The Saxon Shore

PROLOGUE

There is a traditional belief, seldom spoken of but widely held, that age brings wisdom, and that wisdom, once achieved through some arcane epiphany, continues to grow inexorably with increasing age. like most people, I accepted that throughout my life, until the day I round that I had somehow grown old enough to be considered wise by others. The discovery frightened me badly and shook my faith in most of my other beliefs.

Now that I have survived everyone I once knew, I grow more aware each day of how unwise I have been throughout my life. Unwise might even be too mild a word for this folly of persistence I betray in clinging to a life of solitude and pain. The pain is unimportant, and in a total absence of sympathy it has become a form of penance I gladly accept and endure in expiation of my sins of omission and unpreparedness. The solitude, however, grows unbearable at times and I am now accustomed to talking to myself merely to hear the sound of a human voice. Sometimes I argue with myself. Sometimes I read aloud what I have written. Sometimes I speak my unformed thoughts, shaping them audibly to light a beacon in the darkness in my efforts to write down a clean, coherent chronicle of what once flourished proudly in this land but has now ceased to be.

I find it strange nowadays to think that I may be the only one alive in all this land who knows how to write words down, and because of that may be the only one who knows that words, unwritten, have no value. Set down in writing, words are real; legible, memorable, exact and permitting recollection, imaginings and wonder. Otherwise, sung or spoken, whispered to oneself or shouted to the winds, words are ephemeral, perishing as they are uttered. That, at least, I have learned in my extreme age.

And so I write my chronicle, and in the writing of it I maintain the life in my old bones, unable to consider death while yet the task remains unfinished. For I believe this story must survive. Empires have risen in this world and fallen, and history takes note of few of them. Those that survive in the memories of men do so by virtue of the faults that flawed their greatness. But here in Britain, in my own lifetime, a spark ignited in the breast of one strong man and became a clean, pure flame to light the world, a beacon that might have outshone the great lighthouse of Pharos, had a sudden gust of willful wind not extinguished it prematurely. In the space of a few, bright years, something new stirred in this land; something unprecedented; something wonderful; and men, being men, perceived it with stunned awe and then, being men, destroyed it without thought, for being new and strange.

When it was over, when the light was snuffed out like a candle flame, a young man, full of hurt and bewilderment, asked me to explain how everything had happened. He expected me to know, for I was Merlyn, the Sorcerer, Fount of all Wisdom. And in my folly, feeling for the youth, I sought to tell him. But I was too young, at sixty-four, to understand what had occurred and why it had been inevitable. That was a decade and a half ago. Even now, after years of solitary thought and questioning, I only know that, at the start of Arthur's life, I had no thought of being who I am today, nor of how I could presume to teach a child to be the man, the King, the potent Champion he would become. In those years, I had far too much to learn, myself, to have had time for thoughts on teaching.

I know that by the rules of random chance Arthur should never have been born, but was; and then, being born, he should have died in infancy, yet lived. Feared and despised by men who had no knowledge of his nature, he should not have survived his early boyhood, yet escaped to grow. I know that, reared by men who scarcely knew the name or the meaning of kingship, he should never have emerged to be the High King he became, the culmination of a dream dreamed long before, by men dead long before his birth. I know he was my challenge and my pride, my pupil and my life's sole, crowned success. And I know the dream he fostered and made real deserves to live forever; hence this task of mine.

I

I could not identify the clattering noise that woke me, and for a space of heartbeats I lay befuddled, not knowing where I was. The sun was high and hot, and I felt my bed tilt alarmingly. Then I became aware of the warmth of the tiny baby I held cradled in my arm, and I remembered everything.

We were adrift in a small galley or birney that was much too large for me to control alone, even had I known how. The smell of the bearskin pelt on which we lay mingled with the scents of sun-warmed pitch and timber. A heavy, rusted, three-pronged grappling hook had landed on the planking beside me, close to my head. As I focused on it, the thing leapt away from me again, before burying two of its points in the solid timbers of the boat's side. I rolled away from the child and struggled to my feet, throwing myself to the side of the boat and looking up and out.

Above me, towering over and dwarfing our small boat, was a great galley with a single, soaring mast and a rearing, giant, painted dragon's head at the prow. In my first glance I saw a row of long oars, glistening with water, raised vertically to permit the two craft to come together, then a red-bearded warrior standing on the prow behind the dragon's head, leaning backward against the pull as he drew in his rope, hand over hand, dragging my smaller craft towards him. Beside him, another man was in the act of throwing a second grappling hook, and I pulled my head down and out of sight as the metal head landed behind me and was jerked back to thump into the birney's timbers, lodging farther forward, beside the first. As I sprawled away to one side, a roar of surprise told me that my appearance had disconcerted them no less than theirs had me. A third and then a fourth hook clanked aboard and made themselves fast, and I felt our boat being hauled in like a fish, its motion changing as it struck laterally against the waves.

This time I raised my head cautiously and saw that it was the target for a score of bows, all of their arrows pointing at my eyes. I raised my hands high above my head, fingers spread, showing them I had no thought of fight or flight, and immediately slid back down the sloping side before stepping hastily back to the centre of the deck, my hands still high above my head as I fought to keep my footing, waiting for the first arrow to find me. Below me, the child had awakened and begun to howl with hunger, his tiny, angry protests lost amid the noises that now swelled all around us.

I glanced towards him and my eyes were suddenly filled with the bulk and substance of the heavy, golden signet ring with the red dragon crest that hung on a golden chain against his tiny chest. I threw myself towards him and removed the thing from around his neck, stuffing it hastily into my own breechclout and hoping it would remain lodged securely there and not fall out onto the deck. It was the only recourse open to me, and I had no time to improve on the instinct that prompted me to hide the ring there.

Moments later, the first of our "rescuers" leapt aboard from the raised deck of the other ship, closely followed by a half-dozen others. He landed lightly, then stepped towards me, noting that I was unarmed but extending his sword point towards my naked throat and glancing around him in curiosity as he closed the distance between us. He was big, as big as I, and hairy in the way of the Celts, with a full black beard, long hair and moustaches, and thick black chest hair showing through the open front of a sheepskin tunic worn fleece-outward. As I lowered my hands and made to speak to him he drew the point of his sword away from me, then brought it swinging, backhanded, to clout me almost heedlessly across the side of the head with the flat of the blade. I fell sprawling and stunned.

I huddled there, my knees drawn up instinctively to protect the contents of my breechclout, clasping my head in my hands, almost blinded by the pain and waiting for his attack to continue. My assailant, however, had done with me and ignored me completely thereafter. By the time my vision cleared enough to see him again, he had stepped away and was bent over the discarded pile of my armour that lay where I had thrown it on the bottom of the boat. My eyes moved onward, ignoring the others who had come aboard with him, searching frantically for the black bearskin that lay at the foot of the central mast. There, surrounded by three of the newcomers, the baby kicked and squirmed, and even through the racket all around me, I could clearly hear his anguished screams. The three men were looking down at him, arguing among themselves. After a single and dismissive glance towards me, one of them shifted his axe from his right hand to his left, stooped quickly and picked up the child by the ankles, crushing them together carelessly.

My head swam with panic.

Once, twice, he spun the tiny form around his head and then released it to fly into the air, high over the vessel's side.

Afterwards, I was unaware of having moved, let alone risen to my feet, but suddenly I was upon them. I heard my own roar of rage as my shoulder took the big man low in the back, hurling him forward and off balance, and my fingers gripped the shaft of the axe that had hung from his left hand. Still reeling from the momentum of my charge, I swung one foot around hard to kick one of his companions behind the knees, sweeping him off his feet. The third man, caught by surprise, simply stood there, giving me time to shift my weight, grip the shaft of the axe firmly in both hands and spin again to bury it in the killer's shoulder, splitting him from neck to breast bone. Pulling him towards me, his flesh locked around the blade of the axe, I used the dead weight of him for leverage and leapt high onto the edge of the boat's side. I saw a flash of white among the waves and threw myself outward towards it, bringing my hands together above my head to break the water.

The sea was far warmer than I had expected, and after the first shock of my plunging dive my head was cleared of noise and pain. A thousand bubbles hissed all around me, and I opened my eyes, searching frantically for a glimpse of the infant. There was nothing, no matter where I looked, and I kicked my way back to the surface, treading water as I looked around me, shaking the hair and water out of my eyes. I surfaced at the top of a wave and quickly found myself in the trough between it and the next, from where I could see nothing. Allowing myself to relax, I waited to be lifted again to the wave top, and heard a zipping noise as an arrow sliced into the water ahead of me. Now I was high again, and saw the galley, enormous from this vantage point, riding high above and in front of me. More arrows hissed into the sea around me, and I heard a distant chorus of shouts and jeers. I ignored them and tried to turn myself around as I went sliding to the bottom of another trough. Moments later, as I rose to the crest of the next wave, I saw the baby on the surface very close to me, disappearing again as I caught sight of him. I filled my lungs, gulping in air until my chest would hold no more, before folding my body and kicking my feet vertically. In the booming, reverberant silence beneath the surface an arrow dropped in front of me, wobbling harmlessly before falling vertically into the depths below. I strained my eyes towards where I thought to have seen the tiny shape of the child, and there he was, pallid and insubstantial at the limit of my sight, floating beneath the waves. I kicked out strongly towards him, knowing I was too late. The shock of hitting the water alone must have killed him, and with him the hopes of my family.

There are times when the mind of a man performs the most amazing feats; when the speed of thought is so enhanced that lifetimes seem to pass in moments; when the mysteries of life seem crystallized, are clearly understood and then forgotten again in the blinking of an eye. later, I was able to recall the chaos of my thoughts as I swam towards the baby, and to piece them together into coherent patterns that bore no resemblance to the panic- filled, despairing screams that echoed in my mind during those moments. This was my cousin and my nephew both, this babe of two, three months at most, drifting in the clear, warm water just beyond my reach; the son of Uther Pendragon, my dearest friend whom I had sworn to kill. And now they both were dead; as dead as my own unborn son, denied a chance to live, murdered in the womb, I had once believed, by that same Uther. I felt a swelling, aching, unbearable hardness in my chest that told me I was going to have to breathe very soon, and then saw the baby drifting upwards to the surface, rising away from me to where the waves formed a clear green ceiling streaked with lines of writhing, golden light. I kicked harder, forcing myself through the water, clawing my way towards him and seeing without really noticing the way his tiny arms and legs moved rhythmically, almost as if he himself were swimming. Suddenly my face touched him and I grasped him close, breaking the surface, raising him high above my head as I fought for breath, coughing and spluttering and sinking again as I waited for the arrows to find us, finding some insane satisfaction in the knowledge that we would meet death together, united in our blood. Again I broke surface, and this time was able to breathe and keep myself afloat. The galley loomed above us, very close now. We were an unmissable target. I closed my eyes and hugged the baby close, holding his head above the water.

The arrows did not come. A wave broke over us. I opened my eyes and blinked them free of water, and as I did, a rope came snaking down, uncoiling as it fell, to land across my head. Unknowing and uncaring whence it came or why, I grasped it with my left hand, twisting coils of it around my arm as I went under yet again, mouth open and inhaling. Choking in agony, my lungs revolting against the sea water, I felt myself being dragged forward and up, and hands grasped at me, catching my arm, my tunic and my hair. Someone took the child from me, and I felt myself propelled upward and inward and then lowered, quite gently, to the decking of the ship. I rolled onto my belly, coughing and vomiting the brine I had breathed and swallowed, fighting the searing pains that racked my chest and lungs.

The paroxysm passed eventually, leaving me spent and breathless, and I pushed myself up to lean on my elbows, gazing down at the planking of the deck between them and waiting for whatever would befall me next. I had no thought of avoiding it, whatever it might be, knowing that it would be death in one form or another, blooding and vengeance for the man I had killed with the axe. That was why they had dragged me from the sea. They required blood for blood, and death by water would not suffice. The manner of my death was beyond my control, and beyond my caring. The only matter of import in my mind was the death of the child and what it meant to Camulod. The dreams of many people had perished with that baby boy, and I saw them all there in my mind as I gasped and heaved for breath. Caius Britannicus, my grandfather, and Publius Varrus, his friend, both of whom I had revered throughout my life; Picus Britannicus, my father, and Ullic and Uric Pen- dragon, father and son, and a host of others who had dared to dream of surviving in the face of conquest by barbarian hordes, the same hordes who had now wiped out their line. My mind filled up with the image of the baby boy I had discovered wrapped in a black bearskin here in this very boat, and I recalled the pride and the passionate, exultant tenderness that had swept over me in realizing who he was, in knowing this was he, the one who would arise to call the peoples of our land to action and to unity; the future champion for whose hand Publius Varrus had crafted the sword Excalibur. And as I felt the pain of that memory, I also felt another, sharper, localized pain against my pubis, where the signet of Uther Pendragon was evidently still secure, wedged uncomfortably between my body and the deck of the ship.

My chest constricted and I retched again, moving at the same time to ease the discomfort caused by the ring and gasping against the agony of the convulsion that racked me, and as I gulped for breath another image came into my mind: a tall, young man with long, bright golden hair; a champion who perhaps, even now, would be in Camulod, and into whose hands I had commended Excalibur should I not have returned within the year; Ambrose, my own half-brother, absent from my mind since my discovery of the boy.

A heavy foot kicked my elbow and I snatched it away, falling face downward into the bile I had just voided. I lay helpless as my wrists were snatched and bound together at my back, the rough rope burning my skin. When I reared my head back and tried to look around me I saw only legs. At least a dozen men surrounded me, and I saw now that I was on the big galley, not the birney as I had supposed, and that I was lying at the bottom of the well that held the rowers. They hauled me to my feet again and thrust at me, turning me around and pushing me forward until I saw what they required of me.

There was a lateral bench of some kind at the level of my knee, pressing against me. Above it, a narrow wooden step descended from a planked walkway that ran the length of the galley, front to back. Urged onward by the point of either a spear or a sword at the small of my back, I climbed upward, making heavy going of it with the rocking of the vessel and the awkward weight of my arms, tied tightly as they were behind me. I managed the ascent without falling, nevertheless, and stood swaying on the causeway.

I was somewhere approaching midway along the boat, facing the rear. Below me, ranged in rows on either side, a sea of faces glowered up at me in silence. The men were resting on their oars, evidently waiting. At the end of each row, closest to the centre of the keel and within their owners' reach, were piles of axes, swords and spears. Barbarians. The expressions on those faces I could see varied from wild-eyed hatred to dull disinterest. I ignored them, refusing to acknowledge their presence, although I had time to estimate their strength at close to a hundred. A hundred in one galley! That bespoke great wealth on the part of its owners and great skill on the part of their shipbuilders. I looked straight ahead to where the massive mast reared, thick as a horse's barrel, from the bottom of the ship, beneath the planks of the central causeway, which parted around it, leaving enough room for one man to pass on either side. A great cross-spar, half the thickness of the mast itself, was attached to it about head height, though I could not see how because of the billows of dense, saffron-coloured sailcloth that lay draped across the spar.

Prodded roughly from behind again, I made my way rearwards, passing the mast and dipping my head to avoid the overhead spar. The rearmost part of the ship, I estimated about one sixth of the vessel's total length, was decked over completely at the level of the causeway, fronted by a solid wooden wall with a single doorway leading to the enclosed space below. A group of men huddled on this platform, their backs to me. I counted eight of them as I approached, and their armour, such as I could see of it, was mainly toughened leather of the kind our own Celts wore, bossed with iron and bronze, although one wore overlapped iron strip armour in the Roman fashion and another wore a shirt of ring mail. Three wore long cloaks, so I could see nothing of what they wore beneath. All eight wore helmets; conical iron caps, two of which were horned. Alerted by some signal, they swung around as one to look at me, then stepped back to form an open, wedge- shaped grouping that reflected the taper of the vessel's stern and directed my gaze to the man they had concealed.

I stopped short, trying to absorb what I was seeing, and no one pressed me further. The man himself was, of course, the first thing I perceived, but immediately after that I saw the device in which he hung suspended, and my eyes devoured it, attempting to define what it was and how it operated, disdaining its occupant temporarily despite the fact that he obviously held the order of my dying.

Four thick beams, each a handspan square, had been erected from the body of the ship, mortised into the rail that ran around the deck and cantilevered inward at a uniform angle, supported from the deck by other, smaller struts. I saw instantly where they should have met to form a pyramid, but each had been truncated short of that to provide a corner support for a heavy, rectangular frame that hung thus suspended, level with the deck. I had a vision of the great catapults and siege artillery depicted in the books of Publius Varrus, and as my eye took in the workmanship I knew instantly that the craftsman who built it had been the same man who designed and built the galley. The device was a natural extension of the ship. Below it, suspended by ropes and pulleys from strong hooks attached to each corner of this frame, hung a seat, apparently made from strong leather, stitched and shaped and strung from an open-fronted girdle of iron as thick us my thumb. Thin hempen ropes, three of them, hung from this metal chair rim to the floor, whence they passed through a ring bolted into the deck and separated to three other rings, where they were stoutly knotted, one in the back and one on either side. They looked for all the world like reins, and I realized that they were nothing less. The person seated in that chair might ride the turmoil of the waves in comfort, suspended above the deck and able to master all but the wildest motion of the seat by pulling on these ropes.

All of these thoughts had coursed through my mind in less time than it takes to speak of them, and I grew conscious of the silence that hung around me. I looked then at the leader of this crew.

He sat slouched in his hanging seat, wrapped in a great, long cloak of thick, green wool embellished with red symbols unknown to me. Beneath him, one long, booted leg stretched indolently to the deck; the other jutted out horizontally, seemingly rigid beneath the cloak, pointing at me. I gazed at him, looking square into his eyes, holding my own head high.

He had the look of a Celtic chieftain, saturnine, swarthy, with long, dark, flowing moustaches and a small beard that covered his chin but left his cheeks clean shaven. His nose jutted, fine edged and arrogant over cleanly shaped, narrow nostrils, and great black-browed blue eyes, so bright they seemed to glow, swept me from head to foot, taking my measure. I saw the breadth of his high forehead and the long, dark, curling hair swept back behind his ears, the line of it forming the suggestion of a peak exactly at the centre of his brow. He wore a heavy, ornate golden tore, the collar of a chieftain, about his neck, which was thick and strong, hinting of a deep chest and broad shoulders, although these were concealed in his cloak. We faced each other mutely, neither allowing any trace of emotion to paint his features. I was aware of the tension of the men who surrounded me. A wave smacked against the side of the galley, setting the deck atilt beneath my feet, and hemp ropes creaked in protest.

And then he threw aside the cloak, exposing the baby that lay nestled, sleeping or dead, in the cradle of his right elbow. The sight, the unexpectedness of it, caught me off guard and I sprang forward, uttering a cry that was cut off in my throat by a heavy blow across the neck and shoulder that felled me to the deck. As I lay there, struggling for consciousness against the sudden violence that had clamped my eyes tight shut and the roaring of my own blood that filled my head, I heard their voices speaking the tongue of Donuil, the prince of the Eirish tribe we called the Scotii or Scots, whom I had held hostage against his people's good behaviour. They were discussing me.

"Well? Shall I kill him now? He's an Outlander. You'll get nothing out of him. Can't even speak his language." This was a heavy, growling voice, well on in years, and it was greeted by a chorus of consensual muttering. They all fell silent as the next man spoke, and I knew I was hearing the voice of their chieftain.

"Aye, you may be right, Tearlach, but we won't know until we try, will we? He may have information we can use. I think I want to spare his life for now, from curiosity, if nothing else."

"Why waste your time and ours?" The growling voice was filled with menace or disgust. "The whoreson killed Lachie. An eye for an eye, I say, and be damned to your curiosity. Let's spill his tripes and dump him to the fishes."

"Arragh, but why did he kill Lachie, and for what?" There was a ring to the question that made even me wish to hear the answer, and the others fell silent again as the voice went on. "If he's a Saxon, as he would seem to be with that head of yellow hair, then why would he die thus gladly for an alien child? Look at this boy, all of you, and tell me where your eyes are. Look at him! Look at his eyes! Here is no Saxon. This child is pure Gael. Why then, ask yourselves, would this Outlander behave as he did in killing Lachie? Or are you all solid bone clear upward from the necks? Where is your desire to know how such things work—what men will do under dire provocation? Could this be the man's son? Ah! In that case, his anger would be yours, had you seen what he saw . . ."

The child was alive! Even in my pain I felt my flesh tingle with the knowledge of what could only be a miracle. The voice above me pressed on.

"And if this be his son, what then? A Saxon father protective to death of a Gaelic child?" His voice faded, then resumed more loudly, cutting short the man Tearlach's effort to interrupt. "What concerns me, my friends, is how this yellow-headed wolf came to be aboard yon birney, and adrift at sea. Our birney! That concern is not going to be resolved by killing the creature without trying to discover what he might know. Where are our own men, Red Dougal and Alasdair, Fingal and the others of their crew? And far, far more important, where are the women they were sent to find? I'll tell you, my lads, if we cannot find means to loosen this man's tongue, I for one will take little pleasure in the thought of sailing home with such news as we have to bring my father."

A babble of voices broke out as they began to argue among themselves and I made an attempt to rise. It was a forlorn attempt; the hampering effect of my bound arms allowed me only to kick my legs uselessly, squirming around on the planking. I felt a foot insert itself between me and the decking, at the point of my shoulder, and then the heave of a leg turned me so that I almost rolled over onto my back—to be stopped again by my bound arms, coming to rest with the full weight of my body on my tied wrists and one elbow. In spite of my gritted teeth, I could not stifle an agonized groan. I lay squinting up at them while they all stared back. I ground my teeth against the dementing pain in my arms and managed to draw a deep breath.

"I can tell you what you want to know." I grated out the words painfully in their own tongue, through my locked teeth.

The shock on their faces might have been laughable at any other time, but the humour of the scene escaped me until much later. To hear their own liquid gutturals spill fluently from the lips of one they took to be a Saxon Outlander left all of them floundering. They recovered themselves quickly, nevertheless, led by their leader, at whose word two of them leaned over and hauled me to my feet again, bracing me between them. Behind us, I could hear the shocked muttering of the crew as word of this new development spread quickly from one end of the ship to the other.

The leader had pulled himself out of his slouch, sitting erect now, although his right leg still stretched stiffly before him, shrouded in the folds of his long cloak. He held the baby, which had fallen asleep, casually, yet with the assurance of practice, supported by his bent forearm against his side. He gazed at me now through narrowed eyes.

"You understand our tongue."

I nodded, my breathing still too shallow to allow me to speak strongly.

"How so?"

I tried to answer him, but my tongue failed me. I heaved a breath, shaking my head in a mute plea for patience. Finally, when I felt I could articulate the words without faltering, I said, "I learned it from a friend... It is not unlike my own."

"Your friend is Erse?"

I nodded. "He is."

I heard a muttered curse from the largest of the men on my left, and recognized the grumbling tone as Tearlach grunted something about a traitorous dog. I ignored it.

The leader was gazing at me fixedly. "How come you here, adrift in this vessel?"

"By hazard," I responded, shaking my head. The pain in my arms had begun to abate now that I was standing again. "I had no thought to leave the land. I merely sought to save the child."

"Save him? From what?"

I blinked at him, surprised that he should have to ask. "From death," I said. "The boat was drifting on the rising tide, floating away from shore, when I heard his cries. I climbed aboard and found him, then found I was too far away from shore to return." I hesitated, unwilling to show ignorance, but knowing there was no way to conceal it. "I have no knowledge of the sea, or ships, and knew not how to return the craft to land."

"You can swim; you could have swum ashore." His eyes were piercing bright, watching me closely. I shook my head.

"No, I wore armour and had no wish to be without it. So I stayed in the hope we'd drift ashore again. Besides, I might have drowned the child."

His eyes moved aside and I followed his glance to where my discarded armour, ring suit, helmet, sword, dagger and cloak lay piled against the ship's side.

After that one glance, however, he chose not to pursue the matter, apparently accepting the truth of my words. "The child is that important to you? Why?"

I said nothing, but he would not accept that.

"Why did you kill my man Lachie, and why leap overboard after the child?" I merely glared at him and he went on. "You thought to save it?"

I could not respond. His question was too alien.

"Well, did you? Did you think to save the child? Answer me, man!"

"Yes."

"Yes." The single word, repeated in his voice, sounded far different from the word I had said. On his tongue, it dripped scorn. "From what, from death?" He lowered his head again to look at the child before facing me again, his eyes now filled with anger. "What kind of fool are you? It would have been a kindness to the babe to let him drown. Now he will die of thirst and starvation, for there is no food here for him. He is new-born, fool, fit only for suckling at his mother's teat! He cannot eat, or drink, or feed himself, and we have no milk here."

His angry scorn confounded me, for I had not thought of any of this. In seeking to rescue the child I had thought only of his life, not of the means required to sustain that life beyond the moment of salvation. Realization of my foolishness removed the sting from his angry words, however, and I nodded in acquiescence.

"That's true," I said. "I had not thought of that."

"Hmm." He changed the subject, looking down at the sleeping baby in his arms and rubbing one fingertip against its tiny cheek, and now his voice was softer. "What of the men who crewed the boat, did you see them?"

"Aye, they were all dead. Slain."

"All of them?" His head came up and I heard disbelief in his voice.

"All of them," I repeated. "The women, too."

He sucked in his breath with a sibilant hiss, and I saw a fleeting expression of pain in his dark eyes. "How many women?"

"Eight. Eight women, twenty-one men."

"And you were left alive?"

"Not left alive. I was not with them. I arrived late, too late to help them. Could I have a drink?" My throat was raw.

"Later." He was frowning now, a deep, vertical cleft marring his open brow. "Tell me of this. Who are you, and how came you to arrive there at all, let alone too late to help them? And who was responsible for their deaths? Did you watch from safety until the slaughter had been done and then come forth to plunder the remains, or were you one of the killers?" He paused, watching me closely. "I warn you, think carefully before you speak another word."

I looked back at him, eye to eye, and held myself erect. "I rode in pursuit of the man who killed them, thinking him someone else. I saw them from the top of a distant cliff, clustered upon the sands around their boat, which had been stranded high and dry by the receding tide. Even as I watched, I saw their pursuers close with them, and they seemed well matched, man for man. I rode around and down to overtake them, but my horse was hampered by the sand, so that by the time I arrived the fighting was almost over."

The frown was still etched upon his brow. "And they were all killed, every one, on both sides?" I heard his disbelief.

"No, when I came, six of the attacking force remained alive. They were killing the wounded. It had been a hard-fought fight."

"And?"

"I killed them."

"All six of them, you alone?" His disbelief was total.

"Aye, with a bow, from well beyond their reach." I had decided, as I spoke the words, to make no mention of the man I had spared.

Now he looked back at my discarded armour. "I see no bow."

"No," I snapped, knowing I was being reckless, "nor do you see my horse. I left both on the beach."

He pursed his lips and said nothing, and the child in his arm kicked and snuffled.

I felt myself swaying with fatigue, and my bound arms burned with agony. The pain in my head, which had been dulled, took on a new sharpness and located itself, it seemed, right in the middle of my forehead.

The seated chieftain continued to bite thoughtfully at the inside of his lower lip, saying nothing for a spell, then returned to the subject of the women, asking me how they had been killed. I told him haltingly, fumbling for words, reliving the scene in which the attacking force, led, I had thought, by Uther Pendragon, had snatched up the eight women and used them as living shields against the arrows of the defenders. I avoided, however, naming names, either my own or Uther's. My own confusion, watching the affair, had been profound, since I had known neither that the man I thought was Uther wore only Uther's armour, nor that the bowmen facing him were Uther's men. I ended my recital to find myself facing another question.

"You were pursuing one man, thinking him someone else, isn't that what you said? Explain that."

"He was my cousin," I told him, reeling so the men supporting me had to renew their grip. "I thought he had killed my wife, and I had hunted him for many days. He warred against Lot of Cornwall."

That captured his interest, but not, it appeared, in Lot of Cornwall. "You thought he killed your wife? You thought? You did not know it?"

"No, I did not know, but I believed he had, and I sought vengeance. I saw him from afar, as I have said, recognizing his armour, but when I caught him, it was someone else, an Outlander who had already killed my cousin and stripped his corpse for his own use."

"So your cousin is dead?"

"Aye."

"When did this take place, this slaughter?"

I squinted up at the sun. "Today, although I don't know how long ago. Shortly before or after noon, I think. We were blown out from land and there was nothing I could do but wait until we were blown in again. I lay down with the child and fell asleep."

The man facing me shook his head in wondering disbelief and his lieutenants burst into guffaws of raucous laughter at my innocence of the ways of the sea.

"You may be fortunate we saw you before you fell beneath the horizon," the leader said. "Where did this happen, do you know?" He read the answer in my eyes and spoke to one of his own men. "Sean, how far would he have drifted with this tide, and from where, in, what, four hours?"

The man addressed leaned over the side of the rail and then looked up at the mast top, to where a banner fluttered. Then he leaned outboard, hawked and spat, watching his spittle fly off with the wind. His voice, when he spoke, was peculiarly high, almost a falsetto, a grotesque sound to issue from so big a man.

"Six leagues? Eight? Perhaps ten. The tide is to the east, so the place lies west, and northward."

"How long to get there? Do we have the time?"

Again the squint up to the masthead. "We have a wind, not much, but it should do. With all men on the oars, we could be off the coast close to the place by nightfall, if we go now."

"So be it." The chieftain looked back at me. "You have until nightfall, if we reach the coast, otherwise till morning. The truth or falsehood of your words will be plain when we find the spot." He paused, his head cocked to one side, looking at me obliquely.

"The resolution lies with you, so I hope you will recognise the place we seek. Failure to do so will prove you have lied, and you will die." he spoke to one of the others. "Cut him loose and find him somewhere to lie down until we sight the coast, and give him some water and a bite to eat." Then to me again, "Rest yourself well, Yellow Head. You will have need of all your faculties."

They cut my bonds and led me to the corresponding platform at the decked-in front part of the boat, where they gave me to eat and drink and threw me a skin to sleep on. I drank the water thirstily but fell into sleep before I could eat the bread.

My body stiffened while I slept, so that by the time someone shook me awake my aches had settled deeply into my bones and I had a hard time rising to my feet, beset with cramps and pains and a head that threatened to burst apart with the clamour of my surging blood. That possibility concerned me, for I had twice in recent years been saved from death by the ministrations of a trusted friend whose skills in medicine had prompted him to drill a hole in my head to relieve the pressure of blood on my brain, what he called hematoma. Once upright, I leaned for a spell against the fore part of the ship, close by the great, thrusting dragon's head, allowing the gusting wind to clear my head and ignoring the jostling of the fellow sent to fetch me. I braced myself against the surging deck, stretched myself to my full height, closed my eyes and drew deep, steady breaths, holding each one for a count of three before expelling it completely and filling my lungs again.

The exercise worked, and calmed me to the point that I could tell the present pounding in my skull bore no resemblance to those other, far more ominous headaches I had known. The root of this one lay in the hard, flat metal of the weapon that had hammered me to the deck, bruising my neck and shoulder, both of which ached in concert with my head.

As my various pains died down and I approached mastery of myself once more, I realized that I had awoken to noises that were alien to my ear and offered nothing to appease my aching head: the steady, rhythmic pounding of a deep drum that was not, as I had thought at first, the surging of my own blood in my head; the creaking, grunting, strangely shuffling rhythm of the oarsmen; the groaning of straining ropes and the thin, shrieking whistle of the wind; and among all these, the constant, wailing shriek of a hungry child.

I rubbed the sleep crust from my eyes and followed my escort back along the length of the galley to the stern platform, and the first thing I noticed as I set out was the angle of the great cross-spar on the mast. A strong wind had sprung up, and the spar now slanted right to left from fore to stern to catch its full power. The bellied fabric of a mighty sail swelled out above me, blocking out the sky, angled away from me so that I looked into the cup of it, its heaviness anchored to a second great spar high above that must have overlain the lower one when the sail was lowered. Now I could see that both spars were tethered to the mast by large iron rings bolted firmly to the spars themselves, and held in tension by a bewildering array of tight-stretched ropes that permitted the angle of the spars to be changed to catch the wind. I glanced to my left then and saw the shoreline of Lot's kingdom, and below me the swaying bodies of the oarsmen moved to the steady tempo of the drum, thrusting the vessel forward so that it seemed to skim over the surface.

They rowed two men to an oar, one lacing the rear, the other forward so that one pushed while his fellow pulled, and even as I watched, the drum fell silent and the oarsmen changed places, ducking beneath their oars to resume their beat again before the vessel had time to lose way.

No one looked at me as I slowly walked the length of the ship, bracing myself against the heaving of the deck. My presence was of no importance for the time being. The baby's cries grew louder as I approached the stern platform and, although no one indicated anything by look or word, I felt sure that the patience of these men must be close to breaking point. I was surprised, however, to see that the leader, still seated in his swinging chair with leg outstretched, continued to hold the child. The only man with him, the one he had called Tearlach, saw me coming and threw me a withering, disgusted look before swinging himself down to the rowers' level, where he disappeared through the door beneath the deck. The leader watched me as I approached to stand beside him, then indicated the screaming infant with a nod of his head.

"Take note of what I said earlier. You would have done the babe a kindness to let him die. Now he is starving."

I swallowed, clearing a film of mucus from my mouth, not knowing how to respond. "I'm surprised you let him live till now then," I said, my voice no more than a croak.

The man in the chair looked at me sharply, offended, and his response was flat and hard. "We are not all as hard as Lachie," he snapped. "I have children of my own. Your folly was to bring the child aboard at all. Allow me the folly of being unable to kill him out of hand." I saw no benefit in seeking to point out that I had sought, not brought, the child aboard. He kicked off with his foot and the chair swung, while he lowered his head and gazed at the child. Finally he looked up at me and brought the chair to stillness with the guide-rope reins he held in his left hand.

"There's the coastline," he said, indicating the shore. "Do you recognize it?"

I looked, but we were still far out, our beak pointed towards a headland that jutted out from the shore to intersect our path. I shook my head.

"No. We may be too far out, but it looks too flat."

"Aye, that's right, you spoke of cliffs, high cliffs. Well, we'll close presently, and once around the headland there, you'll see cliffs aplenty. There are some bays along the shoreline there. One of them should be yours." His tone of voice added, if what you say is true. He lifted the child up, resting it over his shoulder against his breast, and then asked, "Are there cattle there?"

I blinked at him. "Cattle? Where?"

His frown was quick. "Ashore! Cattle, man, cows, or goats or even sheep. This child needs milk."

Again I shook my head, bewildered. "I don't know." And then I remembered. "But there's a woman there, with milk! I found her—saw her there— this morning. She was mad . . . insane with grief, kneeling beside the bodies of her man and children. One was a tiny babe, as small as he. She must have milk."

"Are you sure? And could you find her again?"

I nodded. "Aye, I could. I would have to ride back the way I came, retrace my steps. But she will still be there, I think. The poor creature had nowhere else to go."

"And you would bring her back?" I heard the cynical sharpness in his tone.

Now it was I who was offended. We were alone, the two of us, on the platform. "Think you I'd leave the child with you, after what I've gone through for him?"

In response he moved the child again, holding it up in front of him to peer into its angry red face. I swung away in disgust, looking upward as I did to where the great sail bellied above me, and as I did so, the wind died for a space of moments, then gusted again, so that the fabric emptied and went slack, then filled again with a mighty, cracking sound, stretched and taut, thrusting its emblem into my astonished gaze.

The sight of it sent my mind leaping instantly, back through time, to Camulod and a conversation I had had with a young Erse chief, Donuil, whom I had held hostage. He had warned me, that day, that none of the Hibernian tribes—he called them Eirish tribes—save his would be bound by our bargain. The clans of Eire warred constantly among themselves, he said, and each had its own emblem. His father's emblem, the black galley of his clan, would, Donuil had sworn, stay clear of our seas for the five years of his captivity.

Above me, blazoned on the saffron-coloured sail of this great ship, a huge, black galley swelled against the sky.

The realization of where I was, and the myriad complications thus involved, left my mind reeling for a spell. I was conscious that I stood on a threshold of some kind and that the next few moments might decide my future, for I knew that here, immediately, could lie life or death for me and for my helpless, hungry ward. I turned to the side and gripped the handrail, taking care that the man behind me should not see my face while I tried vainly to recall the rest of that conversation, when Donuil had spoken to me of his brothers and their feuds and jealousies. One of them he had loved, the crippled one. And then I had it.

I turned back to the man in the chair, and he raised his eyes to meet mine, his face expressionless.

"It was a bear that took your leg, Connor, was it not?"

He stiffened, and the colour leached from his face. I felt better at once, but I held my breath, nonetheless, and allowed the silence to stretch until he should break it.

"How could you know that? How do you know my name?"

I allowed myself to breathe again.

"You are Connor, son of Athol, High King of the Scots of Eire."

He was rigid, eyes wide, and then he darted a glance sideways, as though looking for assistance. I held up my hand.

"Peace, I am no magician. The knowledge came to me but now, when I looked up and saw the galley on your sail and remembered it The Black Galley of Athol. Your brother Donuil told me of you."

"Donuil? You know Donuil?" His voice was tight with tension.

I nodded. "He is the friend I spoke of. I am Merlyn Britannicus. Of Camulod. I am the one who took young Donuil captive and held him hostage."

"You!" The tight-wound tension left him visibly and the color began to come back into his face. He heaved an enormous sigh, and slouched back in his chair. "Donuil, by the stones of Cuchoulain. You had me going there, for a moment, man. I thought you were a . . ." He allowed the thought to die and I did not pursue it.

I sought to press my advantage. "It should please you to know Donuil is well, or was, when last I saw him less than a month ago. He rode northeast on a mission for me, to the lands of King Vortigern, to find my brother." I smiled. "And now I have found his."

Still he said nothing, staring at me in perplexity, and I realized that well he might. Friendship was a term that normally had little significance between captor and hostage. I spoke into his silence.

"I released Donuil from his bond to me more than three years ago. He won his freedom in my service and is now my good friend, as close as any brother." Brother-in-law, my mind added.

One of Connor's captains, Sean the navigator, came striding towards us and Connor stopped him with an upraised palm. "Leave us, Sean," he said. "We're talking."

Sean threw me a speculative look. "Aye," he said, his high-pitched voice offering no opinion on the matter, "I see that, but we're about to round the headland there; it might be rough, and you with that babby in your arms. Will you want me to take it?"

Connor looked at him and smiled, the first time I had seen him do so, and the act transformed his whole face, so that I saw a different man. "No, I'll be just grand, Sean, and so will the babby, now away you go and leave us to our talk." As he said the words, the galley pitched steeply, its nose tilting sharply upward and then falling in a swooping, spiralling lurch to crash jarringly into the first turmoil of the waters surging round the rocky point. Caught off balance and completely unprepared, I staggered sideways, groping frantically for the rail, my eyes sweeping upward, awestruck, to where the top of the huge mast whipped in a dizzying circle. Only now did I notice that two men had climbed the great mast and moved out to the end of the spar, where they now leaned suicidally outward, far above the surface of the sea, clinging to lines and anchored by ropes around their waists, peering down into the shallow waters as they watched for rocks and shoals.

By the time I had recovered my balance, having fallen painfully to one knee and clutched at a handy rope that helped me to regain my footing, the atmosphere aboard the galley had changed completely, urgent with raised voices shouting orders as the oarsmen battled to realign the ship, to point it straight into the waves and keep it thrusting forward amid the sudden turbulence that surrounded it and seemed, to my untrained eye, to be threatening to overwhelm it.

"What's happening?" I yelled above the pandemonium.

Connor's attention was on his crew, but he heard the sudden fear in my voice and glanced back to where I stood clutching the rail.

"Nothing to worry about," he shouted, cradling the baby calmly. "Conflicting currents, that's all. The tide from behind us is meeting the ebb from the other side of the headland, so it will be choppy until we round the point." Even as he spoke, the pitching, crosswise motion eased and the ship slid into smoother water. I waited, nonetheless, until the vessel had resumed its former, sweeping gait, before I released my death grip on the rope and the handrail beneath my hands.

Once in the shelter of the headland, however, the wind died with the leaping waves and the sail above me lost its belly, its fabric settling under its own weight to hang inertly from the upper spar. In response, the rhythm of the oarsmen's drum grew faster, and the boat leapt ahead, gliding parallel to the shore, which now lay less than a longbow-shot from where I stood. I stared ahead, looking along the length of the vessel to where high cliffs now appeared, rising one behind the other in serried banks. I raised my hand and pointed.

"That looks familiar, over there," I said, realizing that I no longer needed to shout.

"Let's hope you're right," Connor answered, quietly. Something in the tone of his voice made me look back at him. He was staring at the shoreline, a look on his face that I could not identify, and I remembered his earlier comment.

"What's wrong?" I asked him. "Am I still to die if I can't find the place?"

He shook his head, dismissing my question, his preoccupied gaze still fixed on the land. I asked the next question, unable to recall what Donuil had told me, unsure of how Connor might respond.

"Were you very fond—" I broke off and cleared my throat. "Were you close to your sister Ygraine?"

This time he showed no surprise. He merely closed his eyes for a moment and then turned to look at me. "Ygraine, too?" he said. "How do you know Ygraine?"

"I didn't," I replied quietly. "I only knew of her. Donuil had told me at the outset, when I first met him, that her betrothal to Lot was part of the price of your father's alliance with Cornwall. That was years ago." He was looking at me passively as I continued. "I had forgotten her thereafter, until I heard her name again several days ago, on a battlefield."

"On a battlefield? My sister was discussed in the middle of a battle?" I could not tell from his tone whether he was angry or merely disbelieving.

"No," I said, seeking to explain myself. "The battle was over when I arrived. I met a survivor, one of my own men, who told me Lot's wife had escaped the carnage. That's when I remembered who Lot's wife was."

He shook his head in what might have been commiseration or, again, rueful disbelief.

"It's a Druid you should have been. Yellow Head. You seem to have the great talent for arriving on battlefields after the fighting's all done, wouldn't you say so?"

"Aye," I grunted. "It must seem that way. But—" I broke off abruptly as old Tearlach approached, followed by the navigator and two others. Their expressions were grim, and I hurried to get my next words out before they arrived within hearing distance. "Connor, we must talk more. I have much to say to you."

'Hmm'ph'mm!" That was a sound I had heard Donuil make a thousand times, and it had a thousand possible translations. He swung to face the newcomers "Tearlach, Padraic, our yellow-headed captive here knows much about us."

The older man scowled, his glance sweeping me up and down dismissively. "Aye, do ye tell me?" he growled. "And what could he know about us that would bother us any more than a midge bite through thick cloth?"

My retort was quick, stung by his disdain. "I know you are honour-bound by the word of your High King to stay far from your stinking ally Lot of Cornwall and far from our shores until the release of your prince, Donuil!"

His eyes widened in shock and his head snapped around to look at Connor, who smiled and spoke to all of them. "He speaks the tongue well, does he not? "T'was Donuil himself, he tells me, who taught him the knack of it, teaching him the Erse out of the crude Gaelic his own people speak. They became friends, rather than captor and captive, it seems, and Donuil earned his freedom."

"And you believe him? Where is Donuil now, then? He never came home." His surprise mastered, Tearlach's scowl returned. The others ignored him, their eyes on Connor, who took his time before answering, swinging his seat back slowly until he faced me.

"Aye," he drawled, finally. "That is true, and it has been five years and more since he was taken. And yet, I think I believe him. Donuil is still here in Britain."

"Dead meat, too, if I'm any judge!"

Tearlach's words went unanswered. Connor sniffed, glancing down at the sleeping babe.

"Here, Sean," he said. "Take the wee boy and place him somewhere where he'll come to no harm."

The navigator moved to take the child and carried it away, disappearing in the direction of the area beneath the deck. Mine were the only eyes that followed him, but a movement from the seated chieftain brought my attention back to him. Slowly, his eyes never leaving me, he reached up and undid the clasp that held his cloak in place, then he reached up above him with both hands and grasped two of the ropes from which his chair was hung. Smoothly, effortlessly, the muscles of his arms bunched and he pulled himself erect, the cloak falling from him unheeded as he moved. When his weight was fully on his left leg, he swung the other and it fell to the deck with a solid thump, revealing a carved, wooden peg that stretched to his knee and was attached there by a large leather socket. The limb was a tapered cylinder, perfectly turned out of some dark, dense wood and polished to a high lustre. Above it he wore a rich, woollen tunic in the Roman style, pale green with a Grecian border in the same deep red as the symbols on his cloak, and the thigh beneath the hem, before it disappeared into the leather socket, was solid and roped with muscle. A breastplate of toughened, polished hide, moulded to his torso in the Roman style, was all the armour that he wore, and from his shoulders hung a crossed pair of belts, one supporting a sword and the other a dagger. I had great difficulty in not staring at the wooden leg, but I judged it wise to ignore it.

Connor stood there, still holding the ropes by which he had pulled himself up, and no one moved or spoke as he dragged his wooden leg back to where it would support his weight. The end of it was capped with several layers of leather, cut and fitted to the shape of the appendage's base. He lodged it firmly and then took time to feel the rhythm of the ship, swaying his body slightly to the motion of it. Finally, when he judged his balance sufficiently secure, he released the ropes and stood unsupported, looking at me.

"I still fall sometimes, but not often and I'm used to it now." He turned and walked to the rail around the deck, crossing the space in four steps, swinging the wooden limb out and around each time he moved it, so that his motion was more of a swagger than a walk. When he reached the rail, he turned back to face me, leaning his buttocks against it and bracing himself with his hands. "Well, Yellow Head, I don't know what to make of you, or what to do with you." He glanced at one of the others. "Padraic, what say you?"

The man addressed hawked loudly and spat over the side without looking at me. "I say Tearlach has the right of it. Donuil did not come home. This one should not go home, either."

The navigator reappeared and joined us, glancing from one to the other of his companions, trying to gauge their temper.

"We are talking still of Donuil and his fate," Connor informed him. " Tearlach and Padraic think this man should die. Do you?"

The navigator shrugged. " The babby's going to die. Donuil has been dead to us all for years. Everybody dies."

"The baby will not die," I interrupted him, addressing myself to Connor. "I told you, I know of a worm—"

"Be silent! You will hold your peace until required to speak." The reprimand was whiplash quick, savage and implacable. I subsided. Connor looked back at the navigator. "Scan?"

The navigator shook his head gently and with finality. "Throw him over the side."

"He can swim, Sean."

Sean sniffed. "Lachie could swim, too, but not after this one clove him with the axe. Could he do any better than Lachie?"

"Diarmid?"

Diarmid was the only one of the four who had so far remained silent, a large, red-faced man with a wild beard and a head of hair to match, judging by the thick, coarse ringlets that hung from beneath his big, horned helmet. Now, addressed directly by his leader, he turned his gaze on me and I saw his eyes, pale blue and cold. "He's an Outlander. Kill'im."

I followed all of this with disbelief, amazed at the change this Connor had undergone in the space of moments. When I had told him of my friendship with his brother, I had thought he believed me. He himself had said as much. What I was witnessing now, however, gave the lie to all of that. He stood, looking down towards his knees, the fingers of his right hand scratching idly in the hair that swept back behind his ears. He finally withdrew his hand, inspecting the tips of his fingers as he rubbed them pensively with his thumb, then made a tutting sound and heaved a quick, sharp sigh.

"Well, Yellow Head," he said. "You hear the verdict of my trusted friends. 'They want you dead." He sucked air reflectively between his teeth. "But the decision is mine. And what do I have to guide me in the making of it? You!" He shot out an arm and pointed a long finger in my face. "You tell me that my brother is alive, and well, and living in Britain as your friend. As proof of that, you offer me words that he could have told you at any time, under any kind of duress, and I have said I do believe that lie is here in Britain." The arm fell back to his side.

"But Tearlach could have the right of it. Donuil might be dead in Britain. How am I to know?

"And what of the child, the starving babby there? Whose child is he? Not yours, for you said you did not know beyond a doubt your cousin killed your wife. Your wife is dead, but had the child been yours and taken by your cousin, then you would know, beyond a doubt, his guilt. And then the 'cousin' that you found was not your cousin, but someone who had killed him and stripped his armour for his own purpose. Did he take the babby, too, for his own use? Or are we to believe you bore the infant with you, into war, new-born just weeks ago, in all your armour?

"So . . . the child's not yours. And yet you value it enough to risk your life to save it, not once, but twice? Whose child is this? And what could be his value to you, to me, to anyone? Here is a mystery, Yellow Head, and too profound for me. If the babby be not yours, and not your cousin's, then whose can it be, for it must belong to someone? And then I mind me that there were women among the slain whom you arrived too late to help. But who were the women? You say Ygraine, my sister, was one of them. I doubt that, Yellow Head, since you yourself have said you did not know my sister, other than by name. You may be lying, although to what end I could not guess, other than to extend your life, which might be good and ample reason."

"Deck, there!" The hail from above brought every eye sweeping up to the two lookouts on the spar above. "There's a body in the water!"

As everyone thronged to the side, I looked towards the shore and recognized the dunes and the rising hills I had descended earlier that day. Connor stood beside me, staring down, searching the water. I nudged him and pointed towards the land. We were close inshore now.

"This is the place. Look, you can see bodies up there on the sand."

He glanced to where I pointed and swung to the navigator. "Take her ashore, as soon as we have secured that body!"

II

The business with the bereaved woman, potential wetnurse for the child, turned out to be quite simply taken care of. Once on shore, escorted by a group of warriors hand-picked by Connor, I had no difficulty finding my horse and my abandoned bow and quiver, after which I retraced my path to the clearing that contained the ruined farmstead and its scattered, pathetic corpses. The woman was still there, although she no longer knelt by her dead baby. Prompted by some motive known to her reeling mind alone, she had moved away and we found her wandering close by, among the bushes surrounding the ruin of her home. She gave no response to our greetings, her maddened, empty eyes betraying no awareness even of our presence, but she responded to the gentle urgings of guiding hands and accompanied us without protest. Only once did she resist, at the point where she was led from the clearing. She tugged her arms free and turned around, staring back, then made as if to return, but she had little fight left in her and quickly submitted to the restraining hands that held her again, after which she went where she was led, in a state of utter, uncaring docility.

Night fell as we made our way back towards Connor's galley, through a war-ravaged landscape that was almost completely alien to me. The moon broke through a gap in the clouds just as we approached the end of the solid, flint-strewn ground, marked by a ragged, eroded edge where the highest of spring tides had penetrated inland. Beyond that edge and less than the height of a tall man below its lip, the domain of the sea began in a flat-bottomed stretch of arid land composed of shale and clay and advancing sand. This barren, pebble-strewn strip, stippled with clumps of hardy grass that fought for life against the saline, briny sourness clogging its roots, extended southward and to the east, its clay and shale quickly giving way to sand and more sand, to where a series of tall, weed-crowned dunes swept up to block all sight or sound of the distant sea.

I drew rein, and my companions stopped with me, grouped around me motionless in that stillness that descends instantly from time to time upon men moving uncertainly in darkness through hostile territory. I ignored them, standing in my stirrups to look about me in the hush of total silence, my ears listening in vain for any sound of waves from the distant shore. Ahead of me and several hundred paces to my right, the first hill began to swell upward, angling southwest to where its steep-soaring might would also be truncated by the hungry sea to become the first of the frowning cliffs that stretched unbroken from there all the way to the farthest tip of the rugged peninsula of Cornwall. The moon was enormous, almost full, and its brightness lit the distant hillside well enough to throw shadows visible from where I sat, but it revealed no glimmer of water, south or east. None of my escort had sought to question mc, or to comment on the route I chose to follow. None could, for they were strangers here, more alien than I to these bleak lands that had belonged to Gulrhys Lot, the self-styled Duke, and later King, of Cornwall.

There were fifteen of us, and I the only one astride a horse. The others stood grouped around me, waist deep and deeper in the sturdy, stunted brush that coated the terrain here in wild, haphazard clumps and thickets separated by skeins of stony, lichen-covered ground too inhospitable to accommodate even these bushes' hardy roots. The biggest of the men, their leader Tearlach, glanced up at me.

"Well? Are we close?"

I considered how to respond. "We must be," I said eventually. "Or we ought to be. Can't see a thing from here." I cleared my throat, forcing myself to speak with an authority I did not possess in my present circumstances.

"They'll have a fire, a beacon light to guide us in, but we can't hope to see it from here, with all those dunes between us and the sea." I gestured upward with my chin to where the moonlit hillside reared above us in the southwest. "I'll ride up there and take a look. Wait for me here."

I swung my horse around and rode off at a canter, following the rim of the broken land adjacent to the beach. My horse Germanicus, the eighth of his name, moved with confidence now, far more secure than he had been before the moon had emerged to light his world, and I glanced up at the sky as I went, pleased to see that the clouds were clearing rapidly and that stars were now visible almost everywhere I looked.

Soon the ground began to shelve upward and we were on the hillside proper, above the invisible line that held back the scrubby whins and bushes, and moments later I saw the moonlight reflecting in a silver band across the waters beyond the dunes that now lay below and to my left. Higher we mounted, and with every stride, it seemed, my horse laid ever widening, moonlit vistas open to my gaze. We had almost reached the summit, however, before I saw the glow of distant firelight on the beach, miles to the east. I knew the fire must be a large one, but to my eyes it seemed the merest spark, so distant was it from my present perch, but it was a spark ignited and fed by an enemy, the brother of a friend, and he had in his keeping something more precious to me than life itself. When last I saw him, he had held my honour and my duty, carelessly but unknowingly, in the crook of his bent elbow.

A pounding in my chest told me I had been holding my breath, and I released it in a sibilant gust, sniffing thereafter and shaking my head briefly to clear it of unwelcome thoughts, before reining my mount around again and retracing my path downward to where my escort waited with the woman.

I found it in no way strange that they should have permitted me to ride off thus, alone. Mine was the only mount, and yet they had no fear I might attempt to flee. They knew—at least their leader knew—that I would do what I had set out to do. They had good reason to know how greatly I valued what they held of mine.

They could never have imagined how short of the truth their knowledge fell.

The moon held, lighting our way for the remainder of our journey, but it took us almost three more hours to make our way through the dunes and along the narrow strand to where the fire blazed, and Tearlach strode ahead of me for the last half mile, making better progress over the loose sand than my mount. The tide was far out when we arrived, and the great galley lay high and dry on the beach not far beyond the firelight, lolling on its side, for all the world like some giant sea beast.

One of the men on guard heard or saw our approach while we were still far distant and raised the alarm, but big Tearlach pulled a bull's horn from inside his scrip and blew a long, winding note that informed them who we were. When we arrived at the firelight's edge some time later, I dismounted and walked the last short distance with the others, dropping the ends of my horse's reins on the ground, confident in the training that would keep him standing there until I returned to him.

The galley's entire crew stood silent in the leaping light of the enormous fire, watching our arrival with great interest, ranged in a broad arc behind their commander. He stood alone, slightly ahead of his lieutenants, shadowed by the flickering of the flames beyond his left shoulder, bareheaded and with his arms crossed on his chest beneath his great, ground-sweeping cloak. Only the sound of our feet in the sand, the roaring of the pyre and the thin, incongruous wailing of a child broke the hush that lasted until Connor and I stood face to face beside the great fire. He gazed at me for long moments, his lips pursed beneath the swooping lines of his full moustache, and then his eyes moved to where the woman stood unmoving between two of his men, each of them holding her loosely by one elbow.

"So," he grunted eventually. "You found her. Did you have difficulty?"

"No, none at all. She had hardly moved from where I saw her last."

"Hmm. What tongue does she speak?" His gaze remained fixed on the woman.

I shook my head. "None that I know of. She has made no sound since we picked her up."

He looked at me then, surprise showing in the speed with which his eyes sought mine. "Is she mute?"

"I doubt it. She is demented, unhinged by grief."

"Aye." His eyes swung back to the woman. "Well, we may be able to cure that." He nodded his head in a brief, sideways jerk, and one of his lieutenants, who had been watching him more closely than the others, moved forward immediately and signalled to the men holding the woman's arms. He strode off and they followed him, leading the woman between them. Connor looked back to me.

"Well, Caius Merlyn," he said. "It would appear you have some truthfulness in you, at least. My tent is yonder, and I have some mead. Come you."

I ignored the implied insult and hesitated, torn by a strong desire to follow the woman and her escort, but resigned myself to following him to a smaller fire that burned outside the only tent on the beach, wondering as I went at the easy confidence of his swaying gait as he swung the carved wooden peg that had replaced his right leg. By the fire he waved me towards a wooden stool and disappeared into the tent to reappear moments later carrying a stoppered flask and two horn cups. He seated himself on a second stool and stretched his real leg out towards the fire, then pulled the stopper from the flask and filled a cup, passing it to me before pouring his own.

I sat without speaking, waiting until he had finished, gripping the flask securely between his knees and stoppering it one-handed before allowing it to fall by his feet. He gazed at me then with a trace of ironic amusement, then he raised his cup to his lips. I drank with him, feeling the fiery sweetness of the honeyed mead fill my mouth with a sudden, flowering burst of warmth and flavour, starting the saliva flowing strongly before sliding down my gullet to spread its liquid, energizing heat through my body, which I only now realized was deep chilled by the cold night air.

I shuddered with pleasure, feeling the fire's warmth reach out, as though suddenly to caress me. He drank more deeply than had I, and when he lowered his cup with a satisfied sigh I knew it was empty. And then he was standing again, looming above me.

"Stay here," he said. "Enjoy the fire. I'll be back presently."

I watched him walk away, his ungainly yet strangely graceful gait silhouetted briefly against the larger fire close by, and then I was alone. A few moments longer I sat there, staring into the flames beside me until my eyes teared, and then I swung myself around to face the sea, allowing the flames to heat my back. I was fire-blind at first, and the darkness before me was total, but as my eyes adjusted to the night again, the looming shape of the galley's hull came into focus, its outline leaping up high above me to blot out the star-pricked sky. I leaned backward, craning my neck to see the top of it and remembering how enormous it had seemed the last time I had seen it thus, from beneath, as I floundered helplessly in the waters that bore it so easily.

The sounds of Connor returning brought me back from my recollection and I turned to face him where he stood by the fire, eyeing me with that same, strange expression I had marked before.

"Where did you find the horse?"

I shrugged my shoulders. "Where I left him."

He looked surprised. "The very spot?"

"No, not exactly. I had left him ground-tethered. He is trained to stay where I leave him, but I had been gone for many hours. He's an intelligent beast and had wandered away from the shore to the nearest forage. He stayed there."

"Hmm. And the bow?"

"Where I left it, too, with my arrows. The very spot. It wasn't hungry."

He thrust the tip of his tongue behind his lower lip, digesting that without smiling.

"I have never seen such a large bow. Those others we found on the strand are as long, but differently made."

"Aye," I concurred. "It's different, unique, I think. It came from Africa, many years ago, long before I was born. It belonged to my great-uncle Varrus." I saw no point in adding that the others, the Pendragon longbows as they were becoming known, had been modelled upon my own, for length, at least, since the Pendragon had no means of fashioning the layered, double- arched complexity of the great bow's compound structure of wood, horn and sinew.

"Varrus?" Connor's eyebrow had ridden up on his forehead. "What kind of a name is that?"

"It's Roman. His full name was Gaius Publius Varrus."

"So your uncle was a Roman? And who else had a hand in the making of you? Romans were small, I'm told, and dark of skin. Your yellow hair and the height of you makes me doubt you're purely Roman . . ."

I said nothing in response to this and he considered my silence for long moments before turning away abruptly and jerking his hand in a gesture that meant I should accompany him. I rose and followed him, our path skirting the larger bonfire and plunging into the darkness again to where a glow, shrouded by the massed figures of many men, announced another, smaller fire that could not possibly afford warmth for the hushed throng that surrounded it.

The crowd parted at our approach, allowing us access to the small fire and the sight that had held them all so rapt. The woman we had brought with us knelt there, head down, her milk-swollen udders bare to the night and the eyes of all as she suckled the tiny, gluttonous starveling she held tenderly in her arms, and as I watched them, my throat swollen suddenly with a feeling close to grief, I saw the tears that fell from beneath her hair to land upon the child. Someone among the fierce Eirish warriors surrounding her moved forward and quietly placed a blanket over the woman's shoulders, smoothing it into place and draping it across her to cover the nursing baby, whose eyes were closed now in sleepy, well-fed bliss.

How long I stood there, I cannot recall, but presently I felt Connor's fingers on my arm, and I went back with him to his own fire where we seated ourselves again and he poured another cup of mead for each of us. No one came near us after that, and we sat without talking, he staring into the flames and I staring at him as we sipped at our cups.

We had not found his sister Ygraine on the shore. She and her slaughtered women, with the bodies of the birney's entire crew, had been swept out to sea by the incoming tide that had borne me away in the birney. The sole corpse we had found floating naked in the sea had been one of them, but a stranger to Connor. Where her clothes had gone I could not tell, but deprived of them her body had possessed nothing to signify rank or station. What we had found was merely a dead woman, drifting alone and bereft, as all corpses are, of any human dignity. Ashore, only the corpses of some of Uther's bowmen remained, lying where they had died in their last stand on the dunes above the high tide mark with several of those commanded by Derek of Ravenglass, the man who had killed my cousin Uther Pendragon and stripped him of his armour, donning it himself and thereby causing me to pursue him, mistaking him for Uther.

Connor had refused to believe his sister dead, in spite of my story and of the evidence scattered along the shoreline. That there had been a fight of some sort, he could see; that some women had been involved, and had been killed there, he was prepared to accept, having seen one of them. The death of his own sister, however, the Queen of this wild region of Cornwall, whom he had come to rescue and return to her father's hearth, he simply refused to accept without the evidence of his own senses. He had my own admission that I had never seen Ygraine before that encounter, and that, allied with the fact that the woman found floating in the sea was a stranger to him, cast doubt over the identity of the dead woman I had named Ygraine of Cornwall.

I could have convinced him otherwise, I knew beyond question, simply by telling him of my own wife, Deirdre, his is other sister, whom he had thought dead for more than a decade. For Deirdre of the Violet Eyes, as she had been known in childhood, had lived beyond the time of her supposed death, vanishing from Eire and travelling to Britain by unknown means, where, years later, we two had met and loved each other for the space of one short, wonderful year. I had known Ygraine the instant I set eyes upon her, for she could have been twin to my Deirdre, whom I had known as Cassandra. For some inchoate reason, however, one which I remained unable to define even to myself, I had said nothing of any of this. Something, some foreknowledge, some formless but potent caution, barred me from speaking these thoughts aloud. Three times I had been on the point of telling him, but on each occasion I had found myself robbed of speech. Bewildered, even slightly panicked by the premonition that seemed to force me to remain silent, each time I had swallowed hard and covered my confusion in silence, refusing to think about it thereafter. Now it had returned, unsought. Perhaps, I thought then, watching him, it had to do with the manner of the dreadful death that had come upon my wife. Deirdre had been murdered, pregnant with our child, while I was far from home on the affairs of Camulod, the colony established by my grandfather Caius Britannicus and his comrade and brother-in-law Publius Varrus.

Connor broke into my thoughts.

"I think I have decided what to do with you, Yellow Head."

I glanced at him, forcing myself to react casually, as though his comment were of minor import. "That's interesting," I heard myself say, and some interior part of me was surprised by the calmness of my own voice. "Do you intend to tell me about it?"

My restraint was rewarded with a bright, amused, slightly surprised grin. "Of course," he answered, the whiteness of his even teeth startling in the reflected light of the leaping flames. "And you can be assured you are the first to know of it."

"Well, my thanks for that, at least. It's pleasant for a man to know that his fate has not been common gossip before he learns of it." He returned his stare to the fire at that, disdaining, I thought, to respond to my ironic tone, and a brief silence fell, quickly dispelled by me. "How long must I wait?"

Connor pursed his lips and ejected a stream of spit into the fire. "My mouth tastes like the floor of a bear's cage," he grunted. "Have you ever seen a caged bear, Yellow Head?"

"Aye, several." My thoughts had leapt back in time to my boyhood and the books of Publius Varrus; to the description of the caged bear he had pitied and then forgotten immediately on the day he met the girl dressed in blue who was to haunt his dreams for years.

"And?"

I blinked at him. "And what?"

"What think you of bears?"

"What should I think of bears? If anything, I should wonder, I suppose, why you would compare a foul taste in your mouth to anything bearish."

"Don't you think there's something unnatural about a caged bear?"

"Aye, there is, but there's nothing unnatural about a bad taste in one's mouth. If you insist on the analogy, however, then I must say that of all the animals I know, the bear least deserves to be caged. It is the most intelligent of beasts I've ever come across."

He smiled now, and there was an element of wistfulness, perhaps of sadness in his smile. "I know what you mean. It was a bear, as you know, that ate my leg."

"Ate it?"

"Well, no, not exactly. It bit me. Severed the muscles of my calf, and they festered. I owe my life to one man in our company at the time who was not afraid to cut off my leg in the face of threats on his own life. He chopped me at the knee, cleanly, with an axe. One blow. Placed the axe in position, and then hammered it home with an iron maul. Drove me into unconsciousness, and almost into dementia afterwards. Thank all the gods of Eire, he had told his assistant what to do after that to cauterize and staunch the wound, because Lachie—the man you slew—struck him dead when I screamed out."

There was not much open to me then in the way of response, but I seized on what he had said about his saviour. "He was a physician, then?"

"Who, the man who saved me? No, he was a Druid."

That really surprised me. "Lachie killed a Druid?"

Connor nodded. "Aye. Stone dead. And lived accursed thereafter."

"Hmm . . ." I paused, collecting my thoughts. When he showed no inclination to speak further, I went on. "So, pardon me for asking, but what has all this of bears to do with your decision regarding my fate?"

"Your fate?" He laughed aloud. "Hardly your fate, Caius Merlyn, in the sense I think you mean it. I have not pondered the death of you."

"Ah! Then what have you pondered, if I might presume to ask?"

"Your life, and the manner of it."

"My life." I stared at him, unable to decipher his expression. "The manner of it." I felt foolish even as I uttered the banality, but he laughed again and reached down between his feet to retrieve the mead flask.

"You're something of a bear yourself, Merlyn. That long black cloak of yours with the big silver emblem on the back marks you as one; a bear, a warrior, a formidable foe"—he pulled the stopper with his teeth and spat it out onto the ground before continuing as he poured for himself—"or a staunch and intelligent ally." He proffered the flask and I leaned forward to take it as he went on. "So, here is what I have decided. I must go home soon to my father's Hall, perhaps without my sister." I held my horn cup on one knee and poured carefully, my eyes on my task, my ears straining for every subtlety of his voice. "If that should come to pass, my father Athol will not be happy to see me back empty-handed, but by then I'll have little option other than to face his wrath. I cannot remain on land here, with a mere hundred or so men, not knowing where to begin to seek Ygraine—not when the land is acrawl with hostile armies. You tell me Lot is dead, and I see no reason to doubt you. Men die in war, and leaders are human, too, and die as men do from time to time. Ygraine is strong. She has her own bodyguard, and they loyal to her to a man, since they are all her own, my father's people. She knows I will be here, waiting for her, and so I shall stay, keeping myself offshore, for as long as I can. A month, at most. She should be here long before that."

"And I?" I turned as I asked the question, to find his gaze fixed steadily on me, his eyes twinkling beneath raised brows.

"You, Yellow Head? You are my surety against returning completely empty-handed. You hold my brother Donuil, whether as prisoner or friend, I neither know nor care. Tearlach and the others think he is dead. I choose to believe you. Donuil was—and is—greatly beloved by my father, the king, and by me, too, let it be said. You shall bring Donuil to me, and I shall take him home with me, and when you do, you may have the child back, safe and sound and in good health now that he has a nurse."

"What? You expect me to ride off and leave the child here with you?"

"You expect me to allow you to ride off, taking the babe with you, and no assurance that you will return, other than your word?"

I had risen to my feet in anger. "My word has been taken before now, and never found lacking!"

He ignored my anger and did not answer for the space of several heartbeats, then in a musing voice he said, "Aye, but by whom? Your friends and equals? I am an Outlander to you, man. No bonds of honour tie a civilized man's word to such, not even in my country." His calm reply chastened me. I sat down again, my mind racing.

"A month, you say?"

"Aye, at most, a month."

"And what if. . . what if trouble befalls you?"

"Trouble? You mean if we are attacked? We won't be on land. We'll sail off and return when it is safe."

"Unless another galley finds you."

He shrugged. "Aye, there is that, in which case we shall fight, and we shall likely win. Mine is a large galley, and a fierce crew."

"A month might not be long enough."

He laughed, half in scorn. "For what? How far must you travel to this home of yours . . . what did you call it?"

"Camulod."

"Aye, Camulod. Is it more than two weeks' journey from here? It can't be."

"No," I agreed. "No more than six days, seven at the most, but Donuil may not be there when I arrive. I told you, he had ridden out to the northeast at my request, at the same time I left Camulod, to search for someone. He may not have returned, may not even have found the man he seeks. It could be months before he returns."

Now it was Connor who rose from his seat, his face set in displeasure. He dropped his cup on the ground by his side and twitched his cloak so that it settled about his body. "In that case, Yellow Head, seek ye the child in Eire, in my father's Hall, for that is where he will be." I moved to protest, but he cut me short with a stabbing gesture of his left hand. "Enough! No more discussion. Be satisfied I choose to trust you thus far. I know how you value the child, although I know not what he is, or means, to you. Suffice it that you are prepared to die for him. I can make use of that, since it means you'll be prepared to live for him as well, and thus return my brother to his father's hearth. A hostage for a hostage, no? You will leave tomorrow, in the light of dawn. You have your horse and your bow. Your armour and the rest of your weapons are there, all of them, inside my tent. Take them, and then find yourself a place to sleep, in the morning you will leave. No one will hinder you and we two shall meet again either here within the month, or in Eire when you arrive there. Until then, farewell."

He turned on his false leg and made his way towards the clustered forms of his lieutenants around the main fire. I watched him leave and then finished the mead in my cup, setting the flask down carefully after replacing the stopper, then I collected the bulky bundle of my weapons, helmet and armour from the darkness inside the doorway of his tent. I thought of searching out the child and his new nurse, but I knew not where to begin looking. Instead, I carried my gear to where I had left Germanicus, unsaddled him, and spent a half hour rubbing him down with coarse sand-grass before leading him away from the firelight to a place beyond the beach where he could graze and I could sleep for the remainder of the night.

Sleep would not come, however, and I lay awake thinking bleak thoughts. Finally, I sat up, lifted my tunic and unwound a long strip of cloth from around my waist where I had tied it the previous day. Secure between its folded layers was a small, leather pouch, and I tipped its contents into the palm of my hand. Two massive golden signets, one of them on a thin gold chain—the red dragon seal of Pendragon and the savage, curl-tushed boar seal of Cornwall—both held in trust for the infant who now lay sleeping somewhere close by, warm and at peace for now in the milk-sweet embrace of his new nurse. I replaced the rings in the pouch, hearing the solid, heavy clink they made in meeting, and retied them securely about my waist, and then I rolled myself in my cloak and sought sleep once more, this time successfully. My last waking thought was of Uther Pendragon, lying cold and long days dead on a riverbank, somewhere to the west of us.

The sound of voices woke me in the darkness before dawn as the camp stirred into life. I rose slowly and sleepily and dressed in my full armour before moving to saddle my horse, tightening the cinches securely before hauling myself up onto his back. It felt good to feel the weight of my swordbelt again and the solid cover of my iron, leather-lined helmet. New fires were springing into life all along the narrow strand that fronted the sea, and I could smell the briny tang and hear the roar of waves washing up as the tide came in, the sound amplified strangely by the ear flaps of my helm. I kicked Germanicus into motion, and rode directly west, recalling clearly the directions of Derek of Ravenglass, and had no difficulty in finding the mouth of the river on whose banks Uther Pendragon lay unburied. The great white stone Derek had described as marking the entrance to the river's channel was visible from far away, and when I reached it I swung inland, moving through the shallows by the riverbank, allowing the big black to pick his own way among the boulders that littered the bed of the stream. The river scarcely merited the status Derek of Ravenglass had accorded it, being no more than a broad, shallow stream, slightly over fifty paces wide at its broadest, where it flowed out to join the sea. Within the channel, cool and tree-covered, it dwindled rapidly in the space of a hundred paces to less than one third that size. It was pleasant there, however, for the day, young as it was, had already grown more than merely warm, and the twelve heavy miles along the sandy beach from the site of Connor's galley had heated both my horse and me uncomfortably. Three miles upstream, the Ravenglass king had told me, I would find the remains of Uther and his men, mixed with a number of Derek's own.

From time to time as my horse carefully picked its way upstream, I came to deep and pleasant-seeming pools trapped behind fallen logs or dug deep- channelled by the fall of water from some minor obstacle higher in the stream bed, which rose steadily as we moved inland. Each of them tempted me to dismount and bathe, for I was itchingly aware of the long passage of time since I had last been truly clean. For all that, however, I had no real desire to yield to the impulse here. Somewhere upstream, I knew, the bodies of a substantial number of slain men lay scattered in and around this stream; mutilated bodies that had been dead for days. I thought of Lucanus and his horror of polluted water, and I recalled my horror—God! had that been mere days ago?—when, just as I stooped to drink from another stream, I had suspected wrongness, and had found other slain men, men whom I had known, floating a short way upstream, swollen obscenely, their leaking fluids fouling the water around them.

I rode on, trying to rid my mind of such thoughts by dwelling on other things. Derek of Ravenglass came back into my mind, and I pondered our bizarre encounter days earlier, and the strange lack of ill will I bore him then and now. He had killed my cousin Uther Pendragon, but in so doing he had, in the oddest way, restored to me my faith in Uther himself, a faith that had died the day before I had set out to find him and kill him. For, as I had told Connor, I had believed that Uther, my cousin and dearest friend, had brutally slain my wife and unborn child. Derek of Ravenglass, by killing Uther and despoiling him of his arms and armour, had given me cause to doubt my belief again, based as it was upon logic that I now suspected might have been flawed from the outset.

Confronted that day with Derek where I had expected Uther, since he wore Uther's distinctive armour, I had seen what I might not have seen had I, in fact, met Uther. I looked to Uther's saddle bow hung an iron-balled flail with a leather-covered handle. Derek had agreed to give it to me, and it hung now from my own saddle bow. The red paint that coated its short chain and the heavy, iron ball on the end of it was chipped and battered from much use. Now, as I rode, I unhooked the weapon and grasped the handle, swinging it up to catch the weighty mass of the ball in my left hand, where I examined it closely. The thing had been the death of many men, but I knew now, almost beyond a doubt, it had not taken the life of my Cassandra. I had believed, before seeing it in Derek's possession, that I had found the selfsame flail sunk in the muddy bottom of a shallow mere, close by the spot where my wife had met her death. I had assumed it Uther's, for at that time I knew of only two such weapons and Uther had made them both, one for me and the other for himself. I had been carrying my own, many miles away, when my wife was killed. Uther had vanished from Camulod again, as he used to do, without a word. His guilt, once I had found the flail and recalled other profound suspicions, had been glaringly self-evident to me.

I sighed now, and reslung the weapon from its hook, remembering my father and his startling example, recounted to me at his own expense, of the requirement for moral men to be willing to accord the benefit of doubt when faced with a lack of solid proof, no matter how great the circumstantial evidence of wrongdoing.

In the few years that had elapsed since Uther's invention of this fearsome tool, years through which I had remained immured, all memory and knowledge driven from my head by a battle wound, others had copied Uther's design and the weapon had become widely used. I knew that now, but my knowledge was very recent. Someone had used one to murder my wife and the child she carried. Someone, but evidently not Uther. Or was that evident? My memory stirred again with suspicion. Perhaps he made another, identical, to replace the one he had lost. I shook my head violently, attempting to dislodge the thought, and as I did so I heard the crows.

My flesh crawled with revulsion at the familiar sound, the anthem, the very death-watch of war. The discordant cacophony was still far off, but I kicked my horse to a faster gait, dreading what I should shortly face but unable to tolerate the thought of allowing the grisly feast ahead of me to pass uninterrupted for a moment longer than I could help.

The stream bed narrowed dramatically at one point, throwing its waters higher and more strongly, as though to impede my passage, and the banks became suddenly rocky and precipitous, looming high above me as though to shut out the light of day. The channel turned sharply right and then left again, rising steeply, and then I reached the end of the broken water and emerged suddenly into a clearing where the high wall on my left fell away abruptly, leaving an open, thickly treed glade along the river's grassy edge where the water flowed smooth and deep. On the right, the cliff loomed still, harsh and unyielding.

I pulled my mount to a clattering halt, scanning the scene before me. White and black. For long moments my eyes refused to acknowledge what confronted them. The white was naked flesh, bleached and blood-drained, for a chaos of once-fierce warriors lay stripped of everything, including any semblance of humanity. The black was dried blood, torn flesh and flap- winged scavengers. Outraged, I screamed my anguish and sent my mount charging through the shallows, splashing mightily and dislodging the gorging birds from their repast so that they rose in an angry, fluttering cloud, their caws of panicked warning deafening me. I reined in my horse when we reached the bank, hauling him back onto his haunches as I gazed in horror at the scene around me. Corpses, hundreds of them, it seemed, lay sprawled and tangled, piled in confusion, with, here and there, the solitary, lonely- looking, swollen-bellied body of a horse among them. From the trees around me, the crows and magpies chattered and scolded, warning me away from what was now theirs, and above their sound, I slowly became aware of another more pervasive, the buzzing of a million swarming flies.

My stomach churning with the need to vomit, I forced myself to look around me carefully, knowing immediately I had no hope of finding Uther's body. These ravaged corpses had been thoroughly despoiled. No weapons lay abandoned on the ground, no clothes, no armour, no signs of the camp I knew had been here. No order governed the disposition of the bodies, either; friend lay entwined with foe, united, inseparable and indistinguishable. The flies held dominion here; they and the scavenging birds the only living creatures in sight.

Disgusted, and shaking with nausea, I turned my horse around and left that awful place, following the outline of a clearly trampled path, and there, mere paces from my passage, I found Uther Pendragon.

There was no mistaking him, even after three days of death His size, his hair, and the hideous, gaping, ragged-edged wound in his lower back, just where I had seen, known and felt it in an awful dream, left no room for doubt. He lay where Derek of Ravenglass had left him after stripping him, alone by the base of a great, dead, hollow pine, spread-eagled among a welter of tumbled, rotting boughs so that his right foot stuck grotesquely skyward, his knee caught in a fork of one of them. The green and blue carpet of flies that coated him finally overwhelmed me, and I fell from my saddle to the ground, retching helplessly.

Later, when I was strong enough, I staggered to my feet and covered my mouth and nostrils with a cloth, tying it in place to leave my hands free for the task. It was the work of mere moments to drag some of the dried-out tree limbs to where he lay and pile them over him. Moments more, and I had struck flint to steel and breathed a small flame to life. I tended it carefully and watched it grow to become ravenous, and then I fed its hunger with Uther's pyre. Remounting my horse, I sat and waited until the leaping tongues of flame soared high enough to lick at, then ignite the long-dead wood of the great hollow pine above him. Only when I was sure that the conflagration could not be stopped did I move my horse away. Then a neighbouring tree, another pine, its inner growth dark and dry, flashed into violent, blazing fury, throwing a sudden cloud of flames and whirling sparks into the air, startling me. Grass fires were breaking out already from the flying sparks. The entire glade would burn, and all that it contained. The air had grown thick and black with whirling smoke and departing birds, and the fury of the fire that consumed Uther Pendragon, nurtured by burning pine sap, already hid him from my view.

"Farewell, Cousin," I whispered, feeling a desolation the like of which I had never known. "Your son will think well of you, I swear."

I departed then, quickly, leaving everything behind me to the cleansing flames.

III

I had ridden through a war-torn landscape on my journey to Cornwall and the southwest, but the return journey demonstrated to me just how little of it I had really noticed. Then, I had ridden fuelled largely by an outrage kindled by my own, personal anger at Uther and what I believed him to have done, and partly by my shock at the stories of the atrocities committed by my own men, the soldiers of Camulod, under his leadership in the war against Lot. The sights I had seen had been those I wished to see on that stage of my journey, those that would feed my rage against the cousin who had wronged me. I had looked for them diligently and had found them in profusion, but in the seeking of them, I had ridden oblivious of other, more terrible spectacles.

Now, much less than a month later, I returned by the same route, sickened by the carnage I had seen in Cornwall, appalled by the senseless squandering of so many young, healthy men. I rode in full awareness now of the path of war and warriors and the havoc they had wreaked between them. The burned and ruined cottages now gave off a sullen, all-pervading stench of bitter smoke and charred embers that spoke wordlessly of desolation and despair. The sight of hanging corpses that had angered me earlier seemed insignificant now on my homeward ride, the smell of them hardly noteworthy now, the swarms of flies and scavenging birds attracted to the mouldering bodies negligible by comparison with the sheer enormity of the numbers of dead and maimed and crippled soldiers littering the landscape I had newly quit. I rode through all of it in a state of almost total despair.

Only once on the journey did I come across any sign of danger, and it might have been no more than my frame of mind that made it seem thus. Early one bright morning, new-risen from a bed of thick-piled grass that had done little to ease my uneasy wakefulness, I emerged from a dense copse on the banks of a shallow river to find myself confronting four armed and mounted men on the other bank. A single glance told me I knew none of them, nor recognized their style of dress. They were all armoured, after a fashion, in mismatched, bossed leather garments, breastplates and leggings, and they all carried leather-covered shields. On seeing them, a deep and sullen anger overtook me and I stood upright in my stirrups, drawing my long sword and passing it to my left hand and then unhooking Uther's heavy flail from the saddle bow and swinging it around my head, daring them wordlessly to challenge me. They exchanged sullen glances among themselves and then swung about in unison and rode away, kicking their shaggy horses to a gallop that soon bore them from my sight.

I drank from the stream and went on my way, acutely aware for the remainder of the day that they might be waiting somewhere ahead of me, hoping to take me by surprise. I saw no sign of them, however, and by the following clay had forgotten them.

Three days later I came again to the hostelry where I had heard the chastening tale of the visitations of the armies of Lot of Cornwall and Uther Pendragon—Uther of Camulod had been the name they gave him, to my angry dismay. The place had been owned by a man called Lars, who had turned out to be the long-lost eldest son of Uncle Varrus's old friend Equus. In the course of a pleasant evening with him and his wife and her brother Eric, a merchant, I discovered not only that Eric made his living largely by trading amicably with the Saxons who had settled the lands to the southeast of Isca, but that the people of the entire region around that city thought more kindly of their recently arrived Saxon neighbours than they did of Uther's armies and the forces of Lot of Cornwall. Those sentiments, outrageous as they had seemed to me upon hearing them, had begun to seem almost acceptable a short time later, when viewed in the context of what these people had suffered at the hands of their fellow countrymen. Now the hostelry lay empty and abandoned, all the doors and windows boarded over. I hoped that they had made their way safely northward to Camulod, as I had urged them to.

It began to rain, as it had rained when last I passed this way, and for the next two days I rode through heavy, intermittent squalls that soaked me to the skin and turned the world into a place of dripping, miserable, lightless shades of grey.

The sun came out again on the third day to reveal to my unprepared eyes a scene untouched by war. From that moment on, I rode through green and pleasant landscapes where men worked peacefully and fearlessly, it seemed, in their own fields, as if the struggles of ambitious warriors had no existence in this land.

I avoided Isca and Ilchester, the desolate town closest to Camulod, keeping my distance from the great Roman road and riding across country now, through heavily wooded land, towards the borders of our Colony, feeling a shapeless joy stirring in me as I began to recognize landmarks. By the time I realized I would not, despite my wishful thinking, arrive home before darkness fell that day, I had reached the beginnings of that area closest to our lands, where the dense forest began to yield to the openness of our fertile valley. I knew exactly where I was now, and remembered a favoured campsite from my youth, a grassy, moss-soft bed beside a rippling stream, concealed from casual view by a screen of thick bushes and a waist-high embankment that once had marked the edge of a much greater stream than flowed there now. Only as I approached within bowshot of the spot, riding almost carelessly in the gathering dusk, did I realize that the site was already occupied.

I drew rein immediately, holding my horse still, wondering if I had been seen moving through the dense shadows beneath the widely spaced trees, and sat there for long moments, every sense alert. I had no idea who was there by the stream, and reason told me that here, on my home lands, it was more likely to be a friend than otherwise, but my recent travels had shown me graphically that nothing in this land today should be taken for granted and that it behoved a cautious man to entrust himself fully to his own instincts for self-preservation.

Germanicus stood stock-still beneath me, his ears pricked forward, as alert as I. He, too, had heard what I had: either a grunt of pain or a bark of laughter from the direction of the hidden bank. Moments passed slowly, and then the sound came again. A man's voice, speaking normally this time, too far away for me to hear the words. The tone, however, told me I was unobserved; I detected no urgency, no warning note. Slowly, taking pains to move in silence, I dismounted and led my horse to the nearest tree, where I tethered him securely with the bole between his bulk and the direction from which the voice had come. I removed my war cloak and folded it across my saddle, then unharnessed my long sword from where it hung against the horse's side and slipped it through the ring at my back between my shoulders, where I could unsheathe it quickly. That done, I retrieved and strung my great bow, slipped my left arm through the sling of my quiver and nocked an arrow before moving forward cautiously towards whatever awaited me.

It took me a long time to cover the hundred and fifty paces to a spot where I could hope to see beyond the protective fringe of bushes that screened the campsite. At the outset, I moved with extreme stealth, hoping to number the group ahead of me by the sound of their voices. As I progressed, however, it became clear that one man was doing all the speaking, and I grew confident that he was alone with perhaps one other. I increased my pace slightly after that, although still moving with great care, until finally I heard a second voice, which was unmistakably feminine. This was an unknown voice, but it was young, and with its utterance came an end to any immediate threat of danger. One man and one young woman together in a secluded spot seldom offered threat to anyone. Unless, I revised, it be to a stealthy stranger creeping up to invade their privacy.

I coughed, as though clearing my throat of phlegm, and a man's head sprang into view directly ahead of me. His eyes met mine and both of us froze for a space of heartbeats. He was bareheaded, not only unarmoured but unarmed, and I saw his eyes fly wide as his mind registered the danger implicit in my helmed and crested head and the high cross-hilt of the cavalry sword slung behind my shoulder. Recognition flared in me and my own shock was as great as his as I took in the thin, aquiline set of his swarthy features and the narrow peak of hair that swept forward to split the expanse of his wide forehead, leaving his greying temples almost bald.

"Cay!" he said, almost conversationally, managing to sound surprised and unruffled at the same time. He had collected himself far more quickly than I. "Where in Hades have you come from? And afoot?"

I was on the point of answering when his companion raised her head above the bushes separating us, confounding me further. She was very young and extremely beautiful, although the height of the intervening shrubbery prevented me from seeing lower than her chin, which, by the angle at which it was stretched, told me she was standing on tiptoe to peer at me. I was aware of straight, black, glossy hair, and large, bright blue eyes that were opened wide as though before an apparition. It occurred to me later that I probably looked as startled as she did, for this bucolic solitude was a situation in which I had never expected to find my good friend Lucanus.

"What's the matter?" Lucanus's head was tilted slightly to one side as it always was when something puzzled him.

"Nothing," I assured him. "Nothing at all. I simply did not expect to find you out here, so far from your Infirmary."

The young woman had disappeared.

"Well, come and join us. We were just about to set off for home."

"To Camulod?" The idea almost made me laugh. "You're too late. You'll never get there before dark."

"Nonsense, Caius. Lots of time. Come, come in."

"Fine," I shrugged. "Let me fetch my horse. I left him beneath the trees back there, since I didn't know who you were."

In the few moments I required for my task I had time to regain my mental composure. I had never know Lucanus to consort with a woman, and I had known him for many years. Never, in all those years, had I seen him alone in the company of a woman other than by casual or accidental circumstance. So it was no more than natural, I told myself, that I should be amazed to find him here, so far from anywhere, alone in the company of an extraordinarily beautiful young woman.

As I moved around the screen of bushes and into the lovely little campsite, my surprise grew. A single blanket lay upon the mossy, grass-covered mound at its centre, and the young woman knelt, head down, wrapping the ends of another blanket around a long, compact bundle. I saw no tent, and only the smallest kind of fire, without cooking stones or utensils. I stopped short, my eyes scanning the clearing.

"By the gods, Luke, you were serious! You intended to return to Camulod today."

"Well of course! Why would you doubt it?"

"But you'll never make it. It's more than twelve miles and it'll be dark in a couple of hours."

"Aye." He looked up at the sky. "Well, we did lose track of the time slightly."

The young woman now rose to her feet, clutching her bundle to her chest. In doing so, however, she somehow managed to step on the skirts of her own clothing, pulling herself sharply off balance so that she lurched and lost her grip on her burden. It sagged and fell apart with a strange series of hollow- sounding noises, and I gaped in disbelief as a cascade of shiny bones clattered to the ground. That they were anything other than human was a possibility dispelled immediately by the shiny skull that rolled towards me and came to rest by my foot, its upper teeth seemingly sunk into the mossy ground and its hollow sockets glaring up at me. Bereft of words, I turned slowly to look at Lucanus. His eyes, too, were on the skull.

"Aye," he muttered after a prolonged moment of silence. "A pretty skull." He stooped and retrieved it, wiping a trace of dirt with reverence from its polished brow before passing it in silence to the young woman, who promptly knelt in front of him, ignoring me completely, and began from the beginning, spreading the blanket wide and piling the large collection of bones—even my unpractised eye could see arm and leg bones and ribs and a pelvis—in the centre of the square. I was gazing in fascination at a small, blue bag that lay among them.

"What's in the bag?"

"What?" Lucanus, distracted, had to glance to see where I was looking. "Oh! Phalanges, metacarpals, metatarsals, other small bones. . hands and feet."

I realized I should not have asked, as a vision of the brocaded bag that had held the dismembered hands and feet of Gulrhys Lot Hashed into my mind. Lucanus was moving.

"Come, we had best be on our way. No point in losing any more time than we have already."

"No, Luke, wait." He turned to face me, almost in mid stride. I glanced at the girl. "I meant what I said. It's too late. The night will be black as I lades and you'll only be inviting trouble if you insist on trying to win back to Camulod in utter darkness. Better to stay here and head back at dawn. Have you any sleeping mats?"

He shook his head in a mild negative.

I grinned and sighed. "Well, no matter. I have resources to provide bedding for all of us, providing the night is not too cold. And we can build a larger fire. What about food? Is there any?" Again a negative. I sighed again, this time less patiently. "Can you fish?"

"Er.."

"I can." This was the young woman. I glanced at her, trying to ignore her beauty and the visions of her and Lucanus that were flickering behind my eyes.

"Good. I have lines and hooks, and I know there's fish aplenty in the stream there. If you don't object to catching some fish for us to eat, I'll go looking for something more meaty, while it's still light enough to shoot. What's your name?"

"Ludmilla." Her great blue eyes looked at me directly as though challenging me. I felt a tiny frown flick at my brow. The name was familiar. Ludmilla. I sought it briefly, but could not place it, then merely shrugged and directed her to my saddlebags, where she would find fishing lines and hooks. While she was doing that, I gave Lucanus my tinderbox and instructed him to light a fire, after which I stripped off my armour thankfully, and clad only in my tunic and sandals, gathered up my bow and quiver.

An hour later I returned with a fine hare that I had taken on the run with a well-flighted arrow. Ludmilla was still fishing, and Lucanus sat alone by the fire, which he had nurtured and bordered with large flat stones for cooking on. My collapsible cooking irons formed a tripod over the flames from which hung my leather boiling bag, the water in it just beginning to steam. Behind Luke, close by the fire but far enough away to leave us room to move around, my leather tent was pitched and a shelter had been rigged over the lower limb of the nearby fir tree. I could see a pile of fresh-cut bracken within my tent, and another between that and the blanket shelter. That gave me pause. I had assumed that he and Ludmilla would share a couch.

"That's a splendid-looking hare."

I grinned at him. "Isn't it? Took him in full flight, too, with one arrow. He was going like the wind." I dropped my bow and quiver and took the hare to the water's edge, where I began to skin it. "Good thing I did, too. It was almost too dark to see by the time I found him, and he was the only living thing I'd seen. Has Ludmilla had any luck?"

"Of course she has. Look." Ludmilla's voice came from behind me, and I turned to see her brandishing a trio of lovely trout, each one a meal in itself.

We ate like courtiers that night, sitting by the fireside long after darkness had fallen. Familiar with the place, I had known exactly where to find wild onions and garlic, since I had planted them myself, with my boyhood mentor, the Legate Titus, many years earlier. With young nettle shoots and a liberal pinch of salt from my cooking supplies, they turned the hare into a stew fit for the gods, and while it simmered, Ludmilla prepared the fish she had caught and I took the opportunity to walk downstream and bathe in the darkness, scrubbing the travels' stains from my skin with icy water, then towelling myself dry afterwards. By the time my teeth had stopped chattering, I had returned to the welcoming fire where we nibbled on fresh trout that had been garnished with onion and sprinkled with salt before being cooked slowly, wrapped in burdock leaves laid on the flat stones at the edge of the fire. We had no bread, but Lucanus, it transpired, carried in his saddlebags a quartet of nested metal bowls, used for many medicinal purposes, none of which included the serving of food therein, although they were perfect for precisely such a use. And from his saddle bow he retrieved a capacious, almost full wineskin, some of which I added to the contents of our stew-pot. As our leisurely meal progressed, I came to understand that there was nothing of the carnal in the relationship between my two companions. What there was, in fact, remained unmentioned, but whatever it was, it lacked sensuality. They behaved towards each other like courteous neighbours, and I soon became convinced that this had nothing to do with my presence.

Reluctant to pry, I avoided the topic of their strange presence in this place by asking Lucanus to bring me up to date on what had been happening in Camulod in the month I had been away. All was well, he told me, although Donuil had not yet returned from his quest to find my brother Ambrose. But Aunt Luceiia was in good health, he said, and everything was as it should be—except for some recent bad tidings. His voice died away, and I could see he was searching for words, looking distinctly uncomfortable. I waited, saying nothing, and finally he cleared his throat decisively and looked me straight in the eye.

"There's ill news of Uther, Cay. A report—several of them, in fact—that he might have been killed in Cornwall. Nothing definite, you understand . . . simply reports, all unconfirmed, and all very recent. His army suffered a massive defeat against Lot, a few weeks ago, somewhere in the southwest. An appalling slaughter. Apparently Uther marched into an elaborate trap. From what we've heard, he came against two armies where he expected only one, and was caught between them. Popilius was there, and survived, but he has been too ill since his return to tell us anything concrete. He has pneumonia, but I have high hopes for his recovery, despite his age and his weakness from his wounds. The main party of survivors has not yet reached Camulod, unless they arrived today. They have a large train of wounded with them, I'm told.

"Anyway, Popilius and his escort, a group of twenty men, arrived two days ago after having spent a week on the road. Several other small groups have drifted in since then. It was from two of these that we heard rumours of Uther's death, but no more than rumours, as I have said. We have had no confirmation."

I had been staring into the fire as he spoke, unwilling to let him see the expression in my eyes. Across the fire from me, the woman Ludmilla sat motionless, and I could feel her eyes upon me. Now I looked up and spoke, hearing the deadness in my voice.

"Uther is dead, Luke. I burned his body myself. He met three armies in that trap, not two. There was one ahead of him that he had been harrying and thought to catch, but Lot's main force was there, too, waiting for him, and a third rabble of Hibernians came up behind him. I was there, but not before it was over. I had been trying to catch up to him, to warn him, but I came too late. The carnage was complete, but Uther had escaped with something less than a thousand men, mainly his own Pendragons, pursued by Lot. I followed the sign of their running fight for days and saw too many corpses of men from Camulod. Then one day I found Gulrhys Lot hanged from a tree. I don't know how he died, or who killed him, but he is dead, nonetheless. I cut him down and burned him, too. Uther was killed the day after that, early in the morning, surprised as he and the remnants of his party were breaking camp."

I stopped suddenly, on the point of telling him about Ygraine of Cornwall and the child, but acutely aware again of the woman sitting listening on the other side of the fire. During the pause that ensued, neither of them showed any awareness of my sudden reticence, or if they had noticed it, they had evidently attributed it to an emotional reaction to the tale I had to tell. Lucanus broke the silence.

"How did you find him?"

"I was told where to look, by the man who killed him." His eyes widened but he said nothing. "Do you remember Derek of Ravenglass?" He nodded, his eyes widening even more. "Well, it was Derek who killed Uther, although at the time, and until I confronted him and told him so, he had no idea the man he had killed was Uther."

"And?" Lucanus was watching me closely. "Did you kill Derek?"

I opened my mouth to answer him, but nothing came out. Finally, I broke his gaze and turned my eyes back to the flames. "No," I grunted. "I did not. I was sick of killing and of death by that time. Ravenglass told me he had killed Uther in battle, not knowing who he was. The killing was impersonal. The only thing that distinguished Uther in his eyes was the size of him. They were both of a size and build, you'll recall. He took Uther's armour for his own use. He was wearing it when I caught up with him. That's how and why I caught up with him."

"You thought he was Uther."

"Aye."

"So the two of you did not even fight?"

"That's what I said."

"No, you said you had not killed him. You might have fought him and shown clemency."

"Aye, you're right, I might. But we did not even fight. The clemency I showed was to myself."

Lucanus eyed me in silence for a time, mulling over what I had said, and then shifted to a more comfortable spot on his mossy bed. "I believe you," he murmured, "and it was merited . . . I have great hopes for you, Caius Merlyn Britannicus. But tell me, what was it that convinced you Derek of Ravenglass spoke the truth—that in fact he had no idea of Uther's identity?"

I glanced at him sharply. "Why would you ask me that?"

"Why would I not? Uther Pendragon was your dearest friend, apart from being close kin, your first cousin. Was he not?" The barest hesitation had prefaced that final question and I knew it related to the friendship rather than the blood kinship. I also knew it portended an awakening suspicion in Luke's questing mind about my reasons for seeking out my cousin, but I chose to ignore it as he went on. "It seems to me you would demand proof of Derek of Ravenglass that this killing was, in fact, a simple battle casualty, rather than the premeditated killing of a notorious enemy leader."

I looked away again. "I needed no such proof. It was there in his face and in his words. I recognized the truth as he spoke it."

"Hmm. How?"

"Damnation, Luke, what do you mean, how? He told me what had happened that morning and I believed him."

"How so? Don't be angry with me, Cay. I'm not trying to vex you. I have no doubt of the truth of what you're telling me, but I must confess I am extremely curious. The Caius Britannicus I've known in the past would have killed his cousin's killer out of hand, merely for wearing Other's armour, before the fellow had a chance to say a word. Is that not so?"

"Hmmph."

"So? Something must have given you pause. Something stopped you. What was it?"

"Could you bring yourself to believe it might have been the blood through which I had been wading for days? I told you I had seen enough of death and killing by then."

He ignored my sarcasm. "Yes, I could, Cay, had the victim of his killing been anyone else in the world. But not Uther Pendragon."

I tore my gaze away from the fierce centre of the fire and stood up to face the woman across the fire, waiting in silence until my eves had adjusted to the change in light and I could see her clearly. Finally, the dots in front of my eyes subsided and I gazed into her eyes, clearing my throat uncomfortably. She returned my gaze openly and forthrightly, her face a portrait of dignity and calm serenity.

"Lady Ludmilla, I have no wish to insult you. Lucanus is my closest friend, normally far more astute at sensing the discomfort of others than he has shown himself tonight. But he is being obdurate and inquisitive and so I must be forthright. I simply may not speak of this matter in your presence, or in the presence of any other, and for that I ask your forgiveness. The words I have to say are for his ears alone, to be delivered at another time and in another place. That has nothing to do with you, but solely with me and my need to keep my own counsel on this matter." I knew I sounded pompous and I hated the awareness, but I could think of no other words. I turned back to Lucanus who sat gaping at me in astonishment. "Now, my inquisitive, curiosity-driven persecutor, may we change the topic?"

He jumped as though stung. "Oh, of course, by all means." His eyes went immediately to Ludmilla. "My dear," he said, "I can't begin to say how—"

Ludmilla, however, forestalled him, rising to her feet and leaning forward to look into the leather pot that still bubbled merrily over the fire. "Master Lucanus," she said, "you have done nothing to regret. I understand perfectly what Commander Merlyn means, and I am not offended. But this stew is ready. Now, how do we remove it from the bag into our bowls?"

A simple problem, easily solved: we used the smallest of the four metal bowls as a dipper to fill the others.

We ate thereafter in a suddenly easy, companionable silence, broken only by light exchanges as we replenished our bowls until the boiling bag would yield NT more. Ludmilla ate as much as we did, and I watched her closely from time to time, seeing the way her strong, white teeth stripped the hare meat from its bones, and admiring the lines of her neck as she tipped her head back to drain the last delicious broth from her bowl. In all the time it took us to consume the stew, I did not see Lucanus cast as much as a glance in her direction, other than when she replenished his bowl, but my own eyes returned to her constantly. I knew I had never seen her before, yet her name sounded strangely familiar to me, suggesting that I should indeed know who she was. Ludmilla was a common enough name. I had heard it many times. But hard as I tried, I could not remember ever having actually met anyone called Ludmilla.

Finally I could suffer my curiosity no longer. We had finished eating, and Lucanus had stretched out comfortably by the fire. Each of us had scrubbed out our bowls with earth and then gone individually to rinse the vessels clean in the stream. Ludmilla, the last to do so, came back to the fireside and bade us a good night, but I stopped her as she began to turn away towards her shelter beneath the fir bough.

"Ludmilla, before you go, tell me, please, who you are and where you came from. Lucanus treats you with an air of long acquaintance, yet I cannot remember having seen you before today, and I am sure I could not have forgotten you had our paths crossed."

She stopped, looking at me with the beginnings of a smile on her face. "Oh, we have met, Commander Merlyn, many times."

"We have? Where?"

Now her smile broadened and she nodded her head. "In Camulod, in your aunt's house."

"In my . . ." and then my memory stirred. "You are my aunt's Ludmilla?"

"Of course, if by that you mean I am part of your aunt's household. She has been very kind to me, considering we are only distantly related."

"Related? How? What do you mean? Are you telling me that we two are kin?"

"No, not you and I. I am second cousin to Uther." Her face darkened for a moment and then cleared again, as though a shadow had passed over it. "I mean I was. . . but you and I are not related."

I had risen to my feet. "But. . . how can that be? How could I not know you? You have been in Camulod, in my aunt's household, for years. I've heard her speak of you many times. But you are too . . . Your youth surprises me. I had thought Ludmilla to be older, much older. Are there two of you?"

"No." Her smile was sweet, mocking, I chose to think. "I am the only one, but otherwise you are correct. I have been with your aunt for more than five years now."

"But how could we never have met, and how would I have been unaware of your relationship to Uther?"

Now she laughed aloud, a sound of tinkling, yet resonant silver bells. "Commander, most of that time you did not even know Uther! You were not yourself."

I glanced at Lucanus, hoping for some assistance there, but he lay silent, hands clasped behind his head, eyes closed, enjoying the warmth of the fire. I waved my arm feebly towards the stump on which she had been seated earlier.

"Please, sit again for a moment and help me to understand this. I feel extremely foolish."

"Without reason." She moved back and sat across from me and for the space of heartbeats I stood gazing down at her, perplexed, until she continued. "Will you not sit, too, Commander Merlyn? You are too tall for me to gaze up at without straining my neck." There was still laughter in her voice, I thought, mockery in her eyes. I looked around me for my seat, feeling awkward. When I was seated, she spoke again, no trace of raillery in her voice.

"My tale is brief, and soon told. My grandmother Riganna was half-sister to Enid, Uther's mother. Riganna was the firstborn female child of her father's first wife and Enid the last of his second wife. Fifteen years separated them. Riganna had a daughter called Bronwynn, who was my mother and first cousin to Uther. When I was fourteen, I visited Camulod with my mother and father. You met me then, but I was a mere child and you had just brought your young wife back to live in your aunt's house. Your aunt liked me because I reminded her of herself at my age, and she persuaded my parents to allow me to remain with her for a time in Camulod when they returned home.

"At that time, everyone in Camulod—you more than any other—was completely involved in preparing the embassage to attend the upcoming debate in Verulamium, and shortly after it had been arranged that I should stay you left the Colony. While you were gone, Lot of Cornwall invaded again, and my father was killed in the fighting. When you yourself came back to Camulod, you were gravely wounded. I helped to tend you, but you were unaware of me, or of anyone else." She smiled again. "In the years since then, you have had more to concern you than the servants of your aunt, and my duties have changed, keeping me far from your sight, so it is quite natural you should be unaware of me."

I gazed at her unspeaking, then asked, "You knew Uther?"

She nodded her head. "Very slightly. Not well at all. He knew who I was, and he treated me kindly, as a kinswoman."

"What about your mother? Is she in Camulod now?"

"No, she died soon after my father—of grief, I think."

"So now Camulod is your home." I turned to look towards Luke's recumbent figure and then returned my eyes to her. "But what are you doing here— tonight, I mean? And what about the bones?"

"She is a student." Luke's eyes were still closed. "We were studying the anatomy of the corpus humanus."

"Oh, you're awake, are you? You will admit, at least, Luke, that my curiosity on this subject has been admirably restrained."

"Hmm. I was beginning to wonder if you had even noticed, although you looked shocked to your soul when the skull rolled to your feet." Now he opened his eyes and sat up, shuffling himself into a comfortable position and coming to rest with his elbows on his knees, his face serious. "Much has changed in Camulod in recent years, Merlyn. Particularly in areas that have, I am quite sure, by their very nature escaped your notice."

"Like what?"

He cleared his throat and spat into the fire. "Well, the main one as far as I am concerned is in the treatment of our wounded." I waited for him to continue. "We've been at war now for five years and more. Most of the fighting has been done far from Camulod, thank God, but all of it has demanded much of our young fighting men and, by default, much of the work they used to do is handled now by women. Farming, and labouring, and working in the Infirmary."

"I knew that."

"Certainly you did, but you grew accustomed to it only after your first head injury. You retained no memory of the way things had been before. Your renewed life was one in which women played roles unknown to them prior to your injury." I realised he was right and held my peace. "Ludmilla here began helping in the Infirmary while you were first confined there. She enjoyed the work and became very useful to me, in spite of her extreme youth. As she grew older, she became more and more valuable, and I discerned in her the makings of a natural surgeon. This child is gifted with an awareness of human physiology the like of which I have never encountered, and so, about a year ago, I began to train her as my own assistant. She quickly assimilated an astounding knowledge and understanding of the musculature and organs of the body, and as her knowledge grew, my own awareness of the haphazard nature of the training I had been giving her grew commensurately. So I decided to complete her training properly, beginning anew and more methodically this time. I assembled a complete skeleton, and have been teaching her the entire, shall we say, mechanics of the body. The names and the functions of the individual bones, the major blood vessels and organs, and all the knowledge I have managed to accumulate over the years." He stopped and smiled across the flames at Ludmilla. "She learns more quickly than I am capable of teaching. She is a true descendant of Aesculapius."

I looked at Ludmilla with new respect. Lucanus had never been a man to toss out hollow compliments. He was speaking again.

"Anyway, in the past few weeks, the trickle of wounded returning to Camulod has swollen to a flood and we have been overworked, just as we were approaching a crucial period of Ludmilla's training—a period which, once entered upon, should not be interrupted, but should be completed quickly. I had decreed today a day of study. But it was the fourth consecutive day I had thus designated, and the previous three had been pre-empted by emergencies. The day dawned bright, and Ludmilla suggested we absent ourselves from Camulod, and from interruption, for the day. I remembered having spent a pleasant day with you here some years ago and decided I could find the spot again. We arrived long before noon and began working immediately, and time escaped us. You arrived as we were preparing to leave."

"Well." I found that I was able to smile openly now at the young woman opposite me. "Lady Ludmilla, I am honoured to meet you and to know you now, and I shall certainly never be able to forget you again. I hope you will find it in your heart to forgive me for my lapse of memory."

She smiled again and nodded wordlessly, and I felt better than I had all evening. The fire collapsed upon itself and I leaned forward to replenish it. "It's a warm night," I said. "I think we should sleep well, fed as we are, and rise early for a pre-dawn start. I can't wait to see Camulod again. Lucanus, you take the shelter, I'll sleep outside. Lady Ludmilla, you take the tent."

She would not hear of it, and went directly to the shelter. Lucanus took the tent. Before he retired, he glanced at me again. "About Uther. . ."

_

"Tomorrow, Luke. Another time, another place. Sleep well.

IV

As it transpired, a regular session of the Council of Camulod was scheduled for the afternoon of the day of my return, and that relieved me of any doubts I might have had about the swiftest and most appropriate means of confirming, officially, the rumours of Uther's death. I had pledged Lucanus and Ludmilla, upon the road that morning, to say nothing until I had made the news known to my Aunt Luceiia and the senior councilors, and it was then that Lucanus told me of the meeting.

On our arrival in Camulod, I had made my way directly to the home of my aunt. She absorbed my tidings of the death of her beloved grandson with self-possession and quiet dignity, surprising me in spite of the fact that I knew she had been prepared for the worst by the rumours. As I had had good reason to observe in the past, my great-aunt Luceiia Britannicus was a woman of extraordinary strength and resilience, and great perspicacity. She had known as soon as I greeted her that I bore ill tidings and had assumed, correctly, that they concerned Uther.

She sat in silence as I told her briefly of my discovery of Uther's body, and the primitive funeral pyre I had set to consume him. As I spoke, her eyes filled with tears, but her face remained calm and no drop spilled beyond her lashes. When I had finished speaking she sat motionless for a spell, then reached out distractedly and touched my hand, patting it tenderly as though to comfort me. I sat there beside her, awkwardly, wanting to put my arm around her to comfort her, yet fearful of intruding upon the reserves of strength that enabled her to bear her grief so stoically. After a time, however, she dabbed her eyes with the end of her shawl, sat up even straighter and cleared her throat.

"So Uther is gone, irrevocably. May God look kindly upon him. I knew the truth of it as soon as I first heard the rumour, although he had always seemed so invulnerable." She looked directly into my eyes now, and her gaze was clear and sharp. "I mourned for him then. Sadly, there is no time to mourn further now. How are you, Nephew? And what prompted you to search for Uther? When you left, you said merely that you had to be alone for a time, to come to terms with yourself, that you had no idea where your wanderings might take you."

There was no censure in her voice, and I knew that she yet harboured no suspicion of the vengeful anger that had driven me in pursuit of my cousin. I saw no need to mention it now and cause her further pain, so I merely shook my head and evaded her question.

"I am well, Auntie, but sickened by what I saw in Cornwall and the south, the appalling waste of life and young men. Lot of Cornwall is dead, too, did you know that?"

"No, but I am glad to hear of it. He was an evil man. Are you sure of his death, or is it a report?"

"No. I found him myself, and cut him down from the tree where he had been hanged. Who hanged him we may never know, but it was effectively done. His hands and feet had been severed and hung in a bag about his neck. A richly worked bag that bore the arms of Pendragon. I would have ascribed the death to Uther personally, but that one of the severed hands yet wore the seal of Cornwall and I cannot see Uther leaving that for the Fates to dispose of. He would have taken it as proof of lot's death, if for no other reason. So would any of his men who sought to impress Uther with his zeal and loyalty. It is a mystery, I suppose, that will never be solved."

"Did you remove it?"

"Aye. I have it here, with Uther's own." I pulled the small leather bag from my scrip and passed it to her. She untied the drawstring and tipped the contents into her palm, immediately setting aside the seal of Gulrhys Lot with distaste upon a small table and fingering the great gold signet of Pendragon with its dragon crest, holding it close to her face to admire the intricacies of the dragon inscribed deeply into its flat oval crown.

"Who will wear this now?" she mused, and then looked up at me and offered it back. "It must be returned. Uther has no heir, so his crown will be assumed by some other, by acclamation or inheritance. It has probably occurred already. He had many uncles and kinsmen. This should belong to one of them."

I drew a deep breath, and spoke softly and clearly. "No, Auntie, both of those rings belong to Uther's heir." She glanced at me sharply, pain in her eyes now, prepared to reprimand me. "He has one," I continued.

Her face went blank, then her eyes took on a new awareness, an excitement. "Where?"

I grimaced. "In Eire, among the Scots, with Donuil's people. He is their heir, too. His name is Arthur."

"Their heir, too?" She paused for the space of three heartbeats, her piercing bright eyes scanning my face. "You have a tale to tell me, Nephew," she said then, glancing around to make sure we were alone. "And I think you have no wish to speak it aloud for other ears. Am I correct?"

I rose and crossed to the double doors of her quarters, leaning out to make sure that no one was nearby before I drew them closed and crossed the room swiftly to ensure that the other door was firmly closed and we were quite alone, and then I returned to share her couch and told her the entire tale of Uther, Ygraine and their son, Arthur. She listened closely, making no attempt to interrupt me while I went on to describe my own adventures with Connor and his Ersemen, and my loss of the child. When I had finished speaking, she stood up and moved to a table against the wall, where a white cloth covered a jug of wine and a bowl of fruit. She poured wine for me and brought it back, and as I accepted it she said, "So this child Arthur is related to you both by blood and marriage, the son of your wife's sister, and the son of your own cousin."

"Aye. Nephew and cousin."

"And heir to Pendragon, and to Camulod."

"More than that, Auntie. He is also heir to Cornwall."

She frowned immediately. "How so? Lot was Cornwall's king, and Arthur is Uther's son. His mother was Hibernian. The child has no claim to Cornwall."

"True," I said. "But only we know that. I am splitting hairs, here, being a sophist, I suppose. But to good purpose. Lot acknowledged the child, publicly at least, as his own, according to Popilius, and left no other children. The child has possession of Gulrhys Lot's own seal. Furthermore he is grandson of the king of the Hibernian Scots."

She gazed at me steadfastly for some time, then nodded. "A potent mixture," she murmured eventually, her voice sounding far away, as though she saw great distances ahead of her.

"Aye, the same thought occurred to me when first I saw him. He is a fine, lusty child, Auntie, and his eyes are yellow gold, as were your brother's." I paused, then smiled as I went on. "I could be wrong, of course, but I fancy the resemblance to Caius Britannicus might run even deeper. The boy's nose is large, even for a babe."

"What? He has Cay's eyes and nose? What of his hair? What colour is that?"

I smiled. "His hair is dark, with a baby's darkness that could change as he grows. Not black, though, Auntie, more a deep, dark brown."

"Dark brown plumage, gold eyes and a Roman beak. You describe a golden eagle, Cay." I merely nodded, smiling still. "How will you get him back, Cay, and more to the point, when? I should like to see this child before I die."

I embraced her, slipping one arm around her frail shoulders. "You will, Auntie, I promise. As soon as Donuil returns from Northumbria or wherever he is, we shall leave for Eire. Has there been any news of him?"

"No, not a word. Will you seek him now?"

I shook my head. "Where would I start? He could arrive from a direction other than the obvious route from the northeast. What point in riding off without knowledge of his whereabouts? He could pass unseen within half a mile of me at any time. I have no choice other than to wait here for his return, in the hope that he will come soon, remembering his five-year sentence has elapsed. His uncle promised to come seeking him at the end of that time. I should hate to end one war and plunge directly into another simply because I could not produce my hostage on demand."

My aunt frowned at that. "Is that likely, Caius?"

I grinned at her and shook my head. "No, not at all, Auntie. I told you, Connor holds the child and knows how highly I value its life. He and his people now have a hostage to my good behaviour."

"How, a hostage? You said he was their heir. You think they might harm the boy, their own kin, should you fail to appear with Donuil?"

"They do not know who he is, Auntie. I did not tell Connor the babe was his sister's. Even so, I doubt that they would harm him. Connor is not a cruel man, and he loves children. I could see that from the way he handled the boy and spoke of his own. When we parted, he gave me a month to deliver Donuil home, alive and in good health, in exchange for the child. I told him then that Donuil's absence on my own behalf might make it impossible for me to meet that expectation, and now it looks as though I was correct. . . but I have no fears of Connor's taking vengeance on the child, lacking real proof of Donuil's death. When Donuil returns, we will journey to Eire. The boy will be safe until then."

She was gazing at me strangely now, a trace of troubled shadow in her eyes. "You have not told me everything, I see, Cay. Why would you not tell this Connor who the infant was? Surely, for the child's safety, that would have been prudent?"

I dipped my head, acknowledging the truth of that. "It would, of course, Auntie, but there were other matters to be taken into account, equally important to the child's safety. The matter of his blood, more than any other. As grandson of Athol, King of Scots, they might have taken him and kept him, thinking his place should be in his grandfather's Hall. I see it otherwise. As the son of Uther Pendragon, his place is here in Britain, in his paternal grandfather's Colony and in his own mountains. That is his heritage. To that end he was born."

"What do you mean? To what end?"

"He will fulfill the Dream, Auntie."

She frowned again, perplexed. "What dream?"

"The Dream of Caius Britannicus and of Publius Varrus. The unification of two peoples, Roman and Celt, beneath one leader."

"Nonsense!" Her voice was sharp with asperity. "My brother and Publius Varrus dreamed of survival, and they dreamed well, but their dream was of this Colony of ours, not of two entire peoples. Those two could never be that grandiose. You forget I knew both of them far better than you and for more years than you have yet lived."

"One people, Auntie. The Britons." I had arrived at a decision, without forethought and purely on the spur of the moment. "Among the last things Uncle Varrus told me on his deathbed was that I would be true to my trust and would recognize the one I awaited the moment I saw him. For a time, I thought it might be my brother Ambrose, but now I know I was wrong. It was the child. I knew from the instant I set eyes on him."

She sat staring at me as though I were a stranger, and when she spoke again, her tone was wondering. "Caius," she said, "my beloved nephew, I have no idea what you are talking about, and I find that rather frightening."

I rose to my feet, holding out my hand to her, and she pulled herself up wordlessly and followed where I led.

Moments later, I leaned my back against the closed, bronze-covered doors of the Armoury, watching her as she stood gazing around the walls of the room her husband had built and furnished with such love.

"I seldom come here now," she said. "It hurts to be here. I am reminded too strongly of the man I loved and have lost. And yet it is a wonderful place. It seems filled with the very essence of my husband."

"Par more than you know, Auntie," I said softly.

I seated her in Uncle Varrus's favourite chair, beside his writing table, and she watched silently as I took down the wooden hammer-keys from the wall and used them to unlock the secret hiding-place beneath the boards of the floor. Silent too, I stooped and drew out the long, polished wooden case that lay concealed there, wiping the dust from its surface with my sleeve before carrying it to the table and placing it gently and reverently before her. Wordless still, she stretched out her hand and traced with her fingertips the outlines of the falling star inlaid in gold and silver in the lustrous wood of the case's surface. The case seemed solid, one single block of wood unmarked by seams or joints.

"It's beautiful. What is it, Cay?"

"This case, Auntie, contains the very essence, as you said, of Publius Varrus; the apotheosis of his craft and his love of his work and art. Permit me." I moved behind the table and leaned forward to press with my fingers on the concealed joins and the case swung open, its lid rising easily towards me as I watched her eyes. They sprang wide and her breath caught in her throat and again she reached out in wonder, but this time it was I who was amazed. Her hand, which had been hidden momentarily from my view by the raised lid, came back into view clutching the brightly coloured square of silk that had covered the case's contents since before I was born. Aunt Luceiia had no eyes for what had lain beneath it. As I stared in wonder at her, she raised the bright square slowly to her cheek, pressing its softness gently against her face with both hands, and two great tears trickled down to wet its folds, spreading in dark patches where they touched the material.

"This was mine, Cay, a gift from Publius, given and lost again many, many years ago. I grieved at losing it, but never mentioned it to Publius. He must have taken it—" She broke off suddenly, her words forgotten as her eyes became aware at last of what the silken scarf had covered. The brightly coloured cloth escaped from her suddenly nerveless fingers and slipped unheeded into her lap. I stepped around the table again to stand beside her and for long moments we stared together in awe at the sight before us. It was she who broke the reverent stillness, her voice little more than a whisper. "My husband . . . Publius made this?"

"Aye, who else? Who else could conceive of such beauty, let alone create it, other than Publius Varrus? See, his mark is stamped into the metal, just below the hilt there."

My aunt leaned forward, peering at the tiny "v." " 'Varrus.' Just like the skystone dagger his grandfather made." She jerked her head towards me. "Is this . . .?"

"Aye, Auntie, it is a skystone sword, made from the metal statue of Coventina, the lady of the Lake, as Uncle Varrus called her. It's called Excalibur."

"Excalibur. . . Excalibur." Her voice was still a whisper. "Take it out. I want to touch it, to hold it."

I removed the sword from its case, resisting the temptation to swing it and enjoy its superb balance. Instead, I grounded its point between her feet, holding it upright and steady in front of her eyes with the tip of one index finger on the end of the golden cockleshell that formed its pommel. She stared at it for some time before reaching out to touch it, but then I relinquished my fingertip hold and watched as she ran her fingers over the intricate scrollwork of its huge cross-guard and the abrasive texture of its sharkskin-covered hilt bound in its filigreed network of gold and silver wire.

For long moments she said nothing at all, devouring the perfection of the sword with her eyes, but then she glanced up at me. "Caius? Would you mind leaving me alone here for a little while? My thoughts are . . . I want to . . . absorb this, privately."

"Of course, Auntie. I'll be right outside the doors. Call me when you're ready, and I'll put it away again. Take your time; there's no hurry." I stooped and kissed the top of her head and left her alone with her thoughts.

Moments later, Lucanus found me leaning against the wall in the passageway by the side of the great, bronze-covered doors, my arms crossed on my chest. He had come striding from the rear of the house and stopped short, his face reflecting his surprise at seeing me there, apparently lounging aimlessly. I straightened up, standing away from the wall, and he approached me slowly, returning my greeting.

"You look as though you're standing guard."

"Well, I am, in a way," I said, smiling.

"Against what?" His eyes flickered to the closed doors beside me. "You expect someone to try to steal the bronze sheeting?"

"No, I'm waiting for Aunt Luceiia. She's inside." His curiosity was plainly written on his face. "Remembering her husband Publius Varrus."

"Ah, I see." He plainly saw nothing remarkable in that, because he changed the subject immediately. "The Council meeting will be starting soon. You will be coming, won't you?"

"Of course. How much time do I have?"

"An hour or so." He paused. "Have you discussed the Council with your aunt?"

"No. Should I have?"

He nodded, pursing his lips. "I think so, Cay. I didn't want to say anything while Ludmilla was with us, but there are changes occurring within the Council, changes I don't like and I know you won't like them, either."

"What kind of changes?"

" The worst kind, political. Emerging factions, or the threat of them. A threat yet young enough to be stamped out, thank Cod, now that you are back and well again. Young blood and new faces with an eye to their own position and advancement, rather than to the common good. You'll see, and it won't take you long. But ask Luceiia. She'll tell you more quickly and more accurately than I could. For a very old lady, there's not much that escapes her."

"Tell me more."

"I can't, Cay, I'm late already. Besides, it's better you hear it from your aunt. I should be in the Infirmary now, preparing for the arrival of the main train of wounded from Cornwall. They were sighted this morning entering Vegetius Sulla's old lands, so they should be arriving here any moment now. Talk to your aunt. I'll see you later."

I watched him stride away, suddenly uncomfortable with this unexpected mention of factions within the Council, and all the ominous implications. I have no idea how long I stood there fretting, but presently I heard Aunt Luceiia call my name and went back into the Armoury, where I replaced Excalibur in its case and resealed it beneath the floorboards. She watched me in silence throughout the reinterment of the case, and neither of us spoke until we were once again sitting in front of the brazier in her quarters. I waited, sensing that she had much to say to me, and she did not keep me waiting long.

"Well . . ." she began, pausing immediately. "The mere sight of that sword brought me a new perspective on your talk of dreams." I sat still, feeling slightly uncomfortable, and she snorted, a sound that might have been a smothered laugh or an indication of withering scorn. "The egotist within me was offended, at first, greatly insulted. That is why I wanted to be alone." I merely nodded, and she went on. "Why—this was the first, treacherous, self-pitying thought that occurred to me on seeing it—would Publius keep the existence of this sword concealed from me? It is plainly the most wonderful creation, and the most precious possession, of his entire life. And if he had kept this secret, how many others might he have had throughout his lifetime? What else of Publius Varrus exists beyond my private little world that I had thought so all-encompassing?" She paused again, but this time her lips creased in wry, self-disparaging amusement and I immediately felt better as she continued gently, "I am no less human and insecure than any other wife, it would seem, even after all this time." She sniffed dryly, accepting the folly of her own words. "Of course, as soon as I began to think clearly, I realized I was being silly. The mere knowledge, let alone possession, of a sword like that would endanger anyone. I am quite sure nothing like it has ever existed. No emperor ever possessed such a weapon. Men would fight wars to own it."

"Those were your husband's exact words." My interruption was involuntary, startled out of me. It won me a smile from her.

"I believe you. So, having made it, Publius could never have unmade it. And he would wish to see it put to great and noble use. Hence your reference to his dream and your grandfather's. Did Caius ever see it?"

I nodded, a sudden lump closing my throat. "He was the first to use it, saving my life. He cut down Seneca with it."

"Ah!" Her voice died away on a long exhalation, then: "Who else has seen it?"

"You and I. No other eyes alive have looked on it. Father Andros designed the hilt and cross-guard, Equus worked on the blade and the mould for the hilt, and Plautus was in the forge when Uncle Varrus cracked it open. And Grandfather Caius used it to kill Seneca. Only those five had seen it, before me—except, of course, for Seneca and his animals, none of whom recognised what they were seeing or survived the sighting."

"Cracked what open?"

"The mould. Uncle Varrus poured the entire hilt and cross-guard as one solid piece, bonded to the tang. Excalibur means 'out of a mould.' "

"I see." She was quiet again, and I saw her lips frame the name before she said, musingly, "I thought it merely a poetic name, chosen for its beauty alone, for it has a power to it, a sonority." Her thoughts changed direction again. "So! Having created such a thing, their need was to conceal it from men's knowledge until the time had come to make it known, and thus, you became the Guardian. And now you believe that time will have arrived when the child Arthur is grown?" I nodded. "Did Uther know of it?"

"No, Auntie, he did not. Uncle Varrus felt Uther was too rash, too headstrong, to be entrusted with the secret."

"Hmm. He was correct, too. That does not surprise me. Publius Varrus was seldom wrong. Nor did it surprise me, upon reflection, that he had kept the knowledge of the sword from me. He was protecting me, believing ignorance would keep me safe if things went awry in some unforeseen way." She fixed me with a gaze that would brook no evasion. "What more can you tell me of my great-grandson?"

"No more than I have told you already, Aunt Luceiia. He was strong, lusty and in glowing health when I saw him last. He is a big child, and should grow to be a large man."

"Arthur Pendragon . . ." She savoured the sound of it. "Arthur Britannicus Varrus Pendragon." She heaved a great, sharp, gusting sigh. "Well, I shall simply have to find the energy to stay alive until you can bring him back from Hibernia. After that, I shall be prepared for death, knowing that our family will live on."

I returned her smile, but my mind was busy elsewhere now. "Auntie, forgive me, but I have little time and I have to ask you some questions about the Council."

Her face fell instantly into repose. "What questions?"

"About factions, divided loyalties perhaps. I don't know. Lucanus only mentioned to me within the hour, while I was standing outside the Armoury, that I should speak with you on the topic. I'm due at the meeting very soon now."

"Of course you are, how stupid of me. I really am growing old, Cay, forgetting things. . ." She clasped her hands in her lap, stretching and interlacing her fingers. "Very well, I shall speak and you will listen. What I have to tell you is very brief. Armed with it, nevertheless, you will be forewarned and prepared to draw your own conclusions." The next quarter of an hour passed quickly as I sat rapt, caught up in her tidings and assessing her information from two separate, but not dissimilar perspectives. The first of these was concerned with the immediate problems I faced in the resumption of my responsibilities towards Camulod, and the other entailed the effect those problems might have—if not correctly and summarily dealt with— upon the months-old child now being held hostage in Eire. Arthur Britannicus Varrus Pendragon, as my aunt had properly named him, would one day soon return to live here in Camulod, and mine would be the task of rearing him to manhood. Camulod would be his inheritance, and its governance would be his lifelong duty, in obligation to all of his ancestral names. Larger things might befall Arthur in the life that stretched ahead of him, but none of them would be greater than this, his first and foremost charge. Yet what my aunt was telling me—this damnable thing of factions—posed a threat not merely to the child, but to all we had planned for him and for the future. And so I listened closely and thought deeply, engrossed by the subtle layers in Aunt Luceiia's lucid presentation of her tidings.

The Council of Camulod had grown greatly since I had last paid formal attention to it. Where formerly I would have looked to see a single circle of some twenty men, the elders of the Colony appointed for their wisdom, knowledge and tolerance, I now beheld a double ring of chairs, forty-eight in number. Six of these chairs were occupied by women, the senior members of Aunt Luceiia's ancillary Council of Women. The other forty-two were filled by men, and from the information given me by Aunt Luceiia and amplified by my own observations before entering the chamber I could now see quite clearly the factions to which Lucanus had referred.

Four men had greeted me more warmly and solicitously than any others as I made my way through the crowded courtyard outside the Council Hall on my way to the meeting; four men whom I might not easily have recognized without my newly acquired awareness. Two of these were leaders, two followers. Now, in the gathering that swept out and around from where I stood behind the Speaker's Chair, I could still see them clearly. To my left, in a close-knit group fourteen strong, sat the adherents of Lucius Varo, the most notable among them his adviser, Bonno. Lucius was the direct descendant of Quintus Varo, who had been brother-in-law by marriage to my grandfather Caius Britannicus. I knew of Quintus Varo from my readings. He had been a simple, straightforward man of boundless honesty and integrity. From my great-aunt's report, his blood had been sadly diluted to produce this great- grandson, who now saw my eyes resting on him and smiled at me warmly. I allowed my own face to relax into a noncommittal smile and let my eyes continue to rove.

Lucius Varo was young, in his mid-twenties I gauged, some seven or eight years younger than I. He was a politician by nature, using his fresh, open good looks to insinuate his will upon other, weaker men and bend them to his wishes. He had been appointed to the Council two years earlier, while I was suffering from my memory loss, and had established himself as a constant presence ever since. True to his nature, he had done nothing to which anyone might take exception for the first year or so, content merely to bide his time while making himself helpful, amenable and valuable to all. Only in recent months had he begun to emerge clearly as an organizer, using the combined weight and influence of his supporters to influence decisions taken in Council so that they fell to his advantage. Within a close-knit society that had no use for or need of money, he had amassed wealth of another kind: power and influence. His great-grandfather had been one of the Colony's first and finest farmers, whose entire lands had been dedicated from the outset to the provision of edible crops, rather than to the sustenance of livestock. Over the years, that emphasis had produced, unwittingly, an anomaly, an aberration, within Camulod: a concentration of power amounting to a virtual monopoly of a unique kind within the holdings of the family Varo. Much of the finest arable land in the Colony lay in these holdings, and an agglomeration of the Colony's finest agricultural workers had grown up there, owing their allegiance and their welfare to the owner of the Varo estate, originally Quintus Varo and then, upon his death, his only son Quintus Secundus, who had been known to everyone as plain Secundus and had served the Colony and its Council all his life. His son, Quintus Tertius, had continued the tradition until he died tragically while still a young man, killed in a fire. Tertius's son Lucius had then inherited the Varo lands and title, and his father's place on the Council.

With the advent of the fourth generation of Varos, an unhealthy change had arrived in Camulod. People began to grow aware, although but gradually, that the instant and welcome assistance that had been ever available from the Villa Varo, while still available, now bore with it a duty of acknowledgment and obligation that had never before been necessary. Now, in return for favours smoothly granted, each supplicant was expected, rather than simply encouraged as in the past, to align himself with the house of Varo on matters of policy and internal Colony procedures having to do with the acquisition and administration of land holdings. So smoothly had this transition been achieved, however, that it had occurred without resentment and almost invisibly, until several months before, when several people began to remark pointedly upon the proliferation of support for Varo's many new initiatives, and upon the not so simple fact that, in order to achieve anything in the way of change or progress in land ownership or management, ordinary Colonists now had to deal specifically with Lucius Varo.

Although in possession of this information for less than a single hour, I was already convinced that something would have to be done about the affable Lucius Varo and his dangerous ambition. Camulod had no need of men like him, or of the peril his incipient lust for power embodied. There was no room for politicians in our Colony.

A movement at the far end of the room attracted my attention and I saw that my two old friends the Legates, Titus and Flavius, had entered the hall. They did not move forward, but stood attentively against the rear wall, their arms crossed in front of them, both in full armour. I smiled at them, but they were both too far away to see it. Would these two old war-horses ever stop wearing armour, I wondered, even in times of peace? I thanked God that they were here and well, though both far advanced in years. Their presence offered me an anchor. I had not seen either of them since my return but determined to seek them out as soon as I was free of this meeting.

The Speaker's Chair in front of me was still unoccupied, and Mirren, the current president of the Council—the office was another innovation—had not yet entered the hall, although I had seen him outside and exchanged greetings with him. I allowed my eyes to drift now towards my right, to the other faction that I had identified. Peter Ironhair, its prime motivator, was deep in conversation with the man called Rhenus who had accompanied him when he sought me out in the courtyard earlier. Neither man had noticed my gaze turn their way. I took in every detail I could see of Ironhair, whom I would not have known had I not been warned of him. Peter Ironhair was a newcomer to Camulod, but a highly gifted one. He was a metalsmith, a trade honoured in Camulod since the time of Publius Varrus, and he had arrived in the Colony some five years earlier, rising soon thereafter, thanks to his natural skills and despite his extreme youth, to become one of the prime armourers of the Colony. That position had earned him his place in the Council, which he had held, to great acclaim, for almost three years. He, too, I estimated, was seven or eight years younger than I—like Varo, in his mid-twenties. He was a big man, as one might expect of an ironsmith, his hair iron-grey, prematurely whitened in spite of his youth and obvious health. He was gesturing to Rhenus, and from where I sat I could clearly see the massive rippling of the muscles in his arm. He was dressed well, no sign of the working smith in his garments. He glanced up and saw me watching him, but his expression remained unaltered. I knew, however, with complete conviction that he had noticed my gaze and chosen to ignore it. I looked beyond him, casually, at the people seated behind him, several of whom were leaning forward, listening intently to what he was saying. I counted thirteen in his group. Thirteen of his adherents, plus fourteen of Lucius Varo's amounted to twenty-seven men of the total forty-two on Council. Twenty-seven votes, a clear majority should the two groups ever arrive at a common goal, and close enough, singly, for either party to threaten a serious disruption to the business of the Council.

Aunt Luceiia had informed me that the two group leaders detested each other, and that Peter Ironhair's faction had emerged apparently solely in response to the formation of Varo's group. I had no idea at this point of what his power base was built upon. I knew only that, collectively, the two groups were referred to by the Colonists at large as the Farmers and the Artisans. I found it galling that such clear and disparate interests had been permitted to emerge so quickly, and so far I had no idea of how I would disband and nullify them, but I knew that much of my concentration would be given in the near future to that end. Fortunately, I knew also I would not lack assistance. Luceiia Britannicus herself was a fearsome adversary for either group and for any combination of the two, and Lucanus had assured me of the support of Titus and Flavius and many others among the most respected and admired members of the Council.

A bustle at the rear of the hall announced the arrival of Mirren, the delinquent president. A tall, imposing man, another descendant of one of the Colony's founding families, he now raised his arms for attention, speaking above the babble as he strode to the Speaker's Chair.

"Your pardon, all of you, for having kept you waiting. You know I would not normally do so." He arrived at the Chair and nodded to me before turning back to face the Council, holding his arms aloft in a plea for silence. In the hush that followed, he cleared his throat and spoke out strongly.

"I have just returned from the main gates. The train of wounded soldiers for which we have been waiting has just come into sight and I fear it is larger and more awful than we had expected. I have a report of six hundred and more injured men, some of them fit to walk, but more unable. There is work for everyone this day in settling them and arranging for their care, so this meeting must be short and to the point." He turned to glance again at me and nodded.

"First, however, we have a matter of concern to all of us, which must be dealt with now, before anything else." He paused, and every eye in the hall was fixed on him. "Caius Merlyn here returned to Camulod this morning with momentous tidings. I will allow him to pass them on to you himself. Commander?"

I stepped forward and faced the Council. One person shuffled his feet, somewhere in the second row of chairs, and the sound carried clearly.

"Before I deliver my tidings, there is something I would say to all of you, something that is long overdue from me to you." I had their complete attention, because to many of them I was an enigmatic presence nowadays, having been out of my mind, present in body only, for years. Many of them knew me only as Merlyn the reborn, brought back from the verge of death by Luke's medicinal skills. They had not known me before I was wounded. The others had known me in my youth, but the Merlyn they had known for the past few years was another person. I had considered my words carefully, and now I drew a deep breath and spoke them.

"For years now, I have been among you in body only. My mind, my own, real mind, has been elsewhere, smashed into oblivion by a head wound. Know you now, all of you, that it is I, the old and former Caius Merlyn Britannicus of Camulod, now fully restored, who speaks to you today." I waited patiently until the excited exclamations had died down. Before that happened, however, someone began to stamp his feet in applause, and soon the entire hall was filled with the sound of approbation. When it had finally subsided, I continued.

"Thank you, my friends. It is good to be whole again, but you should know I regained my full health, and my memories, intact, slightly more than a month ago. After that, recalling fully who and what I was and am, I set out immediately to find and join my cousin Uther and his armies in the southwest, to help him prosecute the war with Lot. Unfortunately, they had been long gone by that time, and I caught up to them too late." I paused. No one coughed or stirred.

"I bring ill tidings now, I fear, my friends, though some not so ill." I looked around the double circle, seeing each face on its own, separate from its fellows. "The rumours and reports you have heard before today concerning the death of my cousin, Uther the King, Uther Pendragon, Uther of Camulod, are true. Uther was killed deep in the southwest forests of Cornwall after a long, running battle with the enemy—three of Lot of Cornwall's armies. I myself found his corpse and burned it in a pyre where it had fallen. From his finger, I removed his royal seal, the red dragon of his people." I held up the great Pendragon signet for all to see and allowed silence to settle again. "So Uther is gone, and all of us are the poorer for his passing." I paused, looking around the room again, then added, "Lot of Cornwall, too, is dead and he, too, I burned, though in a simple fire. No pyre for him. I found him hanging from a tree, his hands and feet cut off, so that I knew not whether he had choked or bled to death. Suffice that he is dead, and that Camulod need fear his madness no longer." No outbreak greeted this news. The silence held. I continued speaking into it.

"So the Cornish War has ended, even though the last fruits of its madness are still arriving home as I speak. Camulod is at peace again, for the time being unthreatened. It is a time to make repairs, to rest ourselves and prepare for whatever the months to come might hold in store for us. Rest assured, however, that demands will be made upon us in the future, and they might well be greater than all the threats we have stood against to date. The death of Gulrhys Lot is but a breathing space accorded us by God. It is not a final victory and could not be, since our true enemy, the enemy of all we hold in Camulod, does not originate in Cornwall. Our real enemy lives beyond the borders of land and sea that gird this Britain of ours, and wishes only to usurp what we hold dear. The time that lies directly ahead of us must be a time of preparation, of conserving and of husbanding our strengths and rebuilding our forces."

I turned my head towards Mirren. "That is all I have to report, Mirren. Now, if I might add my own urgings to yours, I suggest we adjourn this plenary session to another day, in view of the arrival of our wounded in such large numbers."

Moments later, the meeting had been adjourned until the same day of the following week and I was outside, searching for Titus and Flavius among the throng spilling from the Council Hall, most of whom wished to congratulate me upon my recovery. I located my quarries easily, however, thanks to the visibility of their ornately crested helmets, and soon caught up with them, spiriting them off with me to my aunt's house, where we could speak privately.

By the time we had arrived there, the rituals of meeting after a long parting had been disposed of, and I had informed them of my own activities and what I had learned since my return. They digested my words in silence until we had entered my aunt's house and were seated around the glowing brazier in the family room, each nursing a cup of wine. Both men, initially, were ill at ease in this sanctum sanctorum of Luceiia Britannicus, but she herself welcomed them cordially and then sat silent in a corner, listening to what we discussed. I wasted no time in coming to the centre of what concerned me.

"Very well, gentlemen, let's talk about priorities. Something has to be done about these factions, the Farmers and the Artisans as they call themselves, and it looks as though I am going to be the one who has to do it. You agree?"

They both nodded solemnly. "Aye," Titus said. "Your father, had he been alive, would have stamped them out before they had a chance to form themselves, and so would you, had you been in any condition to recognize what was afoot. As it stands today, no one else has had the power, or the guts, to do anything."

"Aye, well, that's in the past. It's the future that concerns me now. Lucius Varo I can understand. He stands to gain strength by denying his assistance to the Colony unless it meets his conditions, and he seeks to bolster his own influence and standing as a leading Colonist and citizen. That, I think, may be easily dealt with. But what about this Ironhair? What does he hope to gain, and how?" Both veterans were gazing at me stolidly, accepting that my question was rhetorical and that I was about to answer it for them. I smiled at them. "I am asking you seriously, my friends, and in good faith, because I had never heard of or seen the man until this morning. I know where he came from and how he won his place in Council, and I have no difficulty with any of that, nor can I see anything reprehensible in his conduct. What I cannot see, however, is how, and to what ends, he built the power base he now so obviously holds. What does he hope to gain in forming such a group?"

Flavius began to say something about Ironhair merely opposing Varo, but I cut him short.

"No, I won't accept that, Flavius. If his concern were merely to thwart Varo he could do that openly in Council, using the full strength of the voting body. That will not suffice as an explanation. The man has formed a group of partisans; thirteen of them, I counted today. If Varo's group consists of fourteen toadies, then Ironhair would need only two of the remaining thirteen councillors to keep him firmly in his place. The corollary is that he could command fifteen votes without forming his own group, these Artisans. Something stinks. So again I ask you, what does he hope to gain? What's his objective?"

The two old soldiers looked at each other and shook their heads in unison, admitting they did not know.

"Fine," I said, accepting that. "We'll find out soon enough, because I intend to bring these matters to a head, and very soon. Now, tell me about the garrison. What's our strength?"

It was Flavius who answered me, and as usual he wasted neither time nor words. "More than eight hundred cavalry, battle-ready, and slightly less than double that number, say fifteen hundred foot-soldiers, fully prepared."

"That few?" This was bad news, indeed. I had been hoping to hear much larger numbers.

"Aye," Flavius sighed. "That few. I may be out on the side of caution, as regards our cavalry, with stragglers still drifting in, but I doubt I'm wrong by much. Lot's greed has cost us dearly."

"Hmm. Are they loyal?"

Both men straightened with shock.

"What d'you mean, loyal?" Flavius asked. "Loyal to whom?"

"To you, to us, to Camulod."

"Of course they are!" Titus sounded outraged.

"Good. We may need that loyalty."

"Caius?" My aunt's voice startled me. I had forgotten she was there.

"Yes, Auntie?"

"I have an idea, a thought. It may be nonsense but it just occurred to me."

All three of us were looking at her now, Titus and Flavius twisting their heads to look over their shoulders. She swept on, now that she had our attention.

"It's about Peter Ironhair, and what he hopes to gain."

"Go on, Auntie, we're listening."

"Well, as I said, this may be nonsense, but I think I have just had an inkling of what may be in his mind. Shall I go on?"

"Of course." I stood up. "But first come over here and sit with us so the noble Legates here will not have to strain their necks." I moved to where she sat and took her arm as she moved forward to sit on the couch beside me, facing the others. When she had settled herself, rearranging the fall of her clothes to mask the speed of her thoughts, she leaned forward.

"Peter Ironhair is married to a great-niece of Victorex, who was the first Master of Horse in Camulod. Her name is Carla." My aunt glanced at each of us in turn and then continued, obviously remembering that we were males and therefore unused to the intricacies of female thinking. "Well, many years ago, my brother Caius acquired the estates that had been bequeathed to a former officer of his, a notorious pederast whom Caius had court-martialled and expelled from the legions for his sins. After Caius's death, the ownership passed on to Publius, my husband."

"Philip Ascanus," I said, recalling the incident clearly from my great- uncle's writings.

"Exactly, Philip Ascanus. A most unpleasant man, from all accounts. Well, after Victorex became too old to work as Master of Horse, Publius endowed him with a portion of those lands that Caius had originally purchased through an agent from Ascanus; a fourth of them, I believe, as his reward for many years of service. It was a valuable bequest, in perpetuity. Those lands passed to his nephew, a man called Gareth, when Victorex died, and Gareth had three daughters, the oldest of whom was Carla." We waited, knowing she would soon make sense. She frowned, remembering.

"Five years ago or so, Peter Ironhair arrived in Camulod. He was an able smith and a hard worker and soon made his mark. He met and wooed Carla, who was not comely, but a solid, sensible young woman. Unfortunately, as these things often go, she yielded to him without talk of marriage, and they lived together for some time. Now," she squinted, thinking hard. "I cannot recall the reasons, though I know there were some, and solid, but Gareth, as an incentive to Ironhair to wed the girl, offered to dower her with a portion of his lands. Ironhair accepted the offer, desirous, as who in his position would not be, of adding to his status that of landowner. Everything was agreed, apparently, until the wedding date, when it appeared there was some impediment to the passage of title to the lands . . . I don't know what was involved, it was years ago and the affair was kept quite quiet, but we can find out if we apply ourselves. Anyway, the upshot was that Peter Ironhair lost his claim to those lands through some prior commitment that his wife's father, Gareth, had made originally to Secundus Varo. Tertius, I seem to remember—Secundus was long dead by then—was loath to press his father's claim, but Lucius, Tertius's own son, was adamant, and refused to settle for less than the family's due. Ironhair protested, and the matter went to Council, but was resolved in favour of the Varo claim."

Aunt Luceiia paused and looked at me. "There, Nephew, I believe, lies the root cause of Ironhair's hatred of Lucius Varo."

I nodded, but my eyebrows were raised in question. "Yes, Auntie, I—"

"Wait, I haven't finished." She paused again, then resumed. "Now, here is a man who detests Lucius Varo; a man who has suffered, personally, from being single and unsupported in a conflict with a well-established, strong and greedy rival. Years later, he sees that rival begin to assemble a strong corps of supporters, who will back the fellow up, it seems, in anything he attempts. But as the years have passed, few though they were, the former friendless victim has amassed some strength of his own, and now perceives an opportunity to challenge, and constrain his enemy. There is the motive behind the formation of the Artisan group."

"That's all very well, Auntie, and it explains his motivation, but what about the ends? What is he aiming for?"

My aunt was ready for me. "What did Lot of Cornwall aim for, Cay? Dominance."

"Dominance?" The surprise in my voice was echoed by the smiles that sprang to the lips of Titus and Flavius. Luceiia Britannicus withered all three of us with a glance.

"Dominance." Her tone was obdurate, her pronunciation precise and clipped. "He seeks personal dominion. No more, no less. His prize is Camulod." She observed all of us and resumed before we could come up with a rebuttal. "Think about it, all of you! Since the death of Picus Britannicus there has been no dominant leader within this Colony. You, Caius, have been bereft of your identity for years, a shadow of your former and true self, a persona that Ironhair never saw. Uther has been totally concerned for those same years with his own mountain kingdom and with the war on Lot. The Colony has been run by you two." She took in both old soldiers with a single glance. "I have no wish to disparage either of you, but your days of being perceived as a potent threat to anyone are as long gone as mine." She allowed that thrust to sink home slowly in the silence that followed it.

"Peter Ironhair is a powerful man," she resumed eventually. "Powerful physically and, of late, in influence. He now controls a solid faction within this Colony's affairs. His followers are all young, all artisans, craftsmen, each with his own apprentices, all physically strong and hence all capable of fighting, if the need for fighting should arise. Against him is ranged the group known as the Farmers, who are fanners indeed, and the remainder of the Council, all of whom are well advanced in years and fundamentally impotent in any trial of strength. No leader has existed to oppose his plans. Do you hear what I am saying, all of you?"

I nodded my head, stunned with the evident truth of her conjecture. "We do. You are saying th—"

"I am saying, Nephew, that saving only your miraculous return to possession of your faculties and memory, the stage has been arranged within this Colony for a revolt, fomented by the bitterness between Lucius Varo, the smooth and unctuous politician, and Peter Ironhair, the hard-muscled and popular champion of the ordinary workers of Camulod, with everything—total control of the Colony, its soldiers and its future—accruing to the victor in the fight that must take place . . ." Her voice died away, leaving us speechless, and then continued. "The truth is there."

None of us sought to argue otherwise.

"So what do you intend to do?" Lucanus had listened wordlessly to all I told him, his face bleak in the dappled afternoon shadows beneath the great tree above us. We had ridden down from the main gates, skirting the edge of the great training campus with its usual activity of wheeling and milling groups of training riders, and sought the comfort of a grassy glade, where we had dismounted and now sat on a fallen tree trunk, sharing a small bag of shelled hazelnuts and sun-dried grapes.

"I don't know yet, but before we even begin on that I want your reaction. Do you believe it? Does it ring true?"

He snorted. "You shouldn't even have to ask me that! Of course it's true. It's as plain as the nose on your face; the only possible explanation of all the things that have been keeping us off balance and wasting our time wondering what Ironhair could possibly be up to. Do you still have doubts?"

I shook my head. "No, Luke. But still, it's hard to credit. I mean here, in Camulod."

"Horse turds! Camulod, Rome, Babylon, Athens or Ur of the Chaldeans, it makes no matter. Men are men, most of them prefer venality, given a choice, and the world is one great latrine. The basest elements survive and float to the surface sooner or later to offend the eyes of others. Whatever you decide, my friend, you have to do it soon. What about Varo?"

"What about him? Ironhair's the danger. Varo is only dangerous as long as he is allowed to persist in this acquisitive lust he has for seizing land. I know exactly how to deal with that and I intend to see to it immediately. Apart from that, young Master Lucius merely provides Ironhair with a focus for the pretence of necessary, righteous outrage."

"Aye, but—Oh damn, I'm being summoned."

His eyes were fixed over my shoulder and I turned to where a messenger approached us from the hillside road, a one-armed veteran mounted on an elderly mule. He saw us notice him and drew rein within earshot.

"Master Lucanus, you are needed in the sick bay."

"Thank you, I will be there directly." The man turned and kicked his mount into its return journey, and as he watched the fellow go I saw Luke's features quicken and then set into a scowl.

"What's wrong?" I asked him.

He shook his head and his scowl changed into a tiny smile. "Passing thoughts," he said quietly. "When did you last wash your hands?"

"What? This morning, why?"

"Because I wash mine all the time, sometimes ten times in the course of a day. I know why I do it, too. We surgeons are a cleanly lot. But I had never thought till now of how I do it."

I had heard his emphasis clearly, but his meaning had passed me by. I stood up, shaking my head at his non sequitur and sealing the nut bag with its drawstring. "Good for you, Luke. Before the monastic zealots appeared, the Romans used to say that cleanliness is next to Godliness."

He ignored my comment, raising an arm to point to the departing messenger. "A one-armed man can't do it at all, Cay. He must rely on others to do it for him . . . to wash his hand."

I froze, suddenly aware of what he meant, as he went on. "Emasculate young Varo, deprive him of his power, and you remove the focus for Ironhair's public motivation. He'll have only one hand to try and wash, and lack the means to do it."

"By God, you're right, Luke, and I know exactly how to achieve that!"

He looked at me and grinned. "I knew you would, as soon as I had pointed it out to you. Now I must go. Coming?"

We barely spoke as we rode back up the road towards the fort. Luke's mind was on the work that lay ahead of him, and so was mine. I had six days to prepare for the adjourned meeting of the Council.

V

The appointed day arrived and I found myself, for the second time in a week, facing the assembled Plenary Council of Camulod, but much had changed in the intervening days. During that time I had convened a lesser council of my own, consisting of my great-aunt; Luke, who was not present at this day's gathering; Titus; Flavius; and a few of the senior councilors, including Mirren, all of whom had expressed concern, one way or another, over the way things had been heading recently. Acting with the concurrence of my small committee, I had busied myself over the preceding week, re-establishing my credentials—essentially my position as Legate Commander of Camulod, a position inherited (and earned, I liked to believe) from my father, Picus Britannicus, who had assumed the mantle from Publius Varrus, who had, in turn, taken over the position and its responsibilities from my grandfather, Caius Britannicus, progenitor of the Colony. Camulod had ever been primarily a military-based society, constructed for self-defence and survival in the face of chaos. Our Colonists were free men, joined together of their own free will, governed necessarily by the rules set forth by our Council and subject to its penalties, the most severe of which was banishment. In all matters of internal administration and civil government the Council's authority held sway. Military matters, however—and these embraced not only the defence, but also the protection of the common welfare of the Colony—assumed priority above all else, and there the Legate Commander held the ultimate authority. Much of my credibility came from being a Camulodian born and trained by the founders of the Colony, and from a long, active and successful career as a soldier of Camulod—a man, in short, who could achieve in very short order whatever had to be achieved.

I had begun by visiting our wounded, freshly returned from Cornwall, and welcoming each man home, and I continued by holding a full General Inspection of the Garrison, the first such event in more than a year. I had then visited every holding in our lands, passing the time not only with the owners and managers of the estates, but with the populace, the ordinary Colonists, visiting many of them in their homes. I had shown my face in every smithy, cooperage and manufactory within our bourne, including the domain of Peter Ironhair, with whom I took care to spend a long time talking of his affairs and concerns.

I had begun anew, this time entrusting the work to personnel carefully selected by my associates, the census of our livestock, abandoned so long before when Lot's Cornishmen first fell upon us, and I had set Titus and Flavius about a similar, exhaustive tally of our fighting strength. Both of these tasks were now complete, and I had the results to present to Council today. I had also ridden long and hard to dine every single night with the most powerful and long-established names among our Colonists, being careful to include among those a pleasant evening in the home of Lucius Varo. In the space of a week, in other words, I had become a politician vying for office.

Now I sat in my proper place in Council, in the front row of the double ring of chairs that circled the hall. I felt more resplendent than I had for years, dressed in full, elaborate Roman parade regalia of polished black bull- hide breastplate, moulded to my torso over a rich, blindingly white tunic bordered with a Greek key design in pure black. Most of the matching accoutrements I wore from head to toe had been my father's and were of that quality which sets the truly ornate apart from the merely ostentatious. My buckles and adornments, from the rosettes of my chin strap to the mountings of my polished leather leggings, were of massive, solid silver. My great-aunt's seamstresses had completely renovated my huge war cloak, transferring the great, embroidered blazon of the rampant silver bear intact onto the back and shoulders of a brand-new black cloak, lined with soft, pure white wool. In the crook of my left elbow I held my finest black leather parade helmet, surmounted with my father's own massive, silver-mounted crest of alternating tufts of black and white horsehair.