The Saxon Shore

I grinned at him, feeling much better. "I will, Donuil. I have no intention of dying at the hand of anyone as degenerate as the people Feargus describes. In fact, I have no intention of dying at all, ever." I turned back to Feargus. "Do any of your men use spears?"

"Spears? Aye, many of them do. Why?"

"Because I would like to borrow some. We have our shields, but only three of us carry spears and it seems to me now that we might all have need of more. We will be riding fast and hard, and if we have to fight these demons you describe, I would choose to fight from horseback, at a run, and with a strong spear in my hand."

He grunted. "I wish all requests were that easy to grant." He swung on his heel and shouted to one of his men, sending him running back towards the platform at the rear of the galley. He returned moments later, accompanied by three others, each of them bearing an armload of assorted spears. The weapons all looked heavy and serviceable and were of varying lengths.

"Excellent," I said, nodding my approval. "We won't need anywhere near that many, but there are enough to let each of my men pick one that suits him. My thanks. We can be prepared to move out from here within the hour. That should give us five, perhaps six hours of travel time before nightfall; close to your ten leagues, if fortune smiles on us and we're lucky enough to avoid your savages."

Feargus looked impressed. He turned his head to look towards our horses. Donuil, however, shook his head, looking doubtful.

"I think not, Merlyn. You won't be able to move that quickly. No roads, remember? The entire route along the coast is heavily forested. You'll be riding through trees and underbrush the whole way. It could cut your normal speed by half."

From the outset, it seemed as though Donuil had the right of it. We said our farewells within the hour, some time shortly after noon, and rode into the forest, leaving him staring after us from the deck of Feargus's galley. By the time we had progressed the distance of a bowshot, our speed had been reduced to a slow, torturous walk, and I knew that none of us had ever encountered a wilderness such as this. My vision of a steady, cantering passage had already been proved ludicrous by the difficulty our mounts had found in even placing their hooves to walk. Every step offered a potential hazard, threatening a broken leg or ankle, for this ground, beneath a canopy of mighty, soaring trees, had never been cleared. The forest was beautiful, but utterly alien and apparently unpenetrated by man; every leaf and twig and tiny branch, every limb and tree trunk that had ever grown here, down through the ages, had fallen in the course of time in random chaos and lain undisturbed thereafter. There was a verdant, lush stillness everywhere that choked all sound and made the rich greenery of Britain's great forests seem anaemic and tawdry by comparison. Moss clung to the tree trunks here as it did over there, but the moss of Eire was thicker, fatter, and it grew everywhere; on the ground, on the rocks, on the countless fallen trees, some of them enormous, that littered the ground in every stage of decay, and on the upper portions of the trees themselves, hanging in green garlands from the branches. The earth under our hooves was of rich, reddish loam beneath the carpet of dead leaves that coated it, and crusted with fungi of all shapes and sizes, many more of which also clung to the boles and branches of the trees. A few of those, I knew, might be edible, but many more would be deadly, and I had no way of knowing which was which in this new and threatening land through which we rode.

To our left, inland as we made our plodding way northward over the forest bed, the terrain rose vertically in a series of ancient, green-scummed cliffs from which giant slabs and boulders of granite had been wrenched in ages past and now leaned drunkenly in every conceivable posture, as green and lichen-scabbed as the cliffs that had mothered them. Huge trees grew up there, too, upon the cliffs and slabs and boulders, clinging impossibly to the living rock by vast networks of roots that stretched across, between, along and around the fissures in the stone, and everywhere grew clumps and thickets of brilliant, ancient-looking ferns, many of them taller than a mounted man. Little light penetrated the roof of leaves high above, but wherever a ray of sunlight did succeed, it shimmered gold-green in the silent, surrounding darkness. I was aware of rich, reddish-brown fecundity everywhere I looked, but the pervading impression was of total greenness.

I was in the lead, and now I hitched myself around in my saddle, looking back to Dedalus, who was following me closely. He saw me turn and shook his head, and the disgust in his face was echoed in his tone as he called to me. "You thought to make thirty miles before nightfall? We'll be lucky to make one at this rate." His eyes shifted from my face to the wilderness ahead of us. "Mind you," he added, "the ground's rising. We might ride out of this soon, if we're not just climbing a hill with a down slope on the other side."

I glanced forward again and he was right. There was a definite upward slope to the land ahead. I pulled my horse aside and waved him past me, telling him I would catch up later. Then I sat and watched my pitiful little parade as it trooped by me, offering a word or two to each rider in turn. There were eight of us left—ten, counting the herd boys—of the original group of fourteen, Lucanus had been the first to depart, as planned. Metellus was dead. Quintus with his broken leg and Prince Donuil had gone with Feargus and Logan. But we still had all the horses except the three that had been killed. Eight men, two stripling boys and twenty-seven horses. I cursed myself for my folly in bringing all of them across the sea. They were behaving placidly, nonetheless, and for the time being I had no great concern over them. When the last of my men had passed me, nodding wordlessly to my greeting, I fell in behind him, immediately aware of the beneficial effect twenty-six sets of hooves in single file had had on the ground underfoot, and there faced a dilemma: were I to pull aside now and attempt to overtake the entire train to regain the point, I should be risking my horse irresponsibly on the uneven ground. I decided to remain where I was for a time. And then, within a matter of moments, the man directly ahead of me changed his gait, kicking his horse to a trot, and as I followed him I saw the file ahead of him extending to my left. Dedalus, at the point, had evidently found and was now following a game trail that led along the bottom of the towering cliffs on our left.

Our pace picked up steadily as soon as we were all on the beaten path of the narrow track, and after a mile or so it quickened again as the main path widened after converging with yet another, that joined it from our right. I saw the junction as I drew level with it, and followed it idly backward for several paces with my eyes before suddenly reining in my horse and returning to look more closely. It was a deer track, but I had never seen deer tracks like those I gazed at now. Each hoofprint, clearly visible in the soft loam of the beaten pathway, looked as large as my horse's own, and yet the signs were undeniably those of a cloven-hoofed deer. The track itself, now that I looked at it more closely, was far broader than a mere game track should have been. Unable to doubt what I was looking at, I shook my head in wonder and then rode to catch up with the others, grappling with the outlandish idea of a deer as large and heavy as a cavalry horse. I had lagged behind about a hundred paces, and as I cantered to catch up I took note of the way the path had widened. I called to the last man ahead of me to warn him I wished to pass and was able to do so quite easily, so that my progress from the rear to the head of the column was swifter than I would have thought possible mere moments earlier. As I drew abreast of Dedalus, he glanced at me, his eyes crinkled.

"No roads in Eire, huh? This is almost as good as one of ours. Not as straight, and narrower, but serviceable enough."

"Aye, Ded, but have you thought to ask yourself what made it?"

I caught his glance from the corner of my eye. "What d'you mean? Deer made it."

"I know, but if the wolves and bears in this place are as big as the deer I hope we don't meet any."

He frowned at me, and then raised himself in his stirrups, peering forward at the ground between his horse's ears.

"By the Christus," he muttered, in a voice filled with awe. "I hadn't noticed! You're right. What kind of deer are these?"

"Very large deer, Ded. We can only hope they have deer-like natures and no horns."

The game path was clearly ancient. Saplings had grown up along its edges in many spots, sprung from seeds scattered in the dung of its users, and their leafy branches brushed against us on both sides as we rode in silence for a spell, travelling two abreast easily now at a steady lope on the gently rising gradient that showed no signs of coming to a crest. At one point, where a giant tree had fallen across the track long years before, the route switched sharply, following the enormous trunk for many paces before bending tightly again to pass beneath the bole that continued angling sharply upward to its torn-up base, where ancient roots more than four times the height of a mounted man reared far above us. Whatever its cause, the great tree's downfall had created a clearance, sweeping lesser trees to ruin in its wake, so that now the space around it was filled with light and lesser growth. Ded was looking back at the place where we had passed beneath the tree. We had had to duck our heads to do so, but only very slightly, which indicated to me that the animals who used the path required almost the same clearance as we did. Dedalus was evidently thinking the same thing, for I heard him mutter "Big deer!" again, beneath his breath. Now he looked up towards the blue sky visible above us.

"You know, Merlyn, it occurs to me that we might be enjoying unusual weather in this land of Donuil's."

"How so?"

Before answering, he leaned sideways from his saddle and grasped a trailing garland of moss, tugging it free of the branch from which it hung and holding it towards me. "This stuff. It requires moisture. Haven't you noticed how green everything is? And all the fungi? It must rain here all day, every day, seems to me . . . And if that's the case, it's going to be a whoreson to live here without rusting up solid, our weapons and armour and all."

He was right and I was on the point of agreeing with him when he jerked up his arm, holding it high and cutting me short. "Wait!" His eyes stared fixedly into the middle distance over my shoulder. "What was that?" The men behind us stopped, too, some of them having seen his upraised arm, but the noise of their movement masked whatever it might have been that had alerted Dedalus. I swung around to look where he was looking, my ears straining to hear anything beyond the sounds we made ourselves.

We waited, motionless, our senses on edge, even our horses seemingly spellbound. Nothing stirred. After long moments, Dedalus relaxed, blowing out his breath and settling back in his saddle. "There's nothing there, but I could have sworn I heard something."

I dismounted without speaking and he watched me as I pulled my bow stave from its fastenings beneath my saddle skirts.

"What are you doing?"

"Feeling vulnerable." I fished a bowstring out of my scrip and strung the bow, bracing it with my knee, then hung a quiver of arrows from my saddle horn before remounting.

Dedalus was smiling. "Not used to seeing you jumpy."

I raised an eyebrow at him. "It happens. Keeps me alive sometimes. If we have to leave this path for any reason, we'll have to do it slowly." I nodded towards the tangle of broken trees all around. "My arrows give me speed. It's being unprepared that's dangerous. Let's go."

He pulled on his reins and raised himself up in the stirrups. "All right," he announced. "False alarm, but keep your eyes and ears—"

His voice was drowned by a bellow of rage from very close by. Something came charging towards us from our left, against the base of the cliff. I saw the wild, surging movement of it, and had the immediate impression of low- slung, solid bulk and sorrel brownness before the creature came clearly into view, causing panic among our close-packed horses. It was a boar, massive and fuelled by rage, and it attacked in a terrible, weaving, impossibly swift charge, right into the middle of our column. The untended horses scattered, screaming in terror, from the rank, feral stink of the beast. Before I could even swing my mount around, the nightmare creature had caused death, scything wildly with the strength of its brutal neck and shoulders, its wicked, spiralled tusks slashing to right and left, ripping upwards into the soft bellies of two of the animals within moments of reaching them.

"Spears!" Dedalus was yelling from behind me. "Get down there! Use your spears!"

The pathway between me and the slaughter, comfortably wide a moment earlier, was now all too narrow and completely impassable, choked with men and rearing, fear-crazed horses. Forcing my own panic down, I looked around me, searching for some way to ride back to where the chaos was spreading, but it was hopeless, and I was forced to watch the utter disintegration of my force under the attack of a brute beast. The noise of the conflict escalated madly, the shouts of men mingling with the screams of the animals. No sense of order remained anywhere in our cavalcade, every man trying uselessly to control his demented horse. Impatiently, curbing Germanicus grimly and using his bulk as a battering ram, I forced my way back through the press until I could see some of what was happening. Five men surrounded the enraged boar, I could see now, two on horseback, three on foot, and as I saw them one of the men afoot, Rufio, leapt in and stabbed the beast deeply, thrusting the spear with his whole body, the shaft clutched in both hands and tucked beneath his arm. The creature reared and spun, showing another, broken spear in its right flank, and in its awesome rage flicked Rufio into the air and out of my sight. And then suddenly, with a final, deafening squeal of pain and rage, it broke off its attack and fled into the trees. Long after it had gone, the horses continued to plunge and scream in terror and the men waited tensely, glaring about them, anticipating its return.

It took us a full hour and more to regroup. The panicked horses had scattered widely, in spite of the impossible terrain, and we had the devil's own trouble catching some of them. By the final accounting, we were five horses poorer, three of them disembowelled by the beast, one with a broken leg, and one with a haunch so lacerated by a slashing tusk that it had no hope of surviving the remainder of the journey through such hostile land. Rufio, for whose life I had feared, was merely stunned and hideously bruised. He had landed in a tree, like a javelin shot from a catapult, and fallen heavily to the ground. The others were merciless in their treatment of him, calling him "the Bird Man," a name he was to carry for the rest of his life, although it was eventually shortened, as all such names are. Rufio, from that day forth, became The Bird.

When order was finally restored, I authorized an hour's rest. It was unlikely the boar would return now, and it seemed pointless to me to push on any farther without giving everyone a chance to recover. A good rest, followed by an early camp and a solid night's sleep, it seemed to me, would do all of us good.

Sometime later, Dedalus's voice close by my ear snapped me out of a doze. I roused myself and looked at him questioningly. He looked at Rufio, who lay sleeping beside me, and then he raised his eyes towards the sky. "I was saying it's very obvious, to me at least, that there are no Outlanders around here. That commotion would have been audible for miles in every direction. No one's come to see who caused it, so I think it's safe to say that no one will." He stopped, waiting for my response.

"So? What are you telling me?"

He shrugged his shoulders and ducked his head, managing to appear sheepish and conciliatory at the same time. "Nothing, but that boar was badly wounded and bleeding heavily, arterial blood or I'm a blind man; two spears lodged in him when he broke away, both deep and well-placed, one of them intact so it would hamper him in running far through that." He nodded towards the surrounding undergrowth. "So, he's probably lying close by here, at the end of a plain blood trail. If I'm right, and I'm prepared to wager against anything you might wish to part with, we could have, for the price of a short walk, fresh-killed pig tonight. We have a clear sky, fresh water close by, an injured companion, and we're all tired. It has been an eventful day. We've been shipwrecked, half drowned, abandoned, lost in an alien forest and savaged by a ravening beast that cost us five prime horses. And yet there's more grazing here, of a kind, for the remaining stock than any other place we've seen since setting out this morning, and we have a master with us"—he bowed his head and clenched his fist over his heart in mock modesty—"of the art of dressing and roasting fresh-killed pig with garlic, onions and truffles."

"Truffles?"

He nodded sagely. "The greatest of all fungi. Our swinish visitor was rooting for them when we came along. I found where he was digging, and I found his prize."

"So you think we should stay here tonight and eat like pigs."

He sighed. "Caius Merlyn, I swear you have the gift of reading minds."

I nodded, pretending surliness. "Very well, you have an hour to find the beast. If you don't find it within that time, come back here and we'll eat horse meat. If you do find it, your truffles had better be superb."

XII

It took us until noon on the second day after our encounter with the boar to make contact again with Donuil and his father's galleys, but the weather held fine, with only scattered clouds and one heavy shower, and our progress was uninterrupted. We saw no sign of Feargus's Wild Ones, nor, although we saw ample evidence of the giant deer that had created the route we followed, did we see a single animal.

Our long night's rest and solid food had performed miracles for our well- being, and Rufio, our "flying man," had almost fully recovered from his misadventure, with only an aching in his ribs as a reminder. Ded's truffles had been epicurean, and the wild pig had provided a meal that each of us would remember with fond nostalgia in the years that lay ahead. While waiting for his men to finish scalding the bristles from the haunch that he had butchered, Dedalus had vanished back along the path, returning some time later with a helmet full of tiny, wrinkled, almost dry red apples. What he did to them I do not know, but when he served them with the succulent wild pig in the form of a thick, heavy sauce, they set every man's taste buds reeling with delight. We slept well that night, bloated with wondrous food and cushioned on thick, soft beds of springy moss.

An early start in the dim glow of dawn, begun tentatively with an eye to new and unlooked-for dangers, gave way gradually to a leisurely, carefree trot along our meandering route, following the path of least resistance with only occasional halts to negotiate natural hazards where trees or rocks, and once an entire cliff face, had fallen recently enough to block the way. Only the fallen cliff face caused us grief, forcing us to leave the smooth game trail completely and climb down a slippery, steeply sloping bank to bypass the tumbled obstruction at a crawl, carefully testing each tentative step along the base of the bank before committing to it, then clawing our way back upward to the pathway with much impatient, ill-tempered cursing. The experience reminded us forcibly of the impassability of this primeval forest and the debt we owed to our guiding spirits, the giant, unseen deer. It took us an hour to negotiate the downward slope, far enough away from the debris of the fallen cliff to be safe from loose, rolling boulders, and then as long again to make our way across the short space at the bottom of the sprawling pile that loomed above us. It took us more than twice as long again, however, to regain the pathway from the bottom on the other side, worming our way up sideways with the horses, whose hooves scrabbled and slithered and fell back on the soft, greasy loam.

And then, slightly before midday on the third day of our journey, we emerged without warning at the top of a high cliff and saw the two galleys of Feargus and Logan below us, drawn up onto a stone-grey, sheltered beach. Behind them, an arm of the sea swept inland and out of sight, masked by the high cliffs on which we sat. The cliff that had towered on our left throughout our journey pinched out here, on this high plateau. I waved to the tiny figures on the beach below, and shouted, but received no response. Finally, I nocked an arrow and launched it gently, watching it fall to earth beside one of the fires that burned brightly on the strand. That captured their attention, and they ran outward, staring up at us and waving, gesturing wildly towards our left. Sure enough, there was a downward route where they indicated, but it was terrifying in its steepness. Dedalus, beside me as usual, spoke the words that were in my mind.

"I hope that's not a river estuary behind them, or we're stuck here. Don't think it is. Water's too clear; no silty outflow. Must be a sea arm, what the Celts call a lough. Anyway, that's north, Donuil's country, over there, and we have to get there." He paused and spat over the edge, watching the flying spittle fall away. "You agree?"

I nodded. "So far. What else is in your mind?"

"Well, since you ask, it seems to me that taking the horses down there entails one certainty: we'll have to bring the whoresons up again."

"Why? We might be able to ride right along the beach, as far as the inlet extends."

"Aye, and it might extend for miles and then pinch out, leaving us to ride all the way back and still climb this cliff again . . . I say leave the horses here, hobbled, where they can graze along the fringes of the trees. We can carry our saddlebags and go down on foot. That's not a roadway, and horses have no hands. A man can climb down backwards, if he has to. If there is a way along the beach, and if it's possible to lead them down, we'll come back up and get them. If not, we'll have to come back, either way."

"Done," I said, and wheeled to make the arrangements.

After our perilous descent and the welcome we received from Donuil's Scots, they sat in silence around us while we ate, and listened intently as we told them the story of our meeting with the boar. One of our number, a normally taciturn man called Falvo, grew lyrical in his description of the monster, and his account of the battle fitted strangely with my own recollection of the debacle I had witnessed.

When Falvo had finished his tale, translated in the telling by Donuil and its verity endorsed by the approving murmurs of the rest of my men, Feargus looked at Dedalus, who had found the boar's body afterwards, then turned to me. "How big was this beast, truly?"

As I shrugged my shoulders, Dedalus reached for a blanket-wrapped bundle I had noticed hanging from his saddle earlier. "Big enough." I answered, watching him idly. "He cost us five horses and almost killed Rufio there."

Something large and yellow flew through the air from Dedalus to Feargus, who caught it in an outstretched hand and held it there for everyone to see. It was one of the beast's huge, spiralled tusks and the sight of it brought a concerted hiss of surprise from the assembled Scots. I turned to Dedalus.

"I didn't know you'd taken that."

"I took them both." He tossed the second one to me. "They'll be impressively barbaric once they've been cleaned up and polished."

I hesitated, struck by a thought. "How did you know what Feargus asked me?"

Ded grinned. "I didn't. I guessed from the tone of his voice. It's what anyone would have asked, isn't it?"

Fascinated to see the thing up close, I examined it carefully, aware of the glances of the others moving between me and Feargus who still held its mate. It was heavy, solid ivory, yellow with age and dirt, save where it was worn white towards the tip, and it was thicker than the base of my thumb at the blood- and bone-encrusted end where Ded had chopped it free of the jaw in which it had been set. From there, it swept outward in almost three complete, tapering curls, perfectly round in section save for the last part of the third curl, the width of my hand in length, which was edged with wickedly sharp, blade-like ridges capable, as I knew, of shearing and destroying anything they struck. From end to pointed end, the thing extended almost the full length of my arm from wrist to elbow.

"Dermott, come forward." The voice belonged to Feargus and an old man stepped forward at his bidding. "Show them."

The man, whom I could not remember having seen before, extended his right arm, and I looked with wonder at the bracelet wrapped around it, embracing the entire lower part. It was a tusk like the one I held, but it had been worked into a thing of beauty, polished to a creamy, glowing whiteness and carved, its ends capped with hand-crafted gold.

"Dermott is our bard," Feargus said, his voice solemn and filled with respect. "But in his youth he was a fearsome fighter and the greatest hunter of our clan. His wife, Moira, wears the other tusk, the twin to that. The arms of each of them have shrunk with age, but these symbols of their prowess that they wear with pride do not age. They killed the boar between them, with two spears, before any of you were born. A man-eater it was, ancient and evil and cursed for years. The biggest boar ever seen or known in our lands. Look!"

He held up the new tusk until it was level with Dermott's, and the polished whiteness of the old man's bracelet was dwarfed beside the dirt- smeared mass of the new-killed monster. A murmur of awe rose and fell into silence. Long moments Feargus held the tusk there wordlessly before passing it to me. I felt the solid weight of it matching that of its fellow in my other hand. I handed both tusks back to Dedalus, who rewrapped them in his blanket, and then I led the conversation towards the things I needed most to know.

Dedalus had guessed correctly. The water beside us was a sea lough, stretching inward for two leagues, or six of our Roman miles, and there was no open way along the beach. Half a mile inland, the precipice fell straight into the lough, its bottom lost in the depths. The only route for us to follow was atop the cliffs, where our horses already awaited us, but we were pleased to learn that our journey was more than half complete and we could travel from this point onward without fear of the Wild Ones, whose territories now lay behind us. Not that we should ride carelessly, Feargus added, since the Wild Ones knew no boundaries. When we reached the inner rim of the lough, Logan told us, taking over from Feargus, we should strike out to the north and west where, after another eight leagues, we would come to a river estuary with a road along its bank on our side. To the left, that road would lead us straight into King Athol's stronghold, the heartland of the Celtic Scots. If the galleys arrived there first, as they ought to, he said, they would row upstream to their point of anchorage close to home, and await us there, sending runners on ahead to prepare our welcome.

Having seen the surprise on my face that this "heartland" should lie so close to the domain of the Wild Ones, Donuil interrupted Logan to explain that his father had built his stronghold in the south of his domain because of the richness of the soil and the openness of the country. Fully four fifths of all the land the Scots claimed as their own was either heavy forest or rugged, barren uplands.

I asked next about the giant deer whose prints were everywhere, but of which we had seen no other sign. Elk was their name, a Norse word, Feargus told me, and he went on to explain that the legends told that they had been imported, two hundred years earlier and more, by a Norse king who had settled in Eire but pined for the giant deer of his homeland. He had sent his longships home to bring back breeding pairs of the huge beasts, and they had thrived in Eire's forests, where no predator but man was large enough to stalk them. They lived in the deep forest and preferred marshy land and boggy streams, since that was where they fed. Seldom were they seen beyond the deepest woods, and when they did venture that far they were easily killed. They were gentle creatures, he said, like all deer, but large enough to be dangerous, even lethal, when threatened, for their massive horns were like the horns of no other deer, being heavy, broad and spatulate, sculpted like great, flat spoons and as wide across as a big man's arms, with only tiny, blunted tines around the outer rims to mark them as deer horn. When the rutting males fought for dominance every year at the time of mating, he said, the clatter of their head-butting could be heard echoing through the forest for many leagues.

Dedalus broke the mood, tired of listening to interminable tales in a tongue he could not understand. "Merlyn," he growled, "it's mid-afternoon. Do we stay here tonight and climb that whoreson cliff in the morning, leaving the horses alone up there all night?"

"No, Ded. We'll sleep up there tonight and get an early start."

"Well, we'd better get going soon. I'd hate to attempt that climb without sunlight to guide me."

I sighed, and rose to my feet, and we took our leave again of Donuil and his Scots.

As soon as I set eyes on Athol, High King of the Scots of Eire, standing among his advisers on a raised dais, awaiting our approach, I saw the false presumption in the term Outlander, an expression I had used throughout my life. An Outlander was foreign, alien, someone from another land and therefore barbarian. Athol the King, however, despite his advanced years, would have been unmistakably a king in any land, regal in every aspect, including the stillness with which he watched us come. He seemed to embody his entire race, his upright bearing stamped with that unmistakable air of authority and magisterial presence the Romans had called dignitas. I was immediately thankful that I had called a halt and insisted on my men taking the time to clean themselves up before riding in, for though I knew nothing of this man, I saw at once that he was king in more than name, and while I could have no indication of the thoughts that must be swarming in his mind as he watched our approach I knew they would be far from trivial. He was forming his first impressions of the men and power of Camulod as we advanced. We were the victors who had made a hostage of his son. Now we were escorting that son home, but he must be wondering to what ultimate purpose. I felt sure, somehow, that he must be reassessing the potential worth of the child he held as surety for this return.

We had encountered no difficulties on the route from the shore where we had left Donuil and his party, and we found the road along the side of the river estuary exactly when we had expected to. The wide, shallow river had been deserted, and I had assumed that the two galleys had already passed and were awaiting us somewhere upriver to the east. I was right; we met them about five miles upstream, and they had been awaiting us for no more than a few hours, ready to escort us into the realm of their king.

Now, as we rode slowly towards the king himself, across the flatness of a central court ringed by silent watchers, I sucked in my belly and made an attempt to sit straighter in my saddle, even though I was already straight as a spear, encased in my unyielding parade armour. Donuil rode on my right, half a pace ahead of me as was his right in this, his father's place, and Dedalus was right behind me, in charge of the king's gifts: the pair of horses, their coats burnished to a blaze, and the decorative case that held the Varrus weapons. Athol looked only at Donuil, assessing the difference that five years had wrought, and schooling his features to give no hint of what he was feeling. The rostrum on which he and his advisers stood was set at about the height of a man's chest, on a scaffold of some kind, its entire front shielded by the king's guard, who stood shoulder to shoulder on the ground, facing us, their weapons cutting us off completely from any close approach to their leader. They were impressive, even though there was no hint of uniformity in either their dress or their appearance. Only in the wary watchfulness of their eyes and in their stance was there unity.

When we had approached to within a few paces of the guards, Donuil drew rein and the rest of us, who had been waiting for his signal, followed his lead, stepping down from our saddles and holding our mounts close- reined, their muzzles by our right shoulders. Donuil dropped his reins to the ground and stepped forward; the guards parted silently to give him access to a flight of steps their bodies had concealed. He mounted the steps in silence and went directly to kneel in front of his father, bowing his head and clasping the old king's outstretched hand. I watched only them, taking great care not to allow my eyes to look around. Behind me, my men did the same, I knew, because they had strict orders to do so. Donuil had explained to all of us that idle curiosity would be ill regarded, prior to his father's formal acceptance of our presence.

The old man gazed down at his son's head without speaking or moving for long moments, and then I saw his arm tense as he pulled Donuil upright and stepped forward to embrace him. The younger man, whom I would have expected to tower over his father, was not much taller than he. They spoke together in quiet tones and at the edge of my vision I was aware of several of the men behind the king leaning forward, trying to catch what was said. Eventually Athol nodded and Donuil turned towards me, beckoning me forward. I dropped my own reins and mounted the steps to the rostrum, aware of the king's eyes studying me. I gazed back at him, studying him with equal frankness.

He was slim and erect and, for all his advanced age—I guessed him to be well beyond sixty summers—his arms and neck were hard and tightly muscled, clearly showing the physical strength these Celts demanded in their kings. His long hair was shining clean, not white but paler than silver, parted in the middle and cut so that it fell bluntly to his shoulders. His eyebrows, however, were thick and snowy white on his sun-browned face above large grey eyes that held the fire of a man half his age. It may have been the greyness of his eyes with the pale grey of his hair, but at first sight from across the courtyard I had defined him as a man of silver, and that impression was heightened and confirmed with nearness. He wore a heavy overgarment, much like a cloak, of rich, hand-worked pale grey wool above a long, equally heavy tunic of darker grey, flecked with white, that was belted at the waist and kilted to his knees. His belt was buckled in silver, and the long sword it supported was hilted in silver, too, housed in a silver-worked scabbard. From the knees down, his legs were sheathed in supple sheepskin, worn fleece inward and bound with silver-decorated thongs, and silver straps gleamed, too, on his sandalled feet. Decorative bosses of the metal covered his breast, and the cloak was held in place at his left shoulder by a massive silver disc pierced with a pin and housing a great purple stone that looked like glass. Only the single filet of metal binding his brows was different. It was of bright gold, fashioned to look like a knotted cord with acorns on each end. Athol the King had dressed for a grand occasion.

He regarded me with solemn grey eyes as I stopped directly before him, then he reached out his arm in the Roman fashion, his hand spread to grasp my forearm in the grip of friendship.

"Welcome, Merlyn Britannicus," he said softly, his voice a deep, growling purr. "My son tells me you speak our tongue."

I was caught off guard by the directness of his greeting me, for I had not known what to expect or how to behave. My knowledge of regal protocols was severely limited. Uther Pendragon, Vortigern of Northumbria and Derek of Ravenglass were the only kings I had ever met. Each of them had been signally different from the others and none of them had cared for ceremony. I had been afraid of committing some unseemly indiscretion, cursing myself for not having thought to ask Donuil how a stranger was supposed to greet his father. Now I found myself gazing into this man's eyes and gauging the strength of his arm while my mind floundered, seeking an adequate response.

"My thanks for your welcome, King Athol," I said, and then I found it easy to smile. "If you will permit me, I should like to ask you first, and before all else, about the welfare of the child you hold in trust for me. Is he well?"

The king nodded gravely. "Aye, and not merely well. He grows like a young shoat. You have returned my son to me in better health than I have ever known him to enjoy, and I will do no less for you, although the child in this case is not your son. Is that not so?"

I nodded. "True, Sir King, but he could be no more dear to me were he indeed my son."

"Good. You will see him soon, I promise you. He lives in the house of Connor, with my son's own brood, and takes no ill from anyone." He paused, smiling now, but eyeing me shrewdly nonetheless. "You speak our tongue remarkably well, Master Merlyn, for an Outlander."

I returned his smile, aware of his pointed use of the term I myself had used to describe his son years before, and feeling immeasurably better by the moment.

"You are kind, my lord. I speak it poorly and inadequately, but I was unaware of that before I came into your lands. Your son is a fine teacher, but lenient."

He glanced now towards Donuil, still holding my arm. "Lenient? How so?"

"In permitting me to stumble, without seeking to improve my hesitancy. I speak, as you can hear, at less than half the normal speed."

He smiled again, returning his gaze to me and releasing my hand. "That is mere usage, soon cured by time and custom." He looked beyond my shoulder, to where my men stood at attention. "Your men look fine, Caius Merlyn; a credit to you. But where are the rest of your horses?"

"Outside your gates, my lord. I thought it wise to leave them there until we, or you, should decide where best to keep them. But of those you see here, two are for you in person, a matched breeding pair selected by your son with the guidance of our Master of Horse."

"Hmm. I noticed them as you approached. You honour us. Before we look at them, however, there is a ritual we must share." He raised one hand and a man stepped forward from behind him, bearing a small platter on which lay a flat loaf of bread and a tiny dish of salt. Athol broke the bread, tearing off a small piece and handing the remainder to me. As I, too, broke off a piece, he sprinkled his with a small pinch of salt and then salted mine, too. We ate together. Then, the ritual completed, the king stepped forward and raised his arms in a gesture requiring silence, although the stillness all around was profound.

"It is done," he said, raising his voice by a mere shade, knowing that everyone present, including the advisers ranked behind him, hung on his every word. "My son is returned to us in health. Caius Merlyn Britannicus, Commander of the Forces of Camulod in Britain, has shared our food. He and his men and all his goods are under my protection; treat them as you would me and mine. For now they will rest and recover from their journey. Tonight we will celebrate their coming."

There was no acclamation, no markedly visible or audible reaction, and yet a sense of wellness filled the air as the throng around the courtyard immediately surged into motion and dispersed about their tasks. Athol turned, placing himself between Donuil and me, and taking each of us by one elbow, led us back to where his advisers stood waiting to greet us. Behind us, my own men relaxed and clustered together, awaiting disposition.

There are times when one experiences instinctive revulsion towards a person whom one is meeting for the first time. It doesn't happen often, but I learned long ago to trust the feeling, despite the apparent lack of logic that frequently attends its occurrence. Of course, in most of these cases, the aversion is easy to explain and understand, inspired by the physical appearance of the stranger. It is far easier to like, at first sight, a man or a woman who conforms to one's own notions of attractiveness than it is to feel drawn towards one who is unwashed, ill formed or burdened with some grotesque, dehumanizing affliction. When an unexpected introduction to a total stranger sets my internal alarms jangling discordantly without rhyme or reason, experience has taught me that this gut-level reaction is infallible. During my brief introduction to Athol's counselors, I experienced three such episodes, each of them different from the others.

The first man fell into the category of the easily understandable. His physique, his appearance, the very way he stood and moved repelled me. His name was Mungo, and the sound of it, completely alien to my ears, conjured an image of a large, ugly fish stirring heavily in the bottom mud of deep, murky waters. To my eyes, however, he presented no sign of fishiness. Mungo Rohan was a squat, rock-like presence, massive of chest and shoulder, with enormous hands and wrists that were coated with thick, wiry black hair. A great bush of black and grey beard hid the lower half of his face and obscured what little neck he had. His head, however, was bald as an egg and his eyes were small and porcine, squeezed too tightly together for my taste on either side of a misshapen nose that had been smashed beyond repair in the distant past, and almost hidden beneath the thick bar of eyebrows that sprouted wildly above them. I marked him immediately as one I would neither like nor trust. He glowered at me for long moments before stepping forward to greet me, nodding affably enough once he decided he had made the impression he wished to make, and extending his hand in a fair semblance of courtesy and friendship. I clasped his hand, inclining my own head slightly in return, aware of the deadness of the glaze that hung between his eyes and mine and was evidently intended to mask his true feelings. Adviser to the king he might be, I thought, and senior by age and rank, but any advice this man dispensed would be well weighted to incline any outcome towards the benefit of Mungo Rohan.

As I clasped his hand, aware of the weight and strength of it, I allowed my gaze to drift beyond him to where Connor stood watching me from the far end of the line, his face creased in a smile of. . . what was it? Anticipation? Or was it mere contempt? Mungo released my hand and stepped back, and the king moved me along to the next man in line, who made no more lasting impression upon me than a stranger passing in a crowded street.

Next to him, however, was a face I recognized immediately, and it was smiling in welcome. Fergus, son of Iain, son of Fergus, brother to King Athol, grasped my wrists in both of his and thanked me for safeguarding his nephew as I had promised. We had met only once, on the day I took Donuil hostage and allowed this man and his surviving warriors to depart from the battlefield with their weapons, and therefore their honour. I was as glad to see the big man as he evidently was to see me.

The fourth man was very different, and the sight of him brought my heart bounding into my throat. I knew we two had never met before, and yet I knew this man! I recognized the size of him; the colour of his yellow hair so like my own; and the way his face would twist awry when he laughed in the teeth of a strong wind, showing his own teeth, white and strong but flawed by a missing canine; but I failed completely when I sought a reason for this sudden presentiment. I must have frozen in shock, for the smile on his lips faltered and his eyes clouded momentarily with concern. I had to make a strong effort to collect myself and behave casually.

"Well met," I said, before he could speak.

His smile, which had been on the point of failing, came back admirably. 'Tour name and fame are well known here, Merlyn Britannicus. Welcome home, Brother." This last to Donuil, who stepped forward to embrace him. When they stepped apart, the yellow-haired brother addressed me again. "I am Caerlyle, brother to Donuil here, whom you have returned to us, and to Connor, whom you have met elsewhere. They call me Kerry. Welcome to Eire."

I nodded, my thoughts still awhirl at the feelings his appearance had brought out in me. "My thanks. . . Kerry? Should I call you that? Not Caerlyle?"

"No, Kerry suits me well. I sometimes fail to answer to Caerlyle, it's been so long since any but my mother called me that." This man was charming, full of self-confidence and strength, his face open and bereft of guile. Why then, I asked myself, were all my internal warning systems vibrating? And whence came this unsettling familiarity I felt with him? I held his hand, gazing directly into his eyes.

"We've never met before, have we?"

His eyes flared with surprise. "No," he said, laughing at the strangeness of the question. "How could we? I have never been away from here and this is your first visit to Eire. Where could we have met?"

I shook my head. "You look amazingly familiar. It must be that you remind me of someone else, someone from long ago." I smiled. "I find that as I grow older I see more and more resemblances with people I have met long since. It disconcerts me sometimes."

King Athol spoke from beside me, his hand on my elbow steering me gently towards the next man in line. "You will find, my friend, that the phenomenon you describe grows even stronger as you approach my age. People tend to fall into types. Meet my good-brother, Liam. I was once wed to his mother's sister."

Liam was a hunchback, small and wiry-looking, with large eyes and a liquid, lilting voice of surprising resonance and beauty. "Twistback, they call me," he said, grinning. "No imagination, some of these people." I grinned back at him, liking him instantly, and turned to the next man in line.

The basilisk stare of utter dislike from this one's eyes caused me to blink at him in astonishment before I could stop myself. Even King Athol, who was on the point of introducing us, hesitated visibly, evidently as nonplussed as I.

"Fingael?" I distinctly heard the note of uncertainty and surprise in the old man's voice. "Fingael, what ails you?"

"Nothing. I'm fine, Father." The man's eyes never left my own as he spoke the words from one corner of his mouth in a whispery voice that was sibilant and ominous. Apart from that response, he made no move either to recognize my presence or greet me in any way. His father cleared his throat, in embarrassment, I thought, and spoke again, this time with iron in his tone.

"Then perhaps you will greet our guest as befits his rank and status, rather than leaving him to suspect that we have lax rules of hospitality in this, my kingdom!"

"His rank and status?" The words came out like a challenge to combat, their insulting tone clear for anyone and everyone to hear. "He is Brother Donuil's friend and jailer. There are those of us who don't make friends that easily or that dishonourably."

I saw Athol stiffen on one side of me and sensed Donuil gathering his strength to move forward angrily in his own defence. I forestalled both of them with raised hands, pressing the back of my right hand against Donuil's breast, restraining him gently. He subsided, although I could feel his unwillingness, and I addressed myself to his uncivil brother.

"You must excuse my uncertainty, but do you and I have some unsettled difference between us of which I'm unaware?"

He sneered at me. "No. We have nothing between us. I don't like you, and that's all there is to it."

"Damn you, Finn, you pig-headed dolt!" Donuil moved forward again, and again I stopped him, this time facing him and stilling him with my eyes and tone.

"Donuil, my friend, this is my concern." I turned back to Fingael. "I can see that you dislike me. Everyone can." I kept my voice level and forced myself to pause, having no wish to add to the damage this lout was attempting to do. "Dislike might even be too mild a word." I paused, looking him straight in the eye and allowing my silence to stretch until I saw him start to say something more. Before he could, I spoke again. "Well, doubtless you have your reasons, sufficient for your own mind at least. But your dislike has the air of long usage, and until we came face to face I had no awareness of your existence. You form your judgments quickly, it would appear."

"Quickly enough." He had ignored Donuil completely and the sneer was still pasted to his face. I resisted the urge to wipe it away. He was a big man, but not as big as I, and younger, and beneath his present scowl he would be, I saw, pleasant-faced, clean-shaven, with bright red hair and green eyes that blazed from a stark white face that was sunburned on nose and brows. His bearing radiated challenge and I knew I could not yet walk away; this man would assume from that a victory of some kind.

"How old are you, Fingael, son of Athol?" I asked him, seeing his eyes widen in surprise at my level tone.

"Old enough to know my mind."

"Aye, but not to trust it, eh?"

"What?" The sneer vanished. He had no idea of my meaning. Neither had I, but I had retained the initiative.

"I would guess you to be two years, perhaps three, older than Donuil. Twenty-six or -seven I'm thirty-two. Do you understand my point?"

He frowned ferociously, indicating that he did not. I continued speaking. "I had lived for more than half a decade before you were born, young Finn. To this point, I have lived throughout your entire lifetime without seeing you or hearing of you until this, our first meeting. I would happily forgo a second meeting for the remainder of it in equal ignorance."

Someone caught his breath in surprise and then there came a shout of laughter in which everyone joined save me, Fingael, Donuil and their father King Athol. While it was ringing, I turning casually away from him, dismissing him as I moved towards the next man in line. Athol the King stalked beside me, rigid with fury at the insult offered me, yet saying nothing that might add to an incendiary situation. I know I greeted the man but have no memory of it. My mind was awash with other, far more serious matters: anger at Fingael's insults and confusion over my strange, unshared recognition of Caerlyle. And so I progressed until I faced the last of Athol's counselors, his son Connor. Here, at least, I found interest and pleasure in his welcome and in the open frankness with which he hugged his brother Donuil.

"You impressed my brother Finn, Yellow Head," he said to me eventually, when he and Donuil had finished belabouring each other's back and shoulders. "He has not met many who can best him either in words or a fight. I must warn you, he makes a bad enemy and cares not for losing."

"Hmm. He's lucky never to have met my cousin Uther."

He smiled at me. "Two of a kind, are they?"

"Aye, you might say they're similar, in much the same way that certain lambs are similar to bears—both may be born black." I turned to look back towards Fingael, but he was nowhere to be seen. "Where did he go?"

"My father marched him off as soon as you had moved away. I imagine the king is speaking to him now of hospitality and the rules of Eirish courtesy."

"Is he always as pleasant with strangers?"

He looked at me, one eyebrow raised. "Who, my father? Or Finn?"

"Fingael."

"He's a boar, with a boar's manners," Donuil muttered.

Connor's gaze, still amused, went to Donuil and then back to me. "In truth, he is not. Neither a boar nor generally unpleasant without reason. I've never seen him quite that way before today. But Finn is. . . difficult at times. He has his own ways. My father, who is no more patient than most kings, has yet great patience in some little things. For twenty years now he has been trying to teach Finn to school himself, but without much success." He threw an arm around my shoulders and I caught a whiff of the remembered smell of him, leather and light, clean sweat and a tang of some wild perfume in his hair. "Come, let's drink some ale before I die of thirst. I have a vat long cooled beneath the ground. And I have a babby in my house you might wish to see. And if we are to speak of boars, I'd rather hear the tale of the one you killed in the south than of the one you bested here today." He led the way down from the rostrum and directly to his hut, walking with the familiar, rolling gait I recalled so clearly. The cordon of guards that had lined the rostrum had long since disbanded and my own men had disappeared, back to the camp we had established beyond the walls. Only a few of Athol's people paid us any attention as we crossed the now-empty central space.

I spent more than an hour of the time that followed with my young cousin Arthur who was, as the king had said, growing like a young pig. The child was now at least six months old, and possibly seven, by my best reckoning, and was already a large child, although distinctly lacking in regal attributes. He was, indeed, closer to a young shoat than a young king, for his home was the dirt floor of Connor's house, and he sprawled naked and dirty before a banked-up, guarded fire with a large number of other mites, some of them little older than himself. Connor had to search for him amid the tangle of small, bare bodies before hauling him out and handing him to me, and as I waited for him to identify and extract the future Commander of Camulod from the squalling company of his current peers, I found myself smiling in disbelief. In truth, I picked the boy out before Connor did, recognizing him by his startlingly coloured eyes, and feeling gratification at the evident, sturdy strength of the child. But he was filthy, and there was no denying that, stripped of all the rich swaddling that would have covered him in Camulod, and liberally daubed with a moist compound of dirt from the floor and fresh urine from one of his small companions, his regal heritage was far less evident than was his common humanity. I was already reaching for him by the time Connor hauled him out of the press, and I felt ridiculously pleased when the child grinned at me immediately upon being passed to me. I exulted in the solid weight of him at the end of my outstretched arms, and pulled him to me quickly, smiling into his eyes and then opening my mouth in laughing protest as his chubby fingers immediately reached out for me and closed on my face, his tiny nails sinking into the sensitive skin at the end of my nose. Connor did not notice. He was staring down in mild bemusement at the pile of children about his feet.

"These are not all mine, you understand," he said, unfazed by the din and activity all around. "We just seem to attract them, somehow. My wife enjoys the sounds and smells of children, and all the gods know they can produce enough of both for anyone, so mothers who don't share her pleasure are happy to cater to it by lending her their own to care for while they do other things. Come and meet her. Bring the babby." He led Donuil and me out and into another hut standing apart from the one shared by "the brood," as he referred to the children, and there I met his wife Margaret, a jolly, laughing young woman of generous build who hugged Donuil and then welcomed me shyly, disguising her nervousness by fussing with the baby Arthur, whom I clutched firmly in the crook of my right arm. I thanked her warmly for the care she had evidently lavished on the child, and her confusion and embarrassment increased, so that I had, for pity's sake, to suspend my praises. She did assure me, however, and I had no doubt of it, that she would continue to look after young Arthur for the duration of our stay here among them, and that I need have no worries over his welfare. Some short time later, still flustered and red-faced, she made excuses and left the hut to see to the other children, leaving Connor, Donuil and me alone with the child and the jug of ale Connor had promised. I placed my squirming young charge on the ground at my feet, and the three of us sat and talked of trivial things before the brothers left me alone with the child for a spell. When they had gone, I sat gazing at the boy who lay quietly for the moment, looking up at me wide-eyed, and again I found myself marvelling at the beauty of his strangely golden eyes. I knew from my reading that my grandfather, Caius Britannicus, had had similar eyes, so I accepted that they must be a Britannicus family trait, although one that was seldom seen. But it occurred to me now that they must pass downward through the maternal side of the family, for Caius Britannicus had been this child's great-uncle. It was my aunt Luceiia who gave Arthur his Britannican blood, and therefore his yellow-gold eyes. Eagle's eyes, Publius Varrus had called them, and that memory led me to thinking again about who this child was and what he represented. I shook my head in wonderment at the making of him. So much mingling of noble bloodlines and so much family strength and character had fused together, so beautifully, in this one small boy child: Roman blood of two great families, and all the inborn strength and fortitude and dignity of the leading families of the great Celtic clans of Cambrian Pendragons and Eirish Scots. Surely, I thought, if Destiny awaited him, as I believed it did, the spirits of his ancestors would combine with sufficient potency to make him master of whatever lay ahead of him.

I realized that I was straining, leaning forward in my armour so that breathing was becoming difficult, and the boy lay staring up at me, kicking occasionally with bare, plump feet. I leaned forward further, with some difficulty occasioned by the unyielding metal length of my cuirass, and poked him in his swollen little belly, making those inane, speech-like noises that all grown people seem to make when looking at infants. Then, embarrassed by the noises I was making, and by the way the child regarded me, as though to ridicule my efforts at addressing him, I stooped further, grunting with the effort, and picked him up, holding him above me at arms' length while I sat back, thankful to be stretching, and frowned up at him in perplexity. He continued to stare back at me, solemn faced.

"What are you going to be, young Arthur Pendragon?" I growled. "Who are you going to be? Will you be a warrior? And if you are, what kind of fighter will you be? What will your enemies have to say of you?" Without warning, a stream of water leaped from his tiny spout and the sound of it spattering against my parade breastplate was ample commentary on how he cared about what his enemies might think. I sprang to my feet with a curse, laughing despite my shock and holding him still at the extension of my arms, turning him so the jet of his urine arced away from me. He gurgled, laughing with me, no doubt because of the sudden, swooping movements of my startled reaction, and a warmth swelled up in my throat, making me want to hold him close and press him to my breast. But he was very small and fragile, and my breast was encased in armour, so I merely set him down again while I dried my dripping harness, and then I carried him very cautiously back into the room with the other children. It seems strange to me now that I had no fear of handling him on that occasion, for his smallness awed me at other, later times. Perhaps it was his sturdy nakedness that day that made me realize he would not break from handling. Later in his babyhood, in Britain, where he was always clothed, he seemed far more delicate and vulnerable.

Fingael, son of Athol, was conspicuously absent from the festivities that began before nightfall, by which time the odour of spit-roasted venison had permeated the entire community and brought a throng of people back into the central communal space before the rostrum in the expectation of feasting and music. Within an anteroom of the great long hall that took up one side of this gathering place, while the crowd outside was becoming more noisy and festive with every passing moment, my friends and I were welcomed yet again, less formally this time, at a reception attended by the king and all his most trusted followers. At the urging of Donuil and Connor I had laid aside my armour for the first time in weeks and had ordered my men to do likewise, so that we paraded ourselves in our finest clothes, without weaponry of any kind, in a clear gesture of trust and confidence in our host and his people. In contrast to our unarmed trust, however, all of Athol's people save himself and his sons came armed to the teeth, as the saying goes, and decked in their most savage finery, most of which set my Roman-instructed teeth on edge.

I had been raised in the old Imperial tradition, to Roman tastes and sensibilities, in spite of the fact that my entire family on my father's side prided themselves upon being "British" and not Roman. By comparison with these Eirish Scots, however, even my mother's Cambrian Celts were restrained in their tastes and use of colour. I had noticed from the outset that Donuil's people had no fear of mixing colours, but this gathering in the Hall made all the bright raiment I had seen up to this point seem muted and drab, as the daily wear of most people is by comparison with their festive finery. With an evening of festivity stretched ahead of them, they had arrayed themselves in their finest and I had never seen so many bright and vibrant, violently opposed colours used in such profusion: yellows and greens and reds and blues intermixed haphazardly enough to challenge the eyes. And yet, as I grew inured to the welter, I began to perceive certain unities in the chromatic chaos. All of the clothing was patterned, I could see, and all of the patterns were based upon a simple check design common in the monochromatic work of all weavers. In the case of these Scots, however, the colours of the yarn the weavers worked were wildly mixed, dyed in a multitude of hues. Thus it might be seen that all the members of one family group might wear the same pattern of green and red, with cross-lines of hazy blue or white or even yellow offsetting the dominant checks, but the reds and the greens might vary from person to person in shades that ran from the palest, near- white green of sun-blocked grass to the deep green of forest conifers, and from anemic orange to the crimson of clotting blood. And sometimes, I could see, these colour variations would appear in one large garment, such as the great, toga-like robes in which several of the older men were swathed. The younger men, no less garishly caparisoned, wore armour with their brightly coloured clothes: breastplates and arm guards and sometimes even greaves or leggings of iron, bronze, brass or layered, toughened oxhide. All of them carried sheathed daggers of one kind or another at their waists, although there were no swords or axes to be seen.

I mentioned the weapons to Connor, who sat beside me at one point, partly reclined upon a long, low couch that would once have graced some Roman household and that I guessed had been placed here for his special use, since the other furnishings in the anteroom were few and far more primitive. He looked at me with a half smile.

"You find that strange, that men should go armed at all times?"

I shrugged my shoulders. "Aye, in the King's Hall, among friends, on a festive occasion."

He grunted, in what I assumed to be a stifled laugh. "They're not really armed, my friend. They left their swords and axes and their spears outside."

"But not their daggers."

"No, not their daggers. Their daggers are not thought of as weapons— more as a badge of free manhood."

"Those badges all look lethal."

"Aye, and they would be, were they ever drawn. But to the bearer, most of all. It is death to bare a blade in the King's Hall."

I blinked at him, surprised. "Then why wear them at all? A man in drink might be provoked to draw."

"True, but it's custom. No true man should ever be weak enough to permit himself to be provoked into suicide, therefore the custom has become a test of a man's true worth."

"Speaking of that," I smiled, thinking it a good time to change the subject, "what has happened to your brother Finn? He's not here."

"No, he has gone hunting." He looked away to where his father sat talking to Donuil and the hirsute Mungo. "My father decided he has a taste for goat."

"Goat? And Finn had to go hunting for a goat? The paddocks I have seen are full of them."

"Mountain goat," Connor continued, his face carefully schooled into emptiness.

"Mountain goat. I see. And how close are the nearest mountains?"

"Oh, very close, but they are not high enough to harbour mountain goats."

"Are any?"

"Aye, but the closest of them is a good three days' journey from here."

"Three days. And three days back. How long to catch a goat?"

"Long enough, my astute friend, to enable you to settle down here in peace for a while."

"Aye, until Finn comes home. Does your father think an enforced exile will make him see me in a more friendly light?"

Now Connor turned and looked at me directly. "My father is no man's fool, Caius Merlyn. His enduring kingship bears that out. By the time Finn comes home, my father will have formed his own opinion of your worth, from his own observation, uninfluenced by any other's perception. You will have earned your own place among us by then, your own identity. Thereafter, anything that transpires between you and Finn will be your own affair and will not reflect upon my father or his hospitality. As I said before, Finn has his own ways, but my father the king has his, too."

I nodded, then asked what he had meant in referring to his father's enduring kingship. His answer surprised me, adding once more to my knowledge of these strange people.

"You don't know our ways? Hasn't my brother told you of our rules of kingship?" I shook my head. "Well, we are different here in Eire from you, and from any other people I have met, including our neighbours. I know you call us Celts, and I suppose we are, since every other people in these lands is Celtic, save for those born, like you, from Roman stock, but we call ourselves Gaels." He pronounced the word almost as "Gauls," and I immediately took it to mean that his people came from Gaul and questioned him on that, but he shook his head. "No, I think not, although there might be something to it, back in the long ago. To my knowledge, though, we have no connection with those other Gauls. We are of this land, and have always been."

"Whence comes the name then?" I saw from his face that he could not answer, and waved him on. "No matter, it's not important now. You were about to tell me of your custom of kingship."

"Aye. The law of our people states that our king be of the people . . . king of the people."

I stared at him. "I don't understand. Surely that is self-evident?"

"Oh no, not so. How many kings do you know?"

I shrugged. "Very few, a mere handful: my cousin Uther, who was always more of a brother to me than he was any kind of king. King he was, of course, after his father's death, king of the Pendragon strongholds in the Cambrian west. But Uther never ruled, in the kingly sense. He was a warrior chief, paramount, but king only in name. Then there was Lot, who called himself King of Cornwall, although the title was self-assumed; Vortigern, King of Northumbria; and Derek, King of Ravenglass, although again I assume that to be a false kingship, more vaunt than verity since Ravenglass is but a town, and a Roman one, at that. And now your father, the High King of Eire."

"No!" His denial was so abrupt as to be near violent. "My father makes no claim to being High King of Eire. There can never be such a High King so long as there is one other king who disputes that claim. All of them would. Any High King of Eire would have to fight to gain and hold that rank. None has, to this day."

"I see. But I have heard Donuil speak of your father as Ard Righ, I am sure. Is that not what the title means?"

"Aye, in some sense, although in ours it simply means high chief, and therefore king. But Athol Mac Iain, my father, is King of the Gael—you would say King of Scots—and therein lies the distinction."

"What distinction?" I felt foolish having to ask, for Connor looked at me as though I were feebleminded, and in truth I was beginning to wonder myself about my powers of perception, for there was something here that was eluding me.

"Think about it, man," he exhorted me. "You said the words yourself: 'Lot, King of Cornwall; Derek, was it? King of wherever, which you said was only a Roman town; and Vortigern, of whom I have heard, King of Northumbria. Then Uther, your cousin, king of the Pendragon strongholds. You have defined the norm in your own words. Even the emperors of Rome conform to the common way: they are all kings or emperors of some place. They rule their people's holdings. They hold the land. Our kings are kings of the people and the people hold the land. We are unique in that, and so my father is the King of Scots and rules his people in trust—not their land, for it is theirs."

I shook my head ruefully. "Now I see what you mean. It is indeed a distinction, and as you say, unique. I would never have seen it, had you not pointed it out to me."

He grinned now, suddenly more relaxed. "Oh, you would have seen it, eventually. You would have noted that the kingship my father holds has its own encumbrances. As king of the people, he remains one of the people and is therefore under constant scrutiny. As a king without land of his own, he relies upon the goodwill of his people in time of war and in time of need to supply him with what he otherwise lacks, the resources of the land."

"Wait a moment, Connor, this is too much too quickly for me. There is a contradiction here, involving the very idea of kingship. How can any man be a king and hold no land? Land, as you yourself have only now pointed out to me, is the very essence of kingship."

He sat up straight and reached for the cup that sat on the ground by my feet, emptying it at a toss. "No, you are wrong, my friend. Think about it. Kingship, in its purest sense, untrammelled by language, involves rule: the governance and guidance of the people. It involves things spiritual and moral. It involves those elements of life and rules of living that dictate the difference between sane living and mere mindless savagery. The land itself is really unimportant. . . it is no more than the space a people occupies, and from time to time it may become unhealthy or untenable. The king of a land has nowhere else to go. The king of a people, on the other hand, may take his people anywhere they wish, or need, to go."

I had lost all awareness of where we were, oblivious to the noise and movement all around us. Here, in the midst of a strange, unchristian people, in conversation with a man I would have dubbed a barbarian short months before, I was hearing talk of morals and philosophy the like of which I had seldom heard in Britain. Connor was still speaking.

"That ability, that capacity, is what I meant when I spoke of my father's enduring kingship. Great burdens lie upon the man unfortunate enough to bear the title 'King' among our folk. He must have, and show at all times, great physical strength, and a soundness of mind to match it. When he becomes too old, too weak or too untrustworthy to serve as king—leader, guardian, champion and . . . what's your Roman word? Mentor? . . . That's it, mentor—in all respects in his people's eyes, he must step down or be deposed, allowing a better or a younger, but certainly a more able man—more able at that time, I mean—to assume the kingship. My father Athol is old to be a king, but he is hale and strong and his word is law to all. His justice and his wisdom are renowned and, to this date at least, his fighting skills are unimpaired. I tell you honestly, Merlyn, I'm almost twenty years younger than he is, but I would not care to cross him."

I turned to where Athol stood talking with another group, looming over all of them except Donuil, who still stood by his father's side. "Aye," I said, smiling. "He looks formidable, for all his years." As I spoke, a man approached the king and whispered to him, and Athol turned to look at me as though he had been warned that I was watching him. Then, excusing himself from the group around him, he made his way directly to where I sat with Connor, Donuil following him closely.

"Master Merlyn," the king said as he approached, speaking in the accents I now knew to be the courtly, formal style of the Erse tongue. "I have been aware of spending little time with you, but I'm reassured by the sight of you two together. At least I know you have not been bored or ignored." He nodded to Connor, who merely smiled and held his peace. The old king's eyes flicked up and away towards the great doors of the Hall, which were being pulled open as he spoke. "The festive part of your welcome is about to begin. The people are gathered and the food prepared. Our bards and minstrels are assembled and awaiting our arrival." He smiled again. "You may find much that is strange to you in this evening's fare, but I think you will enjoy it. More than your men may, I fear, since I understand most of them do not have the tongue of our people."

I had risen to my feet at his approach, offering my hand to Connor who, in spite of his wooden leg, pulled himself up by it without the slightest sign of discomfort. "King Athol," I said now, feeling completely at my ease, "my men will have no difficulty enjoying themselves. The food I smell would assure me of that even had I not tasted your drink. Besides, there is nothing like the warmth of welcome to assuage the weariness of a tired, far-travelled man. Words have a strange but welcome way of falling into unimportance beside shared peace and openness of mind." Beyond his shoulder, I saw Donuil's face soften as he recognized my reference to the love I had had for his mute sister.

"Good," said the king. "Let's away, then." He stepped to the side to make room for me on his right, and together we walked from the Great Hall, followed by Donuil, Connor and the others, out into the open space where huge fires blazed, their leaping flames banishing the evening shadows and adding their own noise to the voices of the crowd and the sounds of wild and alien music. He raised his arm, and at the signal someone blew repeatedly on a great horn until the sounds of revelry had died away and all eyes were on the king. Athol raised his voice and invited everyone to the feast and the doors of the Great Hall behind us swung fully open.

The feasting continued for many hours, accompanied by music, dancing and the enthralling songs and tales of the king's bards, of whom there were five, ranging in age from a very young boy who was a gifted harpist and whose voice was pure and clear as mountain stream water, through a trio of fine singers of varying ages, to old Dermott, who wore the boar's tusk about his forearm and whose prodigious memory for intricate details made insignificant the fact that his voice wavered with years. Vast quantities of food were paraded in style and then consumed, and two different kinds of beer, one dark brown and one almost clear amber, were served in huge jugs drawn from enormous wooden casks. There was no wine, and only the king's table held jugs of potent, fiery, honeyed mead of a kind I had never tasted. King Athol drank little, and was equally abstemious in his eating. His self-appointed function there, I gathered, watching him closely, was to preside over his people's pleasure, to ensure that all were looked after and none was left untended. On his right, Donuil, too, drank little, although he ate hugely. I sat directly to the king's left and guided myself by his example, and Connor sat on my left.

And then there came a time when the songs died down and gave way to a brief lull that was quickly drowned by a rising babble of noise as the drinkers, free now of the constraints of listening politely to the performers, began to vent their euphoria. Athol turned to me.

"We may leave now, Master Merlyn, or stay, as you wish. The remaining part of the festivities will look after themselves." He was smiling slightly, his eyes on mine, prepared to accede to whatever I might wish.

I shrugged and shook my head, smiling back at him. "I remember my father's dictum for such occasions, sir. He maintained that the presence of senior officers became more than unnecessary beyond a certain point at all such gatherings."

The old king smiled. "Unnecessary and unwelcome. Your father was a wise man. Shall we go?" He rose to his feet as he spoke, and the evening's festivities had progressed to the stage where very few of the revellers were even aware of the movement on the high table platform. Moving without haste, Athol led the way from the Great Hall, patting a shoulder here and there and exchanging pleasantries with many of the older people present. As we moved behind him, Donuil drew abreast with me and grasped me gently by the arm.

"What will you do now?"

I looked at him. "What do you mean, what will I do now? I'll do what any sane man should do. I'll sleep. What else should I do?"

"Have you had any thought of speaking to my father about Deirdre?" I looked quickly over my shoulder. "Don't be concerned, no one else heard me. But don't you think you should say something soon? She was his daughter."

"Aye, and your sister." I was still looking around me, uneasy at the thought of being overheard, but no one appeared to be paying any attention to us. Connor had moved ahead to walk beside his father and everyone else who had been at the head table had stopped along the way to talk to others. Now I looked back at Donuil. "I am aware of my responsibilities in this, Donuil. But it's a story that will be long in the telling, so I had decided to wait until tomorrow, when your father would be rested and there would be less pressure surrounding all of us."

He nodded, but any agreement he might have offered was forestalled by his father, who had stopped to wait for us to draw level with him at the exit from the Hall.

"Master Merlyn, the night is not yet too old, and I would like to speak with you in less . . . public circumstances. Will you come to my quarters?"

"Of course, sir, with pleasure."

"Good." He glanced at Donuil, then towards Connor. "We will be three, then, with your—what was the word—your adjutant? Will you object if Connor here makes four of us?"

"Not in the least."

"Then please, come with us."

XIII

It took us only moments to cross the space between the Hall and what I took to be the king's own hut—it could hardly have been called a house, even though it was the most commodious building I lad yet seen in the enclosure apart from the Great Hall itself—and once inside, I was immediately struck by the shadowy darkness of the place and forcibly reminded of the gift of candles we had carried all the way from Camulod. I turned to Donuil at once, but he was smiling already. "I'll bring them," he said, and left at once. His father watched Donuil leave, raising only one eyebrow to indicate his curiosity before waving me to one of the four backless Roman-style chairs that were grouped around an open hearth pit in the middle of the floor.

"There is no ceremony in this place," Athol said. "Here, we serve ourselves." He moved away and began to pour ale from a large, earthen pitcher into four mugs of kiln-fired clay. Connor moved to assist him and I looked around me in curiosity. This was a one-room dwelling, with only a single, fur-covered cot against a side wall. The wall with the doorway was blank and undecorated, with two small window embrasures covered on the outside by wooden shutters. The remaining three walls were hung with a strange variety of skins, none of which seemed to be decorative, and with a variety of swords, shields and other weaponry, including a pair of large, unmatched axes and a smaller, lethal-looking hatchet with a heavy head and a widely flared cutting edge. It was, I decided, a distinctively unregal dwelling. When Athol spoke again, the humour in his tone embarrassed me greatly, for my amazement had evidently registered upon my features.

"I do not live here, Master Merlyn. I merely sleep here from time to time. My living quarters are behind the Hall, where we dined tonight, but there are times when I find it convenient to escape, and my people are considerate enough to leave me to my own devices when I come here."

"Forgive me—" He cut short my apologies with a laugh and a wave of his hand.

"For what? For looking about you? That is natural, and you are a stranger here. Now, where did Donuil disappear to?" He stepped towards me, holding out a drinking mug for me to take, and then seated himself beside me, leaning comfortably into the side arm of his chair with the ease of long usage.

"He has gone to fetch a gift we brought for you," I told him, sniffing the aroma of the cool ale before tasting it. "We had both forgotten about it in the excitement of arrival."

"Another gift? Those you have given me already are magnificent enough to beggar any I have ever received. And the return of my son himself is gift enough to gladden all of us." The delight in the king's voice was unmistakable. Connor was grinning as he, too, came to sit close by the fire, which was leaping brightly in its pit. "Well, by all the gods," the old man continued, "we'll drink to your new gift now, Master Merlyn, before it comes, since it is not possible that it could disappoint us."

He sipped his ale tentatively and waited for me to try mine. It was cold and delicious, and I nodded in appreciation. Seeing my approval, Athol nodded, too, and took a longer drink before setting his mug down and fixing me with a straightforward gaze. "You have done well by my son, Merlyn Britannicus, and I am grateful. He speaks very highly of you, and in the short time since we two have met, I can perceive why that should be so." His face broke into a smile again. "And he is fiercely proud of the fact that he is now a horseman . . . what is the word you use, a cav—?" He stumbled over the alien sound.

"A cavalryman, sir. Organized, disciplined horse troops are called cavalry."

"Cavalryman, aye, that's the word. He's fearsome proud of that." He had fallen out of the courtly language of his formal bearing and spoke now in the liquid, rolling Erse of the common folk.

"And so he should be. You have no cavalry here in Eire at all?"

"We have no horses. Och, we have ponies, wild creatures and strong enough to carry a man, but small they are, scarcely bigger than asses. They look little like those massy creatures you have. There's nothing in all Eire to compare with those beasts of yours for size."

I smiled. "Except your giant deer. There's nothing in Britain to compare with those."

"The elk? But they're not Eirish! They came from beyond the seas, in the old days, brought by an Outland king. You don't have their like in Britain? I thought you must have. Anyway, they liked it here, I suppose, for now there are hundreds of them. But they're stupid things. There's no sport in hunting them, although they carry much meat. They are too big and slow. The most difficult part of the hunt is finding them, because they live in the deepest woods, among the swamps. Give me a small deer any day. Hunting one of those is a challenge." He paused, then: "But I was talking of your horses. Would you . . . ?" He broke off and cleared his throat before continuing. "My people are fascinated by your horses, and by this whole idea of cavalry. Tomorrow promises to be a fine day. Would you consider showing us what your cavalry can do that makes them such a powerful force?"

"You mean an exhibition? A cavalry demonstration? But there are only eight of us, nine counting Donuil. One of my men was killed on the way here, and another broke his leg."

"Nine cavalry may be an awesome force to people who have none."

My eyes went from him to Connor who was watching me closely, and I realized that I was being tested in some way I could not define. "Of course," I said. "There won't be much I can show you, but there are enough of us to give you some idea of what's involved in our manoeuvres. Where could we arrange such a thing?"

It was Connor who answered me. "That's easy. Right outside our main gates there's a clear space of common grazing. You crossed it this morning on your way in. It's bounded by the river on one side and by the forest on the other two. We could do it there."

" Then we shall. At what hour?" I had noticed the place, but had been too preoccupied with our imminent reception and the appearance of Athol's stronghold to pay much attention.

Now Connor looked at his father. "What do you think, Father? Early or late?"

The king hawked and spat into the fire. "The place will be full of thick heads in the morning. Better wait until they've had to eat and drink again and recaptured their senses. Some time after midday." He glanced at me. "Would that suit you? After midday?"

"Of course, whenever you think best. There's no great need for preparation, since my men and their mounts are ready at all times for whatever I call upon them to do."

The door opened as I spoke and Donuil entered again, lugging one of the boxes of candles we had brought from Britain for his father. He crossed directly to stand in front of the king's couch and then dropped to one knee, lowering the heavy case carefully to the ground, where he prised off the lid, using the flat of his knife to spring the nails that secured it. Athol and Connor watched in silence as the lid was removed and set aside, after which Donuil removed a thin covering of straw and pulled out a single long candle of translucent, golden-looking wax, offering it to the king. Athol took it from him, holding it delicately between his fingertips, evidently in complete ignorance of its purpose.

"It's very fine," he said eventually. "And wondrous pure in its smoothness . . ." A lengthy pause produced no reaction from either Donuil or me, and Connor's blank expression warned his father that no help could be expected from him, either, so that the king was finally forced to ask the question he would dearly have loved to avoid. "What is it, Donuil?"

Donuil grinned now and took back the candle from his father's hand. "It is a gift of light, Father. Light more pure than any save that of the sun itself. Watch this." He rose to his feet and placed the candle on the floor by the case before crossing to where two tallow lamps flickered on a table against the wall. Wetting his finger and thumb with saliva, he snuffed the wicks on both of them, plunging that area of the room into shadow and filling the air with the heavy stink of smouldering. Three more lamps burned at various places in the room, and he dealt with each of those the same way, leaving the fire in the hearth as the only source of light in the large chamber. "Now," he said, moving swiftly to the hearth. "Behold the light of the Christian priests." He knelt in front of the fire, scooping up one of the dried rushes that covered the floor and folding it into a narrow spill, which he lit from the fire. Shielding the small flame carefully in one cupped hand, he brought it back to where we sat and held it out towards his father and brother.

"See," he said. "It's yellow."

I could see from the looks of them that they were hard put not to scoff openly, since it took no great feat of observation to perceive that the flame of a dried-out rush would be yellow. Now, however, Donuil reached down and scooped up the candle from the floor, lighting it and immediately shaking out the flame of the spill. In the comparative darkness, the tiny bead of light at the tip of the new-lit candle burned white and pure, strengthening and growing steadily as the melting wax began to saturate the wick, until the brightness of it far outshone all five of the tallow lamps that had burned earlier. As his father and brother sat rapt, Donuil silently drew more candles from the case on the floor, lighting one after another until twelve of them surrounded him in a semicircle, each stuck to the floor in a congealed pool of its own wax. No one spoke, no sound marred the stillness in the room, and I experienced a feeling almost of awe at seeing the effect such a simple thing as a wax candle could have on people who had never seen its like.

It was Athol the King who finally broke the silence.

"This room has never been so bright after the set of sun, and has seldom seen such brightness even at full noon. What are these things? You called them the light of the Christian priests?"

Donuil looked now at me, for the first time since he had re-entered the room. "Aye, Father, but they are called candles, and Caius Merlyn here thought to bring them to you. He once used them to write by, late at night, as do the Christian clerics. He obtained these long years ago, from a Christian priest, before a battle in which he was wounded, and he had forgotten them since then. I recalled them some time ago, when we were talking one night and, thinking them long since lost, mentioned that you could have made great use of them here. Caius found them and decided to bring them to you, as a gift. We brought three cases. There are two others, just like this one, in our tents."

The king rose up and extended his hand to me in thanks. I shook with him, feeling slightly embarrassed by what I saw as an inappropriate reaction to what was, in essence, a paltry gift. He left me in no doubt that I erred, however.

"Caius Merlyn," he said, his voice deep and low, his delivery slow enough that I could hear, in the two words of my own name, all of the sonorous, lilting cadences of his native tongue. "There can be few gifts more valuable, or more welcome, than the gift of light in darkness. This land of ours is bright and green, rich and full of colour in the summer when the flowers are in bloom . . . but the summer is too short, and all too soon the nights stretch out again towards winter and the gathering darkness starts to make its terror felt again. We are a simple people, but we are hagridden by our fear of darkness. Our Druids and the night-tales of our folk are all concerned—far too concerned—with terror and the threatenings of the dark; with that great portion of our lives when folk can see no trace of the world around them and therefore dreadful things are free to move about them, unsuspected and unseen. The darkness of the unlit night means blindness and deprivation and the fear of madness. The only thing that keeps men sane is light—firelight, torchlight, tallow light and lamplight. Children dread the night, the darkness, and if the truth be told, every grown man and woman dreads it, too, in the rooted depths of their being. One of these candles, burning as it does, could keep an ailing child, or man, in comfort through the longest, blackest night and see him safely into day again. I will keep two of these cases aside, in your name, for just that purpose. They will be night lights for the sick, and I will set my people to providing the same quality for future use. It can be done, and the existence of these you have brought proves that. Men made these things in Britain. Our men will make the like of them here in Eire. Of what are they made? It's not tallow."

"No, Sir King," I responded. "It is wax. Pure beeswax, but I know not what the wick is made from."

"Wax? The wax of bees? Is that so?" Athol looked to Donuil, as if for confirmation, but Donuil merely shrugged to show his ignorance. "And how do you acquire bees' wax without being stung to death?"

It was Connor who suggested an answer to that. "Probably the same way you acquire their honey for your mead, Father. By smoking them into a stupor, then taking what you want."

"Aye." The king's voice was musing. "And we've been doing that for a hundred years and more, yet no one ever thought to burn the wax as fuel."

"Why would they, Sir King?" My question earned me a high-browed look almost of pity.

"Why? Because the possibility was there for the recognition and the taking. Christian clerics thought of it, and Romans before them, I would wager, but none of my people did, though they are no more stupid than any other." He stopped and cleared his throat with a great noise. "Well, at least we can begin to use it now. Again, my thanks, Lord Merlyn. I hope we will find something of equal merit with which to send you on your way when your visit here is ended. Two of my sons have befriended you, and I see much that moves me to commend their judgment."

His words, and their unexpected warmth, filled me instantly and unexpectedly with writhing guilt and made nonsense of my earlier resolve to remain silent, for this night at least, on the other matters, completely unsuspected by him, that lay between us. I took a deep breath and glanced at Donuil, who was watching me closely, and then at Connor, who sat easily on my right, smiling slightly. Suddenly, for no good reason, I felt afraid for the outcome of my venture here in this alien land.

"Suspend your judgment until you know me better, King Athol," I heard myself say in a tone suddenly distant and formal. "We are far more closely bound than you suspect."

The king frowned slightly now, puzzled, the small smile still upon his lips. Then, in wary recognition of my sudden formality, he rose slowly to face me, settling himself firmly in an attitude of wariness, his weight distributed evenly on spread feet, his body seeming to lean slightly forward as though to resist the pressure of anything I might throw at him. All of us watched him as he did so, awaiting a further reaction, although for a spell he did not respond beyond rising, merely scanning my face, particularly my eyes, with his own gaze. I sensed then, rather than saw, Connor's body stiffen on my right, but a hand flick from his father, caught from the corner of my eye, albeit tiny and backhanded as though he waved irritably at a buzzing pest, forestalled any reaction or interruption Connor might have been tempted to make. The silence stretched, and the king's eyes left my face and sought Donuil's. Evidently having found nothing there to alarm him, Athol eventually spoke, in slow, even tones.

"More closely bound than I suspect? How so?"

I knew that my next words would be among the most important I should ever utter. A misplaced inflection or mannerism might bar Arthur, and me, from Camulod forever, confining him, or both of us, to this foreign place as prisoners. I stood up slowly and moved towards the hearth, placing myself so that its fire burned brightly at my back.

"I know more of your family, Sir King, than you do. But before I tell you what I know, I must speak of two things. . . things I must say in advance of anything else, since failure to speak of them now might—no, they would— give Connor, if not you yourself, apparent cause to doubt my truthfulness hereafter."

Even though my heart was galloping like a horse with anticipation of the unknown outcome of my course, I admired the old king's self-possession in the face of what he must have perceived as extraordinary and mystifying behaviour on my part. He merely nodded, maintaining his silence and indicating courteous patience. Connor sat leaning forward, his peg leg straight out before him, his left hand gripping his good knee, his right hand holding his ale pot as though to throw it. Donuil was rubbing his long nose with a forefinger, looking downward.

"The first of these two things is this: I came here, into your kingdom and into your presence, fully resolved to speak my mind and tell you all that I will tell you now. Until moments ago, however, I had intended to speak to you of them some time tomorrow. Donuil and I were discussing that when you invited me here after the feast, and I had just finished telling him I have had no suitable opportunity to speak with you in private since we arrived, and these matters demand privacy, I believe. Now that has changed. We are here, in private, and I cannot, in conscience, hold back longer." I paused and tipped my head towards Donuil. "The major part of what I have to tell you will be attested to by Donuil, who has experienced the truth of it at first hand. The remainder, that which Donuil cannot personally verify, you must judge for yourself, based upon your own assessment of the matters I shall disclose."

Athol nodded once again, concealing any signs of impatience with my hedging, and retaining his outward mien of good-humoured courtesy. He glanced briefly at Donuil, who nodded his head wordlessly. "I accept that," Athol murmured. "Though it sounds mysterious, even ominous. What is the second thing?"

"I will deal with that now," I said, hating the stilted quality I could hear in my own words, yet utterly incapable of changing them. "It concerns the propensity that exists in all of us to cleave to that which we wish to believe, rather than to that which our senses indicate to be the unpalatable truth." I turned my gaze now upon Connor. "Connor, when we first met, when you hauled me out of the sea, I told you the truth. I recognized you, do you recall?"

He nodded, plainly not knowing what was coming next.

"We spoke then of Donuil, and the friendship between him and me. You chose to doubt my truthfulness—a reasonable choice under the circumstances—and decided to keep the child, Arthur, as hostage against the safe return of your brother to your father's Hall; a shrewd ploy, since you well knew the child to be worth more to me than my own life, although you knew not why."

"Aye." Connor's voice was low-pitched. "I was wrong to doubt you, I know now. But I had no way of knowing it then."

"I agree, and I harbour no ill feelings. You freed me thereafter to seek Donuil, and you yourself remained behind to await your sister, Ygraine, disbelieving what I said of that, too."

Now his face flushed red and he moved to struggle to his feet. Again, however, he was restrained by a gesture from his father, whose own voice now betrayed a hint of anger. "What of Ygraine? I have heard nothing of this."

Connor was glaring at me now and answered his father without removing his eyes from mine. "There was nothing to hear, Father. Mere rumours and foolishness."

"Not so!" I turned towards the king, facing him squarely. "Connor refused to accept my word of Ygraine's death, but your daughter died in my own arms, King Athol, on the beach that day that Connor found me. She had fled her husband, Lot of Cornwall, days before, and she and all her women and her guards were slain in a fight I witnessed from afar. I was in pursuit of them, or of the man I thought to be pursuing them, but I arrived too late to be of any help. They were all dead or dying by the time I reached them. Very few of their assailants, a mere handful, had survived the fight. I slew them with my bow." I saw no benefit in adding that I had allowed the last of them, their leader, to depart unmolested.

The king's face had whitened to a pallor resembling the beeswax candles that had so delighted him mere moments earlier, and he clasped his hands out of sight behind his back, closing his eyes with such concentrated effort that the skin tightened upon his face, the wrinkles on his brow smoothing out to show clearly against the paleness of his high forehead. I spoke on gently, attempting to lessen the pain for both men, father and brother.

"I told Connor of this later that day, but he argued that the woman who died in my arms that afternoon could not have been his sister. And, by his lights, I will admit, he had strong room for doubt. I had told him myself that I had never previously met his sister, or even seen her in the flesh. Nor did we find her corpse when we returned to seek it. She, and all the others, had been washed out to sea by the returning tide before we could win back. We found one naked female, floating in the waves, a stranger, unknown to Connor or any of his men. So he reasoned that this woman I had cradled in death was another slain by coincidence upon the strand where he had sought to find his sister. It could not possibly have been Ygraine, he chose to believe, because her bodyguard of your own Scots was strong enough to safeguard her against any danger, as was their blood duty. His reasoning was sound enough, but flawed. His knowledge was incomplete. He had—he could have had—no notion of the carnage that had been wrought for weeks in the blighted Cornish lands through which I had been riding, too late at all times to achieve anything worthwhile in any matter."

Silence, then in a quiet, calm voice: "Yet, knowing that, you made no effort to convince him of his error."

It was a statement, not a question, and I lowered my voice in responding. "No, I did not. I accepted his need to believe what he believed, and saw no profit in angering him. Besides, I had concerns of my own, which would have been endangered had I sought to convince him otherwise."

"The child."

"Yes, the child."

Athol sucked air audibly through his front teeth. "What is the import of this child, Caius Merlyn? He has great influence, it seems, for a mere babe in arms. Who is he?"

"He is my ward. Who he is, exactly, will become clear as my story unfolds, but I have no wish to name him now."

He sucked at his teeth again, in a quirk I suddenly recognized as one he shared with his son Connor. "Something you said . . . you told Connor you had never seen or met his sister. How, then, could you assume this woman was my daughter? And how did you know that her name was Ygraine?"

I suddenly wanted this to be over. "I knew she was Ygraine, wife to Lot of Cornwall, because I recognized her."

Now the king's frown became a deep-graven scowl. I counted to fourteen before his voice grated, "There is a lie here, somewhere amidst all this. How could you recognize her, never having seen her?"

This was proving to be as painful for me as for my listeners. I swallowed hard, to dislodge the lump that had swelled suddenly in my throat, and when I spoke again my voice emerged as a whisper. "Because, save for the colour of her hair, she might have been the twin of my dead wife, her sister. . . your other daughter, Deirdre."

The stillness that struck the room was total. Athol stiffened, his eyes fixed upon mine and I watched his pupils widen. Connor froze in mid-movement, so that he hung awkwardly in his seat, appearing to be off balance and yet poised, almost comically, on one buttock, his right arm braced to drag the weight of his false leg to a new position. Only Donuil appeared unaffected, slouched against the right arm of his backless chair, chin down, his eyes upon his hands cupped between his thighs. As the stillness stretched, he looked up slowly, taking in the tableau presented by the three of us, then heaved a deep, audible breath and spoke for the first time.

"That is the truth, Father. Deirdre, whom we all thought long dead, was Merlyn's wife. I met her and knew her again, spoke with her often in our own sign language, lived in Camulod with her, and tended her grave there after she was killed." He raised one hand gently, palm outward, in a sign to forestall his father's questions, speaking calmly and with great dignity into the shocked silence. "We assumed her dead, Father, when she disappeared the second time, after her second fever. She never returned and was never seen again. She was dead to us. But the fact is, she lived, and travelled far. . ." He broke off and sighed, looking to me for aid. I stared back at him, expressionless. This part of the tale was his alone He sighed again and carried on.

"I had been in Camulod for many months before I saw her, because she had been assaulted, grievously—she was still mute and deaf—and Merlyn had hidden her to protect her from her attackers until she could identify them for him. The two of them fell in love while she was in his care, and one day, when he believed it safe, he brought her home to Camulod. That is when I saw her."

Donuil's father interrupted him at this point. "You are sure it was her, your sister?"

Donuil's surprise at the question was so great that he laughed aloud, biting the sound off immediately it issued from his lips. "Am I sure? Father, she was Deirdre, my loving little sister, and she flew to me the moment she set eyes on me. I told you, we talked long in our own private language of signs. Of course it was her." His father nodded acceptance and Donuil continued his tale.

"I asked her, of course, what had happened to her, why she had left us, but she had no more idea than we have. She remembered only awakening one day and being frightened by her own reflection, which was that of a woman, where she had expected to see a child. The years between what she expected to see and what she saw were lost. She was with people who treated her kindly enough, and who knew her well, but she did not know who they were or how long she had been with them."

"Madness." This was a whisper from Connor, and Donuil answered it immediately.

"No, Brother, not madness. There is a term for her illness, which I learned from my friend Lucanus, the surgeon of Camulod. It is amnesia. Deirdre had lost her memory, the result, he guessed, of the high fevers I told him had consumed the child. She was no more mad than you or I, or Father here. She had simply lost her memory of all that had happened to her. . . Anyway, there she was, alive and well and happy to see me again. Merlyn and I thought to bring her home here, to visit you after they were wed, but war broke out, and we were absent for a time from Camulod, and when we returned, she was dead, murdered by someone, with the babe she carried, while she was out of the shelter of Camulod. Merlyn knew nothing of it. He himself had lost all memory, his mind driven from him by the smashing of a swinging iron ball that should have killed him and would have, save for the skills of the same Lucanus I spoke of."

I watched the king struggle to control himself as he listened, attempting to come to terms with what was being thrust upon him. He had loved both his daughters, I knew this from Donuil, but Deirdre had been his favourite and he had grieved long and hard twice in the past, believing her dead. Now, as he learned that she had lived through all his grief, only to die again, by mindless violence in a far land, conflicting passions betrayed themselves, sweeping across his face, each in its turn to be dismissed and condemned and disallowed. I saw sorrow, compassion, anger, disbelief, suspicion, resentment and dismay each register upon his face and in his eyes, but after they had passed in a fleeting thought, his face grew calm again and he mastered himself. His eyes moved back to hold my own as Donuil continued speaking.

"Two years and more went by, and Merlyn knew nothing of his former life. But then his memories came back, and he believed that Uther, his cousin, had been the killer of his wife. He had suspected long before, though he could not prove his suspicions, that Uther had committed the first violence on her, the attack that led Merlyn to hide her far from Camulod. Now he believed in Uther's guilt and set out to find and kill him. Uther was at war, in the southwest, against Lot. By the time Merlyn caught up with him, Uther had been killed and his armour stripped from him. Merlyn knew nothing of his death, or of the theft of his armour, and so pursued the killer who appeared as Uther from afar. The chase led him to the beach where he found Ygraine, and with her the child Arthur, drifting off in the birney. He climbed aboard the boat but could not return to shore. Connor found them drifting that same day."

When Donuil finished speaking the king sat down, staring off into the middle distance for a long, long time before he eventually straightened his back, rose to his feet again and spoke to me in slow, deep tones.

"We will speak more of this later, Caius Merlyn . . . You are, in truth, my son by marriage?"

I nodded. "I am."

"And this child, this Arthur. He is yours? Yours and Deirdre's?"

"No, Sir King, he is not."

"I see." I heard first the regret, then the bafflement, plain in the old man's voice. "Then who is he? I had thought. . . almost hoped, for a moment there, listening to Donuil, that he might be my grandson."

I opened my mouth to speak, but the words congealed on my lips, and the words of my great-uncle Publius Varrus, unthought of for years, flashed clearly before my eyes; words he had written recalling the occasion when he stood beside my own grandfather Caius Britannicus and heard that noble man deny what he had always claimed to be his birthright, abjuring his Romanness and claiming British identity. As it had for Grandfather Caius on that long-past day, as it must at some time for all men, my own moment of truth had arrived. I overcame the surge of cowardice that had stricken me mute and forged ahead, unmindful of the threat to all my plans and those of all my kin, knowing all at once the rightness of my course.

"He is."

A pause, the length of several heartbeats, while the king looked at me, grappling with the meaning of my words.

"What did you say?"

"He is your grandson, born of Ygraine, your daughter, to my cousin Uther. Uther Pendragon."

The king sat down again, subsiding suddenly back into his seat as though the strength had left his legs. Once seated, he turned immediately to Donuil, seeking verification, but Donuil merely shrugged and cocked his head, indicating ignorance. Connor, however, had shrugged off all restraint and now leaned fiercely towards me, clutching at the arm of his chair in preparation to rise and face me beard to beard.

"Damn you, Merlyn," he rasped. "You told me none of this!"

"Damn me if you will," I responded. "What other course lay open to me? You refused to believe me when I spoke of Ygraine. What would your reaction have been had I told you the child was her bastard, bred between her and her light of love, my cousin, whom I had been pursuing? And if you had believed me, what then? Would you have permitted me to keep the child, as I am sworn to do? I doubt that! More likely you would have fed me to the fishes then and there and brought the infant home with you. Am I not right?"

He hung there, angry words trembling upon his lips, threatening to spill, and then he recovered himself and subsided, sniffing loudly and breaking eye contact with me. "Aye," he muttered. "Mayhap I would, at that." His father, however, had seized upon what I had said last, and now questioned me.

"To what are you sworn, Caius Merlyn? What is the boy to you? Why would you claim any right to him and why would you even wish to, were he the son of the man who killed your wife and your own child unborn? Were I you, I should have killed the child out of hand, purely for vengeance, blood upon blood. Is that your intent, even now?"

"Father!"

"Quiet!" Donuil's protest was cut short by a peremptory slash of his father's hand. "I am speaking to Master Merlyn here."

I turned my back to them, gazing into the fire, hearing the sound of Athol's angry breathing behind me as I sought the proper words. Finally I turned back and spoke.

"The child is very special, Sir King," I began. "He is unique; bred to a purpose, and of the blood of many kings and champions. He is your grandson, and the blood of your people runs in his veins. But he is also the grandson of Ullic Pendragon, King of the Cambrian Celts, and by his mother's marriage, at least, he can lay claim to Cornwall, once he is of age. He also claims the heritage of Camulod, its builders and its kings, though they sought not to be kings in name: Caius Britannicus and Publius Varrus—noble names of ancient lineage, springing direct from earliest Roman times. His destiny is greatness, for he will be king of all Britain, Ard Righ, High King of all the land, uniting its peoples to withstand the growing influx of the Germanic Saxon hordes." I had spoken forcefully, willing my tongue to articulate without the slightest pause, unwilling to permit the expostulation I thought must cut me short in mid-delivery, but the king had shown no sign of wishing to interrupt. Now I stopped, curious, and waited for a reaction.

Athol stooped from the waist and picked up his clay cup from where it had lain untouched for a long time. He sipped at the contents pensively before moving to stand beside me in front of the fire, gazing down into the glowing coals. Donuil and Connor looked at each other, but neither spoke. I turned again, shoulder to shoulder now with the king, and stared with him into the fire.

"An impressive destiny," he said, eventually. "High King of Britain. A name like that brings its own dangers and breeds enemies from stones."

"I am aware of that, Sir King."

"Aye." He drank again, then spoke over his shoulder. "Donuil, you have been there, in this place Camulod. I ask you as my son, a Prince of the Gaels of Eire. Is this claim true, and could it come to pass as Master Merlyn says?"

"Aye, Father, I believe it. It will come to pass."

"Will? Not could, or might? You are that sure?"

Now I heard Donuil rise for the first time, and as I glanced his way I saw him extend a hand to help his brother to his feet, after which the two moved closer to us. As they approached, Donuil said, "Sure enough to have decided that my own destiny lies with Merlyn and the child. I will return with them to Britain when they go, to play my part in whatever the fates hold stored for them."

The king glanced over his shoulder, one eyebrow raised sardonically. "If they go," he said. "If I permit them to leave. I am king here, remember, and the child is my grandson, all that I have remaining of his mother, whom I loved."

I was watching closely, hearing the threat and its implications, but I was surprised to see Donuil smile easily, undismayed by his father's words.

"And why would you forbid it, Father? Had the child been born legitimately, it would have been Lot's heir, bearing his blood, and I have heard your opinions regarding Lot and his true worth. Nevertheless, the child would have been king of Cornwall and you'd have been well pleased. Now he has no taint of Lot about him, he has a claim to the Cornish kingdom, and he has, besides, the promise of all Britain, certainly of Camulod and Cambria . . . High King of Alban, Father! The blood of our clan will flourish with his prosperity."

"Aye, or suffer with his death. You are foolhardy, it appears to me, my son, in this decision. It will bar you from all chance of inheritance here in your own right."

Donuil's smile grew even wider. "What chance is that, Father? I am your youngest son and the pole of claims above mine reaches high. I'll never be king here after you are gone, and you will admit that, if you are pressed. Besides, it might even be less perilous fighting in Britain than it would be here in Eire. Arthur, the child, has a chance of gaining the Ard Righ's chair there. No man will ever have that chance in Eire, by your own admission."

The king pursed his lips, his eyes expressionless. "And my familial blessing? You would forfeit that?"

The smile disappeared from Donuil's face immediately. "No, Father, I would not in truth, if it could be avoided. I would hope to leave with your goodwill."

"Hmm." Athol turned his gaze on Connor. "And you, Lord Connor, what think you of this?"

Connor had been listening, his eyes on me most of the time. Now he coughed slightly. "I do not know what I should think, Father. I have heard more here than I ever thought to know."

"Your brother here trusts Master Merlyn more than some of his own kin. Have you anything to say to that?"

Connor grimaced and glanced at Donuil. "His good sense surprises me. He has hidden it well, in the past." He looked back to me, his gaze now openly speculative. "I agree with him, too, which also surprises me. I believe Master Merlyn, in spite of all my wishes to deny him. Ygraine is dead, I now accept, as I accept the fact that I have mourned her without knowing. So is our sister Deirdre. But if he won Deirdre as he has won Donuil and almost my unwilling self, there may be more to him even than meets the eye, and that's impressive enough."

I said nothing, sensing that it was not yet time for me to speak. Now the initiative passed again to Athol. He swung away and sought my cup, then handed it to me, and when he spoke again he had lapsed back into the courtly language he used as king.

"So be it. You said you thought this discussion should be private, Master Merlyn, and you were correct. Let it remain so. None but we four shall know of its occurrence, for now. Are we agreed?" Connor, Donuil and I all muttered our agreement. "Good, then here is what has formed in my mind while we have talked. You spoke of the boy's destiny, Master Merlyn. Destiny, I think, is a wondrous but perilous thing for those selected to attain it. Most men live and die without ever hearing or thinking of it, for Destiny is not the truck of ordinary mortals. Destiny attains the stature of godhead, of immortality. It gives rise to legend. It reeks of the whims of gods, goddesses and priests. Those who speak of such things, and there are many of them, mostly priests, would have us believe it will come, to those touched by it, without effort. I adopt a more hard-headed view of it, when I think of it at all. I find I prefer to believe it should take hard work to achieve. A child of Destiny, a High King, must be taught, it seems to me, how to be first a man that other men will respect and admire, then a chief whom they will follow, then a king who can command them in peace as well as in war, and only then a High King, who can impose his vision on a people. Do you agree?"

"Completely."

"I thought you would. You have thought, then, on this training?"

"Deeply."

"And what have you decided? How will you see to it the child is trained?"

"At my own hand, Sir King. I have made up my mind, long since, to give my life to the training of him, but I believe it must be in Britain, where he is to rule."

"You see no hope for him in Eire, then."

"No." I shook my head. "Not in this matter. He must be taught, from earliest boyhood, to perceive the land he rules: the people in it, its problems and its requirements. Afterwards, armed with a clear understanding of those things, and a sense of his place at the head of them, he might have some chance of succeeding in the task ahead of him, which is to combine those peoples, and the solutions to the problems that confront them, and to weld them into a common folk."

"You see him as a lawgiver?"

"Aye, among other things, but first as a soldier. A leader, as you have said, and a champion."

"Hmm. Well, you can train him in that, at least, but what of the other things?"

I shrugged, finding it easy now to smile. "The rudiments are all in place. He will learn the structure of a civilized society in Camulod, taught by its finest minds, and he will learn his place within that structure, responsibility and leadership. There, too, he will learn of weapons and of warfare, of cavalry, and of tactics and strategy. He will also study the basic elements of education, literacy, logic and polemics. He will study metallurgy and engineering, and his teachers will be the finest we can provide."

"And who will supervise these teachers?"

"I will."

"Hmm." Athol looked away again, staring into the fire, and then he spoke, announcing the decision he had reached. "So be it. My trust in you shall be no less than my sons'. You shall return to Britain, Caius Merlyn, with my grandson, at winter's end—as soon as the weather on the seas has moderated to allow you safe passage. Donuil will accompany you as my appointed guardian to the child. Connor, whose galleys dominate the seas between our two shores, will act as liaison between you and us, carrying information and, should the need arise, assistance from one to the other. We will discuss more details in the time ahead. For now . . ." He turned to face his sons. "You two will please me greatly if you leave us. I wish to speak to my goodson Merlyn of his wife, my daughter Deirdre, and your presence may hinder him from speaking with the depth I seek." The term he used to speak of me was not "good son" but rather "goodson," a single word, carrying connotations of family attachments. I had heard it used before, during the day that had passed, hut never beyond the land of the Scots. Donuil and Connor excused themselves and took their leave, and I was left alone with Athol, who moved directly to refresh our cups while I threw fresh wood on the fire at his request.

We talked far into the night, the king and I, by the brightness of his new candles and the leaping flames of the fire. I talked to him of his daughter and of my love for her, omitting nothing that I could recall. I spoke to him of her athletic abilities, of how they had amazed me at the outset when I realized that I had never known a woman or a girl so strong and supple, or so fleet and self-assured in matters of sport and physical prowess. I spoke, too, of my own frustration in never having learned how she came by such skills, and in never having learned to "speak" with her, using my hands the way she and her brother did. I told him of my youthful, arrogant belief that I could leave her for a while and then return to find her and the child she would bear me and to take up at the leaving point and spend my life thereafter pleasing her. And I told him of the times I spent with her and of the love I bore her, how it grew from nothingness into the fire that blazed to become the core of my existence, then was extinguished, utterly and dev- astatingly, for years, to spring back blazing, phoenix-like, into full life with all the agonies of true love lost and long unmourned. I talked of the home we shared in my tiny hidden vale and spoke to him of how she had felt, nestled in my grasp and how she tasted on my lips; of how I held her sheltered in my arms; of how she succoured me when I was weary and in pain; and of how she glowed with health and life and fullness when I last beheld her, advanced in pregnancy. And last, I spoke to him of how I found myself, beside her grave, close by the darkened waters of the little mere in Avalon, and of the agonies I suffered by that grave, tasting for the first time a lifetime of guilt and grief and loss.

Through all of this, King Athol sat and listened, speaking no word, allowing me to pour out my heart and soul into his ears and understanding. He was the perfect listener for my tale, because I knew that he, too, had mourned for my lost love, not once, but time and again, and was doing so now afresh. He listened minutely, absorbing every word, every flicker of expression that crossed my face, bearing the pain I suffered during this, my first complete mourning for my beloved love and for the nameless, faceless child she had prepared for me.

Only long after I had fallen silent, emptied of everything, did he speak, and then he asked of Uther. Did I still believe that Uther had violated and finally killed my love?

Exhausted as I was from purging myself, I thought long before answering, and when I did I spoke with a new confidence, finding a certainty inside my soul that told me of Uther's innocence in all I had condemned him for so ruthlessly. No, I told Athol, I did not believe that Uther was at blame. His guilt had been in my mind alone. That led me to speak of my own father, Picus Britannicus, and his unwavering sense of truth and justice; of his staunch belief in according the benefit of doubt in the absence of absolute proof of guilt. Of his belief, in other words, of the essential good in man, and of the enormity of those dark passions that could lie in all of us, capable of overwhelming anyone, but not without great struggle. I explained how he had brought me to doubt Uther's guilt, and of how that had sufficed until I fell in battle, to awaken to myself years later and find that, once again, my love had been struck down by an unknown assailant.

From there, I went on to describe my pursuit of Uther through the battlefields of Cornwall, revealing to the king, for the first time, the story I had heard from Popilius Cirro, our veteran primus pilus, concerning the capture of Ygraine by Uther and the liaison that had flourished between the two, resulting in the birth of the child Arthur. Athol listened in silence to all of this, making no judgment either of his daughter or my cousin, although at one point he uttered a single, scathing remark consigning his erstwhile ally and goodson Gulrhys Lot to eternal perdition. I ended my tale with the culmination of my hunt, when I found myself face to face, not with Uther Pendragon, but with another who wore Uther's clothes and armour. The circle was complete, and we sat silent together until the fire died down one last, long time. Finally, the king stood up.

"It is late, Goodson," he said, "and I have learned much of you this night. Thank you for telling me the things you have, and know that I consider my poor daughter Deirdre fortunate to have known you, and you fortunate to have found the happiness you had, fleeting though it may have been. Few men are blessed with love such as you have depicted here to me tonight. Get you to sleep now. Tomorrow you must show your cavalry to all my folk. This night, however, you have shown your self to me, and I shall regard it highly the remainder of my life." He dropped his hand onto my shoulder. "Sleep well. And sleep sound, for you deserve kind sleep."

XIV

The following morning, soon after sunrise, Athol sought me out again, and once more we sequestered ourselves in his "sometime" house, free from interruptions and the daily commerce of the settlement. He had thought further, he told me, on what we had talked of the night before, and had lain awake almost until the sky had begun to pale with the new day. His bearing gave no hint of sleeplessness, for all that, reminding me of Luke's observation that the aging process differs in each of us. It evidently affected Athol only superficially if, at his age, he could so easily forego a night of sleep.

He began by questioning me on Britain, particularly on the lands that lay between Camulod and Glevum, where we had met with his envoys, Feargus and Logan. He asked about the nature of the countryside; whether it was densely wooded like his own territory, or more open to the sun. He wished to know about the people: Was the territory populated? If so, by whom? Did they farm the land? Who claimed the land? He knew it was not Camulodian ground, but to whom, then, did it belong?

I tried to answer all his questions, although I wondered why he would ask such things and asked several questions of my own, inquiring whether he had plans for colonizing Britain. No, he assured me, smiling, all he sought was local knowledge. If his grandson were ever to be living in that place, he felt it fitting to know as much about the region as he could learn. I accepted that and told him that all of the territory around Glevum lay in the Pen- dragon lands, to which Arthur himself was the true heir, and it was clear the information

Soon after the noonday meal I begged leave of him to ready my men and made my way out through the gates of the Scots' stronghold to where my cavalry, such as it was, had already assembled to wait for me. Only Donuil was missing. I had left him behind with his father and the other counselors, charged with the responsibility of explaining the few brief manoeuvres we would be presenting for their amusement. The delegation was an act both of self-preservation and consideration; Donuil's horsemanship was still far from the equivalent of the others', and his participation might have endangered the brief exhibition we were to mount. Besides, I saw no point in making his shortcomings as a cavalryman obvious to his own people. As it was, I felt acutely embarrassed at the paucity of the resources at our disposal in this exercise, and had I been able to conceive of any means of avoiding what lay ahead I would gladly have grasped it. Always a believer in the strength of initial impressions, I felt strongly that there could be no advantage to Camulod or its reputation in presenting a vague shadow of its potency. If the thing could not be done right, I saw no benefit to anyone in doing it at all. The thought of eight men attempting to portray the power of Camulod's thousands seemed ludicrous to me. The king, however, had requested a demonstration, and I felt honour bound to indulge him.

My men looked their best, dressed in the finery I had insisted they bring along for formal occasions, and their equipment and armour gleamed in the watery afternoon sunlight. It had rained heavily through most of the morning and I had begun to hope that the day might be too inclement to permit a public gathering, but these hopes were dashed in the late forenoon, when the sun broke through the cloud cover and encouraged great wedges of blue sky to follow it. I saw Dedalus sitting his horse slightly apart from the others, holding the reins of my black, and made my way towards him. There was no formalized order of rank among my companions; all of them were capable of command and each of them had known his fellows too long for such niceties to be necessary. On this occasion, however, Ded seemed to have assumed the lead. I went straight to where he sat, thanking him with a nod as I took my reins and pulled myself up into Germanicus's saddle. He nodded back, indicating the crowd of Scots who had already assembled on the gently sloping meadow outside the walls.

"They're out in force, expecting a spectacle. I hope they won't be disappointed. Eight men won't amount to much of a cavalry charge."

I grinned at him, refusing to allow my face to show how much I shared his misgivings. "Rely on it, old friend, they will be impressed. Bear in mind they have never seen anything like us before. The mere size of our horses is enough to awe them, and their armour, even the best of it, is paltry beside ours. When they see a line of us, leg to leg in formation, charging them at the gallop, they won't even think to count and see that we are only eight. They'll see only force and power, weight and threat, and terror is the only thing they'll feel." I looked him over carefully, from the freshly unpacked and carefully brushed centurion's crest of horsehair bristles on his helmet to the polished silver mountings on his spurred boots. Dedalus wore the crest of a senior centurion, a primus pilus of the Second Augusta Legion, which had served faithfully in Britain for almost four centuries, based in the legionary fortress of Isca Dumnoniorum, now reduced to the sad, dilapidated huddle known merely as Isca. He had never served in the Second Augusta, gone since before his birth, but his great-grandfather had, and the crest had been passed down from him to Dedalus, who wore it with as much pride as had his ancestor. It was dyed to a startling, chalky white and the horsehair bristles projected a full handspan above the crest's silver mounting, which sat across the helmet's crown from side to side, rather than from front to back like a staff officer's. The effect was striking.

"You look magnificent," I told him. "So do the others, but that centurion's crest is finer even than Rufio's."

He grunted. "It is. It's Second Augusta. Rufio's is a mere imitation: Twentieth Valeria."

"Careful, Centurion," I grunted. This was an oft-repeated piece of raillery. "My own grandfather commanded the Twentieth, as Legate. Given the opportunity, he would probably have kept your grandfather hopping. In his day, the Twentieth took second place to none."

Dedalus sniffed. "Aye," he said disdainfully. "So I've heard. Second place to none. That's why the Second Augusta lads were proud to call themselves 'None.' " He looked around at the others, most of whom were watching us, waiting for my signal. "But you're right, we look good. And so we should. When you sent word to me last night about this nonsense, the men were all too far gone in drink for me to make any arrangements, so I let them sleep. But they were all up at dawn, cursing you and me, and I've had them hard at work preparing for this ever since."

Dedalus was the only man among us who would drink neither wine nor ale nor mead. The only things I had ever seen him drink were water and the juice of fresh-crushed fruit: apples, pears and plums. All of us had long since grown used to this strangeness in him, and I knew from many past experiences that it made him utterly reliable at times when, were it not for him and his sobriety, no man could have done service.

"Look at the size of that thing," he muttered, gesturing with his head to some point behind my shoulder. "Surely in the name of all the ancient gods he doesn't throw it?" I turned to see what he meant and saw Rufio talking down from his horse to a stocky, massively muscled Scot who clutched an enormous spear, bigger than any I had seen before. As I looked, Rufio reached out and grasped the shaft of the thing, trying to lift it. It was as thick as his forearm at the base, and scarcely tapered towards the head, which consisted of a heavy, wickedly barbed, spade-shaped blade that reared up far above the head of the mounted centurion. Curious, both about the Scot and his weapon, I kicked my horse into motion and walked across to where they were. He saw me coming and eyed me calmly and I nodded a greeting as I approached. Rufio turned to me, alerted by his companion's look.

"Good morning, Commander," he said in Erse. "I was admiring this. Cullum here tells me it's a boar spear. We could have used a few of these when we met the one that attacked us."

"Aye," I replied, in the same tongue. "But you'd have to be the size of Cullum to carry it, and then you'd be too heavy to ride a horse. Good day to you, Cullum, I am Merlyn Britannicus. How do you use this thing?"

The man called Cullum grinned at me. "You only take it on the hunt. You drag it behind you. When you find a pig, you attract his attention. Then you dig the butt of this into the ground, crouch down beside it, and make certain that the pig runs onto the end of it. If it misses, the thing is of no more use. Neither are you."

I returned his grin. "Aye, I can well believe that. I can see you have never missed."

"Oh, that I have, Commander, twice. Both times, though, I was lucky. They were small pigs; small enough to kill otherwise."