heard the sounds that accompanied the event and noted them because they were so strange and jarring. And both sight and sounds were seared indelibly into my memory. And yet I failed utterly to comprehend what I had heard and seen … and even now, I find myself wondering which came first, the sight, or the sounds? Such was their speed when they occurred that they were indistinguishable,’ but in a hundred dreams throughout the year that followed, they broke apart, sounds and sight, and took place again and again, inexorably and appallingly, sometimes sight followed by sound, sometimes the other way around, but always with the power to snap me sharply awake, gasping and filled with terror.

As my fingers brushed at the end of my nose, dislodging the tickling fly, Lorco’s entire head appeared to change shape. It was a phenomenon too brief to register, but I saw, or it seemed I saw, his entire head, flex in less than the blink of an eye, the way a reflection will sometimes undulate in a calm, dark pool when an unseen fish passes beneath. It was as though all the bones of his skull had suddenly been replaced, for a mere flicker of time, by a liquid-filled bladder of some kind. It lurched and instantly reformed itself. And as this odd event occurred I heard alien noises: an abrupt, violent hiss and a ripping, rending, meaty sound that terminated in a solid, crunching thunk! as something propelled Lorco toward me with great force, jerking him forward from the waist as his face split asunder in a welter of blood and flying pieces of whiteness that I would later come to recognize as teeth and fragments of shattered bone.

I did nothing, frozen in the instant by disbelief and feeling something within me grasped and crushed in the grip of a massive fist of solid, icy coldness that I could not even begin to recognize. I saw my best friend’s suddenly ruined face come thrusting toward me, a spray of blood bursting from his ruptured mouth, filling the space between us with a red, wet mist, and then I saw his eyes, wide and terrified, shrieking at me in eloquent silence, begging me to tell him what had happened. Unable to move, I saw his horse begin to spin and carry him away from me, and as he began to topple sideways to the ground I finally saw the arrow that had killed him. It was a heavy, iron-headed war arrow, triple-bladed and wickedly barbed, and it had struck the back of his neck, severing his spine before passing through the cavity of his mouth to shatter his upper front teeth and emerge through the base of his nose.

Even as Lorco pitched forward, and knowing that he would crash headfirst to the ground, I still had not begun to comprehend what had happened. Then I heard shouting, and saw movement ahead of me, and looked up toward the rear of our train in time to see the man who had shot Lorco preparing to loose another arrow at me. I remained frozen, but fortunately my horse was already reacting uneasily to the panic it sensed in its companion. It reared sideways, tossing its head and whinnying, and I watched the arrow spring from the killer’s bow and leap across the intervening space between us to hiss by me so closely that I felt its passing. And now, as my panicky mount spun me around, I saw that our entire party was surrounded and outnumbered by a swarm of strangers, most of them armed with bows. Even as I looked I saw Harga go down with two arrows in him, one of them deep in his skull behind the right ear, having pierced his leather helmet.

Fool, I remember thinking, seeing the silvery iron helmet hanging from his saddle. He should know better than that. I should have, too, for my own helmet hung close by my knee, but I was a mere boy, not a soldier, and so I absolved myself.

Then clarity returned and terror threatened to overwhelm me as I saw that I had mere moments in which to save myself or die. I could see six of my companions, not counting Lorco, already sprawled in the dirt of the path, and I saw several of the enemy take note of me sitting there, high up and empty-handed on my fine horse. One of them was almost within reach of me by that time, an outstretched hand grasping for my reins. I snatched them myself, barely in time, and pulled them tight, swinging my horse around hard, striking the man with its shoulder and sending him sprawling.

Someone shouted urgently, a warning to someone else to catch me before I could escape, but I was already spurring my horse hard, roweling him viciously in my need to get away from there. Another form leaped up at me, attempting to seize my bridle, but my horse was already surging forward. I kicked out with a savagery born of desperation and the man fell away as the thick, iron-studded sole of my heavy riding boot connected with his ear. I dug with my spurs again and now I could feel the strength of the horse beneath me as he strove to leap away from the gouging torment of the pain in his sides.

Another man leaped at me and was struck and thrust aside by the plunging horse, and a fourth slipped and fell with a cry beneath its trampling hooves. I heard three sharp, whistling sounds that I recognized as close-shot arrows, but I was almost free of the throng by then, with only two men now between me and the bare fields beyond. The man farthest to my right had a bow, and as I saw him he brought the weapon up and sighted toward me. Acting purely on instinct, I let go my reins, seized a handful of mane in each fist and threw myself down along the horse’s left side until I was hidden from the bowman completely. It was a trick I had practiced with this horse many times, for more than a year, and the only means the bowman had of countering it was to ignore me and shoot the horse. Fortunately, he did not. He may have wondered what happened to me, but by the time he stopped gawping I was past both him and his companion and my horse was galloping flat out. I swung myself back up into the saddle and leaned forward as his arrow belatedly flew by me, missing widely. I sighted between the animal’s ears toward the dark line of trees that marked the outer edge of the forest wherein I knew I would be safe—safer by far, at any rate, than I could be in the open fields that flanked the river—and raked him with my spurs again.

No one tried to follow me, and an hour later I dismounted by a narrow, fast-flowing stream where I lay on my belly and thrust my face into the water, drinking greedily until I could drink no more. The water was cold enough to hurt, but I made no attempt to get up. Instead, I rolled my head from side to side, soaking my head completely and allowing, encouraging, the chill to keep me numb and thoughtless. When I could stand the cold no longer, I pushed myself up onto my knees and tried to stand but fell instead to all fours in the streambed and vomited up what I had drunk.

I do not remember crawling out of the water, but sometime later, it might have been an hour, perhaps even longer, I awoke on my side on the thick grass beneath one of the trees on the stream’s bank.

There was a thought, a memory, already in my mind when I regained consciousness that afternoon on the bank of the stream. It was the memory of my own hubris, less than two weeks earlier. When I had learned that Bishop Germanus had great things in mind for me once I had reached sixteen, I had thought of myself as being a man and a warrior dedicated to the greater glory of God. Now the recollection of it made me cringe with shame.

For more than five years I had been among the top students of the Bishop’s School and for the last three of those years I had shown myself to be virtually unbeatable in the military training segments of our daily curriculum. I had worked hard and trained constantly, cherishing dreams of being a warrior, until now, today, and my first opportunity to put my training to the test. And I had fled in terror.

A voice in my mind told me to stand up and be a man, but I tucked my hands into my armpits and drew up my knees, hunching myself into a ball and moaning aloud as I allowed myself at last to recall what had occurred. Again and again and yet again I watched poor Lorco’s face explode and saw him falling sideways into death, and yet, absurdly, I was concerned above all else that he was about to land on his head and injure himself on the hard ground. And then I began to recall the bodies of our companions as I had seen them last: . Harga, falling backward from his saddle, arms spread, an arrow in his skull and another protruding from beneath his left arm; Gorgo, our finest bowman, sprawled facedown in the dust of the path, his buttocks thrusting comically into the air because of the way he had fallen; Dirk the Huntsman and Alith and Fistus, his runners, and Petrarch the cook, who always liked to see his food being killed, and limping Tamarus, his assistant—all of them recognizable in a single glance, all of them dead within moments of each other, reduced to shapeless huddles of drab, bloodied rags.

And then my mind showed me images of our attackers, more than a score of them, perhaps as many as two score; screaming men, many of them aiming bows, many more running headlong, leaping and charging toward me and whoever else might have survived their first murderous onslaught. They had appeared from nowhere, it seemed, springing fully formed from the earth itself like the demons spawned by the dragon’s teeth in the ancient tale that had terrified and thrilled me as a child. As I thought about them at greater length, however, it became obvious that they had been lying waiting for us among the osier willows on the riverbank and in the long grass on the left side of the path we followed.

Harga had committed the primary sin of military command by riding through unknown territory without advance guards, and all of us had paid a fearsome price for his neglect, lulled into false security by the knowledge that we were following close on the heels of our own forces. Once more I saw the ground around our group covered suddenly with leaping, running men, and I heard their screams and felt again the terror that had consumed me. And I saw myself again kicking one man in the head and then spurring my horse into a dead run, running and running and running as far and as fast as the beast would carry me.

I had fled from battle at the first hint of hardship, and the knowledge burned in me like gall. I howled aloud and squirmed and kicked on the hard ground, weeping and wailing like an infant and wriggling and groveling in abject misery, and had I been able to dig like a mole I feel sure I would have buried myself alive, then and there.

Eventually, however, these convulsions of grief and self-loathing died away and gave place to emptiness and a great, welling, leaden-hearted misery. I lay motionless after that for a long time, mentally identifying and exploring the aches and pains I had imposed upon myself in lying there. I had used up all my store of tears and my whole chest felt hollow, like an inflated bladder, weightless and yet filled somehow with tension and unbearable loss.

I must have fallen asleep at some point during all of that, because the next thing I became aware of was a deep, explosive snort and the sound of a hoof stamping close by my head. I jerked awake to see my horse looming above me, and the sight of him filled me with another wave of guilt and shame, for I saw that I had left him fully saddled and bridled. I sat up, groaning with the effort, and pushed myself to my feet, where I stood swaying for a time before I felt strong enough to reach out and take hold of his reins. As soon as he felt the reins in my hand, he snorted again, softly this time, blowing air through his velvet muzzle, and raised his head high, pointing his ears forward and then standing motionless, as though waiting for me to mount. I stroked his neck and muzzle, then slapped him on the neck and told him to wait while I returned to the water to kneel and drink again from the stream, more decorously this time and knowing that I would not be sick again. I dried my mouth with the back of my hand and swung myself up into the saddle, where I sat for a time, simply looking about me and trying to decide what I ought to do. My horse whickered again, his ears twitching as he waited for my signal, and as I bent forward slightly to lay my hand on his neck, my outstretched fingers touched the top of the heavy bronze helmet that hung from the hook on my saddlebow.

I stopped, staring at the helmet and remembering the sight of Harga’s helmet hanging from his saddle in the same way. Had he been wearing the thing, the arrow that pierced his skull would probably have been deflected and he might never have had to fling up his arm the way he had, exposing his vulnerable armpit to the second arrow that struck him. I suddenly felt the welcome weight of my own full-body armor: a complete front and back cuirass of hammered bronze, with matching kirtle of armored straps and, strapped to my riding boots, long, heavy leg greaves that came up above my knees. A long-bladed spatha hung by my left side from a sword belt that crossed my chest, and a matching dagger hung in a sheath from my right hip.

I should not have been wearing armor that day at all, as a member of a hunting party, but Harga had been in a vengeful frame of mind that morning and had ordered both of us, Lorco and me, to wear full armor as a punishment for being what he called “insolent smart-arses.” He had discovered, the previous afternoon, that the wagon we were using to transport the deer we killed also contained the four chests belonging to Lorco and me containing our clothing and our armor. They had been loaded in Auxerre when we joined the Lorco expedition to ride south with them. Harga had thought it highly amusing to make us undo the bindings and unpack our chests and to display all our goods and possessions to the others in the hunting party. He took a malicious pleasure in trying to humiliate us that way, but we, having spent the previous five years living in communal quarters with close to a hundred other boys, saw nothing belittling in what he made us do, because in fact the complete display of everything brought from home into the Bishop’s School was a ritual event, undergone by every new boy who joined the scholastic ranks, and in those instances much, including anything edible, was confiscated by the older boys. Of course, we said nothing about that to Harga.

And so this day we had worn armor in the blazing sun. But we had been on our best behavior for most of the day and even Harga had not objected—in fact he had pretended not to see—when we took off our helmets. A new wave of grief swept over me as I realized belatedly that Lorco, too, might still be alive had he been wearing his helmet. My eyes awash again with sudden tears I would have sworn a moment earlier could not be in me, I gulped and swallowed and bent forward to take the heavy bronze helmet from its hook and slide it over my head. The sudden hollow hush that surrounded me as the leather-lined cask sank over my ears was unexpectedly peaceful, and the restriction of vision caused by the broad, hinged cheek protectors forced me to sit straighter and turn my head when I wanted to look at anything that did not lie directly ahead of me. I unsheathed my spatha and held it up to where I could see the blade, unbloodied, unsullied, unused. I sheathed it again and kicked my horse forward in a walk.

As soon as the animal began to move, my body adjusted to its motion and my thoughts became cogent and cohesive. I glanced up at the sky and saw the sun low in the west, its glare trapped behind all but the edges of a swollen cloud. The attack, I knew, had occurred before noon, so I must have been lying by the stream in the woods for several hours. By this time, I knew, the enemy, whoever they had been, must have collected their booty and moved on long since. But what they might have done with the bodies of my companions was an unknown that I had to address. Bad enough that I had run away from the killing field in the first place, but if I were to return to the Duke as the sole survivor of this debacle, I would have to bring information on the aftermath of the slaughter, verifying and reporting the names of the others dead … besides his son. My jaws began to ache with the strain of gritting my teeth together as I made my way back to the scene by the riverside, following the deeply gouged tracks of my earlier, headlong flight without difficulty and growing increasingly aware that if anyone had chosen to follow me they would have had no trouble finding me and killing me.

I saw the wagon first, standing abandoned near the river, among grass that grew as high as its axles. The horses were gone, as were the butchered deer carcasses; clearly our attackers had had no wish to encumber themselves with a wheeled vehicle. As I approached, I thought at first that I could see a body hunched on the ground beside one of the rear wheels, but on closer inspection it proved to be the broken, boxy shape of one of the chests that had been on the wagon. There were articles of clothing all over the surrounding ground, scattered to the winds as though they had been pulled from their chests and flung straight up into the air, but whether they had been mine or Lorco’s I had no idea and less concern. They were garments, clothing, things of less than no value. I moved on.

The first body I found was that of Borg, the cheerful young man who had driven the wagon and had been the friendliest of the group toward me and Lorco. His throat had been slashed open, almost severing his head, and he had been stripped naked. My stomach heaved as I looked down for the first few moments at what remained of him, but then I swallowed hard and tugged on my reins, turning my mount, and my eyes, away in search of others.

I could see most of the others now, their lifeless bodies strewn haphazardly over a surprisingly wide expanse of ground, and I guessed that some of them must have fought hard and long before being cut down so far from the path, irrespective of whether their horses had carried them there alive or dead. There were no dead horses, however, although it did not occur to me to look for any at first. Only when I saw the distance at which some of the bodies lay from the river path did I think to look about me for dead animals, and at that point another element of the enigma of what had happened clicked into place. I remembered waiting for the thump of an arrow hammering into my mount’s side as I hid behind its bulk from the aiming bowman, and I recalled being surprised that the killing shot had not come. Now, however, that was no longer so surprising. These men, whoever they had been, had attacked us for our horses and perhaps our weapons, no more than that. They had not been interested in simple plunder.

As soon as I saw the truth of that I tried to recall the attackers. Hazy, confused images came to me at first, of open, screaming mouths and wild, staring eyes; of madly running men brandishing fearsome weapons and intent upon my death; of flashing, naked, dirty limbs, long, bony legs and knobby knees and, in some instances, bare, muddy feet. And then my mind fastened upon an image of one particular man, the man who had flanked the bowman whom I dodged by hiding behind my horse’s barrel. He had been facing me, too, crouched and tense, ready to kill should I approach him closely enough, but the fearsome weapon he had clutched in one hand, upraised and ready to strike, had been misshapen and clumsy looking, a club of some kind—a plain, heavy-looking wooden cudgel that looked nowhere near as menacing as the ash wood practice swords I had been using for years at the Bishop’s School. This killer had not even had a blade to brandish. From that recollection sprang others, and I rapidly began to revise my opinion of our opponents.

They had been stronger in numbers than we were, but they had not been as well armed, and the impressions I had had of heavily armed and armored men had been born more from frightened panic than from observation. Many of them had been bowmen, true, but I could recall now, looking back less fearfully, that more than half of them had not. The essence of their victory had lain in the success of the trap they laid; in their numbers and the speed and surprise of their onslaught. More than anything else, however, their victory had been our fault, attributable to the slovenly, incompetent leadership of the Sergeant-at-Arms, Harga.

Chilled by that assessment, I sucked in a deep breath and set about my self-imposed task of cataloguing the dead. We had been thirteen, including myself, Lorco, and Borg the wagon driver, but I found fifteen corpses scattered about the field, and four of those were strangers to me. That meant that there was a body missing, and someone else from our group had survived the attack, unless—and the idea came to me quickly, surprising me with my own pessimism—the missing man had tried to escape by the river and had been killed in the water. I pulled my horse’s head around and turned to look toward the river, and as I did so I thought I saw a flicker of movement off to my right, among the osier willows that lined the riverbank.

I froze, afraid to turn my head again and look more closely, but then, accepting that I had a choice of fleeing yet again or staying where I was, perhaps to die this time, I acknowledged to myself with great bitterness that I would never be able to live with the shame of running away again, and so I gritted my teeth, unsheathed my spatha, and turned to face directly toward the place where I had seen the movement, seeing the spot slide into clear focus in the gap between the side flaps of my helmet.

I stared and waited, silently defying whoever was there to step forth, but no one appeared and nothing moved, and eventually I began to feel foolish, sitting there on my horse like a living statue and facing an uninhabited stretch of treed riverbank. I nudged my heels into my horse’s flanks and it began to walk forward slowly, its ears pricked in the direction we were taking. And then, in a burst of movement that brought my heart into my mouth, Lorco’s horse lurched out from among the distant willows and came trotting toward us, whinnying a welcome. The sight of it almost unmanned me yet again, for I had assumed that the raiders had taken it with all the others, but seeing it trotting toward me, with Lorco’s silver helmet dangling from its saddle hook, I realized that it must have run away right at the start of the attack, when Lorco fell from its back, and not stopped until it entered the river willows, presumably to find water. It had obviously managed to remain unseen by the enemy, who must still have been fighting at the time.

The magnificent animal, one of Tiberias Cato’s finest blacks and bred from the same sire and dam as my own mount, came directly to us and made no move to avoid me as I sheathed my sword and leaned forward to take hold of its reins. As I straightened up again with the reins safely in my hand I saw something that I had never expected to see again. The magnificent long-bladed spatha that Lorco had won in the school arena weeks earlier, Tiberias Cato’s own spatha, hung in its belted, hand-tooled sheath from the hook on the other side of the saddlebow from Lorco’s helmet. Slowly, reverently, I reached across and collected it, then removed my own sword and replaced it with Lorco’s, hanging mine from the hook on my saddlebow. Then, once again, I unsheathed the sword, and the difference between it and my own was immediately apparent. It settled into my grasp, filling my fist completely and satisfyingly, and in the pleasure of simply holding it and feeling the heft of it, it took several moments for me to remember that I was a coward and undeserving of such a weapon. Grimly then, I sheathed it and returned to the task of recording the dead.

The corpses were not all completely naked, but all had been stripped of everything of value—weaponry and armor. I had to check each of them, including those not ours, before I could identify the missing man, but eventually it became clear that the man called Ursus, the Bear, was not among the dead. He was a loner, a taciturn, self-sufficient man who asked nothing of anyone and expected to be treated the same way. I had never heard him speak, but even in the short time I had spent in his company, I had learned that he had a reputation as a fearsome fighter. Now he was missing, and I found myself wondering if he, too, had run away as I had.

I had not once descended from my horse since my return to the killing ground, and thus I ended up sitting high in the saddle and gazing down at the carnage on the ground, wondering what I should do next. I had no desire to ride away and simply leave the bodies lying there to rot, but I could see no alternative. There were fifteen dead men lying here—fourteen men and one boy, my best friend—and I had no means of burying them, having nothing to dig with other than a narrow-bladed sword. Nor was there any way to burn them in a pyre. The scrub willows that lined the riverbank were green and wet and no more than an inch thick at any point, and the closest trees of any adequate size were half a mile away and it was growing dark already.

Aching with the knowledge of what I must do, I dismounted beside Lorco, who lay where he had fallen, close by the wagon. He was flat on his back and mercifully his eyes were closed above the ruin of the lower part of his face. I stooped and picked up one of the loose garments that lay by my feet, and draped it very gently over his head, concealing his wounds. That done, I dug into my saddlebag to pull out the small codex that Germanus had given me before I left the school. It contained a transcription of several prayers attributed to the blessed Saint Anthony, and others attributed to Saint Martin, a native of Gaul. I opened it to the beginning of the first prayer, then knelt beside the body of my friend and read the entire selection of the prayers of Saint Martin aloud, dedicating them in the reading to the surrounding dead while focusing on my beloved friend.

By the time I finished reading it was almost too dark to see, and I stood up to leave, knowing I could do no more for Lorco or for any of them, but as I turned to remount my horse, I again saw the garments scattered about my feet and realized that I would be a fool to leave all of them there when I would surely have need of them later. I sorted through the things that I could find, surprised at how much had been left undisturbed in at least one of my chests. I filled my own saddlebags and Lorco’s with clean, dry clothing, then improvised a pair of bags from two spare tunics and stuffed those full as well before tying them together and slinging them over Lorco’s saddle. Only then, in what was close to full darkness, did I ride away from the killing ground, unwilling to spend a single moment longer than I had to in that place.

I rode though the dark along the riverbank for more than an hour, following the narrow path that traced the black line of willow shrubs along the waterside, and then the moon rose, full and large in a cloudless sky, and I was able to see clearly enough eventually to identify a large stand of trees that would shelter me for the remainder of the night.

I made a dry, dark camp at the base of one huge tree and God blessed me with a sound and dreamless sleep.

I awoke with the sun shining directly into my eyes through the screen of leaves that hung over me, and the first thought that came into my mind was a vision of Lorco dead on the ground as I prayed over him. I knew that before I did anything else, I had to find Duke Lorco and tell him about his son, about what had happened to him and about how I had come to survive the attack. It was not an encouraging incentive to leap up and be on my way, but nothing could have induced me to leap up that morning under any circumstances, since I had slept wearing full armor and my awakening body was now busily making me aware of the outrages to which it had been subjected overnight. I struggled to a sitting position and scrubbed at my eyes with the heels of my hands.

Moments later, still barely awake but trudging painfully in the direction of the river to relieve myself and wash the sleep from my eyes, I was astonished to discover that there was no river. The last vestiges of sleepiness vanished instantly as it became clear to me that at some point during my night walk—and it must have been early, probably in the darkness before the moon rose—I had somehow taken a divergent path and wandered inland, away from the river’s edge. A fringe of shrubs still edged the path along which I had arrived here the previous night, and I remembered how determinedly I had watched and clung to the bulk of their blackness. But these were hazel shrubs, not osier willows as I had thought, and search as I might, they concealed no broad, placid stream of water.

That discovery led me to think about drinking water and that, in turn, made me think of food and realize that I had none, which meant that I must now think myself not merely as a coward but as a fool, as well. Until the moment we were attacked, it was true, none of us had had any reason to worry about food—we had food in abundance, from fresh-killed venison to dried chopped fruit and nuts and roasted grain. We had ground flour and salt and various dried and smoked meats, too, all of it safely stored on the wagon in boxes and casks. But now I was alone, hungry and thirsty and more than a little apprehensive of what might lie ahead of me.

All the more reason then, I thought, pulling myself together, to find Duke Lorco and his expedition quickly, and thereafter, I swore to myself, I would never go anywhere or venture into any situation without food and at least a full flask of water in my saddlebags.

I had unsaddled my two mounts and brushed them down before going to sleep the night before, and although I had been working in the dark I had tried to be thorough and militarily professional in seeing to their needs, knowing they had been saddled all day long. I was grateful that, thanks to the training hammered into us in the school stables, they had not been without rations, for it was the law according to Tiberias Cato that every horseman carry a bag of grain for his mount and keep it in his saddlebags at all times. So I had brushed the animals down and given them each a handful of grain in their nosebags before hobbling them for the night. Water had not crossed my mind, for they had both drunk deeply merely a few hours earlier, and I had been confident then that the river lay right behind our campsite. Now I examined the animals in the light of day and decided I had not done badly by them, considering the darkness under the trees the night before. I brushed them both down again, briskly, saddled them, and then swung myself up onto my own and led the other out into the full morning light.

Open fields stretched away in every direction from the copse where we had sheltered, and it was easy to see from the absence of farm buildings that the land belonged to one of the latifundiae, the huge collective farming corporations that provided most of the Empire’s annual grain harvest. There were no hills of any description, anywhere, just broad, flat fields with an occasional copse of trees that had been left standing to serve as windbreaks in bad weather. Far to my left, at the very limit of my vision, the fields came to an end, hemmed by dense trees. There was nothing at all on the right. The fields there simply stretched away to the low horizon, and presumably beyond that to infinity. I turned and rode back and around to where I could see, beyond the copse, the path along which I had traveled the previous night. Sure enough, a single line of hazel shrubs, clearly a demarcation line or border of some kind set up by the landowners, extended from where I stood to the flat horizon, indicating the way I had come, and the direction of the sun on my right told me that I had been traveling from northwest to southeast. The river, I remembered from what Dirk the Huntsman had said, had been running mainly southwest at the point where we had been attacked, so I knew it must now be somewhere to my left, westward of where I now sat.

Wasting no more time, and talking aloud to my horses in order to avoid having to think about anything else, I set out to find the river first and then the Duke and his men.

I had ridden about five miles, and the terrain had been changing very gradually for the previous couple of miles; I had been aware of climbing an unseen gradient for some time, a barely discernible slope that only became really evident when it eventually leveled out into a plateau. Near the top my horses had to scramble to crest the steep west bank of a fast-flowing brook that had cut itself a channel in the soft ground in its rush to join the river, flowing down from a rocky outcrop south of me that was the closest thing to a hill I had seen all morning. And suddenly there was the river, straight ahead, beyond the crest of the slope and less than a hundred paces distant.

No osier willows lined the low-lying banks here. The swollen river, broad and silent but sullen and dangerous looking, filled its muddy bed almost completely, its silt-laden waters reaching to within a couple of handspans of the grassy edges of the channel. The river must have been flowing westward for some time, more or less paralleling my own route, to the north of where I was. It must have changed direction, swinging west, within a mile of the killing ground, and the only reason I found it at all was that it meandered again, southward this time, to cross my path. As soon as I found the riverbank, however, I knew that something was far from well.

I drew rein and peered into the distance, looking for signs of life and confidently expecting to see Phillipus Lorco’s horsemen somewhere ahead of me, but there was nothing. Surprised, but not yet uneasy, I turned in my saddle and looked to left and right, but there was nothing to be seen there, either, although I could see that the open grassland ended in dense woodland on my right, about a mile north of where I sat. Nothing stirred there; no flash of sun on metal, no moving column, no pillar of dust. Puzzled now, I turned to look back the way I had come, as though I might have passed them along the way without noticing the dust and the noise or the sight of more than a hundred mounted men, and it was then that I noticed the absence of the track.

Six score of mounted troopers, three fully manned Roman turmae, one composed of light cavalry, one of mounted archers, and the third of heavy, spear-wielding contus cavalry, with all of their extra mounts, supply wagons, and ancillary personnel, create a significant amount of damage when they pass over a grassy plain, particularly when the troopers are riding in formation, four or five abreast in a single column. It is impossible to conceal the evidence of their passing. When we were attacked, we had been riding two abreast on the narrow, packed-clay path beside the river precisely because of the mess that had been created and the dust that had been churned up when Lorco’s turmae had ridden over the dry fields on our left earlier that morning. We had had no wish to stir up that dust again because all of us knew from long experience how choking and debilitating it would be. We were privileged, we knew, to be apart from the main body of our force on such a hot day, because the unavoidable presence of swirling, choking, all-pervading dust, caking your face and gathering in the folds of your skin and neck, coating your tongue and filling your eyes and nostrils, trickling down your body beneath your armor back and front on runnels of sweat, to dry out and create unbearable itches in unreachable places, was a fact of cavalry life in the late spring, summer, and autumn months.

There was no such track to be seen here, no matter where I looked, and so great was my disbelief that I began to ride hither and yonder, searching for it as though it was something I might have mislaid through sheer carelessness. I had good reason to be concerned, for the absence of a track meant, beyond dispute, that Lorco’s cavalry had not come this way. They had taken another route, which meant that I was now lost and alone in an unknown and hostile land. I reined in my horse and sat staring up at the cloudless sky while the terror from the day before, reborn at full strength and ravening for release, built up inside me until I found myself incapable of moving. Fortunately, I recognized the peril in that thought even as it occurred to me, and I rebelled against it, hearing a new, angry voice rising inside me and insisting that although I had played the coward by moving too fast the previous day, I would not do the same this day by sitting still.

I jerked my head around hard, breaking my paralysis, and looked to my right, northward, to where the missing troopers now had to be, and forced myself to think about what could possibly have gone wrong with them. Duke Lorco, I was convinced, would not have changed direction before we caught up to him, not with his son and me riding with the hunting party. So if they had not changed direction, then they could not have passed this way yet, which plainly meant that something must have detained them. But what? And then the answer came to me, and relief swelled up in me like an enormous bubble.

They would have waited for us to catch up to them in camp the previous evening, and when we did not arrive, they would have assumed the hunting had been poor and we had remained in the field to try again at dusk. After that they would have continued to wait until long after dark before deciding we had opted for another dawn hunt. But Duke Lorco, I estimated, would not have been comfortable with his son’s prolonged absence, so he might well have sent couriers to ride back early in the morning—I was convinced, in fact, that he would have done precisely that—to find the hapless and incompetent Harga and to chivvy him into making better time. And then, that done, the Duke would have waited where he was, doubtless fuming, but impotent to change anything before his lost hunting party caught up. He would not have traveled farther without first seeing his son safely back in camp.

Feeling as though someone had lifted the weight of my two horses off my shoulders, I swung them around and set out to the north at a canter, following the river again until it entered the tree line, after which I stayed as close to the riverbank as I could. I had to pick my way in places between the densest clumps of undergrowth, so that the progress I made was less swift than I would have wished. However, now that I had a purpose and a direction I could follow with confidence, I made better speed than I might have otherwise.

As I rode, weaving my way between the trees and through the undergrowth, my mind was racing ahead of me, following the logic of my suppositions about Duke Lorco’s behavior. If he had in fact sent out couriers and waited for them to return, then it was likely that by the time I caught up with him he would already have learned of his son’s death and of my disappearance. The prospect of not having to be the one to tell him of his son’s death was an attractive one, but I could not imagine any meeting between the two of us that would not entail my having to tell him, somehow, of what had happened to Lorco, how he had died, and how I had run away, leaving everyone else behind me to be slaughtered. Thus my guilt revived and grew stronger as I rode, and my misery and self-loathing, forgotten for a brief time, returned to drape themselves over my shoulders.

That is how I was feeling when I rounded the bole of an enormous oak tree and found myself face-to-face with a trio of men on foot, no more than twenty paces ahead of me. The sight of them made my breath catch in my throat, but I have no doubt their surprise was as great as mine, because it was evident in the startled way they leaped backward, groping for their weapons. For a moment my heart bounded in joy, my first thought being that they were scouts and I had found Duke Lorco and his men, but it took no more than a glance to show me that these were not Roman soldiers, far less cavalry. They were all dressed differently, but in a predominant color of red. Two of them were armored in what looked like legionary plate armor, while the third wore a tunic of bronze-colored ring mail and had dull silver greaves strapped to his legs. This one, the smallest of the three, had been walking with an arrow nocked to his bow string, and as he sprang backward at the sight of me, he nevertheless sighted hastily and loosed his arrow. It hit me hard and high on the left breast and was deflected by my cuirass, but it caught me off balance, and the force of its impact sent me reeling backward, toppling me over my horse’s rump to land sprawling on my knees and hands.

Fortunately for me, for I was still wearing my heavy helmet, I landed without either breaking my neck or knocking the wind out of myself. My helmet was jarred forward over my eyes in the fall, cutting off my vision, but I managed to push it up and back in time to see, between my horse’s legs, the strangers starting toward me, separating widely to come at me from different directions. The bowman with the silver greaves remained in front, weaving slightly as he tried to find an angle from which to shoot me, but the other two were moving quickly now, circling to each side of me.

I had no time even to think of being afraid, although I knew beyond a doubt that if I tried to run away this time I would be dead within moments. Their encircling move, however, forcing me to fight in two directions, was one with which I was more than familiar—I had had the moves and countermoves of that attack and defense drummed into me since I was old enough to swing a practice sword. I looked down at the ground beneath my feet and saw that it was sloping downward to my right, and then I took two long paces backward, distancing myself from the two horses ahead of me yet keeping their bulk between me and the bowman in the ring-mail shirt.

Both of the men moving to attack me from right and left carried swords, the one a broad, heavy-bladed thing that looked as though it might be a one-edged blade, the other a long, slender, spathalike weapon that look well cared for and well used. The man approaching on my left had the heavier, ugly weapon and he was farther away from me than his companion was. He was also slightly above me, beginning to move down toward me. The fellow on my right was below me and closer, just starting to crouch and raise his sword as he came at me in a sidling shuffle. I took three running steps toward him, which he had not expected. He hesitated, wavering, and I almost beheaded him with my first slash. He barely managed to get his sword up quickly enough to save himself and my blade smashed his aside, by which time I was beside him, pivoting with my whole body and dropping into a crouch as I aimed a hacking slash at the unprotected back of his knees. It was a blow I had been taught by Tiberias Cato himself, years earlier, and when successfully delivered it was crippling. He screamed as my blade severed his hamstrings, and he dropped immediately, first to his knees and then forward onto his face, but I knew he was finished as a fighter and did not wait for him to fall.

I spun on one foot and sprang up and back to face the other attacker from my left, but he had seen how I handled his friend and he was more cautious, crouching defensively and waiting for me to come to him. I knew I could beat him—there was no trace of a doubt in my mind about that—but by that time my flesh was crawling in anticipation, waiting for the impact of the arrow I knew must be coming for me at any moment because I was out in the open now, clear of the horses and vulnerable to the bowman, who had all the time he needed to sight on me. Nothing came, and finally I risked looking over to see what he was doing. It was the quickest of glances, no more than a flick of the head, but it showed me what I least expected to see, and I could not resist looking again, even although I knew the risk I was taking by looking away from the sword-wielder on my left.

The bowman was dead, flat on his face on the ground and motionless, with an arrow through his ring-mail tunic and buried almost to the feathers between his shoulder blades. And as I saw that, my opponent attacked. He had seen me look away, then look again, and on the second look he lunged, swinging a mighty overhand chop that would have cleft me in two had it landed. Of course it did not land, because I had Cato’s magnificent spatha with which to deflect it. I swept it aside easily and leaped backward, only to land awkwardly on a round section of stick that rolled beneath my foot and sent me crashing to my back on a bed of the previous year’s oak leaves.

My opponent was above me almost before I had landed. Spread-legged and dark-faced, he rose on his toes to gain the maximum impetus from his ungainly weapon. I tried to whip my sword across in front of me to stab him in the groin, but my blade had slipped beneath a branch or a root when I fell, and as soon as I felt the resistance in my arm I knew I would not be able to dislodge it quickly enough to save myself. Then, for the second time in the space of two mornings, I watched a life snuffed out abruptly by a hard-shot arrow. This one caught my opponent in the hollow of the neck, just above the metal rim of his cuirass, and drove him backward, off his feet and into instant death.

I rolled hard to my left, dragging my sword behind me and feeling the moment when it sprang free of whatever had been holding it. As soon as I did, I spun on my left elbow, kicking my legs around, and lunged to my feet quickly, if far from gracefully, facing the direction from which the second arrow had come. I told myself that whoever had shot my enemy must be my friend, although I did not dare to trust myself sufficiently to believe it. As soon as I was safely upright, I set my feet squarely and hunched into a fighting crouch, glaring around me to see who and where the marksman was, but he remained unseen. Slightly to the right of where I now stood, the man I had hamstrung lay dead, too, pinned to the ground by yet another arrow. Directly ahead of me now was the massive oak tree that had stood between me and my three erstwhile attackers, and I guessed that the fourth man, whoever he was, must be behind its huge bole. I glared at the tree, willing him to come out and face me.

Moments later, just as I was beginning to feel foolish, a voice spoke from behind my back.

“That tree is not going to attack you, boy.”

Appalled at how easily I had been duped, I spun as quickly as I could move, raising my sword as I did so and preparing to throw myself to the attack, although I was once again expecting to die, shot down before I could really move forward. But then I stopped in midstep, astonished. The man facing me was Ursus. He held his arms folded across his chest as he leaned back against the trunk of a tree, his legs crossed at the ankles and his entire weight on his left foot. His bow, still strung, hung from his right shoulder. I was stunned to see him and was incapable of finding a single word of greeting or of gratitude or anything else. I simply stood and gaped at him.

“You handled yourself well, for a youngster. Who taught you to fight like that?”

I had never heard this man speak before, and now I found the sound of him to be more pleasant than I would have expected, based purely upon the things I had heard the others in the hunting party say about him. His voice was deep and sonorous, warm and mellifluous and somehow suggestive of humor. I cleared my throat and tried to answer him coherently.

“Teachers … I had many … at the Bishop’s School, in Auxerre.”

“They taught you to fight? I thought they were churchmen, priests.”

“They are, but the bishop there is Germanus. He used to be an imperial legatus, commander-in-chief of all imperial forces in central and northern Gaul. He was Duke Lorco’s first legatus.”

“Shit … I knew that, but I never made the connection between Germanus the legate and Germanus the bishop.”

“You mean the Duke didn’t tell you?”

He straightened up from the tree and uncrossed his arms, leaning forward slightly to peer at me, a strange expression on his face. “Are you twitting me?” Before I could react to that, however, he nodded and the expression on his face changed. “I’m a mercenary, lad, a sword for hire. I don’t even have a rank that earns me any more than basic pay, whereas Phillipus Lorco is the governor of an entire imperial region. We don’t have much in common, Duke Lorco and I. You understand?”

Then he walked straight toward me, and as he passed he waved at me to go with him. I followed him to where my two horses had found some grass growing in a patch between the trees and were busily crunching and cropping at the succulent greenery. Ursus stopped and I almost walked into him.

“Which one do you want?” he asked.

“That one’s mine,” I said, pointing.

“Good, I’ll take the other one, then.”

He moved directly to the horse, and I spoke to his back. “You saved my life. Twice.”

He paused in the act of stroking the animal’s muzzle and turned to look at me, then nodded slightly. “Aye. You were outnumbered, but you were unlucky, too. If you hadn’t stepped on that stick and fallen you would have beaten both those men.”

“But I did fall.”

“Aye, and you were fortunate that I was there and watching. But don’t be too grateful. Next time, you might have to do the same for me, and though you won’t find me ungrateful, I might not thank you at the time.”

I said something then that I did not know I was going to say, and to this day I don’t know why I said it at that particular moment. It may have been relief at finding him to be more pleasant and approachable than people had said he was, or it might simply have been that the guilt that filled me had suddenly become unbearable.

“I ran away.”

Ursus looked at me, his face blank, then quirked one eyebrow. “From where, the school?”

“No, from the fight, yesterday. I panicked, lost my nerve, and ran for my life.”

“So did I. It all happened too quickly and there were too many of them, too suddenly. One moment we were ambling along as though we were the only people in the world, and then, the next, there were men leaping all around us on every side and arrows flying everywhere and dead people falling off their horses, their heads and bodies bristling with arrows. I was riding alone, closest to the riverbank, because my horse was grazing wherever he could find a mouthful of grass, and I saw the two men on my left, the cook and his helper, knocked off their horses, both of them in the same instant, one forward, the other backward, both stone dead. I’ve been in this game long enough to know a dead man when I see one, even if he’s still falling. I took one look around and saw wild men everywhere, three of the whoresons, at least, for every one of us when we were all alive. Then one fellow jumps up in front of me, coming at me with an ax. I put the spurs to my horse, ran the whoreson down and just kept going, right into the river, where I slid off and got my horse’s body between me and the bowmen on the bank who were already shooting at me. I got away, but they killed my horse. One of their arrows hit it in the neck and severed a big vein. Shame. Good thing I can swim, though.” He paused, then looked me in the eye. “But I thought I was the only one who got away. How did you manage it?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I was talking to my friend Lorco when he was killed. An arrow hit him in the back of the head and came out through his face. There were strangers everywhere, screaming and shouting, attacking us on foot, and more than half of the people in our group were dead. I saw bodies lying everywhere. And that’s when I panicked and ran away. I didn’t stop running until I was deep in the forest.”

“Doesn’t sound like panic to me. More like good sense. You’re still alive. And you stood and fought those people we just killed today. Nothing cowardly there. And you couldn’t have done that if you’d been killed yesterday, could you?”

He stared at me, waiting for an answer.

“No,” I said, quietly. “I suppose not.”

“Don’t suppose anything. Accept it and stop fretting. What happened to us yesterday—to me and to you—happened because it was meant to happen. If you and I had been meant to die in that ambush we would have died. But we lived, so we were not meant to die. And if that’s the case, then what is the point of whining about not being dead?”

I nodded. “Where is Duke Lorco now?”

“I don’t know. I expected him to be somewhere up ahead of me, but I suspect you’re telling me now that’s not so. Am I right?”

“Yes. That’s why I came back in this direction. How could you not have seen him yesterday? You must have swum right by his camp at some point.”

“No, not yesterday. After the ambush I hid in a bank of reeds in a pond that once was an eddy in the river. And I mean hid … head down and flat on my belly most of the time, holding my breath in case someone might hear me breathing. There were hostiles everywhere. The whole countryside was swarming with them, and none of them looked like the people who attacked us earlier in the day. I think they were an entirely different bunch—an army, not just a rabble mob like the crew that hit us. I never got close enough to any of them to hear them speak, but as far as I could tell from what they were wearing, they were Burgundians, and they were well armed and well equipped. The first ones I met were on the other side of the river, and they almost caught me out in the open on the riverbank, but I saw them just in time and managed to make it to the tall reeds around the edge of the pond. And there I stayed for the rest of the day, because there were more of them all around me, on my side of the river. I don’t know how they got to be on both sides, because the river’s wide, and it’s in spate, but there they were.

“All I could do was sit tight and hope to get back into the water as soon as it grew dark enough, and then swim downstream from there. Whoever these people were, Burgundians or not, they had been passing by me all day, all headed south, as far as I could tell, and there were thousands of them. I mean, I couldn’t stand up and count them, not without getting myself killed, but I could hear them passing by and they’ just kept coming and coming.

“Thing was, though, I couldn’t tell where they were really going, or where they planned to stop for the night, and that worried me, for if they were going to be sleeping all along the banks of the river, then I wouldn’t be able to make as much as a splash, and if I hit a stretch with bad currents, I could give myself away just by trying to stay alive.

“Anyway, late in the afternoon they started to thin out, but as luck would have it, just before dark, as I was getting ready to make my escape, a whole new detachment of them came along and settled in for the night right along the riverbank next to where I was hiding. They set up a guard post so close to me I couldn’t even lie back in the reeds and sleep, in case I snored. I was stuck in there until the whoresons left this morning at dawn, and I’ve been drifting downstream ever since, with my head in the middle of a floating crown of long reeds that I made while I was stuck in the pond, waiting to get away.” He paused, then added, “Crown isn’t the right word. It was more of a wreath, with long reeds sticking straight up out of it so that no one could see my head in the middle of it. I’m starved. Have you got anything to eat?”

“No.” I half turned back to where the three dead men lay behind us. “But they might. We didn’t expect to be in need of food yesterday, until we were attacked, but those fellows came here a-purpose, so they probably brought food with them.”

“Bright lad,” Ursus said, turning smoothly and moving back to check the contents of the scrips that hung about the dead men’s waists. Sure enough, we found bread, dried meat, and a small pouch of dried nuts mixed with what tasted like chopped dried pears, as well as a full skin of watered wine. We sat down where we were, our backs against the big oak tree, and made short work of all of it, ignoring the dead men and eating and drinking until our empty stomachs were full again. By the time we finished there was not much left to save, other than a heel of bread and an end of the dried meat.

Ursus sighed, finally, and stretched where he sat, grimacing as he did so.

“I don’t know,” he growled. “We’ll live now, for a while, at least long enough to get ourselves killed if we run into any more of those Burgundians. But where’s Duke Lorco? That’s the question you and I have to answer. We’ll have to find him by the shortest route, for our own safety—” He broke off, frowning at the expression on my face. “What’s wrong with you?”

I shrugged, trying to make light of what I had been thinking and to dismiss the grim vision that had sprung into my mind. “Nothing, not really. I was just thinking about what you said about the hostiles … the Burgundians … . Thousands of them, you said. Is that true or were you exaggerating?”

Ursus made a face. “No, it was true.”

“Far more than Duke Lorco has with him.”

“Aye, but Lorco’s cavalry are worth ten men afoot, and he’s got three turmae.”

“True.” I nodded, but with no enthusiasm, for the calculation attached to that was not a difficult one. “That’s more than a hundred troopers … . But a single thousand men would match them at ten-to-one odds, and you said there were several thousands of Burgundians. That could make odds of twenty, thirty to one.”

“If it came to a fight, aye, it could. But who’s to say it would? Lorco’s smart enough to keep away from an army of that size.”

“What if he has no choice?”

“What do you mean? Of course he’ll have a choice. There’s always a choice.”

I dismissed that, seeing the fallacy behind his bluster. “No, not always. Look at what happened to me with these three. I came around the big tree and there they were, right in front of me, looking at me. I had no choice but to fight. Same thing might easily happen to Duke Lorco.”

Ursus pulled his mouth down into a scowl of doubt. “Nah, I don’t think so. Lorco would have scouts out. He’d never be stupid enough to ride without scouts.”

“Granted, but these Burgundians would have scouts out, too—that’s what these three were doing here, scouting. But they ran into us, and now they’ll never get the word back that we’re here. Couldn’t the same thing have happened to Duke Lorco’s scouts?”

Now the scowl on Ursus’s face had deepened to a glower. “By the Christ, boy, you have a knack for seeing the blackest side of things, haven’t you?” He glanced around us, looking at the forest growth that sheltered us. “Well, we can’t sit here forever, so let’s go and try to find our own before the enemy finds us. I warn you, though, they’ll be swarming like bees to the north of us, and if we can’t pass through them—which is almost certain to be the way of it—we’ll have to ride around them. God alone knows how long that might take. However it turns out, you make sure to stick close behind me, keep your head down, and do whatever I tell you to do right now, with no arguments and no questions. If you ever live to be as old as I am, then I’ll take orders from you. In the meantime, I’m the Magister, understand?”

I nodded, and we moved directly to mount up and head northward in search of our friends.

We never did discover what befell Duke Lorco and his three turmae. They simply vanished from the ken of men. Ursus and I searched for them for three entire days, and not once in that time did we find as much as a trace of them, although we might have had cause for thanks in that, since the entire countryside was overrun by the force that Ursus had described, and his estimation of their numbers as being in the thousands turned out to be very conservative. We were surprised, too, to see that they had large numbers of horsemen among them, because Ursus had seen no riders among the troops that moved steadily past him on that first afternoon when he had hidden among the pond reeds, and we were forced to assume that they had ridden separately to join the foot soldiers.

We watched these riders closely, after our initial surprise wore off, and although their mounts were healthy and well equipped, it soon became obvious that the riders themselves had had no intensive training in coordination. They were warriors, but not cavalry troopers. That realization, reinforced by our observations of the casual, informal way the riders moved about the countryside, encouraged us to step out of hiding and venture among them as though we had every right to be there doing what we were doing. We moved openly but took care nonetheless to avoid coming too close to any particular group, and we managed to avoid detection, although there were times during those days when we passed within spitting distance of some of the invaders.

Notwithstanding all our caution, however, we were twice involved in skirmishes with small groups whom we met in places where we had no reason for being present, other than trying to slip past the carefully guarded strong points that had been built on high elevations overlooking those places where enemies like us might be expected to try to pass by undetected. We were fortunate enough on both occasions to see these people before they saw us. There were three foot soldiers in the first group and two horsemen in the second, and I take no shame in saying that it was Ursus who dispatched four of them, including both horsemen, each of them driven off his horse’s back by a single deadly hard shot. I captured the fifth and last of the men by running him down, smashing my horse directly into him and bowling him over, then leaping on him and disarming him before he could regain his breath, after which I held him at the point of my sword until Ursus could tie his arms securely behind his back.

It was in questioning this captive—Ursus, it turned out, could speak a version of his language—that we discovered the enemy were in fact Burgundians from the southwest. A federation of their tribes, our prisoner told us, six in all and numbering close to ten thousand warriors, had left the lands they had settled almost a hundred years earlier and struck east in search of more living space. So far, he said, they had been on the march and victorious on all fronts for half a month. They had encountered no serious opposition and had annexed everything between their home territories and the spot where we had captured him, and it was plain to see from his attitude that even although he, personally, had erred and fallen into our hands, he did not expect to be our prisoner for long. He told us that we would be discovered and killed within the very near future.

Simply by falling into our hands, our prisoner had presented us with a problem, because we could not take him with us when we moved on, and we could not simply set him free. We knew we ought to kill him, but because of the teachings I had absorbed in the Bishop’s School, I was incapable of doing that and equally incapable of permitting Ursus to. “Thou shalt not kill” is an unequivocal Commandment. Not that I would have hesitated to kill the man in the heat of battle—or so I told myself, blithely disregarding the fact that I had never yet come close to contemplating killing any man. I knew well that killing in self-defense is permissible at any time, and that in time of war, when the cause is just, killing as the result of armed aggression is justifiable. Killing in cold blood, however, was murder, unacceptable under any conditions, and so we were trapped, becoming, in effect, prisoners to our prisoner.

Fortunately, he absolved us of our quandary by freeing himself in the middle of the night and then foolishly awakening us with the noise he made in escaping. Ursus felled him with a single arrow from a distance of thirty paces, which, at night and against a running target, was a bowshot verging on the miraculous. We scrambled out to where the fellow lay and dragged him back into the cave where we were sheltering. We left him there in the morning, after we had scouted the area and identified a reasonable opportunity to move out of hiding and escape unobserved.

The decision to abandon the northward search for the Duke was made by Ursus, but I made no objection when he suggested it. As we had moved north during the previous two days, the concentration of Burgundians around us had increased dramatically, and it was obvious that to continue moving as we were, haphazardly and without real objectives, was folly. It was already amazing that we had avoided detection for as long as we had. The single alternative open to us, Ursus decided, was to turn back and head southward, to wait for Lorco and his turmae at some spot where the lie of the land itself would dictate that they must pass close by us. That decision made, and its common sense plain and clear to both of us, we turned back with great feelings of relief and headed south to await Duke Lorco and his troops.

For the next two days we traveled steadily, following or paralleling the easiest and most obvious route to the south and finding ourselves being shepherded gradually but unmistakably in the southeasterly direction dictated by the river as it penetrated a wide, forested valley between two ranges of hills. The route we followed was one that had never seen the construction of a Roman road, yet it was wide and obviously well traveled, and by the time we had gone a score of miles along it, it had become obvious that the Burgundian invaders had no interest in it, because we saw little sign of them. The few isolated groups that we did see were making their way hurriedly and single-mindedly to the north, paying no attention to whatever might be going on around them.

By noon the following day, having spent the entire morning watching for Burgundians and seeing none, we finally accepted that we had left them and their invasion route safely behind us. We made a comfortable camp that night, close by the road but sufficiently far away from it among the trees to be confident that we could safely light a fire without risk of its being seen by any late-night travelers, and then we lay awake for several hours in the firelight, talking about our missing companions, wondering where they might be and when we would encounter them again.

We never did. Nor, to the best of our knowledge, did anyone else. I learned later, after my eventual return to Auxerre, that there had been a deal of speculation in their home region during the months that followed their disappearance, but Phillipus Lorco himself had quickly been replaced by a new governor who was faced with his own priorities, and the disappearance of Lorco and his three turmae had quickly faded into acceptance, its urgency diffused by the other events surrounding the Burgundian invasion that summer.

The most widely accepted version of what might have happened was that Lorco and his party had ridden blindly into a trap and had been wiped out, but there were those who refused to accept such a notion. Those doubters, claiming personal experience, friendship, and long-standing knowledge of Governor Lorco, swore that Lorco would never commit such an elementary error as to ride through unknown and potentially hostile territory without deploying scouts on all sides of his force. Bishop Germanus, having spent years as Lorco’s Legatus in the field, was a voluble proponent of that belief, but when I heard it, I found myself wondering immediately if there might be any truth to the less acceptable version. Thinking back to the dilatory conduct and the unconscionable laziness of Lorco’s lieutenant, Harga, and that man’s failure to take even the simplest of precautions, thus leading us into an entrapment from which Ursus and I should never have escaped, I was forced to wonder about the degree to which Harga’s laziness might have been inspired or encouraged by his own observation of his superiors’ behavior. I felt uncomfortable and disloyal to Duke Lorco for thinking such things, but I could not avoid them. For a period of days I frequently found myself wondering if I had been a fool to give up the honor of winning Cato’s spatha merely to make a son look good to a father who did not merit such an honor. I kept such thoughts to myself, however, knowing they were both unjust and unworthy, and never expressed my own personal doubts or misgivings to anyone. Lorco was dead, whatever his failings might or might not have been, and his son had been my closest friend, killed in front of my eyes. I determined that no hint of criticism that might affect the honor of their name would ever pass my lips.

On the afternoon of our third day’s journey south we came to a spot where the entire valley narrowed to the width of a narrow gorge through which the river poured, changing from a broad, placid, meandering stream to a raging torrent within the space of half a mile. Here, Ursus said, was the spot where we would wait for Duke Lorco. He remembered passing through the narrow passage on their way north, and told me that Lorco himself had said that if anything untoward occurred later in their journey and anyone found himself cut off, they should head for this place and wait for the remainder of the group to come back. We searched the narrow riverbank for evidence of the cavalry’s passage but we found none and so were able to settle in to wait, confident in the knowledge that the main group was still behind us.

We set up camp, dangerously and precariously, on the steep side of the cliff that formed the left side of the gorge, and we took time to ensure that it was the best site we could find, secure from casual detection from beneath yet affording us an unimpeded view of everything that happened in the gorge itself, on both sides of the river. And there we remained for days, watching and waiting. Several groups of travelers passed by us, going in both directions, some of them strongly armed and alert for interference, others less so. None of them suspected our presence and none of them bore any resemblance to our missing Duke or to any of his people.

After four days our concern had grown too great to ignore. We could not go back, and we could no longer afford to remain where we were. Ursus had shot a deer on the second morning of our stay and we had been eating that ever since, but we had no other provisions. I had found some wild onions and garlic growing along the riverbank, and Ursus had found some succulent mushrooms, so we had been able to augment the taste of the deer meat, if only slightly. But we had no salt and no flour, nor had we anything in the way of dried fruit, roasted grain, or nuts. It had become clear to us by then that one of two things, each equally unlikely and unwelcome, had occurred: either Lorco and his party had encountered a strong Burgundian force and been captured or defeated, or they had decided, for reasons unknown to us, to make their way home by an alternative route. Whichever was true, it was clearly futile for us to remain where we were. So once again we headed south.

Ursus had only nine arrows left by that time, and now, accepting that we would not be rejoining Lorco’s cavalry and were in fact to be solely reliant on our own resources, those nine missiles took on a greater significance than they had ever held before. They were our sole means of dealing death at anything greater than arm’s length, and in consequence we were loath to take aim with them at anything that offered us even the slightest threat of losing another. Fortunately, Ursus was an excellent fisherman and he also knew how to construct a snare for catching hares and even ground birds like grouse and partridge. He would rummage carefully among a patch of underbrush until he detected the narrow pathways—sometimes more akin to tunnels—along which the small animals and birds made their way, and then he would fashion a noose from an old bowstring and anchor it with a solidly driven tent peg before carefully suspending it close to the ground and disguising its outline with cunningly blended grasses. We would then withdraw and leave the noose to do its work, and it seldom failed. We took partridge and grouse and, twice, badgers, neither of which submitted to the noose, far less succumbed to it. Each of them completely destroyed the trap into which it had blundered, and made off with the invaluable bowstring, presumably still wrapped about its neck.

We traveled southeastward from the river gorge for six days without incident, avoiding all human contact, proceeding with the utmost caution and moving stealthily at all times, checking lines of sight and being careful never to move into any position from which we might become visible to anyone else. Within those short days, however, I learned much about woodcraft and the lore of tracking from my companion, who turned out to be far more pleasant company than I had been given to expect. He showed me, expending great patience and tolerance, how to watch for, and detect, the tiny, telltale signs that marked the passage taken by an animal on its way through the undergrowth, emphasizing that once I knew how to see the signs of passing animals I could not fail to see the damage done by humans in their passage. These were signs that I would never have seen had he not been there to point them out, and I knew well that he had spent the better part of his lifetime absorbing the lessons that enabled him to see them—a bent-back twig; a wrongly turned leaf that caught the light when none of its fellows did; a clump of hair caught on the thorns of a wild rosebush; a curled-up leaf that had filled with seepage after being crushed in the center and formed into a cup by a deer’s cloven hoof.

We were in a place that had been burned out in a massive fire, probably seven to ten years earlier, Ursus estimated. We had been afoot for some time after breaking camp before dawn and had made good headway until we reached this stretch of forest and were forced to dismount. The brush had quite suddenly become impenetrable, I remember—saplings and bushes that were simply too thickly packed to accord access to a mounted man—and neither of us had spoken for some time, our attention focused intently, for more than a mile, it seemed, upon finding the easiest possible route through a wilderness of springy, immature growth that had not yet begun to assert any order upon itself. We had just fought our way through what we hoped had been the very thickest growth and encountered the first signs that the brush was thinning—everything seemed much lighter and brighter ahead of us—and when I heard water running on my right, I felt a sharp stirring in my bowels that I knew I could not ignore. I muttered to Ursus and handed him my reins, telling him I would catch up to him, and he merely nodded and kept going, paying me no further attention as I made my way toward the sound of the running water to relieve myself in private.

When I had finished and cleansed myself, I made my way back to rejoin Ursus in no particular haste, following the signs of his passage easily beyond the spot where we had parted company. The growth around me was thinning with almost every step I took, and the oppressive feeling I had experienced earlier amid the thickets gave way to one of lightheartedness. There were birds singing everywhere, exulting in the perfection of a magnificent summer morning, and I responded to the music, forgetting for the first time in days to wonder what had happened to Duke Lorco and his party. I stepped around the bole of a respectably sized tree at one point and realized that not only was this the first mature, unburned tree I had seen in a long time but also that I was almost in open ground, standing upon a path of some kind, a game trail that ran straight ahead of me, unrestricted by undergrowth, so that had I so wished I could have spread my arms wide and spun around without hitting a single obstruction.

I started to do precisely that, raising my arms in the air like wings and preparing to spin around, but I froze instead, shocked into immobility by the sight of Ursus’s bow and quiver lying on the path less than twenty paces from where I stood.

They lay there, in the open, like dead things, the two most valuable weapons Ursus and I possessed, and even before the first flare of panic had subsided, I was thinking about the reasons for their being there. Clearly they had been left for me to find, a warning of some kind. For some reason unknown to me but evidently imperative, Ursus had decided that I could make better use of the weapons in this instance than he could. That all seemed self-evident at first glance, but I had no understanding at all of what it meant and even less understanding of what had happened to Ursus and the horses. And then I saw how the path, just beyond where the weapons lay, veered sharply to the left and disappeared, concealed beyond the bend by a towering clump of vibrant dark green growth that I recognized as an ancient and impenetrable thicket of bramble briars.

Ursus had gone around the bend in the path with both horses, but before doing so he had stopped and removed the weapons from about his shoulders, laying them there for me. He knew I would be close behind him, but he had no means of knowing how close, and if he were walking into danger beyond that bend in the path that knowledge might be crucial. I snatched up the quiver and slung it over my shoulder, then dropped to one knee and nocked an arrow to the bowstring. My intent was to listen, but even as I knelt I heard the sound of metal blades in contact, not ringing as they would in a fight but slithering along each other almost lazily as Ursus raised his voice.

“Come then, you ill-matched set of whoresons. Let’s see if four Burgundians—or whatever you call yourselves in the underworld that spawned you—let’s see if you can best one Roman Gaul. See, two blades I have, each one of them fit to kill a pair of you before you can puke your fear out. Come to me, then, and taste your deaths.”

I edged around the bush in front of me, the bowstring taut to my ear as my eyes sought the source of Ursus’s voice. He was facing me across a clearing, perhaps a score of paces from me, his back against a tree trunk that was wider than his shoulders. Safe there from attack from behind, he stood on the balls of his feet, leaning slightly forward and rubbing the two long blades of the weapons he held, one against the other. They were his own spatha and mine, the one I had left hanging from Lorco’s saddlebow when I took Tiberias Cato’s weapon in its place. His eyes were narrowed in concentration but he was smiling, too, the confident smile of a man who knows he is about to take much enjoyment from some imminent activity. He saw me as soon as I appeared around the bush, I know, but he gave no sign of it. His torso weaved slightly from side to side as his eyes moved constantly, watching all four of his attackers simultaneously.

Our two mounts stood close by him on his left side, slightly behind him and beyond the tree, their trailing reins anchoring the animals where Ursus had dropped them on the ground. I knew immediately that he had led the horses there, to place them safely out of his way, and had then darted back to the tree, putting it solidly at his back.

The four men ranged against him, all of whom had their backs to me, had made no move to attack him yet, and looking at their posture, observing the uneasy, anxious way they traded glances back and forth among themselves, I could tell they were bemused, to say the least, by his behavior. He should not have been smiling, not against odds of four to one. I could almost hear their minds working, worrying at the logic here, so much so, in fact, that my mind began framing antic thoughts about what they must be thinking: this fellow had two fine horses, both richly saddled and equipped, which meant that he was not alone. But he was alone and carrying two swords, one for each hand, which indicated that his companion, if he had one, must now be somewhere else without a weapon, and that made no sense at all, for no sane man would leave his sword behind him in strange territory. And that raised the possibility that this man had had a friend and lost him to death, burying him and continuing to journey with his possessions. Which meant, in turn, that this fellow—

With a snarl of fury, one of the four gave up his puzzling and launched himself toward Ursus. I let him go, knowing that Ursus had his measure. No sooner had this fellow started moving, however, than his accomplices joined him, all three of them lunging forward to assist the first man. None of them had seen me yet, and so I sighted on the leading runner of the three, a huge, gaunt man with long black hair and stiltlike legs that carried him out in front of the other two. I sucked a deep breath and then released it steadily as I followed his rush, obeying every lesson I had ever learned on sighting and shooting with a bow, and as the first clash of striking blades reached my ears I released and watched my arrow hiss across the space between me and the running target to hit him brutally hard in the neck, just behind the point of his jaw, and hurl him bodily off his feet and head over heels to roll and sprawl in a huddled mass just beyond the kneeling body of his friend, who had already been dispatched without ceremony by Ursus.

The behavior of the remaining two men, after seeing their companion so suddenly and unexpectedly destroyed, might have been laughable under any other circumstances. I saw them hesitate in midcharge, then break off their attack, spinning away from each other and from the perceived direction of the new threat they had found in me. One of them spun completely around and came running straight for me, covering ground at an enormous rate, while the other ran back the way he had come, pursued by Ursus. My attention, however, remained focused on the shapeless huddle of drab rags that marked the first man I had ever killed. There was no doubt in my mind that he was dead. I had seen my arrow hit, and it had reminded me exactly of what had happened to my friend Lorco when a similar arrow hit him in approximately the same place. But this death was one that I had inflicted, personally. I had taken this man’s life. He was now dead, finished, ended. He would never move or smile or laugh or eat or weep again, because I had killed him.

The fellow running at me now—and I could see him with utter clarity—was wide-eyed with terror, plainly expecting me to raise my bow again and shoot him down before he could reach me. But filled as I was with the thought of what I had done to his companion, the thought of rearming my bow had not even occurred to me, and as I watched him come hurtling toward me I saw the white knuckles of the hand that held his upraised sword and accepted, somewhere at the back of my mind, that I was going to die there. Even as he began to straighten up for the deathblow and his eyes showed dawning awareness that he was destined not to die before he could reach me, he stubbed his foot hard against something in his path and fell, sprawling forward and crashing heavily against me, grunting in my ear with the pain and with the effort of trying to recover his balance.

He was a big man, far taller than I and easily more than twice my weight, and the impact of our collision sent me flying and smashed the breath from me. Even as I crashed to the ground, however, I knew that the ancient goddess Fortuna had been watching over me. So complete had been his loss of balance that he had had no hope of swinging his sword, even although all his being had been focused upon cleaving me in two, and now we were both on the ground, both in one piece. I refused to yield to the urge to hunch over and hug my middle, which appeared to have been replaced by a ball of solid pain. Instead I bit down hard on my own cheek, focusing upon that pain, and forced my legs to swing up and over my head, rolling violently backward on tucked shoulders until I could push myself to my knees and see what my opponent was doing.

He, too, had landed badly and winded himself, but where I had fallen on hard ground, he had fallen or bounced sideways into the enormous clump of brambles that had flanked me. His entire face was ripped by the wicked thorns of the bramble briars, as was the palm of the hand he was holding up to his eyes. I could see him gasping for air, too, and hear the great whooping noises that were coming from his open mouth. I scrambled away from him, pushing at the ground in my panic before my common sense began to return to me. He was at as great a disadvantage as I was for the moment and could do me no harm. But that would change if he recovered more quickly than I did. And so I forced myself to sit still and breathe deeply and steadily, willing my body to behave itself and recover its functions before my enemy did.

With a scream of pain and anger that would have frightened me mere days before, the giant facing me dragged himself to his feet, snarling with rage and agony and hacking determinedly with his sword at the briars that surrounded him on all sides. I felt a stirring of awe at his strength and endurance, for I knew how viciously the thousands of long, hooked barbs on those green stems, some of them as thick as a boy’s wrist, were ripping at his muscled flesh. Even so, he made headway, gradually clearing a way out of the dragon’s nest that held him, and when it became plain to me that he would soon be free, I realized too late that I should have reclaimed my abandoned bow and shot him dead long since. I looked about me then and saw the quiver that had fallen from my shoulder when the big man knocked me down. I counted six arrows in one brief glance, but could see no signs of the bow I had been holding. And then it really was too late. The big man won free of his prison and reared up to his full height, raising his sword high above his head again and roaring something at me in a language I had never heard before. It was evident that he had no intention of missing his next swing at me.

Strangely enough, I felt not the slightest stirring of fear, though I had every reason to be afraid. I could not see a single patch of skin anywhere on my assailant’s body that was not covered in blood. I had never seen anyone so bloodied. He was huge and he was angry and he was covered in severed, trailing lengths of barbed briars and coming to smite me into oblivion for having dared to cross his path and I felt no animosity toward him.

As he lurched toward me, however, I moved easily away from him, circling smoothly to my right, unsurprised by the awareness that I was moving that way in order to take advantage of the fact that he was left handed, and as I moved, the spatha by my side, for so long the property of Tiberias Cato, seemed to spring into my hand by magic. I saw his eyes narrow at the sight of my unsheathed blade, and then he snarled again and raised his right hand to his forehead to wipe the blood from his eyes, and the contempt in his gesture was unmistakable. I hefted my weapon, feeling its balance, and moved again toward his sword arm, inhibiting him and forcing him to step back and away as he sought to raise his blade high for a clean swing at me. I heard Tiberias Cato’s voice again in my mind, explaining to us, as he had at least a hundred times each year, that the wooden practice swords we used every day had been used by Roman legion-naries for a thousand years, and that they had been designed in the earliest days of Rome to be twice the weight of a real sword, so that a man’s muscles, accustomed to dealing with the heavy practice swords, would rejoice in the apparent weightlessness of the real thing.

I reversed direction, moving left and away from him now and freeing him to use the full extent of his long, left-handed swing. I watched carefully, gauging my moment, then leaped away, a long jump that took me well clear of his clumsy, sweeping blade so that it hissed by me a good arm’s length from my right knee. I gave him sufficient time to rally and try for me again, and again I leaped nimbly beyond his reach.

By the time we had repeated the same moves a fourth time he was beginning to flag. His blade was heavy, as well as long, and the effort of swinging it and missing was, if anything, more damaging than anything else he might have done. His anger increasing visibly now with every heartbeat, he snarled something unintelligible at me, and I knew he was defying me to stand and fight, or more accurately to stand still and let him kill me. I grinned at him, drawing my lips back to show him all my teeth, and prepared to repeat the dance, even hesitating in preparation for leaping away, but this time he was determined that I would not skip away from him again, and as I began my spring to the left he threw himself after me, withholding his swing until he was sure of me.

Even as he launched himself, however, I had already shifted my balance, and jumped this time to his right, landing behind him as he charged past me and crouching to sweep the end of my blade hard across the unprotected back of his knees. The double-edged tip of the blade missed the hamstrings this time, but sliced deeply into the thick muscles of his left calf.

With a bellow of rage the monstrous man swung around with impossible speed, slashing at my face as he came toward me. I threw my upper body sharply backward, almost falling over but avoiding the hissing slash of his blade and managing somehow to counter his attack with a blow of my own, blade against blade, my right-handed blow against his left, smashing his blade down and away from me so that his entire body followed the line of his swing and I ended up behind him again. I leaned forward, my weight on the balls of my feet, and closed with him quickly, stabbing hard, but my blade hit solid metal and its tip slid off the back of a cuirass I had not expected, worn beneath his tunic rather than over it.

Again he turned and came at me, but this time I detected a new respect in his approach. He paused, watching me, waiting for me to move, and when I did not, he changed his grip on his sword, holding it differently, more like a sword now than an ax, and began to circle me, moving now to my right, forcing me to move left against my natural inclination. The aversion I felt to moving so unnaturally reminded me of yet another lesson from my mentor Cato for dealing with a left-handed opponent. I shifted my weight and took two quick steps toward my assailant, leading off with my right foot and then stepping forward and to the left. The sudden move took me right inside his guard and put me in front of him, within smelling length of his unwashed body, my sword arm raised in expectation of his next blow. It was an awkward, ill-formed hack, as I knew it would be, useless from the start because I was all at once too close to him too suddenly. I caught his blade on my own with no effort and turned it aside, and as it fell away past me I dropped my right shoulder, pivoted to the left, and thrust my blade into the flesh below his navel, below his cuirass. It was a classic stroke, and I carried it out as I had been taught, twisting my wrist sharply to free the buried blade and jerking it straight back and away before the sundered flesh could clamp around it and before the dying man could drop his hands to grasp it.

He fell to his knees at my feet and gazed up into my eyes, his face twisted into a mask of consternation and terror as he realized what I had done to him. There was nothing worse than a belly wound, I knew. I had never seen one before, let alone dealt one, but I had heard all about what they meant: a slow, lingering, agonizing death.

“Finish him. You can’t leave the poor whoreson like that.”

I looked away from my assailant’s face to where Ursus stood close by, watching us, an arrow in his bow again, and I knew that even if I could do no more, Ursus would put the fellow out of his misery. But that, again, would be an avoidance that I would find difficult to live with. I looked back at my former opponent, who had fallen forward and now hung head down in front of me and moaning quietly, then I stepped to one side, gripped my spatha firmly in both hands and swung hard at his exposed neck, killing him instantly. Then I turned aside and vomited.

I have no idea how long it took me to recover from the sickness that swept over me, but when it was over and I picked myself up off the ground I found that Ursus had confiscated our assailants’ provisions and kindled a fire to cook some bannock to go with the cooked meat he had found in one of their packs. The smells were delicious, and I approached the fire slowly, feeling somewhat shamefaced about my latest pusillanimous behavior. Ursus, however, said nothing at all and contented himself with serving me some heated meat on a slab of thin, salty, freshly baked bannock. I accepted it gratefully and devoured it without saying a word. Ursus ate his more slowly, and when he was done he licked the blade of his knife carefully and pointed it at me.

“You did well, lad. First kill’s never easy to handle. But it’ll never be as difficult or as worrisome again, I promise.”

“He wasn’t the first.” I raised my head and looked Ursus directly in the eye. “The one I shot with your bow was the first.”

Ursus twisted his face into the semblance of a half grin and shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “That one didn’t count. That was no more than helping a friend in need. If you hadn’t taken that one down he would have been on top of me before I could handle his friend, and that might easily have been the end of me. Truth is, lad, your first real kill’s always the one whose blood gets on your hands and your clothes—the up-close, frantic one who’s trying just as hard to kill you as you are to kill him. He’s the one you’ll dream about for a while. But you’ll get over it, in time. We all do.”

He skewered the last piece of meat that lay simmering on the flat iron griddle he had laid on the coals of the fire—he must have found that, too, I realized, in his searching—and dropped it onto the last remaining piece of bannock in his hand, then closed his fist, squeezing the whole thing into a solid cylinder of bread and meat. He held it out to me. “Here, finish this, and then we’ll salvage those arrows and drag the bodies out of sight. Can’t bury them, but we can’t just leave them lying there, either.”

A long time later, after it grew dark, he spoke to me again across the dying fire. “Where exactly are you headed? Where are your people from?”

It was the first thing either of us had said for hours and it roused me from my semistupor of meditation. I realized that I couldn’t answer his question properly, simple though it was. I knew where I was going, but I had no notion of how to get there from where we were.

“Genava,” I told him. “It’s a lake, far to the southeast, I think, close to the Alps—part of the Frankish kingdom called Benwick. King Ban rules there. He is a Ripuarian Frank and my stepfather, wed to my mother’s sister—”

Ursus interrupted me with a scoffing laugh. “A Frank’s a Frank, lad, be he from north or south. Leave it at that.”

“No, that’s not true. The two are very different, no matter that they sound alike. King Ban is a Ripuarian Frank, but I’m not. I’m a Salian Frank, from the north, near the Rhine river. My father’s people lived and ruled along the Rhine. Ban rules along the Rhodanus, which is called the Rhone nowadays. Rhine, Rhone, almost the same, one in the north, one in the south. Are they the same river because of that? I think not.”

Ursus raised both eyebrows and pursed his lips, then nodded deeply, maintaining his wide-eyed look. “Prettily put,” he said. “A point well made, so I will say no more.”

I shrugged. “The fact remains, I know where I’m headed, but I don’t know how to set about going there from here. I don’t know where we are now.”

Ursus laughed, a sharp, deep bark. “Is that all? Well, lad, that’s easily taken care of since I know exactly where we are, and I also know the route from here to Benwick and Lake Genava.”

I blinked at him, astonished. “You do?”

“Of course I do, and you’d better learn to do the same, and the quicker the better.” He paused, gazing at me. “Knowing where you are is a matter of simple self-preservation. Look at me, a professional soldier, a mercenary. If I don’t know where I am at any time I could be killed, simply for wandering among the wrong people. And so I pay attention to where I go, always. I’m so used to doing it that I never think about it any more, but I always remember where I’ve been and I know where I am headed next—even if it’s only as far as I can see in a strange country.”

“So where are we now?”

“Seven days south of the gorge on the Liger River, headed southeast, this being the seventh day, and I’d say we’ve been covering less than a score of miles a day because we’ve been cautious, moving slow, keeping our heads down, covering our tracks, and taking care to stay out of people’s way. Seven more days at the same speed should bring us to Lugdunum. The locals call it Leeyon, but whichever way you say it, it’s the military administration’s headquarters for south-central Gaul.” He paused, waiting for my admiration, and when I admitted it he grinned. “What’s important about that, though, from your viewpoint, is that if we swing back to the northeast from there and follow the High Road, we can be bathing in Lake Genava in five more days, providing the water’s warm enough.”

This was momentous news, and I was pleasantly surprised at how close we were to my family home, for had he told me it would take us three times as long I would have accepted that without demur. I felt my face split into a wide grin.

“Well, whether the lake is cold or not, King Ban’s bathhouses are fine, I promise you. They were built for a Roman governor long ago and they lack nothing that his wealth could provide. Will you come with me, then, to Benwick?”

“Of course, how could I not? I have to see you safely home. We should find word of Duke Lorco in Lugdunum, but even if we are ahead of him and he hasn’t arrived yet, we’ll leave word there that I’ve escorted you home and I’ll follow him later to Carcasso. Does that sound like good sense? ’Course it does, so let’s get some sleep and be on the road again early tomorrow morning.”

The twelve days Ursus had estimated for our journey were more than sufficient. We found ourselves approaching Lugdunum at the end of the fifth of the seven days he had allowed us for that portion, and this was mainly because, within three days of setting out on that last lap, we had found ourselves in a heavily traveled area serviced by one of Rome’s great spear-straight roads and hence were able to discard all our former caution and proceed openly at more than twice our previous pace.

Lugdunum was a surprise to me. I knew I must have passed through it years earlier on my way north to Auxerre, but I had absolutely no memory of the place, and I found it to be very different, in almost every way that I could think of, from its counterpart city of Treves in the north. Each had a military fortress, and the imperial legions quartered there were the same in both places. Apart from that similarity, however, everything else was different from one town to the other, beginning most notably with the food but extending to the local people, the farmers and artisans who lived in the surrounding areas. The climate was warmer here, for one thing, since we were now in southern Gaul, but the very appearance of the local folk was completely dissimilar to that of the people who lived in the Treves region. These people here were darker skinned than their northern brethren, and they seemed plumper, somehow, sleeker, more content, and more self-satisfied. “Better fed” was the way Ursus expressed it, and in the utterance he made it sound like some kind of cause for shame.

The wine they drank was better, too, I learned, and even though I could not have told from tasting it I could see for myself that the white wine of this region was closer to yellow in appearance, so I was prepared to believe that it might be thicker and more fruity with the kinds of sugar that northern wines lacked notably. It was the local red wine that made this region famous, however, according to what Ursus told me, and I saw no reason to doubt him, although I had no desire to taste any of it. I had tasted my first cup of watered wine at twelve years old. Now, almost four years later, the blend of the two liquids I infrequently drank was barely stronger than that first anemic mixture of one part wine to three parts water. I still found the taste of it unpleasant and preferred the honest tastelessness of chilled, clear water.

We found no trace of Lorco’s turmae in Lugdunum. No one had heard of him or from him since he and his party passed through on the way north a month earlier. And so Ursus delivered a formal report to the military authorities, describing all that had happened, to the best of our limited knowledge, and left another written missive with the commander of the garrison for delivery to Duke Lorco when he arrived. That done, Ursus and I ate in the garrison refectory that night and slept soundly for eight hours in one of the barracks rooms before striking out again at dawn along the broad, straight highway that followed the Rhone river to the lake called Genava in the ancient territories of Cisalpine Gaul.

We rode with the river on our right, and at first we had no shortage of companions along the route, teamsters with laden wagons, and self-sufficient pedestrians, and an occasional string of laden mules led by handlers as taciturn as the creatures they led. But as we traveled farther and farther beyond the protection of the military headquarters, our traveling companions reached their various destinations in hamlets and small towns and villa farms and left us to travel on without them, until eventually we were alone again on the open road. We no longer had any need to hunt for food, which pleased us both, for once Ursus had established his identity and his membership in Duke Lorco’s squadrons, he had been able to draw some of his unpaid stipend from the offices of the military paymaster in Lugdunum. With those funds he had immediately gone looking for a commodious tent of hand-sewn leather panels to replace the one he had lost in the ambush by the river. I was most impressed with the workmanship I could see in the tent’s finish, but Ursus waved a hand dismissively, saying it was nowhere near as large or as fine as the one he had lost. Then, having bought the tent, he also bought a horse to carry it, for the thing was much too large to carry on the horse he had inherited from Lorco. I watched closely, but said nothing while he negotiated with the horse trader, but I was satisfied that he had acquitted himself well and had bought a fine, strong animal.

From the horse dealer’s premises, we next made our way to the armories, where he replenished his supply of arrows and purchased a bow and another quiver full of arrows for me before taking me on an expedition to purchase rations for the ensuing week, and now our saddlebags were filled with provisions: fresh crusty loaves of heavy, rich brown bread; several kinds of dried and salted meat and fish; four rounds of cheese, two soft and new, and two hard and dry; a flask of the garlic-enriched fish oil that had been beloved of Roman soldiers for countless hundreds of years, together with a vial of thick, aromatic black vinegar and even two earthen jars of salty, fat green olives preserved in their own oil. We were men of wealth on this portion of our journey, at least when it came to eating.

On the afternoon of our second day out of Lugdunum it threatened to rain heavily on us and we could see no signs of any rift in the thick-piled banks of cloud that had swept in upon us from the north, so we decided we would rather make camp early and sit warm and dry in our new leather tent than press on for no good reason and endure the deluge.

We picked a spot in the open, about a hundred paces from the roadside and close to the river, in the shelter of a huge dead tree that would provide us with all the firewood we might need. It took us almost an hour to pitch the tent to Ursus’s liking, since this was the first time we had tried it and every tent ever made has its own quirks and peculiarities. By the time we had it up and ready to use, my hands were sore and bruised from struggling with stiff new abrasive and unyielding ropes. As soon as that task was done, I went gathering ferns for our bedding, no great hardship compared to pitching the tent because, as close as we were to the water, ferns grew in lush profusion among the trees on the riverbank.

By the time I had brought back four enormous double loads of fresh green bedding, Ursus had built a healthy fire that he felt confident would burn throughout the coming storm, and we settled in to eat and wait for the storm to break. We ate well that night, and the storm held off until we had eaten our fill and seen to our horses’ needs for the night. We could hear thunder rolling in the distance and so knew that the storm was out there, but no rain fell for a long time and we saw no signs of lightning throughout the time the sun set and night fell. I fell asleep almost before it grew completely dark, and Ursus was already snoring by that time, and I slept soundly through the earliest stages of the breaking storm.

I snapped awake sometime in the middle of the night, my eyes full of the remembered flare of a burst of brilliant light, and my breast shocked near to death with the concussion of a single massive, booming explosion. I sprang upright, leaping from the softness of my bed to land on my feet, glaring blindly about me and trying to tell myself that I was not afraid. I had no memory of drawing the sword that filled my hand and no awareness of where I was or what was happening. All I knew was I was in pitch darkness and something terrifying had happened. But then I heard the solid, steady roar of heavy rain on the leather panels just above my head, and my memory returned.

I sucked in air, hard, and tried to calm the thumping in my chest, but it was still pitch black in the tent, and that, combined with the fury of the storm, was frightening, despite the fact that I now knew where I was. Another flare of lightning lit the tent, followed after a moment by a rolling crack of thunder, far different from the one that had brought me leaping from my sleep. Even as the lightning flared and flickered out again I thought I saw something moving at the door of the tent. I opened my mouth to call out to Ursus, and then heard the sound of a heavy blow and muffled curses.

Without giving myself a moment’s pause to listen again and be sure, lest I lose my nerve, I threw myself toward the front of the tent just as another lightning flash showed me the flaps hanging open. I had closed them myself when I went to bed, and Ursus had already been asleep. I leaped forward and pushed through the flaps to where I could see movement, a struggle of some kind, taking place ahead of me. Ursus, I knew, and someone else. I called his name and moved forward, raising my sword and trying with my free hand to clear the streaming rainwater from my eyes as my feet slipped and slid in the muddy grass, and then I saw more movement looming close beside me, and before I could begin to turn something, someone, hit me hard across the head and I went down.

Whatever it was that had struck me, it was not metal, and at first I thought it had done me no grievous harm. I felt the wetness of long, sodden grass against my cheek and I rubbed my face in it gratefully before rolling away. No one was pursuing me, I could see, but that could change at any moment. I took a deep breath and tried to rise to my feet, but my head blazed immediately with pain and I barely managed to struggle to my knees. I made one more effort to stand and fell instead, to support myself on all fours while the rain hammered down on me. Appalled at my own weakness, I stared into the blackness and saw Ursus, his back against a tree again, facing a group of crouching figures. Lightning flared again, and in the darkness that followed it I saw six figures lit in the blackness of my mind. I knew then that Ursus was a dead man, for I was utterly incapable of rising to my feet, let alone of rushing to help him.

“Alive, damn you! I want this whoreson alive!” The voice seemed impossibly familiar to me. Through the pounding of my head I tried to remember where I had heard it before, but the roaring in my ears was growing louder and suddenly I found myself facedown in the grass, my mouth open in a puddle of mud. I grunted and spat and tried to roll over, to get my face away from the threat of drowning.

When I opened my eyes again the rain had stopped and I was in great pain and still lying on the grass. I tried then to roll again, but I could not. I couldn’t move, and the effort of trying was unendurable, but I gradually became aware of what was causing my immobility: I was on my knees, but face down on the grass, and someone had thrust a stick of some kind across my back, locking it in place with my elbows and then tying my wrists tightly across my belly. The ends of the stick, protruding on each side of me, made it impossible for me to roll to either side. I found that I could turn my head, however, providing I moved it very slowly, and so I worked painfully until I could see what lay on the other side of me. It was Ursus, and he was unconscious, bleeding profusely from what looked like a deep wound on his scalp. He was very close to me and his arms had been tied the same way as mine, allowing me to see that the stick securing his elbows was a spear shaft, which made it likely that mine was, too. But who were the people who had attacked us, and why had their leader wanted to take Ursus, and presumably me, too, alive?

Before I could even start to puzzle over an answer, I heard movement on the other side of me and turned my head slowly and carefully back to see what was there. The soaked logs of our fire, which had not survived the storm after all, lay directly in front of me now, blocking my vision, and the sour stench of wet ash filled my nostrils. But beyond the soaked heap of the ashes in the fire pit, two figures came into view. Looming high above me and ludicrously distorted by the angle of my vision, they moved forward and stood gazing down at Ursus, ignoring me. Both men wore heavy iron helmets with full face flaps that hid their features and both wore heavy military-style cloaks, but neither the helmets nor the cloaks looked Roman, although I could not have said why.

One of the two men hawked and spat on the ground. “This has to be him. He fits the description and he’s the only one we found in a day of searching.”

“What about the other one?”

“What about him? He’s an accomplice and he’ll share the other’s fate. But I want to get them back as quickly as possible. Looks as though the rain’s passed by, so let’s get on the road. Call the others and make them ready. Four men to accompany these two. Ropes around their necks and let them walk, or run if they have to. They’re lucky I don’t hang them. Whoresons.” He sneezed, and then cursed loudly, reaching up to pull the helmet from his head with one hand while he wiped his mouth and nostrils with the back of the other, and as a shaft of moonlight lit his face I recognized him.

“Chulderic?” My lips formed the word, but no sound emerged. I stretched my neck and spat to clear my mouth before trying again. This time I tried harder, however, determined that he should hear me, and his name came out as a shout.

“Chulderic, is that you?”

I saw the amazement and consternation that swept his face as he jerked his head around to look down at me, his eyebrows drawing together into a single bar.

“What in … ? Who are you, to call me by my name, whoreson?” He was gazing straight into my face but clearly did not know me.

“Chulderic, it’s me, Clothar, son of—Ban!” On the very point of blurting out my true father’s name, I remembered all the dire warnings I had ever heard about the dangers involved in that, and changed the words on my lips. “Clothar of Benwick!”

He stood stunned, peering at me open mouthed, incapable of moving, yet weaving slightly on his feet as though he might pitch forward and fall down.

“What did you say?” he asked after what seemed like a long time, and then he took a step and did fall forward, landing on one knee beside the fire and bending forward to grasp my face and turn it to where he could see it more clearly. “Clothar? Is that … ? By the white bull of Mithras, it is you. How come you here, boy?” He looked up at his companion and barked, “Get him up out of there and cut him free.” The man moved swiftly to obey, lifting me gently to my feet and then cutting firmly at the ropes binding my wrists across my belly before removing the spear from across my back.

“I’m on my way home,” I said as the ropes fell away from my wrists and before the pain of returning circulation had time to strike. “To King Ban, with messages from Bishop Germanus. My friend here is Ursus, who has been guarding me along the way. Cut him loose, please.”

“Urs—?” Chulderic glanced from me to my unconscious companion and then back to me again. “This is a friend of yours? The bowman? Is he a Roman? Can you vouch for him?”

Now I spoke through gritted teeth as I tried to deny the agony in my wrists and ankles, and I had little patience with what I saw as Chulderic’s obtuseness. “For what? Of course I can vouch for him, but I don’t know what you want. Nor do I know if he’s a Roman. All I do know is that he’s a good man.”

“Ah, so you don’t know him that well … . Has he been with you all day long?”

“Aye, he has, and all day yesterday, too, since we left the garrison at Lugdunum. He has not been out of my sight for nigh on three weeks. Why are you asking me these questions? What do you think he has done?”

“He has nigh murdered King Ban, boy. That is what he’s done.”

“Balls!” The expletive came naturally to my lips and Chulderic did not even blink at it. “Ursus has been riding by my side since we left Lugdunum yesterday at dawn. I told you that. We have not even stopped to hunt since then. We camped at the twenty-fourth mile marker last night and traveled on today until the storm began to build, late in the afternoon. We made camp, right here, to wait out the storm.” I stopped then, realizing what the old man had said about King Ban. “Is the King dead?”

“No. I said he was nigh murdered, not killed dead. He lies about five miles from here, in an armed camp. Someone shot him yesterday, from afar—a sneaking, cowardly attack that almost succeeded but fell short.”

“You mean the arrow fell short?”

“No, boy, the attempt fell short, of complete success. The arrow struck the King beneath his upraised arm as he stood up in his stirrups to rally his men, and it struck deep and high into his chest, its point deflected upward by the armpit rim of his cuirass. The wound is grievous, but it might not yet be fatal. The next few days will tell, and he is surrounded by physicians and the surgeon Sakander, the best there is. If anyone can save him, Sakander will.”

“And you think Ursus did this thing, in my company?”

“We have a description of him, Clothar. He was seen. A tall man, dressed in black and well armored, carrying a bow.”

“And riding a high black horse?”

“What? No. We heard no tale of any horse. The killer was afoot.”

“Well someone has mistaken Ursus for someone else. He is tall, and he wears black and has good armor and a bow, but he also rides a magnificent horse, the twin to mine. Both are close by here, hobbled in good pasture with a third animal, a packhorse, about a hundred paces along the riverbank there. Did you not check them?”

The old man frowned. “Not in the dark, no. We came up on your tent under cover of the storm because one of our scouts had seen you late in the evening, before the storm broke. But he said nothing of horses.” He turned again to his companion and indicated Ursus. “Do as he says, Jonas. Cut him free. We’ve obviously made an error here. Master Clothar, as you’ve heard, is King Ban’s nephew.”

I felt myself frowning so hard that my face was starting to ache. The vision of my uncle as I had last seen him hovered in front of my eyes.

“What is the King doing here, Chulderic, so far from Genava?”

The old man looked at me in surprise, astonished that I should even have to ask such a foolish question. “He is being the King, fighting for his people and their safety. The entire countryside is crawling with two-legged vermin—Alamanni and the accursed Burgundians—all seeking what they call ‘room to live.’ We’ve been killing them as quickly as we can, and in the biggest numbers we can find, for nigh on three months now. They must breed like rats, the whoresons, because the more of them we kill, it seems, the more of them spill out of sewers and noisome craters in the earth. And they are outraged, crying to Rome for help against our ravages! Can you believe such shit? They want us to hold up our hands and step aside and let them take over our homes without a word of protest. Oh, it’s been going on for a hundred years now, especially with the Alamanni, you know that. But now the whoreson Burgundians are causing us more grief than the damned Alamanni ever have.”

He paused, and for a moment I thought he was finished, but he was merely rallying his forces, gathering his strength, and nurturing his outrage and disgust.

“And they have imperial backing, it appears, whoreson supporters at some rarified level of government who maintain that Empire—and tell me, pray, what Empire that might be? Tell me that!—Empire, they say, could not survive without their wondrous aid. Burgundian aid! They are being given title to lands around Genava—other people’s lands—as a reward for what is described as ‘faithful and unstinting service in Imperial Wars’! Have you ever heard such rabid filth? What about us, who live here and have fought and died for the whoreson Empire forever, without thought of asking for special privilege or dispensation? Would it ever have occurred to us to ask Rome’s blessing upon our actions had we decided we have a right to usurp and dispossess our neighbors? Sweet Jesus crucified!”

I had been waiting for a pause in his tirade and I leaped in before he could begin again. “I need to see King Ban, Chulderic. Will you take us there?”

He nodded, but his eyes still lingered suspiciously on Ursus, who had not moved since being cut free and showed no sign of returning to consciousness. “Aye,” he growled. “I will. But we had best see to your friend here. He should have come to his senses ere now.”

He was right, and I knelt quickly by Ursus, shaking his shoulder and calling him by name. Fortunately, he heard me on my first attempt and came awake slowly, groaning as he reached up to cradle his head, but then he remembered what had been happening before he fell and he snapped awake, pushing himself up until he was sitting, staring up at Chulderic. I offered him my arm and pulled him up to his feet, and then I made the introductions and told him what had happened.

When I had finished, Ursus stood looking at Chulderic, stooping forward slightly and fingering the swelling behind his ear. “Was it you who hit me?”

Chulderic smiled. “No, sir. That would have been one of our younger men. Strong warriors they are.”

“Aye, so it seems, especially when hitting a man from behind his back.” He squinted at me. “So now what do we do?”

“We go and visit the King and hope we find him well.”

Chulderic cleared his throat, a deep, harrumphing sound that contained all his skepticism. “Little chance of that. If you’re the praying kind now, from your bishop’s school, pray you then that we find him alive. He was struck down by a freakish chance, but the blow went deep. He might already be dead. Damnation, but I wanted to haul the man who shot him in to his judgment.

“Come then. Let’s away.”

Even from afar there was an air of dejection hanging over the King’s camp as dawn broke that day. I became aware of it as soon as we emerged from the surrounding forest and began making our way toward the distant tents. The few guards I could see stood slumped, rather than bristling at attention in the usual way of perimeter sentinels, and the normal bustle of a military camp was subdued, with no one moving at speed anywhere and no upraised voices where normally there would be a babble of sounds and shouts. Even the smoke from the cooking fires seemed to hang listless and inert, settling in flattened layers of varying density above the fires rather than dissipating in the early-morning air. I glanced at Ursus and saw immediately that he, too, had sensed the hopelessness here.

Chulderic and I had talked as we rode about the dispatches I bore for the King from Germanus. I had been carrying them belted about my waist, beneath my armor, and I had already passed them over to the old man, as Ban’s senior and most trusted counselor. I knew I could trust him to read and absorb the tidings I bore and, provided the King were fit to hear them, to pass their content on cogently and succinctly enough for the King to understand them and make any decisions that might be necessary. Now Chulderic rode beside me, knee to knee, and his face was wrinkled with concern. I could see his white-knuckled grip on the reins and knew it was only by a great effort of will that he was suppressing his urge to go galloping forward at top speed to be by his King’s side. Of course it was much too late for that now and nothing would be served by his making an undignified spectacle of himself in the last few moments of our approach. And so we rode sedately forward and dismounted decorously in front of the King’s tent.

As we did so the flaps to the tent were pushed apart and a tall figure emerged, stooping to keep his head clear of the peak of the entranceway. It was my cousin Samson, Ban’s second son and my favorite kinsman among his offspring. I was delighted to see him there, because Chulderic had made no mention of his presence with the King’s party, but I realized immediately that his attendance upon the King, along with that of his brothers, would be commonplace enough to merit no particular attention. At twenty-three, as I reckoned his age, Samson’s natural place as a warrior was by his father’s side. Samson ignored me completely in passing, going straight to take Chulderic’s reins from the groom who had been holding them. Chulderic gave him no chance to speak.

“How is he?”

Samson shrugged and dipped his head, twisting his mouth in a wry acknowledgment. “Not good. The surgeons say the arrowhead is lodged against his spine, deep beneath his shoulder blade. They can’t probe for it, and they can’t cut in to it because both the shoulder blade and the collarbone above it are directly in the path of the knife.”

“And so they do nothing?”

“Sakander tells me there is nothing they can do without killing him, and I believe him. If they break the collarbone in front to gain access to the arrowhead, they might have to sever it completely, and Sakander says the chances of its knitting again are slight, given my father’s age … and besides that, he says, even if they could reach the arrowhead, there is still no guarantee that he would be able to remove it—it’s a war arrow, remember, heavily, barbed—without killing my father.”

Chulderic spat an obscenity and then headed toward the tent’s entrance, but he stopped and looked again at Samson. “Is he awake?”

“No. He was, until a short time ago, but Sakander fed him a potion and he fell into a deep sleep just before you arrived. Now he should sleep for several hours.” Samson looked at me then, and from me to Ursus, a small frown ticking between his brows. “Who are these people?”

Chulderic saw where Samson’s eyes were directed and spoke first to that. “That one is Ursus, a mercenary and a bowman. We thought for a time he might have been the one who shot your father.”

Samson shook his head again, a short, sharp negative. “No, we found that one. He died before we could question him, but the arrows in his quiver were identical to the one that shot my father, so we know it was him.” He glanced next at me, his eyes sweeping me from crown to toe. “And this one?”

“That’s your brother. Clothar.”

Samson recoiled slightly, in shock and surprise, his eyebrows shooting up toward his hairline, but then his face broke into a grin of recognition. “By the Christus! Clothar? It is you! Welcome, Cousin.” He stepped forward immediately and threw his arms about me, giving me no time to register surprise at his awareness of our true relationship, and as I embraced him I recognized the well-remembered scent that always hung about his person, a clean, vigorous smell of light, fresh sweat mixed with something else, a fragrance reminiscent somehow, utterly illogically, of wild strawberries. He pushed me away again, holding me at arm’s length while his laughing eyes gazed into mine, gauging my height and width. “By all the old gods, Chulderic,.he has grown up, our little tad, has he not?”

Chulderic grunted but made no other reply and Samson’s expression sobered. “I could wish you had come at a better time, Brother, for our father—and he is that to both of us, although differently—is sorely hurt and like to die.” I saw Chulderic stiffen from the corner of my eye and Samson released me and stepped away, speaking now to the old man, his words blunt and unyielding. “What, Chulderic? What would you have me say? That the King is but slightly scratched and will be sound tomorrow? Our Leader the King has been struck down by a war arrow—an iron-headed arrow with fluted, extended barbs designed to do maximum damage to anything it strikes. I do not like the sound of that, or the reality of it, any more than you do, but it would be folly to deny it or make light of it. He is my father, a man, not a god. We must accept that and plan accordingly.”

Chulderic nodded. “Aye, we must, of course. Has word been sent to your mother?”

“Aye, it has, and to Gunthar and the others.”

Hearing Samson say those words, I had a sudden image of Gunthar’s face, wearing its habitual sneering look of condescension, and I wondered whether time had improved his disposition.

Samson had already moved away to hold back the tent flaps and permit Chulderic and me to enter, but I stopped him with an upraised arm, and he lowered the flaps again and stood looking at me, one eyebrow quirked slightly in expectation. I glanced from Chulderic to Ursus and then, keeping my voice low, I asked the question that was filling my mind.

“Forgive me for asking now, Samson, but it is important. How long have you known that we are cousins?”

The outer edge of his lip twitched in what might have been the beginnings of a smile, but may also have been a slight tic of annoyance. He nodded his head, a single gesture of acknowledgment. “We found out years ago,” he said. “Shortly after you went off to school with the bishop. We were curious about why you should go there and not us, and I suppose we were too curious, because father and mother sat us down one night and told us about who you really are, then swore us all to secrecy. So we know who you are, but we have kept the knowledge secret among ourselves.” He hesitated, and then the smile broke out on his lips. “You’re wondering about Gunthar, are you not? Thinking he would make profit from that knowledge were it his to hold?” I nodded, wordless, and Samson shook his head. “He knows nothing. He was nowhere close to Benwick when the matter arose, and you may be sure that none of us went trotting to inform him. No, your secret is safe, Cousin.”

I inclined my head to him, as courteously as I could. “Thank you for that,” I said quietly. “Now I should like to see the King, if I may.”

Samson made no response to that other than to raise the entrance flaps again to permit us to enter the King’s tent. He himself remained outside and I noticed that Ursus made no move to join us, probably aware that he would be denied entry. I caught Ursus’s eye and nodded slightly to him before I stooped to follow Chulderic into King Ban’s tent.

It was dark in there, the strengthening daylight failing yet to penetrate the thick leather panels of the tent, and what light there was came from the flickering flames of a quartet of lamps suspended from poles around the King’s bed. The bed itself was heaped surprisingly high with coverings, but then I realized that they were draped over a construction of some kind that covered the King’s upper body and had been built to retain warmth while protecting his injuries from the weight of the coverings. A tall, austere-looking man whom I assumed to be the surgeon Sakander sat erect at the head of the bed, close by the King’s side, radiating an aura of intent watchfulness. His eyes were already fastened on Chulderic by the time I entered behind the old warrior and he paid me no attention at all. There were other people in the spacious tent, three that I counted among the shadows as my eyes began adjusting to the darkness, but as we approached the King’s bed Sakander waved one hand and they all left immediately.

“How is he?” This was Chulderic, growling at Sakander.

“How would you be, given the same affliction?” The surgeon’s voice was deep and level in tone, his diction precise and utterly lacking in the pompous affectation assumed by so many of his colleagues. He spoke to Chulderic as to an equal, and I had little doubt that the two of them were friends of long standing. “He is near death and I am powerless to help him. This was a freakish wound, the like of which I’ve never seen before, but the unlikelihood of it does nothing to lessen its gravity.”

“Hmm.” Chulderic gazed down to where his friend the King lay sleeping. As though he knew Chulderic would say no more, the surgeon continued speaking.

“Whoever the bowman was, he must have had the strength of a demon, for the arrowhead struck hard and sank deep, dislodging solid bone. It pierced the hollow of the shoulder socket beneath his upraised arm, deflected off the ball of the bone, I suspect, and then again, sideways and inward from the angled plate of his shoulder blade. From there it sliced through flesh and muscle, turning all the time because of the curvature of the arrowhead blades, until it struck his spine, lodging solidly this time, perhaps between two of the vertebrae.”

He paused, then cleared his throat before going on. “That is what I suspect, but I have no way of proving or disproving it, short of killing him by cutting into him and mutilating him further, digging for the arrowhead. But we have other arrowheads that illustrate the problem facing us. See for yourself.”

He indicated a table opposite him, where lay four war arrows, all identical to each other. “Those came from the same quiver as the one that shot down the King. They are identical in the fletching, as you can see, and in the shaping and weight of the warheads. No reason to suspect that the one in the King’s wound should be any different.”

I looked carefully at the four arrows, seeing the bright yellow feathers with which they had been fletched, and as I did so Chulderic picked one up, holding it close to his eyes to examine the heavy iron head. I leaned closer to him to share his appraisal. The thing was a work of art, made by a master craftsman and comprising three razor-sharp, wedge-shaped blades of thin, tempered metal cunningly welded into a lethal tapering triple-edged point. At the broadest end of each blade the metal had been flared and twisted out of true to form wickedly curving barbs that, once set in a wound, would be impossible to remove without destroying all the flesh surrounding the entry channel. The very sight of the curved barbs made me wince and grind my teeth, imagining the bite of their entry.

“By the balls of Mithras,” Chulderic growled, “the man who made these things knows his craft.” He wrapped his fingers firmly around the center of the shaft he held, then moved it around behind his back as he bent toward the unconscious form of the King, peering closely at the sleeping face.

“How long will he sleep?”

“Two hours, I hope, perhaps longer. But it could be less. It depends upon how well his mind blocks out the pain.”

“That’s what you gave him the potion for?”

“Aye. The substance is strong. It induces sleep and stifles pain.”

“What is it called, this substance?”

“It has no name of its own. It is one of a range of marvelous powders, all of them white, that are miscible in water and produce wondrously beneficent effects. We call them opiates, and although I know not where they come from, they are supposedly distilled from the essence of white poppy flowers in a distant land to the east, beyond the Empire’s bounds.”

“The Kingdom,” I whispered, remembering something Tiberias Cato had told me about his days as a boy there.

Sakander turned his keen gaze on me immediately. “What did you say?”

He did not call me “boy” but I felt the rebuke nonetheless and I felt myself flushing. “I said, the Kingdom. It is what the Smoke People call the ancient land far to the east, beyond this Empire.”

“The Smoke People. And who are they?”

I shrugged, feeling foolish to be talking of such irrelevant and inconsequential things over the unconscious body of the King. “A tribe of nomads, horsemen, thousands of miles from here. A friend of mine, one of my teachers, once lived among them for a while and learned from them about the Kingdom, an ancient place of great wisdom and learning, peopled by men with yellow skin, black eyes, and straight black hair.”

I was conscious of both men staring at me, and then Chulderic, his voice inflectionless and unreadable, said, “Sakander, this is the King’s youngest son, Clothar. He has been away, in the north, attending Bishop Germanus’s school in Auxerre since before you came to us. Apparently they have taught him some novel notions.” He looked back to the King. “When will we be able to move him?”

Sakander began speaking without removing his eyes from mine. “He should not be moved at all, but since it is clearly both dangerous and foolish for us to remain here, separated from the army, then we may as well move him immediately and hope to achieve the worst of it while he is still in the grasp of the opiate.” He turned back to the King then, dismissing me for more important matters. “I have him lying on a board, beneath those covers, for ease of carrying, because I did not know how soon we might want to move him. Four strong men should be able to bear him easily from here to the largest of the commissary wagons. It is well sprung—as well as any wagon can be—and I have it already stripped of all its contents and layered thick with straw to guard him as well as may from bumps and bruises.” The surgeon shook his head. “I don’t know whether it is better to move quickly or slowly in such cases, but whichever way we go, Lord Ban will be badly jarred in transit. Fortunately we are but four miles from the main encampment, so if we leave within the hour we can be there before noon.”

“Aye, four miles from the army’s camp, but we’re fifty miles from home.”

Sakander nodded, his face expressionless. “True. Will you give orders to break camp?”

“Aye.” Chulderic called to Samson, who came in immediately. The old warrior explained what he and Sakander had decided, then instructed the younger man to choose four men to move the King, and then to make the necessary traveling arrangements to rejoin the main body of the army.

Ban of Benwick remained unconscious while he was gently moved, and he slept through the entire four-mile journey to the main camp. Sakander sat beside the King the entire time and his face was somber and unreadable, but I suspected that he was not entirely grateful for the King’s lack of awareness. It seemed to me, watching him as he bent forward time after time to wipe the King’s face with a moist cloth, that the surgeon might have been happier had he discerned even a hint of discomfort in the King’s demeanor. But that was purely a personal conjecture and I had nothing at all on which to base my suspicion, beyond an insistent prompting from somewhere in my own head. It simply seemed to me that the King slept too profoundly.

Ban slept that entire day away, and the night as well, opening his eyes only at midmorning on the following day. I had ridden out of camp by that time, accompanied by Ursus, unable to remain waiting passively for something to happen and even less able to sit quietly by while my father—this title in defiance of the fact that I knew him to be my uncle—fought for his very life. Chulderic told me later that the King was very weak, but free of pain and lucid when he awoke, and that he remained that way for nigh on two hours, during which time Chulderic had been able to pass on to him the gist of the messages I had brought from Germanus. The King had listened and understood, and had made several pronouncements, in addition to which he had had Chulderic summon the cadre of his senior officers, both to witness and thereafter attest to his lucidity, his soundness of mind, and his self-possession, and also to bear witness to his issuance of several specific instructions concerning the immediate future of his lands and his people.

Astonishingly, Ban had then, and thus publicly, rescinded his acknowledgment of his firstborn son, Gunthar, as his legal heir and follower, denying him the right to claim the crown of Benwick. His second son, the twenty-three-year-old Samson, Ban had declared in front of everyone assembled, would be his heir henceforth and would assume the crown on Ban’s death. It was a momentous announcement and apparently a spontaneous one, in the eyes of those who were present for the occasion, notwithstanding the King’s claim that he had been considering it for years, believing he yet had years ahead of him to resolve such matters.

My own belief is that the King’s claim, disregarded and generally discounted as it was, was no less than the truth. I knew from comments made by Samson and Brach that Ban had been having serious misgivings for years about Gunthar’s fitness to succeed him, but I also accepted that Ban truly had believed there was no shortage of time ahead of him and that he was under no urgency to make such a grave decision. As soon as his circumstances changed, however, Ban the King, who had always been a pragmatist adapting constantly to the real world in which he lived and ruled, made a final and irrevocable decision and announced it bluntly, in the presence of witnesses.

So now my cousin Samson would be king of Benwick. And my cousin Gunthar would not. Wrack, ruin, and chaos lay between those two statements.

Even as I listened to Chulderic’s report of the King’s pronouncement, I knew that the old warrior was as perturbed by the development as I was—it was plain to be heard in his tone. He had been counselor to Ban for many years, but he had always held his personal opinions close and was notoriously tight-lipped on matters of the King’s concerns, so I had no real knowledge of how he felt about what he was reporting to me, nor had I any insight into whether he might approve or disapprove of the King’s decision. Such perceptions, however, were irrelevant. The King had made up his mind and had then made his decision public. Neither Chulderic nor anyone else, and least of all I, could do anything to change what had been done. But neither one of us could ever have envisioned the carnage and the depredations that were to follow from the King’s decision. That all lay in the future.

For the time being, once the first impact of the news of Ban’s decision had passed by, my own mind became entirely preoccupied with the awareness that the King’s sudden decision on this matter of the succession must reflect his own belief that he was going to die. It was a notion that my mind could not encompass. Ban of Benwick, my uncle, father, guardian, was and had always been the single, strongest constant in my life, far more so at that time than even Germanus. The perfect embodiment of the term “warrior king,” he had always been indomitable and indefatigable, a champion among champions of any stripe, with an upright, unimpeachable integrity and dignitas that had won him the respect and admiration of everyone who knew him and had dealings with him. And now this paragon was to die? It was simply unacceptable and I would not, could not countenance the possibility. I knew he was sorely wounded and I had seen the proof of that with my own eyes, but he was Ban of Benwick, indestructible. His wounds might be grievous and even life threatening, I told myself, but they would not be fatal. Ban would overcome them. He would. He must.

In the meantime, however, in complete defiance of all my expectations and my most sincere prayers, King Ban grew increasingly drowsy and more weakened from day to day, sleeping for longer and longer periods until eventually, four days after his fateful pronouncement, he slipped backward into a deep slumber from which he was never to awaken.

He asked for me, however, on the day following my arrival while he was yet in fair condition, given the serious nature of his injuries, and when I went into his presence he knew me immediately and made me feel very welcome. He was lying strangely, propped up carefully and off-center on a mountain of soft skins because of the seriousness of his wound, and he still had that curious protective construction about his chest and shoulder. His face was gaunt and haggard, deeply lined and gray with pain, and his voice was whispery, his breathing shallow and careful. Nevertheless, despite all his discomfort and my own discomfiture, he made it possible for me to gain great pleasure from his company. According me the status of manhood by speaking to me as an equal, he asked me all about my school and my various tutors, all of whom he knew by name thanks to the dutiful correspondence of the bishop’s chief scribe and secretary, Ludovic. He asked me, too, about his old friend Germanus, but I had the distinct feeling—why, I could not have explained—that he already knew more about the bishop and his affairs than I could tell him. Then, too, he praised me for my prowess in arms and asked me about the adventures I had shared with Ursus on our way here, eliciting the information from me, almost without my volition, that I had killed my first enemies along the way.

I was aware of Sakander the surgeon sitting at the rear of the tent throughout all this, but the man never stirred and offered no interruption at any time. He merely sat watching, alert to the condition of his charge.

Finally, however, Ban raised his uninjured hand slightly and waved the fingers gently from side to side as though indicating that he had something more to say on another topic. I nodded, my eyes fixed upon his lips, and he began to speak again in a papery whisper, speaking words that I have never forgotten.

“You have always been a fine boy, Clothar. You would have been … you are a living tribute to your parents, and I have been proud to watch you grow toward manhood. Now I shall watch you no more … not from this side of Heaven’s veil … .” He paused, and I remained motionless, waiting for him to continue but thinking that I had never before heard him mention the Christian Heaven by name. He coughed very gently, deep in his throat, then continued. “Young as you are, you have never been afraid of facing your duties, and that … that is as it should be. Duty comes first for a man of honor, Clothar. Never forget that. Never lose sight of it. So long as you hold fast to duty, you will hold fast to God, for He it is who defines duty, and He has great things in store for you. Be ready for them, Clothar, for they await you … but be ready, too, to find that they are onerous. Great rewards demand great sacrifices.” His eyes closed, but he held his hand still raised above the surface of his bedding, so I knew he was merely resting, not yet finished, and I waited until he spoke again.

“Auxerre,” he whispered then, his voice a mere breath. “Auxerre. Germanus. You must return there, to Auxerre, to Germanus. And let nothing come between you and that goal.” His eyes widened and it seemed to me a fiery spark sprang to life deep within them. “Promise me you will,” he said, reaching out to grasp my fingers in his own and surprising me with the strength of his grip. “Swear it to me: you will go from Benwick to Auxerre, to Germanus. Swear—” He stopped abruptly, and his eyes narrowed as he peered at me, pulling me down toward him. “You understand the swearing of an oath, what it means? Do you, boy?”

“Aye, Lord,” I nodded, repeating what I had been taught at the Bishop’s School. “It is a sacred promise to God Himself, not to be undertaken lightly and never to be broken, upon pain of damnation.”

“Aye, boy, that is what an oath is. Swear then, to me, that you will do as I bid you and that nothing will prevent you from doing it.”

I swore the oath at his request, looking directly into his eyes and accepting the duty he thus placed upon me, but even as I did so it was halfhearted, diluted by a reluctance that was born of a silent, sneaking belief that the King was not altogether strong in mind. In all the years that I had known him I had never heard him talk so fervently before about God and God’s expectations of real, living people. Truth to tell, I had never heard him speak of God at all, under any circumstances. That he should do so now was, I feared, an indication of just how weakened he had become.

He saw my reluctance, however, and reacted strongly to it, stiffening his voice and speaking with more authority. “I wish I could stand, boy, to be beside you with my hand upon your shoulder as you do this, but it may not be. Go you and bring me the guard who stands outside the tent. Quickly now.”

I did as he asked and then watched, uncomprehending, as he instructed the man to find the bishop who was chaplain to the Christian troopers and to bring him back with him. He then continued talking to me about trivial things, in that whisper-quiet voice, until the bishop entered some time later. The bishop bowed his head and Ban nodded once to him, in recognition, then asked the bishop to hand me the pectoral Cross that hung about his neck, and then to go back and wait outside. Clearly mystified, the bishop handed the ornate Cross to me and then bowed to the king before backing out of the tent, having spoken no single word. When we were alone again, ignoring the surgeon at the rear of the tent as he seemed to ignore us, Ban smiled at me, the ghost of the carefree grin I had loved for so many years.

“Up, boy, stand up and hold that thing out in front of you. Stretch out your arm. Is it as heavy as it looks?”

I nodded. It was even heavier than it looked, made of solid gold, but I said nothing.

“Aye, well it should be. It represents a heavy burden … your duty to God. Mine is almost over … my duty to the same God. You’ve never known me as a prayerful man, have you?” When I shook my head his faint smile widened. “That’s because I never have been one. But duty, Clothar … the acceptance of it … and … and the … discharging of it … are prayers by themselves, and I have never been one to … to shrink away from duty.” He paused, and I could see he was close to exhaustion, his voice near to being inaudible, and I held my breath, remaining motionless as I watched him will himself, eyes closed and breathing shallow, regular breaths, to regain sufficient strength to complete what he wished to say. Finally, after what seemed to me to be an age, although the watchful surgeon at my back showed no sign of alarm or concern, he mastered himself and began to speak again, his voice stronger and deeper.

“I told you God has great things in store for you and will lay heavy expectations upon you. I believe that completely, and so does my friend Germanus. Once I am gone, nothing in your life will be unaltered, and so I need to be sure that you will return to Auxerre and to Germanus. That’s why I have you standing there in front of me, clutching that heavy Cross. Be aware of it, and swear me your oath again, this time with some conviction.” This time, strange as it might seem to those people who were not there to witness what Ban said, I believed him absolutely, so that I swore the oath with passion and conviction, promising solemnly that I would return to Germanus in Auxerre within the year and that I would permit nothing to hinder me or dissuade me.

This time, when I had finished, the King rewarded me with a contented smile and waved me away with those frail, wavering fingers, asking me to return the bishop’s Cross. I did so, and this time saw Samson waiting patiently outside the tent, gazing off into the distance, his long arms wrapped about his chest. I mentioned this to the King, and he asked me to summon his son. When Samson came in, the King beckoned to him to bend close, and whispered something into his ear. Samson went away frowning and returned with a powerful, magnificently made bow and a large, heavy quiver filled with arrows, which he stood holding at the foot of the bed. Ban nodded. “Give them to Clothar.”

Deeply astonished, I took them from Samson’s outstretched hands, then turned to the King. “Lord,” I asked him, “what am I to do with these?”

He smiled, and when he spoke his voice reminded me of the rustle of dead leaves stirred by the wind. “Do with them what you will, my son. They are yours. They have been the death of me, but they are wondrous fine and should go to someone who will use them well.”

I went rigid, realizing only then that these were the weapons that had struck him down—I saw the bright yellow fletching of the arrows and was stunned that I had not recognized them instantly. The large quiver was heavily packed, filled with at least two score of the bright, yellow-feathered war arrows.

“No,” the King said sharply, waving his sound hand slightly but sufficiently to stop me and dispel what I was thinking. “No, don’t throw them down. They are superb weapons. Learn how to use them, Clothar, and remember when you do that they are merely tools for your direction and use. They had no will to harm me when they brought me down. That came from the man who used them. His was the urge to kill. Treat these with the respect they deserve, as powerful, well-crafted weapons, and they will serve you well, my son.

“Now kiss me and go with God, and I will pass your love and kindness to your father and mother when next we meet. But bear in mind your promise at all times from this day on: within the year, you must return to Auxerre and to Germanus.”

His voice was very weak by then, and Samson’s face was stretched tight with concern. I looked from one to the other of them, and then to Sakander, who sat gazing at me, his face still empty of expression. The surgeon nodded to me, as though granting me permission, and I stooped and kissed King Ban of Benwick for the last time.

Early on the morning of the day of the King’s funeral, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I emerged from my tent to find Samson deep in thought directly ahead of me, staring off into the misty distance and completely unaware of what was going on about him. It was a chilly morning, overcast and damp, and anyone could see it would turn into a nasty, rainy day once the lowering clouds had finished massing overhead and decided to purge themselves of their burden of moisture. I greeted him and asked him what was wrong, and he half turned toward me, surprised to find me there so close to him. I asked him again why he looked so glum, and this time he said, “Beddoc,” then turned his head away again.

Beddoc, I knew, was one of his lieutenants, a clan chief who led nigh on a hundred warriors raised from his own holdings not far from Genava. I had met him on several occasions and found him difficult to warm to. He was a naturally dour man—a single glance at his dark, humorless face was all it took to see that—but he was enormous, too, and the sheer sullen bulk of him, draped in drab armor and faded furs, emphasized the air of unfriendliness and inaccessibility that surrounded him.

“What about him?” I asked, when it became plain Samson was going to say no more.

“He’s gone. Last night sometime, during the third watch. Left without anyone knowing why or where he was headed.”

“He must have told some of his men where he was going.”

“No, his men went with him.”

“All of them? That’s impossible. How could a hundred men break camp and sneak away without being seen? The guards must have seen them.”

“They did, but all the guards on that watch last night were his men. He took them with him, too. Left the camp. unguarded for the duration of the watch. Sellus, captain of the fourth watch, discovered they were gone when he rolled out to rouse his men.”

I did not know how to respond to this because I had never heard of such a thing. A hundred men vanished in the night from a campsite with no one else noticing simply defied credence. I was so amazed by what he had told me that I completely missed the real significance of the event. “Surely someone must have seen something,” I protested.

“Aye, we think someone did. A man called Castor, from among my own troops, another called Gilles, one of Chulderic’s men, and some young fellow who worked with the commissary people. All three were found dead by their fires, wrapped in their blankets with their throats cut. We think they must have been awakened by the stir, and killed as soon as they were noticed.”

My mind tried to process this incomprehensible development. Finally I found my tongue and heard my own question emerge as a bleat. “But why, Samson? To what end?”

My cousin glanced at me and then began to walk, quickly, beckoning me to follow him. “To what end? What about self-interest, will that serve as an end? Beddoc is ostensibly one of my lieutenants, but that is purely nominal and born of political necessity. The truth is that he is one of Gunthar’s four closest henchmen. Always has been, since they were boys. I’ve been watching him ever since my father made his announcement deposing Gunthar as his heir and naming me in his stead, and you may be sure I’ve been watching very closely. Had Gunthar become king in Benwick, Beddoc would have become perhaps his strongest lieutenant and supporter, secure in one of the king’s fortresses as a reward for ongoing loyalty and support. That’s what he sees in his own mind, and that’s what he seeks to protect now.”

“By deserting, you mean? How so?”

“How not? He is scampering to warn my brother Gunthar of what has happened, and the knowledge is making me sick. I should have known he would do that. The gods all know I’ve known him long enough! I should have anticipated his reaction and posted guards discreetly to watch his every move. The King’s decree formally making me his heir was public enough to stand as law, but no one at home will know of it yet. As soon as the King was wounded, and never anticipating any of what was to transpire on this matter of the succession, I sent off a messenger to bear the tidings home, but Gunthar knew nothing of the King’s decree thereafter. When Beddoc reaches him with his news, my brother will simply announce the King’s death and assume the kingship, and once the crown is on his head, validly or otherwise, it will require the strength of Jupiter himself to take it back from him. Gunthar is no weakling and he has no fear. My brother will not be governed by the normal, civil rules that should apply in such a case. ‘Honor thy father’ has little appeal to one such as Gunthar when the honoring involves abandoning a claim to kingship. He lacks only sufficient strength to back his will. Beddoc has much to gain by warning him and pledging all his men to bolster Gunthar’s strength. And understand me clearly, Gunthar will need all the strength he can muster if he is going to try to withstand me and defy the King’s wishes.”

“What of your other brothers?”

“Theuderic and Brach will stand with me. Gunthar has never done anything to endear himself to either one of them. Nor would he be willing to share any part of what he thinks to gain with either one.”

“And the Lady Vivienne?”

“What think you, that Mother would go against her husband’s wishes after all these years?”

“No.”

“No, indeed. I suspect that my father’s decision, long-postponed as it was, sprang from my mother’s doubts. The King was always something blind to Gunthar’s faults. Mind you, Gunthar leaned backward close to the falling point to disguise those faults from Father’s awareness; it was the rest of us who had to bear the brunt of them. But still, even when he came face-to-face with the worst of them, our father would always seek and find some reason to explain why this and that were so extreme and why Gunthar might claim provocation in the face of circumstance. It was tedious for the rest of us, but we soon learned to live with it. Mother, however, could always see through Gunthar and was unimpressed by the King’s excuses. And as Gunthar grew older, she grew increasingly less pleased with how he was—how he is.”

“So you are saying your mother influenced your father?”

Samson laughed, a single, booming bark that held no trace of humor. “Influenced him? Aye, completely! In everything he ever did. Of course she influenced him. How could she fail to? Mother is nothing if not direct, and we all know she is the strongest person in our lives. But in this particular instance, concerning Gunthar and his fitness to be king, aye, she has worked for years to change his mind.”

“And you believe she was right to do so?”

“I do. Gunthar as king defies imagination. Don’t you think she was right?”

“Yet you made no mention of that to Chulderic a few days ago when you discussed this very matter of the King’s unwillingness to change his provisions regarding Gunthar.”

He nodded. “True. I did not. I knew it and Chulderic knew it, but until the King spoke clearly on the matter of his final choice it would have been disloyal for either one of us to speak of it. Here we are.”

We were in front of Chulderic’s tent, and it was the center of a beehive of activity, with people running hither and yon, all of them shouting to each other to make themselves heard. I grasped Samson by the elbow, tugging him back before he could duck between the tied-back flaps.

“What? Come inside, we have but little time.”

“No, wait, Samson. What will you do now, about Beddoc?”

He frowned. “Follow him, hope to catch him, but he has a long start.”

“How long?”

“Perhaps an entire night watch: three hours.”

“Is he on foot?”

“He’s on a horse, but all his men are afoot, aye.”

“And have you already dispatched men to follow him?”

“Aye, as soon as we discovered he had gone. But they’re afoot, too. They’ll not catch him, unless he falls sick or dies.”

“And when will you leave?”

“Not until we have attended to my father’s funeral rites.”

“You think that wise? Why not leave now, as quickly as you can, and take the King’s body with you? He won’t suffer by being kept intact for another day or two and he will feel no pain now on the road. And if you leave now you’ll be but hours behind Beddoc, instead of a full day, and Gunthar will have that much less time to decide what he will do.”

Samson stared at me intently, his brows furrowed as he reviewed what I had said, and then he gave a terse nod. “You’re right. That makes sense. Chulderic?” He shouted over his shoulder, preparing to swing away, but I stopped him yet again.

“Let me go now, with Ursus.”

He peered at me. “Go where? What—?”

“To Genava! We have fast horses, Ursus and I, bred for stamina. Beddoc’s people are all afoot. We can overtake them by nightfall. How far are we from Genava, forty miles? We can be there by tomorrow, before noon, ten miles and more ahead of Beddoc.”

His eyes narrowed as he grasped what I was saying, and then his fingers fastened on my shoulder. He pulled me into the tent with him, shouting again for Chulderic, and within the hour Ursus and I were riding again toward Genava and whatever might await us there.

I could never have imagined what lay ahead of me as I followed Ursus out of King Ban’s last encampment that day. The weather was foul when we set out and it remained foul for the duration of our journey—indeed, the rain was to persist in varying intensity for three entire weeks—and events and ramifications to those events were to occur within that time that I was simply unequipped to envision, let alone anticipate.

Riding through the driving rain that first morning, I would not have believed, had anyone suggested such a thing, that I might even come close to forgetting or forsaking the last promise I had made to King Ban, to return to Germanus in Auxerre. My faith was still strong in those opening days of what I would come to remember as Gunthar’s War, and there was no room yet in my soul for self-doubts or for questioning the values I had been taught throughout my life. My beloved aunt, Vivienne of Ganis, awaited me at the end of my journey, less than forty miles distant, and I could scarcely wait to set my eyes upon her again.

I admit I knew that things had changed greatly in much too short a space of time, and that the welcome of which I had dreamed and for which I had yearned would not—could not—be as I had envisioned it. The Queen who would have welcomed me with love and joy a mere week earlier was now a widow, burdened by a newborn widow’s grief, and a tormented mother, too, who could not fail to be torn and distracted by the rivalry and conflict so suddenly flung up between her sons. I knew I would be fortunate indeed were the Lady Vivienne even to notice my arrival. All of that was in my mind, as I have said, and in my thinking as a man, but in the hidden recesses of my heart, wherein I was still merely a boy, I dared yet to hope that Vivienne of Ganis would welcome me with radiant smiles and open arms.

We caught up to Beddoc and his band late that afternoon and avoided them easily by leaving the road and sweeping around them, leaving more than sufficient room between us and them to ensure that they would have no suspicion of our presence. They had been marching hard all day, knowing they had a three-hour head start on anyone pursuing them, and to the best of my knowledge, none of them save Beddoc knew that Ursus and I existed, and not even he knew that we had swift horses at our disposal. Beddoc’s sole concern, I was convinced, was to reach Benwick and align himself with Gunthar before any word could reach the castle from King Ban’s party. To that end, he had struck out and away in the middle of the night, knowing that no one he had left behind owned horses that were fast enough to overcome a three-hour lead. His men might be vigilant in watching for pursuers but, human nature being what it is, they would not suspect they might be overhauled as quickly as they had been, and even had they seen us by mischance, they would not have recognized us as representatives of King Ban’s men.

Avoiding them was easy. We had known for some time before finding our quarry that we were gaining on them rapidly. The great road that stretched, magnificently straight, all the way from Lugdunum to Genava carried little traffic nowadays, even at the best of times, and this was far from being that. The threats of war and invasion were enough to deter all but the strongest and most desperate travelers, and so we had the rain-swept causeway all to ourselves, and we saw not the slightest sign of military activity anywhere as we progressed.

Solid and arrow-straight, the roadway provided us with significantly greater advantages than it permitted Beddoc and his men. We were heavily cloaked and well protected from the wind and rain, mounted on strong horses that moved swiftly and cared nothing for the driving downpour. Beddoc and his people, on the other hand, were afoot and heavily laden, making heavy going of their forced march, trudging through heavy, unrelenting rain under full military field packs, because when they had crept away from Samson’s camp in the dead of night they had not dared to risk the noise of harnessing and stealing baggage wagons for their gear and equipment. They had left their cumbersome leather legionary tents behind, confident that they were but one night’s sleep beneath the stars away from home, and so each of them lacked that heavy burden, at least. And so they plodded now through the pouring rain, huddled in misery, footsore, aching, and feeling very sorry for themselves, their sodden clothing and ice cold armor chafing painfully wherever they touched skin.

We came closest to them at the point where they had stopped for their last rest of the day. They had been stopping regularly, once every hour, as marching legions always had from the earliest days of Rome’s soldier-citizenry, and at one point Ursus waved to me to slow down and moved out slowly ahead of me, scanning the wet earth along the roadside. Sure enough, we soon found the spot where Beddoc’s men had spilled off the hard top of the road in search of relief from the cobbled surface and whatever shelter they could find beneath the canopy of the trees on either side. We reined in and Ursus swung down from his saddle to search for whatever it was that he expected to find. I sat straight in my saddle and dug my thumbs into the small of my back, under the edge of my cuirass, grimacing as I stretched and flexed my spine and stared ahead, over my horse’s ears, along the tunnel of the road that stretched ahead of us.

Had the terrain here been as flat as the road was straight, we should have been able to see Beddoc and his party long before this, but the ground in this region undulated gently, in long, rolling ripples that stretched east and west, so that the road ahead rose and fell constantly. You might be able to see as far as half a mile ahead at any time, but then the road would crest and fall away into the next gentle valley and be lost to sight. The sight lines here were impaired, too, by the foliage of the trees that had encroached almost to the edges of the road in some spots, so that their lower boughs appeared from a distance to sweep down completely, to brush the surface of the very stones.

That, I knew, was something new, because I also knew that there had once been a time, extending into the boyhood of King Ban’s grandsire, when an entire department of the imperial civil service had existed solely to maintain the roads in central and southern Gaul. Under its supervision the great roads, so long and straight, had been maintained and regularly repaired, and huge swaths of cleared land, fifty paces wide, had been kept free of growth on either side of each one. But after nigh on a hundred years of neglect and untrammeled growth, the protective borders were now choked with all kinds of brushwood, and large, mature trees now towered close beside the roads themselves, close enough, in many cases, for their massive roots to have damaged the edges of the paving, heaving the paved and metalled surface upward and causing cracks and fractures in the very fabric of the road. Those insignificant-seeming invasions of the roadbeds, according to the wisdom of Bishop Germanus, marked the beginnings of a process of disintegration that would eventually and inevitably, with the hungry assistance of time and weather, bring about the ruin and destruction of most of Rome’s wondrous network of roads.

I saw Ursus stoop and pick something up, and then he came back toward me, gazing down at whatever it was he had found, then lobbing it toward me when he was close enough. I caught it and held it up to see it properly. It was the heel of a loaf of bread, just small enough to fill my palm and hard enough that I could clearly see the gnawed marks where someone had tried in vain to bite into it with strong teeth.

“It’s still dry,” Ursus said, standing now by my knee, “in this weather, save on the very outside. That means we can’t be any more than a quarter of an hour behind the man who threw it away. There’s an abandoned mansio about five miles ahead. They’ll stop there for the night. Or at least, they ought to.”

A mansio was an inn—one of the hostelries provided by the Empire for the comfort and convenience of couriers traveling the main roads upon Imperial business. Imperial couriers had seldom been seen in this part of Gaul for nigh on two decades now, however, and most of the old hostelries had been shut down and abandoned long since.

“Why there?”

“No other choice.” He reached up with a bent finger and flicked a drop of rain from the end of his nose. The downpour suddenly intensified, the rain falling harder than ever, and I had to bend down toward him and listen closely to hear his voice above the thunder of it on my helmet, even though he was shouting at me. “They’ve no tents, remember? And it’s too damn wet for them to even try to shelter under the trees.” He moved even closer to me, leaning against my horse’s side, his left hand holding my ankle as he shouted up at me and his face twisted into a rictus that I soon recognized, to my complete astonishment, as a grin. He was absolutely enjoying all of this, the journey, the chase, and the deluge.

He removed his hand from my ankle and raised his voice even louder, wiping at his eyes with a forefinger. “The mansio’s old and it’s been sitting empty for years, long before I was born. It’s got no doors or windows but it’s still standing, thanks to thick stone walls, and it has a roof, or most of a roof, and fireplaces. They’ll be better off there than any other place between Lugdunum and Genava. They might not be completely dry, or completely warm, but they’ll be out of the wind and the worst of the rain and they’ll have firelight and a bit of heat. They could be far worse off.”

“And what about—?” The rain slackened as quickly as it had increased, and I heard myself bellowing. I lowered my voice instantly, glancing about as though to see if anyone else had heard me. “What about us?”

“What about us?” He was standing sideways to me now, his hands on his hips so that his cloak hung tentlike from his extended elbows. “We’ll cut away from the road here, ride around, and get ahead of them. From then on, every mile we gain on them is worth at least six to us, because they’ll be walking to catch up to us and we’ll be flying on horseback. Once past them, we’ll ride for ten more miles, then stop for the night at a place I know, where we’ll be warmer and drier than any of those poor fools.”

“Ten miles, once we’re past them? It will be dark by then, and probably still raining, which means there’ll be no moon to light our way. How will you find this place you speak of? Is it on the road? What kind of place is it, anyway?”

“Nitter natter, Master, so many questions.” Ursus grinned and swung himself up onto his mount, making nothing of the sodden weight of his cloak. “It’s a shepherd’s hut, built of stone, solid as bedrock and strongly thatched, and it is never without a supply of fine, dry firewood. And as for your other question, no, it’s not on the road. It is four hundred paces off the road, as I remember, and I could find it blindfolded if I had to. But I won’t have to. Come, let’s go.” He looked up at the sky, then kicked his horse into motion, angling it away from the road and toward the forest, shouting back over his shoulder as he went. “I would say we have two hours of daylight left to us, perhaps two and a half. That should be more time than we need to reach our spot without riding through darkness. Once past Beddoc’s crew we can really travel quickly, since we won’t have to worry about running into them.” He kicked his horse again, pushing it to a canter, and I followed close behind him, shouting back at him.

“How do you know this place we’re going to, and how do you know it’s still there? When were you there last?”

He didn’t look back but his voice drifted to me over his shoulder. “I saw it last three years ago. I know where it is because I was born near there. I know it is still there because it was built to endure forever. And I know that’s true because the shepherd who built it was my grandfather. I helped him chink the walls while I was still a babe in my mother’s arms. And I know it’s warm and dry and stocked with fuel because my cousin Doran still uses it today, when his flocks are on that side of his lands.” Now he turned back and looked at me, laughing. “Have you any further questions, Master Clothar?”

I closed my mouth, which had gaped open in surprise at what he was telling me, and then laughed back at him, kicking my mount’s flanks to bring it level with his, and we rode on through the downpour, out into the forest’s edge where we could ride parallel to the road and pass our quarry by without fear of being seen.

It was dark within the confines of the forest, and although I knew the expectation was illogical, I felt it ought to have been drier, but this forest was all deciduous growth, so there was nothing but a thin screen of leaves preventing the driving, incessant rain from falling straight through the canopy to the ground. And so as we rode through the trees we found it worse in places than being out in the open air, facing the rain. Out there, at least, we would be able to tell where the attack was coming from and hunch ourselves against it. Here, in the shadows beneath the trees, depending on what we or our mounts brushed up against or disturbed in passing, we were constantly being caught unprepared by small deluges, and sometimes enormous ones, that crashed down on us from all directions, landing indiscriminately on our heads or on any other part of our bodies that happened to be in the way. I tried hard to empty my mind of anything other than picking my way forward through the undergrowth and remaining alert to the possibility, however unlikely it might be, that Beddoc might have sent out scouts in such weather to check the forest’s edge for enemies.

Sooner than I had expected, Ursus held up his arm in a signal to halt, and I reined in close to where he sat staring off to his right, listening intently. I tilted my head to listen, too, only to wonder for possibly the hundredth time at the acuity of my companion’s hearing. I could hear nothing but the hammering of rain on my helmet. The noise of it filled my entire world.

“What can you hear,” I asked him.

“Nothing, and that suits me well. We’re close to the old mansio, but not too close. I’m going to take a look. You stay here.”

He swung down from his saddle and went toward the road, and I could not believe how quickly he faded from my sight, obscured by the mist among the trees and the falling rain, the blackish green color of his heavy woolen cloak seeming to absorb the very air about it and rendering him invisible. I forced myself to sit patiently, waiting for him to return, and in a short time he did, looming up suddenly within paces of me, though I had been watching diligently for the first signs of his coming.

“They’re there, settling in for the night about a quarter of a mile up ahead, and a miserable-looking crew they are. They won’t all be able to fit beneath the roofed portion of the place, not by a long shot, so there will be a deal of squabbling over who gets to stay where and I imagine the people in charge of them will have a job keeping the peace. I managed to get close enough to hear a few things, but the only important thing was someone giving orders for a squad to come into the forest looking for firewood … dry firewood. They won’t find any, not in this downpour, but that means they’re going to search deep into the woods, trying to find a dry cache, so we had better make a wide loop just to be sure we avoid them. Let’s go.”

We struck off deep into the woods and rode in a long semicircle for the better part of half an hour, until we were sure we had left the enemy night camp far behind us, and we came out onto the road again. From that point on, free of the need to worry about being seen, we traveled as quickly as our mounts could carry us. The daylight lasted long after we had expected it to fade, so that it was still not completely dark by the time Ursus reined in and led us off the road, along a narrow but clearly marked pathway that took us, as he had promised, to a dry and sturdy, draft-proof haven that was stocked with an ample supply of cut and split firewood, carefully piled beneath sheltering eaves that had been extended for that purpose. We had a fire going within minutes of arriving and we ate in comfort and then bedded down in the luxury of two narrow, hand-built cots, with our wet clothes hung and stretched out around the inner walls, steaming toward dryness in the heat from the fire.

I was almost asleep when Ursus spoke for the first time in nigh on half an hour, and his words snapped me back to wakefulness.

“Be prepared for anything tomorrow, Clothar, and expect it to be worse than anything you can imagine. You hear me?”

“Aye. But why would you say that?”

“Because that is the only way to go, as a thinking man. Going in expecting the very worst, anything you find that’s less than that will appear to be welcome. I have the feeling that we are about to be involved in a struggle, you and I—perhaps a civil war between brothers—whether we like it or no. The stakes are high enough to justify a war, no doubt about that—a kingship and its power for the winner. I don’t believe in auguries but I mislike the way things have fallen out, these past few days. This brother of yours, Gunthar, sounds like a bad one to me. He does not strike me as the kind of man who’ll be content to sit quietly back and run the risk of being frustrated and deposed. Granted, he doesn’t know yet that King Ban dispossessed him, or that Ban himself is dead, but he does know Ban was seriously wounded, and that in itself might have been enough to make him react according to his true nature.

“I hope I’m wrong and everything is well, and I would be happy to admit within a few days that I’ve been speaking like an old woman tonight, but we’ll find out the truth tumor-row, when we reach Genava. Sleep well, in the meantime, and hope the rain stops before dawn. At least we’ll start out warm and dry in the morning, which is more than can be said for Beddoc’s cattle.”

With that, Ursus turned noisily around in his bed and was snoring heavily in the space of what seemed like several heartbeats, but his last words had bereft me of any easy ability to sleep and I lay awake with my own thoughts until the fire had died out completely and even the roaring of the rain on the roof dwindled into silence.

How would Gunthar react, I wondered, now that Ban’s last decision had been made public? I had always been as one with his half-brothers in believing him to be abnormal in his responses to being thwarted or crossed in any way, and we had often laughed derisively at his excessive reactions on such occasions, declaring him, among ourselves, to be insane and beyond redemption, simply because we had had no fear of him in those days, confident in our father’s protection and in our own conviction that Ban’s firstborn son was different in almost every way to each and all of us. But the last time I had laughed thus, I was less than ten years old and knew nothing of the world. Six years had elapsed since then and I had barely thought of Gunthar in all that time. How had he changed during those years, I wondered now, and I doubted that any change he might have undergone would be for the better.

It was more than conceivable, I thought, that Ursus was exactly correct and that we might be hovering on the verge of falling into a situation that was beyond our control, within the next few days. And thinking that, I fastened upon the phrase, beyond our control, and tried to think what that meant. My entire life, I realized now lying there in the flickering firelight, had been entirely under the control of other people, King Ban, Chulderic, Tiberias Cato, and Bishop Germanus foremost among them, until the day of the ambush in which Lorco lost his life. Since then, from that day forward, I had thought I was controlling my own life without help, but by then I had become dependent upon Ursus, exchanging one mentor for another so that even now, gazing into the future, I was being guided by his wisdom and experience. Be prepared for the worst, he had said, because that way anything less looks like a reprieve. I tried earnestly to envision the very worst that could occur to us in the days ahead, but all I could think of in those terms was Lorco’s head suddenly changing shape and bursting apart with the impact of the arrow, because that was the very worst thing that had ever happened to me. I could not imagine anything ever being more dreadful than that, and thinking that, I must have drifted off to sleep.