The Sorcer part 1: The Fort at River's Bend

"They couldn't. Landroc kept them out of it. So Droc thrashed me and then the two of them walked away, laughing. He did it because he could, and that is all there is to understand, I suppose."

"What, that he's a bully?"

The look he threw me was one of pure pity. "No, that he is the king's son."

I was astounded, unwilling to believe what I had heard.

"What does that have to do with anything? Do you believe King Derek would condone his son's behaviour in this?"

"It has to do with everything, Merlyn, and it began last week." Ignoring the expression on my face, he spoke to me as if I were the boy and he the teacher, and I sat, fascinated by his words and his passion. "Last week, the day after Uncle Ambrose came, I found something, too—something much more valuable than Ghilly's old sword. I found a brooch, in the deep woods outside the town walls, a big, old brooch with a jewelled stone in it like a large piece of yellow glass. It was of silver, I think, but all tarnished green and black with age. Foolishly, I showed it to Kesler when I returned to Ravenglass that day, and he tried to snatch it from me. We fought over it."

Kesler was yet another of Derek's many sons, but he was of an age with Arthur, and smaller in stature.

"Well? You fought, and then what?"

"One of King Derek's captains stopped us and wanted to know what we were fighting about."

"Who was it, do you know? And what did you tell him?"

"It was Longinus, the catapult engineer, and we told him the truth."

"And what happened then ?"

"He made me give the brooch to Kesler, because Kesler was the king's son and the brooch was therefore his, found on the king's land."

"I see. And how did you feel about that?"

The boy gnawed on the inside of his cheek, considering his answer.

"I was angry at first, and then I was not ... or not as much."

"How so?"

"Because I did not really believe the brooch was mine. It never had been mine and had belonged to someone else. Someone had lost it, sometime in the past. And it had value—even beneath all the dirt you could see that. The size and colour of the stone, and the scribing on the metal ... it was the kind of thing not worn by ordinary folk, so it must have belonged to someone of rank, someone from Ravenglass, perhaps the king himself or one of his family ... "

"But?"

He grimaced. "But if that were so, I think Longinus should have taken it to give to the king himself, he should not merely have permitted one of the king's sons to take it. That did not become clear to me at the time. I only thought about it afterwards. Was I right to think so?"

I let that one pass, for the moment. "Hmm. And then Droc took the sword today. I see now what concerns you."

"Do you?" The lad's face brightened.

"Of course I do. The injustice of what you witnessed today brought out the anger you've been feeling since the first occasion."

"No!" His voice was suddenly loud again, echoing the lightning change that had swept over his face as I spoke. He caught himself, moderating his tone. "No, it's much more than that, Merlyn. Can't you see what happened? Droc had plainly heard about my finding the brooch and what had happened over that, and when he saw the sword that Ghilly had found, he simply decided it was his, by right, since it had been found in his father's territories. So he puffed up his chest, displayed his muscles and took it, despite the fact that it was worthless to him. That is the injustice."

Abruptly, we had come to the nub of the matter. Now it was clearly evident. This nine-year-old boy had come up against an injustice, clearly delineated in his uncorrupted view, and now he was wrestling with the abstractions of justice and its uneasy relationship to physical power; with the philosophical intangibles of force and power and their influence on morality! I drew a long, deep breath, holding up my hand to give him pause, and tried to marshal my chaotic thoughts. Here, I knew, was a seminal moment in the relationship between my ward and me, a moment I could neither ignore nor defer to another time. But how was I to respond? Watching me closely, waiting for me to speak, he leaned backward in his chair and folded his arms across his chest.

"Look you," I began, then subsided again, rubbing the side of one finger against the stubble on my chin. The boy made no attempt to hurry me but sat watching me, unblinking. I dropped my hand from my face and sat straighter in my chair.

"Arthur, there are some things ... some aspects of life ... that appear to change as boys grow into men. They did for me, and they do for all boys. I think you have just come face to face with one of them. In a boy's world, I think, colours are easy to identify—black is black and white is white." I saw his eyes cloud with incomprehension and hurried on to explain myself. "All that means is that, when you're a boy, good is good and bad is bad and there's no difficulty in telling the two apart and then behaving in accordance with your findings. For instance, I believe most boys see men in one of three ways. There are men they like and admire, and they try to stay close to such men, emulating them. Then there are the ruck—the unknown strangers, the common mass of men—to whom they are indifferent, and they go on about their lives as boys always have, ignoring them as insignificant. The third kind of men are those they dislike—the bullies, the misanthropes— unpleasant men. These men wise boys avoid and take great pains to stay away from them. Would you agree?"

Arthur nodded, slowly and deliberately, and I found myself speaking with much solemnity as I continued.

"Good. Well, that ability to avoid such men is one of the things that changes as a boy grows older. While he is still a boy, his avoidance of them is unimportant and unnoticed. He may run and hide from them and spend his days avoiding them and suffer nothing by his flight, because he is a mere boy and hence beneath the notice of grown men. That is his great good fortune, though he is ignorant of all of it.

"When he grows up to man's estate, however, all of that changes. He is still the same boy in his heart, but his body has become a man's body, and his cares a man's concerns. He may no longer run and hide when his old enemies and their kind approach. Flight without dishonour has become impossible with the arrival of manhood. Do you understand what I am saying?"

"I think so. You are saying a man must stand and fight such men, or forfeit his honour."

"No, Arthur, I am not saying that, not exactly. What I am saying is that a man must learn to live among such men, to make allowance for their imperfections, and to strive to live a decent, honourable life in spite of them. He need not—indeed he cannot—-always fight them."

"Why not?"

"Because ... because there are so many of them, if the truth be told."

"So many? D'you mean there are more of them than there are honourable men?"

Did I mean that? I had to think carefully before responding.

"No, Arthur, I did not mean to suggest that at all, but you are forcing me here to think carefully about what I do mean, and I find it difficult to be exact. Let me think about it for a little." He sat gazing at me until I was ready to speak again, and I resumed slowly.

"I suppose the reality is that men—the ruck, that common mass of men I spoke of earlier—are indolent when all ] boils down to honour and dishonour. They would prefer an easy life, free of complication and the need to think about things whose meaning will elude them. That is not to say they lack honour, you understand? It merely means they are ... "

"Weak." The single word startled me, encompassing, as it did, so great a revelation of the depths of this strange man-child. I blinked and coughed, attempting to hide my surprise, but I saw little point in disputing the correctness of his choice of word.

"Weak ... yes, I suppose that is the word that best describes them in this case. The mass of men are weak, content to leave their welfare in the hands of other, more resolute men."

"Stronger, both good and bad."

"Hmm. Yes, but remember where this discussion began, Arthur. You are still seeing things through your own eyes, a boy's eyes, in terms of black and white, while in the world of men—the world in which we must all live most of our lives—those colours are but seldom seen. Your pony, Primus, is beautiful, and his coat is pied—black patches and white patches. Tell me, is he a black horse with white markings, or a white horse with black?"

Arthur smiled. "I've wondered about that before now, many times, and I've never been able to decide which is correct. Which do you think he is?"

"I don't have to think, Arthur, I know. He is neither. He is a black-and-white horse, very rare and extremely valuable. Few instances of such colouring exist in nature. Only a few birds, one kind of cattle, certain swine and very few such ponies. Otherwise, the colours mix and blend, and that leads us back to where we were with boys and men. Black mixed with white produces grey, Arthur, and the world of men is filled with shades of grey. Black and white, in the sense of absolute goodness and badness, godliness and evil in men, are seldom encountered in this world by anyone. In all my life I have met only one man whom I consider to be truly good, and I can think of none but two whom I considered truly evil.

"I think most men must be stupid."

"What?"

"I said they must be stupid, men on the whole as you called them ... like sheep. It is stupidity to let others rule your life simply because you lack the will or the desire to think, or to make decisions. Are women the same way?"

"Women?" I laughed aloud. "Of course they are, why would you even ask such a question? Women are no different from men in such respects. They are fundamentally the same in matters that concern their lives and the way they lead them. Women can be as strong or as weak as any man, as benevolent or wicked, as gracious and kind, or as cruel, mean and vicious. But by and large, they wish only to lead a simple life, uncluttered by the need to make decisions about matters of which they know but little. As you grow older, you will learn much about women and will come to see that they are little different from men in some respects, and universally different in others. You may even find that there are some of them whose company and friendship you will prefer over that of men."

"Hmm." The boy plainly preferred to defer any judgment on that until a later date. He was frowning slightly, deep in thought, his eyes gazing somewhere into the space between us.

"So then, what you are saying is that most men prefer to be told what do. Is that correct?"

I shrugged. "That would be one way of putting it. Personally, I would carry it further: most men require to be told what to do, most of the time."

The boy's frown deepened. "Why?" He had made no attempt to deny or dispute what I had said, accepting the truth of it as uttered. I sighed, deeply.

"I don't know, Arthur, but that is the way of the world. There are always leaders and no lack of followers. Men build societies—empires, kingdoms, cities, towns—and in all of them, in every one, the ruck are followers and the few are leaders. Even in your own small group of friends, there is a leader."

"Me."

"Aye, but when you turn your ponies loose to graze, what happens? Do they drift apart?"

He sat up straighter. "No, they stay together ... "

"And?"

"They follow Primus. He is their leader."

I nodded. "And so it is with cattle. The herd follows the lead bull, the dominant stag leads the herd of deer, the prime ram leads the flock of sheep."

"Dominance. The strongest dominates, everywhere."

"Among the animals, yes, that is true, the strongest dominates by right of conquest, and holds his leadership purely by strength and fighting prowess. But men are different. Men are rational beings, with the ability to combine their strengths with their intellect and talents for the common good. And when they do that, they develop government, which is no more than a regulated system of behaviour based upon the formal rules that we call law." I waited now, observing the play of thoughts upon the boy's face and fighting my own temptation to say too much by forcing myself to count slowly and await his next words. When they came, they were more or less what I had expected.

"But who is it that lays down those rules, in the beginning?" He answered his own question before I could. "The leaders ... " He shook his head. "But what if they don't want to? What if they make no laws, but rule only by strength, and the fear their strength inspires in others? Or what if they use their laws solely to foster their own ends? What then, Merlyn?"

"Then, Arthur, you have a cruel society in which no true laws exist and the people are no more than slaves, living at the mercy of their overlords, for leaders such as you describe surround themselves with heartless, vicious men attracted by the promise of the rewards of anarchy."

"Anarchy?" I knew he was familiar with that term, for we had discussed it less than a month earlier. "But anarchy means lack of leadership, you told us that last week."

"It does, but ask yourself this. If the dominant leader is a lawless brigand, existing for his own pleasure without law of any kind, what else can exist under his power but anarchy? And that brings us back to where this all began. Do you remember where that was?"

"Aye." There was not the slightest hesitation in his voice. "The changes from boyhood to manhood. No honourable man can run and hide when faced with enemies."

"Good lad! Now you see what I meant when I said that."

"I begin to, I think. Men of honour must combine their intellects and talents to defeat those who would trample on the lives of other, weaker folk."

"Aye, that they must, but the truth goes higher than that, Arthur. Men who consider themselves to have honour have, in their very being, a duty to improve themselves, their way of life and living, and to extend those improvements to benefit their fellows. They are the men by whom societies are founded and built."

"You mean men like Great-grandfather Varrus and Caius Britannicus, don't you?"

"Aye, I do, and all the others who helped them to build their Colony at Camulod."

"Camulod is a democracy, isn't it?"

"In the Greek sense, meaning a place where the people govern? No, I would not say that. But the people are free to live in Camulod in freedom from fear. They know no one will dispossess them on a passing whim. They know their wives and husbands and children may safely walk abroad without endangerment. They know no one will coerce them or force them to do anything unjust or demeaning. And there is no king there, no single man whose will is paramount and unrestrained—the Council sees to that. And that, I suppose, makes Camulod something of a democracy."

"Not like here. This is a kingdom."

I smiled at him. "True, but not a bad one."

"Hmm. It has a king."

Something in his tone made me crease my brow. "What's this, then? Do you think Derek of Ravenglass an unjust man, or a bad king?"

"No." His tone was grudging. "But no one in Camulod would have taken the brooch I found away from me, or taken the sword from Ghilly."

"Nor did King Derek, Arthur. He did not take your brooch away."

"No, but it was taken in his name, under his law, and the manner of it was unjust."

"How so? You meaning the giving of it to Kesler? Well, you may be right, but even so, the fault was not King Derek's. What's the matter? Am I wrong?"

Arthur's face had set, in mere moments, into an expression I took for stubbornness. He sat staring at me for a short time and then spoke out, addressing me formally now with that disconcertingly adult directness I had noticed in him several times before, on those infrequent occasions when he had felt strongly enough about something to weigh his options and opinions and had then decided to speak his mind and suffer the consequences.

"One of us is, Commander. The training I have had in logic, from yourself and from Master Lucanus, indicates that one of us is—must be—gravely in error in our basic beliefs in this."

I sat blinking at him, struggling to maintain a noncommittal expression as I waited for him to finish.

"It seems to me that if anyone, and particularly one of King Derek's senior captains, makes a decision, or a judgment on a matter in dispute, and does so in the king's name, then he must do so in the firm belief that the king himself will endorse that judgment and back up the decision. It follows therefore, in logic, that the final responsibility in the matter rests directly with the king, since he permits the use of his name in such things. If he does not, and if he is ignorant about, or indifferent to such a thing, then the use of his name and his authority is really an abuse, and the king is king in name alone. His authority has been taken from him."

I was forced to smile, both in admiration and in delight at the boy's mind, but I sought still to cloak both. "Even if the deed is done without ill will, in the belief that the king's best interests are being served? Longinus is King Derek's loyal follower."

"Yes, and even more so in such a case, for then the subordinate betrays the greatest disrespect and arrogance, in daring to think for the king, as well as speak for him."

The shock of Arthur's words was so great that I found myself on my feet, swinging away from him and moving rapidly to the fireplace, where I crouched with my back to him and busied myself piling fresh, unnecessary logs onto the fire. What a boy this was, and what a mind he had! And what a man he would become in the time ahead. I had to swallow the great lump that swelled in my throat as I battled with the intense emotions that filled my breast: pride, love, admiration and an awed awareness of an intellect more powerful and potent than my own. I felt tears flooding my eyes, and told myself it was the fierce heat of the fire that drew them, and then I realized what I had done, and that the lad was sitting silently behind me, perhaps in fear. I drew a great breath and straightened slowly, turning to face him. He sat gazing at me, his eyes wide and troubled.

"I was too bold. I—"

"No, you were not. You are correct, absolutely and undeniably correct, and I was wrong." I took a step closer to him, clasping my hands behind my back and looking down on him. "Only one thing concerns me, in all you said. Do you know what it is?"

"No ... " His voice had a rising inflection.

"Your judgment condemns Derek as a weak king. Do you truly believe that is the case?"

He looked away from me to gaze into the heart of the fire, and when he spoke again his voice was quiet. "I do not think King Derek is a weak man. His people, the common people, love him, and his sons have no fear of him. But a king must be above all others. By permitting wrongs to be done in his name, even in ignorance, he betrays weakness, undermining himself and endangering his own authority and therefore the safety of his folk ... and if a boy like me can see it, so may anyone else who cares to look."

I sighed and sat down heavily in my chair again, picking up my cup of wine and draining it.

"Weaknesses come in many guises, Arthur, but I fear you are right in this. Pray now that no one else has your insight. So far, Derek's rule here is unchallenged, and it is benevolent. We must hope it remains that way."

Arthur grinned, a boy again. "Well, as a man of honour, it is now your duty to make sure that nothing changes. Commander Merlyn."

"Aye, it is ... though it has taken a mere babe to point that out to me, and I do not thank you for it. Well, have we finished here, or have you more wisdom to impart to me?"

He was grinning still. "No, we have finished. Thank you for listening to me, Merlyn."

"You have barely left me opportunity to speak—what other choice was open to me? Now what are you thinking in that mighty mind of yours?"

"Merlyn, will I ever be a leader?"

"You know you will. You will command the men of Camulod, at least, and those of Cambria, your father's kingdom. But why do you ask that now?"

"Because I must decide how to ensure that no one, ever, will usurp the right to use my name or my authority to his own ends without my knowledge. That will be difficult."

"Aye, it will be that."

"But if I am to lead in Camulod, or to be king in Cambria, then I must lead in fact, as well as in name. I must have laws, and see to it that they are kept, and that the people who depend on me can live, as they do now in Camulod, in the absence of fear."

I was smiling by the time he finished. "I think you may succeed in that, Arthur, providing you have men of worth about you. But do you mean they may also live in the expectation of justice?"

"Of course." There was no trace of a smile on his countenance now.

"Good! Wonderful! I hope to be there to assist you. Now let's go and find some food. That wine has made me hungry."

Germanus Pontifex, Auxerre, Gaul.

From Caius Merlyn Britannicus.

Greetings, my neglected friend: For a long time I have sat here, gazing at the spotless face of this sheet of papyrus, painfully aware of how much time has elapsed since I last took a stylus in my hand to write to you. Nowadays, it seems, the only writing I find time, or make time, to attend to is the task of maintaining my own journal.

I have been intending to write to you for months. I have two reasons: to petition you for advice on a matter that has been troubling me, and to bring you up to date with all the things that have transpired here in Britain, and in our Colony of Camulod, since last you heard from me. Now that I am faced with the task, however, it seems impossible to encapsulate all that I wish to say into one single missive.

We have had great upheavals in our land in recent times, as I know you are aware. When last you Wrote you expressed the hope that we had passed unscathed through the wars at that time in Cambria, my cousin Uther's former kingdom. We did, in fact, remain largely uninvolved in that conflict, and it has long since been resolved. However, it has also led to dire complications and a political climate dangerous to the life of young Arthur Pendragon. Raising him to manhood has become my life's prime commitment and responsibility.

As you know, the boy is the son of my cousin Uther Pendragon, who died at the time of the lad's birth. Now nine years old, Arthur is the legitimate Pendragon heir to Cambria, his father's kingdom. He is also, through his mother's claim, the ducal heir to Cornwall, although that is a complex issue, fraught with oblique connections: Gulrhys Lot, the erstwhile Duke and self-styled King of Cornwall, ostensibly the boy's father and unaware of the child's true paternity, acknowledged him publicly as his legitimate heir, and I have Lot's personal Seal in my possession, keeping it safe on the boy's behalf. More legitimately, and still on his mother's side, the boy is also an heir to the kingdom and holdings of his grandfather, Athol Mac Iain, the king of the Hibernian people the Romans called the Scotii and who refer to themselves as Gaels. In addition to everything else, he is both great-grand- son to Publius Varrus and great-great-nephew to Caius Britannicus, and therefore successor to the major holdings of Camulod.

For all of those reasons, to safeguard the boy's life against men of overpowering ambition who have already sought his death, I removed him some time ago from Camulod to our present location, high on the north-western coast of Britain, in the mountainous region known locally as Cumbria, close by the western extremity of the great wall built by the Emperor Hadrian to defend his Province of Britain against invasion by the Picti, the Painted People of the Caledonian territories to the north.

When first we came to this place, I thought and sought to disappear from the sight of men. I left our refuge here in the town called Ravenglass, openly, and took ship for Eire, accompanied by young Arthur. None but my own people and a few trusted friends knew that the captain of the ship, Connor Mac Athol, was brother to young Arthur's dead mother. He dropped us back ashore again mere miles north of the harbour at Ravenglass, where friends awaited us with horses. From there we journeyed back overland, in secret, until we had regained our mountain fastness miles behind the town. Thereafter, I altered the colour of my hair, grew a full, Celtic beard and changed my name from Caius Merlyn Britannicus to plain Master Cay, a simple farmer. Another member of our group, Hector, a former Councillor of Camulod and an able man, then assumed the titular control of our new home. Thus we have remained.

Mere days ago, however, another layer was added to this open deception. My brother Ambrose, whom you know to resemble me as closely as one robin's egg does another, sailed into Ravenglass, once more aboard Connor's ship, pretending to be me. All believed him to be Merlyn of Camulod. I stood with him, and thanks to my altered hair and physical appearance, none remarked how similar we look.

Ambrose has assumed full command of our forces in Camulod and complete responsibility for the administration of the Colony's affairs. I encountered him for the first time, you will recall, on the occasion of the great debate which brought you and me together in Verulamium. Shortly thereafter he changed his place and style of living, moving from his erstwhile home in Lindum, where he served as a captain to Vortigern, to live with us in Camulod. He is visiting with us now, soon to return to Camulod, carrying this letter with him. He will convey it to one of the itinerant bishops who pass through the Colony, whence it will make its way to you.

In the interim, everyone who has seen him will know that Merlyn of Camulod came here for several days this spring, then sailed off once again aboard an Erse galley before the month had passed. They will also know, and will report to any who inquire, that he came and went again unaccompanied by any stripling boy.

None who seek the boy with Merlyn would think to look for him in the company of a plain hill farmer such as I have become. He will remain safe, therefore, for the foreseeable future, and my hopes are high that we may continue to pursue his education uninterrupted.

In fact, that education, and in particular the scope of it, is the matter that has been troubling me. It is for this reason that I seek your assistance and guidance now.

I take great pride and ever-growing pleasure in the attributes and accomplishments of my young ward. I firmly believe that he will one day confront a destiny beyond that vouchsafed other boys and men. My mind and my very soul are filled with excitement over his remarkable progress. Mere hours ago, he demonstrated to me again his phenomenal abilities, his mental prowess. This has renewed my determination to instruct him properly and as fully as my own powers will permit, to equip him for whatever tasks lie ahead of him. He has already learned much of what he will need to know, and the process of teaching him continues, shared among myself and my good friends here.

In brief, his grounding in philosophy, logic, rhetoric and polemic has been thorough and painstaking, and the same criteria have governed his teaching in mathematical, engineering and military matters. Discipline, tactics and strategy are real to him now, far removed from mere theory and abstractions.

Despite our successes in all of these endeavours, however, I have strong doubts concerning my own capacity to teach him in one particular area. For this boy to become the man I am convinced he will be required to be, I believe that he must have careful and enlightened tuition in the essentials of Christianity—not merely in its basic tenets. He already possesses and practises those basics. He must acquire a fundamentally solid Christian outlook upon life in all respects. Such learning involves an appreciation of Christian philosophy and morality that I am ill equipped to teach. I remain what I have always been: something of a doubter when it comes to other men's interpretations of the Will of God. Arthur needs more depth and far more enlightenment in such things than I can offer him, and no one else among our number can supply that lack. The strength of Ambrose's beliefs and dedication would make him a wondrous teacher, but his place is in Camulod.

I am convinced that the boy would benefit from anything you could recommend to us to aid in this instruction—text, letter, treatise or philosophical dissertation. If you could send such material to his attention, I would gladly undertake to study it · myself, with the intention of providing him with a sympathetic and partially understanding ear into which he can pour his reflections. I see such a focus as crucial to his development.

Soon I must return with him into the world. When that time comes, he must be sufficiently well informed to recognize that world for what it is. He must be able to discern, as a Christian warrior, that goodness, strength and order exist to counteract evil, weaknesses and chaos even in our small world of Britain.

I appreciate whatever consideration you can give this matter. I also trust this finds you in good health and that the duties of your calling leave you leisure, from time to time, to ride abroad. I await your response with pleasure and anticipation.

Merlyn Britannicus

ELEVEN

On the day before Ambrose and Ludmilla were to leave, the dawn brought a chilling onslaught of fiercely malevolent sleet, with more snow than rain in the mixture, and high, erratic, gusting winds of such ferocity that the worst of them brought trees and limbs crashing down throughout the morning, endangering the men working in the forest. Hector called a halt to all work, concerned that someone might be injured by a falling branch, and thereafter everyone spent the entire afternoon and evening indoors, attending to all the neglected little chores that could be disposed of without going outside.

Of all places in the fort, the bathhouse was the warmest and most welcoming, and most of us made our way there eventually that day, so that by mid-afternoon it was crowded, resounding with the high, excited voices of the children, who were not normally permitted to share the place with adults, but on this occasion were accorded the rare privilege of playing in the tepid pool, the largest of all the pools.

By the time I made my way into the sudarium, bypassing the most crowded area of the baths, I found that almost every man in the fort had had the same thought as me and had contrived to arrive before me, so that I had to wait until they made sufficient room for me to squeeze myself into a narrow space that verged on being Uncomfortably close to the main steam vent from the hypocausts. I looked around me in the gloom and recognized most of my companions as their faces drifted into view and away again, obscured by the banks of swirling, steamy vapour.

Lucanus I had seen immediately on entering, and I guessed that he had been there longest. He sat with his eyes closed and his head tilted back against the wall, the sweat pouring from him, streaming down his face and body, and his now-sparse hair was plastered to his skull. He was flanked to the right by Hector, who smiled and nodded to me, and to the left by Dedalus, who sat hunched forward, dripping sweat onto the floor from his chin and the point of his nose. Elsewhere I saw Rufio, Mark and Ambrose, and then someone broke wind richly in the far corner and earned himself a torrent of abuse from those around him. Those closest to him moved away, setting up enough eddies in the steam to obscure all hope of recognizing anyone. Revelling in the heat, and feeling my skin begin to prickle comfortably with the beginnings of a sweat, I slumped backward between the men on either side of me, the brothers Lars and Joseph, feeling the tiled coolness of the wall against my shoulders and allowing myself to relax as I sucked the hot, moist air deep into my lungs.

Gradually, as men drifted out one after the other, surfeited, the space around me grew less crowded, and eventually I was able to stretch out supine on the stone bench, pillowing my head on a towel. I knew that I ought not to spend much longer in the humid, superheated air, yet I was unable to resist the temptation to relax completely.

I must have dozed, because when I awoke again, spluttering in shock and outrage, gasping in vain for my voice,

I had no idea where I was. And then I saw my brother's handsome face laughing down at me in heathen glee. He had crept up and emptied a bucket of icy water onto my defenceless, sweat-soaked belly, and the empty bucket still swung from his outstretched hand. With a massive roar of rage I leaped to my feet and made a lunge for him, intent upon ripping off his head, but he was gone by the time my feet hit the floor, and the cold air from the open door set the billows of steam swirling in chaos.

Bellowing in full roar, I charged after him, throwing the door wide again and sweeping out through the deserted changing room into the open bathhouse, to find myself confronting an entire crowd of people, men and women and even some children, all of them turning to see what the commotion was about and seeing, instead, me in my full nakedness. I skidded to a halt, almost falling in my haste, and then I turned and walked back into the steam room again, holding myself stiffly erect, fighting for dignity but carrying with me the image of Ambrose, fully dressed and still holding the wooden bucket, laughing at my discomfiture from across the tepid pool with the young woman Tressa standing beside him, gazing at my nakedness wide-eyed.

I re-entered the steam room, furious and shivering, and I lowered myself to sit on the bench where I had previously been lying. When I had stopped shaking and my breathing was normal again, I found my mind seething with fantastical images of vengeance on my brother, all of which involved my approaching him while he slept and repeating the outrage on him in a variety of ways. At that point I realized that I was alone in the steam room and that no one had been there since my dousing, and I began to smile, imagining Ambrose gliding quietly in while I slept and shepherding the others out of there in silence, his finger to his lips lest they waken me. Only then, I knew, when everyone else was safe from the wrath he knew would follow his jape, had he come back in with his brimming bucket to perpetrate his crime against my dignity. I had heard reports of my brother's love of practical jokes. Never before, however, had he tried anything of the kind on me. And now a state of war existed between us, with me the loser in the opening stage.

The steam billowed again, announcing the opening of the outer door, and the shape of my tormentor loomed through the mist. He stood looking down at me, his eyes dancing with mirth.

"How are you? Have you cooled down?"

"I'll live," I said, keeping my face expressionless.

"Good, I'm delighted to hear that. But weren't you aware that most men normally put on their clothes before venturing out into the public area, among the women? And the children. Cay ... the remembered sight of you in all your hairy horror may keep some of them awake at night. You really should be more considerate of others."

I allowed my face to relax into a smile. "Ambrose, you are going to suffer for that little fit of self-indulgence. It will come back to haunt you when you least expect it. This outrageous behaviour of yours today will not go unpunished."

He grinned. "Oh, I think it will. I leave tomorrow, don't forget, and tonight I shall be sleeping in the arms of my wife. Not even you would be cruel enough to punish an innocent woman for my little idiosyncrasy."

"An idiosyncrasy? The shock could have killed me! Bear in mind from now on that, at some time over the coming months, or even years, you will have to sleep, or relax away from your wife. Whenever you do, you had best be careful, because I swear to you, I will have vengeance, brother mine, one way or another. You'll suffer for it, I warrant you."

Ambrose laughed aloud. "Attack? I woke you up, that's all I did. What healthy, virile man lies sleeping in mid- afternoon? We have work to do, you and I, so I wanted you to be alert for it."

"Oh? What work is that?"

All at once his expression sobered. "The duplicate sword. I want to sit down one last time with you and Joseph, to make sure that we have missed nothing and everything is as it should be. I spoke with him here, less than an hour ago. He has been working on the drawings we discussed and they are ready, and he tells me he has spent four days, and two entire nights out of the past three, in the forge. Now he is most insistent that we three meet one more time, to finalize the details of this project, and I agree with him. All very well for you and I to feel the matter's in good hands, but the final responsibility will lie in Carol's jurisdiction, and he will have to deal with it alone. It would be unwise, even unjust of us, not to make sure that we have left nothing to chance that might be remedied and dealt with in detail. This may be the most important undertaking any of us ever assumes. That's why I came back in here, originally, to fetch you. But when I saw you lying there, lolling all naked, with your mouth hanging open, some mischievous urgency took hold of me and I went looking for cold water. And now I come seeking a truce. We really must meet with Joseph."

I stood up and moved towards the door, passing him on my way.

"Truce, then, until our business with Joseph is con- eluded. After that, beware thy mortified and vengeful brother. Is it still storming outside?"

"Disgustingly."

We sent one of the boys to ask Joseph to meet with us in my quarters, where the light was better than anywhere else that late afternoon, thanks to the wealth of fine wax candles I possessed. A dozen of them were burning in two candelabra on my big table when he came in from the rain, clutching an armload of impedimenta and cursing the weather from beneath the voluminous cloak in which he was swathed.

"Damnation," he spat as soon as the door was closed. "I thought winter was gone."

"So did we all," I answered. "Come over to the fire and warm yourself."

As he stood stamping his booted feet and unwrapping the folds of his cloak, Ambrose relieved him of the heavy burden he clutched awkwardly beneath one arm, protected by his cloak, while I poured him a beaker of the hot, honeyed wine we called "sweet flames," some of which I had prepared as soon as I reached home.

Joseph had brought two things with him, clutching them protectively beneath his cloak to keep them dry: a long, cloth-wrapped bundle containing lengths of iron, judging by the heavy, clanking noises it gave out, and a thick roll of heavy parchments. He thanked me as he took the steaming cup from me and then crossed to stand before the blazing fire in the brazier, cupping the drink in his chilled hands, leaving me and Ambrose to examine the drawings he had brought. As Ambrose set about stretching them out on the table top and weighting the ends to prevent them rolling up on themselves again, I took the opportunity to look long and hard at this Joseph who had decided to accompany us from Camulod, leaving behind a lifetime of belonging in one place to seek a new life in the unknown north. I was surprised to realize that I had no idea how old he was, although I knew he was at least a decade older than me. Joseph had been fully grown and already working in his father's smithy when I first began to take notice of the people around me who were not part of my immediate family.

Joseph's father had been known as Equus, the Roman name for a horse, because of his great size and strength; his three were all big men, but they lacked the sheer massiveness that had earned Equus his name. Lars, the eldest, having no wish to spend his life as a smith, had run away from his home in Colchester as a boy to enlist in the legions, and had not been heard of again for more than a score of years until I found him, by sheer accident, running a road house for travellers on the way to Isca, while I was pursuing my cousin Uther, several years earlier. He had journeyed to Camulod at my urging, and there had been reunited with his surviving brothers, Joseph and Carol, who had become the Colony's senior smiths.

Joseph, I remembered from my boyhood, had once had black, thick-curling hair. Although he was now completely white-headed, his hair remained a thick, healthy-looking mane, and it occurred to me now, for the first time, that he was vain about it, keeping it clean and quite long, in a fashion I had seen in no other smith. Publius Varrus, my beloved uncle, had always worn both hair and beard close- cropped, and I remembered him telling me that long hair is a hazard in a spark-filled smithy. By some miracle, Joseph had managed to retain most of his teeth, at an age when his contemporaries were all toothless, and his skin was dark, almost swarthy, so that in the summer sun he quickly turned a deep, dark brown against which his pale blue Celtic eyes stood out startlingly bright. He was, I realized for the first time, a fine-looking man, with a narrow, intelligent face and a finely chiselled nose with a distinct Romanness to it, despite his Celtic blood. As he stood there, gazing into the fire and oblivious to my inspection, I ran my eyes down from his head to his feet, noting the square, solid strength of him and seeing how the hardship of his craft had kept the signs of his advancing age to a minimum. His forearms were corded with muscle, the lines of them thrown into tension by the way he was holding his cup, and I knew that his upper arms and shoulders held the same, clean-cut definition.

Joseph wore only a plain, dark-grey, knee-length tunic of heavy, coarse wool devoid of decorations, a functional garment, tightly belted at the waist, designed and intended to disguise the ravages of working among smoke and charcoal all day, every day. On his feet and legs he wore heavy leather boots of the kind that our foot soldiers wore, thickly soled with several layers of cured and toughened bullhide then studded with heavy metal hobnails made in his own forge; the upper portions were bound and sandalled up to just below his knees, and beneath them he wore heavy stockings of the same thick, dark-grey wool, their tops turned down to cover the boot tops.

At that point, he became aware that I was watching him and turned to look at me, one eyebrow raised in curiosity, but at precisely the same moment Ambrose straightened up from his first scrutiny of the drawings and called to me to come and look at them.

They were very fine, although some of them were scarcely comprehensible to me, and I found myself surprised at the precision of Joseph's penmanship.

"These are excellent, Joseph, but why are there two sets?"

He grunted and sniffed, then put down his cup before answering. "For comparison. We'll use but one of them, the plain set. The other, showing Excalibur as it is, we'll burn as soon as we are all satisfied the main one is correct." He left the fire and crossed to where we stood, holding his cup in one hand while he pointed out details of the drawings with the other. As he stood close by my side I detected the odour of the smithy on his clothes, a nostalgic mixture of forge smoke and something I could only think of as "the iron smell" that transported me immediately to my boyhood. Joseph spoke with the authority of the craftsman as his hand moved swiftly across the drawings. "Here you have Excalibur as it is, and I swear, by all the gods, I've never seen a thing so wondrous fine. I knew it had been made, by Publius Varrus and my father, but the making of it was all I had heard of. My father spoke of it with pride, but now I know he also spoke with great reserve, because he never mentioned the beauty of the thing, or its · greatness, or the size or colour of it. I knew it was longer than a short-sword, but I thought of it in those days as something resembling a spatha, but finer, with a blade an arm's length long. Nothing, no imaginings of mine, could have prepared me for the actual sight of it—the sheer size and splendour of the thing. I mean, from what my father did say from time to time, I knew this wondrous sword had no blemishes, but I could never have imagined what he truly meant by calling it flawless. Its beauty is unnatural ... " He paused, shaking his head again in amazement.

"Anyway, here are the dimensions of the thing, this list along the edge, as exactly as I could measure them. The angle of the taper, two ways, length and thickness. The length of the tang—it has a triple tang, did you know that?" He checked himself, glancing at me. "Of course you did— it was you who showed me how and why. Anyway, as you know, one piece of that tang, the central strip, looks like a normal tang, but the other two are bent at right angles, to form the bracing—skeleton might be a better word—for the poured cross-hilt, here. Then there is the length and the thickness of the cross-hilt itself, the length and diameter of the hilt, the size of the pommel, and of course, in the case of Excalibur itself, the binding and securing of the covering on the hilt—silver and gold wire intertwined above this blackish, rough material that I guess to be some kind of leather." He stopped speaking and moved around the table to where he could face both of us.

'That brings me to the reason for making two sets of drawings. I could have used Excalibur itself to highlight the differences in the two, but in the preparation for this meeting, I chose to make two sets of drawings, so we will be comparing like to like. Look here."

His index finger swooped to touch on the drawing of the ornately carved and decorated bar of Excalibur's cross- hilt. "This workmanship is superb. Unique and pure Celtic. Loops and twining branches, thorns and leaves, with every detail perfect. Whoever did this was a master. But I see no need to have anything resembling that on the new sword. A plain crossbar is all we need for that one—a functional guard against accidental dismemberment, as I remember you described it, Ambrose. Plain, simple, straight bar of metal—fundamentally an abnormal, lateral extension of the standard boss with no adornments at all, that's what's called for here.

"Same thing with the hilt and the pommel. We'll pour the whole thing, of course, so the pommel will be poured as part of the mould and it won't look anything like the cockleshell on the real one. But there's a problem there, perhaps minor, although it could be major. Either of you have any idea what I'm talking about?"

I glanced at Ambrose, and both of us shook our heads. "What is it?" I asked.

"Weight, and perhaps balance, since the one affects the other. Weight is the one that concerns me. We've weighed the sword, as it is, but I've no idea of the individual weights of the various elements—the blade itself, minus the hilt, for example—but most particularly the weight of the cross- hilt. That is a big, heavy cross bar, functional and solid, built to be a strong protector against other blades, but the decorations on it there are deeply graven, almost as if they were incised, although we know that's not so and they were simply poured into the shaped mould. There's a profusion of them, and it doesn't take a sorcerer's eye to see that. Not an unused thumb pad's width on the whole thing, front and back. Replacing that with a plain bar of iron's going to throw the weight right off, because all those deep grouts between the upraised figures will now be filled with solid metal."

I raised a hand to stop him. "It doesn't have to be a perfect duplicate, Joseph. There's no need for that degree of nicety."

"Isn't there, Master Cay? You told me you required a duplicate. A duplicate is a perfect replica. Besides, if it's too different, the balance is likely to be as ill bestowed as in a drunken man. If this new weapon is to do the job you want it to, then it behooves us to make the damn thing as close as possible to a perfect twin of the original. And we want to get it right the first time, because it will take long months to make, and months again to remake, starting from the basic elements, if it's wrong. That would mean a complete re-start—we can't make modifications to correct errors. D'you take my meaning?"

"Aye, I do, and there's no doubt you're absolutely right. But all we require is a working replica, not necessarily a perfect duplicate. Is your brother capable of doing this?"

Joseph looked squarely at each of us in turn. "I'll tell you true, I would rather make this sword than anything else I could ever think of, and I believe I could make it as easily here as my brother can in Camulod. But common sense says differently. The forges at Camulod, built as they were by Publius Varrus and my father, are well established and the best equipped I've ever seen. Besides that, the iron statue's there, not here, and you, Ambrose, will be returning there tomorrow, so the work could be in hand within the week. Having said all that, I'll state my opinion on my brother. Carol is the only other man in Britain I would trust with such a task."

"Excellent! Then I am satisfied. Have you any other questions? Anything further you wish to discuss?"

"Aye, one thing. The colour of the blade. It's like polished silver, it's so pure, How was that achieved?"

I shook my head. "I don't know, with any kind of certainty. Publius Varrus did not write of that stage of the sword's development. But I have always assumed it worked the same way as the shine on the skystone dagger."

"On the what?"

"The skystone dagger. That was what Publius Varrus called the knife that launched him on the search for his skystone, the mysterious rock that fell from the heavens, the one from which he smelted the metal of the statue we call the Lady of the Lake. His grandfather, Varrus the Elder, had made it from the metal smelted from another, smaller skystone he had found when Publius was a mere child. That was more than a hundred years ago. Publius buried the dagger, eventually, with Caius Britannicus—his parting gesture to his finest friend. Anyway, in his writings Publius Varrus mentioned that he had asked your own father, Equus, how his grandfather had made the metal of the blade shine so brightly, and Equus responded that the brightness was already there, within the metal. They had merely had to polish it to bring it out, and the more they burnished it, the brighter it grew. That is all I can tell you."

"Hmm, Then if you're right, and if the same holds true of the metal in the statue, all we need do to keep it dull is simply to refrain from polishing or burnishing the blade. I've never seen this statue. Does it shine like the sword?"

"No, not at all, and yet it is lighter in colour than all other iron I have seen, and it does not rust—well, I suppose I can't really say that. It has never been exposed to any risk of rust. It has been sitting dry and well maintained in Publius Varrus's own Armoury since the day it was first made. The only time he removed it was when he melted it. down to obtain the metal for Excalibur, after which he resculpted it and returned it to its place in the Armoury. Is that important?"

Joseph shrugged. "Only you can answer that. You are the one who will be using the new sword. How important is it to you?"

"It isn't, but I suspect, if our conjectures prove true, that the blade will have a brightness all its own. Even so, we should warn Carol not to make it mirror-bright, like its twin, here. Our purpose in making it is not to draw attention to it—quite the opposite, in fact." I turned to Ambrose. "Will you remember all of this when you speak to Carol, Ambrose, or should I write it down?"

He shook his head. "No need. The drawings are all I will require. I won't forget a word of this discussion or the ones that went before. My head works well, in such matters."

"One more thing I have to ask," Joseph resumed. "Perhaps the most important. How big is this statue, this Lady? I mean, is there enough metal in it to make another sword?"

I gazed at him, speechless and suddenly filled with apprehension. "I have no idea," I said. "I mean, I know how big the statue is now, but I never saw the original, so I have no way of knowing how much metal Varrus took from it to make Excalibur. I've always presumed he took half, but that is sheer presumption. What will we do if there is not enough metal?"

"Well, we will find out early in the proceedings, as soon as we begin to melt it down and turn it into work rods, because we know the number, weight and dimensions of what we require. But by God's bones, we might end up making a scaled-down version, according to what we have to work with. Will that suffice, if it should come to that?"

I shrugged. "I suppose so, but I really can't see that being the case. The statue must be at least three times, perhaps five times or more the weight of Excalibur. I haven't tried to carry it in years, not since I was a boy, but I recall its being very heavy."

"Aye, for a boy." Joseph made a harrumphing sound. "Well, it needs must be twice the weight, at least, for I'll guarantee that half the original weight will be chiseled out and filed away. On the other hand, if you are right and it's five or six times the weight, we may be able to make two of them."

"That would be most unlikely, I should think." I glanced at Ambrose. "What do you think, Ambrose?"

"I'm the last person you should ask. I've seen the statue, but I've never paid much heed to it. It is not the most beautiful sculpture in the world. It is large, though, I remember that." He paused, and then pointed to the set of drawings that I myself had found so strange and incomprehensible. "What are these things, Joseph, these strange symbols?"

Joseph glanced at me and grinned. "Do you know what they mean, Cay?"

When I shook my head, Joseph moved to unwrap the long cloth-wrapped bundle that had clanked so heavily when Ambrose laid it down, and we watched curiously as he extracted a longish, boss-hilted sword, in the style of a Roman cavalry spatha, together with a handful of plain, thin iron rods about the length of his arm, from wrist to shoulder, approximately two handspans. Some of them were round in section, less than the tip of a man's little finger in diameter, others flattened into strips.

Joseph offered the sword, hilt first, to Ambrose. 'That is the finest blade I ever made." He nodded towards the iron rods. "Do you know what those are?"

Ambrose smiled, looking from the sword he now held to the rods.

"Joseph, I have a feeling you will be unsurprised when I tell you I have no idea."

"Well, those are working rods. They're the next sword I will make." He reached into the bundle again and brought out a large, shapeless lump of pasty, whitish material with a chalky consistency and placed it beside the rods. "And this is what I'll use to help me achieve that."

Ambrose prodded the lump with the point of the spatha. "And what is that?"

"Birdshit, for the most part—pigeon dung, in fact— mixed with flour, honey, milk and a little olive oil."

I laughed aloud, for a sudden memory of my Uncle Varrus had sprung into my mind, bringing with it a recollection of many long summer afternoons spent with a small scraper and a metal container, scraping pigeon droppings from the dovecote in the Villa Britannicus, for which I was rewarded in a variety of delightful ways. Ambrose glanced at me askance, thinking we were mocking him, and I held up my hands, palms outward, shaking my head to disclaim any complicity in this.

"It's true," Joseph protested. "One of the oldest secrets of the ancient smiths. A paste made of these ingredients, and coated on the iron during heating and forging, hardens the iron." From the expression on his face, Ambrose was still plainly unconvinced and Joseph went on, laughing now, "I wouldn't lie to you in this, Master Ambrose. If you think of that lump there as being made of a hundred equal parts, then forty of those parts will be pigeon shit, twenty- one of them plain, wheaten flour, fourteen of them honey, twenty-three parts milk, and two parts olive oil. That, you'll see if you count them, makes a hundred, and if you think I came up with that out of my head, you give me too much credit. Now these—" He broke off, his hand outstretched towards the thin iron rods, and turned to me again. "May we look again at Excalibur? It will be easier to explain my point if I have it here, to show you what I mean."

I brought out the great sword and handed it to him, and he held it extended in front of him, gripping the hilt in both of his square, strong, smith's hands, his lips pursed in a low whistle of wonder.

"Even now, I can't believe this tiling exists. Look at the size of it! Unblemished, absolutely flawless. Until I set eyes on this, I would never have believed such a weapon could be made, let alone made so well. God's bones, I

know men who are not as tall as this is long from tip to tip, and so do you! No man, nor no armour in the world, could withstand such a blade." He raised it, straight- armed, until it reared above him to touch the low, vaulted roof above his head, and then he lowered it again swiftly, bringing the cross-hilt close to his face and pointing to the greatest width of the blade as he addressed himself again to Ambrose.

"Look you here, now, at this portion, the thickest and the strongest section. It is, what? three and a half, four fingers wide? Now look here, where the twin blood channels begin, and note the depth to which they sink. Note, too, the patterns in the metal. You see them?"

"Aye, the wavy lines. What causes those?"

'The forging of the sword. Now look here at the parchment and learn a little of the weapon-maker's craft. These marks that mystified you are easily explained." He indicated the strange, stylized markings that had puzzled us.

"If you count, you'll see the entire process of making a sword blade, right there, in ten descending steps. It's an oversimplification, of course, and it gives no indication of the amount of work involved, but to a smith's eye, it's absolutely simple and straightforward. The trick is to realize that you're looking at the thickest part of the blade, the piece I just pointed out to you, just beneath the cross-hilt. Look at the bottom one first. If you were mad enough to saw through the blade at that point, just beneath the cross- guard, and look directly at the sawed-off stump of it, that's what you would see. Then, moving back up to the top one step at a time, you see a reversal of the smithing process, all the way back to the seventeen narrow rods of plain, wrought iron that you started with. Can you see it? Cay, can you?"

I nodded, for what he had described was the missing step between reading Uncle Varrus's observations and notations and seeing them put into effect in very simple terms. Ambrose, however, had never met or known Publius Varrus and had probably never set foot inside a forge. He was staring in perplexity at the drawing. Joseph watched him.

"You have a question, Master Ambrose. Ask away."

"The three large black dots, marked as 'twisted and forged.' What does that mean? I can see the seventeen rods on the first line becoming the flattened and squared pieces on the second, but where did the three come from?"

"Here, here and here," Joseph answered, tapping a finger on the second line. "See, there are three sets of five black rods divided from each other by two whites. Each of those sets of five black rods—three flat in the middle and one square on each flat side—is twisted and forged into a single spiralled rod. We coat each strip of them in the bird dung mixture, bind them together with wire, fire them up, weld one end, just to hold them together, and then clamp that end in a vice. Then, using tongs, we twist the other ends into a spiral. It's tricky, and it takes a long time and many heatings of the metal, because it can only be done when the iron's yellow-hot and soft, and it loses its heat quickly—but in the end, provided you don't do anything stupid, you end up, in each instance, with a single, tightly wound, spiralled rod of layered iron. That's where those markings along the edges of the blade and in the blood channel come from."

He reached over and pulled several pieces of parchment towards him, layering them carefully, one atop the other, so that the deckled edges showed as a succession of tiny steps. "See that, the pretty way the edges flow together? Same thing happens with the iron. You twist five flat straps of metal into a spiral, and you end up with a rod that has twenty grooves running its length—four edges for each strap, you see? Then you heat the whole thing up again and pound it with a smith's hand maul until it's flat again, and you see those markings in the iron, where the edges have been hammer-fused so flat that all they leave are line markings."

"But why go to so much trouble, Joseph? Why not just work with one thick piece of iron in the first place? And why the pigeon dung? I don't follow any of that."

I crossed my arms and leaned my buttocks comfortably against the table as I heard the incomprehension in my brother's voice. I had no urge to interrupt, even though I could have answered his first question, at least. In response, Joseph picked up one of the thin, round rods and casually bent it into a circle shape with his hands, then handed it to Ambrose.

"Wrought iron is too damn soft, in its natural state. Don't ask me why, or why it changes character when you layer it and forge it in multiple strips, because I can't tell you. But I can tell you that if you try to twist a single piece of iron into a spiral, sooner or later it will break, and usually sooner than later. So we layer the strips and twist them, and they reinforce each other. As we do that, even before we do it, we coat the individual strips with the heating mixture. I only know it works, and smiths have been using it for hundreds of years because the simple truth is that a spiral rod made that way is harder, and tougher, than an identical rod made the same way, without the mixture.

"Adding the mixture demands an additional degree of care in the heating process. We can't simply coat the rods and thrust them into the coals—the paste would simply burn away. So we smear on the paste, pack the bundles in it, wrap them in cloth and tic them with string. Then we pack the whole thing again, this time in sand, in what we call a gutter trough. That done, we heat the package in a wood fire to orange-red heat for a couple of hours, and then allow everything to cool. Take my word for it, those rods, when the time comes to twist them, are much harder to manipulate than the untreated rods.

"Now, if you look again at the second line, there, you'll see that only two of the sets of rods—the outer sets—are marked for heat treatment. That's because they're the two that need to be hardest. The central piece won't need to do the work of the two outside rods. Its prime function is simply to support the others. The three rods, though, in their upper extensions—about a handspan in each case—will not be welded together. They will form the triple tang on which we'll build the hilt and cross-guard. So, there you have it. The secrets of a sword-maker."

"Not all of them." Ambrose was still frowning. "How is the welding done?"

"By heating and forging. We heat the metal to a yellow heat and beat it. In the beating, the components are welded together perfectly."

"Hmm. I didn't know that. There are two more bars here, of a different shading, marked as cutting edges. How do they differ from the black rods?"

Joseph sniffed and sighed, but showed no other sign of impatience with my brother's curiosity. "In two ways, which are really only one. First, it is but one rod, folded almost double and clamped into place along the outer edges of the pre-shaped blade core so that it follows the taper of the blade. Bear in mind what I said earlier—the drawing you are looking at is a section of the blade, through the thickest part of it. The edger is a long rod, at least twice the length of the others, and in the case of this sword we are contemplating, it will be very long indeed, requiring much time to make.

'The second difference is that it will be hardened with the paste treatment, then worked, or forged, for a longer time than the three central rods, since it has to be the strongest, keenest part of the blade. Hence the shading— that indicates the importance of the piece. When it has been added, and welded to the core, and if the smith has done everything with absolute correctness, then nothing remains but long, hard hours and days and weeks of chiselling and final shaping, and filing and polishing, followed by the process of pouring and finishing the hilt. And talking of pouring and finishing, my hot wine is cold and unfinished. Cay, have you more of it?"

"Aye, on the hob there." I paused. "What was that?"

The others stiffened, listening, but there was nothing. Joseph looked at me, frowning.

"What did you hear?"

"I don't know, but ... " As I spoke, I recognized what I had heard. "The wind has died down. It was the sudden silence that I heard."

Ambrose got up and crossed to the door, opening it and leaning out. Through the open doorway I could see that it was already approaching dusk. He straightened up and closed the door again.

"You're right. The rain has stopped, too. Are we going to eat tonight?"

Joseph barked a laugh. "Aye, but not for another hour or two, at least. It's early yet. That's not the real night you can see out there. The storm clouds have simply eaten the sun. Dinner's nowhere near being ready. I came through the kitchens on my way here. The fires were not even alight yet."

Dinner, a communal affair, was always served in the common mess hall in one of the refurbished barracks blocks just after full darkness had fallen, although that would change as high summer approached. Suddenly, however, the mention of dinner made me realize that I was hungry, and I remembered that I had not eaten since breakfast.

I reached for the jug of wine on the hob by the brazier, pleased with what we had achieved and knowing we had time to finish off the honeyed wine at our leisure. The others accepted a cupful each, and thereafter we sat talking quietly for a spell, replenishing our cups from time to time, enjoying the heat from the fire and the equally welcome heat from the warmed wine. Eventually our conversation died away completely, so that for a long time the only sound in the room was the guttering of the flames in the brazier accompanied by the occasional soft crunching of settling coals, and I found myself dozing contentedly in my chair. Suddenly Ambrose startled me wide awake again by jerking himself to attention, listening.

"What was that?"

"What? I heard nothing."

He glanced at me, then tilted his head backward. "Listen."

We listened, not knowing for what, and then the door shuddered in its frame in concert with the shutters on the windows.

"Damnation!" Joseph rose to his feet and crossed to the door, opening it to look outside, where it was now full night. Two hours at least must have elapsed, I realized, while we sat at our ease before the fire. As the thought occurred to me, the door was torn from Joseph's hand and blown back to slam against the outside wall and a gust of bitterly cold wind whirled into the room, fluttering one unweighted corner of the parchment on the table, extinguishing several candles and making the brazier flare up in a shower of sparks. Joseph leaped outside and in again, pulling the door with him and fastening it securely, after which he turned to look at us in disgust, wiping his hands on his tunic. His hair was tousled and his tunic splattered with heavy raindrops.

"So much for the passing of the storm," he said. "It was regrouping, not retreating."

I saw the woman Tressa at dinner that night and, as had been the case in every instance since I first saw her, once I had noticed her I remained disconcertingly aware of her presence.

Because of the foulness of the weather, there were no absentees from the dining hall on that occasion and the building was crowded, with every table occupied and a mass of children far more noisily in evidence than was normal. I remarked on that to Shelagh when I first arrived with Joseph and Ambrose, and she said it was because the weather had forced the children to remain indoors, depriving them of the opportunity to wear themselves out in their normal fashion and thereby keeping them awake and boisterous when they would normally be ready for their beds.

Ambrose went immediately to sit with Ludmilla and Donuil and Shelagh, where a place had been reserved for him beside his wife and between her and Arthur, Bedwyr, Gwin and young Ghilleadh. I moved with Joseph to sit with Lucanus, Rufio, Dedalus and Mark at a nearby table that was free of children.

Lucanus was in fine fettle that night, and he soon became embroiled in a debate with Dedalus, concerning the relative merits of work horses as opposed to cavalry mounts, that kept all of us vastly entertained. Lucanus, while admiring all living creatures thanks to his calling, had no great love of riding horses, and the discussion was lively and good-naturedly acrimonious, so that eventually others began to drift towards our table, attracted by the hilarity. Soon there was no room for anyone else to sit. Even so, Ambrose arrived after a time and sat himself down beside me, encouraging me with a thrust of his hip to squeeze up closer to Joseph, sitting on my left, and make room for him.

It was at that moment, as I laughingly complained about my brother's rude insistence, that I once again noticed Tressa, bringing a basket of fresh bread loaves to our table. From that moment on I barely paid attention to what was being said around me. My eyes followed her as she moved here and there about the hall fetching and carrying and making sure that supplies of food were replenished as they dwindled. She was not working as a servant, here. It had become traditional for the women to take it in turns to serve the food at night, and those who were sitting to dine tonight, Shelagh included, would serve at other times.

A particularly loud burst of raucous laughter from my companions recalled me, and I looked around to find everyone's eyes on me. My instantaneous reaction was to flush, thinking they had been watching me watching Tressa, but it quickly became apparent that they were all waiting for me to respond to something that had been said while I was distracted.

"Forgive me," I said, shaking my head as if to clear it. "I was somewhere else. Did someone ask me something?"

"Aye," Dedalus said, his big face creased in a huge grin. "I asked you what you're going to ride when that big black horse of yours breaks down, finally, beneath the weight of you." This brought another loud burst of laughter, and I realized that I had truly lost track of their discussion, for I had no idea what they all found so amusing. I took refuge in bluster.

"If you're speaking of Germanicus, Master Dedalus, I'll have you show him more respect. He has borne my weight now for more than a decade without the slightest sign of growing tired."

"Oh, no doubt, no doubt at all, but it's not your mount's redoubtable strength we're talking about here, Master Cay, it's the growing weight of you!"

"What are you saying?" I looked down at my midriff, searching for signs of growing girth that might have escaped me. "Are you saying I am growing fat?"

More hilarity greeted this, and Lucanus leaned forward to look at me from his end of the table. "No, Cay, Ded is but making fun of you, since it's obvious you have not been listening. We were talking about how the armour of our troopers has proliferated since we first began to ride as cavalry. Their armour, and hence their overall weight, has been increasing steadily, while our horses seem to have reached the limit of their growth in recent years. That's when Ded made a remark that you, with your size and the weight of your chain-armour shirt and leggings beneath your cuirass and your greaves, plus all your saddlery and weapons, must one day kill your horse."

I looked around the table, where everyone had fallen quiet. "Well," I said, into the silence, "since death comes to all living things in time, I'll find another like him. Perhaps not his equal, for he has no equal, but akin to him."

"Not here, you won't," Ded growled. "Not down in Ravenglass, or anywhere else outside of Camulod. Our mounts are horses. All else that passes for horseflesh up here is built for midgets, not for cavalry troopers, and most certainly not for giants like you."

I gazed at my large friend, accepting the truth in what he was saying. I had, in fact, no substitute for Germanicus. It was a lack that would have to be soon corrected.

The realization reminded me of another matter that had been bothering me intermittently, each time I thought upon our presence here. Five years, as I had planned, was to be the maximum length of our stay in Mediobogdum. By that time, Arthur would be thirteen, almost ready to assume his role in life. He would also have outgrown his lovely little black-and-white pony. But that was not important now. What was important was that much could happen within five short years, and we were ill prepared, up here in our isolated mountain fort, to deal with any concerted attack that might, somehow, avoid the notice of our Ravenglass neighbours. Now I nodded to Dedalus, concurring in his judgment.

"You're right, of course, and it's too serious a matter to be jesting over. I'll think about some way of changing things."

Dedalus nodded, sober-faced now, and turned his attention to the man opposite him, who had made a comment on some other matter. I turned my back on all of them to speak with Ambrose.

"You recall the conversation we had about an escape route through the valleys at our back, to the great Roman north-south roads?" He nodded. "Well, it has just occurred to me that we might have a requirement to use it as an adit, long before we have a need to use it for escape. You heard what was just said. It makes sense. We will soon need more horses up here, and it's a major task to ferry them on Connor's galleys, in the numbers that we will require."

"How many might that be?"

I shrugged. "I don't know, but we could use a score and more tomorrow, were they available, and it would not hurt us to have some extra manpower on hand, either. Would it be feasible, think you, to send a squadron of troopers up here by road, as escort to a small herd of stock?"

"Stock?" He looked at me askance. "You mean breeding stock?"

"No, riding stock. We've no need to breed any, and we have no pasture to allow it, even did we wish to."

Ambrose was silent for a moment, mulling over what I had said, and as I waited for him to respond, I found myself looking for Tressa again. I found her close by, leaning across to wipe the chin of one of the children at a neighbouring table. As I watched the way her skirts stretched across the curve of her buttocks, Ambrose broke in on my thoughts.

"She's a good-looking one, that, isn't she? She'll be keeping some lucky lad warm on the cool nights. Is she attached?"

"No, not yet. She's one of the newcomers, and single." I saw no point in attempting to deny that I knew who he meant.

"Hmm. Well, it should be interesting to see who wins her, for I'll wager every single soldier in the place will try. Does she interest you?"

"How could she? She's half my age."

He looked at me in surprise, one eyebrow climbing high on his forehead. "What in the name of all the gods at once has that to do with anything? If she is old enough to mount, that's all that should concern you. I have no doubt you're young enough to mount her."

I cut him short. "Enough of that. What were you thinking about after I asked about the horses?"

I saw the hesitation in his eyes as he wondered about my reaction to his mention of the woman, and then his expression altered as he evidently decided to abandon the topic.

"The squadron of troopers. It must be close to two hundred miles from here to Camulod, and that's too far to send a mere forty men to escort a score of prime horses through unknown and hostile territory. They'd have their hands full tending to the stock if anything went wrong, and if they encountered serious opposition on the road, we might lose all of them, horses and men."

I sighed. "It was just a thought. But you're right, it would be folly. We'll have Connor bring a few mounts each time he comes this way. It will take time, but we'll have enough, eventually."

"No, no, no, Cay. You misunderstood me. I was not. saying it could not or should not be done. All I meant was that a squadron would be much too small a force. It will require at least two squadrons, supported by a maniple of infantry."

"A maniple? A full hundred and twenty men? You can't mean that, Brother."

"Of course I can. Think about it—our garrison stands at full complement in Camulod today, and we are at peace. Our soldiers need to be challenged. What better training exercise could there be than an expedition to explore the lie of the land and the condition of the people and townships, as well as the roads themselves, between Camulod and here? If they proceed in sufficient strength, they will have no difficulties winning through, and they will have to forage as they go, to feed themselves. I think it's an excellent idea. It will achieve a multiplicity of things, testing both men and officers, challenging them in every way conceivable, and adding invaluable information to our knowledge and understanding of the conditions in the heartland of the country, including the condition of the major roads.

"Camulod has great things to gain from such a venture and, as I see it, little to lose. The men dispatched will see it as a furlough—two months away from garrison duty. I can't see it taking less time than that. They won't be on a route march, but on an information-gathering expedition. We'll send clerks with them, to write down and define the matters they find and explore. And we'll send three squadrons of cavalry, two of them to return while the other one remains with you and returns to Camulod with the next expedition, for once we start this program of discovery, we'll have to maintain it, and I am sure we will wish to. I think you have come up with a superb idea. I'll put it into effect when I reach Camulod, and in fact, I'll head the first expedition myself. I'll wager my largest concern will be in choosing from among the volunteers."

"Excellent! So be it. I'll be looking forward to the first arrivals."

I felt absurdly pleased with myself, and my chest swelled in pleasurable anticipation as I looked about me again, quite openly and brazenly this time, in search of Tressa. As I found her, I saw Shelagh watching me, a tiny smile on her lips. So intent was I on Tressa, however, that the sight of that small, knowing smile did not disturb me nearly as much as it might have. I was euphoric and carefree and unheeding of restraint or common sense. For reasons that I cannot quite define now, even after having thought of them at various times during all the years that have passed since that night, my mind was set upon the straightforward contemplation of an alluring and provocative woman. A woman who, my intellect informed me, would be more accessible than Shelagh and much more amenable to being approached.

I do believe, in fairness to myself, that I might have experienced some short struggle with that strait-laced part of my inner self that had made so much, in recent months and years, of my need to seek and achieve celibacy and self-mastery, but if that was the case, it was a short-lived struggle. I felt young and virile at that moment, charged with a young man's potent imperatives. Then Luke's voice drifted to me from farther down the table, and I resolved to speak with him again, and soon. I turned back to the conversation at the table, and Tressa passed from my sight, but not from my thoughts.

TWELVE

"Well, Brother, what do you think?"

We were standing side by side, huddling half out of the wind and rain beneath the gabled eaves at the eastern end of the roofed stable, across from the barracks block in which I lived. The storm had raged all night unabated. As we watched our companions making their final preparations for the journey into Ravenglass, it was already considerably more than an hour after dawn, although only our minds told us the truth of that. There was little evidence that the sun had, in fact, risen. At that moment we were surrounded by a freakish and impenetrable fog: roiling, billowing masses of low, heavy clouds, churned by the howling wind, obscured everything from view beyond a score of paces in any direction; their density and volume safeguarded them against the fury of the gale, which would otherwise have shredded and scattered them to nothingness.

Ambrose said nothing for long moments, but then, when he did answer me, his response seemed contradictory to his obvious intent.

"I think we must be mad even to be considering leaving for Ravenglass now, in this weather. Even if he arrives on time, Connor will never be able to approach the harbour in a wind like this. He'll be forced to ride out the storm at sea and won't even think about coming inshore until the thing has blown itself out. When that happens, we'll know about it as soon as Connor does, since we are no more than twelve miles inland, and by the time we travel from here to there, he will be approaching anchorage and our reunion will be timely and opportune."

"But ... ?"

"But what? No buts, Cay. You asked me what I think and I told you—"

"Aye, and I could hear your reservations." I leaned close to him, shouting into the wind that had suddenly swelled to howl around and between us. "You are thinking about the fact that everything is ready now, for departure, and we spent much of last night making it so. And you're influenced by the fact that so many of our people are up and astir already, dressed for the weather and prepared to defy it, cheerfully or otherwise."

The wind dropped away again, leaving me shouting at the top of my voice. Germanicus sidled nervously. I curbed, him tight and continued, moderating my tone. "And on top of all that, you're angry at the weather itself, determined not to let it beat you. You don't want to let it push you into a position that you might later see, in your own mind, as weakness."

As I finished speaking my brother turned towards me in mocking disbelief, his mouth hanging open in exaggerated awe. "There you go again," he said. "You and your foreknowledge! How could you possibly know that? How could you know what I was thinking?"

I laughed outright at him and punched him on his mailed arm. "Idiot! You know as well as I do I've been thinking exactly the same things. I'll wager most of the others have, too. Each one, if you ask him, will probably admit that he has been thinking, longingly, about his warm bed, wishing he had stayed in it this morning instead of dragging himself out here to face a long, cold, wet and windy journey when there's really no need for it."

At this point, protected as we yet were under the stable's roof, everyone and everything was still fairly dry, although tousled and wind-blown. Only Ludmilla and Shelagh were missing, remaining sheltered indoors until it was time to leave. The others, a surprising number, had chosen to escort the Lady Ludmilla and her husband to meet the Eirish galley that would ferry them from Ravenglass back to the coastline close to Camulod. Dedalus, Rufio, Donuil and Lucanus were there, all of them wrapped, like Ambrose and me, in the dense, heavy, horsemen's cloaks of woven and waxed wool that were made to uniform specifications for all troopers by our weavers in Camulod. Arguably the most valuable foul- weather garment any of us owned, these military cloaks were modelled on those worn for hundreds of years by Roman legionaries, but had been redesigned to cover a mounted man warmly and completely, with a heavily draped, ample back that flared out to spread capaciously over the back of a horse, keeping the saddle, and hence the rider's buttocks, dry and protected.

Longinus, Derek's captain of artillery, was also there, but he was out in the roadway, sheltering from the elements for the time being beneath the leather canopy of the wagon that would transport Ludmilla and her belongings. His task in the forest completed, he was returning home to his normal duties and his family today and would ride beneath the driver's canopy on the wagon bench with Lars, Ludmilla's driver for the day.

The remainder of the party consisted of Arthur and Bedwyr, who had been permitted to accompany Arthur's uncle and aunt to bid them farewell. All four boys had sought permission to make the journey, days earlier, but in the interim the brothers Gwin and Ghilleadh had both come down with some form of sniffly sickness that had them, as Donuil aptly described it, flowing from both ends. They would now remain behind, despite their pleas to the contrary. The foulness of the weather would have kept the other two behind as well, had not Lucanus decided they would be better off out in the storm than stuck at home with their wretchedly sick companions.

As I watched the boys, admiring the confidence with which they sat their ponies, swathed in cloaks like ours but made to fit their smaller size, I noticed Dedalus coming towards me. His head was muffled in the cowl of his cape and his helmet made a bulky shape at his waist where he had fastened it to his sword belt by the chin strap.

"Cay, I'm going to go and fetch some coils of heavy rope to take with us. I'll throw them in the back of the. wagon. There's ample room. And I think we should take an extra pair of horses along, too." He glanced up at the roof above out heads as though he could see the leaden sky beyond it. "I think we might need them. There will be trees blown down everywhere, and the open roadway might have acted like a tunnel since this storm broke, channelling the wind. The road could be blocked, in places. If it is, we'll need to clear a passage for the wagon."

I glanced at Ambrose. "Ded's right. It could be a nasty journey, but the decision is yours, Brother, and now's the time to make it. Do we go, or stay and wait for the storm to blow itself out?"

Ambrose sighed and drew his cowl further over his head. His helmet, like my own, hung from his saddle bow. My horse Germanicus lifted his tail and made dung, and the warm odour of the fresh droppings mingled with the smells of wet earth and straw and horse sweat all around us.

"We go. Everything is ready, even Ludmilla. I promised Connor we would be there today, waiting for him. Neither of us considered the weather at the time, but a promise is a promise. I'll fetch the women. Tell the others to be ready."

I nodded to Dedalus, who left immediately on his own errand, and then, alerting everyone else to be ready for departure, I pulled myself up into the saddle as Ambrose disappeared through the rain in the direction of the quarters he and Ludmilla had been sharing with Donuil and Shelagh. He returned moments later, accompanied by both Women, and a very short time later we were beyond the gates of the fort, filing downward through the gusting rain to where the road led steeply down towards the valley of the Esk and Ravenglass, twelve miles away.

Four times we had to stop between our starting point and Ravenglass, to clear the road of toppled trees or massive, fallen limbs before we could proceed farther. On each occasion the effort of harnessing the extra horses and dragging the dead weight of the shattered wood aside caused us to look at each other and wonder what we were about, subjecting ourselves to such unnecessary punishment on such a day. For some reason, however, attributed much later to some communal form of madness occasioned by the storm, the complaints and wonderings remained unspoken.

We encountered the first and worst of the blockages halfway down the steepest slope from the plateau, in a spot that lay exposed to the worst of the onrushing winds. No mere fallen tree barred our way there, waiting to be dragged aside by newly harnessed, yet-fresh horses. Instead, we found a tangled snarl of interlocked branches and massive boles covering the entire roadway, an insurmountable barrier that made a mockery of our determination and should have driven us back up the hill to safety and shelter in the fort. As we sat cursing the obstruction, however, watching Dedalus explore the tangle for signs of weakness and ways of tearing the mass apart into smaller, more manageable clusters, young Arthur went exploring away from the road and discovered a route by which he thought we might be able to bypass the snarl, at the cost of only a modicum of work in cutting down a number of saplings to permit our single wagon to pass.

I went back with him to look at what he had found and discovered that he was right. There was a passage of sorts, a narrow, twisting, open way between the bare rock of the hillside and the overgrown, artificial bank of broken stone created by the debris displaced by the Roman engineers who had first built the road. It was a short bypass, adequate to our purpose, but it was a narrow, dangerous and steep descent—more of a rocky chute than a passage—cluttered in places with stunted, gnarled and ancient trees that would have to be individually removed. I assessed it carefully, then sent Arthur to bring Dedalus to look.

More than two hours later, close to noon, we re- emerged on the road beneath the blockage, soaked through and chilled, despite our celebrated foul-weather cloaks. It had taken all of us to negotiate the narrow descent; even the two women were called upon to leave their shelter and add their weight to that of the men holding the ropes, trying to keep the wagon from breaking away and smashing itself on the rocks all around. We wasted no time in self- congratulation but remounted and continued on our way, nursing our individual miseries. Compared to that episode, the struggles with the three remaining deadfalls were barely worthy of note. Nevertheless, it was approaching dusk on a grey, lowering afternoon before we drew within sight of the fields flanking the last three miles of the eastern approach to Ravenglass, to see the last thing any of us had expected to see.

Arthur and Bedwyr brought the tidings, because they were ranging far ahead of us as usual. They came thundering back through the driving rain, their ponies' ears flattened against their skulls, the boys themselves standing erect in their stirrups and shouting, waving wildly to gain our attention.

"Men! Raiders!"

My mind accepted and absorbed the information instantly, without pause for wonder or curiosity. I sank my spurs into Germanicus's flanks and I was aware, as the big black horse's muscles bunched and uncoiled beneath me, his shod hooves striking sparks from the cobbled road, that my brother and at least two of the others were close behind me. And then I was reining in, dragging Germanicus back, almost to his haunches, as I looked and sought to make sense of what I was seeing through the misty curtain of rain that hampered my vision. Ambrose was beside me now, Donuil, Dedalus and Rufio slightly ahead of me and to my right. Arthur and Bedwyr were behind me, keeping out of my line of sight, I knew, lest I should notice them and send them back to safety with the wagon.

In the distance, barely visible through the driving rain and further obscured from view by the mud that coated them, a score or so of men were making their way in a straggling line across the fields, travelling southward; from our right to our left. Even from where we watched we could see that all of them were too tired for running. Dedalus turned and shouted to me over the noise of the wind.

"They're Eirish, but what are they doing out here?"

Ambrose shouted back, asking the question that was in my mind. "How do you know they are from Eire?"

"Their shields. Donuil, am I right?"

Donuil nodded. "Aye, the shields are Eirish, but the men are not ours. I thought at first they might be Connor's people, since he's expected today, but they're not. They look like Condran's folk, from here. But where have they come from and why would they be coming from the north? There can't be any more than a boatload of them, so they wouldn't be thinking of attacking Ravenglass, even from the rear."

"They're a rabble, too. Let's ride them down."

"No, wait!" I raised my hand, to hold Dedalus back. "You're right, Ded, they do look less than threatening, but let's think for a moment, before we go charging down on them, because Donuil's right, too. Why would they be coming from the north and attacking, in the condition they're in? A mass landing in the north to circumvent the town's harbour walls might make some sense, and Condran might have a leader clever enough or desperate enough to try it, but that would field an army, not a mere boatload."

"It's the storm!" Rufio's head was nodding as he spoke.

"What?"

"The storm! They've been blown ashore, I'll wager, their galley wrecked."

"Damnation! Of course! And they're headed for Ravenglass because they think there's safety there. The town must be under attack from the remainder of their fleet, despite the storm." I stood in my stirrups and looked back to where our solitary wagon sat motionless, some fifty paces behind us.

"Arthur, Bedwyr, back with you to the wagon and make sure that Lars and Longinus keep it well back, away from danger for the sake of the women. Go, now!" As the boys left, unwillingly and showing great disgust, I turned back to the others. "We'll close with them, but keep to the road until we are between them and the town. Once there, we can turn and face them. If they hold the pattern they have now, strung out as they are, we'll be able to roll them up like a strip of parchment. Let's go!"

None of us was ever in the slightest danger. As I had suspected, the sight of five heavily armed and armoured men on massive horses dismayed the bedraggled strangers and extinguished whatever fire might have remained in their hearts. Even before we drew abreast with them, with half the width of the field between them and the road on which we galloped, they faltered and stopped their advance, bunching together as they gaped at us. The wind that had been buffeting all of us for hours stilled abruptly. When we reached the point closest to them I called for the others to halt and ordered them to don their helmets. The mere sight of us sitting there on horseback, facing them and taking the time to throw off our hoods and strap on our heavy helmets, caused them to begin moving backwards, although they faced us still. Rufio's horse reared and whinnied—an angry, impatient sound in the silence of the suddenly windless day.

"How should we do this?" Dedalus asked, his voice sounding preternaturally calm and quiet.

"Line abreast, and not too quickly. Take your speed from me. We'll give them time to absorb the sight of our advance, but bear in mind, all of you, the going will be heavy. Our horses will sink in the mud the moment we leave the road, so be prepared. We'll take the largest group first, those twelve on the right, then veer left and take the next largest and any foolish enough to stand between the two. That should do it. If they choose to fight, so be it. Should they run, however, let them go, don't chase them. I think we might be better occupied in getting to the town without loss of time."

I unhooked the heavy iron flail that hung by its handle from my saddle bow and slipped my hand through the leather loop to grasp the short, thick handle, flexing my wrist against the weight of the weapon and very much aware of the lethal iron ball dangling on the end of its short chain. I glanced along our little line: Rufio on the left, then Dedalus, Ambrose, myself and Donuil. Rufio and Donuil both held spears. I had my flail and Ded and Ambrose both held long cavalry swords. I kneed Germanicus forward, off the road, and as I did so, without any warning, the rain stopped and a glimmer of bright light pierced the cloud cover, so that the sudden cessation of hissing sound and movement gave the entire scene, for a fleeting, transitory moment, an appearance of bright, gleaming, silent unreality. Then we were moving again, the sound of our horses' iron-shod hooves loud on the cobbles of the road before they stepped off into the mud of the field.

The first group we approached, a huddle of twelve men, bunched together even more closely as they watched us coming. But then, when we had halved the distance separating us from them and just before I urged my horse into a canter, when I was beginning to think they might break and run, they split apart and began running awkwardly towards us in a pincer movement, weapons drawn, evidently intent upon surrounding us. As soon as they did so, others who had been watching made shift to join them. I sank my spurs into Germanicus, feeling him surge beneath me.

"They're going to fight! Keep moving, through them and back again. They won't last long."

Nor did they. Three of them died on first contact, two on the spears of my companions and one by my flail, picked up and cast away like a shattered doll, his metal breastplate crushed and ruined by the iron clang of my backhanded, over-arm blow. I had already chosen my next target, but as he saw me look at him and sway my horse towards him, he turned and fled, his feet skidding and sliding in the treacherous, thick mud beneath his feet. I caught up with him in moments, towering above him. I could see his panic in the way he ran, cowering and flinching, cringing from my anticipated blow. Much in me wished to spare his life, to let him go, but there was a clarion need, too, in my mind, to demonstrate that we were here apurpose and were to be reckoned with. Clemency now might—and almost certainly would— be construed as weakness. I swung, hard, whirling the ball high and pulling it over and down and around even harder, backhanded, so that it struck the running man between the shoulders, rising upward, driving the breath and life from him in an audible grunt, smashing his spine and lifting him off his feet to throw him forward, his arms outstretched, to fall sprawling in the mud.

Now I reined in Germanicus, seeing the fleeing Ersemen everywhere. My companions had already stopped and were all watching me. I wheeled my horse and moved back towards the road, and the others fell into place beside and behind me as I passed. All of us knew now what needed to be done; we had to ride to Ravenglass immediately and hope that we were not too late and not too few to help. I stood in my stirrups and waved to Lars in the distant wagon to come now and follow us, and then we were on the move again, all five of us filling the width of the roadway as we rode abreast.

Eyes moving constantly, alert to the danger of entrapment and lurking bowmen, we traversed the short length of forest-lined road between the first of the fields and the outermost edge of the town that had grown up beyond the walls of the harbour fort. At the town itself, we reined our horses to a stop. Nothing moved anywhere, nor was there any sound to be heard except the clatter of one set of hooves from behind us, where Longinus appeared, riding Shelagh's mount, pale-faced and tense with the effort of clinging on to the moving animal. I had no need to ask why he was here; Ravenglass was his home, and his place was there, commanding its artillery. I took hold of his horse's bridle as he clattered up to us and stopped.

"the outer town's deserted." Rufio's voice was rough. "They've all gone inside the walls."

"Aye, but why? I can't see any reason, can you? There's no threat here, no enemy."

Longinus was looking around him as he spoke, as were we all, and it seemed he was right. We were the only people in the outer town. We moved forward, alert for any sign of danger, and as we approached the walls of the fort itself," the missing sounds of the town began to make themselves heard from the safety of the other side. Then I saw movement above and realized that, for the first time since our arrival the previous year, the eastern walls of Ravenglass were manned. The guards were alert, too, but there seemed to be little urgency in their demeanour. They had recognized Longinus immediately, and the outer gates swung open to admit us. Longinus dismounted at once, nodding to me as he handed me the reins of his horse, then made his way swiftly and directly, I had no doubt, to the distant western wall and his beloved catapults.

Relieved that there seemed to be no immediate danger, Ambrose left at once to return and escort Ludmilla, who would, he knew, be concerned about what had been happening, and Donuil accompanied him to rejoin Shelagh for the same reasons. The rest of us, Dedalus, Rufio and I, entered the fort together and went looking for Derek, our ears and minds filled with overheard snatches of conversation and conjectures describing the storm, wrecked galleys and drowned men.

We found Derek up on the western wall overlooking the harbour, and as I mounted the stairs I saw Longinus standing with him, bent forward as he peered down from the battlements. I was surprised to see that there were relatively few defenders up there, but before I could say anything Derek nodded to us and pointed with his thumb in the direction of the wharf beyond the wall.

"The gods were looking after us last night. Look over there."

There have been times in my life when my mind has been swamped and confounded by overwhelming impressions. One of those moments came upon me when I crossed to look down from the battlements into the harbour beneath. What I saw remains with me in images that rear behind my eyes, defying me then and ever since to find words to describe it.

Chaos and madness and unbridled destruction: half and more of the long, seaward-pointing pier of thick oak trunks and planks splintered to ruin, shattered and ruptured amid a nightmarish confusion of sunken, upended and overturned galleys scattered the length and breadth of the harbour; barnacled bottoms pointed skyward, yawing sluggishly in the dying current; shattered keels, broken masts and spars; drifting, torn and severed ropes and frayed, unravelled cables; drowned, bobbing bodies twisting in scores; swirling, scummy broken water, heaving and surging; gleaming, glistening piles and heaps of seaweed everywhere, torn from its roots and cast up by raging waves on to the wharf road along the bottom of the wall; corpses littering the shore and sprawled at the base of the wall where they had been thrown by the same waves' fury; other men scurrying among these, carrying bared blades, looking for signs of life to snuff out; everywhere the signs of overwhelming tragedy and the awful, blasting power of nature's unrestrained rage. And oars everywhere, littering the surface of the sea like impossibly straight, leafless branches, while on the straight upstanding stern of one sundered galley, a scattering of arrows stood in the wood of the planking, the only evidence among the carnage, save for the scurrying scavengers beneath, that men had been involved in dealing death here.

Incapable of speech, I fumbled at my helmet straps and bared my head. Derek stood watching me, saying nothing. Finally, I found something to do. I began to count the shattered galleys. I lost count at fourteen and blew out a deep, sharp breath.

"How many wrecked, do you know?"

He shrugged. "We counted twenty, but there could be more."

"God! And so many bodies. There must be a hundred there, still in the water."

"Aye, but they're the light ones. Those who were wearing armour sank and stayed down."

"Sweet Jesus! What happened? I mean, I know it was the storm, but what could have possessed their leader to allow his boats so close inshore in such conditions? He should have ridden the thing out, safe out at sea."

"Greed possessed him, and a hunger for vengeance. They thought the storm was over, and sought to surprise us in the aftermath. There was a time, last night, when the wind fell and the storm abated and it seemed for a long time to have blown over. We all thought so. It had been raging for the entire day, by then."

I nodded at his words. "Aye, we thought so, too, up in our fort. The wind died down and stillness fell and all was calm for several hours."

Derek was barely listening to me, his eyes staring out to where the low island in the bay interposed itself between the town and the open sea. When he spoke again his voice was low, as though he spoke for his own ears alone.

"It seems now, when I look back on it, as though we were becalmed for a while in a gap between two storms, and when it had moved over and beyond us, the second storm resumed more fiercely than the first had been at its worst. I have never known winds such as those. We lost two men from off the walls here, plucked up and away and blown down into the courtyard. No one can recall such a thing ever happening before." He snorted and spat wetly. "Anyway, thank all the gods, the commander of these people, whoever he might have been, judged the danger past, exactly as we did. He moved inshore in the darkness, preparing to attack us with the dawn, and when the storm returned the high tides took his fleet and dashed it to splinters here." He stepped forward to the wall and leaned out, bracing his hands on the stone parapet. "As I said, I don't know yet how many keels were lost, and we may never know, but I think we need fear little more from the Sons of Condran. Two disastrous visits in succession should destroy their taste for sacking Ravenglass."

He turned now to look closely at me for the first time since my arrival. "You, my friend, are drenched, and blue with cold, and I have been up here all day, since before dawn. Let us go and find a fire somewhere. I doubt your good-brother Connor will arrive today. Born sailor that he is, he probably held his fleet in shelter over there, in the lee of Man."

I looked to where he pointed, and though I could see nothing, I knew he meant the large island that hulked out there beyond the shores of Britain. Though I was no sailor, I had to agree. It seemed the proper thing that Connor, seeing the storm approaching from the west, would have assessed the risks and chosen to seek shelter there on Man, safe in the shadow of the island.

I sighed and cast one last long look around the death- filled bay below and then I turned away, looking down into the town. There stood the two boys, Arthur and Bedwyr, staring up at me, in their own little island of stillness among the throngs bustling around them. Derek had begun to move away and I stopped him, catching at his sleeve. He stopped and half turned, watching curiously as I crooked my index finger and beckoned to the two boys to come up. They turned to each other with incredulous grins visible even from where I stood, and then they began running towards the nearest stairs.

"What are you doing?" Derek's tone was filled with disapproval. "You think this is a sight for boys?"

"No," I responded, watching the boys' heads as they came bounding up the steps. "Not for mere boys. But for future warriors and leaders of men there is a lesson to be learned from this, I think."

Derek grunted disapprovingly but held his peace thereafter. When the boys arrived by my side I took each of them by the shoulder with one hand.

"Listen to me now, both of you. You have it in your hearts to ride to war some day, to fight and to win glory, is that not so?"

"Yes, Cay, when we are old enough," Arthur said, his eyes wide. Bedwyr merely nodded, too full of excitement to say anything.

I nodded, frowning at them. "Aye, when you are old enough." I crouched to kneel on one knee, bringing my eyes level with theirs. "Well, it may be that you will never believe this until you see it for yourselves, but there are some sights that no man ever grows old enough to countenance without pain and fear, and one of them lies now beneath us, there on the outside of the wall. I have decided you should see it. Come now and look."

I led them to the parapet and stood between them, still holding each of them by the shoulder, and I felt the stiffness that came over them as soon as they had seen and begun to absorb what lay down there. I knew it was cruel to do such a thing to them, but it really could not have been better, from my unique point of view as teacher and guide. Even faced with death on such a scale, they were yet distanced from it here on the wall top. Blood and wounds and carnage they could see, but broadly, from afar, washed and diluted by the sea and lacking detail. The glistening entrails and spilled body fluids were too far off to mark, and the foul smells of violent death would yet remain unknown to them for this time, at least. Even so, the spectacle changed and chastened them forever, in the space of brief moments, dispelling for all time the high, laughing excitement of the glory-hungry boy in each of them. When they had seen, and looked their fill, I turned them to me and spoke to them again, aware of the pallor of their cheeks and the tearful distress that filled their eyes.

"As you can see, there is no glory to be found in war, lads. The real truth of it lies there, plain to be seen—death and distress and shame and pity; squalour and filth and madness; wrack and ruin and waste and destruction; a lack of grandness and a disbelieving urge to vomit and to weep with the pity of it all. No man dies well in battle, and none dibs gloriously. If you learn nothing else today, learn this: dead men do not win wars. Dead men lose everything, including their dignity, and starting with their lives. Only living men can be victorious. No one—ever—wins in death.

"All of those lifeless men below, littering the water's edge and floating in the waves, are dead because their leader was a fool, criminally lacking in judgment. He endangered all his men and all his fleet by being too rash, and he lost all of them. Had he survived, he should be hanged for his murderous folly, for to command is to bear responsibility for the lives of each and every man in your command. Those lives are yours to spend in winning wars, but you must spend them cautiously, judiciously and with unwillingness, taking great pains to see that none of them, not one, is wasted or uselessly lost. To send men into battle, thus exposing them to death, is the responsibility Of leaders, but to squander any one of them without need is murder, plain and simple. Bear that in mind from this time on, and remember these dead hundreds here today, squandered and murdered. Now go, both of you, and find your Aunt Ludmilla. Tell her, and Shelagh, that I am with King Derek and will rejoin them soon. Off with you, now."

Derek had watched all of this in silence, offering no judgment either by his look or bearing, and he had nothing to add as we made our way down from the walls and through the fort to his great house.

THIRTEEN

I remember that storm, and that visit to Ravenglass, as marking two events: the beginning of the end of an era in my own life, predicated upon a decision I made while I was there, and the first truly discernible step towards man's estate made by young Arthur Pendragon, in confronting, contemplating and coming to terms with the concentrated death and destruction in that harbour.

Connor appeared, under sails and oars and brightening rays of light from the rising sun, two days after we arrived, confirming Derek's guess that he had anticipated the great storm aid sheltered his fleet safely in one of the coves of the large offshore island known as Man. When the weather cleared, he had set out again and on the way had met and engaged the few, straggling survivors of the Sons of Condran's fleet, sinking all of them. He was concerned over the delays and conscious of how little time remained to him to deliver his passengers safely in the south, then turn north-westward again to meet with the remainder of his fleet returning from the north on their way to Eire. Thus, he wasted no time in embarking Ambrose, Ludmilla and all their goods and was soon making his way carefully back out to sea, threading a passage through the wreckage that littered the harbour.

We watched them leave, waving from the battlements until they rounded the bank ahead of us. Then we spent three days assisting Derek's people with the Herculean task of cleaning up the detritus of the storm, salvaging or demolishing the wreckage in the harbour so that it no longer threatened other vessels, and burying those bodies we could find, knowing full well that corpses would wash up on the surrounding beaches for months afterwards.

When all that could be done had been achieved, we made our way back to Mediobogdum beneath sunny skies, surrounded by the singing of a million birds and the lush greens of new, rioting foliage that was bright, in sheltered nooks, with heady, sweetly scented blossom: apple, pear and hawthorn, white and pink.

That homeward journey passed in reflective silence, by and large, each of us dwelling, according to our natures, upon what we might have faced on reaching Ravenglass had the storm not briefly gulled our enemies. I found myself recalling it already as a tempest.

We found the tangled mass of ruined trees still in place on the hillside, blocking the steeply sloping road up to our pass. We accepted its enormous presence with stoicism and yet also with vague feelings of surprise to find it all unchanged after a week had passed. Clearing it away, with axes and saws and ropes and teams of horses, and reopening the road would be our highest priority in the days ahead. We passed it by without pausing in our ascent, however, since we had left Lars and the single wagon safe in Ravenglass to await a summons once the way was cleared; it took us but a tiny fraction of a single hour to mount the steep, bypassing defile on horseback, proceeding in single file and grateful that this time we were unhampered by the torrents of cold water that had showered on us from every tree and sapling we had passed beneath on the way .down.

I was at pains to ride dose beside Lucanus on die most difficult section of the upward slope, for I had noticed some time earlier that he seemed to be in pain and to be making great efforts to disguise die fact: his face was pale and peaked, die lines around his eyes and mouth etched more deeply than I had seen them before. I made no mention of my concern, knowing him to be quick and querulous in denying such things, as though a sickness or infirmity within himself were deadly insult to his physician's craft. Rather than alert him to my suspicions, I merely contented myself to ride close by his side, saying little but prepared to seize him .should he begin to fall. Only when we had safely passed the worst of the upward climb did I leave his side, and then I moved directly to where Donuil and Shelagh rode ahead of us, side by side, talking quietly of their own concerns. Warning them not to look back at Luke, I alerted them to my concern and arranged with Shelagh to coax him to his bed as soon as we arrived safely at the fort.

A short time after that, we breasted die last steep gradient and saw the western wall of Mediobogdum bright in the midday sun, above us to our left. Dedalus blew a blast on a coiled, copper horn to announce our arrival, and by the time we turned off the road to approach the main gates, Hector and several others were on the way out to meet us. I felt myself smiling as I saw the welcome on their faces, but the major part of my awareness was concerned with the beckoning plume of shimmering smoke wafting from the flue above the bathhouse furnace. I greeted everyone as required, then hung my helmet and swordbelt from my saddle-bow, draped my cloak across the saddle and turned Germanicus over to Donuil, after which I made my way on foot directly to the baths.

The steam room had another occupant when I arrived and I sensed his presence immediately, even though he was invisible among the swirling clouds of steam. The voice of Marie, the young carpenter, answered my greeting. He was standing against the wall when I finally saw him, and he lowered his arms from over his head as I approached, then launched into a series of questions about our journey. Loath to be coaxed into a long and unwelcome chronicle, I forestalled him with an upraised hand, shaking my head and asking his forbearance, pleading weariness and the simple need to stretch out and relax. He shrugged and smiled and nodded, accepting my demurral, and returned to what he had been doing when I entered, raising one arm and reaching behind his head to press the fingers of his hand against his spine between his shoulders while he pushed the elbow backward towards his ear with his other hand. On the point of lying down, I watched him curiously instead, noting His closed eyes and the concentration with which he held his uncomfortable position for a count of perhaps twice ten before changing over and doing die same thing with his other arm. When I asked him what he was doing, he lowered his arms and smiled at me, his face flushing red.

"I'm stretching the muscles of my arms—these ones." He squeezed the massive muscles at the back of his right upper arm with his left hand. 'They're stiff and very sore. So are my shoulders and my back muscles—my belly, too, and even my thighs. It's all this felling of trees that does it, swinging an axe from dawn till dusk every day for the past three weeks. Chopping down a healthy oak is like to chopping through a boulder, according to Longinus. He says both will destroy the sharpest axe's edge and bruise any man's muscles, and I believe him." He stopped, turned slightly to brace his left hand against the wall at his back, then raised his right foot, patching it in his right hand and swinging it up behind him so that the long, divided muscles in his thigh sprang into tension. "Crassus, a Roman- trained masseur in the baths at Ravenglass, taught me this technique of stretching aching muscles once they are warm. It's unpleasant at first, but it eases them, relieves the painfulness and stops them from cramping. I've been doing it for months, ever since we arrived here, and it is effective. And it grows easier, too, with repetition."

I was looking at him as he spoke, noticing for the first time the perfect shapeliness of the clean-lined, sharp- etched muscles rippling beneath his skin. He was magnificently made and in the very prime of his young, glowing manhood, smaller than me by almost one third my weight, I guessed, but perfectly proportioned for his size. I glanced down at my own heavily muscled body, seeing the solid thickness of my thighs and calves and my flat belly, innocent of fat, yet lacking the clean, clear muscular delineation that was so striking in young Mark.

"I don't remember you as being quite so—muscular," I said.

He had finished stretching his thighs and was now bent forward, stiff-kneed, his palms flat on the floor.. He straightened up easily and grinned at me. "I wasn't—never have been, until I came here and started swinging an axe for hours every day. There, that's all. I'm finished now. A cold plunge and a brisk towelling, and I'll be a new man. You should try it, Cay—felling trees, I mean, I think you would enjoy what it will do for you"

He picked up a towel from the bench and wrapped it around his waist before he left, and I stretched out again, settling my own folded towel beneath my head and frowning thoughtfully as the first stinging trickles of sweat broke out at my hairline and across my belly. I had grown lax with myself lately, I knew, neglecting my soldier's regimen over the course of the past winter. I would begin the following day, I decided, and spend at least a part of each morning henceforth swinging an axe against solid oak.

No one else came in to mar my solitude. I bathed at leisure, then shrugged naked into my tunic, pulled my sandals over my bare feet, and made my way to my quarters, carrying the remainder of my clothing beneath my arm, bundled into the cuirass I carried like a basket. I was anticipating a pleasurable change into fresh, clean-smelling clothes, but all thought of such things disappeared when I found the woman Tressa in my quarters. She had evidently thrown wide the shutters to air my rooms, and seeing that immediately, I also saw beyond them to where she was working in the shadowed interior with her back to me, wielding a broom.

As soon as I set eyes on ho-, without pause for thought or any kind of consideration, I spun on my heel and walked hurriedly away, afraid that she might turn and see me there. Even as I did so I was cursing myself for my cowardice, instantly angered at myself for thus cravenly fleeing the sight of a harmless young woman. It would not be accurate simply to say I was surprised and dismayed to find her there in my quarters, although I was—I was actually appalled, and I found the strength of my reaction startling enough to make me question it. When I did, I found conflicting things, strangely hidden deep inside myself, that did not please me greatly. There was no denying that some part of me had hoped to find her there; another part of me, however, a disconcertingly reproving part, had disdained the idea; and yet another large and unsuspecting part of me* the outward-facing part, appeared to me, upon examination, to have been completely unaware of any thought of her.

That latter "truth" was an outright lie, of course, and the fact that it was a lie to myself made it the more annoying. Tressa and her alluring charms, her dimpled smile, her high, proud breasts, lithe waist and swelling thighs, had seldom been out of my thoughts since the night of the storm, when I had watched her so studiously during dinner. Confronting and accepting that, at least, enabled me now to look more closely at the second part of how I felt: the disapproving censure of some other, more carefully concealed part of me. Whence had that sprung, and why so virulently?

Thinking these thoughts, I realized that I was striding along the main street of the fort like a man with a mission, and I forced myself to slow my pace until I was ambling, almost dawdling. Several people passed me, nodding silently in greeting, before I came to the rear gate and walked through to pause on the brink of the chasm where I had hovered a short time before, my arms spread like an eagle on the wind. I found a flat-topped stone outcrop, cushioned with moss, and seated myself where I could look down into the valley beneath and let my thoughts take me where they would.

This ability of mine to take myself to task and thus identify the motives that had prompted me towards a certain course of action was one that I had cultivated over long years of assiduous self-examination. I had begun questioning myself and all my motives in response to a withering criticism from my cousin Uther, who had accused me of being far too smug and all too often self-righteous, judgmental and priggish. Determined, with the arrogance of youth, to change my behaviour from that time forward, I had taught myself to question and examine myself mercilessly, coming eventually to know myself too well ever to gull myself for any length of time.

Now I brought this ability to bear upon the matter of this woman, Tressa, and upon my own very real reaction to her. I stripped myself ruthlessly of false denials and pretenses, and the last scales fell from my eyes so that I accepted what I saw, incontrovertibly, to be true: I found the woman unequivocally attractive, and was resolved to yield to the inevitable and act upon the attraction. I was left, however, with an inner conflict on the matter of celibacy, over which I had spent so many agonizing hours in die past few years. Something deep within me, some niggling voice of conscience, was displeased over that abandonment of what had seemed a glowing ideal. Now, treating the discomfort like some inedible remnant from an otherwise delicious stew, I sat there atop the cliff, beneath the high, stone walls of Mediobogdum, and chewed on it, biting and grinding at the gristly elements of my concern until nothing remained but indigestible fragments that I spat out, one by one.

My desire for celibacy—utterly genuine and heartfelt—had sprung from several sources, each of them entirely comprehensible, if not exactly laudable or logical. My lust for Shelagh was a burden I had carried for years, never satisfied and never justifiable, since it involved perfidy and betrayal to my closest friend. My commitment to chastity on that account had been flawless; celibacy, I hoped, would eventually extend that physical chastity to my unconscious thoughts. My guilt and conflict over my memories—and my two-year loss of memory—of my dead wife, while inexplicable, were nonetheless very real, and some deep- hidden part of me had sought a resolution there in celibacy, too, although I found myself incapable of defining or even delineating why I should be feeling any guilt. And then, apart from Shelagh, the only other woman to whom I had felt an attraction, the lovely Ludmilla, had loved and wed my brother Ambrose. I had no guilt there, and no lustful longings, for which I was intensely grateful. Ludmilla was my sister now, and I thought of her as such, with a fraternal love. And yet, I knew, she, too, had played a role in my attraction to the celibate state: I had dared to begin loving her and had lost her before my feelings had a chance to grow. Celibacy would have removed such a threat forever from my future;

Then had come my terrifying brush with the spectre of leprosy and the foulness of contagion. There was a binding and convincing reason for being celibate! But that had passed, with the arrival and relief of Luke's lost parchment and the shrinking size of what I had assumed to be a leper's lesion.

Amidst all these elements, there had been growing and ■ emerging the love and pride I took in young Arthur Pendragon, and the responsibility I felt for giving him all that lay within my mind and my abilities to give. I had believed that celibacy would empty my mind of all that was profane and leave me free to learn and to teach the boy. And then had come this lovely and attractive young woman Tressa.

My reactions to the merest sight of Tressa had confounded me for a time, but then I had begun to lose my fears of her, recognizing them for what they were: simple fears of rejection and of having grown too old, at forty, to be attractive to a young woman.

Beyond that, I had an illogical fear that the mere admission of being physically attracted to a woman could somehow endow that woman with power over me, and that fear persisted despite the fact that the logical part of me knew it to be untrue—Shelagh was proof of that. I also knew that being attracted by this Tressa woman was a far cry from allowing myself to be besotted by her; I knew my intellect would arm me with the means to keep myself protected from her wiles and knew, besides, that she could be no match for me in such matters. Her speech was slow and simple, her demeanour humble and submissive and her manner deferential and respectful. Her presence, therefore, might be pleasantly distracting, but it could be in no wise threatening, now that I had defined the terms within which I might deal with it.

Having settled my mind to a great degree, I turned again and walked slowly back to my quarters, where I found Tressa working still, setting the place in order against my return. I greeted her calmly, noting the pleasure with which she greeted me, and then attempted to ignore her for the time being, an effort doomed to fail because I was acutely aware of the brightness of the yellow smock she wore, and of her physical proximity.

Once I had assured her that her presence would not disturb me, I seated myself at a small table by one of the windows and busied myself with reading one of Uncle Varrus's large books, while she continued to bustle about, fulfilling the tasks set out for her by Shelagh. In so doing, however, she passed quite close to me on several occasions, and I became acutely aware of how the smell of her filled up the air between us and suffused my breathing. She had a pleasant smell, warm and clean and faintly musky with the suggestion of fresh sweat. I tried to shut it from my consciousness, but the mere awareness of it had awakened in me the realization that I sat there naked, having come from the bathhouse unclothed save for my tunic, and I found myself becoming uncomfortably engorged with lust and blank-minded with helplessness.

Tressa, of course, had no suspicion of the effect her nearness was having on me, and it was that innocence that finally enabled me to overcome my condition and once more achieve a semblance of calm. Once she saw that I was not upset or disgruntled by her presence, she began talking as she worked, prattling on in her soft Cumbrian dialect about innocuous things, and I began to find it subtly pleasant and relaxing to sit there and listen to her voice. As I had suspected from her reaction to my appearance, she had not expected my return so soon. She had been there for only a short time when I arrived, she told me at one point, shouting the words from my sleeping chamber where she was engaged in spreading fresh bedclothes on my cot, but she had almost finished now and would soon be gone, leaving me alone to recover from my journey.

As I half turned to hear her words, which came to me muffled and distorted by the doorway between us, my eyes took in the other table in the room, the main table, and now I noticed that a pile of assorted clothing, all of it mine, lay there beside a covered basket. Curious, I crossed to look more closely at the basket. Its lid opened to reveal a pincushion containing at least a score of various-sized needles and a profusion of small balls of yarn, thread and twine, all mingled with an assortment of bright-hued bits and pieces of cloth. I heard her come back into the room and move towards me, and I turned guiltily, as though she had caught me prying. She seemed unaware of my awkwardness, however, merely glancing at the pile behind me before telling me that when she had finished her first tasks, she had intended mending some of my more ill-used clothing, but that she would now wait until a more convenient time, when I was elsewhere in the fort. She moved towards the table and it suddenly seemed to me that she came looming towards me. Caught flatfooted by this unexpected approach, and incapable of speech, I moved away from her, quickly, stiffly and awkwardly, as though I feared she might attack me, and in doing so I succeeded somehow in overturning her basket, scattering brightly coloured balls of yarn all over the table and onto the floor.

Quick as a kingfisher, without a word of reproach, she bent and began scooping them up, making a lap of her skirts and dropping the balls into it as she reached and stretched to gather them, moving in a scuttling crouch that I found more erotic than erratic, revealing as it did far more of her shape than I was prepared to see. My throat swelled up with excitement and I stood transfixed, aware of a bared ankle and the swell and thrust of legs and buttocks beneath tight-stretched cloth, but incapable of removing my eyes from the sight of the hanging scoop of the bodice of her smock and the full, vibrant breasts exposed there by her posture and activity. Full knowledge of my unconfined condition came flooding back to me as I felt my loins stir and then harden rapidly, and then she caught a foot, somehow, in the fabric of her skirts and wavered, almost overbalancing and lurching close to where my phallus jutted very visibly against my tunic. I spun away from her again and strode into my sleeping chamber, swinging the door safely shut behind me and leaning back against it, hearing the thumping of my heart loud in my ears and wondering if she had seen my blatant and unambiguous arousal.

Months, now, it seemed, I had awaited this moment, only to be undone by the unforeseen clash between my own readiness and unreadiness. The fear of losing the opportunity, of frightening her off by being too importunate, loomed over me like some avenging demon. And then, still overwhelmed by panic moments later, listening with my ear against the door while my heart thudded palpably at my ribs, I heard her leave, pulling the outer door closed behind her. I leaned there, against the door, for a long time, willing my heart to slow down and attempting vainly to empty my mind of the riotous thoughts that swarmed there. When I moved out again, into the main chamber, I knew both pleasure and regret, for although I had succeeded in not alarming Tressa and damaging my own chances, I had yet lost an opportunity that might not be repeated, for Tressa was gone again, safely out of my life for the time being.

Sometime after that, when I had regained my equanimity and my sense of humour and proportion, Shelagh knocked loudly at my door and leaned inside, looking at me strangely.

"Are you well?"

"Come in," I said, squinting at her, outlined as she was against the brightness of the afternoon behind her. "What do you mean, am I well? Luke was the one who looked unwell, remember? How is he?"

She stepped inside, leaving the door ajar, and moved to lean beside the window. By now I had shed my old tunic and was dressed completely in fresh clothes. Shelagh, however, was still wearing the travelling clothes she had worn on the journey to and from Ravenglass, a suit of riding leathers fashioned of a long tunic, split to the waist on both sides and worn over soft breeches. It was modelled on my own suit of leathers, which was, in turn, modelled on the clothing worn by Publius Varrus and fashioned for him originally, prior to their wedding, by his wife, Luceiia. At first, upon seeing Shelagh riding like a man, in leather breeches, some people had been scandalized, but she had ignored their outrage, and so inured had everyone become in the interim to seeing her dressed thus that they had now lost all awareness of her sex in this particular respect.

She looked me up and down now with narrowed eyes, her head tilted to one side.

"Lucanus is well. I think he was merely tired from the journey. He's no longer young and, as you know, he never was a horseman. Riding—merely staying in the saddle— is an effort for him and it tires him quickly. As soon as he climbed down from his horse, his colour improved and he became himself again. I tried to coax him to lie down, but he would have none of it. I saw him a short time ago, sitting in the sun talking to Joseph, and he seemed perfectly at ease. How are you feeling?"

"Me? How should I be feeling? I'm no different than I was when we rode up here—in prime condition."

"Hmm. Tressa said you seemed unwell, upset."

The moment she spoke the other woman's name, I experienced a flash of revelation. Tressa, on leaving here, had gone directly to Shelagh! Of course she had, I realized now, understanding. Tressa was acting at Shelagh's behest. The knowledge made me thrill, but I was careful to conceal any sign of it from Shelagh. My thoughts and emotions were in a turmoil, but only for a few moments, after which I was in control of myself once more, and, for the first time in my memory, of Shelagh, too. I found myself smiling broadly at my lovely friend, and side-stepping.

"Ah! Tressa," I said. "Well, Tressa was in error. I am not unwell, nor am I upset. But now that you bring her name up, we two should talk of Tressa."

Shelagh shifted slightly, placing herself now directly in front of the window so that she was silhouetted against the brightness of the afternoon. She stood there for long moments looking at me, her head held high and the light behind her preventing me from seeing the look in her eyes. I waited, counting silently to ten before she responded, in a very gentle voice, "Very well then, let us talk of Tressa. What should we discuss?"

What, indeed, should we discuss? More quickly than comprehension could permit, I found myself off-balance. The simplicity and the immediacy of Shelagh's question caught me unprepared, and I realized that I could say nothing in direct response without either betraying, perhaps offensively, my sudden knowledge of what she was about, or sounding both foolish and ungrateful, or, for that matter, without sounding harshly and undeservedly critical of Tressa. I coughed, clearing my throat in an attempt to win myself some time for thought, and then I decided to take refuge in the truth.

'Tressa," I said, suddenly finding it easy to smile. "You set a trap for me, baited with Tressa."

For a fleeting instant, I saw her stiffen, as though in surprise, and then she tossed her head, although her voice, when she resumed, sounded unchanged. "A trap? You make me sound unfriendly, Caius. How would I do that, and why?"

'To lead me astray, perhaps?" I kept my tone light and friendly, part of me afraid she might take offence where none was intended.

"From what?"

· "Why, from my resolve to remain sexually unencumbered, what else?"

Again, that fleeting stillness, and then a laugh—high, clear and amused—and all I could see was the black shape of her, all detail lost against the flaring brightness of the sky. at her back.

"Unencumbered? You would see a lovely young woman like Tressa as an encumbrance?"

I waited, but she had nothing more to add, and when I was sure of that, I shrugged. "Most men who consider celibacy worthwhile would, Shelagh."

"Ah yes, of course, your celibacy."

"What? What do you mean, 'your celibacy'?"

"Just what I said, and with a heavy hint of scorn. Celibacy, in any man, is an admission of failure to live as the gods intended—but in you, my dearest friend, it is ludicrous." She straightened up, abruptly, and moved away from the window, so that I could see her face again, and I felt a surge of relief. Now she laughed aloud and moved directly to sit at the table where I had sat earlier that day.

"Why are you laughing at me?"

"I'm not." But even as she denied it, her laughter-continued, although I knew it as the laughter of a friend, containing nothing demeaning. "Come, come here and sit with me." I moved to sit across from her on the other chair and she sat still for a space of heartbeats, smiling now and shaking her head fondly. "You have the gift we share to thank for this, dear Cay, for I admit I brought Tressa to you deliberately. I saw her, in a dream one night, and saw you with her, smiling." She held up her hand- "Now, don't ask me, for I cannot say whether the dream was prophesy or no, but it was clear, and unmistakable, and wholesome. So I acted upon it."

"Whether I would or not?"

"No, for I knew you would. You need to." She shook her head, briefly and impatiently, and puffed an errant wing of hair out of her eyes. "Caius, this talk of celibacy is absurd, coming from you, and I care not for your careful, self-serving reasons. You are no celibate!" She made the word sound like catamite. "Aye, you'd have me believe you would be celibate! At least, your responsible mind would be, with its love of logic, and that I believe. But what of your other parts—even the other part of your mind, that which purges itself in dreams of women who may or may not be faceless? That purging, that effusion of your seed, is evidence that there is life in you, Caius, demanding to be lived. To deny it, in die face of your god, or mine, or those of anyone else, must be a sin, man! Look at me, now, don't turn your face away"

I looked back to her but said nothing and her eyes narrowed.

"Is it the girl? You find her displeasing?"

I shook my head. "No, not at all. She is most pleasant, and she is clean and wholesome."

"What, then? There's something wrong, somewhere. Where is her lack?"

"She has none, that I can see. None physical."

"And none mental, either. Have you spoken with her?"

I felt my eyebrows rise in surprise. "Of course I have. I spoke with her today. She prattled on for the longest time about the things she was doing."

"No, not like that. She was nervous and afraid of you, I suspect. Have you spoken with her, Cay? Have you conversed with her?"

"On what topic?"

She sighed explosively and threw up her hands in a gesture of resignation. "On anything, man! Caius, you could talk with that girl about anything you have in your mind at any time. Don't be gulled by what you think of—being a man—as her simpleness or her untutored, Cumbrian speech. That young woman is the most gifted seamstress I have ever known, and she has a mind as good as mine or Ludmilla's or any other woman you could think of—and that means it's as good as any man's in a hundred." She slumped back then in her chair, looking at me wide-eyed and shaking her head very gently from side to side as though in wonderment at my ignorance.

"What is it, Shelagh?" I asked. "You have something to tell me, I think."

. "I do. Do you remember this?" She dropped her hands into her lap and spread the fingers of each over one of her leather-covered thighs, on either side of Where the front of her tunic hung down between them. I gazed at them in confusion, my heart suddenly pounding in my breast.

"Remember what?" The tension in my voice was unmistakable—dense and sexual.

"The body beneath these clothes, the one we decided together long since, and for the very best of reasons, that you may never have. In all the years since then, we have never done a thing of which we need ever be ashamed in the eyes of anyone."

I swallowed the lump in my throat. "Aye, I know all that, so what are you saying to me, Shelagh?"

"That I know how much the wanting can hurt, Cay, despite the fact of a husband whom I love and who loves me and who can satisfy my wanting. It grieves me, and has done so now for years, to know that you have no surcease for yours, other than random dreams."

Her voice faded away and a long silence ensued. Eventually I nodded.

"I see. And so you chose Tressa as my plaything?"

"I chose Tressa, you foolish man, but not as a plaything. I chose her for you. And I chose her with great care:"

I smiled. "How so? You dreamed her, you said."

'True, I dreamed of her first. But dreams are dreams and life is real—you of all people know that as well as I do—and so I examined the woman very carefully before I made a move. Every part of her—her youth, her health, her background and her character—I sieved for imperfections, and, save one, found none. She is perfect for you, Cay."

"But I have no wish to marry, Shelagh. If I can't have you, I'll have no one." I said nothing of the fact that I had sworn an oath to myself after Cassandra's death that I would never take another woman as my wife. I saw no need to mention that, and I had had no thought of Tressa as a wife. *

"There speaks a fool, so those words can't be yours. I said nothing of marriage. Finding you a wife was far from my mind."

"That may be true, Shelagh, but it disregards my own notions of responsibility. To return to the gift we share, I, too, have seen things. No dream, but a vision, of a kind. That's why I fled from her today."

"What? What did you see?"

"A thing that frightened me. Today, as I stood over her—she was gathering up her balls of yam that I had knocked to the floor—I saw an image of her, big with child, gravid and threatening. My child. That was the end of it, then and there."

"Pah! That was nothing. A last-moment flash of conscience and self-chastisement."

I gazed at her in surprise. "You say so? Then it was as effective as it could have been. I'll have no more of it, because she will end up with child, if I lay hand on her, and that is a complication of which I have no slightest need. I would not father bastards, so her pregnancy would mean my taking her to wife, and that, with no adverse reflection on Tressa, simply cannot be. My role in life is clear, clean and decided long since—Arthur Pendragon, first, last and always. So trust my judgment and let be, Shelagh."

"She is barren."

"What?" Her words almost drove die breath from me, and I felt my mouth gape with shock. Shelagh was smiling again, though still gently.

'Tressa is barren. That was the single imperfection that I found in her. Her husband put her out a year and more ago and took another wife, who had already borne him two fat sons while he was wed to Tressa, thus proving that the fault lay in Tressa and not in him. Since then, Tressa has lived solely on her ability to wield a needle better than any other in Ravenglass. So you see, her need for comforting and succour is as great as yours."

"By the Christ, Shelagh, you confound me." I sagged back in my chair, completely at a loss. "You have been conspiring to alter my very life!"

"Aye, my dear, but only with myself. Not even Tressa knows what I have been thinking." She was completely uncontrite, smiling at me. 'Think of it, Cay—think about what a nod of the head could mean to you: companionship, a ready wit to keep you agile and alert, a clever woman's mind around you with a pleasant smile and a willing, cheerful bedmate on cold, dark nights ... even on warm, dark nights. All those you need, Caius Merlyn Britannicus, and all of them are there in young Tressa. And no fear of siring children." She paused, blinking, and her smile faded to soberness. "Even the boy would benefit from such a case, for Tressa's need to mother is fierce and strong."

Then, in a quieter voice, she added, "Think you I would advise you lightly in this, Cay? Or wrongly? Or that I would bestow those blessings I covet on someone unworthy?"

I stood up slowly, my mind spinning as I saw the implications here. But before I could find the words with which to respond to such an amazing series of statements, questions and revelations, the door swung open and Dedalus strode in. He almost skidded to a halt when he saw my expression and then Shelagh, sitting opposite me.

"Now, by the Christ! Forgive me, Merlyn—Cay, I mean—for charging in like this without a knock or bidding. I had no thought you might be occupied. Shelagh, your pardon, I'll—"

"Please, Dedalus, enough!" Shelagh rose to her feet, cutting him off with a smile and an upraised palm. "Our talk is done and I was about to leave." She smiled at me. "Think on what I have said, Cay, and consider it at length. There is no need for haste, in any direction. When you are ready to talk further, come and see me." She nodded again to Dedalus and left us with a smile.

Dedalus stepped to the window to watch her walk by, then turned to me. "Again, your pardon, Cay. I entered without thinking."

I barely heard what he said—my mind still reeling with the portent of Shelagh's last pronouncements—but I realized I was being uncivil, so I shook myself mentally and forced my attention to rest on my new visitor.

"What was that? No, no, no. Think no more of it, Ded. You know my door is always open to you. As Shelagh said, our talk was over. We were but making conversation when you arrived. What's that you have there?"

He carried two long pieces of wood clutched beneath one arm. He moved to a chair and seated himself, laying one end of them on die floor and leaning them against his leg as he launched into a long description of what they were and how he had found them. But he might as well have been speaking Attic Greek, for all that I absorbed of what he said, because my mind remained fixed upon what had just passed between Shelagh and me—the deafening knowledge that Tressa was barren! My face must have portrayed a certain interest, nonetheless, because Dedalus kept talking. But as he droned on, his tone changed from a mere accompaniment to my confusion into an annoyance, and eventually I jerked my hand upward in a peremptory gesture of restraint. He stopped speaking immediately.

"Ded, my friend, I must ask you to forgive me, but I have barely heard a word of what you have been saying. My head is filled with other matters."

He sat frowning at me, clearly concerned for me.

"Are you all right, Cay? Is something wrong?"

I shook my head, finding the ability to smile, albeit ruefully. "No, Ded, there's nothing wrong ... nothing that can be changed, at any rate. It's simply ... I have too much on my mind—too many things, all small enough but all demanding redress. Shelagh's contribution, though among the least of them, was simply one more complication than I had thought to face at this particular time. Your input then, my friend, has come as surfeit. Can you excuse my lack of courtesy?"

"Tchah! What lack of courtesy?" He rose to his feet, smiling. "I was the one who thrust myself in here without thought. I was but passing by, on my way to meet with Mark, when I thought to show you these things that I have found." He hefted them into the air, catching them beneath his aim again. "But they are solid, as you see, so they won't dry up and disappear. Deal with the problems on your mind, and when you're ready, I won't be hard to find. Can I help you with anything?" I shook my head, wordlessly, and he shrugged and made his way to the door. "I'll leave you to it, then, until later."

When he had gone I stood staring at the door, my mind in some kind of stasis, empty of all intelligible thought. But then the image of Tressa came back to me, to be replaced immediately by Shelagh's smiling face and the sound of her voice. I moved to sit in my most comfortable chair, allowing my calamitous thoughts to swirl and surge around in my mind. They were, however, too disturbing and too turbulent to be dealt with sitting still, and soon I was pacing my floor from one end to the other, tracing and retracing the same path as I grappled with the welter of my feelings and emotions. Finally, I stopped before the window where Shelagh had stood and leaned out into the still- bright afternoon. All at once I was aware of what it was that had been troubling me about Shelagh's declaration: it contained an inconsistency, so frail as to be almost nebulous, yet tantalizingly present, demanding recognition.

Shelagh had chosen Tressa as a mistress for me, and some inner, disapproving part of me was slightly scandalized by that. She had searched diligently, by her own admission, and had chosen carefully, selecting Tressa over all others. Then, her choice made in secrecy, she had implemented her design and I had refused the offered prize. Only then, in the face of that refusal, had she acknowledged her intent and her manipulation of events for my personal and private benefit. It was, in one evident sense, the gesture of a true and loyal friend, selfless and generous and noble-hearted. And yet ... and yet, it was flawed.

I could not marry Tressa, for a myriad reasons including my own oath never to take a wife. Shelagh, however, even though she knew nothing of that oath, had not sought to find a wife for me. Instead, she had found a potentially willing mistress who would never be a threat, either to my destiny with Arthur, or to that dear place, that shrine sacred to my long-dead Cassandra, shared now by her memory and by Shelagh herself, in my deepest heart. Most particularly, however, the woman she had taken such pains to find could never tie me to her in the future through the bonds of children.

I knew beyond a doubt that Shelagh had laboured well on my behalf, but now I knew also that she had laboured not quite selflessly or self-effacingly. That physicality which she might not provide herself she had provided otherwise; but die strangely passive secret, amorous, excitement-filled attraction to each other that we shared, on the other hand, she had safeguarded wholly, in her role as panderer ... As the full realization of what had passed here flooded through me—Shelagh's tacit, even unconscious acknowledgment of the love she held for me—I found myself smiling again, broadly this time, and filling my lungs with the aromatic air of late afternoon as I bounded out of my quarters and made my way towards Mark's carpentry shop, feeling like a boy released from his lessons.

Dedalus was still there when I arrived, as was Lucanus, the latter sitting on an upturned barrel in the yard fronting Mark's workshop. They were talking of furnishings with Mark, admiring the matching patterns of the close-grained boards in a table he was making. They were all pleased to see me, and when the greetings were all done I turned to Dedalus.

"Now I can concentrate on what you wanted to discuss. You brought some things to show me. Do you still have them?"

"Aye," he murmured, grinning, then crossed to where they were propped against a wall. He picked both pieces up, hefted them one in each hand, then passed one to me. I held it close to my eyes and dug at it with my thumbnail. It was carefully sawed, heavy, dense-grained oak, unplaned but squared on all sides to the width of four fingers. I lowered one end to the floor and the other reached up to my sternum. The second piece, which Ded still held, appeared to be identical.

"It's oak, and seasoned," I said. "Where did you get it?"

He grinned again. "Above the furnace in the bathhouse. Mark, here, was looking for a place to dry some lumber, months ago, when I first repaired the hypocaust system. He didn't need much room at the time, but he required it to be hot and dry and weather-proof, and I knew there was adequate space beneath the bathhouse floor, perfect for his needs. I told him about it, and then forgot about it afterward, but he has been using the space ever since. I went in there today, about an hour before I passed by your place, and found these and a hundred or so others just like them. Mark used them for making bed-legs, when he was building our cots." He saw the incomprehension in my eyes as I glanced towards Mark, who was standing listening, a half-smile on his lips. "Don't you see it, Cay?" I could hear the excitement now in Ded's voice. "It's prime oak, oven- dried and cured, heavier and stronger than ash. We can turn and taper them on Mark's lathe and make ourselves some real, practical staves of the kind we've been discussing— long practice swords, all of a uniform size."

Mark's lathe was his greatest pride, a wonderful machine that enabled him to transform plain, squared lumber into glowing, rounded, exquisitely turned things of beauty. In the flash of a moment, I saw the squared baulk of timber in my hand transformed into a thick dowel, a tapered practice sword.

"By God you're right, Ded!"

"I know I'm right. I'm just glad I went down into the furnace room today, for it would never have occurred to me that we had such perfect material at hand, already cured and seasoned. But what think you, will oak serve as well as ash?"

"Aye, and better, would be my guess." I looked to Mark for confirmation and he nodded mutely, his smile widening.

"I believe it might," he drawled, "but I don't know what use you intend for them, or how much abuse they'll take. If they break, we can always make more, out of ash."

I hoisted the heavy length of wood and caught it at the midpoint. "The Roman practice swords were ash. Our British ones will be of oak. How long to make them?"

Mark looked to Dedalus, who shrugged his huge shoulders. "Like making swords, I would guess. We'll make two as experimental models and then refine them as necessary until they'll do what we require of them." He could no longer contain the smile of delight that broke across his face. "You approve of them, then?"

"I do, and heartily."

"Good, then I'll bring them back to you when they're ready to be used. How long, will that be, Mark?"

The young carpenter shrugged. "I can see it's important to you, and this table top is finished, for today at least. I can start on them now, if you like. You'll have to show me exactly what you want me to do with them—the length and angle of the taper. I'll need an hour to set them up on the lathe, preparing them for turning, but after that, we can begin immediately. If all goes well, they should be ready by this time tomorrow."

Dedalus stood on tiptoe and stretched his arms above his head. "Then what are we waiting for? To work, young Marcus!"

As he stretched, I grinned and launched the heavy length of wood at his midriff. He whipped his arms down just in time to catch it and whirl it, one-handed, up beneath his armpit, as though it were a centurion's cudgel of vine wood, dried and weightless. Then he snapped a flawless Roman centurion's salute, executed a smart about-face and marched into the gloom of the workshop.

I moved to sit on a low stump beside Lucanus's much higher barrel, looking up at him where he sat smiling gently at Ded's antics.

"How are you feeling, Luke? You looked a bit pale and shaky earlier, on the way up the hill."

"Aye, I must admit there was a time back there when I felt that horse would be the death of me. There is something about the rocking motion of a horse that never fails to nauseate me. How you people can stomach it I'll never know."

I sat for a moment, bemused, blinking at him and wondering how he could remain unaware that he alone experienced any rocking motion on a horse. The side-to-side motion to which he referred was born solely of his own execrable horsemanship. Lucanus had never mastered the art of relaxing on a horse's back; he held himself rigid at all times, so that instead of melding with the motion of the animal and riding almost as a part of it, he was forever at odds with it, clinging grimly and in constant discomfort to his precarious perch on its broad back. His failure to see that and to adjust his seat was incomprehensible to me, because I had started riding when I was so young that I had never known, or I could not remember, any such rocking motion.

"So you felt better when you were on solid ground again?"

"Again, as ever. I vastly prefer riding on a wagon. There's so much more in one of those to hang on to."

I grunted a laugh and shook my head. "What are you going to do now?"

"Now, at this moment? I had thought to move inside and watch young Mark at work, but if you have something other than that in mind, I'll gladly go with you."

"Would you enjoy a stroll around the walls?"

He eyed me shrewdly. "With you? Of course I would. Help me down, would you? I hoisted myself up, but it looks to be a long way down there for bones like mine."

I grasped one hand and helped him down from his barrel and we made our way directly to the nearest wall, the northern one that fronted the chasm behind the fort. When we reached it we turned to our right and began to walk briskly around the intervallum, the circuit road that followed the interior of the walls. I plunged directly into what I wanted to say to him, the excitement in me brimming over uncontrollably.

"Luke, I have something to ask you."

"Ask away," he replied, but then he stopped again and turned to face me, alerted perhaps by something in my tone, and his face underwent a sudden change to dismay. "Oh, Aesculapius," he said, almost groaning. "There's that look that reeks of celibacy. Not today, Merlyn, I beg you. I would rather run and try to jump over these walls than talk of celibacy on such a wondrous afternoon."

"No, please listen to me, Luke. You might actually enjoy what I have to say."

One eyebrow climbed high on his forehead. "Oh, you think so, do you?"

"Aye, I do. I have decided, conclusively, that celibacy is not for me."

Lucanus threw back his head and raised both hands outward to shoulder height, then revolved slowly in a complete turn, his eyes closed and a look of ecstasy upon his thin, ascetic features. I heard a strange, thin sound issue from his nostrils and increase in volume until it was a ringing, high-pitched hum. Then, as I watched in amazement, never having seen him do anything remotely like this in all the years I had known him, he opened his lips and sang the note, unaltered, holding it high and pure in pitch until the breath in his lungs ran out, after which he took another breath and sang in a monotone, holding the last syllable until his breath ran out again, "Thanks be to all the gods of medicine and all their ideas of enlightenment ... "

I had not moved throughout this strange performance, not knowing whether to laugh or help him to lie down, and I saw amazement mirroring my own on the faces of the four workmen close enough to hear and see what was going on. Now Luke gazed at me fiercely.

"How did you come to this wondrous decision, and why? Who is she?"

"Tressa," I replied, keeping my voice low, for his ears alone. Until the moment the word passed my lips, I would not have believed I'd ever say it.

"Then blessed be the bounteous Tressa, and I shall rejoice to see you smug and smiling, sated and uxorious in future."

"Uxorious? I am not speaking here of marriage, Luke."

"Nor should you be, my boy, at this stage, but you are speaking of sanity and freshening gale winds of sound good sense. Come, let us walk, for I find the thought of speech on celibacy has suddenly become much less oppressive. I have words to say to you, now that you appear disposed to hear them."

And so we walked, back and forth beneath the stone walls of the ancient fort, and my old friend held me close, my arm tucked firmly beneath his as he spoke of his own agonizing over the requests I had made of him in the recent and not-so-recent past. He had felt all along, he said, that I was in error with my wishes on the matter of celibacy. I had been fleeing towards it, he believed, and he knew well that flight from life was no way to achieve the condition which I thought I desired so profoundly. He had come to believe, to be convinced, that I was determined to launch myself along a road that must surely lead me to failure and frustration, and so he had avoided the topic to the best of his ability. .

Now that I had decided to abandon my unrealistic wishes, he informed me, he could hope that I might find far more satisfaction in the little he could teach me of the celibate way of life, for he was prepared, much more so than before, to teach me what he knew of the philosophy that underlay the discipline.

I was surprised to hear him say these things, and I asked him to explain. He reminded me that my original thought had been to learn self-mastery in celibacy, hoping to use that same self-mastery to aid me in my teaching of Arthur. There was nothing arcane in self-mastery, per se, Lucanus said. That was a matter of pure discipline, and I was already close to being adept in the skill, simply by virtue of the life that I had led. Gaining the arcane lore of the magi who had mastered asceticism and self-denial was an exercise in a further discipline that lay beyond mere sexual self-denial, and that lore, he declared, was superfluous, something of which I had no need at all. My gifts, he swore, my own abilities, already lay in my possession; all I required to make the best and finest use of them was equanimity and peace of mind, both of which lay securely rooted in self-confidence. When I had once decided who and what I was, and had accepted and embraced my role in life, he was convinced all those gifts and abilities would be unleashed and would flourish.

Just beyond the half-way point of our circuit of the walls, ahead of us and rushing towards us, a group of noisy children approached, milling around like fallen leaves in a high wind. We stopped to allow them to swirl by us in a babble of high, excited voices, parting around us and ignoring us as though we were invisible. Lucanus turned to watch them recede into the distance and then walked for a long time in a silence I had no desire or need to break.

"Do you know, Caius," he eventually said, "I can't remember ever having run like that, although I suppose I must have. I was a child once, you know."

"So long ago, my friend, that you cannot recall being one?"

"Oh, I remember well enough ... Some parts of it at least. The happy parts, mainly, but those seemed very few. Do you remember your boyhood?"

"Aye, vividly, and with pleasure. Uther and I enjoyed a childhood shared by few, filled with the joy of being who we were. We spent every autumn and winter in Roman Camulod, and every spring and summer in Celtic Cambria, although the bruises that we gathered were the same in both places."

"Aye, and they were plentiful, I'll warrant. But speaking of bruises, what is happening with that blemish on your chest? Have you been exposing it to healing air, as I suggested?"

"Aye, I have, but not apurpose, now that I think of it. Since the arrival of your scroll and your assurance that the mark is not what I once feared it was, I've lost awareness of it. But I have been going bare-chested recently, thanks to the clement weather."

Lucanus stopped and turned to face me. "Let's have a look at it. Undo your tyings."

I was wearing only a simple tunic, slashed at the neck and tied with a decorative cord, and I undid it, pushing the material aside to bare my right breast. Lucanus peered at it and sniffed. "Aye, as I thought, it seems to be receding. I remember it as being larger. It will be gone within the month, I'd wager."

He moved on and I walked beside him, adjusting my tunic as he murmured something about the pleasantness of the day.

At that point, seeing that we had completed our circuit of the walls and come close to our living quarters, where a throng of people were milling about, he stopped and turned to face me squarely, reaching out to grasp me by the shoulder and demonstrating that his grip was younger and stronger than his thin face might suggest. In perfect seriousness, he told me that my decision was absolutely the right one to make, and then he went on to embarrass me by saying that he considered me to be the finest man that he had ever known, including my own father, and that he could think Of no one better equipped than me to face the task I had set myself.

The boy Arthur would be a king, he said, under my guidance, but given that guidance and the attributes we knew the lad to possess, he believed implicitly that Arthur Pendragon would grow to be a king whose like had never lived in Britain. Not an emperor like Alexander, but a king, conquering no new lands but nurturing and strengthening his own, and gaining for himself a name and reputation that would never die, no matter what came after him.

When he stopped speaking, Luke's eyes were awash with unshed tears, and I had to swallow hard to subdue the lump thickening in my own throat. Thereafter, we were silent until we parted before his door. There was no more to say.

That night, when all our new colonists were gathered at dinner, I crossed to where young Tressa sat among the other newcomers from Ravenglass and sat down beside her. My advent, unprecedented though it was, seemed to provoke no comment, and Tressa betrayed no sign of nervousness or curiosity. She simply welcomed me and then spent the entire mealtime talking pleasantly of general trivia with the others, a conversation in which I joined without reservation. I enjoyed myself thoroughly.

When the meal was over and the gathering broke up, I walked with her out into the evening air, which held a chill and the promise of a late frost. She shivered and clasped her arms over her breast; I unfolded my cloak, which I was carrying over my arm, and draped it about her. She stopped, surprised, and favoured me with a lingering, speculative glance.

"Don't be upset, Master Cay, but what are you about?'

I smiled at her. "What do you think I am about, Tressa?"

She shook her head slowly, smiling faintly in return. "I know not. How could I? This is the first time you have ever paid any heed to me at all, and today you almost ran away from me, I thought. But suddenly now you're sitting with me, looking at me, talking to me, and now wrapping me in your fine cloak."

I realized that I had lost all awareness of what I had thought of in the past as her alien speech patterns. Her voice sounded perfectly normal to me now. I nodded. "I almost did run away from you today, but I have had time and opportunity to think since then. Will you forgive me?"

"Forgive you?" She laughed, a delightful, gurgling sound, deep in her chest. "Why, what have you done that should require forgiveness? I've noticed nothing."

"Well, I have been afraid of you, for one thing."

"What?" She stiffened. "Why would you say a thing like that, Master Cay? Are you making sport of me? If 'tis so, and I think it must be, then I shall leave you now, for I have done nothing to warrant that."

"Shh! Hush." I raised my hand gently as though to touch her mouth and she stilled instantly, watching me from wide eyes. I laid my fingers softly against her cheek and touched the cushion of her lips with the pad of my thumb. "I had no thought to mock you, lass. I spoke the truth. I was afraid of you, foolishly, because I was afraid of me and how I wanted to respond to you ... to the way you make me feel." I leaned closer to her, stooping my head to gaze into her eyes. "Do you have any notion of how you make me feel?"

Even had she been blind, the tone of my voice would have told her the answer to that question. She nodded, hesitantly, speaking past my thumb which remained in place, hovering lightly over her mouth. "I—I think so, now."

"And does that displease you?"

"No ... But—"

"But what?"

"What would you of me now, now that I know?"

I felt her warm breath against the pad of my thumb and smiled again, amazed at how much ease I felt in such an unfamiliar situation. I might have known this girl for years, and her face was filling all my vision, occluding Shelagh and even my dear wife Cassandra with the magic power of her nearness.

"What would I of you now? What would you give? I'll ask you few your friendship and your warmth, your smiles and laughter and your ready tongue."

She had not moved, or made any effort to remove her cheek from contact with my fingers. Now, as I paused, she turned her head infinitesimally, increasing the pressure of her cheek against my hand almost imperceptibly.

"And?" she whispered.

"And, should you care to bestow anything at all on me, I'll ask you for your companionship, your softness and your self, Tressa."

"What else, Master Cay?" Her voice was the merest whisper.

I became aware that others were moving about us, but I did not care. I brushed my thumb across her lips, feeling them move and alter their shape, and then I pulled slightly downward, folding her lower lip outward until I felt the moist warmth of soft underlip against my skin.

"I'd have you stop calling me Master Cay. My name is Cay, plain Cay, to all my friends. And I would—will ask you for a kiss ... "

"Come." In less than a blink, she had me firmly by the hand, leading me away from the area of the dining hall. "People were starting in to listen," she said eventually, when we were well removed from everyone, but her hand retained its hold on mine. "Have you a fire in your rooms?"

"Aye, if it's still alight. I built it up before I left, but the wood we're burning nowadays is dry and burns up quickly."

"And have you wine, that we might spice?"

"I have."

"Then go you and prepare it. I must fetch my work- basket."

"How so? I had no thought of asking you to sew for me, seated before my fire ... not tonight."

She grinned and squeezed my fingers, and even in the moonlight I could see her eyes dancing. "Nor had I thought to sew for you tonight. I cannot sew and hold a cup of heated wine, nor anything else that's warm and spillable." The ambiguity of that brought my entire heart up into my mouth, but she had moved on. "But I must have my basket, for I'd not like to leave it unattended for too long. It contains my very life, all of my tools and treasures."

I felt my blood grow thicker and a pulse began to beat quite palpably in my right temple. "But you left it behind you to go to dinner."

"Aye, I did, but without risk—everyone else was dining, too. Now they will all be back, save me, and the temptation to invade my basket during the night might be too strong for ... certain people. I find it foolish to hold out temptation when I would suffer by having someone yield to it ... " She was still smiling, looking up at me, her head cocked to one side. "Don't you think that wise?" I nodded, suddenly struck mute. I saw her eyes watching my Adam's apple, seeing my nervousness, and then she nodded, too, and her voice sank to a whisper. "Good, then I shall go and fetch it, and when I return, you may have your kiss in return for allowing me to share your fire and wine." She turned to leave, but I stayed her with tightening fingers.

"And what of sharing my bed, Tressa?"

She grinned, her eyes alight in the moonlight with wicked mischief. "Now there is a temptation worth the offering and the yielding. Why do you think I felt die need to bring my basket? Go you and build the fire up, now,"

I found the fire still smouldering, and after I had lighted several of my beeswax candles from the tallow lamp I had left burning, I stirred it back to life, adding new kindling first, and then stout logs. Then I filled an earthen pot with wine and placed it upon the metal hob over the flames, adding a generous pinch of the last remnants of the precious spices brought to Luceiia Varrus from beyond the seas in years gone by. Too little of this mixture of dried and crushed exotic essences remained then to permit profligacy in the use of it, for it was literally irreplaceable, and I used it only on the most important and celebratory of occasions. I had shared, some of it with Ambrose and with Joseph no more than a week before, and this night, I had no doubt, was to be one deserving even more celebration.

I was still working on the preparation of the infusion when Tressa knocked gently and entered, wearing her own long cloak now, over mine, and carrying her precious basket. She stopped inside the door, laid her basket on the floor and pulled the door closed behind her, barring it securely. She then hung my cloak and her own on the pegs on the wall. I had closed and barred the shutters before going out.

'The wine will be ready directly," I said. "Have you tasted it before?"

"Yes, several times. Shelagh made it for me."

"Ah! It's Shelagh's wine you've had, mixed with her fiery honey. This is quite different, prepared with spices from the eastern Empire, whereas Shelagh's mix is made from herbs and simples gathered here in Britain—or in Eire. You may not like this potion."

She came directly to where I stood by the brazier and stood gazing down at the liquid that was beginning to simmer gently in the pot. The parting in her long, rich, dark- brown hair shone pearly white, clean. She raised her head to look at me, no trace of shyness or false coyness in her face. "Your kiss," she said, tilting her head up to me.

I have never forgotten the wonder of that kiss, the first of countless thousands that I was to share with her. I had to stoop to reach her mouth, and I did so hesitantly, quite unsure of how, or if, I ought to touch her with my hands. The result was that I touched her with my lips alone that time, no other contact occurring between our bodies. My awareness of the flaring heat of the fire against my bare leg vanished instantly in the sensation of that first contact with her mouth, banished by the amazing softness of her cushioned lips and the resilience with which they adjusted to the shape and pressure of my own.

She was as tentative as I, in those first moments, gentle and hesitant, unsure, yet both of us gained strength and confidence with every heartbeat and the steady, infinitesimal increase of pressure as our lips and mouths expanded with the pleasure and excitement of the kiss. I moved my head, sideways, and she responded equally, and suddenly the moistness of her lower underlip sent surges of ecstatic intimacy racing through my brain, so that I caught my breath and opened my own mouth to her, sucking her lower lip, full and succulent, entirely into my mouth. She stiffened and her arm came up quickly to clasp my neck, pulling me close, and then my hands were filled with her, the divided column of her back in one, the cup of her soft belly filling the other as her breasts cushioned my ribs. I felt myself grow dizzy with desire and then she was pulling away from me, catching her breath and sweeping the disordered hair back from her forehead.

'Tend to the wine, Master Cay. I must tend to me." Her voice was shaky, breathless.

"I told you, my name's Cay, no Master here."

She exhaled in an emphatic puff. "I know it is, and those who know me well may call me Tress, not Tressa ... but right then, at that moment, you felt like a master." She looked about her. "Now ! Wine, if it please you."

As I bent to remove the clay pot carefully from the hob, she moved away, into my sleeping chamber, and I heard her moving purposefully about in there. I poured wine into two cups and replaced the pot, swinging the hob away so that it did not rest directly over the coals. Just as I thought to ask her what she was about, she came back into the main room, her arms filled with the cured animal skins I used as bedding when I went campaigning. As I stood there watching her, a steaming cup in each hand, she dropped the double armload on the floor before the fire and spread them out with her feet and hands, making a double layer. That done, she brought a low stool from against the wall and placed it to one side, after which she lowered herself to sit on the skins and reached for a cup, smiling up at me.

"Now, come and sit down, plain Cay, and drink with me while we enjoy the firelight."

The mere use of the term 'plain Cay' reminded me that she alone, of all Derek's folk, was aware of my real identity. I was glad she knew that I was Merlyn of Camulod, although I remembered being upset when I found that Shelagh had told her. Now it seemed absolutely natural that she should have been informed. Grinning, I sat as bidden, and she tasted my spiced wine, raising her eyebrows high with simulated rapture at the surprising tang of it.

"What is it?"

"Nectar. We call it 'sweet flames.' It's supposed to be an aphrodisiac."

She raised herself higher on an elbow. "A what? Aphrodisiac? What does that mean?"

I sipped, deliberately slurping noisily. "A love potion to promote desire and to extend performance."

"Ooh ... " Her eyes went round with wonder and mischief. "And does it work? Will I regret the drinking of it?"

"I don't know, lass. Do you think you might?"

"Only if it fails us." She started to laugh, softly at first and then more unrestrainedly, and eventually I found myself laughing helplessly with her, filled with elation and a feeling of release and great relief, so that years fell away from me. We rolled about on die bed she had prepared for us, spilling more than the occasional drop of wine. And soon we had drunk the pot dry, talking and laughing all the while and taking delight in the learning of each other, free of constraint. And as we talked and laughed and took delight, we kissed; and as we kissed, we ventured further, so that soon our clothes were cast aside and we lay intertwined, exulting in the newfound beauty of each other, uncaring if the aphrodisiac were real or not. We had no need of it. And I fed the fire from time to time. And when the sun came up it found us still awake, rejoicing together at the advent of a time that stretched and stretched ahead of us without a care.