The Saxon Shore

Dedalus shrugged and grinned and spread his hands, dipping his head in unrepentant acceptance. "You are talking sense, Ambrose, and that is all I wanted to hear. From the moment I saw those cut-off arrow shafts, I've had a nasty feeling in my guts. Now I feel better, having heard you say I'm not the only one with doubts about the wisdom of reacting too soon and too thoughtlessly."

My sudden impatience had dissipated while both men spoke, and now I picked up the flask of mead again.

"We have much to discuss, gentlemen," I said to the assembly. "Normally, I would forbid drinking at a time like this, but this is far from normal and I have but the one small flask; a sip or two for each of us. Dedalus, break out the cups from the chest there and pour for everyone, and, Rufio, replenish the fire in the brazier there. It's almost out. In the meantime, we should all sit down. There are sufficient chairs and stools in the other rooms close by. Please make yourselves comfortable."

I used the interval while everyone was occupied with drinks and seating to arrange my thoughts.

By the time stillness had fallen in the Watch Room once again and all eyes had returned to me, I had taken up the severed arrow shafts from the table and held them fanned in front of me, examining their bloody points, to some of which dried, clotted matter still adhered. They were evil-looking things when viewed so closely, their points razor-sharp and their barbs wickedly fashioned so that, once lodged, they locked and could be withdrawn only by main force, torn out with great attendant tissue damage. Someone cleared his throat nervously, and I looked up from my examination.

"Young Maripo was right, my friends. The death of the first Camulodian trooper from one of these weapons signalled a drastic change in the way we must wage war from now on. This was the first time our men faced the Pendragon longbow, but it will not be the last. Weapons like these, in skillful hands in a concerted attack, could wreak havoc among us. They render us impotent. There is no safety, in our current tactics, against shafts like these." No one presumed to speak, so I continued. "The question facing us is whether or not the Pendragon people, allies and friends for more than fifty years, must now be considered otherwise." I waited, but still no one was willing to add his comment to my own.

"Pendragon longbows have been used against us. This evidence is undeniable." I dropped the arrow shafts, letting them clatter on the tabletop. "But who used them, and how must we respond?" I looked around the room, catching each man's eye.

"We must respond, be very sure of that. Failure to do so would invite disastrous consequences. But how must we respond, and when, and in what strength?" I nodded my head, indicating Dedalus. "You all heard Ded's comments. He is unsure of how to proceed, as I am, but I have no doubt our basic feelings are alike. And you heard Ambrose speak of Huw Strongarm and his companions. As you all know, or should know, they left their homes to join us here because they have chosen not to live there any longer, with matters as they are. Uther's kingdom is torn by civil war. Contenders for his powers swarm everywhere and the common people know neither whom to trust, nor where to turn for succour. Strongarm himself, with his own force, was impotent in his own home, too new-arrived to be able to compete with already vested powers. He called his homeland a nest of rats, referring to the power-hungry who fight among themselves for domination. He said, too, that the pride his people have borne throughout their lives, of being Pendragon, has been blasted like a tree in a thunderstorm. I heard those very words from his own mouth."

During the pause that followed I was conscious of every eye in the group being fixed on mine.

"When I hear words like those being spoken by a man like Huw Strong- arm, I listen very carefully, and I think deeply on what caused them to be said. Now I really would appreciate some contribution to this monologue."

The only one to speak was Dedalus, again. "None of us can improve on what you have said so far, Merlyn, so speak on." The others grunted, or nodded, each in his own way supporting Dedalus.

"Very well then. It seems to me that we might simply have received a visitation from a single group of big Huw Strongarm's rats, ranging for a time far from their nest. We may never know what brought them to our lands or why they came, but they left with our horses, and those horses will destroy them, because where we find our horses we will have found our killers. And find them we will, by simply following their tracks into their hills, then searching farther.

"Tomorrow we will mend our own internal wounds and use the deaths of fifty of our own to make a poultice that will drain the poison from our military corpus, knitting its flesh into a whole, new body. The following day we will send out a force in strength, a thousand men, both horse and foot, to act in concert and avenge our fifty dead. Huw Strongarm and his men will ride with them. This force will be commanded either by me or by my brother Ambrose, and will serve a set of purposes, each of them hewn to fit a special need." I tallied them upon my fingers as I named them. "One, the most immediate and obvious, is to avenge our comrades and regain our missing horses. Two, it is time we showed our force in the north and west, reminding everyone up there that we are here and that we will accept no interference in our lives or in our welfare." I looked from Dedalus to Rufio. "Three, we will pass by Glevum, which is presently infested with another nest of rats, this time come recently from either Africa or the Berber Coast. Whichever, they are aliens and invaders and they constitute a threat to our domain. They must be cleaned out. Four, the expedition will enable us to glean current knowledge of the state of affairs in Cambria, particularly in the kingdom of Pendragon. We will seek no conflict there, other than with the group who raided us, but we will go there in sufficient strength to discourage any bibulous hothead who might seek to detain us. And five, the last but perhaps the most important, the expedition will give us the opportunity to put our new resolve for unity into effect. The cavalry will ride as escort to the infantry. They will not range ahead, save in emergency conditions."

I stopped again, awaiting comment, but there was none. I had a point to make, however. "Does anyone here object to any element of this proposal? You may speak out if you do. Dissent's permissible at this point, for your concerns may be valid and merit further discussion . . . Anyone?" I looked around me slowly, eyeing each man directly. None showed any concern. "Good! Then may I suggest we adjourn until the morning's scheduled meeting? There is nothing more to be done this night, and our troops should be arriving back throughout the morning. Goodnight, gentlemen." I stayed them with an upraised palm, however, before anyone could even begin to rise.

"Wait!" I had seen Dedalus grinning wickedly and shaking his head. Everyone stopped moving. "Captain Dedalus, you seem amused. Are you?"

His grin widened, but lost its ferocity and changed to one of good humour. "No, Commander, not at all; an errant thought occurred to me, that's all."

"Would you care to share it with us?" Ded knew as well as I did that the request was a command. He sniffed and grunted.

"Well, Commander, it occurred to me that an expeditionary force like the one you described might serve a more ambitious end, particularly were it even stronger than the thousand you decreed . . . With Uther's Cambria a nest of fighting rats and splintered factions, and the common people groaning for relief from civil war, it seemed to me they might be more than glad to welcome their allies from Camulod, and Camulod might quickly gain a new province at little cost. . ."

By the time he had said his opening words I was prepared for him. "A new province. To what end. Captain Dedalus?" I asked, governing my voice carefully to sound dismissive rather than patronising. "Simple conquest? Far from simple. And what would constitute your 'little cost'? Think about what you are saying, my friend. Conquest entails governance afterward; a garrison of occupation and the chronic risk of rebellion against our presence. As things stand, we barely have enough men under arms today to tend our own outposts. That is why we are here tonight, remember?" I laughed, shaking my head in what I hoped would pass as tolerant amazement. "By all the old gods, Ded, I sometimes wonder where your cynicism will lead you. This is Camulod! Do you truly believe, deep down inside yourself, that we could thrive on conquest, or might even wish to seek it? Unity is strength, Ded, and our unity is imperilled today by the rift within our own troops. Think how much worse it might be were half those troops—the disaffected half—ensconced in Cambria and fortified by mountains."

Dedalus grinned again and shrugged elaborately. "As I said, Commander, it was but an errant thought. I had dismissed it—for all those same reasons— when you noticed me smiling. Now I'm glad that you concur with me."

His outrageous impudence brought a storm of laughter and the meeting broke up immediately with good-natured muttering and smiles. I turned to thank Achmed Cato, who yet had several hours of duty ahead of him, and then found Ambrose by my elbow.

"What are you going to do now?" I asked him.

"I'm going back to my cot, what else? I'd been asleep for barely half an hour when I was summoned. What about you?"

I thought about that. I was not even slightly tired. "Records," I said. "I've been asleep for hours, ever since I got back, but I have not made an entry to my journal in weeks. An hour or two of that will make me tired again and bring me close to dawn. Is everything prepared for tomorrow's proceedings?"

"Aye. The camp on the plain has been prepared and everything is ready. Dedalus will speak to the troops."

"Dedalus? Are you serious, Ambrose?"

"Think of it, Cay; Ded is the perfect man for this task on this day, a well- known and respected veteran and one of our senior field commanders, popular with all the men, both cavalry and infantry, yet known for his ferocious discipline. When he talks, the men will listen, and they'll hear what he is saying more clearly than they would were it you or I addressing them. We are relative outsiders at this time, the two of us; I because I am a new arrival, and you because you've been so long 'away' in terms of your illness. Ded is one of them, and they love him."

It took me several long moments to accept and digest the truth, but I accepted it completely in the end. "So be it, then. I'll see you in the morning. Sleep well."

XXII

As I made my way back to my quarters my mind was filled with apprehension at how suddenly a potential war with the Pendragon had developed. It had seemed inconceivable to me, before that night, that enmity could spring up, for any reason, where such warmth had once prevailed between my own people here in Camulod and those others, equally my own, in my cousin Uther's kingdom. My single source of satisfaction from the experience of the past hour lay in my growing appreciation of my brother's perspicacity and natural leadership, and that had been an incidental, almost irrelevant awareness. I found myself praying that Ambrose would have no cause to demonstrate those skills in civil war.

I was crossing the torchlit entranceway of the Praesidium heading down into the darkened courtyard on the way to my own quarters, when I heard my name called and turned to see a heavily cloaked figure waving to me from the other side of the walkway. It was Lucanus, swathed in a long, black cloak like my own. He told me he was on his way to the Infirmary, where the wife of one of the Colonists was in labour and not expected to have an easy time. This would be the woman's third child, he told me, and each of the other two had been breech presentations, causing great difficulties for the mother and resulting in the deaths of both children. This time, Lucanus informed me, he was prepared to deliver the child the way Julius Caesar had been birthed, by cutting it alive from the mother's womb. I shuddered at the thought and for a spell we walked side by side in silence. It seemed to me that the night had grown colder while I was in the Watch Room with the others, and I said so to Lucanus. He agreed with me and muttered something about it being cold enough for snow, at which I scoffed, pointing out that we were only in November. We arranged to meet again later and spend some time together, and I left him at the entrance to the Infirmary, then hurried on to my own quarters, glad to find a brazier still glowing in the darkened room. It took me mere moments to blow on the coals and light a spill with which I lit an array of candles. I replenished the fire, and only then unfastened my cloak and hung it from a peg.

I lost track of time very quickly, caught up in the absorbing task of bringing my daily journal up to date from the brief notes I had written during the past few weeks. My Eirish recollections were exactly that—recollections. I had had neither writing materials nor time in Eire for recording events and ideas, even though I was aware at all times how important such a record might prove to be. Now, in the darkness of this single night, I emptied my mind of all my memories of the voyage, committing them to paper. Twice, I recall, I rose to throw more fuel on the fire, spurred in each instance by the chill that numbed the fingers of my writing hand.

Ambrose finally interrupted me, timing his arrival perfectly to coincide with my own decision to call an end to my efforts. The door burst open suddenly and he was there, admitting the pearly radiance of early day and a blast of cold air together.

"Thought you might still be here. It's time to eat," he said, by way of greeting. "Come and see this."

"This" was a scattering of snow upon the paving outside my door. I looked, and shivered, and went back inside, digesting the implications of this dusting of whiteness as I struggled to pull on my heavy cloak.

"That's wonderful, simply wonderful," I snarled in disgust. "All we really need, this day of all days, is snow! With an expedition to organize and a full parade to conduct in the meantime. Everyone is going to be enchanted."

Ambrose had been squinting up at the sky as I spoke, and now he began to stride towards the refectory. I fell into step beside him. "It was probably no more than an early flurry," he answered me, after a few moments. "It is only November, after all. Had it not been for this sudden cold snap, it would have fallen as rain. It'll pass over and clear up and what's here will melt, so there's no point in fretting about it. I'm hungry."

We turned a corner and a sudden blast of icy wind cut through me as though I were naked. I cursed aloud, feeling put upon and abused. "What if it doesn't?" I complained. "What if the damned snow stays?"

"Then there's no point in fretting about that either, is there? If it stays, it stays. We'll have a chilly parade this afternoon, in that case, but providing no more falls, the expedition can proceed as planned." He stopped walking suddenly and swung to face me, his face splitting into a giant smile. "But what if it really snows, eh? Think of that! What if it snows and snows and drifts and blows? Then we will all be stuck here until it thaws, save for the poor swine who must return to man the outposts before the storm really sets in. But we'll be safe, because our inability to move will be duplicated everywhere. The high hills and passes will be snowbound and blocked off, and the forest roads will be impassable."

I frowned at him, unable to grasp what he was saying, hearing only his evident delight about being walled within the fort by snow. "So what?" I asked him, finally. "Would you enjoy such enforced idleness?"

"Idleness? Opportunity, Cay! I won't go as far as to say I'd enjoy it, but by Cod, I could certainly put it to good use. A solid block of time, free of all outside threat, to solidify the changes we intend to make, and give all our people time to work together on the new order? Don't tell me you would not be grateful for such a godsend."

I would have been, of course, but I had not made the connection as quickly or as intuitively as he had. My admiration of the focused way his mind worked increased yet again. I glanced back to the sky, this time almost with regret. "Now that you point it out, I would. But as you say, it's still only November. This snow is two months early. I doubt that we could be so fortunate as to have it stay now, when we could use it so effectively. Let's hurry, I'm hungry now, too."

The refectory was chaotic that morning, a maelstrom of screaming cooks and running lackeys, all grossly overtaxed by the demands of having to feed so many people at one time and within hours. By the time we re-emerged from it, however, having exercised our privilege of rank and broken our fast on fresh-baked bread and tender, succulent meat cut for us by one of the senior cooks from a spitted, broiling carcass that would be served cold later that day, we were both feeling vastly improved. There was activity everywhere and the evidence of the increased presence of our troops was unmistakable, with work parties hurrying hither and yon under the watchful eyes of those in charge, and an air of irrepressible gaiety widespread, in spite of the biting cold. Great piles of fuel had been stacked close to every firepit on the summit outside the walls and even, on this one auspicious occasion, against the interior surfaces of the walls themselves wherever there was space not yet occupied by buildings. They would be needed, too, for the day seemed to be growing colder by the moment.

Most of the troops had long since returned from the outposts, but some were still out there upon the roads, such as they were, and these would continue to arrive throughout the morning. I had no doubt that every pile of wood would feed a fire before the morning passed. The day's main activities were scheduled to begin after the noontime meal, which would be a festive one, despite the fact that the individual units must remain together and be ready to parade when summoned.

Ambrose and I had found ourselves in a unique situation that morning, for we had done all that we could do in preparation for this day's events and were now constrained to leave the final details in the hands of those to whom we had delegated the tasks. We had agreed during our meal together that it would be both unkind and unwise to let it appear now that we lacked trust in anyone, and so for once we found ourselves at liberty to while away some time in idleness while everyone about us worked with twice the normal intensity.

Amused by the thought, and by the novelty of this sensation of irresponsibility, we set out to saunter at our leisure through the camp, but our progress was quickly retarded by the necessity of responding to an unending series of deferential greetings, and the ensuing awkward small talk with harried men, which invariably interrupted the performance of some task. Both of us quickly wearied of it and sought the silence of Aunt Luceiia's house, where, to no one's surprise, we were attended by the Lady Ludmilla. She told us she had been awake for the greater part of the night, assisting Master Lucanus—she would never think of him as "Luke"; that was my privilege as his friend—in his efforts to deliver a healthy child to the unfortunate woman Lucanus had spoken of the previous night. I was surprised to learn that the child had been born to Hector, one of our youngest and brightest Council members, and his wife Julia, both of whom I knew and admired. Hector, in particular, stood out among the councilors because he was a successful farmer who had had no ties with the Farmers faction, having chosen instead to tend to his own affairs and improve the quality of his arable land and his crops consistently from year to year without significant input from any other farm. I mentioned that I had met Luke on his way to the Infirmary for that purpose. He had not named the woman, which I privately thought strange, since he knew I was friendly with her and her husband. I said nothing of that to Ludmilla, however, who reported that Julia and her newborn son were healthy and well, and that the birth had occurred naturally and easily, with no need for Luke's bright, shiny knives. In gratitude, she added, and this information made me smile with pleasure, Julia had asked permission of Lucanus to name the child after him, a request with which, according to Ludmilla, Lucanus had seemed embarrassed and reluctant to comply, although he did not refuse. How could he, indeed? The child's name-granting lay within the parents' power alone, and the honour bestowed upon Lucanus was one he was powerless to refuse. From that topic, we moved on to discuss the rising number of children being born in Camulod. Fifteen had been birthed within the short months of the previous summer, as far as we could tally, and of those, twelve had survived, an extremely high number, attributable, we were sure, to the methods of Lucanus and his passion for cleanliness and meticulous postnatal care for both mothers and children.

Sometime later, having exhausted the conversation, and aware that my presence had become a patiently borne burden to the others, besotted as they were with each other, I went into the Armoury where, to my surprise and delight, I found Shelagh contemplating an array of knives and daggers mounted to one side on the central wall. Her back was to me and she had not heard me enter—she had left the door ajar again—and so, having set out towards her, I stopped before she could notice me and indulged myself in the simple, but deliciously guilty pleasure of observing her. Even from behind, she was ravishingly lovely, her long, self-willed tresses sweeping in cascades across her shoulders and more than half-way down her back. She stood on tiptoe, peering upward, her hands braced on a table-top, and her stance threw the clean lines of hips and buttocks into relief beneath the softness of the single garment draped from her shoulders and circled with a loose-looped leather girdle. She moved once, reaching further, straining to touch the metal of a wicked, broad-leafed blade with one fingertip, and my heart leapt to see what the movement revealed to my prying eyes: taut slimness of waist and swell of half-glimpsed breast beneath her upraised arm. I dared not stay a moment longer without announcing myself. So rapt was she in her scrutiny, however, that she remained unaware of me until I spoke.

"Good morning, Lady. You have an affinity for blades, I have observed."

She leapt backward and spun to face me, startled at the suddenness and closeness of my voice. "Oh, it's you, Commander Merlyn. Good morning. Knives, yes. Blades, only occasionally." She had regained her composure very quickly. "I should not be in here, should I?"

I smiled and shook my head. "No, you are welcome now. That rule—if rule it ever was—no longer applies. The only reason for my anger last time was the alarm I felt over my careless betrayal of my secret. Now you are privy to that secret, no secrecy applies."

She curtsied gracefully in the Roman fashion, holding her skirts out to her sides and dipping low, head bowed. "My thanks to you, Commander."

"Where did you learn to do that?" I asked, betraying my surprise. "I'll wager you would never do it at home in Eire."

Her eyes flashed and she tossed her head. "I never have, but who is to say I never will? I make my own rules of behaviour, Merlyn, and the man has not been born who can change any of them!"

I grinned, charmed by her scornful mettle. "Not even Donuil?"

"No, not even he." Then she relented, breaking into a smile. "Although he might persuade me in some things. He has a honeyed tongue, you know."

I grimaced. "Aye, I know. He has used it with me, too, although hardly in the way he must with you." I was suddenly and completely ill at ease with this conversation and my mind began to leap around, seeking alternative topics. Shelagh, however, was warming to her subject.

"He's a lovely man," she murmured, her thoughts evidently far from the Armoury. "I hope he comes back soon."

"He will," I assured her. "As soon as he can possibly make his way. Tell me about your knives."

If the abrupt change of direction surprised her, Shelagh gave no sign of it. "My knives," she said. "What would you like to know?"

"Anything, everything. Why do you have so many?"

"Well, they are throwing knives, and I have five of them. I suppose Donuil told you that?"

"No, not at all. He mentioned you had some skill with throwing them, that was all."

"Some skill? Is that what he said? Some skill? I'll show you some skill." She had begun looking about her, evidently searching for something. "Have you a piece of wood, a block of some kind?"

"A block? You mean like firewood? A log?"

"Aye, that would do, a big one. Have you?"

I shook my head, grinning. "No, but there are mountains of them outside in the courtyard."

"Good, then. Go you and fetch one here, and I'll get my knives. 'Some skill,' indeed!"

Suddenly I was alone, my eyes on the open door where she had vanished. Smiling still, and feeling strangely light-headed, I made my way outside, picked the largest log from the nearest pile and returned with it to the Armoury, where I set it down by the open fireplace. It was really large and heavy, as I had discovered carrying it into the building; the girth of a large man's chest and as long as the same man's torso. Moments later, Shelagh came striding back into the room, the blue, flowing fabric of her robe moulded to her thighs by the speed and length of her stride, her belt of knives suspended from her right shoulder, slanting down across her bosom and between her breasts. She was achingly beautiful and completely unaware of it, casting her eyes around the room from the moment she entered.

"May I move these books?"

"Of course. Here, let me move them over to this table."

"Good. Did you find a log?"

"I did. It's there, by the fireplace."

"It'll do. It looks heavy enough. Would you put it there for me, on the table?"

I did so, and she stood for several moments, looking at it.

"It's too low. Can we stand it on top of the books?"

I could not get rid of the smile on my lips, and was enjoying this thoroughly. "We can, but we'll have to put a cloth between the books and the log," I said. "It's filthy and the books are precious. How high would you like it to be?"

"About the height of your chest—the middle of the log, I mean."

Moments later, the heavy piece of wood sat atop four of Uncle Varrus's books, which were safe beneath a heavily embroidered covering cloth from the long table at the end of the room. The midpoint of its height came even with my breastbone and its top sat level with my chin. I stepped back and turned to her.

"There you are, Lady."

"My thanks. Now stand away." Her tone was fierce, her words clipped. I moved away, masking my smile behind my hand for the few remaining moments of its life.

With a speed I could scarcely credit, her right hand came up from her waist, unsheathing a knife in passing, then flashed downward, and a blurred streak passed my eyes and hammered into the raw wood with a solid thunk. Without waiting to see the result of her throw, Shelagh had spun on her heel and retreated two paces before spinning back and repeating the performance. Three times more she repeated this maneuvre, never pausing for an instant, so that by the time I had begun to come to terms with what I had witnessed, she stood ten paces farther down the room from the spot in which she had begun. My eyes had never even sought the target. I had been completely enthralled in watching her movements. Now she spoke to me, her tone still iron.

"Some skill, I think. Take a look!"

I stepped forward to the target, fully aware of it for the first time, and gazed, speechless, at what she had done. All five knives stood together, the buried tips of their blades touching, the thickness of their handles forcing them outwards into a wedge-shaped, solid bar.

"Good God, Shelagh," I gasped. "Where and when and how could you learn to throw like that? That seems impossible. I would have sworn no one could ever do that with accuracy, let alone at that speed!"

"When? I've spent my whole life learning how to do it, but I had a natural ability to start with," she answered, now sounding almost subdued.

"I know, Donuil told me you could kill a running rabbit with a knife as a mere child, but I thought he was exaggerating out of admiration and loyalty."

"No, it was true. But when I was older, though still a little girl—I was eleven at the time—and he was away with his brothers, something happened that Donuil knows nothing about. I was attacked in the woods while walking with a cousin. Her name was Rhona and she was older than I—much older. The man who did it leapt on Rhona and I ran away." Her voice had dropped almost to a whisper. "But before I ran, I threw my knife at him. It hit him in the throat, where I had aimed, but hilt first, and he laughed at me, then knocked my cousin down and chased after me. I escaped, terrified out of my wits, but he went back and raped and killed my cousin. I swore then that I would never miss with a thrown knife again, that the next man I aimed at would fall down and die with my blade in his throat and would never harm another woman. And so I learned my craft better than any other I have known. How did I learn? you asked. I learned by doing it. I threw, and threw and threw again until I learned to gauge the flight of any blade, once I had held it in my hand. I threw and threw until my arms—I throw with both— grew into wooden beams that moved down and through the same motion, exactly, every time. I threw until both my wrists became inured to endless throwing, and grew thicker than the wrists of any of my friends—you see?" She extended her arms to me, stretching them beyond the sleeves of her blue robe and, sure enough, the wrists, and her entire forearms, were thick, dense-looking and strongly muscled.

"That only leaves the 'where' of your questions, Master Merlyn. I learned wherever I happened to be at any time. I learned at home; I learned while working; I learned through endless hours and days and weeks of practising when other little girls and young women were learning women's skills, and yet I learned those, too. I learned while hunting and fighting with the men of our people, for among our folk there is no shame in being a woman and a warrior. You knew that, did you not?"

I nodded. "I did. It is the same among the Celts of this land. Women fight beside their men when danger threatens."

"Aye, and danger is never far afield." Her voice was now almost inaudible.

I turned once more to look at the five knives standing in the solid log. "You could do that again, right now," I murmured. It was an assertion, not a question.

"Aye, I could, but I'm no longer angry, and anger helps. I could do it again, nevertheless, and had you the nerve to blindfold me, then stand behind the log and speak to me, I could place all five blades into it from your throat to your breastbone before you had time to scream." She paused. "You would not do that, would you? Trust me that much?"

I hesitated, caught off balance by the suddenness of her challenge. Would I? I thought I might, but had to clear my throat before I could pronounce the words.

She smiled. "Then you would be a fool; a trusting fool worthy of gratitude, but none the less a fool for that. Accidents do happen, Caius."

I turned away again and began to prise the blades from the wood, finding it far from easy. When I had all five, I took them to where she stood and held them out to her, hilts forward, watching as she sheathed them, one after the other.

"Shelagh," I said, "you are magnificent."

She smiled at me, almost sadly. "No, but I know you mean that, so accept my thanks, for that, and for the other things."

"The other things?" I was puzzled, suddenly unsure of myself again. "What other things are those?"

"Your silence, and your reticence . . . respect, perhaps."

I felt my face grow red. "Forgive me, I don't know what you mean."

"Oh yes you do, Cay. I've seen you, felt you, watching me and known what your thoughts were. I am no maiden, to run blushing at such thoughts. But I am sworn to your friend, his wife in fact as well as name, and neither you nor I could ever deceive him or betray him in such manner."

I swung away, mortified at my own transparency, but she caught hold of my sleeve and turned me back to face her.

"Look at me, Caius Merlyn, look at me!"

I looked, cringing inwardly, and saw no sign of censure in her eyes, which gazed at me steadfastly. And then she smiled again, sweetly and gently, a smile of utter friendship.

"Here am I talking to you of maidens' blushes, and you outshine them all. Think of it thus, Cay: I am a woman, not a child, and aware that you perceive me as a woman. And I am flattered, as a woman, that I can attract the man you are. But I am a warrior, too. Never lose sight of that. I am a warrior, with a warrior's skills and depths. I have trained and hunted with men throughout my life, lived among them, fought with them and heard them speak of men's desires and lusts at all hours of the day and night through peace and war. I have killed men. And I have lain with some. No woman—and few men, for that matter—can survive a battle among comrades and not be physically drawn to some of them. You are a warrior, too, a soldier; you know the kind of fellowship shared peril breeds."

She paused again, staring at me keenly. "Do you understand what I am telling you, Caius Merlyn? These feelings you have, which you have been so painfully determined to conceal, are not one-sided. I feel them, too. That is why they persist; because I have allowed them to. Had they been unwelcome, I would have stamped upon them long before now, in any of a hundred ways that you would have accepted without ever knowing of my awareness. Do you hear me?"

I nodded, slowly, wonderstruck but still incapable of speech.

"Hmm," she said, smiling slightly. "Good. Do you feel any better? You look as though you've been hit on the head."

Dumbly, I shook my head. She laughed and grasped my wrist, pulling me with her towards the chairs that she and I had occupied a few days earlier.

"Sit down, and let me put some wood upon the fire, then we will talk further. Is there anything to drink in here? Would you like some mead?"

I paused in the act of sitting, and straightened up again, forcing myself to swallow in the hope it might release my tongue. "No," I rasped, then cleared my throat loudly and captured a more natural tone of voice. "There's nothing in here, but I can call for some."

"Good, then do that, while I arrange this fire."

I cannot recall what thoughts went through my mind as I moved about the house thereafter. I know there were no servants to be found, and I ended up finding the mead myself and carrying it back to where she waited, and I know that as I entered, kicking the door shut behind me, and moved towards the fire, she sat watching me and smiling that small, friendly smile. I poured the mead and handed her a cup, then sat across from her, feeling the flames against my face and legs, and seeing the way her five, sheathed knives seemed to cling to her form, finding their own relaxed positions and each caressing her with intimate familiarity. She raised her cup to me and tipped it, spilling a small libation on the floor.

"Let us drink to ourselves, Caius Merlyn, to us and to our secrets: to the discussions we have had, the pair of us, and to our friendship, which will be permanent, I think, and spiced with innocent attraction and respect. I, too, may look, and lust inside with no harm done." She laughed, a lovely sound brim-full with mischief, then grew solemn. "We drink also to our friends and to our obligations, to the duties by which we are both almost gladly bound; and to your infant King, his destiny, and the families and lines from which he springs. What was it you called it? The great Dream of the Roman Eagles who founded Camulod.' Now there is a worthwhile litany of reasons why we should enjoy this mead. Will you not agree?"

"Aye," I said, feeling wondrously relieved. "And willingly, to all of them."

"And have you none to add? None of your own?"

I smiled easily now. "Aye, that I have, now you mention it. But we drink first to yours."

We touched the rims of our cups and sipped the fiery beverage they held, and I luxuriated in the honeyed glide of pleasure on my tongue.

She licked her lips and smacked them together. "Not as good as my own," she said. "But not trivial, either." She shifted in her seat and looked at me again. "Your turn; your list."

I took my time, enumerating and then refining the list of gratitudes I felt. Shelagh waited patiently.

"We will drink this time to us, once more, without constraint, and without regret: to this remarkable freedom from guilt you have granted me, and to the . . . obligation you have outlined in that granting. We drink to friendship, yours and mine, unorthodox as some might choose to see it, and that which we share with others. We drink also to Destiny and Duty, two fearsome taskmasters, as you have said, and to tomorrow . . . all tomorrows, in the hope and trust that they will bring fulfillment and contentment." I paused, and tipped the libation on the floor. "Will that suffice, think you?"

"For the gods, or for your list? I think both will be well." She raised her cup to mine again and we drank, then sat for a time in silence, gazing into the flames until I roused myself.

"What time of day is it, I wonder?"

"Around mid-morning." She spoke without looking at me. "Perhaps later, near the three-quarter point, but short of noon. Should you be elsewhere?"

"No, not until noon, but by then I must be dressed in formal parade gear. I still have time." I savoured the last mouthful of my mead.

"My sons—our sons, mine and Donuil's—will be companions to your infant King, you know. Had you thought of that?"

"No, I had not." I shook my head, ruefully. "But you may have daughters."

"Shame, Caius Merlyn! Do you doubt me now? I will have sons. I told you long ago when first we met; two of them, Gwin and Ghilleadh. And they will be companions to your ward, young Arthur. . . Cousins, too."

I shook my head, enjoying this sudden, novel feeling of relief from tension between myself and this delightful woman. "Come, Shelagh, you're not even yet with child."

She laughed. "Not even bedded, as a proper wife."

"No, but think what that means. Arthur is six months old and more, already. By the time your first son is born, even if Donuil were to come tonight and quicken you at once, there would be fifteen months between the two youngsters, and that means thirty months between your youngest and young Arthur. That is a vast gulf during childhood."

"Aye, but childhood is brief. Three years is nothing at all between young men. Look at yourself and Donuil; what is there, nine years between you? Besides, when two or three children grow up close together, age has little influence. Only when an elder child has other friends of his own age does difference emerge."

"But that will be the case, Shelagh! It seems there are children being born everywhere in Camulod today. Only last night, at dead of midnight, I met Lucanus on his way to a birthing. The child was born safely, to the young wife of one of our councilors. It was a boy. They'll call him Luke, Ludmilla told me earlier. So there's one more companion for the King."

"No, there will only be the three, Arthur and Gwin and Ghilleadh. Believe me." Her voice had altered somehow, and I felt a chill run over me, raising the small hairs on my neck and shoulders, but then she was speaking again in her normal tones, quite unaware, it seemed to me, of having said anything strange. "How long had you been standing there, behind me, before you spoke this morning?"

I looked at her then, remembering and smiling. "Not long. Why?"

"I don't know. I was wondering, but idly, if there is more to this 'attraction' than I had thought. It had been my intent to seek you out today, somehow, even though I was well aware of the demands upon your time."

"Why? Why seek me out? To what end?"

"To provoke this talk and deal with the things that had been troubling me. I dreamed of you last night."

My guts contracted as dismay expanded in my breast. "Oh . . . Was it. . ."

"No, not one of those." Her smile was fleeting but her headshake was emphatic. "No prophesy this time; mere fancies, vivid and very real, but disjointed and confusing, most of them erotic. I dreamed I lay with Donuil, and could feel him within me, but sometimes it was you—never for long; never sustained—but there, from time to time. I woke up at one point, in some distress, over what I can't recall, but I decided to do something, to speak to you of this. I wondered, lying there awake in the middle of the night, what effect your dreams might be having on you. If this fragmented chaos of sleeping images could distress me, safely asleep in all good conscience, what might yours be doing to your peace of mind, with all your strictures and your disciplines and loyalties? I've watched you, Cay, and I have seen your agonies of guilt, though the gods know no such guilt was ever less deserved." She shrugged. "And you came here, unexpected. Or were you unexpected? Had I guessed, though unaware of it, that you would come here? I don't know."

Before I could answer her, we heard the sound of studded boots approaching in the passageway outside, and then someone knocked on the door.

"Commander Merlyn?"

"Yes, Marcus, I'm here."

"You asked me to remind you when the time had come to dress, Commander. I have your parade uniform prepared."

"Thank you, Marcus. I'll come directly."

The footsteps receded again and I stood up and moved close to where Shelagh sat, her eyes once more upon the flickering flames in the big brazier. "Shelagh," I said, speaking to the top of her head, "I am leaving here a very different man from the one I was when I first walked in. I know not what this . . . thing, this feeling, this sense of inner freedom is, or whence it sprang, but I am full of it and I know it is your gift. For that. . . for all of it. . . for yesterday, today and all the tomorrows to which we drank together, I am too grateful ever to be able to find words to define my gratitude. But you will know it. You'll see it every time you see my face or hear my name. That is my promise."

She rose to her feet smoothly and with great speed, turning to face me in mid-motion and looking me directly in the eye. The belt of knives seemed natural across her front.

"I know that, Caius Merlyn, and it gladdens me. You have been too sad, too guilt-stricken in past days, but that's behind us." She grinned at me, her huge, wide eyes flashing with wicked humour. "Lust if you must, but keep your hands about yourself, my friend. Thus, we may both enjoy, without false guilt. Now go, before someone finds us and sets all our good work to naught with idle talk."

I left her there by the fire and strode out into the day with a lightened heart and the strength of twelve tall men.

I opted to exercise the privilege of rank again, for the second time that day, and avoided the festive midday meal, although there was no way to avoid the sound of it. I chose to spend that time alone, and had Marcus, my temporary adjutant—an assigned replacement for the absent Donuil—make alternative arrangements on my behalf. Then, nibbling at a platter of food he brought me in my quarters, and preparing myself mentally for the formal activities that lay ahead, I spent a half hour going over all the arrangements in my head for perhaps the hundredth time. Eventually, when I was sure of having done all that I should have done there in the fortress, I slipped quietly out through the postern gate and found my horse, saddled and ready, where I had told my man to leave it, prior to joining the general festivities. Unseen by anyone, I allowed my horse to pick his way down from the heights, and then I spurred him, galloping all the way round the hill of Camulod to the camp built at the bottom of the hill before, and again after, Lot's treacherous attack years earlier.

I have always found it stranger than merely strange that I should have difficulty recalling the events of that afternoon. "Strange" is a foolish and feeble word to use in describing the blankness of my mind regarding all that passed. I think of words like "ominous" instead, but even that would be misleading, for no ill came out of that day's gathering. The plain truth is, it led to great success on every front, in every way. The events and decisions and the sheer enthusiasm engendered in that single afternoon marked, clearly and undeniably, the beginning of Camulod's most truly potent years, a period that was to span three decades. At the end of the clay itself, I was aware of all that had transpired—I must have been, for I was there, in charge, and in full health. But the time that came immediately thereafter absorbed me totally in other things, demanding all my skills and all my efforts, so that when I came to look back, eventually, on what had seemed at the time to be a momentous and portentous day, my mind was blank. The urgencies that had led up to it had been revealed by then, with the passing of time, as lacking stature, and had been replaced by greater urgencies and imperatives.

Dedalus distinguished himself that afternoon; no one had any doubt of that. His friends agreed his time had long been wasted as a soldier, and that he should have been upon a stage somewhere in Empire's headlands, stealing the hearts of emperors and languid women. There is no doubt he achieved what he set out to achieve: to win the hearts of all the Camulodian warriors and bind them into unity and amity again. He used me and Ambrose as his template, dwelling upon our startling similarities and on our different disciplines. He emphasized the difference of our births and boyhoods, one bred and raised right here in Camulod, the other in a distant part of Britain, yet both sprung, irrefutably, from Camulodian stock. Now we were joined as one, Commanders of Camulod and individually indistinguishable one from the other and yet. . . and yet. . . one fought with cavalry, the other infantry. Together, using all our combined skills, he told them all, we could conquer the world! And would they quibble over which of us they followed?

It was heady stuff, presented with the flair and brilliance of a born actor who could charm tears from statuary. But, it appears, the true mark of his triumph was that he had them all convinced, swearing eternal comradeship, even before he introduced the new training schedule Ambrose had devised, to teach each discipline the tactics of the other and make it possible for those gifted one way or the other to transfer between commands. That was the binding ring that sealed the staves into a barrel. From the moment the new plans were announced, the schism had ended.

I do remember, with great clarity, that at one point shortly before the parade was dismissed, I saw a single snowflake drifting down to cling to the tail of Rufio's horsehair crest. I looked up to search for more, but saw nothing. The snow that had fallen before dawn had almost vanished beneath the trampling of so many feet, but the cold persisted. I continued to scan the faces ranked before me, filling every available space in the camp's parade ground. Some of them, many of them now, I knew by sight, and many more by name as well. But some were yet strangers to me, although they all knew me. Another flake came down, and then a third, large, fat and as light as thistledown. And then, as Ambrose gave the order to dismiss, the snow began to fall in earnest, hushing everything, it seemed, and obscuring the milling mass of men heading for shelter.

Ambrose was looking at me, smiling, his outstretched hand held upwards to the caressing snowflakes, which landed on his palm and disappeared. "Well, Brother, what think you? An omen?"

I attempted to catch some of the falling flakes in my right hand. "Perhaps," I said. "We will know tomorrow, if it snows all night. But I feel sorry for the outgoing troops. They'll not be too happy, slogging their way through this to the cold outposts. When do they leave?"

He threw his arm across my shoulders. "Within the hour. They'll reach the first line camps by dark and stay there overnight. In the morning, those who have to go to the outlying posts will make their way there, regardless of the weather, but the quartermasters have already issued winter gear. They won't be cold . . . or not too cold."

Because of the extraordinary numbers gathered for the parade, the Council Chamber had been allotted to the garrison officers for the remainder of that day and night, and I joined Ambrose and the others there for a celebration the like of which had never been known within the fortress. By the time I left to seek my cot, the entire courtyard was covered by a thick carpet of snow so that, on an impulse, I walked as far as the main gates and stepped out onto the bare hillside at the top of the hill road. The silence was absolute, and the falling snow seemed like a living thing. I went back in, bidding the guard a good night, and went to sleep. Ambrose, it seemed, might see his wish come true if the snow persisted for another day. It was still cold, and I threw my cloak on top of my blanket before I climbed into bed.

XXIII

It snowed for seven days without respite, with intermittent, ferocious windstorms blowing and piling the drifting snow to incredible heights, death-filled depths and fantastical shapes. The eighth day dawned upon a motionless, utterly silent, white-shrouded emptiness beneath a solid mass of heavy, uniformly grey cloud. The snow had stopped and people began to emerge into daylight again, peering around them in stupefaction at the manner in which their universe had been altered. Before noon, the snow began to fall again, in a different form this time, the flakes much smaller now, and dense, like tiny chips of ice. In mid-afternoon the temperature plummeted within an hour, and remained at its lowest for nine more days and nights, immersing us in a frigid chaos of misery the like of which no one could remember. Exposed fingers, noses, ears and chins would freeze within moments, even out of the bitter wind. This cold was such that bare skin would adhere to metal, if one were foolish enough to permit such contact, and in the first few days many of us were.

No one had ever known such brutal cold, and soon it became lethal. Entire families living beyond the fortress wall, thinking the worst was over when the first snowfall ended, chose to remain in their homes rather than run the risk of attempting to make their way to safety in the fort, and froze to death when their supplies of fuel ran out during the days and nights that followed; many others, particularly the aged and infirm, starved to death, for neither fuel nor food could be obtained while the storm was raging, and both young and old, who went out into the storm to search for one or the other, lost their way in a trackless wilderness where only days before there had been pathways and clear landmarks to guide their steps. And as the cold killed people, so too it killed our stock; cattle and goats, swine and sheep and horses. Only those animals safely lodged and warm under roofs survived in any numbers. Most of our cavalry mounts remained safe. Of the remaining beasts, penned or abandoned under the skies without food, one in every three perished, a grim reminder of my own hubris in claiming, only months earlier, that we were rich enough, in the event of a poor harvest, to survive the winter months on meat alone.

Not until the first, most frightful phase had passed and life began to regain a form of normalcy did we in Camulod itself learn of the horrors that had stricken others less fortunate and more isolated than were we. We should have known, should have anticipated chaos. That was an opinion voiced by many who, armed with hindsight, could foretell that nothing so awful would ever occur again, were the matter left to them . . .

When first it broke upon us, that cataclysmic winter was a nightmare alien to everyone's experience. The oldest living in our lands, people like my own great-aunt and the Legates Flavius and Titus, each of whom had outlived seventy winters, had never known such weather, nor could they recall anyone from their early lives ever having spoken of such cold and ferocity. How, then, could any of the Council have been prepared for such a catastrophe, or anticipated the broad swathe of death those bleak November days would usher in?

December was nine days old by the time the vicious, killing cold abated the first time, although the snow had ceased to fall some days before. In Camulod, and in the camp beneath, we had been fortunate beyond our awareness, in that the mountainous supplies of firewood assembled for the convocation day had not all been consumed as intended because of the onset of the storm. By the latter days, however, all of it had gone, and even valuable, seasoned wood from the carpenters' stores had been exhausted. Large foraging parties were sent out to gather fuel as soon as the snow stopped, and they had painful, heavy, back-breaking work to find it and bring it back. Wheeled vehicles were useless, so our carpenters removed the wheels and fashioned skids and bound them to the axles of the wagons. Even so, the snow was too deep for the horses to plough through, and so our soldiers had to clear a path ahead of each team. Not since the days of the Emperor Claudius, more than four hundred years before, had soldiers worked so hard at building roads in Britain.

As they made their way through the wilderness, the forage parties began to find the dead. When the first news of such a discovery came back to Camulod, it was greeted with appalled anguish. Within the week, however, such grisly findings were all but commonplace and we had become inured to the new way of things. Many had died: the old, the weak and the unfortunate. Many more, however, had survived frightful deprivation under frequently incredible conditions. One family of seven had fed themselves for seven days on the body of an injured wolf that had died outside their hut. The father had fallen over it, hidden beneath the snow, as he ran out into the storm, in the vain, desperate hope of finding assistance for his starving children. They had boiled it, piece by piece, with melted snow to make a stew, and only the head was left when the soldiers came to rescue them.

It was inevitable that, having found the dead, we had no way of burying them. The frozen ground beneath its waistdeep robe of snow was impervious to mattock, pick or shovel. All we could do, it appeared, was store the bodies of our dead to await the thaw, and I awoke one night in a heavy sweat from a vivid dream of things to come. I had foreseen the thaw: the melting snow and dripping icicles; the warming air and the piles of stacked up corpses; and the still-frozen earth, yielding its hardness only with painful slowness to the mild air above. I was unable to sleep again that night and sat huddled by a tiny fire in the Armoury, shuddering anew from time to time as the memory of the stink of the rotting carcasses of more than one hundred friends and neighbours came back to me.

Even now, from the distance of decades and destinies, I have difficulty in writing of that time and that awful night, for foremost in that dreadful dream had been the rotting face of my beloved Aunt Luceiia. Luceiia Britannicus Varrus died on the last night of the Great Storm, as it came to be known. She was unaffected by either cold or hunger. She died only because it was her allotted time, and she died as she had lived, with tranquillity and dignity, slipping away peacefully in her sleep to join her husband Publius Varrus who, I had no doubt, stood waiting for her with her brother Caius, each of them leaning forward, stretching out a hand to help her from this sad world to their much brighter one. I was there, sitting by her bedside at the time, accompanied by Ambrose, Lucanus, Ludmilla and Shelagh, whom the old woman had grown to love as quickly as she had my wife Cassandra, my Deirdre of the Violet Eyes. One other had been present, a man called Enos, the last in the long progression of itinerant bishops who had been ever welcome in my great-aunt's home. Enos, who had arrived some days before the storm, had perforce remained for its duration. He had been praying constantly beside her bed for three entire days, unweakened in his vigil by any need for rest, it seemed to me—although perhaps he slept when I was absent—and consecrating bread and wine each day for her consumption in total certainty of her salvation. Ever a pragmatist, Auntie had known it was her time and was prepared. She had said all her farewells the previous day, and Lucanus had warned us that we should not expect her to survive another night. We sat grouped around her, watching her closely, and so gentle was her passing that none of us saw her final breath. There came a moment when I looked at Ambrose, questioning, and Lucanus stooped to touch her, and she had already gone.

The only tragic element in her departure lay in the timing of it; dead of peaceful and natural causes, she must now await burial with all the others killed by the storm. The knowledge of that haunted me, robbing me of sleep with visions of her high-cheeked, lovely face and fragile form stacked among others, stiff and frozen in an open-sided storage house, exposed to the icy wind. Our minds do strange things to us. I knew well she was not stacked like a piece of wood but lay alone and apart, where I myself had carried her, wrapped in a heavy shroud made from her own best bedspread and then swaddled in the dense-furred skins of bears, but the image persisted.

And then, sitting there before my tiny fire and staring into it, my mind took me among the flames, showing me things I had not known, and things I had forgotten lay therein: I saw once more the blue and white, lambent ferocity at the heart of the pyre that had consumed my father, searing my eyes and melting his flesh to ashes in the confines of his iron coffin; I saw the glowing, ill-shaped white-hot blade that would become Excalibur, as Publius Varrus pulled it from the red- and blue- and yellow-blazing charcoal of his forge; and I saw the blazing piles of fuel—bushes, trees and grass—that he had used years earlier to dry the muddy bed of a fresh-drained mountain lake, baking its viscous wetness into clay that he could break with pick and mattock until he reached mud again and then repeating the entire process until he found and could exhume his Skystone. And my heart began to pound as I discerned the meaning of such memories: Heat! Strong enough to melt flesh and bone; to smelt raw iron out of stone; to dry the liquid mud that lay beneath a lake. Heat, therefore, strong enough to melt the ice beneath it.

The following morning, I outlined my thoughts to Ambrose, who agreed that what I proposed might well be feasible. Our soldiers had already cleared broad pathways to the trees by then, felling and cutting to supply our fuel needs, then sledding the logs back to the base of the hill, where they were raised to the summit by an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys. This refuelling was a massive operation, involving the creation of common stockpiles on the plain beneath for the use of our other Colonists—we had learned that lesson quickly.

Now, with the adoption of the burial scheme, this drive took on a new intensity. A great, rectangular space was selected on the plain below, beside the military camp, and designated as the burial ground. It lay beside the older common grave of the Camulodian soldiers killed in repulsing Lot's first, treacherous attack long years before. Once designated, the space then had to be cleared of snow, a task that took two days and involved every soldier not assigned to other duty. An advance party had to dig its way forward from the camp's north gate to the closest point on the margin of the selected area, gauging their progress by signals from the engineers by the gates at the top of the fortress hill. As that party made the initial penetration, others advanced behind it, widening the access, shovelling the displaced snow into skid-mounted wagons, which shipped it back to where it could be piled out of the way in dirty mountains that could be left to melt in their own time.

Once arrived at the perimeter of the burial area, the advance party doubled in strength and then branched right and left, beginning the arduous process of clearing the borders of the rectangle, directed all the while by signals from the hilltop. Eventually, that task complete, they turned inward towards the centre, and as the working clearance grew, the number of workers increased in proportion, so that by the morning of the second day the work was running smoothly on all four sides and the project progressed with ever- increasing speed. The snow was uniformly almost shoulder high across the space selected, and dense-packed by the cold, incessant winds, so that it broke beneath the shovels like dry clay and, although heavy, was simple to handle.

As soon as the perimeter was wide enough to permit easy access, the skidded wagons served a double purpose, hauling snow outward to the dispersal points and bringing back fuel for the burning, spreading it thickly on the now-bare, hard soil of the northern end of the burial ground.

It had not escaped Ambrose that all this wood we gathered would be green and difficult to burn, and he proposed a solution that I thought again betrayed his brilliance. We had as many animal carcasses as human. Ambrose proposed stripping them of all fat and rendering that to liquid, which would then be poured upon the wood and itself used as fuel. The remaining meat, inedible because the animals had died and lain intact, was kept aside to be burned or buried later, after the main tasks were completed. The stench it would create were we to attempt, as one man had suggested, to burn it in the melting of the ground, would be unbearable to those on the hill above. In consequence, another large operation was simultaneously under way at the southern end of the site, where massive iron cauldrons, commandeered from the quartermasters, were suspended over fires to render down the fat of oxen and sheep, swine, goats and even horses. As each cauldron was filled, it was lowered with great care from the tripod that supported it and carried on a yoke between two men to where another team directed the disposal of the fat, taking care that none should be wasted and no part of the fuel should be untreated.

The fires at the north end of the area were lit the second night, long after nightfall, and by dawn, our men were out there, digging down through the warm ashes into the softened ground until the earth grew hard again beneath their picks.

The work was killing, but the task was completed as expected, and our dead were eventually interred with dignity and much solemnity, in the presence of the assembled populace of Camulod. It had taken ten long days to complete the task, and by the end of them everyone, and every animal in Camulod, stank from the omnipresent, cloying smoke. The bath houses on the hill and in the Villa Britannicus to the north of the burial ground operated throughout each night and day, and the furnaces and hypocausts never grew cool. And while all of this had been going on, a minor version of the same events occurred within the fort itself, where Luceiia Britannicus Varrus was laid to rest beside her husband and her brother, in new-turned earth that had been warmed to welcome her.

The cold abated finally, the temperature rising from the depths it had sustained for so long to the point at which it now seemed relatively warm, yet the cold was bitter still. The snow endured, too, although we had a period of three entire weeks without a fresh snowfall. And then the temperature soared, and the sound of running water was heard everywhere, and people wept for joy. For six sweet days it lasted, before the running water turned again to ice overnight and another storm swept in and held for four more days. This time there was to be no respite. And so it went on, with intermittent storms but always bitter cold, through January and into February.

By the time spring did arrive that year, early in March, people had begun to fear it might never appear at all. But come it did, and the snow and ice vanished gradually, and the grass grew beneath and new life appeared with shoots and buds and promise of green brightness. We were to discover, later, that a new phenomenon had touched our lands: large groves of trees, healthy the previous year, had died during that winter, killed, it would seem, by the appalling cold. Julia, the wife of Hector, our farmer Council member, had a pretty way of growing flowers outside her home, planting them each year in earthen pots, an oddity she had learned in her girlhood from an old nurse who had been raised in Greece. Hector and she had noticed that these flowers would die some years, if they were blighted early in their pots by a late frost, and he later attributed the same fate to the dead groves of trees, speculating that they might have suffered from the brief thaw that had come partway through the winter; that their roots might have stirred to life too soon and then been killed by the returning cold. It seemed reasonable to me at the time. I would never forget the ferocity of that searing cold.

In the earliest days of the final thaw, the aged Legate Titus, a dear-held fixture in my life since my seventh year, fell on a patch of ice and broke his pelvis. Lucanus did all in his power to assuage his pain, but the old man died within days of the accident. Within the month, his lifelong friend and companion, the Legate Flavius, who had sat steadfast by his friend's bedside throughout his final, painful days, had joined him in death, for no apparent reason other than that he had lost all will to live longer without his familiar. With him passed my last intimate contact with those who had known my own father, Picus Britannicus. I mourned both of them deeply.

If anything worthwhile emerged from that winter, it was the fulfillment of Ambrose's wish for unity among our men. Confined within the fort and equally within the outposts at the borders of our lands, the men of Camulod forgot the schism that had split them into jealous factions. Cavalry could not function amid snow that reached higher than the bellies of their horses, and so all the men of Camulod once more became mere soldiers, bunking together in cramped quarters, sharing the soldier's hardships and boredom, the sameness and the tedium. Yet there was a difference among their ranks: the foot-soldiers worked with the horses now, tending and feeding them; they learned the ways of horses, and they drilled with cavalry weapons, learning to sit on saddles and to ride with stirrups, to control a mount, even though they were confined to those small areas that had been cleared of surface snow.

Ambrose and I watched closely as the healing magic of propinquity and shared hardship welded our men together, and soon, one evening long before the final thaw arrived, we were discussing tactics and the order of our march to Cambria and Glevum. The winter must end soon, and we would be prepared. Our strikes on Glevum and on Cambria must come as quickly as the snows permitted us to move. Ambrose believed the harshness of the winter would aid us with Cambria, since the higher altitudes would remain snowbound long after we were free of snow. Glevum was a different matter, he believed, built as it was beside the river estuary, where fresh winds from the sea would have cut down the snow. What if the bireme had returned before our arrival, he wondered. Then we might face a force of five hundred or more men, fortified by the ruined town. What should we do then? Only the knowledge that the Berbers came from warmer climes made me feel sanguine. I felt sure that they would rather sit elsewhere and await the spring than voluntarily expose themselves to Britain's winter weather.

Lucanus had sat listening to us talk for some time, but had said nothing, and this unwonted silence finally made me aware that he was in the grip of some despondency. I interrupted Ambrose in mid-speech and asked Lucanus what was wrong, but he demurred, shaking his head and mumbling something that I did not hear. Ambrose, aware now, too, that something was ailing Luke, sat silent. Finally Luke admitted that he had been preoccupied with thoughts of Mordechai Emancipatus and his colony. If, as he suspected, the winter had been as savage there as we had known it, he feared greatly for their safety and welfare. As soon as he had named them, I myself became concerned, and feeling guilty that I had not thought of them before, I promised to visit Mordechai in passing, taking another wagonload of supplies to help them mend the ravages of the winter months. My promise allowed Lucanus to feel better, but I could see he would not be at ease until I had fulfilled it and brought back word that all was well with the lepers.

I had difficulty that winter, deep within myself, in dealing with the deaths of three companions, my great-aunt and the two Legates, yet somehow, for reasons I could not explain, I could weep for none of them. Winter had ended by the time old Flavius died, but there was still winter in my soul. Each night, in Auntie's family room, which now was mine alone since Ambrose would not hear of sharing it, I met for hours with Ambrose, Ludmilla, Shelagh and her father Liam. Lucanus was more times present than absent at these sessions, which followed no pattern but evolved steadily into what became my new family life. Less frequently we might be joined by others, among them Dedalus, Philip, Benedict and Rufio, and Hector and his wife Julia, who had formed close friendships with Ludmilla and Shelagh. To my great surprise one evening, I discovered that these two had decided, for some reason unquestioned by anyone, against calling their child Lucanus and had named him Bedwyr. On hearing that I turned to Luke, surprised, but he had frowned, shaking his head for me to hold my tongue, and I made my mind up to ask him another time what had led to this reversal.

I got my chance one day when we spent the afternoon together in one of the smithies, incidentally the warmest places in the fortress, where I had taken a whim to work on my own at fashioning a spearhead of the kind Donuil and I had talked about in Eire. We had been speaking of celibacy, with no great ease on either side, continuing a conversation begun and abandoned days before, when we had been interrupted. Laying aside my hammer, and thrusting the rough spearhead among the coals to heat again, I unburdened myself and told Lucanus of my lust for Shelagh, and of its resolution. Now that Shelagh and I had discussed it openly, I told him, exposing it for what it was, mere natural attraction and no cause for shame, the sullen burn of it had left me, but the knowledge of my knowledge, if he could follow the direction of my thoughts, was there, a constant, never wavering distraction. It made my earlier talk of celibacy, I told him, mere talk. Shelagh had now become a constant in my life, beneath my eyes, within my reach each day, and although I no longer felt the driving guilt and lustful yearnings I had had before, the fact remained that I admired her greatly and would take her to wife tomorrow if, God forbid, Donuil were to come to harm in Eire. How could I become truly celibate, living in such a condition, with mind and body in constant turmoil?

When I had finished speaking, Luke sighed and swung away from me, clasping his hands behind his back, and I felt my gut spasm in misgiving, thinking I had offended him. He remained that way for long moments, holding himself stiffly erect, then slumped and turned to face me. My eyes sought his as he turned, but there was no anger in his expression. Instead, there was something I could not identify. He unclasped his hands from behind his back and examined the palms minutely, peering at them closely, and when he spoke his words held no significance for me, seeming to have no bearing upon anything that I had said.

"Caius, why do you think Hector named his son Bedwyr?"

I blinked at him, bereft of a response to such a non sequitur. He smiled, a wan, sad smile, lowering his hands. "I have a reason for asking."

I shook my head. "I have no idea. I know Julia wished to name the child for you. Hector, evidently, had other notions and preferred Bedwyr. But what has that to do with Shelagh?"

"Nothing, yet perhaps everything. The child is Bedwyr because that is the name chosen for him by his mother. I suggested it to her."

"Very well, I accept that. Ludmilla told me at the time that you had seemed unwilling to have the child named in your honour. But was Julia not offended? Was she not hurt by your rejection? It appears rather cruel to me, hearing of it thus."

"Aye." Luke nodded. "At first she was, but I explained my reasons, and she accepted them with great courtesy. And then she asked me to propose another name. Bedwyr was in my mind, I know not why. I said it, she accepted it, and so the child was named."

I felt my own confusion upon my face. "But what has that to do with me and Shelagh?"

"Nothing, Caius, but it has everything to do with your condition . . ." He waited, smiling more naturally now, waiting for my reaction. When he saw that my confusion had merely increased, he spoke again. "The child's mother, Julia, is the only woman in more than thirty years who has come close to making me regret my celibacy. Her mere existence disturbs me deeply. I lust for her, asleep and awake, and I am an old man." My mouth fell open but he spoke on, now giving me no opportunity to respond. "The mere sight or recollection of her fills me with terror and with thoughts and sensations I would have sworn were dead within me. Aware of that, the prospect of having a child of hers named after me would have been unbearable, a living reminder of my weakness. So you see, Caius, you are not unique, and no one, ever, is impervious to lust."

"Good God, Luke! And you told her this?"

"Not entirely, but she understood."

"And now what? How does she behave towards you?"

He shrugged. "Entirely as she always has, with kindness and consideration. Only with a more marked avoidance of approaching me too closely."

"She avoids you?"

"Not at all. She is merely gracious enough not to tempt me more than she must by her presence."

"You did tell her!"

We were interrupted at that point by the arrival of Dedalus who sought to drag me off to speak with Achmed Cato on a disciplinary matter. I held up my hand to stay Ded and indicate that I would come directly, but I kept my eyes on Lucanus. He smiled again and shrugged his shoulders. "Some of it. As in your case, I benefited thereby. Confession is good for the soul."

I heaved a great sigh of relief, feeling enormously better. "Thank you for this, Luke," I said, turning to where Ded stood frowning at both of us, curious as he always was. "I know how difficult it must have been, but I appreciate your candour."

Later that evening, in the family room, I watched Julia closely, marvelling over what Luke had told me. She was a comely, wholesome, healthy young woman, generously fleshed, aged somewhere short of thirty I suspected, with a pleasant, happy nature and an ever-ready smile. She doted visibly upon her husband and upon the son she now held easily within the cradle of one arm. But I could see no reason for Luke's lust. She was no Siren, bearing more resemblance to Juno, with her double chin and ample, milk-swelled breasts, than to Venus. Lucanus ignored both her and me that night, until the bishop Enos wandered in and settled by the fire and the talk changed to churchly things for once. Enos was saying that the Church maintained its methods of communicating from one land to another, so that the word could go from bishops in Britain to others far afield, like my old friend Bishop Germanus in Gaul. That captured all my attention, and when I asked him if he was saying a letter could be sent from one land and delivered safely in another he seemed surprised that I might doubt it for a moment. From that moment on, Germanus remained foremost in my thoughts, and that night I sat down to write to him.

Germanus Pontifex

From Caius Merlyn Britannicus

Greetings:

I write to you as bishop, though recalling you clearly as Legate, soldier and friend, in complete uncertainty that you will ever read my words.

My father's aunt, Luceiia Britannicus Varrus, of whom we spoke when first we met on the way to Verulamium, has recently died, as have some other, aged friends, and my grief is still fresh and new. She was old when I met you, as you may recall; too old to make the hundred- mile journey to hear your judgment on the teachings of my father's friend Pelagius. Seven years have passed since then, and she has finally expired.

Much has occurred in my life during those years, Master Germanus, and I had met no other bishop since that time until my aunt lay dying. She was devout, and faithful to the teachings of her gentle Christus, and she took pleasure all her life in the sustenance of His labourers, the bishops and the wandering men of God who keep this land of ours enlightened.

One of these men, calling himself Enos, was present at her bedside when she died, and consecrated bread and wine to her salvation. He has no home today, no Seat to oversee, now that the towns in this fair land of ours are fallen into ruin. You were correct in that, prophetic. Now Enos wanders, as he says, "wherever Heaven bids him," and he tells me that the Church is stronger here in Britain nowadays than it has ever been. When there were towns, the Christians held the towns, but the majority of rural folk were pagan pantheists. Now that has changed, he tells me, and the Word of God is everywhere throughout the land.

I asked about your schools. In Verulamium you had decreed that schools be founded to instruct the teachers in the ways of God. Where are they? He answered that they are within the hearts and minds and bodies of such as he; that their classrooms are the open glades and riverbanks and village pastures; that their students are the people, all the folk, including Saxons.

That disturbed me. It still does. Saxons are not "the folk." The folk of Britain are the native Celts and the descendants of four hundred years of Roman life and Roman occupation. Enos told me I am unchristian to deny God's wealth to any. I responded that God spread His wealth with even-handedness and that I grudge no man God's wealth, providing he enjoys it in his own homeland. So he it, I fear I may be damned.

I transmit this with Enos, who has hopes that it may reach you, somehow, in your home in Gaul. I hope it may, but were it lost forever, the writing of it has eased a troubled mind. Farewell

Merlyn Britannicus

Post Scriptum:

I rejoice to tell you that I have heard nothing in years from that new breed of Roman priests whom you called the monastics. You, for your part, may take pleasure in the knowledge that the name Pelagius has faded from our tongues . . . and hence from the minds of all save errant fools like me.

The advent of spring revived imperatives that could no longer be neglected or denied. Before the last of the snow had melted from the ground, our horsemen were manoeuvring again, the veteran cavalry once more forming the tight formations we had evolved through the years and sharpening the skills we had been unable to practice through the long months that had passed. New cavalry troops had been created, too, during the winter, and now rode in groups and squadrons, though without the tightly disciplined sharpness of the others. These men had learned to ride in theory only, walking or trotting their horses on the frozen drilling plain, learning the basic features of control. None of them, however, had ridden at the canter, and none had known the elemental freedom and power born of being astride a running horse at full gallop. Now they began to learn, and many a flying rump learned painfully that the frost had not yet loosed its hold on the earth.

This training all took place in an atmosphere of good-natured raillery, but there was serious intent beneath the laughter. The thousand men dispatched this spring from Camulod would all be horsed. Five hundred would be seasoned cavalry, the other five experienced infantry, mounted for speed. When the time came to fight, as come it would, the two would act in unison, the infantry dismounted, in their own element, and the cavalry free to range widely, driving the enemy onto the spears awaiting in the infantry's serried ranks.

I sat my horse beside Ambrose and Dedalus one afternoon close to the drilling ground, on the road, some way above the wide-stretched plain, where I could watch the parties wheel and regroup. Beside me, Dedalus cleared his throat and growled, "Now there's a likely rider."

I turned and glanced to see who had attracted his attention and failed to recognize the rider who was galloping towards us, crouched low over the neck of a big black like my own that was running strongly. Only when the rider sat back, reining the horse into a sliding halt and pulling off the helmet did I recognize Shelagh, and such was my shock that I could not react beyond staring open-mouthed. She shook out her long hair, appearing extremely pleased with herself, and kneed her horse towards us, up the hill, and as she did so I heard my companions explode into howls of hilarity. Shelagh was dressed as a man, armoured from head to toe in my own black and silver colours. Heavy, ring-mail leggings covered her legs and a tunic of the same material hung beneath her cuirass. She came straight up to where I sat, and bowed from the saddle as deeply as her armour would allow.

"Are you surprised then, Merlyn Britannicus?" Her great, hawk eyes were flashing with pleasure and her teeth were alabaster white behind her crimson, wind-stung lips. I knew I must respond soon, and well. I could feel the eyes of my companions.

"Surprised?" I managed to say, forcing myself to drawl. "I am thunderstruck! I've watched your husband clutch one hand to his horse's mane and the other to his saddle for years, and had believed no Eirishman could ever ride a horse."

"Mayhap you're right, Commander, for I am a woman, though that might be hard to tell at this moment."

That brought another bark of laughter from my friends who, as they were quick to tell me now, had all conspired to keep me uninformed on this. Dedalus himself had been her teacher—a reluctant one at first, bound by the promise he had made her on the boat to Britain, to aid her in anything with which she might require assistance. Once begun, however, it had quickly become apparent to Ded that his tyro student had a natural seat upon a horse and was, in fact, a born equestrian. Excited by the discovery, but bound by a promise to say nothing to me, he had brought Rufio into the plot, and soon all eight companions of the Eirish expedition were taking turns to groom and train the prodigy. Ambrose, as joint Commander, had been admitted to the secret, too, since Shelagh's serious training could not go forward without the approval of either him or me. And so it was done. Of all the new recruits trained in the winter's exercise, Shelagh had been the most outstanding; the one spectacular success, adopted by the troopers to a man, so that they had combined to keep her presence hidden from my eyes.

At that point, I had turned to Shelagh. "Are these men telling me that you have ridden right before my eyes without my knowing?"

She grinned, completely unashamed. "Aye, and with your veterans, too! You've looked right through me, many times, though once you mentioned me to Ded for having performed well in a wheel sweep."

"Damnation," I said. "I need a drink of mead." I turned to the others. "I am not used to drinking with conspirators of any stripe, but all things change, it seems. Will you join me?" We rode uphill to the fort and retired to the family room, which Ludmilla and the other women of the household kept as pristine as it had been while its castellan yet lived there.

A week thereafter, to the day, our expedition left for Glevum and Shelagh rode with us, having earned her place. Even with the merit she had earned, however, I would have been loath to include her, had it not been for the fact that her father would ride with us, too, driving the wagon filled with goods for Mordechai, which he would unload before following us into Glevum, there to await the arrival of Donuil and Feargus's galleys bearing his livestock.

Her father's wagon would slow us down too much, I knew, even upon the great, straight Roman road that we would ride to Glevum, and so I seconded an escort of fifty men, under the command of Rufio, to ride with it and follow on our heels as quickly as they could. Shelagh stayed with her father, and I promised to rejoin them at the hostelry of the Red Dragon as soon as we had cleared the Berbers out of Glevum.

Huw Strongarm and his men went with us, too, but they remained on foot, serving as scouts. They left a day ahead of us and remained out of sight, save for a single man who came each evening, after we had camped, to tell us all was well and nothing moved ahead of us or around us.

We made excellent time, considering there were still large snowbanks on the great roadway among the deeper woods, and we came within sight of Glevum in the early afternoon of our fourth day out from Camulod. Huw sat on a milestone waiting for me two miles from the town. The Berbers were there, he reported, and had apparently wintered in one of the warehouses by the harbourside. They had grown careless and overconfident, doubtless through having remained undisturbed for months, and Strongarm's men had been able to penetrate the town itself in daylight without being discovered. He reported thirty-four Berbers present, all armed with bows and long, curving swords. No contact had been made with anyone, he said, so we might well surprise them if we proceeded cautiously.

His report caused me concern. I had thought to find more men than thirty-four, and said so. Huw shrugged and said nothing, since there was nothing he could say, and Dedalus proposed that the Berbers' numbers might have been severely depleted during the winter months. These people were not accustomed to cold, he pointed out. Their natural habitat was desert land, beneath the sun of Africa. I was unconvinced, but had no option but to concur. Huw now volunteered a plan.

His suggestion was based, he said, on the fact that all the Berbers were bowmen and afoot. My troopers, horsed or unhorsed, would be at a serious disadvantage among the streets and buildings. I nodded, telling him I knew exactly what he meant, for we had had precisely that problem on our previous visit. Now he suggested we permit him and his men to vanguard the attack. They were sixteen, all told, against odds of two to one, but if they were in difficulty they would fall back, their lesser numbers tempting the Berbers to pursue them beyond the town and into our grasp. I could not deny the logic involved, but the odds against Huw and his men depressed me. The compromise that immediately came to me, however, offered them a better edge. If our infantry were to penetrate the town under cover of darkness, accompanied by his bowmen, then we could arrange to split our forces into groups, arranged in open spaces, that would await the Berbers in pursuit of Huw's bowmen, who would lead them directly into our traps. The only obstacle anyone could find in that was that we had no way of knowing where these traps should be set up. None of us knew the town. Huw sat grinning, then offered to take me with him into Glevum, to see for myself and select my own spots.

The idea appealed to me immediately, and the inherent danger heightened its appeal. And so Dedalus and I, accompanied by Huw himself, the giant Powys, and Owain of the Caves, slipped into Glevum on foot in the light of day and made our dispositions in situ. We returned without having seen a sign of Berbers, though we could smell the smoke from their cooking fires.

That night, in the darkest hours before dawn, we made our way back again at the head of two hundred of our men, moving in stealth and silence, our arms and armour muffled against the slightest betraying clink of sound, and settled down to wait. We saw the dawn grow to day and the sun rise in the east in a clear blue sky before the first howls of outrage assailed our ears. We closed ranks immediately, four groups of fifty men, each assigned a specific location to which Huw's bowmen would lead their pursuers. It was over within the hour and our casualties were slight: two men killed and five wounded, none of those seriously. Of the two men killed, one was from Camulod, a veteran called Marc Mercus killed in the street fighting, and one a Celt, the hairless Elfred Egghead, killed in the opening moments of the attack by an arrow in the back, shot by a guard who must have been asleep, since Elfred had passed him by without seeing him. The Berbers fought hard, to the last man, evidently preferring death to the prospect of captivity. I myself had not bloodied my sword throughout the entire affair, and I led the withdrawal from the town assailed by a sense of foreboding. What should have been a satisfying victory had been a stale, unwholesome business.

We assembled our entire force on the flats beyond the town, within sight of the estuary, established a camp and allowed the men to break their fast. I left Dedalus in charge there and rode alone to meet with Liam's party, after which I would ride to visit Mordechai as promised, and then rejoin the army. We would leave for Cambria as soon as I returned the following morning.

Not all bad days are born of ill beginnings. The bright blue sky that had come with the dawn yielded to heavy, sullen clouds by mid-morning, and I found myself testing the chilliness of the wind as I rode, in fear of yet more snow. It was too warm for snow, however, and the truth of that was shown when a heavy spattering of fat raindrops swept from the west and rattled audibly against my helmet. I wrapped my cloak more tightly about my shoulders and rode on, but the rain held off.

I arrived at the site of the Red Dragon hostelry well before noon, after a two-hour ride, to find Liam, Shelagh and their escort already awaiting me. Of the hostelry, however, all that remained was a black pile of charred and broken beams covered by icy, brittle-crusted snow. The fire that had destroyed it had obviously occurred before the onset of winter, and I assumed the Berbers had been responsible. Angry at being thus bereft of the few moments' rest and warmth I had anticipated, I controlled my ill-humour and issued my new orders. Since Rufio reported that his party's progress had been uneventful, I sent the escort on to Glevum, where they could camp with their companions and enjoy a break, no matter how short, from the tedium of the journey. I kept back only Rufio himself to ride with me in company with Shelagh and Liam's wagon. The ride to Mordechai's colony was short from here, less than ten miles, and I saw no reason to expose our men either to contagion or the fear of it. We four would arrive well before nightfall, I estimated, unload the wagon, eat and sleep, and be ready to return again at first light.

The rain began to fall as we sat by the ruined hostelry and watched our men march off to be concealed by the forest that encroached here to the edges of the road. I glanced down at the cobbles between my horse's feet, seeing the raindrops overpowering the shrinking gaps of dryness on the stones, and saw a tiny sapling growing there. I immediately remembered Benedict's prediction and agreed with it, knowing conclusively that this road on which we sat would be destroyed and vanish completely within a hundred years. Behind me, I heard Liam click his gums, stirring the wagon horse to movement, and then the iron tyres began their clamour over the cobbles.

We soon discovered that Lucanus's worst fears had been justified and exceeded. Mordechai's colony lay empty and abandoned, all signs of life extinguished. I knew from the first moment, looking down into the tiny dell from the hillside above through a driving downpour, that we were far, far too late. There is an aspect of emptiness that speaks eloquently of abandonment rather than temporary relocation, and it consists largely of an impression of neglect; it is a visual impression, difficult to define yet unmistakable. This place had lain untended for long weeks, perhaps even months.

I had told Shelagh and Liam the tale of Mordechai Emancipatus on the journey from the ruined hostelry, and now we sat at the top of the rise for a long time, ignoring the rain since we were long since drenched, each of us wordlessly inspecting the scene below. Finally, faced with the choice of simply riding off without a closer look, or making some attempt to discover the when and how of things, I kneed my horse forward, bidding Liam remain where he was with the wagon. Shelagh and Rufio accompanied me, but I alone dismounted when I reached the threshold of the longhouse, with its sagging, open door. Full of the fears that had all but overwhelmed me on my first visit to this place, I held my breath and leaned forward to look inside the long, low building. There was no one there. I called aloud, still making no attempt to enter, and my voice echoed back to me.

Sighing, but relieved of the fear of having to enter, I turned away and swept my eyes around the grassy bowl that formed the common ground. Nothing. And then I saw the pot, the new one we had brought from Camulod on our first visit. It sat where I had seen it last, amid the long-dead ashes of the cooking fire, and it was scaled with rust, accumulated over months. Rufio spoke from behind me.

"How sick were these people, Merlyn?"

"Very sick, some more than others. Why do you ask?" I looked up at him, to see him staring off along the far side of the longhouse. He nodded in the direction of his gaze and I moved to where I could see what he was looking at.

"There's still a lot of snow piled up in there, out of the sun," he said. "They must have had it even worse than us these past few months. Some of them must have died."

"Aye, that's a fair assumption." I was eyeing the pile of snow uneasily, wondering what might lie beneath it.

"Then where are they?" Rufio asked, reinforcing my dismay. "There's no bodies lying around. The ground would be as hard here as it was in Camulod."

"You think they're there, under the snow?"

Rufio shrugged as I turned back to him. "They could be. They must be somewhere. And some must have survived and moved away, otherwise there would be at least one corpse lying around. The last one to die. No one would have dragged him anywhere."

"Aye, you're right, Rufio." Feeling immensely relieved at that realisation, I went directly along the side of the longhouse to the piled up snow, looking for some means of shovelling it aside, closing my mind resolutely against the fear of what might lie concealed therein. An old, broken shovel leaned against the wall and I seized it quickly, using it to scrape the surface snow aside and then digging carefully until I reached bare soil. There were no corpses there. I rejoined the others and swung myself up into my saddle.

"Nothing there at all, but you're right, they must be somewhere. Stay here, I'm going to look around."

I found nothing but the long-dead body of the horse we had left the lepers, but Rufio had ignored my order to stay where he was, and it was he who found the burial place. I heard his voice calling me from the woods opposite the longhouse, and arrived there to find him still astride his horse, a handful of his cloak held to his mouth. The pity of the scene was as overwhelming as the stench of it. A row of bodies lay arranged alongside each other, thirteen of them, each laid out in a semblance of decency and good order. Close by them someone, Mordechai, I had no doubt, had attempted to dig a pit large enough to inter them. It was wide and long, but less than a short-sword's length in depth, and its bottom yet retained the chipped, hard-broken look of frozen ground.

"Mordechai," I said. "He must have gone in search of help."

"Aye, but not long ago. Look at that one." The last body in the line closest to the unfinished pit looked different. We moved closer.

"This one's new dead, Merlyn," Rufio said, his eyes sharper than mine. "He's still fresh. Look, the skin's not even livid." I looked and it was true. This corpse could have been no more than eight or ten hours old, which meant that Mordechai could not be far away, since it must have been he who dragged the body here. As I sat there, feeling my heart accelerate, we heard Shelagh calling to us and kicked our horses to a trot, making directly for the sound of her voice. She was in front of the longhouse, in the act of swinging herself up into the saddle when we broke from the trees, and her excitement was clearly evident.

"Someone was here until this morning," she called as we approached. "Could it have been your friend Mordechai? I smelled fresh smoke inside the house, and sure enough, the ashes of the fire there are still warm. Whoever was here might still be close by, unless he had a horse."

"No, the only horse they had is dead," I answered her. "I found it over there, in the brush. It must have frozen in the storm. If this is Mordechai— and I would guess it is, for he's not among the dead—he'll be on foot, and probably extremely weak, since he'll be starving. Damnation! Where should we even begin to look?"

"That way and this." Shelagh swept her arm from left to right, indicating a faint, but clearly worn path that crossed the clearing in front of the long- house, disappearing into the woods on either side. "We know he didn't go towards Glevum or we would have seen him, and this path seems to be the only one leaving here. It has clearly been well used, if we split up and go both ways, one of us should find him."

"There's one more path," Rufio added. "I saw it when I found the bodies. It leads back into the forest, in that direction." He waved his arm towards the trees, at right angles to Shelagh's path. Three paths, three riders.

"Let's rejoin Liam and talk about this," I said, silently cursing the heavy rain, which seemed to be increasing.

When we had joined him, I explained the situation and Liam merely nodded and sat silent, waiting for me to tell them what to do.

"Very well then, we'll split up, one to each path. But let's be sensible in this. None of us needs to spend the night lost in the woods. We are on horseback, Mordechai's afoot. That means on a clear, unblocked path we should be able to move at least three times as fast as he can; probably four times faster. Let's assume he has been gone since early this morning, sometime after daybreak, eight hours or so. I calculate we have four hours or more of daylight left to us. But in two hours, each of us should be able to cover the entire distance he might have made on foot, so be aware of time! Two hours, no more. At the end of that, turn back, no matter what, and let's hope one of us will have found him by then. Liam, you stay here and wait for us. Light a fire if you can, but don't try too hard or too long. Everything will soon be too soaked to burn. Don't drown yourself in the attempt. Let's go. We have no time to waste."

Rufio took the path that he had found and Shelagh and I went east and west along the main pathway that crossed the clearing. I turned one last time to wave to Liam Twistback, whose eyes were on his daughter's receding form, and as I did so the sky was sundered by a blast of searing blue light, followed by a deafening crack of thunder that brought Germanicus up in a screaming rear of fright. I fought him down grimly, and swung him back onto the path again, letting him feel my spurs as I put him towards the storm-lashed forest.

XXIV

The day darkened rapidly as I rode along the narrow, twisting path among tall, close-packed, slender trees that bore delicate, pale leaves too small to impede the falling lancets of rain. The ground sloped upward steadily so that at times the pathway underneath my horse's hooves resembled a brook more than a footpath. About a mile from Mordechai's clearing, however, both the surrounding trees and the nature of the pathway changed for the better, giving way to a broader, drier path of needles carpeting the ground beneath soaring, heavy conifers. My mount responded quickly to the new ground underfoot, and for a time we made much better progress, increasing almost to a full gallop in places before the ground began to level out again and then slope downward. By this time I was riding through a craggy, rock-strewn landscape, where sudden cliffs, rearing up from the ground beneath and girt in places with the thick, gnarled roots of ancient trees, reminded me of the primeval forest we had traversed in Eire.

As we moved downward now, the slope increased and soon we dropped below the line at which the conifers began, finding ourselves again in a deciduous forest where the previous autumn's dead leaves, slick with the rain, made downward progress arduous and hazardous. At one point, the path became almost precipitous and I was thinking halfheartedly of dismounting and leading my mount down, when he made the choice for me, setting his hooves upon the slippery slope without a sign from me. Accepting that he knew what he was doing, I leaned back in the saddle, letting my reins go loose and trusting him to find his own way down. Avoiding the temptation to lean forward and see for myself where he was stepping, I looked about me instead, and saw the figure of a man hanging from a tree.

The sight terrified me for a moment, and the first thought that leapt into my mind was that I had found Mordechai. A second glance, however, told me I was wrong, because whoever the hanged man may have been, he had been swinging from that tree for months. Even in the semi-darkness of the hillside twilight, I could see the pallid glint of bones from where I was. In days, or weeks, now that the spring was here, nature would complete her reclamation and the last remains of this once-human thing would fall apart, dropping into the undergrowth beneath. Idly, and gauging only from the angle of the hillside beneath where he hung, I speculated that he had been bound on the ground beneath the tree, then hoisted into place by several others, higher up the hill. Sure enough, as I drew closer my eye picked out the other length of rope, stretching away beyond the gallows branch to the base of another tree farther up the hill.

I had reached the bottom of the descent safely and was riding on, eyeing the ghastly sight and idly wondering who the fellow could have been, when something else caught my eye. I could easily have missed it, gazing as I was at the rags and bones above, but that my horse shied and sidled, snorting nervously. I looked down and saw a tattered blanket lying on the path. Dismounting quickly, I gathered it up, saw it had been ripped apart and then saw bloodstains in the wool and the watery remnants of spilled blood beside where it had lain on the stony ground. Glancing backward, up along the slippery path we had just descended, I could now clearly see the marks where someone had fallen and slid down. Mordechai must be close by, I knew. Like me, he must have seen the hanging man and, distracted, had missed his footing and fallen, injuring himself.

I cupped my hands to my mouth and called his name several times, listening hard each time for a response, but I heard nothing other than the wind and rain. And then I saw fresh leaves and twigs in the mud, and beside them a deep mark gouged in the ground, and beyond that another, then another. It was plain that Mordechai had injured himself badly enough to have cut himself a crutch and padded the end with a piece of this torn blanket. I mounted quickly and set out to follow the marks he had left behind. Two hundred paces farther along, I came to a steep bank, which Mordechai had faced and failed to climb. His crutch marks, numerous and deep at the bottom of this clayey bank and deeply graven in the slick slope's surface, told the story eloquently. From there, accepting failure, he had veered aside and off the path, the marks of his crutch disappearing so steeply downward into the forest itself that I could not ride after him. Dismounting, I caught my horse's bridle and set out on foot, leading him, but quickly led him back up to the path again and tethered him. It would have been impossible to take him down into that wilderness and maintain anything approaching speed, and I knew that speed was vital. I knew, deep in my heart, that Mordechai was in deadly peril.

I found him a short time later, literally almost falling on top of him. The hillside was free of trees in this area; I had passed through the last of them some way above. The bushes that carpeted the hillside here, however, were so thick as to be almost impenetrable, and their very density permitted me to see where he had forced his way through them. And where he had gone I followed, almost to the end. I was saved from sharing his fate only by the fact that he, in falling, had grasped at a clump of shrubs on the edge of the abyss that had entrapped him, and from their condition it appeared that they had held him for some time, but he had been too weakened to pull himself back up and so had fallen. Using extreme caution, and aware of my heart thumping at my ribs from my close escape, I crept forward and peered over the edge.

Mordechai lay below me, much too far away for me to reach him, in the narrow, rubble-strewn bottom of a stark cleft in the hillside. The smooth rock face opposite me, at the foot of which he lay, seemed polished, stained with seepage and falling rain, and he lay sprawled at the foot of it, on his back, by the side of a strangely opaque, reflectionless pool that lay directly beneath my face as I peered down. His face was turned towards me and his crutch, identifiable by its padded end, lay lodged beneath his body. His left leg was obviously broken very badly, white bone splinters protruding from the shin, but I could see little blood. He was motionless, but I chose not to believe that he was dead. I called to him, but to no effect. Quickly I scanned the sides of the drop beneath me and saw that it, too, was sheer, like the other side, as though the rock had been cloven by a thunderbolt.

It was then, as I looked back towards him, that he moved, convulsing in a way that brought his right arm sweeping to hit a large splinter of stone that lay beside the edge of the dark pool I had noticed earlier. His arm hit the stone with sufficient strength to dislodge it and send it tumbling into the pool. My flesh crawled with horror, because I saw it fall and watched it disappear and there was no splash, no sound of any kind. What I had taken for a pool was a deep, black, bottomless hole in the floor of the crevice.

I rolled onto my back and sat upright, bracing myself on my straight arms and cursing the rain and my heavy armour. Mordechai needed help immediately, but I had no way of reaching him. He lay at least four times my own height beneath me, and even had I been able to climb down to where he lay, I could never climb up again, carrying him. My mind was filled with all the things I knew I could not do. I could not ride back for Rufio. By my reckoning, I had been riding for no more than an hour. One more hour to ride back would take me there just as the others were abandoning their search, with two hours yet to elapse before they won back to their starting point. By the time they arrived back it would be growing dark and we would still be one full hour away from here. Even were he still alive by then, it was clear to me that Mordechai would not survive the night, down in that hole in the cold and the rain. Even Liam Twistback was of no use to me. The path that lay between us was far too narrow, steep and dangerous for his large wagon. And then I remembered the rope from which the dead man hung, less than a mile away.

I scrambled back up the slope, mounted my horse and made my way back along the path to where I could climb up and cut the rope at the base of the tree that anchored it. The corpse fell to the hillside below me, disintegrating as it hit the ground, so that I had no worries about freeing the other end, and I began to coil the rope immediately, inspecting it as I brought it in. It appeared slightly worn at the point where it had lain across the tree limb for so long, but otherwise it seemed strong enough to do what I required of it. Another thunderclap rumbled away above as I finished the coils, satisfied with the weight and thickness of the rope. Looping it across my chest, I scrambled back down to my horse and made my way back to where Mordechai had left the track. There, remembering that there were few large trees below this point, I used my sword to chop down some strong saplings and cut them into lengths to use as splints. That done, I tore the remnants of his blanket into strips to bind the splints, then unrolled my saddle pack and removed my own thick, springy, waxed-wool blanket, wadding it tightly and securing it beneath my cloak where it would remain at least partially dry. I piled the remainder of my saddle pack's contents beside the path, and then removed my cloak again and divested myself of sword, helmet, shield and cuirass. They would be safe enough, I estimated, and I had no need of either their protection or their weight where I was going. I refastened the dry blanket against my ribs, secured my swordbelt, which now held only my dagger, and shrugged back into my heavy, wet cloak. Already the pleasure I had felt in freeing my head from my heavy helmet had gone, leaving me aware only of the runnels of icy rain trickling down my neck. Once I was certain I had everything that I might need, I slung the coils of rope across the saddle bow and led my patient horse once more into the wilderness of underbrush.

Mordechai had not moved, as far as I could tell, and was still unconscious. Wasting no time, I unloaded the coiled rope, the bundle of splints and the binding strips of blanket, then I went to tether my horse, looping his reins around a low-growing bush. Only then did I realize the true folly of what I was about. My horse, I knew, would remain where I tied him, no matter how loosely tethered. That was his training. But the rope by which I had thought to climb down to Mordechai required an anchor far stronger than a clump of low-lying shrubs, and I was already aware that there were no trees on this slope. The association, however, had escaped me until now! A hasty search revealed the full extent of my stupidity. There was nothing, not even an outcrop of rock that I could use as an anchor, and the rope was far too short to stretch uphill to the nearest tree. I was leaning against my saddle in despair, feeling the urge to weep with frustration, my face pressed against the leather, when my horse turned his head and nudged me with his muzzle. When I ignored him, he repeated the movement, this time nudging harder, pushing me. I stepped back and looked at him. "What? What is it?" He gazed at me and then tossed his head, whickering, as though trying to tell me something. Suddenly, and despite the seriousness of my situation, I felt the urge to laugh. Here I was, Caius Merlyn Britannicus, Legate Commander of the Forces of Camulod, talking with my horse, while a dreadfully injured man lay at the bottom of a hole in dire need of my help. And as I reflected on this, my gaze fastened on the pommel of my saddle and the horse whickered again, triumphantly, as though to say, "Finally! You see what I mean!"

My heart thudding now with excitement, I untethered him and led him slowly closer to the edge of the abyss, where I refastened his reins to another shrub. Then, carefully, I secured one end of the rope to the saddle horn, testing it firmly to make sure the knot would not slip. When I was sure it was trustworthy, I threw the end with the noose over the cliff, where it landed, with length to spare, close by Mordechai. I threw the splints and bindings after it, then turned to speak to my horse, calling him by his given name, a thing I did not often do, and one which he had come to know bespoke some special need.

"Germanicus," I said. "You are not the first Germanicus to serve a Britannicus, but today you have a chance to become the greatest. All you have to do is stand here, patiently as ever, and wait for me to come back to you. Can you do that?" He rolled an eye at me and I knew he could. I drew a deep breath, stepped to the edge of the abyss and sat on the edge, settling myself before taking a strong grip on the rope and rolling onto my belly. My horse stood gazing down at me with one great eye. "Remember," I grunted up to him. "Be patient. I will waste no time."

The rope was wet and hard, tearing at my hands which felt as though they were on fire before I was halfway down, but the rough hemp was far less harsh on me than was the cliff face beneath my knees and elbows. The descent seemed to take more time than I had thought possible, but I reached the bottom without injury, apart from scrapes and bruises to elbows and knees and one long, shallow cut on my right arm caused by a tiny snag of rock I had not noticed soon enough. Taking care to stay well clear of the frightening hole in the ground, I crossed to Mordechai, who was, as I had thought, deeply unconscious. When I placed my fingers beneath the points of his jaw, however, as Lucanus had taught me, I found his pulse strong and regular. Relieved, I turned to where the rope's end lay, and began to widen the noose. There was not as much rope to spare as I had thought, but there was enough. I grasped Mordechai by the shoulders and attempted to raise him up to where I could slip the noose over his head and secure it around his chest beneath his shoulders, but I must have twisted his shattered leg, because even in his deep sleep he moaned and heaved in protest. I knew then that I would have to splint that leg before doing anything else.

I diverted myself momentarily from the unpleasant task ahead of me by leaning forward and gazing down into the awful hole that gaped beside Mordechai. Fascinated, I picked up a large stone fragment and dropped it straight down, listening for the sound of its fall. I heard nothing, and remained there for long moments, contemplating what that meant before I turned, shuddering, back to my task. I worked quickly then, taking advantage of the fact that my companion was so deeply unconscious. I straightened the leg—a grim procedure marked by creaks and snapping, grinding sounds and much welling blood—by pulling on the ankle against the leverage of my own foot lodged in the side of Mordechai's crotch. He moaned again, three times, though still unconscious, and each time I felt sick. As soon as the leg was straight, I cleaned the worst of the blood from my hands before splinting the rough-set bones and binding everything tightly with the woollen strips I had prepared. Rainwater oozed from them as I tied the knots. That done, I reached again for the noose at the end of the rope, but the movement remained incomplete. As my hand stretched out, the air about me exploded in blinding light and I saw a ball of dazzling, unearthly brilliance flash down the cliff, pass in front of me and vanish upwards, streaking faster than my eyes could follow up the other face. Simultaneously, the walls of rock around me seemed to crack asunder, the sound, a solid, concussive impact, deafening me and throwing me aside so that I fell sprawling over Mordechai and into darkness.

I could not have been senseless for long, perhaps mere moments, for when I opened my eyes again, the daylight seemed as before, but my head was ringing with strange noises and my nostrils were filled with an alien scent. That something momentous had occurred I had no doubt, but I had no idea what it was. I touched my head and found that I had cut myself, in all probability when I had banged my head against the ground or the cliff wall. When I examined my fingers, they were coated with blood, but some of it, I knew, was Mordechai's, so how much was my own I had no way of telling. And then I saw the markings on the wall in front of me, a vertical black streak, a handspan wide, ascending with perfect regularity where the ball of fire had passed. Astonished, I turned my head to look behind me, but there was no similar marking on the other wall, down which the ball had flashed. Unknowing what to think, I turned to Mordechai. He had not moved. His leg lay flat, tightly splinted and bound. I had finished that, I thought, and was about to—

The rope had vanished.

I leapt to my feet and rushed to search for it, peering vainly up at the towering wall above me, and there, hanging down less than the height of a man from the edge above, I saw the noose, twisting slightly as it dangled. I knew what had happened now—my knees gave way and I slumped to the ground. A lightning strike had terrified my horse into running, and as he ran, the rope had travelled with him. He had not gone far, I could see, but far enough to condemn me to death with my injured companion. I felt tears mingle with the rain on my upturned face.

Sometime in the course of the following hour, Germanicus returned to search for me, creeping forward daintily until he could look down, as greatly shamefaced as any horse could be, to where I sat huddled, looking up at him. Had he been smart enough, he might have kicked the rope back down to me, but he was no more than a horse, and soon he wandered off again in search of grazing.

It was growing dark when I heard and identified a tiny, alien sound as the chattering of Mordechai's teeth, and the recognition of it helped me pull my scattered wits together again. The others, I knew, would come seeking me at daybreak, and would have little trouble finding us. The sight of my armour piled at the side of the path would send them this way. I knew, too, that I would survive the night, but Mordechai's survival was another matter altogether, and I knew the achievement of it must become my primary concern. Gritting my teeth against the certain knowledge of his dreadful sickness, I dragged him closer to the cliff face, unfastened the warm blanket from against my ribs—I had forgotten its existence completely until then—and spread it over him. Miraculously, it was still dry, thanks mainly to the waterproofing wax scraped over both its surfaces, and the heat of my body. I then added my cloak on top of that and crept beneath both layers to lie beside him, so that we might share our bodies' warmth. Mordechai remained motionless throughout all of this, breathing deeply and regularly, and I felt some confidence that, if I could keep him warm through the night, he would live until morning.

Some time, long after dark, I fell asleep. When I awoke, hearing the caw of a crow somewhere above, my first conscious thought was that the rain had stopped, and my second was that Mordechai was dead. I could hear only my own breathing. I had no means of knowing when he died. I remember only that when I awoke, he was cold beside me.

Shelagh and Rufio found me as I had thought they would, less than two hours after daybreak. Germanicus was still above me on the hillside, and they threw the rope down to me. I stood with one foot in the noose and held on to the rope with both hands, my blanket and cloak slung over my shoulder, and they pulled me quickly from my prison, simply by making Germanicus walk forward. Before that, however, while Rufio and Shelagh looked on from above, I had tipped Mordechai's body into the abyss by which he had lain, saying a silent prayer as he tumbled over the edge. I did not hear him land, but as I rose up the cliff face I gained some comfort from the thought that it was unlikely, wherever he now lay, that his bones would be gnawed by animals.

When I reached the top of the cliff, Shelagh took one look at me and set Rufio to work gathering fuel higher up the hill. She would not let me ride, but bullied me into walking up the slope until we were among the trees again, where she produced a tinder box and soon had a fire going. As soon as she believed the flames healthy enough to feed themselves, she unloaded the pack roll behind her saddle and brought out dry, clean clothes. Knowing that I, and presumably Mordechai, had spent the night out in the rain, and the entire day, too, she had come prepared to find us dying of exposure.

I stripped naked, shivering too mightily even to think of being modest, let alone concupiscent, and dried myself with my own blanket, and then Shelagh threw another over me, after which she and Rufio took turns pummelling me and chafing me until I grew warm again. I had never thought, even in the midst of the terrible winter that had gone before, that I could be so deeply chilled as I was then. In the meantime, on two stones over the fire she had heated a clay bowl of meat and vegetable stew, made by Liam the day before. It was too hot to hold at first, and as I waited for the chill of the damp grass to cool it, the saliva filled my mouth with agonising pangs of hunger.

While I ate, I told them everything that had transpired, here on this cold hillside, and Rufio groomed my poor horse while I spoke. I noticed Shelagh looking at me strangely and asked her what was wrong. She sniffed and shook her head.

"You're covered in blood, all of it dried. You've a cut on your head, and another on your arm there. You are a mess, Commander."

"I know, Shelagh," I said. "But the blood is not all mine. The greater part of it belonged to poor Mordechai. I'll be fine."

"Aye." She looked far from convinced. "Well, do you feel strong enough to travel now? We told Ded we would be back by sunset and here we are, a whole night late and still four to six hours' ride away from Glevum. They'll be waiting for us, ready to go."

"True, they will, but they will wait."

"Aye, and they'll be fretting even now, and will have sent out searchers."

I heaved a great sigh. "You're right, they'll do all of those things, and it would be unfair to prolong their ignorance. But can we take this fire with us? This seems like the first time I've been warm since last summer."

Shelagh shook her head with a fleeting smile. "Not unless you would care to carry it in your helmet. You'll warm up again once we are on the road. Better for you to walk for a while, rather than ride. The exercise will loosen your bones and sinews. Later, when you reach Cambria and find your raiders, you can light a fire to burn the earth."

XXV

Those words of Shelagh's came back to me days later as I sat slouched in my saddle, staring at the prospect ahead of me. To light a fire that would burn the earth here in the high hills of Cambria would require the powers of Vulcan himself. Nothing would burn in this place, for the simple reason that there was nothing to burn. Winter maintained its icy grip and permitted nothing to be seen but rocky cliffs and snow-shrouded, shadowed, treacherous wastes of whiteness. Yet, beside this incontrovertible fact, there was a growing certainty in my mind that I had not the slightest wish to burn anything in Cambria, in spite of all I had said to the contrary in former days.

Dedalus had been sitting quietly beside me as I pondered the sight before me, and now his voice broke into my thoughts, confirming my own opinion of our location but scattering the other, nebulous thoughts I had been mulling over in my head.

"We are too high, here, Cay. They must be below us in another valley, and somehow we have missed them." I nodded, accepting the truth of that in silence as he continued. "Horses could not survive up here in winter. Even had these people been foolish enough to bring the beasts so high into the hills, and even had they done it before the snow fell, they would never be able to keep them alive in such deep drifts."

I turned my head to face him. "I know that, Ded. I came to the same conclusion some time ago. But I have had other, more troubling thoughts upon my mind."

He hawked and spat into the snow. "Aye?" he said eventually. "And you think the higher air up here will clear your head?"

I had to smile at his tone. "Something akin to that," I murmured.

"What's on your mind, then?"

I snatched a deep, slow breath and held it for a time before expelling it through pursed lips, blowing like a horse. "I really can't tell you that here and now, my friend. I've not yet thought the matter through. But I am working on it, and when I have decided what my problem is, and how to phrase it, I'll come to you for your advice." He said nothing, but pouted his own lips and dipped his head eloquently. "In the meantime," I continued, "there's no arguing with you. We are too high. We'll make our way back down into the valley where we left the commissary wagons and camp there tonight. Then we'll head south and west, keeping below the snow line if we can, and see if we can pick up any sign of our quarry in that direction."

"Good. I'll get the men turned around and moving."

I watched him ride away to where the others waited, and thought again how fortunate I was in my friends. Then, as the waiting ranks broke up in the apparent confusion of reversing their tracks without endangering their mounts either in the deep snow or on the precipitous slope that flanked the narrow ridge we had ascended, I returned to contemplating the unease that lay within me, finding it matched by the desolate yet magnificent panorama of snow-filled gorges and soaring peaks around us.

I had found, quite suddenly, that I had no wish to declare or prosecute any form of war on the Pendragon people, and the belated realisation, within the past few days, had caught me unprepared.

In the dying days of the previous autumn, faced with incontrovertible evidence of invasion and treachery on the part of at least one deviant faction of the Pendragon, my sense of outrage over the wanton slaughter of my men had made my resolution to avenge the attack upon Calibri seem straightforward and necessary. That conviction had remained ever present in me throughout the dreadful winter that followed and had governed my plans for the spring. It had burned bright and clear within my breast throughout the approach to Glevum and the engagement with the aliens quartered there. The change had occurred after that, after my night-long imprisonment with the dying Mordechai in the rain-soaked rock fissure and after my farewell to Shelagh.

I had experienced no epiphany; no sudden revulsion over my course. No new idea had sprung, full-bred, into my mind, nor had any chain of tangible events given rise to my change of heart, although several factors had contributed thereto. The transformation of my thoughts had simply occurred, slowly and unheralded, within my deepest feelings. And radical as it was, the thought had merely emerged within me, and grown with utter conviction over a period of days, that I had no wish to carry warfare into the Pendragon lands. Yet I was gravely troubled by this change of heart, because my reason, arguing in the persona of Commander of Camulod, told me that I must, imperatively, issue warning—clarion, stark and deadly, backed with dire example—of the draconian consequences that would attend any future sallies into Camulod from Cambria. I had spoken to no one of my thoughts, and had ridden silent and brooding ever since Glevum, aware that I provided but ill company to my friends.

"Commander Merlyn! Will you remain behind?"

I turned in the saddle and waved in acknowledgment of Ded's shout, kicking Germanicus into motion to follow my men, and as he ambled forward, picking his way with care, I attempted to focus my thoughts upon the amorphous reasons underlying my new frame of mind.

One common element was real enough and would, I somehow knew, eventually come to overpower all others: the child Arthur, my ward, was heir to Cambria, heir to Pendragon. While he was yet too young to be aware of anything, he would not always be so, and he would, I felt, have but scant cause to thank me later if I stirred enmity between his people and ourselves during his childhood. The fact that Pendragon had spilled first blood would bear little weight were the boy to emerge into manhood inheriting a legacy of hatred and fear where once there had been alliance and amity, generations in the making. That element I could accept without difficulty. There remained only the very real need for some form of retribution and example in this present case—a requirement that I feared might prove troublesome if I adhered to the logic plaguing me at present. I had, when all was said and done, led a force of a thousand men all the way from Camulod in the name of retribution.

Yet there were other influences to my thinking, some of them stark in their simplicity, others more obscure. Mordechai's death had affected me greatly, but not until long after I had been pulled up out of the cleft that was his grave. To be sure, I had felt sadness and pain and deep regret on awakening to find him stiff and cold beneath my blanket, but my physical discomfort and the arrival of Shelagh and Rufio and the need thereafter to win free of that stony sepulchre had kept my mind focused upon other things and dulled complete comprehension of the implications of his death.

Shelagh's commonsense advice to me had been wisely given. I had walked up the slope from the fire she had kindled to the path, hobbling in agony from my stiff and aching muscles. Once on the flatness of the path, however, my anguish had begun to abate. Hobbling along behind Rufio and ahead of Shelagh, who led my horse, I had begun to feel my muscles loosening again, but the ascent of the slippery slope beneath the spot where I had found the hanging man, which called for greater effort from a different set of muscles, had been a purgatory, unmitigated by the fact that my companions had to dismount, too, and lead their horses upward with care.

Once free of that killing slope, however, and on fairly level ground once more, warmth had begun to return to my muscles. I found what our runners call "the second wind," and my bone-weariness seemed to fall away from me within a short time. Even then, however, I did not mount my horse, but broke into a trot, instead, and soon found I could lengthen my stride into a full, clean run. Marvel that it seemed at the time, I felt my strength grow as I ran, rather than diminish, so that I was soon feeling euphoric, covering distance easily and covered by a sheen of hard-wrung sweat. Three miles and more I kept this up, up slope and down, before my legs began to falter, and then I called to the others to stop, beside an icy streamlet, where I washed in shocking, clear, cold water and then dried myself with a blanket before shrugging into fresh clothes from the store they had brought for Mordechai and me. Once dressed, I donned my armour and mounted Germanicus again.

A short time after that we regained the abandoned colony and found Liam Twistback waiting in his wagon for us, by a fire on the top of the little hill, with two rabbits spitted on sticks over the flames. All of us were hungry and the sounds and sight of broiling meat set our saliva flowing. Fresh bread Liam had, too, baked in the ashes of the fire he had kept burning all night long. When we had assuaged the fiercest of our hunger pangs, we told him of my misadventures and his face grew long in the listening.

"Poor people," he murmured, glancing around at the abandoned encampment beneath. "I feel great pity in my heart for all of them. Ill as they fell, through no fault of their own, they were abandoned by the entire world save this man Mordechai . . . How did you say his last name?"

"Emancipatus," I told him, noticing the way the clear, hard Latin sound sat ill in the fluid Eirish tongue I now spoke as well as my former hosts. "It means 'free man,' or rather, 'freed man.' "

"Aye, well, he's freed now, right enough, poor man. I should have liked to meet him, for all that we must leave his people rigid and unburied 'neath the open skies."

As I listened to him utter the words, I realized that Liam was right. We could not bury Mordechai's dead, for a number of reasons, the major of which was the one that had frustrated his own attempt: the hardness of the ground.

And so, in the end, we left them as they were, ranged neatly alongside the open, half-dug pit that should have been their grave, with the rough, barely remembered prayers I could recall as their sole benison.

Later, as I rode behind the wagon, idly watching father and daughter talking together on the driver's bench, I recalled the tenor of what Liam had said and thought about the fate of those sad folk who had been stricken with the leprosy. In my youth, I had heard tell of leprosy and its foulness and had, with shivering detachment, accepted its horrors as described to me. Why should I not? I had seen nothing of it; knew none who suffered from it; thought never to encounter it in my fair life. Some I had heard describe it as God's punishment on evildoers, His scourge on those whose sins were overweening, and in my youthful ignorance and folly I had had no thought to question what was said. Lepers were lepers. None thought of them as human folk. Now, however, I knew differently. Lepers were no more than ordinary people like ourselves who had contracted a dread, fell disease. And the one in ten thousand people who retained no fear of them, people like my friend Luke and his friend Mordechai, were helpless to assist them other than in giving solitary comfort and solace. But that comfort and that solace had a value beyond price to those who bore the brand of Leper.

Mordechai and his people had all died simply because, alone and unassisted, they lacked the means to sustain themselves through a hard winter. That such was a risk all people bore was true, and witnessed by the deaths in Camulod, but other, normal people had the opportunity, at least, of gaining help from neighbours and community. Had such communal help been offered—even from a distance and in fear and pity—to Mordechai's lepers, they might have survived. I knew now, beyond doubt, that there was moral wrong involved therein, but no means of redress would come to me. I had no one on whom to affix blame. There was no town nearby, no settlement whose people might have changed the outcome. The lepers here had fled normal community, some driven out, in fear of being killed, and others spurred by fears of passing on their contamination to friends and loved ones. The very nature of their illness demanded seclusion and sequestration, precluding normal human contact. But somehow, I felt, there had to be a means of alleviating the soul-searing pity of such things. I knew I was ill equipped to answer this by myself, but I resolved to take the matter up with Luke, once back in Camulod.

My drifting thoughts were interrupted at that point by a shout of warning from Rufio, who had seen movement ahead of us on the road. Our alarm was short-lived, however, for we quickly recognised our own men, a double squadron under the command of the taciturn Benedict, dispatched to look for us at dawn after the concern caused by our failure to arrive back at Glevum the previous night. They met us just short of the burned-out ruin of the Red Dragon hostelry, close to where the lesser road we followed joined the broader highway to Glevum itself, and thereafter we made better time.

Two hours later, deep in a conversation with Benedict, I was startled again by a loud, female shout from the wagon ahead of me as Shelagh leapt to her feet and then jumped down from the still-moving wagon to run forward, off the road to where my view was blocked by the vehicle itself. Startled into action, Benedict and I spurred our horses and cantered around the wagon just in time to see her launch herself upward towards the summit of the low hill we were traversing, climbing bent forward with her skirts already kilted and tucked between her knees, scrambling upward using hands and feet like a small boy fleeing from an angry farmer. Astonished, I turned to where her father sat smiling, watching her from the wagon.

"In God's name, Liam, what ails her?"

He grinned at me, waving his arm towards the sea. We had been climbing steadily for more than an hour, our path taking us parallel to the coast in a northeasterly direction, and at this point on the flank of the hill, no more than five miles from Glevum, the distant sea had come into view, off on our left. There, by some trick of height combined with clear morning light, a small fleet of vessels lay plain to see, some larger than others, all of them tiny and far distant, but one of them showing clearly the black galley outlined on its square, central sail. Shelagh had spied Donuil's return, or at least the return of her people. Now, with a shout of my own, I bade Benedict remain where he was and spurred my horse to the hillside in Shelagh's tracks, feeling the power of his mighty, bunching muscles as he thrust himself upward, overtaking her rapidly. I thought to catch her quickly, before she reached the crest of the hillside, but she was as agile as a deer and we gained the summit almost together, she mere paces ahead of me, leaping up and down in her excitement and waving with all her might towards the distant fleet. I drew rein and watched her, seeing the radiant joy that shone from her, a vision that rendered me momentarily incapable of looking towards the west and the galleys that lay there. Suddenly, then, she spun towards me and ran to grasp me by the ankle, tugging at me to alight.

"It's Donuil, Cay! He's here! My future husband comes to seek me!" As quickly as she had grasped me, she released me again and ran towards the edge of the summit, stopping only when she reached the highest point, there to begin waving again, although she must know as well as I that there was not the slightest hope of anyone aboard those craft seeing her. Grinning ruefully to myself, I swung down from my saddle to join her, looking carefully now for the first time towards the ships below. Clearly seen from this height, they were about a mile from shore, making great speed and proceeding directly towards the coastline under oar and sail. They made a stirring sight. Four great galleys, I counted, two of them larger than the others, and ten smaller craft, similar to the vessel Liam had built for Shelagh. These would be the vessels, birneys rather than galleys, built to transport Liam's livestock. I guessed that one of the two largest galleys would be Connor's—all four now clearly showed the black galley device on their sails. Feargus's craft, one of the smaller pair, I recognized by the colour of its sail, more reddish than the plain, dun brown of the others, and where Feargus sailed, Logan would be in consort, which marked his vessel plainly, too, since it was of a size with Feargus's. The fourth galley, though, was as big as Connor's, and I had no idea who might captain it.

As I reached her side, Shelagh reached out and drew my arm through hers, hugging it close so that I felt the cushioned softness of her breast against my elbow. She spoke no word, merely gazing, rapt, towards the distant spectacle.

"Feargus and Logan, certainly," I said. "And Connor, I would guess, but who is the other?"

"Brander," she replied.

"Brander? Come to Britain without his fleet? That makes no sense. Why would he come here alone?"

She looked up at me, as if to see whether or not I was making fun of her. "Alone? Brander goes nowhere alone. See yonder."

I looked where she pointed and saw nothing, but then my eyes adjusted to the distance and searched even farther and I felt my stomach turn over. All along the line of the horizon to the northwest the straightness of the sharp-lined join of sea and sky was marred by tiny imperfections which revealed themselves immediately as the shapes of distant vessels, score upon score of them, ten miles and more from shore.

"Sweet Jesus!" I breathed. "How many are there?"

Shelagh looked, without great interest. "Five or six score. Brander must be returning home to the northern isles. That means the war is won, for better or for worse. His galleys will be needed in the north."

"Won?" Even asking the question, I had to smile at her sanguinity, though I was grateful she remained unaware of my smile since the alternative to her assessment could not be thought of as amusing in any way.

"Aye, won or being won. Were it not won, there would be no livestock to bring over here, and Brander would not be sailing back to the north."

"Aye, I suppose . . . But—"

"But what?" She was looking at me now, gazing up at me with those hawk's eyes of hers.

"Shelagh, I thought I heard King Athol say the animals were to be removed for their protection. If the war is won, they would need no such protection. They would be safe."

"Aye, safe, but hungry." She clutched my hand now in her own right hand, keeping her left arm clamped close upon my forearm, so that when she pulled my hand towards her, my curling fingers came to rest between her breasts. I knew she had no thought in her of what she did or of what it did to me, so I gave no sign of being aware of what I touched.

"Before this war was thought upon, our biggest pains were overgrazing, Cay. We lack the space to feed our beasts, and our people grow more numerous all the time. That's why the king wished my father to bring the kine to Britain, with your assistance and permission. Here, in these open grasslands, they will thrive and prosper, grow and breed. In a few short years, we can transport them to the north and raise them there in safety. But not yet. Now they are come here, in safety. And escorted by Brander's whole fleet, ensuring safe passage. Such is their value, these animals of ours. Goats and swine and sheep and cattle. They mean prosperity and ongoing security for our folk. So I say the war is won. You wait, you'll see. Would you dare to wager with me?"

I smiled and shook my head. "No. A man would be a fool to wager against you, Lady."

"Hah! You think so? I see you are a man of wisdom." She broke off, frowning. "What's wrong? What are you thinking?"

I shook my head, but she would have none of it, insisting on an answer.

"Donuil," I muttered, eventually, hating to have the thought wrung from my unwilling mind that he might have died in the war.

"What of him?" She was smiling up at me. "Surely you are not jealous of his coming?"

"No," I said, refusing to be teased. "But what will you do if he is not aboard those galleys?"

She laughed gaily. "Then I shall marry you and be queen over Camulod."

Her levity shocked me profoundly. "Shelagh!" I gasped, feeling my face constrict with disapproval.

She became immediately contrite and pulled me down to where she could kiss my cheek and bathe me in the perfume of her hair. "Och, Cay," she said into my ear. "Do you take me for a foolish woman or a callous wretch? Of course he is there! Look at Logan's galley, at the mast, the cross spar. What's there?"

I looked and gasped again. "A hanging man!"

"Aye, but a hanging wooden man! Yon is my throwing target, brought for me by Logan, who made it for me when I was a lass. I made him promise to bring it to me here, and also that if all was well, he would suspend it from the spar where I could see it long before they came to land. Were it not there, I should have known my husband was not coming and would then have had time to prepare myself before they made landfall."

I was looking at her now with more respect than I had ever felt for her before. "When did you arrange that?"

"In Glevum, when we landed. You seized Feargus by the arm and wandered off to whisper with him, trading secret things. While you were gone, I had words of my own with Logan, who has been like another father to me since I was a babe. He it was who taught me how to throw a knife with consistency, you know. I had talent, and a true eye, but he showed me the knack of throwing true time after time. And one winter, he carved out a target man for me from a great log, and bound its breast in leather armour. I called it Mungo, out of dislike for Mungo Rohan who was even then a great black pig. Now it seems right that a hanging Mungo should announce my husband's safe return, do you not think so?"

I had been watching the galleys below as she spoke. They had come about and were now sailing swiftly to the left of us, southward, Brander's huge craft veering across the wakes of the other vessels to take up a station to seaward.

"Look at that! Where are they going now?"

"Southward, to where I shall find them, eight leagues south of Glevum."

Again she had surprised me. "How can you know that?"

She shrugged, gesturing with one hand to where the ships moved below. "Because it was so arranged. There is broad grassland there, and a banked shoreline, where the galleys can unload. Feargus and Logan found the spot the first time they came here in search of Donuil. They could not land at Glevum, you'll recall, because the other, alien vessel was there when they arrived, stealing the coloured stone, the marble. Eight leagues, Lagan told me. How far are we from Glevum now?"

"No more than five miles. Under two leagues."

"Then we have six to travel. I had best collect my father and be on my way. We will meet again when you return from Cambria."

"But—"

"But what, Merlyn Britannicus? Your men await you in Glevum and your duty is clear. You must avenge your people soon, before the weather robs you of the chance to find your stolen horses."

"Damnation, Shelagh! I can't simply leave you here. I'll take you to Donuil."

Now she swung to face me, real surprise and concern in her face. "What nonsense is this? You were to leave me at Glevum! That would have left me with eight leagues to ride, instead of six. My father and I will be in no danger. We'll meet the others before you have time to lead your troops out of the town."

"But I want to see Donuil!"

She flashed a grin at me. "So do I! And so you shall, when you return. But in the meantime, my need is greater than yours, and I have no desire to spend the night waiting for Donuil to finish talking with you before he beds me.

"I would not deprive you in such a way, Shelagh."

Her grin became a laugh. "Not willingly, not intentionally, but you would; or he would. No, you may not come."

"But what about Brander? I would like to meet him."

"Brander won't land. He, too, has people awaiting his return. Look you there, already he veers off, his charges safely brought to shore."

Sure enough, Brander's distant galley was turning again, pointing its dragon beak towards the north and west.

"Connor, then. He will be there."

"He will, and will remain until you return. Come you here." She caught me by the chin strap of my helmet and pulled my face down towards her, and then she kissed me as she never had before, a long, sweet, aching kiss that filled my breast with joy and yearning, yet strangely stirred no passion in my loins, since I knew of its intent.

"Merlyn," she said softly, when she had broken contact lingeringly with my mouth. "That kiss was for your friendship and your love and your restraint. I wish it could be more, but we have said all that. Go now, and do what you must do, knowing that you hold a place within my breast that none will ever share, even my husband. I have two sons to bear, and you a child to rear and train to be a king. I cannot envy you that task, Merlyn Britannicus, but I know that you will excel in the doing of it and that the child, having you as tutor, will be taught the things a king must know, and a man must do . . . and I know that those are seldom the same things. Few men, few kings, excel at both. Even Athol, king among his Scots, was better king than father, for in the tending of his people he had not the time to tend his sons in fullness, and so bred ingrates and murderers among his own. Remember that, dear friend, when you turn to the teaching of your king. Governance, and equity, must be for all. Go you now, with my love, in spirit more than ever could be fleshly."

I stood mute, feeling my throat filled with a ball of grief and mixed emotions. Then I nodded, still silent, and led her down to where her father and my escort waited.

I ,long after she was gone to join Donuil, her words resonated in my breast, but presently the words she had whispered of her love for me faded into acceptance, leaving only the words she had said about my task, and kingship. Words that simmered in my breast and brought me to a change of mind and heart about the duty facing me in the days to follow.

XXVI

On the morning of the second day after we had turned around to descend beneath the snow line again, we found our horses. Huw Strongarm and his Celts had left our camp shortly after daybreak, leading directly southward from where we had spent the night on a quiet, well-watered upland plateau beyond which the ground sloped gently south towards another line of hills. There was no sign of winter anywhere that morning. The skies were clear, filled with the promise of a bright spring day, and the invigorating nip of the early morning air buoyed our spirits as we prepared to break camp and follow our scouts into the valleys to the south of us. I had just dismissed my ten troop commanders after the morning meeting and was checking the cinch on my horse's saddle when I heard my name called and looked up to see Philip waving to me from some distance away, where he had been watching his assembling troop. When he saw me look towards him he waved his arm southward, indicating something beyond my sight farther down the slope.

Curious, but not yet alarmed, I pulled myself up into the saddle and kicked Germanicus into motion, making my way to where Philip had been joined by Benedict and Rufio. Dedalus and two others joined them before I reached their side, and all of us stared off to the south. Three men, who could only be our own scouts, were running towards us and were soon close enough for the keen-eyed Dedalus to identify them as Menester, Gwern and Guidog, the inseparable trio. They were still more than a mile from where we sat watching them, and when Ded stated the obvious, that they had evidently found something, I cleared my throat.

"Aye, and there's little point in making them run all the way up here to tell us what it is, when they'll have to accompany us back down again. I'm going to meet them, gentlemen. Form up your troops and follow me, but hold them in check, if you please. Raise no alarm until we have discovered the truth of this."

I spurred forward and kicked my horse to a canter, breathing deeply and wondering at the calm that filled me. When the three men saw me approaching, they stopped as one, leaning forward, hands on their knees, to catch their breath. As I rode up to them, Guidog, the spokesman of the three, called out their news.

"Dead men, Commander. Thirty of em. flanging from trees down there in the next vale. An' horse tracks everywhere. Shod tracks and horse shit. Looks like they been keepin' 'em there all winter long."

I drew rein, looking back over my shoulder to where my men were coming down the long slope behind me in five columns of two hundred men each, ten wide by twenty long. Already they had spread out to form a five-front advance, and they looked impressive.

"Where is Huw?" I asked Guidog.

"He stayed there, Commander. Sent us back for you. Sent the others on ahead to follow the tracks."

"Very well, let's go." I stood in my stirrups and circled my hand above my head, signing the others to follow me, and then I moved forward again at the canter. Wordlessly Guidog and Gwern placed themselves on either side of me, each grasping a stirrup leather. Menester ran ahead, loping easily, as though he had not already run for several miles uphill. We came soon to a place where the ground began to dip more steeply, swinging west, and we followed the natural fall of the land into a narrow pass that opened out soon afterwards into a wide, gently contoured valley floored with deep, rich grass. Below us, more than half a mile ahead, a copse of massive trees stood alone in the midst of the green bowl.

"Oak trees," Gwern grunted from beside my left knee. "That's where they're all hanging, some of 'em nine to a limb. There's Huw."

I saw Huw Strongarm emerge from the trees and stand awaiting us, but as we approached I paid more attention to the macabre fruit hanging from the oak branches than I did to my chief scout. Guidog had not exaggerated. I counted thirty swinging corpses. Huw stood watching us approach, and appeared to be leaning on his unstrung bow stave. I knew that was not so, however, since no Pendragon would endanger his own bow, his most prized possession, by treating it so carelessly. He said nothing until I spoke.

"Who are they, Huw?"

"Two Pendragon renegades. The others are landless."

"Landless? You mean Outlanders?"

"No, they're locals, but they're not of our folk. I recognize none of them. They're dirty, though. Long-time dirt, too. They stink from afar. That's what tells me they're landless. Folk who belong—anywhere—keep themselves clean."

I made no attempt to pursue that thought. "How long have they been hanging, and who would have done this?"

Huw hawked and spat. "Yesterday, I'd guess. They've been up there overnight. Soaked with dew, all of 'em. But who did it? Your guess is as good as mine there. But whoever it was, they took your horses. These people wintered here. You'll see that when you go around these trees. There's a stream there, a couple of huts and some well-used firepits. And they kept the horses there, strung from lines most of the time, it looks like." He broke off to gaze up at the man hanging closest to him. "Reckon that's where they got the rope to hang these from."

I could hear the noise of my men approaching behind me. "You sent the others on ahead to follow the horse tracks?"

"Aye. There's no trick to following them now, Merlyn. They'll leave a track like one of your Roman roads. They can't be far ahead."

"Good. Wait here."

I swung my horse around and rode back to join the others, who were in the process of forming their parade ranks while they waited for my next instructions. I waved the ten commanders forward and told them what had transpired here, and that we would ride on immediately. Rufio looked at Dedalus and raised one eyebrow, not knowing I was watching him do it.

"What does that mean, Rufio, that look? Have you something on your mind?"

"No, Commander!" The look he threw me was one of wide-eyed innocence. It was Dedalus who answered my question properly.

"We were talking on the way down here, Merlyn. About the lie of the land. It makes me itchy."

"Why, in God's name? It's perfect cavalry country, firm and dry."

"Aye, except up there." He gestured to the north and west, where the hillside sloped up above us on our right. I looked where he pointed and saw nothing but open grassland stretching to the horizon for more than a mile.

"What do you mean? There's nothing up there."

"Perhaps not, Merlyn, but we haven't looked, have we?"

"No, we have not." I was almost laughing at him, surprised by his unease. "You think there might be cavalry up there? Hidden beyond the crest?"

"No, I don't, since we have the only cavalry in the country, and there's a mile of open hillside there. But if we continue down this valley, beyond the trees there, for another half mile, the hillside on the right there grows steeper and shorter. That's where the cavalry could be behind the hilltop . . . Or the Celts and their longbows."

That wiped the smile from my face, as it was meant to. I had an instant vision of massed Pendragon bowmen shooting at us from a height as we rode uphill towards them and it was not a pleasant image. As few as a hundred bowmen, shooting from high ground, in massed volleys, could create havoc among a thousand horsemen.

"Aye . . . Foolish of me. You're right, Ded. We haven't looked yet. But now we will. As soon as we move out, send a squadron up to ride along the crest. Do it now. Any other questions?"

Benedict coughed and spoke. "How do you want us to proceed, Merlyn? The valley's wide here, but what if it narrows farther down? Two columns abreast?"

"Aye, perhaps. We're going downhill, so we'll be able to see once we're free of these trees. Be ready to deploy on my signal. Let's go."

We rode on for half an hour longer, following the clear sign left by our missing forty horses, and the track led us down and down to our left, ever southward, away from the hill crest that had so concerned Dedalus, until all threat of danger from that direction died away and I had him signal his men down from the heights to join us again.

And then, as we swung left once again, still advancing in five columns across open ground, a horn sounded from ahead of us, slightly to our right, where a low rise too small to be called a hill broke the smoothness of the valley floor. I stopped immediately, as did everyone behind me, our heads swivelling as one to the point from where the sound had come. A small knot of mounted men emerged from behind the rise, riding in single file, and sat there, facing us. I counted nine of them, too distant to identify, but clearly Celts mounted on the shaggy hill ponies on which I had learned to ride as a boy.

"Dergyll." The word came from Huw Strongarm who stood by my right knee.

"Who?"

"Dergyll ap Griffyd." He turned and looked up at me. "You know him. First cousin to Uther. Their fathers were brothers."

"Hmm. Friendly?"

"Friendly?" Big Huw grinned and made a harrumphing noise deep in his throat. "Perhaps, perhaps not. I sought to join him first, when we returned from Cornwall, but he was engaged elsewhere and did not return throughout our stay. Friend or foe, this I'll say for him, he's the best real warrior Pendragon has, now that Uther's dead."

"What's he doing here, think you?"

Huw swung his head around to look again towards the distant group. "Protecting his own, I should think. This is Pendragon ground."

"Aye. Of course." I held up my arm, fingers spread and palm twisted backward to still the sounds behind me, where some of the men and their mounts were growing restive. "Well," I asked, feeling peculiarly indecisive. "What should we do, think you?"

Huw kept his back to me, speaking over his shoulder. "Right now? Talk to the man, Merlyn. Thank him for hanging your thieves and saving you the trouble."

"Aye, indeed. It must have been he."

Now Huw turned again and glanced up at me, his face unreadable. "Who else? They tell me he commands two thousand men."

That made me think deeply, although only in terms of numbers, not of odds. I would have backed five hundred Camulodian troopers against two thousand unmounted Celts without thought a short time before. Now, however, Ded's strictures against the folly of pitting mounted men against massed bowmen gave me pause.

"I will ride forward alone and speak with him." I glanced at Huw for confirmation. "You think that is foolish?"

The big Celt shrugged. "No, not if he's the same man he was five years ago, but he might have changed since then."

"Changed in what way?"

"In any way. Perhaps he lost a wife or a son. He certainly lost a crown, for he should have been next in line for the kingship after Uther's death. You won't know until you approach him, Merlyn, and the only alternative is to attack him now. You want to risk that?"

"I have no wish to do that, Huw, risk or no, so I'll parley." I stood in my stirrups and signalled my commanders forward to me again. Dedalus, as usual, was first to reach me.