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

Mediobogdum

FOURTEEN

In the late summer of that first full year of our residence, the first overland expedition from Camulod arrived with our new supply of horses, making their way, to the great excitement of everyone in the fort, over the high saddle of the pass above and to the east of us.

Anticipating that they might be arriving someday soon, I had begun posting guards on the peak above the pass several weeks earlier, and so the horn announcing their arrival had sounded as soon as they came into view, permitting us ample time to assemble our own small force and change into our military trappings, seldom used in those peaceful days of building, to welcome the newcomers appropriately.

A stirring sight they made, too, their weapons and armour and equipment flashing in the westering sun as they wound their way down from the heights to our gates, a journey of some third of an hour. They moved in what seemed like an endless file, four wide. Two squadrons of cavalry rode front and rear, with the foot soldiers and extra horses in place between them, the latter haltered and strung together in sets of four, with the outer horse on each rank, alternating right and left, being ridden by a trooper.

Ambrose rode at the head of them all, beneath my own

great, black-and-white standard with the silver bear, which had become the standard of Camulod. Watching his approach from my vantage point on our fort's south-east tower, I felt my heartbeat quicken and my breath speed up in a very strange fashion. It was like watching myself ride towards me, which was in fact, as I had to remind myself, precisely the effect Ambrose was looking to achieve. In the eyes of the people, he rode as Merlyn of Camulod, and even I might have been convinced to believe it. The effect on young Arthur and his three friends, however, was far more salutary.

Arthur had always been smitten by the heroic aspects of Uncle Ambrose, as he called him. On this occasion the boy was actually struck dumb by the splendour of the Camulodian approach. I have no doubt the reasons for his reaction were many and mixed. It might have been occasioned by the fact that we ourselves had been away from Camulod for more than a year by then. It might also have been augmented by the fact that we seldom wore armour nowadays in Mediobogdum, and were more akin to farmers and artisans—in appearance and dress at least—than to soldiers and warriors. Then again, it might have been due to the simple apparition of a large, disciplined force of regimented, heavily armed men and horses in a place where we had grown accustomed to seeing the native warriors going about on foot, or on shaggy ponies, individually.

Whatever the reasons, when the vanguard of the Camulodian troops arrived and Ambrose himself sat smiling down at us, immense in his high-crested Roman helmet and heavy, shimmering and highly polished plate armour, flanked by his three senior troop commanders, young Arthur walked forward alone, wordlessly, his eyes shining, his hands held out to relieve Ambrose of his heavy shield. My brother grunted, looking down at the boy, and then swung easily down from his high saddle, passing the shield to him with one hand and reaching out to ruffle his hair with the other; he paused, then, the gesture incomplete, and changed his mind, contenting himself with gripping Arthur cordially by one shoulder before moving directly to embrace me.

"He's too big to be greeted as a child now," he whispered as we hugged each other. I said nothing, stepping back to clear the way for the others at my back to move forward.

When all the introductions had been completed, Ambrose released his three troop commanders to supervise the settling of their men and horses on the flat parade area outside the eastern gate, where the infantry that had accompanied them were already laying out their tents and gear in the traditional Roman style. A group of us moved into the fort and up onto the eastern wall, where we could see what was going on. From that viewpoint, it was Lucanus who observed that this old fort had never seen such a gathering of military might before. At its most active time, shortly after it was built, it might have held five or six hundred men, although we had strong grounds to doubt that it had ever been so fully garrisoned, but it had never seen more than a hundred heavy cavalry mounts at once. As Lucanus pointed this out, Derek, who had been staying with us for a week at that time, stood silent, his arms folded on his chest, his bearded chin resting on the gorget of his leather breastplate as he stared at the horse camp that now filled the parade ground. This was, I knew, the first time he had actually seen the kind of peacetime force that Camulod could field, and he was impressed, aware that this was merely a patrol dispatched several months earlier and barely missed in Camulod.

When I had told him, at the time of Ambrose's departure months earlier, that we would be having visitors by land from Camulod, the king had been perturbed, fearing that such an open use of the rear road to Ravenglass might point the way for others afterwards, but he had been mollified when I pointed out that the reason for the visit was to leave a defensive garrison of cavalry behind, and that it would be relieved and replaced by newcomers on a regular, twice-yearly basis. The reality of having a solid, well- trained garrison to guard his back had made light of his fears of invasion from that direction.

Finally, once Ambrose had satisfied himself that all was well in hand and that the troops would have no difficulties settling in, I managed to take him aside and sequester him in the steam room of our bathhouse, having first made sure that we would not be disturbed. There, after he had enjoyed the first flush of pleasure at being able to relax and cleanse himself of the soil of his long journey, I was able to question him about his passage from the south, developments in Camulod and most particularly about the matter foremost in my mind: the new sword that was to be forged from the Lady of the Lake.

He set my mind at ease on the latter question immediately. My concerns about the sufficiency of metal in the statue had been unfounded, he said, because it had quickly become apparent, upon a cursory examination of the rough-sculpted form, that Publius Varrus could only have used about one-third of the total mass of the Lady for the making of Excalibur. Joseph and Carol together had developed the formula that led to this conclusion: Excalibur, when finished, would have weighed approximately half as much as it did on first being forged. The difference in weight would have been shed in filing, trimming and chiselling the metal into its final shape and size. The surprising and welcome news, then, was that there ought to be enough metal remaining in the statue of the Lady to fashion two identical swords, if such was my wish.

That gave me pause. Was it my wish to have two duplicate Excaliburs?

The question was no sooner asked than answered. These swords were representations, not duplicates; they would be practice swords and, as such, would be subjected to much overuse and great indignities. Better to have two of them, therefore—particularly since Excalibur could then remain concealed. That resolved, my next question concerned the length of time it would take to make both. Ambrose's response was an eloquent shrug of his shoulders. He would not return to Camulod until the start of winter, he pointed out, and until he did, Carol would make no start upon the second piece. The first might well be complete by then, but even so, it would remain in Camulod until the following spring.

I had to content myself with that, and for a long time · we spoke little more of things political, since all Ambrose now wanted to do was bathe and steam and close his eyes and mind to everything except the pleasure of the moist heat as it leached away his tired and aching stiffness. That process, however, had no deleterious effect on his ability to talk about his own home life and his family in Camulod. Ludmilla had borne him beautiful twin daughters, one radiant blonde and the other raven-haired, late in the summer of the previous year, and their father was enraptured with them, entirely unimpressed by the prevalent opinion that daughters were a burden to a man. He had named them Luceiia and Octavia, in honour of the Britannican ancestors whom he had discovered only after meeting me in Verulamium years earlier, and I believe he could have talked of them happily in his sleep.

Ludmilla was thriving, he reported, and had sent her love to all of us, but most especially to her beloved mentor Lucanus. She had assumed overall responsibility for the medical welfare of the Colony on Luke's departure, at his insistence, and under her supervision all matters of health and hygiene in Camulod were carefully policed and well- maintained. Her staff had grown with the arrival of a young surgeon who had been trained by die military in Antioch, and who had made his way to Camulod purely on the strength of stories about Luke that he had heard in his travels in south Britain. There, having met Ludmilla and no doubt tested her abilities in his own way, he'd decided to settle and practise his skills in Luke's superbly built Infirmary.

From there, our conversation drifted pleasantly to other topics, all of them quite trivial and all of them making me slightly nostalgic for the life and folk of Camulod. By the time Ambrose began to bestir himself and show any inclination to talk seriously again of "important" matters, I had already decided it would be selfish of me to keep his tidings from the others, and equally inconsiderate to keep the pleasures of the baths from my brother's troopers. And so we dressed and left the bathhouse to those who were no less in need of its seductive joys than he had been.

Within the hour, we had assembled the remainder of our initial group, including Donuil and Shelagh, and made our way outside the fort to sit informally in a casual grouping at the top of the chasm that guarded our rear, and there Ambrose told us all the details of his journey from the south. Arthur, of course, was there with his three bosom friends, Bedwyr, Gwin and Ghilleadh, the four of them perched, still as stone pillars, fearful that they might be dismissed. Everyone ignored them, and they eventually settled down to listen.

My brother brought surprising but welcome tidings. The towns he had passed through in his journey, having lain abandoned and neglected for years, were now being inhabited again—not in any highly organized fashion, he reported, but there were definite signs of revitalization. Glevum and Aquae Sulis, in particular, he said, each had populations now of several hundred people, although the new citizens, rather than living in the indefensible Roman ruins, preferred to dwell on the outskirts of the towns, finding security in rapid access to the safety of the deep forest in case of attack. The bridge outside Glevum, over the Severn River, had been repaired and reinforced and was once more, as it had always been, a natural gathering point for people from north and south of the river wishing to trade. Elsewhere, too, he told us, along the great Roman road the people were now calling the Foss Way, because of the wide ditches or fossae that lined it on both sides, small centres were springing up where natural routes crossed the high road. People were organizing themselves again in small communities, looking to their own defences, planting crops and even clearing new ground in many places, because that section of the land, at least, was relatively peaceful and unplagued by war. No Saxon hordes had penetrated this far north and west, to date, and raids from Eire were now few and far between. I had little doubt, on hearing that, that thanks were due there to our alliance with Athol's Scots, and to the damage done to the Sons of Condran in the past year.

Ambrose and his troopers had been welcomed everywhere, once the realization had spread ahead of them— magically, it seemed—that they were not intent on pillage and raiding. The sight of strongly armed and disciplined warriors who posed no threat, and their promise to return that way again regularly in the future, had put new heart into people all along the great road, which, he informed us in response to a question from Dedalus, was surprisingly in superb condition, still almost free of weeds and erosion. I smiled at Ded when he asked his question, knowing he was remembering our comrade Benedict and his prediction, on returning from Eire a decade earlier, about trees destroying die roads in Britain, given time. Ambrose went on to talk of the force he had brought with him: three squadrons of cavalry, each forty strong, and a full Roman maniple of infantry consisting of ten twelve-man squads.

Ambrose turned to me directly, saying he had thought to leave four squads of infantry with us, in addition to the squadron of cavalry we had discussed. Could we feed such numbers? I looked to Derek, silently inviting him to speak, since his would ultimately be the task of feeding them. We had no fields of crops, up here on our plateau, and all our food, save wild meat and freshwater fish, was grown by Derek's folk and traded to us in return for our help in their fields and in the forest, plus our commitment to assist them should the need arise to defend their town. Derek thought for several moments and then shrugged, smiling slightly. Forty-eight trained warriors and their officers, he admitted, might be an asset worth making the occasional sacrifice to keep and feed.

Ambrose smiled and nodded. Our new garrison would remain with us, he said, for five months, at the end of which they would be relieved by an incoming complement of troops, and this would go on, twice each year, for as long as we had need of such strength.

From these, Ambrose broadened his discourse to include such tidings as be had from other places. Cornwall was quiet and apparently mending itself, he said, with no news of war or trouble coming out of there. Cambria, too, was at peace, with Dergyll Ap Griffyd's rule continuing in strength and amity. But word had come out of the north, brought by Connor's ships, of an army being assembled in the far north-east, beyond the ancient Wall, in die lands of a king called Crandal, of whom I had never heard. He intended to raid southward into Northumbria, which would bring his forces into conflict with Vortigern and his Danish mercenaries. None of us hearing Ambrose doubted that the invaders would be stopped in Northumbria. Hengist's Danes would keep them occupied and make them wish they had remained in their northern lands. No news had come to Camulod of Vortigern or Hengist, so Ambrose presumed they both were flourishing. Otherwise, he believed young Horsa's warriors, free of his father Hengist's iron rule, would have come spilling south and west.

With such a willing audience hanging on his every utterance, Ambrose could easily have talked for far longer than he did, I suspect, but he had other matters to concern him and so had to take his leave of his listeners as the afternoon was wearing on towards twilight. His troops were new here, he pointed out, unused to the fort and their new quarters, and he owed it to them to make sure that they were disposed as well as they could be, and that the arrangements were well in hand to feed them all their first meal here in Mediobogdum. As he strode off, leaving the rest of us to wonder at the tidings he had brought to us, Arthur and the other three lads trotted at his heels like well- trained dogs.

Shortly after that, I found my own reasons for leaving and made my way to my quarters,- where I sat in the gathering darkness for some time, mulling over everything I had heard that day.

The foremost thing on my mind as I sat there was the matter of the new practice swords. The how and why of using them had plagued me for some time, although I had then considered only having one, plus Excalibur itself. Ostensibly, Arthur would use the new weapon to learn the skills he would require to -use Excalibur to best effect. However, the matter was more thorny than that, and the difficulty lay in the danger of employing any such weapon without accidental harm to the user, be he novice or expert. A weapon that could cut through iron, as these could, would make short work of any flesh and bone that came against its edge, so I must make sure, from the outset of our planning, that I became familiar with the tricks and techniques and tendencies inherent in these blades long before young Arthur ever handled one of them.

As though they were fresh written in my mind, I recalled the words with which Publius Varrus had described the damage to his forearm from the very first of the long- bladed swords Equus had made. Equus and he had discovered immediately that the new, long blades, when used against each other, behaved as no blades ever had behaved before, their tempered-metal tongues rebounding and leaping from each other with a hungry power fed to new extremes by the length of the arc of their swing. And those swords, I knew, had been mere tempered iron, lacking the magical essence—the mysterious skystone metal—that gave Excalibur its fearsome strength and edges. Excalibur's cross-guard would, I knew, discount some of that danger, stopping a glancing, sliding blow to the forearm, but I could not rely on that alone to safeguard the boy.

Now that we were to have two replicas, however, the way became simpler, and I decided to include Dedalus, Rufio and Donuil in the exploratory training program with the new weapons. Among the four of us, we would be able to determine the properties of the new blades and the expectations their users should and should not have of them. The boys, in the meantime, could be set to work learning the heft and mastery of the new wooden training staves, strengthening their young limbs to hard usage as they did so. Then, as we four adults devised the ways and means of best using the new, keen blades in combat, we would pass on those knacks to the boys, teaching them variations in the ways they swung their staves, so they would learn to use the new, long swords before they ever knew the swords existed. I relaxed then, having formulated that design, feeling in my heart that it was right.

Later that night, long after everyone was well abed, Ambrose, who had spread his bedroll on the floor of my quarters for the night, woke me up to go with him to inspect the guard, since this was the first night of the new order in Mediobogdum and I ought to make myself familiar with the routine right from the outset. It was a beautiful summer night with a cloudless, starry sky, and I sucked the night air deep into my chest with great enjoyment as we walked the full length of the parapets of Mediobogdum, talking to each guard we met and finding all of them alert and watchful. Then, from the fort itself, we made our way out onto the parade ground, which had been transformed in the space of one afternoon into another heavily guarded armed camp.

The young officer of the guard there was a man unknown to me and barely out of his boyhood. I found out that his name was Decius Falvo and that his father had been one of my companions on my expedition to Eire. Ambrose regarded young Decius as one of his most promising infantry commanders and I was unsurprised, because his father, whom I had always known simply as Falvo, was one of the finest and most thoroughly dedicated soldiers I had ever had the privilege of knowing. Decius told us that he had mounted an outlying guard high above us, on the peak above the pass, and that there was a wide and well-worn path up to the place, attesting to the fact that the Romans had used it as a lookout point long centuries before.

Ambrose turned and looked at me. "Feel like a climb? We can't inspect the inner guard and leave the outlying ones neglected."

We were challenged and identified ourselves long before we reached the top of the steep path up to the peak. There a cluster of four men stood on duty, peering out and down from the heights into the blackness of utter night, unrelieved by a single spark of light. Above our heads, in brilliant contrast, the sky was a mass of twinkling stars and a crescent, newborn moon hung just above the topmost peak of the high fells to the north-east.

Ambrose and I stood side by side, gazing outward, neither of us feeling the need to speak. The experience of simply being there made me feel powerful and privileged. I turned to look down to where the fort lay hidden in the darkness of the plateau beneath us, and it seemed strange to me that, apart from the dull glow of several sunken fires, I saw no sign of life or movement where I knew large numbers of people slept. The corollary—that there might be an army on the other side of us, similarly shrouded—seemed too commonplace to mention. A short time later, having had a few words to pass the time of night with each of the sentinels, we were on our way back down to the camp beneath.

When we arrived back at the front of the fort itself, in plain sight of the guard stationed at the main gates, Ambrose stopped by the smouldering remains of a fire and began to stir it back to life, feeding it with kindling until the first flames sprang up, then piling heavier fuel on top. Avoiding the heaviest drift of the smoke, I seated myself on a nearby log, and presently he pulled another log close to mine. We had had little opportunity to speak on our inspection tour, since all our attention had been given to negotiating narrow, rock-strewn pathways in the darkness.

We talked for a time then about Tressa, and about my relationship with her, and I was absolutely open with my brother. He was curious, of course, and evidently did not want to pry, but I was so happy in my life with Tress that I told him everything in my mind, and he listened and was glad for me. I spoke at length about Arthur and Tress and the relationship—not really surprising, given a modicum of thought and consideration—that had sprung into life between them, based upon mutual trust and liking and their shared human need: his for a mother and hers for a child. The three of us had, in the short space of several months, created a family for ourselves, strange though it might have appeared to be in the eyes of others. Lovers though we were, openly and unashamedly, Tress and I continued to live apart. Similarly, Arthur continued to sleep in the home of his friends Gwin and Ghilleadh, as he had always done, being cared for by his former nurse Turga and deferring to Shelagh in all things as his adoptive mother. And yet somehow, Arthur and Tress and I had become a solid, tightly interdependent familial unit, sharing our lives, our strengths and weaknesses, our beliefs and our ideas, without stinting, and blessed in being able to do so without the internal jealousies and strife that seemed to mar so many other people's family lives.

When I had finished talking of my love, we sat in companionable silence for a little while, and then Ambrose turned our conversation again to young Arthur.

"The boy looks well," he said. "He's growing tall, as we expected he would, and he shows signs of having shoulders as broad as yours and mine. He's skinny, though, don't you think?"

"He's a growing boy, Ambrose, and that's normal. I was that way at his age, weren't you? All the food he ingests—and he eats like a horse—is used to push him up to his full height. Once he's achieved that, he'll grow in breadth and weight."

Ambrose glanced at me, his eyes twinkling. "You sound like Lucanus."

"And so I should. Those were Luke's very words to me, when I said the same foolish thing to him, bare months ago. The boy will grow upward, first, and then fill out. In the meantime, our task is to make sure he stays as strong as he can be."

"And how do we do that?"

"He's almost ten, now, as I said, and in the past year his education has undergone a shift in direction—less book study, less indoor theorizing, more practical training in weaponry and soldiery. He and his friends have been working with the new training swords, ever since you left for Camulod last time with Connor—" I broke off as his eyes crinkled into a broad smile. "What is it?"

"Nothing, really. I remember the weight of those things, that's all. Are you still making them from solid oak? Those boys should hardly be able to lift them, let alone swing them."

I nodded. "Aye, well, that's true. For the time being, they're using lighter shafts suited to their strength, and using them two-handed, treating them most of the time as spear shafts. But that is changing, and the boys are growing stronger every day as they build up the muscles in their arms and shoulders. Dedalus and Rufio are sharing responsibility for training them, and as our two most able experts on the new weapons, they are hard taskmasters. Wait you, till you see. I promise you, you'll be surprised."

My brother nodded and changed the subject. "There's one more thing I wanted to discuss with you. It's for your ears alone, I think, although what you choose to do with the information is your concern."

I turned to face him squarely, alerted by something in his tone. "What is it?"

"Arthur may have a brother in Cornwall."

"What?" I sat blinking at him, unable to accept the import of what I had heard him say. He shrugged, holding my gaze, content to allow me to think through what he had said. "That's not possible," I said finally. "Uther and Ygraine are both dead since his birth."

"Cay, your mother has been dead since your birth and yet you and I are brothers."

"We had different mothers."

"Precisely so."

I sat staring at him as the full import of what he had said began to sink home to me. "Sweet, gentle Jesus! Are you telling me that Uther sired a child on another woman before he died?"

"No, I'm telling you that I have heard a report—a rumour, and no more than that—that Uther lay, initially, with one of Ygraine's women, before he entered into his liaison with the Queen herself. I have no knowledge of the truth of it, the story simply came to me by chance, overheard as a soldiers' legend, like the tale of your magic in the empty room, that Uther had rutted wondrously amidst Queen Ygraine's women. You know how soldiers are. They give their heroes, and dead heroes in particular, attributes and personalities that would defy the gods. The word is, among some of the men, that Uther plowed a broad furrow in Cornwall and fathered bastards by the score."

"Well, that's not difficult to believe. Uther's appetites were legendary in that respect, and most of his men almost destroyed themselves seeking to outdo him. Rape and venery are part of war and part of the payments soldiers take for risking their lives. Given how long that war dragged on, Cornwall must be full of bastards sired by Uther's men. and I've no doubt my cousin did his share of repopulating the countryside after his armies emptied it."

"Aye, no doubt." Ambrose leaned forward" and pushed at a burning log with his foot, thrusting it closer to the heart of the fire. "But one of those bastards he sired may be of noble blood on both sides of the tryst, and that could breed a challenge to young Arthur, in time to come. The rumour says that the woman involved was one of the Queen's ladies, sent to Lot's court by her brother, a king called Crandal."

The name surprised me, for in the space of a single day, never having heard it before, I had now heard it twice. Ambrose told me that this man was a king among the Painted People north of the Great Wall and that his name had spread far and wide in recent years because of his conquests. Apparently the man was no mere warrior but a champion and a hero to his people. He had never been beaten in battle and had conquered all the lands that lay around his own, so that his domain now extended the length and breadth of eastern Caledonia, from the Wall to the edge of the high mountains in the north and west.

I sat listening in silence, aware only of Ambrose's voice and the crackling of the fire, until he had finished. When his voice tailed off, though, I was still dissatisfied.

"So why did you bring up his name now?"

He looked at me in surprise. "Why? Because now, it appears, he is preparing to strike southward, into Britain below the Wall. But this matter of his sister makes the business more immediate to us. I didn't want to mention the woman's involvement today, when we were speaking earlier, because the boy was present."

"Hmm." It was my turn now to stare into the fire, thinking deeply. "So where is this woman now?"

Ambrose shook his head. "I know nothing of her. In the tale I heard, she left to have her child elsewhere, once it was known that the Queen had taken up with Uther."

"She was banished?"

"No, apparently not. From what I heard, she had lain with Uther at the Queen's instigation, as a ploy to win favours for her mistress. That she was quickened was ... unfortunate—unplanned but not disastrous. It was only later that the Queen herself became involved with Uther."

"Damnation! So this story could be true? There could be another heir to Uther's kingdom?"

"Aye, and a firstborn one, at that. Bastard though he be, he's no more so than Arthur."

"So where is he?"

Ambrose shook his head slowly. ."Who knows? He could be anywhere, concealed like our own boy for his own safety. But bear in mind, Caius, I heard only a rumour. It may be total fabrication."

"Aye, and it may equally be true." We sat quiet thereafter, each of us with his own thoughts, until I said, "What if it is true?"

Now Ambrose roused himself and stretched. "What if it is? All that would change in our design is that Arthur might conceivably lose the Pendragon mountain kingdom in Cambria. True, it's his patrimony, but its loss would not be totally unbearable. He'd still have Camulod and all its strength, and the kinship of the Eirish Scots, and his claim to Cornwall. Sufficient there to keep a lad of Arthur's mettle on his toes for fifty years or so. Anyway, there's little profit to be had from fretting over it. If this boy is out there, somewhere, he will come forward, sooner or later, to declare himself—and when he does, he won't have Uther's Seal to wear on his right hand, nor Uther's armour on his back, nor Uther's Camulodian cousins on his side. Have you spoken to Derek yet about regaining Uther's armour?"

"Aye, several times. I believe he'll give it to the boy when the right time comes, but he'll do it through me. He has no wish for the child to know or even to be curious about who killed his father. He keeps the armour well maintained, though. I've seen it. It's free of rust and the leather harness is supple and well oiled ... " I sat gazing into the fire for a while, then expelled my breath loudly and stood up.

"You're right, Brother, there's little to be gained by agonizing over a child who might never have been sired or, if he was, might well have died in infancy. If he's still alive, and dangerous to us, we'll find out soon enough. But we won't discover anything tonight. Let's go to bed."

Ambrose remained with us in Mediobogdum for only two weeks on that occasion, at the end of which he returned to Camulod by the same route. But from the first day of that visit, young Arthur threw himself more wholeheartedly than ever into his training, working ceaselessly with the wooden practice swords and driving his companions to equal his own efforts. Remembering the sight of his Uncle Ambrose riding down from the high pass at the head of his troops, Arthur would take no rest from that time on until he had ensured that he, too, would one day make such a commanding appearance at the head of his own men. I was well content with that, and drove him the harder because of it, deriving pleasure from the speed with which he absorbed everything to which I set him, and from the satisfying way his lean, narrow frame soon began to fill out and grow visibly stronger.

I find it strange that I seem to have lacunae in my memories of that brief, happy time. Few coherent images linger in my consciousness of the passage of time in the period of years that followed; the summers and the winters, springs and autumns blended into a timeless, almost unheeding idyll during which we were unthreatened By the world outside and utterly uncaring of its affairs. To some extent, my inattention was attributable to the luxurious novelty of my life with Tressa. Perhaps the truth might be served better by phrasing that last observation as "the luxurious novelty of having Tress in my life," for I have no wish to suggest that we two settled in together to enjoy a life of conjugal bliss; that would be far from the truth. We did, however, grow quickly into a close friendship that was cemented by the sexual intimacy we enjoyed openly and without subterfuge.

Of course, there were events that took place during those years that do stand out, but all of those were self- contained, brief ruptures in the fabric of our daily lives— many of them pleasant, others less so. Marriages were made among our folk and Derek's, and children were born, and some of those—very few, thanks to our good Lucanus—died in infancy. One of our number, a newcomer from Ravenglass, ventured outside the north gate late one night, far gone in drink, and fell over the abyss to his death, taking with him the companion who had walked with him hoping to lead him safely home.

Ambrose himself returned as often as he could, at least once a year, as did Connor from Eire. I recall quite clearly that on his third visit, or it might even have been his fourth, Ambrose astonished us all by telling us that Camulod had garrisoned the abandoned town of Lindinis, or Ilchester as it was being called nowadays, the closest settlement to our Colony on the great road south to Isca. His announcement created a furore of questioning and debate upon die wisdom of such a thing.

Ambrose sat back throughout the entire chorus, smiling to himself and simply allowing us to vent our outrage and disbelief, his eyes ranging from face to face as he listened. Ilchester, he was informed, as if he did not know, had degenerated quickly after the legions left, becoming a dreary, squalid, dreadful place of ruins and desolation. It was entirely unsuited as a garrison station for Camulod's troopers. It was too far away from Camulod itself and would be practically indefensible in the event of attack from north or south. The road itself offered an enemy direct access to the walls. What was the Council thinking of, initiating such a thing, and had they no concern at all for the morale of the troopers stationed there in such a place?

I had noted the smile on my brother's face from the outset, and so had contributed nothing to the general storm of disapproval, preferring to wait and hear what he would say when it had blown itself out. Dedalus, too, I noticed, sat in silence, and it amazed me that none of the others seemed aware of that. His was the voice that should have roared above all the rest, and yet its silence went unheeded. Eventually, however, the noise subsided and the few individual voices that still muttered tailed self-consciously away into a lengthy silence that no one seemed inclined to break. I caught my brother's eye and leaned forward.

"Aren't you sorry you mentioned that?"

"No," he replied, his smile growing wider. "I expected it and I enjoyed it."

"Then you have a response?"

Ambrose looked about him. "Of course, and I'll give it gladly, although I may not be able to address every point that was raised here." He paused. "First, let me say that Lindinis, or Ilchester, whichever you prefer, is a vastly altered place from the desolate slum you knew. The ruins are all gone, leaving a wide, cleared space all around the fort. The walls stand high and strong, far higher than they were before, three earth-filled tiers of them, faced with new palisades of logs. Inside the walls, the houses are all rebuilt and full of people—the garrison and their families. We have new earthen walls reaching to new heights, new parapets and towers housing artillery, and a broad, deep, triple ditch surrounding all, crossed by three separate bridges that are raised and lowered from gate-towers by the garrison. The town is virtually impregnable today, even from the open road, and morale there is very high. In the space of a year, incredible as it might seem to you who knew it years ago, Ilchester has become a sought-after post." He stopped, and looked around from face to face.

"Now, why did we do it? Why did we go to such great lengths to redeem a lost town, thirty and more miles from our home base?"

Hector spoke up. "Overcrowding. It was bound to come to that."

"Precisely, Hector—overcrowding." Ambrose turned his gaze back on the others. "You were all there at home the year following the Great Winter. You know how hard we worked to build new quarters for the intake of soldiers we enlisted that year to fill the ranks left empty by the wars in Cornwall, and if you think upon it, you'll recall how much talk there was of reallocation of our arable lands for crops to feed them all. Years have passed since then, and each of them has seen a new intake of soldiers, because soldiers are our lifeblood.

"None of us can ever afford to forget the reason for Camulod's founding. It was survival! Survival in the face of catastrophe and invasion by aliens. That survival involves military readiness—not simply the will to fight but the strength to fight and win, and that strength is our garrison. The moment we allow our garrison to weaken in any way, we might as well lie down and die, because our survival will be at an end." Again he paused, letting his listeners agree to that before he hammered home his next point.

"But soldiers have to eat, my friends, and even though Camulod is blessed in being wondrously fertile, there are limits to what the land can produce. We were aware more than a year ago that we had begun to approach those limits, but that is when one of our councillors, Lucius Varo, put forward the suggestion in Council that we should reclaim the fields that lay fallow around the town of Ilchester.

'The idea seemed sound, if logistically difficult, and so a scouting expedition was dispatched to look into the matter. I commanded that expedition, and my report was enthusiastic, because I saw a double opportunity present itself: a new source of food, combined with an end to overcrowding. Besides that, I recognized that the reclamation and refurbishment of the old fort would give our soldiers something new to occupy them when they were not training for war—something useful, and something permanent in which they could take pride. I had obtained some documents, a year or two before that, detailing the construction of a highly sophisticated fort in Gaul, and I decided we should have a similar construction here in Britain. It took a year to build, with more than a thousand men labouring on it every day, but it was completed months ago, before the winter set in, and it is magnificent. Thomas Atribatus, the fourth generation of his name, commands the garrison, and Lucius Varo himself is installed as civil governor, representing the Council and responsible for the farming operations in the surrounding area. Our new castella is not made of stone, so it won't stand forever, but it will serve our needs for the next hundred years."

There was more discussion after that, but the fire had gone out of our objections in the light of Ambrose's clear and dispassionate comments.

I find it curious that I can recall instants like this, across the gulf of decades, with great clarity, and yet there are others that are lost forever in my mind. Letters arrived from Germanus in Gaul, and swords and weaponry arrived from Camulod; soldiers arrived and stayed, and were relieved and left; and life went tilting onward.

I revelled in the novelty of becoming a working member of a small, close-knit and happy community. I was a warrior first and foremost, nonetheless, and I never lost sight of that. I trained and drilled for several hours every day, with the boys and away from them, pitting myself against Dedalus, Rufio, Donuil and others daily as I had done throughout my life, keeping my muscles hard and supple and my military skills well honed.

I know now that I was completely at peace in those days, for only the second time in my life, savouring and loving die challenge of hard, daily work in the forest and the daily bliss of coming home at last to the warmth of Tressa's company. And as I luxuriated in the happiness of my new life, years slipped by inexorably and invisibly.

Thinking back on that time earlier today, I found myself smiling to remember that, Of all the people who might have recalled me to the realities of life and the passing years, it was Derek who shook me from my daze. It had been a blazing hot summer, and on that particular day, distracted by the heat, I had been unable to concentrate on any of the tasks I had assigned myself. Instead, I saddled up Germanicus and made my" way out of the fort and down into the valley towards Ravenglass itself. I had no particular purpose in mind at the time; I was simply being lazy and indulging myself.

Truth to tell, I was feeling rather neglected and sorry for myself, because Tress had no time for me, and my other close companions were all involved elsewhere. Tress was cloistered with Shelagh and three other women, hard at work indoors, adding the finishing touches to an ornate and quite magnificent robe on which they had been working, under Tressa's guidance, for many months. The garment was to be a gift for Salindra, the second, very young and hugely pregnant wife of Derek's eldest son. She was expected to give birth at any moment, and Tressa was concerned that after all the weeks and months of work that had gone into her endeavour, the birth might yet occur before the robe was finished. I had visited the stone tower room in which they were all slaving over the thing, apparently sewing by feel, rather than by sight, in the cool semi-darkness.

Lucanus had been absent for more than a week, on affairs of his own in Ravenglass, and I did not expect him back for at least several more days. He had recently become concerned over the scarcity of certain medicaments he prized highly, and had determined to spend time with the captains and crews of the various vessels that called into Ravenglass, in the hope that he might be able to enlist their support and find ways and means of replenishing his stores. Rufio, Donuil and Dedalus were down there, too, involved in other matters concerning stores and supplies, all of those far more mundane than Luke's. In the interests of education, they had taken the boys with them as supernumerary quartermasters. Consequently, alone and at loose ends, I made my way down from our plateau and through the forest towards the town and, I hoped, some convivial company.

On emerging from the forest road and into the fields lining the last few miles to the town, I found myself thinking again of the spot to which Derek had led me that first day when I had arrived in Ravenglass. Soon I had threaded my way through the massive agglomeration of loose stones and boulders that lined the outside edges of the fields and was angling Germanicus up the densely treed slope beyond it, towards the elevated site on the far side of the crest, where Derek and I had sat and talked.

The place was exactly as I remembered it, a natural throne overlooking the enclosed, forested valley beneath and the shimmering sea in the western distance. I dismounted and made myself comfortable in the spot Derek had occupied, finding it opulently padded with moss and perfectly positioned to provide the best possible view of the prospect far beneath. I sat there for the next half hour, gazing out to sea and thinking about nothing in particular, before I was alerted by the unmistakable sounds of someone mounting the trail towards me. My sense of logic told me it must be Derek, but I rose immediately to my feet and took cover nonetheless, concealing myself among the trees until I could see the newcomer.

It was indeed Derek, and as soon as I recognized him I stepped out of my concealment, calling his name. He was surprised to find me there but not displeased, and I was glad to see the welcome in his smile, for it had occurred to me somewhat belatedly that he might be as jealous of his seclusion in this secret spot as I had been of my own in my little hidden valley close to Camulod. If he was put out, however, he gave no indication of displeasure, and after having traded greetings and civilities, he settled down in his own preferred spot and waved me down to join him. Thereafter we indulged ourselves in talk of such trivialities as the uncommon weather and the progress of crops and work projects. Within the month, he reminded me, it would be time to begin gathering in what looked to be a prime crop of grain and vegetables, and we talked for a time about how my own people, including our soldiers, should be distributed among his in order to share the task equitably and bring in the harvest as quickly as possible. Then for a while we simply sat there, basking in the afternoon sunlight and dozing shamelessly, lulled by the heavy droning of bees, the darting flight of blue, red and green dragon-flies and the buoyant, fluttering dance of butterflies. One of the latter, a brilliant thing of brown and white and red, landed on Derek's outstretched leg and sat there twitching, alternately opening and closing its magnificent wings to the sun's caress.

Derek glanced at me to see whether I had noticed it and then grunted, "You ever see one of these things being born?"

I nodded. "A few times. It's a miraculous thing to watch, isn't it?"

"Aye, it is that, although I've seen it but once. How did you see it the first time, can you recall?"

I smiled. "I had to be shown it, otherwise I would never have noticed it, or even thought to look. I had a teacher called Daffyd, a Druid, who found a place, one year when I was a mere boy, where several of the cocoons had been secured to a stone wall. He watched them closely, and when he gauged that they were ready to split, he brought me to the place and made me watch." The memory filled me with pleasure and I laughed aloud. "It took a long time—almost an entire day, as I recall—and he wouldn't tell me what we were waiting for. I had convinced myself that he had merely found a new and malicious way of keeping me from my games, making me sit motionless, peering at a brown and highly polished but utterly lifeless, uninteresting thing. It looked like some kind of insect, I could see, but it was undeniably dead.

"I remember I suffered the boredom stoically, at first, but then as the day drew on I grew more and more disgusted and fidgety—so much so that he eventually decided to forego the pleasure he had thought to win from my surprise, and told me what we had come there to see. It seemed utterly outlandish and impossible that a large, hairy caterpillar could have enclosed itself within that tiny thing—a chrysalis, he called it, and now that I think of it, I'd like to ask him where he heard that word, for it's Greek, the only Greek word I ever heard him use. Anyway, the caterpillar part was bad enough, but it seemed even more impossible that out of it would come a butterfly. And then it happened! The casing began to move, and to split, and out crawled a shaky little thing that unfolded to become a butterfly. I've never seen anything as lovely or as moving as the way its wings unfurled and dried. Why are you smiling?"

Derek shook his head very slightly. "Simply remembering how I felt, too. It shook me to the bottom of my being, and I was man full grown when I saw it. It was after I first met you, in fact, during Lot's wars. I was hiding, being hunted by some of your cousin Uther's people, and they were right on top of me. I was huddled against a rock and this thing, whatever you called it, was right in front of my face. It began to split open and I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I mean, it was so close to my face, and so ugly looking I was disgusted. My flesh crawled and I wanted to vomit. But I could hear the voices of the people who were searching for me—they were almost within arm's reach, and I didn't dare move. And then the damn thing crawled out and stretched and spread its wings, and they seemed to dry out, and it was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. When it finally flew away, leaving the empty shell behind, I felt as if I had been robbed. I've never forgotten it, and I've never seen it again, but it taught me that sometimes things more glorious than you could imagine can crawl out from places that amaze you."

I said nothing, and after a moment, he continued. "But I don't think I'd go so far as to believe the damn things start out as creepy-crawlies ... caterpillars. That sounds like it came * from someone who'd had too much mead. I mean, think about it. You don't really believe that, do you? Butterflies come from eggs—strange-looking eggs, but eggs, nonetheless. Birds do, too—they break the shell and crawl out, feathers, wings and all. But the eggs are laid by birds. You don't hear anyone saying that things like worms wrap themselves in eggshell and then come out as birds. That's ridiculous."

I was grinning at him. "I wouldn't argue with you, Derek, but butterflies aren't birds, and that is what happens. It's called metamorphosis."

"What?"

"Metamorphosis. Another Greek word. It means a change of form. The butterfly lays eggs that hatch into caterpillars. The caterpillars then grow to full size and spin themselves a complete covering of some kind of material they produce in the way spiders spin webs. They wrap themselves completely in that covering and go to sleep for a long time, and when they wake up again and emerge from their covering, they're butterflies."

"Horseshit!"

I threw up my hands, laughing. "Fine! I won't argue with you, because there's no way for me to prove it, but it's the truth, I swear."

He favoured me with a long, considering look that dripped scepticism, then sat silent for a long time, so that when he spoke again his words took me by surprise.

"Like that boy of yours, young Arthur."

I turned my head to look at him. "I don't follow you."

"Meta-what-you-called-it ... He's changing into something very different."

"What d'you mean? You've lost me."

"He's changing. Arthur. Changing quickly. Growing up. He battered half the life out of my Droc this morning, right outside my door. Cracked his skull, I think, and broke a few bones belonging to Droc's cronies, too."

"By the Christ! Are you serious?"

"Of course I'm serious. Mind you, they deserved it, and probably more than they got. I had to lay down the law to the young louts, in terms they couldn't misunderstand. But Droc didn't hear me. He was unconscious when I arrived. Good thing Lucanus was in the town. He took him away and wrapped him in bandages from head to shoulders."

I was stunned. "I find that difficult to believe. Droc is twice the size of Arthur and years older. How could young Arthur have beaten him so badly? He's a mere child."

Derek began to scoff, then stopped, looking at me in disbelief. "A mere child? When did you last see him?"

"Who, Arthur? A few days ago, the morning he left for Ravenglass."

'Then you saw a different boy from the one I saw. I'm talking about young Arthur Pendragon."

"I know you are. So am I."

'Then one of us has ailing eyesight, and it's not me. Let me ask you again, in different words: When did you last look at him?"

I gazed back at him, considering his rephrased question. When had I last looked at Arthur closely, analytically? I did so now in my mind, focusing on how he had appeared to me that last morning, and I saw immediately that I had been less than judicious in my assessment of the boy. He was no mere child; Derek was correct. Arthur had stopped being a child long before today, but I had failed to note, to really register, the change.

In truth, at thirteen, nigh on fourteen, Arthur was almost as tall as the tallest among us—myself and Derek. He was still slight, of course—still gangling and unformed—but he was strong and well made, with ever-widening shoulders and the merest suggestion of dark fuzz beginning to appear on his chin and cheeks. I visualized his hands, long and slender yet filled with strength, with tapering, blunt fingers and thick wrists, corded and muscled with the constant exercise of swinging the wooden practice swords. Then I thought of his smooth, tanned face with its piercing, tawny- yellow eyes, sharply planed cheek-bones above a wide, laughing mouth with perfect, brilliant teeth, the whole head framed in long, dark-brown hair shot through with golden streaks and set on a thick, strong neck and shoulders that already showed the sloping musculature that would grow and thicken into massive manhood. Arthur Pendragon was growing up very quickly, I realized. I nodded, pursing my lips and sniffing to acknowledge that Derek had the right of things.

'Tell me what happened."

Derek reached into his tunic and produced a long, thin- bladed knife and a length of hollow reed on which he had evidently been working, carving it into a whistle.

"Well, on one level, two boys had a grudge fight. It happens all the time. But one of the boys isn't really a boy any longer, and he's a bully, to boot. Unfortunately, he's my son, and I'm not proud of that, but I've taken my boot * to his arse often enough to convince myself that beating him won't change him. Perhaps what happened to him this morning will have more effect than I've had. We'll see." He began marking the reed, preparing to cut notches along the top of it.

"Was he bullying Arthur?"

"No, no." He held the reed up to his eye, squinting along the length of it. "He'd tried that, apparently, but couldn't make it work. No, he was bullying the little one, Ghilly, and his cronies were helping him. They beat the little fellow up quite badly. I wasn't there, you understand, but I got to the bottom of it after I'd been summoned by one of the women who saw what was going on. Anyway,

as I pieced it together afterward, they were knocking the young lad around when Arthur came riding into the town, and they stopped as soon as they saw him—not because they were afraid of him but because they wanted to see what he would do.

"Turns out that they'd been trying to win some kind of superiority over Arthur for months, but he wouldn't fight, no matter what they did. Simply ignored them. They tried intimidation, and they tried insulting him, and they tried jostling him. One of them even walked up to the lad on one occasion and punched him in the face. Arthur simply took it and ignored them—wouldn't react, wouldn't fight. They couldn't understand that and they couldn't overcome it and it drove them to wilder and wilder extremes. They knew he wasn't afraid of them, because he never tried to avoid them, but they could not provoke him into fighting. Until today. One of them had the bright idea of taking out their spite on little Ghilly, guessing that they might get a reaction from Arthur that way.

"Well, they did, and it was more than they expected. Arthur saw Ghilly lying on the ground, bleeding. He helped him up and led him away. Never said a word to anyone or looked at a single one of Droc's people. But no sooner was he out of sight than he came back, this time carrying one of those fighting sticks of yours. He walked straight up to Droc and his group and said, 'Very well, I'm here,' and then he let loose. Dropped three of them before any of them realized he had come to fight, and once they did realize what was happening, they couldn't do a thing against him, even though they're all bigger than he is. I've never seen him use that stick, but according to what I heard this morning he makes it do magic."

I was smiling broadly. "How many of them were there?"

"Eight, and he walked up to them as though he were the only person in the street. Not a care, not a flicker of hesitation. And he beat all of them, including Droc, my fearless son, may the gods protect his useless, brainless bulk. Arthur didn't break his head, by the way, he merely tripped him. Droc fell head first into a wall. He does that kind of thing very well. What are you looking so pleased about?"

"Am I? I suppose I am. It pleases me that the boy can be so ... mature. Mature enough to avoid fighting when he thought it unnecessary or unwise, and also mature enough on the other hand to fight without hesitation against bigger, older boys—and thrash them—when he felt it necessary. But now I have to leave you here and go and find Dedalus and Rufio. I've matters to discuss with them."

"Concerning the boy."

"Aye, and his education. Clearly it's time to move him along."

"Along to where?"

"Towards manhood."

Derek grinned and shook his head, turning his attention to his whistle. "He'll get there soon enough, my friend. But I suppose if you feel you have to speed him along, then that's what you must do."

I spoke at length with Dedalus and Rufio that afternoon before I returned to the fort, and later that evening and long into the night, I discussed my plans for the next stage of the boy's education with Donuil and Shelagh, and with Tressa, whose opinion I had long since come to value and respect. The first step in the next stage must be Arthur's alone, I told them. It was a crucial step, and I had to be assured of his readiness. I saw no place there for any distractions occasioned by the presence of his friends, although I had little doubt that they would soon follow him into formal weapons training, as they followed him in all things. ,

Arthur appeared at the door of my quarters before mid- morning, smiling diffidently and clearly wondering why he had been summoned here alone.

'Tress told me to come and see you."

"I know, I asked her to send you over. Come in."

He stepped into the room, looking around him, a half- smile on his face, his eyes resting only briefly on the oaken practice sword that stood propped against the table where I sat.

"Have I done something wrong?"

"Why would you ask that?"

His smile grew wider, but lost none of its uncertainty. "Why wouldn't I? You haven't sent for me like this for ages, and the last time it was because I'd stayed out late, after curfew."

'That's right, I'd forgotten. No, you're not in trouble, so sit down."

He sat, his face clearing quickly, and waited for me to continue. I sat looking at him for a few moments longer.

, "Derek told me yesterday you were fighting with his son."

"Oh. Droc. Yes."

"You thrashed him."

He looked uncomfortable. "Yes."

"You used your practice sword. How?"

"What?"

"How did you use the stick, one- or two-handed?"

"Er ... I'm not sure. Both ways, I think. Didn't have time to think about it."

"Hmm. Where is it now?"

"Outside, on my saddle."

"Fetch it, then, and come with me. I have my wagon outside."

He harnessed his mount to the tail of the wagon and climbed up onto the bench beside me. I slapped the reins and sat silent as we plodded through the fort to the eastern gate, heading towards the drilling ground beyond. When we reached the stone hut by the gate-tower, where we kept our leather practice armour, I motioned to him to jump off and put some on. I was already wearing heavy, toughened bullhide armour, including the arm-protectors that we had made to protect us from shoulder to wrist. He leaped down and disappeared into the tower, and I carried on through the gate without waiting for him.

I stopped the wagon close by the ramp leading up to the parade ground on the flattened knoll overlooking the fort and jumped down, swinging my heavy weapon and loosening my arm and shoulder muscles as I made my way up the ramp. A short time later I heard him running to catch up to me, but I reached the top of the ramp ahead of him and turned to point my weapon two-handed at him.

"Exercises first."

He stopped, facing me, not even out of breath, then held his weapon horizontally towards me, both hands gripping the ornately carved hilt end, and closed his eyes, concentrating. Then he drew a deep, steady breath and launched into the exercise program we had devised, first to loosen, and then to strengthen our arm and wrist movements.

I simply stood and watched him, saying nothing and missing nothing of his performance. I was uncomfortably aware that I had last watched him do this a full six months before and that I had been lax since then in looking to my charge, lulled by the placid sameness of our day-to-day life. I had known he was training hard, and I had known he was doing well, thanks to Dedalus and Rufio, who worked with him daily and kept me informed of his progress, but I had had ho concept of how much the boy had learned and improved. Six months earlier his performance had been impressive, but now it was spectacular.

His eyes remained closed in concentration, and the stick-club weapon in his hand whirled faster and faster until its movements became a sustained blur, impossible to follow as he spun it two-handed, then one-handed, then from left grip to right, over and beneath and down and up and around until the final snap, when he spun on one leg, stepped forward with the other and brought the shaft flashing down to stop abruptly where it had begun, parallel to the ground, in a blow that, had the weapon been edged, would have split an enemy in two. When he opened his eyes again to look at me, his face expressionless, I had to collect myself.

"Impressive," I said, tonelessly. "Dedalus and Rufio told me you had improved. Now, apart from exercises and attacks on unarmed boys, can you use the thing effectively when someone else is pitted against you?"

His teeth flashed in a brilliant smile and I found myself surprised once again, in spite of their familiarity, by his radiant, wholesome good looks. "Shall I try?"

Well, he tried, and I had my hands full trying to beat him. His strength and resilience took me completely by surprise, and the fury of his attack made me forget within moments that I was pitted against a boy, "a mere child" as I had called him the previous day. He backed me up soon after we began by deflecting one of my blows and stepping inside it, forcing me to leap backward to safeguard my ribs. Once he had me on the retreat, he kept me there, reacting to his whirlwind attacks from every direction, so that I had no time to develop attacks of my own. Finally I gulled him by leaping back from one of his blows and allowing the impetus of his missed swing to take him sideways, opening his right flank to my attack. I threw myself back towards him, and I pressed home my advantage as though I were fighting Ded or Rufio, no thought in my mind of decreasing my drive because of his youth or lesser strength. I forced him to take one pace backward, then another, and then a third, which brought him to the steep edge of the slope beyond the drill ground. There I caught his whirling blade high on my own, stepped in close and smashed him with my chest, pushing him over the edge to where he slipped and fell to one knee.

I grounded my weapon immediately, deeply grateful for the opportunity to do so, and held out my hand to help him back to the level field, where he stood watching me, clearly prepared to continue. I had to force myself to breath evenly, when I wanted to pant and puff like the old man I felt myself to be. Eventually, when I was sure I could control my voice, I spoke.

"Good. Now I think you're ready for the next stage."

He simply stared at me expectantly, knowing that this was an important moment but with no idea of how it was or what it might involve.

We had had the two new Camulodian swords by then for several years, and in all that time none but myself, Dedalus, Rufio, Lucanus, Shelagh and Donuil had seen them; Shelagh and Luke only because they had been there when the swords arrived. It had seemed safer to all of us, from the beginning, to keep their existence secret, and we had been extremely conscious of the need for care in how we handled and transported the weapons, and in where and how we actually used them. In use, as we had discovered that first day, they rang with a clarion sound that was unique and astonishing and audible from great distances, and so we had been at pains to find a practice spot that was unlikely to be discovered by curiosity-seekers, such as inquisitive young boys, attracted by the ringing of the pure iron blades.

That we had found the place very quickly was due more to sheer, blind fortune than to any form of scientific questing: Dedalus had almost fallen headlong into it on the morning of the day the swords arrived. It was little more than a deep cleft in the rock face below the escarpment on which the fort was built, but it had high, vertical walls that contained the noise we made and a level, grassy floor that was both wide enough and long enough to suit our purposes perfectly. To reach it, however, involved almost an hour of travel from the fort itself, first down the road to the valley below, then along the accumulated scree at the bottom of the cliff face to where a dense clump of hawthorn concealed the narrow entrance to the cleft.

We kept the swords there, in situ, most of the time. When they had to be transported to and from the fort, we moved them in plain sight, wrapped in cloth in the bottom of the wagon, which was normally full of tools and pieces of equipment. No one had ever paid the slightest attention to them.

Now I led Arthur back to the wagon and hauled the long, cloth-wrapped bundle from the wagon bed, unwrapping the swords and handing one of them to him, hilt first. He was speechless, entranced by the lethal beauty of the weapon in his hands. It was far from being the first sword he had ever held, but it was the most fearsome. For almost two full years now, he and Gwin, Bedwyr and Ghilly had been working with Roman short-swords, traditional gladia made decades earlier by Publius Varrus. All four boys were adept in their use, having learned the basic disciplines of cut, stab and thrust in the traditional manner, "fighting" a solid practice post sunk in the ground and working from behind the shelter of a heavy infantry shield. That training was the practical reason for the daily use of the wooden staff Arthur now used so effectively: the heavy ash or oak staves were designed to be twice the weight of the swords they represented, so that when a warrior held a real sword in a real conflict, the weight of the weapon would seem negligible compared to what he was accustomed to.

As I stood watching him, Arthur raised his eyes from the sword he held, looking first at me, then turning his eyes to where the four practice posts were sunk into the earth at one end of the parade ground.

"No," I said, knowing what he was thinking. "Not that. Practice posts are useless for these swords. The weapons are too long, their arc too big. Cavalry swords require and demand an entirely different technique, and that's what you'll be learning from now on. You've been learning it already, for the past few years."

He gazed now for long moments at the weapon he held, the lower third of its blade resting on his open left palm, and then he looked me in the eye. "This isn't like any of the cavalry swords I've seen before. Where did it come from?"

"From Camulod," I replied. "Carol made it, and it is a cavalry sword, just like the others, yet very different. It's longer, heavier and above all sharper and more dangerous. You'll find there's more discipline attached to the use of this sword than to any other. All the rules apply that apply to other swords you've used, but there are new, additional rules that apply to these particular weapons. Ded and Rufio will continue to be your teachers, and from time to time I'll be working with you, and so will Donuil."

He was hefting the sword as I spoke, looking at the blade that stretched out from his fists.

"One other thing should be obvious. You won't be using this in quite as many ways as you use your staff. The only time you'll use it two-handed is when both hands are on the hilt. Try closing your fist over any part of that blade and you'll lose your fingers. Now, let's see those exercises again, using the sword."

He went through the entire sequence of exercises again, very slowly at first as he adjusted to the novelty of the feel and heft of the new sword, then with increasing confidence, until I could no longer see the hesitations where he had eliminated moves that involved catching the end of his weapon in his left hand to block a downward chop or deliver a full torso thrust. He did not say much, but it was evident that he was fascinated by the task that now lay ahead of him: the mastery of this new sword. I resisted the temptation to cross blades with him then and there; there would be time aplenty for that in the days ahead.

That same afternoon, I instructed Mark to set up four practice horses—Arthur, as I had known he would, had been most insistent that his friends be permitted to enter on this new phase of training with him. His reasons for insisting, however, had pleased me greatly. What point was there, he had asked me, in his graduating to the next phase of his training alone? Without the shared participation and the assistance of his friends, he would have a more difficult and trying time mastering the new techniques, and their friendship might suffer because of it. With their equal involvement, however, the effort would be lessened by a factor of four, since they could all work together. Even Ghilly, he pointed out, who was not yet twelve, had earned the right to move ahead and would not let either his youth or his lack of muscle hold him back from taking his rightful place among the four. I had listened, shrugged and agreed with him.

The practice horses were made of short, massive logs mounted on wooden legs. They resembled ludicrous saw- horses big enough to accommodate a saddle with stirrups and reins and a bridle. I had discussed their construction some time before with Mark, and so he was able to erect them quickly at the far end of the parade ground, close by the upright posts we used for short-sword practice—now that the boys were to be taught the use of the new swords, there was no further need for secrecy or concealment. Mark and the two men he had conscripted to help him hoisted the last of the awkward structures into place before sunset, using a tripod and pole block and tackle. The "horses" were far from elegant or graceful, but they were adequate and functional, and I saw the rightness of them when I went out to examine them at Mark's summons.

In the gathering dusk of evening, just before dinner that same night, I took the four boys out to see the new structures, and in order to mark the occasion in their minds as being of more than normal significance, I had Dedalus, Donuil and Rufio accompany us. There, once the four boys had clambered up onto the stationary devices and their initial exuberance had worn down, we informed them that in this place, mounted on these saddled forms, they would learn most of what they needed to know to use these new weapons. They would learn to use them on foot, too, I pointed out, but not as much and not as often. Like the long, ball-and-chain flail invented by Uther Pendragon, these long swords were primarily cavalry weapons.

Thereafter, we entered a period when the bell-like ringing of skystone iron could be heard coming from the parade ground at all hours of the day. We had four students and four teachers and only two of the swords, and so we worked out a roster which ensured that each student would work regularly with each teacher. Much of what we four teachers had developed was new, common to all and suited to the properties of the swords, but each had acquired small tricks and idiosyncrasies of his own, naturally suited to his individual fighting techniques.

Eventually, and very soon after the initial excitement and novelty of the new weapons had begun to abate, Arthur's inquisitive mind and his natural sense of justice brought him to my quarters with questions. Why were the four Camulod boys the only ones to be learning the new techniques? That was simply answered. There were no more than two swords and a finite number of hours in the day. Then why were there only two swords? Could Joseph not make more, since these weapons were so obviously superior to anything else in existence?

To answer that one, I had to tell him that the swords were made from the statue Publius Varrus had smelted from the skystone, his Lady of the Lake. He was thoroughly familiar with the tale, of course, but only with the early part of it. He had no idea that Excalibur existed, and I was determined that he should not yet learn about it, even though I was utterly convinced he was the one destined to use the sword. Publius Varrus had entrusted me with the secret of Excalibur, and it was one I had guarded well. Arthur would see it and own it one day, but not until he was ready, and right now he was still a boy.

He listened to what I had to say about the two new swords and the uniqueness of the metal from which they were made, and when I fell silent he nodded slowly, obviously not quite convinced of the correctness of my logic. I watched him.

"What's the matter? You wish to say something more? Speak out."

He shrugged. "Well, Merlyn, I understand what you mean, but it still doesn't seem right to me that Gwin and Bedwyr and Ghilly and I should be the only ones to learn to fight with new weapons. What about my other friends? This makes it look as though we are ... different, better somehow, more privileged."

"You are." He blinked at me and I plucked at my lower lip. "These other friends of yours, are you referring to the other boys living here in Mediobogdum, or are you including those in Ravenglass? Remember that the Romans lost the world because they taught the barbarians the Roman way of war. Would you want Droc and his cronies learning how to beat you more thoroughly than they can now?"

"I didn't mean them!"

"No, I assumed that, but where do you draw the .line? Are we to tell King Derek that we don't wish to teach his son anything? He hasn't asked us to, prior to this, but if you start giving lessons to all your friends who are his people, he'll have every right to demand that his sons share the learning."

That quieted him, and I stared at the top of his head as he gazed at his feet, thinking the matter through.

"Look, Arthur," I said then, taking pity on him. "There is one thing you have to bear in mind. You are the central and sole focus of all of these activities. You are Arthur Pendragon, great-grandson of Publius Varrus and King Ullic Pendragon, great-great-nephew of Caius Britannicus, founder of Camulod. You are the son of Uther Pendragon and the rightful heir to Cambria, and on your mother's side you have a claim to kingship of the Hibernian Scots. The day will come when you may have to fight for one or all of those birthrights. That day will find you well prepared, indeed uniquely prepared, if we continue as we are. Gwin and Ghilly and Bedwyr train with you because they are your closest friends and have been since your infancy. Someday, they'll be your commanders, weapons in and of themselves, and therefore they are worthy of being taught what they must know to perform their tasks and achieve what you will require of them. Do you hear and understand what I am saying to you now?"

"Yes, Merlyn. I do." He nodded his head with conviction, his great, golden eyes wide and solemn. "But I would at least like my friends to learn the fighting sticks."

I laughed, a short bark. "Then you'll have to teach them, because none of us who are already teaching you have the time. Are you prepared to do that? D'you think you are capable of doing it?"

He looked at me calmly, his eyes level and filled with confidence. "Yes, I do, if you'll permit it."

I shrugged, smiling. "I wouldn't think of stopping you. I'll have Mark issue the staves you'll need. How many of your friends would like to learn now, today?"

"Seven." He did not even have to count.

"Fine. You'll have seven staves, tomorrow or the day after, depending on when Mark has time to turn them on his lathe. Now run away and let me back to work."

It took little longer than a week for me to become used to the sight of him and his three satellites drilling their less- privileged friends in the uses of the wooden staves the others had envied for so long. I thought at first it might be a passing thing—that all of them, including Arthur and his three trainers, would soon grow tired of the discipline required and the daily grind of practice in addition to their normal round of chores and tasks. But such was not the case, and I watched with ever-increasing admiration as the seven novices grew more and more proficient. Their numbers swelled to thirteen and then to seventeen, and all the time Arthur was indefatigable in his attention to them.

It occurs to me again now, as it has so many times in the years that have elapsed, that the stature young Arthur achieved was due as much to what lay inside him as it was to the external, dictatorial forces that shaped his behaviour. He was to meet many powerful men—kings and princes, chiefs and warlords—in the time that lay ahead of him, and he was to see and evaluate for himself an entire spectrum of examples of how and how not to mould men, train armies, conduct campaigns, make laws and govern peoples and territories. He carried within him, however, from his earliest boyhood, a natural sense of lightness and the fitness of certain things, allied with an innate regard for justice, as opposed to power and privilege, that set him above all others of his time and made ordinary men love him.

Time and again I witnessed it during his boyhood, as in the instinctive and immediate sharing of his four ponies with his three bosom friends—an offer made in ignorance of the fact that this had been precisely the intent of the gift- giver, Connor—and again in this matter of sharing his knowledge and his fighting skills with his less-privileged friends. The task involved great inconvenience and sacrifice of personal time and freedom for him, yet it would never have occurred to him not to do it. He saw it as a natural obligation, to be taken in stride and accomplished to the best of his abilities, and he would spend long, additional hours on balmy summer afternoons when he might have been fishing or riding, instructing any of the boys who were having difficulty in mastering the tricks they were learning. I watched quietly, as did Ded and the others, and took pride in his dedication and his apparent selflessness, but yet, for all my pride, I must admit it never occurred to me that I was watching the evolution of anything amazing.

I saw and admired the conscientious young man; I overlooked the future warrior, champion and king completely.

FIFTEEN

Very soon after the installation of the wooden horses, the slow-passing, idyllic days of the previous years-long interlude began to seem like an impossible dream. Time, once again, dictated a steady, marching beat. The harvest, which began less than a month after Arthur's first session with the new swords, introduced the new order with a slow and stately roll of drums. Everyone—our own people and the folk of Ravenglass—worked together to a clearly defined plan.

Within the week, however, the steady rhythm of the drum beat gave way to a stuttering, irregular staccato as the weather broke without warning and a succession of heavy storms crashed down about us, each more savage than the last. The early storms of the first few days were greeted philosophically, but as their frequency and intensity grew greater, every other task in Ravenglass was abandoned so that every able-bodied person could work in the fields to salvage the crop before it was utterly ruined. Nursing mothers carried their babies swaddled on their backs as they wrestled with stooks or flailed the grain on the thrashing floors, and old people of both sexes, many of whom had done no hard labour for years, worked as crews on the wagons and grain sleds or spent their time tending the horses and oxen, without whose strength the grain could not have been transported. The weather worsened steadily, bringing torrential rains and high winds every day for almost three weeks, so that eventually we had to abandon almost a full quarter of what should have been a prime harvest to rot where it lay, utterly waterlogged and ruined.

Harvest time also brought a brief visit from Connor, who, accompanied by little Feargus, had sought shelter from the terrible storms at sea. He brought tidings to accompany the bleak outlook that this ugly month had spawned. War had broken out again in Eire, and the pagan, north-western tribes called the Children of Gar were now in possession of the major part of Athol's former kingdom on the east coast. They had not yet taken all of it, Connor reported, but that was due only to the fact that one tiny portion on the coast itself was defended by a rear guard garrison of warriors, the last of Athol's clan to remain in Eire.

The women, children and old people had now all been successfully transported to the clan's new territories in the islands off the coast of Caledonia. The ferocious, last-ditch campaign was being fought only because the remaining defenders literally had their backs to the sea and nowhere to go. They were to have been evacuated as quickly as vessels could be brought in to transport them, but the logistics involved were intricate. Surrounded and heavily outnumbered as they were, the Scots had to stand fast. Even with galleys available to them, none could simply sail away, abandoning their less-fortunate comrades, so no withdrawal was possible until sufficient galleys had been assembled to take the entire army off in one night.

That assembly had been close to complete when Connor and Feargus had sailed, a few weeks previously, carrying the last cargo of young cattle and livestock across to Liam Twistback in the south, and by this time, Connor was confident, the operation should have been completed and the race of Scots should have been completely removed from Eire, which they had already ceased to think of as home. In consequence, he and his men were now travelling directly to the north, where Connor would henceforth base his fleet with his brother Brander's, in his clan's new territories.

The storms abated, eventually, and fine weather returned. Connor set sail for the northern isles, and within days of his departure the autumn column arrived by road from Camulod, under the command of three of our old friends, Benedict, Philip and Falvo, all of whom had travelled with us to Eire a decade earlier. They, too, had taken the brunt of the weather gods' displeasure, and their troops presented a spectacle very different from all those that had come before. No glorious panoply here; these soldiers had been on the open road for almost a month, sleeping in one- man legionaries' tents of leather the entire time. Many of them were practically unfit for duty, suffering from chronic exposure to malignant conditions and rife with chills, aches, pains, congestion, fevers and ulcerated abrasions caused by the chafing of cold, wet armour.

Poor old Lucanus went to work the moment they arrived, and we saw little of him for the ensuing few days. Shortly after our arrival in Mediobogdum, he had designated one entire building as his Infirmary, and he lived there, in the senior centurion's quarters at the western end of the block. Luke seldom ventured out, even to eat. His meals were taken to him where he sat with one patient or another, touching them, talking to them and willing them back to health.

The sight of our three old comrades was like a draught of heady wine for Dedalus, Rufio and me, and the celebration of their arrival was a major event, although a highly exclusive one, since none but the six of us attended. Only the next day, when the fumes had cleared from my head and my skull had ceased reverberating like a brazen cymbal with each beat of my heart, did Benedict hand me the letter he carried from my brother.

I had asked him the previous day what had kept Ambrose from us, and he had merely shrugged and said that Ambrose now felt he should no longer keep the challenge of the long journey to Ravenglass to himself; that it was time others shared the responsibility and honour. I had accepted that. The letter, however, threw a different light on things. I made my way outside the rear gate to where I could sit undisturbed and broke the seal on my brother's letter, hearing his voice in my mind as I read aloud what he had written:

Ambrose Ambrosianus to Caius Merlyn Britannicus:

Greetings, Brother.

I have received word out of Cornwall, brought for your attention by a Druid of those parts, that there has again been great strife in that unfortunate region. Kings and princes, including that Dumnoric who won prominence after the death of Gulrhys Lot, have gone down in death, and the land is fought over and laid waste by a large number of warring factions. One of the warlords involved is your old enemy Ironhair, of whom we had hoped to hear no more. Alas, having resurfaced, he has won a degree of preeminence and seems bent, according to this report, upon the total destruction of all his challengers. In a reversal of roles, it appears he is now assisted by Carthac, whom we know to be a depraved monster of a man, the mere sight of whom strikes terror into their enemies.

I inquired of the Druid why this should be so, and his response brought back to me the tales you told of this Carthac's descent into dementia after a head injury received in his youth. It would appear now that his depravity is such that he is no longer worthy of being considered human. He has gigantic strength and he kills for the sheer pleasure of spilling blood and causing pain. I am told his prowess in battle is extraordinary and his presence in a fight is the equal often normal men. That may be greatly exaggerated, but nonetheless it bespeaks great strength and power. His blood lust is insatiable, they say, and does not abate once free of the battlefield. This Carthac loves to kill by slow torture and has been known to do so merely to while away some evening hours, choosing victims at random, even from among his own army.

The primary horror, however, and the greatest cause for the fear and awe the monstrous being causes, is his cannibalism. He roasts the flesh of his victims and eats it, and he wears necklaces of human ears about his neck and shoulders. Everyone walks in terror of him, save for Ironhair, to whom the creature seems devoted: Our Druid friend came here seeking your assistance for the people of that land, and mistook me for you. He was greatly disappointed not to find you here and begged me to pass on this word to you, and to wish you well. His name is Tumac, and he says he knew you well, once, long ago.

Tumac! I released the bottom of the tightly rolled scroll, allowing it to spring back into place, rose to my feet and began pacing agitatedly. Tumac had been the second, and the younger, of the two students apprenticed to my old teacher Daffyd the Druid. They were mere children when I first knew them, and years younger than me. Long before I knew I had a brother called Ambrose, Tumac and Mod had been as dear to me as siblings. Daffyd had been viciously slain by this same Carthac for his loyalty to me, and Mod, the elder student of the two, had been speared and left for dead at the same time, vainly trying to assist and protect his tutor.

The unexpected sight of Tumac's name in this letter dispelled any "doubt I might have had about the truth of the report on Carthac's madness and atrocities. Cannibal and murderer by torture! Why had someone not put an end to him long before now? He was but a man, despite his fearsome reputation, and even a mad dog would be long since dead for lesser sins than those of which he stood accused.

I had no doubt his appalling ferocity might inspire terror in any individual man, but I remembered Dergyll's description of how, when Carthac's boyhood excesses had become too grim to suffer, his companions had banded together to get rid of him, abducting him by force and thrashing him savagely, then abandoning him high in the hills with dire Warnings of what would happen to him should he ever dare return to afflict them again. That had been effective in deterring him then. Perhaps his dementia had progressed too far in the interim to be checked, but I found myself wondering why someone had not simply killed him, from concealment, with a well-aimed arrow.

Deeply agitated by these thoughts, and shaken by the depths of the feelings of revulsion, anger and disgust they stirred in me, I forced myself to breathe deeply and made a determined attempt to empty my mind of Carthac and of Ironhair. I walked the length of the escarpment behind the rear gate several times, staring down at the carpet of tree tops far beneath and forcing myself to keep my mind empty of anything except what I could see with my eyes. Then, when my unruly thoughts had settled down and I felt calm enough to read again, I returned to the letter, settling myself again on the rock that had become my favoured seat. ,

Caius, I have no idea how these tidings will affect you, but I suspect you will be much disturbed by what you are reading here. If that is so, rest easy. Cornwall is as far from your new home as it is possible to go in west Britain, and Tumac says that · Ironhair's ambition is to rule as king in Cornwall. I see no reason to doubt the rightness of that, and it follows naturally that, as an upstart king, usurping power in Cornwall, Ironhair can pose no threat to you in Ravenglass, where no one knows your true identity. Nonetheless, forewarned is forearmed. Ironhair yet lives, and now we know where.

Otherwise, all is quiet here in Camulod. I have no word of how things are developing in Vortigern's domain. Optimist I may be, but I choose to accept the silence as confirmation that the king is well and Hengist still has power upon his son Horsa. Dergyll reigns on in Cambria, and he and I have met several times in the past few years. He is an amiable fellow and seems to rule his folk with benevolence and wisdom over and above his iron hand. He asked me to wish you well, wherever you might be.

Greetings, too, from Owain of the Caves, who continues to instruct our bowmen in the art of the great Celtic bow. He assumed responsibility, a few years ago, for two unwed sisters here in Camulod who had lost their only brother to the wasting sickness several years prior to that, and since then he has kept both of them pregnant and seemingly well content. He spoke warmly of you when last we met and asked me to pass on his good wishes when next I saw you. I was surprised that he should know anything of your whereabouts, or that you and I should be meeting each other, but then I realized that with the passage of so many of our people between here and Ravenglass, it would be impossible to keep the secret close. I treated his approach with circumspection, nevertheless, and made sure to betray nothing, even though he is an old friend of yours. He made no mention of our boy, so I believe his wishes may be taken at face value.

I hope you enjoyed the sight of Falvo, Benedict and Philip coming down the hill towards your gates. Ludmilla sends her love to all of you.

Be well. Ambrose.

Ambrose's comments on Owain of the Caves troubled me almost as much as his tidings of Ironhair and Carthac, and the fact that I should be troubled by such a seemingly insignificant thing increased my uneasiness. So to rid myself of the ridiculous sense of wrongness where no wrongness ought to be, I took great pains to think the entire thing through logically, seeking the non sequitur that must be there. I found the answer in what was perhaps the most innocuous line of the text: "I ... made sure to betray nothing, even though he is an old friend of yours ... "

The inconsistency was one of allusion rather than fact. Owain was one of a group of Uther's Celtic captains who had eventually made their way to Camulod after deciding they could no longer stay in Cambria with Uther dead. They had all been Uther's friends as well as followers, utterly loyal to him, and upon their return from the wars against Lot of Cornwall, mere weeks after Uther's death, they had found themselves, collectively, unable or unwilling to cast their lot so soon in favour of one or any of the contenders for Uther's vacant kingship. Unfortunately, each of the contending warlords had construed such neutrality to entail hostility, and the group had become personae non gratae in their own homeland.

After four of their number had been murdered individually by stealth, leaving only fourteen of them alive, they decided to come down out of the mountains and offer their allegiance to me, and I was glad to accept both it and them. They had been my companions and comrades in arms for years by that time, and that association breeds strong ties. But there was only one of them, Huw Strongarm, son of the bowyer Cymric who made the first longbow of yew, whom I would think of calling a real friend. Though Owain and I had marched and camped together, and had fought in several engagements together, and I knew that Uther trusted him as he did all the others, he had been one of Uther's men and no more than that to me. And yet, I thought, he might have harboured more friendly feelings for me, in the most casual way, just as I had held amity for bam without conscious volition.

I would tune dismissed the question then and thought no more of it, save that one matter had been plaguing me for years: someone had betrayed young Arthur's security to Peter Ironhair and smoothed the way for Ironhair's assassins to steal into Camulod and attempt the life of the boy. In that attack, which was undone only by Shelagh's quick thinking and her mastery of her deadly throwing- knives, Hector's wife had been violated and murdered and Arthur and the other children had barely escaped with their lives. Someone we knew, some trusted person within Camulod, had betrayed our trust and remained concealed. That knowledge had sown fear and suspicion among us, who had never known distrust prior to then, and had resulted in my flight—for it was nothing less—with the boy in tow, from Camulod to Mediobogdum.

And now Owain of the Caves, who had been in Cambria when Ironhair was fighting there to install Carthac as the region's king, and who had been in Camulod at the time of the invidious attempt on Arthur's life, was asking questions of our whereabouts and calling me an old and valued friend. I knew that I was probably inferring too much from what Ambrose had written, but the fact remained that someone in Camulod was steeped in treachery and in the pay of Ironhair. Owain had mentioned nothing of the boy. Nor had he need to. In finding me, he would have found Arthur. And now, with Ambrose's acknowledgment that our presence here in Ravenglass was no secret today in Camulod, I was forced to accept the inevitable corollary: the traitor might or might not be Owain of the Caves, but if the betrayer was still in Camulod, and I must assume he or she was, then the boy was no longer absolutely safe here, and there was nothing I could do to change that, short of fleeing again, this time to the Caledonian Isles.

Unsure of precisely how to proceed, since my suspicions were purely personal and very probably unfounded, I yet sat down and wrote to Ambrose at length, telling him of my reactions to his letter and asking him to keep an eye and an ear open and attentive to Owain of the Caves from that time on, taking note of how inquisitive he might appear to be about me. When I had written it, I read it over and again, then sealed it and dispatched it back to Camulod with the returning troops whose tour here in the north-west was over.

That done, I led the newly arrived officers to Ravenglass within the week and presented than to Derek, inviting him to visit the fort, where we would introduce him formally to the new garrison. He welcomed our three friends and their junior officers magnificently, mounting a banquet in their honour the night we arrived and arranging for them to tour the entire area around the town—inspecting it from a military, defensive perspective—the following morning.

On returning from the tour, while the others were sampling the best brews of the town's hostelries, I took Derek aside and told him about Ambrose's letter, my suspicions about Owain and my consequent fears for Arthur's safety here in Ravenglass and for the security of Camulod itself. He made no attempt to make light of my concerns; he listened gravely to all I had to say and then attempted to put my mind at ease.

There had been few strangers in Ravenglass for several years, he pointed out, since the death of Liam Condranson and the expulsion of his followers. Most of the traffic passing through the port nowadays was local, made up mainly of fishermen, with the only heavy ships and galleys being those of our Eirish friends and other peaceful clans trading from further north along the coast. Barely one visitor in any score was a stranger nowadays, and he promised to make sure from this day on that every unknown person coming through was watched by his people at all times.

Greatly reassured by his level-headed reaction to my worries, I thanked him and sat back, aware that he was staring at me and plainly had more to say.

"What?" I asked him. "You have a question? Spit it out."

"When will you be leaving?"

"What?" His question was simple and straightforward, but it surprised me so much that its immediate meaning was beyond me.

"When will you be leaving, you and your people? Don't tell me you haven't been thinking about it. You've been here now for more than six years. That's how long you said you'd stay, when first you came: five or six years, until the boy was grown. He's grown."

"I haven't been thinking about it. And the boy's not grown—not quite."

"Horseshit. For all intents and purposes your boy's a man. He's almost fifteen. If he hasn't started tupping the wenches already, it's only because Shelagh keeps him on a tight leash and an early curfew. But curfews are for evading and leashes were made to be slipped. Short of iron bars across the doors and windows, nothing's going to keep the boy inside at night if he wants to be outside, baying at the moon. Personally, I'd wager he's had more than a few of my young women spread-eagled ere now. God knows there's few around here that would fight him off. He's too good-looking by half."

I simply sat and stared at him, hearing the truth in his words. Arthur, I knew, was almost through his transition from boyhood to manhood, but I had never really thought of him until now as being sexually awakened. As soon as Derek spoke the words I saw the extent of my own blindness, and I asked myself how I could think of myself as being attuned to Arthur's needs and yet remain completely unaware of this. Tress, I knew, must be aware of it, but she had said nothing of it to me. I resolved to ask her about it that very night, then made shift to empty my mind of that and to focus my thoughts upon Derek's surprising question.

"Where do you think we would go, if we were to leaver'

"Go?" His eyes widened in mock surprise. "Well, let's think about that ... Camulod? Would that be a good starting point? Or Cornwall? Or Cambria, perhaps?"

Ignoring the heavy sarcasm, I shook my head.

"Derek, you may not believe it, but it's been years since I've thought about leaving here."

"Then you should be ashamed. You're spending too much time with your head between Tressa's legs, my friend—your thoughts are focused on the wrong end of things. Boudicca's buttocks, man! You've spoken of your mighty destiny so much to me that even I believe in it now—I, Derek of Ravenglass! And now you tell me you've abandoned and forgotten it? Is that supposed to make me feel happy?"

I waved my hands to cut him short. "No, no, no. That's not what I meant at all, Derek. I haven't forgotten any of—"

"Then what's wrong with you? You brought the lad up here to save his life and to train him. He's trained, Merlyn, and he's full-grown. Now he needs to be refined. He'll grow bigger and he'll grow older, but if he does either here, in Ravenglass, then the world will be passing him by. He needs to go out there now, into the world, and learn how it functions. He has nothing more to learn here, I swear to you, other than the arts of spreading female legs, and he can do that anywhere. Now he needs to travel, to see other regions, to meet other men and form his own judgments by which he'll stand or fall. He needs to meet strangers and fight with them or turn them into friends and even followers. You've talked long in the past of how he will rule Camulod, one day. That day is nigh, my friend. Time to go meet it."

I drew a deep breath and thought about the rightness of what he had said. I felt ashamed of myself. I had never lost sight of what he described, but what I had lost sight of— willfully—was the closeness of the departure point for the next stage of our venture. Now I saw that I had grown too comfortable here in Derek's north-west haven, had grown too soft, mentally, in my tranquil life with Tress. I rose to my feet and gulped down the remaining wine I had been savouring.

"You're right, my friend," I said. "I've lingered here too long and the world is unfolding elsewhere. There's a monster in Cornwall who needs to be put down, and his master's as mad a dog as he is. Arthur needs to ride to war."

Derek looked intently at me. "Who's the monster in Cornwall?"

I told him briefly about Carthac and Ironhair, and when I had finished he sat up straight.

"It's going to be quiet around here, once you people leave."

"Aye, it will be, I suppose. But what about the garrison? Will their absence henceforth cause problems for you?"

"How should it? This town's almost impregnable. It stood intact for hundreds of years before your garrison arrived, and it'll continue to do so long after they are gone."

I felt my eyebrow rising at that. "Impregnable? I seem to recall a certain acquaintance of mine—the king of Ravenglass, I believe he called himself—pleading with me and my friends, a few years ago, to stay close by and help him fend off an attack his people could not repulse alone."

Derek was completely unaffected by my sarcasm. "That was different, and you know it. We had been at peace for a long time, unsuspecting of treachery, and we had an entire Erse fleet inward bound with no thought of hesitating, or scouting the land, or taking any preliminary measures. They came to conquer and they thought their treacherous whoreson of an admiral already had us beaten. I needed Connor's men up on my battlements to be seen in their numbers. It was a simple message to go away and stay away."

I nodded, acceding the truth of that, then looked him in the eye. My thoughts drifted back to the day we'd landed in Ravenglass, and everything that had passed between us since then. "I'll miss you, my friend."

"No you won't. I'm coming with you. That is, if you'll have me. I'm old bones, but not much more so than you, and I can still carry a shield and swing a sword or an axe. Will you?"

"Will I have you?" I was amazed. "Of course I'll have you, and gladly, but when first we came to Ravenglass you said you hoped you'd never have to swing a sword again. You'd had your fill of war and slaughter."

"Aye, and I believed every word of it, at that time. But now I've changed my mind. I'm coming with you."

"What about your people?"

"What about them? Let my sons look after them. They're only waiting for me to die, anyway, watching me grow fat and closer to an apoplexy. They huddle like a flock of crows, watching and waiting so they can squabble over the pickings. We'll let them squabble early, then, and sort the matter out among themselves. Besides, I want to see this boy of yours ride into battle, and I want to see this Camulod of yours, as well, to see if it really rivals Rome itself."

I grinned at him and held out my hand. "So do I, Derek, so do I."

I took my leave of Derek and went to collect the others who had accompanied me into the town, and within the hour, we were on our way back up to Mediobogdum, a laughing, light-hearted group made up of Donuil, Lucanus, Dedalus, Rufio, Philip, Falvo, Benedict and me. When I judged the time was right, about half-way through the journey, when the ceaseless bantering had abated slightly, I told them of my thoughts and my decision to leave for Camulod in the spring, and then asked them to say nothing to anyone else until we could convene the whole populace of the fort at one time. The decision to return to Camulod was mine, I emphasized, and would not be binding on any of our group who might wish to remain when the garrison and serving officers returned to Camulod. None would, I thought, but everyone deserved the right to have the choice.

Once home, I stabled Germanicus and left my companions bantering among themselves as I made my way to find Tress. We were home much earlier than expected, and she met me at the entrance to my quarters, wide-eyed with alarm, one hand held up to her mouth.

"Cay, what's wrong?"

"Nothing, there's nothing wrong, my love. Calm yourself." I went directly to her, taking her into my arms. "Something came up, in Ravenglass, that's all, something unforeseen, and we decided to return immediately. Tomorrow, I must call a meeting of all our people and talk to them."

She leaned back into the support of my arm, cocking her head at me. "What was it that came up? What happened?"

"Nothing really happened, I merely had a long overdue talk with Derek, that's all. He made me see that I've been dangerously close to wasting time here."

Her frown was instantaneous. "What? Wasting time, how?"

"By being indecisive. Avoiding the inevitable. Now I have to leave. We have to leave. To return to Camulod. It's past time—Hey!"

She had spun away from me as I said the words, ripping herself out of my arms, her entire body rigid with displeasure and disapproval. I stood blinking at her, aware that she was hurt and angry but incapable of guessing why. And then, being male, I asked the male question: "What's wrong, Tress?"

"Nothing." The chill in her voice would have blighted ripening fruit.

I felt anger stir in my own breast. "That's ridiculous! Something is so far wrong you look as though you might never recover, but I'll be damned if I know what it is. What did I say to cause that? I said we're leaving, that's all."

She withered me with a sidelong look, and when she spoke I heard, for the first time in years, the burr of her local idiom in the acid of her tone. "That's all? That is all?After five, almost six years, you decide to leave, on the strength of one conversation, and that is all? Well, you'll pardon me, I hope, if I overreacted. We'll all regret the loss of you, I'm sure."

Suddenly, blindingly, I saw the cause of her anger and stepped towards her again. "Tress, I said we are leaving. Us. You and me. I meant you first of all, with me, and then young Arthur and all the others. I'd have no place in Camulod today without you by my side. I made the error of assuming that you'd come with me and so forgot to ask you if you would. Will you?"

She was staring at me, great tears trembling on her lashes. "What?" she asked, her voice faltering.

"Will you come with me, to Camulod?"

"You'd want me there, among all those grand people?"

I laughed then. "Want you? Are you mad? And what's this nonsense about grand people? The place they live in is grand, I'll swear to that, but they are all very ordinary- Well, quite extraordinary, some of them ... But there's no reason for you to have any fears on that account. You're more than equal to any of them. Of course I want you there, beside me as my wife, mistress or concubine. As any one of those, yes, I want you, although I hope you'll be there as my wife and remain my mistress and my wanton concubine."

She frowned again, her eyes filling up with some thought I could not decipher.

"What's this about being your wife? Why would you say such a thing? Years you've known me now, and ne'er a word about being wife or husband has passed between us. No need for such a thing with us, I believed, as you did, too."

"Aye," I agreed, shrugging my shoulders. "But that's changed now—" In truth, it had changed but that moment, with the sudden, flaring fear that she might not come with me. My former vow never to wed had been reviewed in that flash of time and rejected as foolish.

"How, changed? And why so quickly?" Her eyes were flashing sparks. "Is what we have not good enough for Camulod? Will all your mighty friends be shocked to find you living with a common woman who is not your wife?"

"Gods, will you listen to the woman? Tressa! That's not what I meant at all! I meant only that I have grown to love you too dearly to wish to continue without being your husband. If I cannot have you with me, then, God protect me, I have no wish for Camulod. I want you there as my true friend and companion, guide, confidante and counsellor. Yes, again, to all of those. But as a female intimate who lies with me and then goes home to sleep alone, no, that I will abjure from this time forth." I reached out and gathered her into my arms, feeling the uncertainty with which she let herself be pulled. "There's a place already prepared for you in Camulod, my love," I whispered into her hair. "A place filled with light and love and airiness in which you will spread your wings and glow like the most precious-coloured butterfly. A place of honour, in the house of my Great-uncle Varrus and my Great-aunt Luceiia, and it entails being my openly professed lover and my spouse and my true friend. Will you take it?"

She leaned back in the crook of my elbow for long moments, looking up at me with tears trembling on her lashes, and then her arm swept up and her hand cupped the back of my neck and she drew me down to her mouth, and then, for a long spell, there was nothing that I need to write about or that any other needs to know.

I met with all our folk the following day and told them of my thoughts and my decision, taking great pains to let them know that I considered none of them to be bound by my wishes. They had accompanied me from the south long years before and since then had created a new home here on this harsh mountain plateau, forging friendships and alliances with Derek's folk in the town beneath and with those of Derek's folk who had come up to live with us in Mediobogdum. Any who wished to remain behind when we left for Camulod, come spring, would do so with my fullest blessing and support, and any of the people there from Ravenglass who wished to come to Camulod would be equally welcome.

When I had finished speaking there was a long silence, broken finally by a loud and prolonged belch from Dedalus. As the laughter died away, he said, "Well, having rid ourselves of that foul air, we had best apply ourselves to bethinking what we have to take with us when we leave. Winter will soon be down about our ears, and when it's gone we'll be too close to leaving to have time to spend rooting around for things we've missed. My proposal is, we draw an inventory from the stores, tally up everything we own and have, and decide then what we must leave behind. Derek's folk will be glad to have anything we choose not to take, and that could amount to many wagon-loads of goods. Who are our scribes and clerks? Let them go first to work, and then the rest of us will improve on what they have to say.

"But first, Cay, if you're sure you want to leave in the new year, you ought to send word in advance to Camulod, now, before the first snowfall. Otherwise Ambrose will know nothing and will send out the relief column to come up here. We might miss them on the way, if they're patrolling."

And so the work began. Within the week a mounted party of ten men went spurring south to Camulod, bearing a letter from me to my brother, explaining what was in my mind and telling him that we would be beneath the walls of Camulod within a month of the last snow's disappearance from our northern hills. Systematically, we set about dismantling the home we had created for ourselves in Mediobogdum. Two hundred years it had sat empty ere we came, and after we had gone it might be yet two hundred more before another came to live in it.

Tress began to pack up all the objects that surrounded our life together, secure in knowing that we would be travelling side by side and that she need have no fear of being abandoned. Nothing was actually moved away from where it would normally be found, but I began to note that every article, every utensil, every stick and piece of furniture was marked with a twist of coloured yarn. I said nothing, content to leave the marshalling to her, but I found it interesting to compare the various items that were marked with the same colours. I felt sure there must be logic and reason behind the patterning, but it escaped me utterly.

Arthur found me, one dull and cloudy afternoon not long after that, engrossed, for the first time in years, in a meticulous inspection of the contents of the larger of the two wooden, iron-bound chests that had belonged to Caspar and Memnon, the long-dead warlocks who had brought about my father's death and plunged us into the first battles of our war with Gulrhys Lot of Cornwall. I had kept the heavy, solidly constructed boxes close to me, always locked, ever since they had first come into my possession, years before the boy was born.

Always I had told myself that I would learn the secrets of their tightly wrapped and carefully preserved contents, and in the early days of owning them I had, in fact, tested many of them and formed some hazy notions of the uses for which several might have been intended. As far as I had been able to discern, however, every single item contained in those chests had but one purpose: the infliction of death by means unknown and unconscionable to the soldier warrior. The forms of death within these two receptacles, meticulously ordered in nested trays and laid out in some bewildering symmetry of malevolence, represented an abundance, an entire spectrum of chaos that lay far beyond the intent or understanding of ordinary, sometimes violent men.

Each of the two chests contained several layers of trays, varying in depth, but each carefully fitted as a cover for the one directly beneath it, and all of them equipped with long, looping thong handles to permit their removal. As far as I could see, all of the evil deaths of political assassination, of sorcery, of necromancy and of ruin sown among mankind for the sheer pleasure of creating terror and chaos were represented in this unique collection. There was nothing in either chest, that I could find, that embodied anything other than grief and pain and agony and despair. And so I had soon abandoned any study of them.

Not daring to accept the risk of having them fall into other hands, I was nonetheless unable to destroy them. I had not yet explored them fully; indeed, I had not even looked at all the contents of the second, smaller, chest. My better judgment told me there was no such thing as good in either of them, but until I knew that to be absolutely true, I would remain incapable of simply destroying them.

My renewed interest in the chests had sprung from Tress's personal coding of our goods with coloured yarn. Within the seeming chaos of her coloured threads, I knew, there was a clear and flawless pattern, discernible to her, and that thought had led me to renewed thoughts of the warlocks' chests. A similar pattern, I suspected, must lie waiting to be deciphered among the neatly wrapped packages in their trays and compartments. Everything within them spoke of care and order.

"What are you doing, Cay? Oh, your pardon—may I come in?"

I waved to Arthur to enter and then sat back on my stool with a short, violent sigh, looking at the ordered disorder I had strewn about me. The contents of the two topmost trays of the larger box lay spread out on my left and on my right, arranged beside the empty trays themselves. The third tray, consisting of twelve compartments, four across by three down, all a handsbreadth deep and each containing a clay bottle of some kind, lay exposed within the chest. Several thoughts flashed through my mind as I heard the boy's voice, the foremost among them that I should banish him with the rough edge of my tongue before he could see what I was doing. I abandoned the idea even before it formed.

"Pull a stool over here and sit beside me, and don't touch anything else."

He did as I said and then sat there, bent slightly forward, his bright, gold-flecked eyes flicking over everything that could be seen within and outside the chest. I held my peace, waiting for him to speak, but he said nothing for a long time. Finally he glanced at each of the empty trays on the floor.

'Trays upon trays. There must be others beneath that one there, still in the chest?"

"Aye, there are. How many would you estimate?"

His eyes flicked back to the two empty trays. "Which one of those was uppermost?"

"That one." I nodded towards the one on my left.

"Hmm. Then they grow deeper as they nest deeper, so I would say there might be three more, the same depth as the one still in there. No more than that and probably fewer—one or two. Is the other one the same?" He was gazing now at the second, smaller chest.

"More or less," I answered him. "Different contents, but the same overall effect, I imagine. I find enough to occupy me here, in the larger one."

"What's the overall effect you mentioned? What's in diem?"

"Death, and a dilemma."

He glanced sideways at me, his eyes wide with surprise. "What do you mean?"

I turned to face him. "Do you recall the story of my father's death?"

He nodded. "He was murdered in his bed by sorcerers. What were their names ... ?" His eyes were distant, seeking recall. "Caspar, that was one of them, and Memnon."

"Aye, those were the names. Caspar and Memnon. Sorcerers, as you say. I think of them as warlocks."

"What's the difference?"

"Very little on the surface, I suspect. To my mind, however, a sorcerer is one who seeks to use things magical, supernatural, to influence the world of men. Whether they do it for good or ill matters little and depends upon the sorcerer himself, or herself. But since I do not believe in magic or the supernatural, I find sorcerers to be pitiable, laughable and usually harmless, once they've been exposed as being impotent."

"Woman can be sorcerers?" He sounded surprised, and I laughed at him.

"Arthur, women can be anything that men can be, except fathers. You'll find that out very soon now."

He was not to be distracted from his main interest this time.

"Tell me then, if sorcerers are pitiable, what makes the difference between them and warlocks?"

"Warlocks are an altogether different form of being, Arthur—at least they are in my estimation. The difference is no more than a matter of degree, in some respects, but in others—very important others—it is a matter of great moment. You should understand, of course, that that's no more than my own, personal opinion and I could be wrong. Nevertheless, I have thought about it long and often. Warlocks are real and frightening. They seek, and exercise, powers that normal men cannot credit, let alone understand. And in contrast to those others whom I think of as sorcerers, warlocks deal only in evil. They use physical magics like these things you see here: a hundred forms of poison, each one causing death. Warlocks bring death in their train. They deal only in evil and in ruin for the people they encounter." I had surprised myself, never having put these feelings into words before.

The boy sat staring at me. "Well," he said at length, "that's the death part. What's the dilemma? The death I can understand, if all those packages and boxes and those vials contain the poisons you spoke of. Do they? Every one of them?"

"Near enough. I don't know every use of everything that's there, but all of those I have identified are carriers of death in one form or another, most of them agonizing."

"Will you show me?"

"Partially. I'll show you those I have identified, but I will not demonstrate their venom for your amusement. You'll have to take my word for that."

"And you say you haven't yet examined everything in the boxes? How can that be? Aren't you curious? I would have had them all out and examined by now. How can you be so ... disciplined? You're amazing, Merlyn."

"You must call me Cay, remember?"

He threw me a glance of pure irritation. "Yes, I remember, but we're here alone, and you've always been Merlyn to me." He ducked his head. 'That one slipped out. I'll try not to let it happen again. But you still haven't told me what your dilemma is, regarding these ... things. Is there a name for them?"

"I think of them as nostrums, but that's not accurate, for nostrums are medicaments, whereas these are malignancies. As to the dilemma they present ... " I smiled at him, a weary smile completely lacking in amusement. "Can you not guess?" I did not wait for his response. "I don't know whether to destroy them or to study them further."

"You should study them, of course. But how would you destroy them, even if you wanted to?"

"Some I would burn—most of them, in fact. Others I might bury, or dilute to nothingness."

He inched his stool closer to the chest. "Show them to me, please."

Item by item, then, I showed him the various substances I had identified in the larger chest, beginning with the glazed clay boxes, with tight-fitting lids, that contained the noxious, greenish paste that brought awful, burning death to anyone cut by a weapon coated in its residue. This was the venom, I explained, that Lot's warriors had smeared on their arrowheads when they ambushed his father's troops in Cornwall, and which I had used to execute the warlock Caspar, slitting his brow with one of those same arrowheads.

Arthur listened closely, eyes wide with fascination as I moved on to unwrap and expose other items with which I had become slightly familiar during my first few weeks of study long years before. Among them were the tightly wrapped linen strips containing the deadly, envenomed thorns with which Caspar had thought to make me keep my distance from my threatened Aunt Luceiia. The notes which I had made at the time of my first, investigations were still there, folded on the topmost tray of the larger box, and I consulted them as I went on, remembering the thrill with which I had first ventured into these mysteries, and detailing my own discoveries about them for Arthur's understanding. I showed him all of those I had defined to any depth at all, and those I had set aside as having properties which I had not yet identified.

Watching his reaction, it was easy to recall my own fascination with the astonishing array of nostrums spread before us now. I remembered my amazement at the range of colours—every colour I had ever seen and many I had never seen before—and the textures and materials that had emerged from all the many wrappings and containers held within the compartments of each tray: glass phials and stoppered tubes of weird and wonderful proportions held dozens of crystalline mixtures and unknown powders; small boxes and containers made of wood, or clay or sometimes waxed papyrus, held strange pastes and crushed mixtures of things that had been ground down by mortar and pestle; others contained unguents and oily substances that seemed to me to have been rendered over fire; rolled tubes of bark and others made of leather protected bunches of varied grasses and dried leaves and twigs, and there were tiny, cunningly made boxes filled with dried berries, seeds and nuts.

I reached out and picked up one handspan-long tube made from the bark of some exotic tree and tied with a leather thong. It held a single twist of long, dried, yellow grass, folded upon itself time and again and bound, in turn, with a loop of its own stuff.

"This," I said. "I have no idea what it might be, and it looks innocuous enough, but I suspect, from the care with which it has been wrapped, that it has more than casually lethal properties."

He nodded "What would you do with it?"

I shrugged. "Who knows? Cut it up into tiny flakes and sprinkle it in someone's food? Boil it in water to extract its juices? Set it alight to give off lethal smoke? I've no idea. But judging from the materials with which it is surrounded, all of which are highly toxic—and I know that, before you ask, because I fed small amounts of each of them to animals and they all died—I would hesitate to think that this particular grass might have some therapeutic quality. There's little fear that I would bind a wound with it, for example.

"There is my dilemma, in miniature. If I wished to destroy this grass, this single substance, how would I go about it, safely? Can't burn it, because I might inhale the smoke and die convulsed. Nor can I bury it without wondering if something might dig it up and eat it. Can't scatter it upon the wind, in conscience. And yet it is no more than a twist of grass, only one element of what these chests contain." I paused, remembering. "But here's something else that will interest you, and it is the single, most convincing reason I have found for not destroying everything that's here, because it's the one and only thing I've found in here that is not poisonous, and I've tested it quite thoroughly. It is, nevertheless, lethal."

I dug into the lowest layer of the open chest, removing the remaining trays one by one, and finally brought out the most fascinating substance I had found in the entire collection. It was contained in a rather large; flat wooden box, the largest of all the boxes in the chests, that was tightly bound with twine. I undid the twine and removed the lid to reveal a blackish, granular powder, knowing it would fail, utterly, to impress Arthur visually. The powder was odourless and practically tasteless save for a saline, brackish tang. I knew it to be non-poisonous, since I had tested it by feeding it to three rabbits, none of which had suffered any ill effects. This powder, I had long since discovered, would not dissolve in water, but when I had thrown it on the fire, thinking it useless, it had frightened me near to death by flaring up with an appalling, flashing hiss and throwing off great clouds of dense, black, bitter smoke which had made me splutter and cough but had done me no other harm. Recovering from my first terror, I had made other tests and found this mixture to be the most volatile and dangerous material I had ever experienced, igniting even with the heat of a stray spark. What purpose it might serve lay far beyond my ken, but I suspected it must be dire. I had attempted to visualize the conflagration should an errant spark once fall into the box, and my spirit had quailed at the horror. In consequence, I treated the substance, which I thought of as "fire powder," with great care and circumspection.

Now I took a generous pinch of it between two fingers and my thumb and wrapped it tightly in a twist of cloth. I made sure to close the box carefully, then handed the twist to Arthur.

"Here, there's nothing more to see of it than you have seen. It has no taste, no odour, no particular colour apart from black and brown, and no use that I could find for it. It does not dissolve in water, nor in wine, and it's not poisonous. Throw it in the fire, there, behind you."

He turned and did as I had bidden, watching to see what would happen. The twist landed on some unburned coals and lay there, beginning to smoulder at the ends. He turned to look at me and I waved him back to the fire, and his eyes returned to the smouldering cloth just as the powder inside it ignited. There came a sudden, concussive whuff of sound, a blinding glare of blazing light, and then thick clouds of black, evil-smelling smoke, shot through with whirling sparks, boiled up and belched outward from the brazier. I had been expecting it, but even I was taken aback by the ferocity of the reaction.

Arthur leaped to his feet in terror, the colour fleeing from his face as he fought against the panic that urged him to run and hide. He teetered there for a long moment, poised between flight and acceptance, and then he suddenly dropped to his knees, grasping a piece of kindling from beside the brazier and using it to brush a number of fierce-burning embers towards the hearth before they could set the entire room alight. I rushed to help him, horrified by the sight of so many burning patches on the rug Tressa herself had woven for me. Between the two of us, we somehow cleared everything before any noticeable damage had been inflicted, and then we both sat back on our haunches, puffing and laughing nervously.

"Well," said Arthur, "that's two things you can't burn without risk: the yellow grass and the black powder. What is it, Cay? Do you have any idea?"

I shook my head. "None. It looks like crushed charcoal, doesn't it? But it's not like any charcoal I've ever seen before."

"It burns so quickly, that's the frightening thing about it. No warning of any kind, just whoosh! and it's gone. Have you ever heard of anything like it?"

"Absolutely not, but the warlocks who brought it here were from the distant reaches of the Empire. Their names were Egyptian, but I suspect they came from even farther afield than that, perhaps from beyond the eastern borders, where the people are said to be yellow of skin. I'd wager that even if they were not from those parts; they'd been to them. Anyway, now that you have seen how this powder works, what do you think I ought to do with it?"

He shook his head and then smiled. "Use it to frighten people? It works very well for that."

I laughed with him and then rose to my feet and placed the box of powder back into its space at the bottom of the chest, after which I allowed him to help me in repacking everything else I had unearthed. As I was locking the padlocks, he stood off to one side, watching me.

"These things are very dangerous. Cay."

"Aye, they are that, but they're safe enough in there, for now, so long as I have the only keys to the boxes. There's only one of each. I haven't looked inside these things in years, but now I know I have to go through everything they contain, meticulously, and try to discover what each item is, and what might be done with it. I could never bring myself simply to destroy them without trying to discover what they are. D'you understand that?"

"Of course I do. They represent knowledge. Though you might not, there are people somewhere who know all the uses of them, and knowledge is power."

Knowledge is power. I smiled, hearing him quote the words I had said to him so many times.

'There were people, once, who knew the uses of them, Arthur, but they are dead. Perhaps they took their knowledge with them into their graves. We may never discover what these things are."

"You will. If you apply yourself, the way you're always telling me to apply myself, you'll answer all your own questions. All you need do is work at it."

I grinned, dropping my keys into my scrip. "You are impertinent, but I hope you are also right. Come, let's find Tress before she finds us and sees what we almost did to her handsome rug."

Tress, I knew, was visiting Shelagh, and as we walked towards Shelagh and Donuil's quarters I placed my hand casually on Arthur's shoulder, gauging his height as I always did. In the past few years he had shot up so that, where once I walked with my elbow only slightly bent to hold him, I now had to raise my hand almost to the level of my own shoulder.

"It will rain tonight," I said.

He looked up at the lowering clouds and grunted, his lack of interest apparent in his next question. "Cay, will you take me some day to see Stonehenge?"

"Stonehenge? Yes, of course, if you want me to. What made you think of that?"

"I was thinking of the lichen Grandfather Varrus noticed on the standing stones, the day he first waited with Great-uncle Caius to meet my Grandfather Ullic. It was a cloudy day then, too, like today. I was thinking, too, about knowledge and its power. When I first read that tale, I didn't know what lichen was, and so I asked Lucanus and he showed me some. I'd seen it before, but I'd thought it was just dirt and grime and that the colours in the patches were accidental. Lucanus told me lichen are living plants, just like moss. Today I see lichen everywhere. But if Grandfather Varrus had not written those words, I would never have known."

He half turned and squinted up at me, something else on his mind. "Grandfather Varrus had his books, and your Grandfather Britannicus had his, and I know you have writings set down by your father, my Uncle Picus. I've read all of them and I've learned much from them, but all of them have left me feeling ... I don't know what the correct word is ... incomplete? I feel as though I am still learning, still being exposed to the thoughts of my elders, and you are my most recent elder. Will you write down your thoughts some day?"

I found myself wanting to grin, self-conscious, yet amused and flattered. "I don't know, Arthur. I had not thought that far ahead. I have the task of caring for the books now, but I hadn't thought of adding to them. I haven't had time, to tell the truth. Of what should I write?"

"Of your life! About Camulod, and Ravenglass, and. Eire. And of my father Uther, and Cornwall. If no one had written down the early tale of how the Colony was founded, none of us would remember. This is an important task, Cay. Someday I will write my life's tale down, for my own sons and grandsons, just as Grandfather did." -

I grinned at him and squeezed the back of his neck, feeling the hard column of young muscle. "Should you live so long," I teased him, "I'll keep you mindful of that promise."

Ah, the dreadful things we say in jest!

There was one more item contained in those chests that was not maleficent, and I found it the following day. I mention it now because, insignificant and quaint as it seemed at the time, it yet became one of the two most powerful items contained in that evil collection.

I found it at the very bottom of the second chest, carefully wrapped in soft and supple, beautifully tanned leather. On first opening it, handling the package with great care, I regarded it with sheer horror, unable to bring myself to touch it. It was a human face, eyeless, but miraculously preserved and complete with full head and facial hair, and my flesh crawled at the visualization of how it had been achieved. It had apparently been removed intact from a living skull, then treated somehow, to maintain the colour and the texture of the skin, and lovingly wrapped in the leather covering.

Only after I had stared at it aghast for several endless moments did I begin to discern that it was not what I had taken it to be, and even then it took me a long time to gather up the strength I needed to be able to reach out and touch the thing. As soon as I did touch it, however, my fingertips informed my still-doubting mind that they were touching wax of some strange kind. It was a mask, and it was made up of two parts, but it was unlike any mask I had ever known.

The hair was real enough, but it had been applied with great artifice to a foundation of the finest, open-weave cloth, which I soon recognized as a precious, diaphanous stuff from Asia Minor much prized by my Aunt Luceiia. The mask itself had been made up of many tiny layers of this delicate material, obviously laid over a real human face and coated, piece by piece, with some kind of glue or fine paste. I could clearly see the outlines of the integrated parts when I held the thing with its back towards a bright light. Then, once the outlines of the face had been achieved, the outer surface had been coated with some kind of pliable yet hardened wax, and the magician who constructed the wonder had shaped and painted the outer coating to resemble life itself.

The upper piece fitted over the eyes and nose, completely covering the wearer's own features, and the attached wig, of long, coarse, dark-brown hair sown into a soft, thin cap of the same material as the mask itself, fell in ringlets to cover the wearer's own hair entirely. The upper edges of the eye holes were covered by thick, fierce brows, but the lower edges were so thin as to be almost insubstantial, fitting against the lower lids and sagging downwards into deep, utterly realistic bags of seeming flesh on either side of a thick, jutting, pock-marked nose. From visible pores in the skin of the cheeks, just below the pouches beneath the eyes, the hairs of a long, unkempt beard sprouted wildly, blending into a long, dark-stained moustache.

The second, lower part was similarly made, but fully bearded, fitting the bottom part of the face from just beneath the ears and covering the jaws and chin, ending just beneath the wearer's lips. I realized immediately that this part would have to be applied first, and the upper part must fit over it. I also realized that, wondrous as it was, the mask would be usable only by the person for whom it had been made, or by someone who very closely resembled him, facially. It was unyielding in its main structure, made to fit only the cheekbones on which it had been moulded. And naturally, having discovered that, I held it up to my own face.

Expecting to feel the hard edges of ridges that would not conform to my own bone structure, I felt instead a tenuous, quite unidentifiable comfort, which quickly flared into a surge of something approaching superstitious terror as I realized the thing had snugged completely and alarmingly onto the contours of my face, coating my features like a second, cool and omnipresent skin. It fit me perfectly, and on realizing that, I instinctively released my grip on the thing so that it should have fallen. Instead, it remained in place, its fabric warming to the feel of my own skin and nestling so thoroughly against it that the mask felt weightless and insubstantial.

The awareness of how unlikely such a fit must be set my heart hammering and raised the small hairs on my neck. My mind threw up a score of reasons for the impossibility of such a thing. How could this possibly have occurred? Of the hundreds of men I knew, none other, save my brother Ambrose, could have matched the facial contours of this mask so perfectly. Whose mask had it been? I knew immediately it could have belonged originally to neither Caspar nor Memnon, the two warlocks. Their faces had both been utterly different from mine and from this mask. Memnon was facially disfigured, with grossly protuberant eyes on different levels. My memory seemed to indicate that Caspar might, possibly, have been able to wear it. But it had not been made for Caspar's face. His cheeks had been too flat, his nose too long, his eyebrows too prominent and his chin too regressive. Whose face, then, could have been the model for its creation, and why should I, of all men, end up in possession of the thing? Did it possess some frightful portent? Had some god arranged for it to fall into my hands? Or might God Himself have meant me to possess it for some purpose of His own? It fit me perfectly, defying all the odds of probability, and the knowledge of that shook me to my depths, so that, flaring with excitement, I went searching for a mirror for the first time in my life.

I quickly found that the mask would not stay in place indefinitely without the pressure of my hand, and once I had accepted that I went back to the source—the tray in the chest—looking for whatever means Caspar had used to keep the thing in place on his face. There, in the bottom of the tray, I found a tiny flask of liquid that was astoundingly adhesive, sticking my fingertips together instantly, yet not so firmly that I could not pull them apart with a degree of ease. I also found several small, round boxes of waxed papyrus that contained pastes of varying colours, clearly cosmetics intended for use in the final preparation of the disguise.

I locked my door and amused myself for several hours in front of Aunt Luceiia's silver mirror, marvelling at the completeness and complexity of the changes I effected in myself. Then, irked by the painful tenderness caused by the adhesive, I packed everything carefully away, and made my way to the bathhouse.

SIXTEEN

Once again, the secrets of the warlocks' chests were driven from my mind by more pressing events that demanded my attention. I would think of that late autumn, forever after, as the Autumn of the Beasts.

First came the wolves, driven to descend on us, Lucanus believed, as the result of some sickness that had decimated their normal prey. It seemed to me he must be right, for there were very few deer around that year, and one could ride for an entire day through the forest without encountering any of the hares, rabbits or squirrels that normally abounded in the woodlands.

Wolves, like bears and other large animals in the wild, generally take pains to avoid contact with humans. That particular year, however, the wolves came closer to our fort at Mediobogdum, and in greater numbers, than they ever had before without the spur of winter starvation to impel them. The sound of their howling, just beyond our walls, became a nightly commonplace from the late summer onward, and after the loss of several of our animals, we were forced to move all our livestock into the safety of the fort each evening before the sun went down. We were completely unprepared, however, to be attacked and plundered in full daylight.

Shelagh had begun raising swine the first year after our arrival, and her herd had prospered. She had quickly acquired buyers for as many prime yearling pigs as she wished to sell, but from her father she had inherited a keen eye for healthy traits in beasts and she always managed to retain the best of each litter as future breeding stock. Because she now owned a dozen prime sows, she had constructed a large and spacious pen to hold them, close to the bathhouse and its plenteous water, but far enough removed so that the stink of the proliferating farrows would be bearable to people coming and going from the baths. At night the animals were brought inside the fort and penned again in another enclosure built against the north wall, as far away from our habitation as they could be.

On one late and lovely afternoon, when the trees had almost lost their golden cloaks completely, a pack of wolves, desperate with hunger, braved the nearness of men and attacked the swine pens.

The alarm was raised immediately, of course, although the squealing of terrified pigs would have brought us running even had no one seen what was happening. Within moments of the first outbreak of noise, more than a score of men, all armed, converged upon the vicinity of the swine pens. I was one of the first to arrive, having been on my way to the bathhouse, but because of that, I was one of the few who arrived unarmed. Dedalus came running next, from another direction, carrying a spear, his longbow and a quiver of arrows slung across his back. Seeing me without a weapon, he threw me the spear and unslung his bow, nocking an arrow even before we had seen any targets.

The: noise was appalling, and among the demented squealing of the pigs we could hear what we took to be the snarling of dogs. The dogs were wolves, and they were swarming everywhere, attacking with awe-inspiring ferocity. I counted fourteen of them before I gave up and began to concentrate on reaching them and beating them off, only to discover that the latter was easier to think about than to achieve. These wolves betrayed not the slightest inclination to slink off as they normally would when challenged by men. Instead, they turned on us and attacked us without hesitation. One huge animal leaped directly at me, fangs flashing, and it was by die merest chance that I was able to drop to one knee and fling up my spear point in time to pierce his hurtling body; even then the dead weight of him threw me over backwards.

I scrambled to my feet again, wrenching out the spear point, and saw another gaunt form writhing on the turf ahead of me, skewered by an arrow. Dedalus had positioned himself to my left, on a little knoll, and was drawing and shooting methodically, bringing down wolf after wolf, not bothering to kill each one since he knew that there were enough of us to finish off the ones he wounded. And then Hector, on my right, went down beneath two animals, one of which had sunk its fangs in the wrist of his sword arm.

I was in easy throwing distance but dared not throw, for I might have killed Hector as easily as either of the wolves. Rufio saved Hector's life by leaping to his side and swinging a massive axe I had never seen before. With two enormous blows he destroyed both animals and then leaped forward, over Hector, to confront another that was slinking forward, belly down, towards the fallen man. When he landed in front of it, the beast warned him away with flashing fangs, growling and slavering, but Rufio was already swinging and the edge of his axe caught the wolf on the shoulder, cleaving it and hurling it to Rufio's left, where I pinned it to the ground with my spear.

The battle seemed to last for ages, but it must really have been only a very short time before the first wolf fled, yipping and yowling, and the others followed it to safety. Even then, however, they withdrew only a short way before stopping to turn and snarl at us again from what they took to be a safe distance. The Celtic longbow that Dedalus held, however, was lethal at far greater distances than that, and he killed four more of the animals before the surviving beasts realized how vulnerable they yet were and fled, pursued by two more of Ded's deadly arrows.

We found twelve dead wolves in and around the pens, and opinions varied as to whether seven or nine had escaped the slaughter. We also found five dead yearling pigs and two so severely savaged that we had to kill them. None of the fearsome sow matrons had been injured. We dined communally on pork for the ensuing week.

And then, a mere ten days after the wolf attack, Rufio's horse came home alone in the middle of the day, lathered with sweat, its eyes rolling in terror partly caused, I had no doubt, by the unaccustomed flapping of its sad- - die's empty stirrups. My mind immediately filled with visions of the surviving wolves from the previous week's escapade, and I was the first one to horse, although Arthur and his three friends and every other man then in the fort were close behind me. Once we had left the fort and reached the road, however, there was no way to tell which direction to take; the ground was too hard and stony to show any sign of passage. I reined my horse in hard and waved the others down, and we returned immediately to the fort, where we summoned the garrison from the camp and organized search parties.

No one had any knowledge of what Rufio's intentions had been when he rode out that day. He would not have ridden down into Ravenglass, we knew. We had a rule, informal but observed, that no one was to ride to Ravenglass without reporting his or her intentions—primarily to avoid causing concern should the journey require an overnight stay, but also because there was always someone who required something from the town and was unable to go there personally to collect it. We also knew he would not have crossed the saddleback pass into the next valley, since there was no conceivable reason for anyone to go there. But that was all we knew. He might have gone up the flank of the hill to the south-west, towards the places where we were working in the stone quarry and the forest; or he might have gone down into the forested valley beneath, in the hopes of finding deer or other game.

We had eighty bodies available for the search, half of them infantry. I sent forty men on foot down into the valley and took the remainder with me up onto the south-west flank of the mountain above us. Less than six hours of daylight were left to us, and we searched until the gathering dusk became too thick to deal with, so that we arrived back at the fort long after dark, making our way slowly and with great difficulty down the rock-strewn hillsides towards the beacon fires that our friends had lit around the walls of the fort. In all our minds and hearts, we hoped that the other party had found Rufio, but they had not returned, so our hopes were quickly dashed. Sure enough, when they eventually straggled home exhausted, they had seen no sign of our friend.

That night, one of the few occasions when Tress actually slept beneath my roof instead of returning to her own quarters, I frightened her by snapping awake and bolting upright in bed, shouting something that I did not remember and which she failed to understand. She sprang up immediately and threw ha arms about me, clutching me tightly to ha warm bareness as she made shushing, soothing noises. Eventually, when I relaxed and subsided to lie on my back, staring at the ceiling, she remained leaning over me, her soft breasts cushioned against me.

"What was it?" she asked, eventually, her voice the merest whisper.

"A dream." I could see her clearly, outlined in the light of the full moon that shone through the open window of my bedchamber. "Rufio. I saw Rufio." The effort of saying the words was enormous, for I had no wish to articulate them. The prospect of admitting my dream, even to myself, appalled me, for I had foreseen the deaths of far too many of my friends in former years, in dreams just like this one. I had thought that far behind me nowadays, for it had been years since the last occurrence of the frightening phenomenon, in Eire, where a dream had shown me the murder of one of Donuil's brothers.

There was a pause the length of several heartbeats, and then, "Where was he?" No hint of surprise or disbelief!

I swallowed, hard, trying to moisten my dry mouth. "In a hollow, a clearing, among trees on a hillside ... a rock face behind him ... "

"Was he alive?" When I said nothing, she grasped my shoulder and shook it. "Cay! Was Rufio alive?"

I tried to pull away from her embrace, but she clung to me. "How would I know that? It was a dream, Tress, nothing more."

"No!" She pulled me closer to her, hissing with urgency. "It was one of your dreams, Cay, and I know about your dreams. Now think hard, before the veil closes. Did you see anything else? Was Rufio alive?"

I resisted asking her how she came to know about my dreams, drawing comfort instead from the way she evidently had no doubt of my abilities, and forced myself to concentrate on the image that had brought me shouting from my sleep. Closing my eyes, I sought to breathe deeply and evenly, emptying my mind of everything that might distract me. Tress seemed to be aware of what I was doing and remained silent, looking down on me, braced on one elbow. Somehow, it seemed as though a mist swirled in my mind, and then it began to settle and the vision came back to me, hazy and indistinct, but real and discernible,

"He's masked in blood, unmoving ... no telling whether he's alive or dead ... Helmet's missing ... Blood everywhere—on the grass, on the stones ... He's lodged between two trees ... moss on the trunks, and blood on the moss. I can see where his fingers have clawed the moss from the bark ... " As I described it, the image shifted, as though my eyes had adjusted, and I saw something else, half-hidden in the shadows among the surrounding trees. My mind rebelled in disbelief, and the scene faded back into mist, leaving me staring wide-eyed at the dark ceiling. I held my breath for a long time, struggling with my thoughts, and then expelled the air from my lungs, allowing myself to relax. "That's all. It's gone. That's all I saw."

"Hmm ... " She released me and swung away, out of the bed. I watched her naked form as she moved across to the door into my main room. "Come, Cay, I'll rekindle the fire. Get dressed, and hurry."

"What? Why? What good will it do to sit up by the fire? We don't know where he is, Tress."

"We might. Or we will. Put on your clothes."

I rolled out of bed and went to the bowl on the night- stand, where I threw cold water on my face before beginning to dress myself, fumbling in the darkness for the clothes I had shed with abandon when I realized that Tress would not leave that night. By the time I had shrugged into them and crossed into the other room, Tress had candles lit and the fire was alive again, flames licking hungrily at the new fuel she had piled on the freshly stirred coals.

She herself was still naked, crouched over the fire with her arms out to the heat. I crossed directly to her side and caressed the smooth, warm bareness of her, loving the firm softness beneath my hands. There was no thought of such matters in Tress's head, however, and she pushed me away, motioning me towards one of the two chairs flanking the fire as she ran lightly back into the bedchamber and emerged moments later wrapping a woollen blanket about her. She sat then in the chair opposite me and stared at me, wide-eyed and expectant.

"What?" I asked her. "What is it? You obviously expect me to say something significant." She made no reply. "Well, I have nothing to say, that I'm aware of. You'll have to prompt me."

"Rufio. We know where he is."

"No, we do not, Tress. It was dream, and I saw no signposts."

"Of course you did, you silly man. We don't know exactly where he is, that's true enough, but we know more than we did earlier today."

"How so?"

"Because you saw him lying in a hollow, in a clearing on a hillside. Is that not so? And he was lodged against two trees, with moss on their trunks, that he had scraped away."

"So?"

"Ach! Cay, that tells us much, or it tells me much. There was a rock face by him, too. That tells us more."

"I don't follow you, Tress."

She shook her head sharply, to silence me.

"He was lodged between two trees, you said, with a rock face behind him. How did you know he was on a hillside? And how was he positioned between these trees?"

I blinked, thinking back. "The ground sloped down, sharply. He was on his back, his head hanging backward, down the hill. The trees were close together, almost touching—perhaps a fork, two trunks of the same tree. His spine was arched over them. He had tried to push himself outward. That's when he clawed at the moss."

"So the moss was towards his head."

"Yes."

"And the rock face you saw. Where was it? You said behind him, but was it to his right or left?"

Again I sought the memory of my vision. "On his left, running parallel to where he lay."

"Aha! You looked in the wrong places."

I looked at her with a measure of scorn. "That makes as much sense as my dream."

"I know it does, even though you do not. Think about it, Cay! Moss grows mainly on the northern side of trees— every child learns that on first entering the woods—and it grows thickest on the very northern side. You saw Rufio lying with his feet pointing south between two northern- facing trees, his head hanging downhill to the north, with a cliff face on his left, his east side, facing west. That means he's on the hillside, below the pass, where you didn't search, low down, in the river valley."

"How do you know he is low down?" I was convinced she was right.

"Because the moss was thick on the tree trunks. There's no thick moss on the trees on the high slopes."

I nodded, acknowledging my own short-sightedness, then shrugged.

"What," she asked immediately. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing, Tress, nothing really. I admire the way you make sense of my vision, but it was only a dream, and it was incomplete."

"How incomplete? I don't understand."

"I didn't tell you all of it, and the part I withheld makes nonsense of die whole thing."

She sat up straight, the blanket falling away from her shoulders, waiting for me to continue.

"I saw a man called Peter Ironhair just beyond the clearing, watching me."

"Peter Ironhair?" She was frowning. "You mean the ironsmith who tried to kill Arthur in Camulod, and then ran off to Cambria and thence to Cornwall?"

I sat staring at her. "You know," I said, eventually, "I find myself amazed by how much you know of things I've never told you."

"Shelagh has told me everything about you. I know everything there is to know." She stood up and crossed to where I sat, then settled into my lap, placing her right arm around my shoulders and wriggling until she was comfortable. The fire in the brazier snapped and spat sparks onto the stone flagging of the fireplace. When she was settled, she pulled my head down towards her breast and spoke into my ear.

"You know, Caius Merlyn Britannicus—" She paused, then leaned forward, blowing the warmth of her breath against my ear. "You know I love you, do you not?" She waited for an answer and I nodded, mutely. "Well," she continued, "know this, too. I believe in you, and in your gifts, which you think are some kind of curse. I believe that you have the gift of prophecy. What was it Master Lucanus called it? Foreknowledge. Is that the word?" She waited for an answer, and I nodded, again. "Well then, I believe in your power of foreknowledge, and I believe you have seen Rufio, lying hurt, perhaps dead—the gods forbid—in a place unsearched till now. Tomorrow, therefore, you must go down into the valley and along the cliffs until you reach the downfall of the fell behind us here, to the east."

"And what if he's not there? Not only will I appear to be a fool, but I might well have destroyed any chance of finding the real place where he is lying, at least in time to save his life."

"He will be there." She took my right hand in her left and slipped it between the folds of her blanket to lie between her breasts. "You feel that? My heart beating? My knowledge that you're right is as sure as the beating of my heart." She released my hand, but left it where it was, to behave as it would while she continued talking.

"As for the face of Master Ironhair, that is as far beyond me as it is beyond you. Shelagh told me you sometimes fail to understand all that you see. Is that true?"

"Aye, too frequently."

"Then this is one of those times. But remember what you saw—Ironhair's face where simple reason tells us it could never be. The meaning will come clear to you one of these days, and when it does, you'll know what to do. In the meantime, however, you have to find Rufio."

She paused, leaning out and away from me to squint at my reflection in the light of the fire. "You're still not sure, * are you?" I shook my head slowly and she continued. "Very well, here's what to do. Send out the search parties tomorrow, exactly as you had planned to do, to cover the territories you selected earlier tonight, but go by yourself, with several of the men you trust most and who know you best, and search the area you dreamed about."

"Dedalus," I said. "And Donuil. Luke's too old for the kind of terrain we'll be covering, and Philip. Falvo and Benedict should remain with their troops. But they're Rufio's closest friends."

'Then take them with you. They have officers beneath them they can trust, and the troops will all be split up, anyway. Take Rufio's friends with you. Shelagh won't stay behind, either, when one of the men she thinks of as her own is lost. Take her and the four boys. One of you will find him."

"So be it." I pulled her to me and kissed her long and deeply, overflowing with relief and determination, and soon we returned to bed, as impatient for each other as we were for the night to recede.

It was, in fact, Shelagh who found Rufio, in precisely the circumstances I had dreamed, at the farthest end of the valley beneath our escarpment, in an area that I would never have thought even to penetrate, let alone search. And, as Fortune would have it, Shelagh was accompanied by Lucanus, who had refused to remain behind in Mediobogdum, claiming that Rufio would have great need of his skills if he was still alive. I was far beneath them with Arthur and Bedwyr, almost on the valley floor, when they made their discovery, but their cries reached the ears of Dedalus on the slope between them and us, and young Bedwyr's keen ears picked up Ded's bellowing in the distance above our heads.

I knew the clearing, immediately, as the site of my dream. Shelagh and Luke were on their knees beside Rufio, working quickly and with great concentration. Dedalus stood over them, his face a picture of anguish and anger, and beside him Gwin and young Ghilly gazed in pop-eyed horror at the ministrations being performed nearby.

"How is he?" I called, dismounting hurriedly.

"He's alive, but barely," Ded answered.

I turned towards Arthur and Bedwyr, both of whom were preparing to dismount, and ordered them to stay where they were, then I made my way forward to where I could see Rufio. Black and white, I thought immediately, my memory taking me back to the day when I rode into the carnage of the scene at my cousin Uther's last battle. Then, as now, the White had been the pallor of dead flesh and the black the ugliness of dried and crusted blood. Rufio appeared dead, despite Ded's statement to the contrary.

Luke had already removed Rufio's armour, slicing through the leather straps that held it in place with a sharp knife, then cutting away the clothing beneath to lay bare the awful wounds that marred our friend's shockingly pale flesh. I had suspected an accident of some kind, perhaps even an attack, but nothing had prepared me for the sight of Rufio's wounds. He had been savaged, not merely wounded; his flesh lay open at the left shoulder, scored in great, parallel gashes, two of which extended all along his upper arm, and his face was invisible beneath a mask of dried blood that plastered his hair flat against his head so that it seemed to be a polished black skull.

"What in the name of God—"

"It was a bear. Look at that." Ded nodded towards something on the ground almost by my feet and I looked down to see an enormous black paw, tipped with claws longer than my fingers. It had been severed cleanly at what would have been the wrist on a human limb. Mute with disbelief, I looked from it to Rufio. Dedalus read my mind.

"Rufe must have brought one of the two new swords with him. I know of nothing else that could have taken off a thing like that."

I looked all around, but saw nothing. "Where is it now, then?"

"Stuck in the beast, I'd think. Nothing else would explain why it left him here without eating him."

I sucked in a great breath, to settle both my stomach and my mind. Dedalus was right. Lacking a paw, the beast should have been sufficiently enraged to destroy Rufio utterly. Only a greater wound, and greater pain, could have driven it off before it killed him.

I was aware of Lucanus issuing orders to the others who had arrived, and somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that he was telling them to build a litter in which to carry Rufio back to the fort, or at least out of the woods to where Luke could have space to do what must be done to cleanse and bind those dreadful wounds. My thoughts, however, were bound up in what lay before me.

"We have to find it," I said.

"What, the sword or the bear?"

"Both. The one we need, the other we need dead."

"Aye, granted. But I'm not going up against that thing, wounded as it is, without a score of spears around me."

"It should be dead by this time."

"Aye, and so should Rufe, but he's alive."

"You're right." I turned towards the boys. "Arthur, take young Ghilly with you and Bedwyr and find the nearest search party. Tell them we've found Rufio, but that we need assistance to track and kill a wounded bear—a very large bear. We need men with spears, as many as you can find and not less than a score. Tell whoever you find in charge to send someone back to the fort with word to call off the other searchers in the hills above the fort, and to have the Infirmary prepared with fresh bedding and bandages and boiling water. Lucanus always requires large quantities of boiled water. Go now, quickly, then lead the others hack to join us here. We'll be waiting for you. And be careful! We don't know where that bear might be. If you hear it, or see it, stay well clear of it. Go!"

The boys were gone in a matter of moments, and shortly thereafter Luke and Shelagh left, too, walking one on either side of the litter and each holding one of the ends of a leather strap, Rufio's swordbelt, which they had passed beneath the centre of the bier, ready to take up the strain should any of the four bearers, Donuil, Philip, Falvo and Benedict, slip or lose their balance on the treacherous hillside.

Ded and I watched them leave, then turned our attention to the blood-soaked ground around us, looking for the trail of blood left by the departing bear. It was not hard to find, and from the wide swath of blood-smeared destruction leading off downhill into the woods it soon became obvious that the animal had charged away, blinded with pain and fury and bafflement, into the heart of the forest. We went no farther than ten paces along the trail before we turned back to wait for the others, and for the next hour we stood close together, seldom speaking and staring tensely into the silent forest all around us. I found myself looking for the tree that had concealed Ironhair in my dream, but I failed to find it.

"What about him?"

"Who?"

"Ironhair. You said his name."

I wasn't aware that I had spoken. "I dreamed of him last night, that he was here."

Ded turned slowly to look at me. "Ironhair was here, in your dream, with Rufe? D'you mean that?"

I shrugged. "No, not with Rufe—farther back, among the trees. It was but part of the dream, a nonsensical part."

"Hmm." For a long time I thought he would say no more than that solitary grunt, but then he continued. "I don't know anything much about this power of yours, Merlyn, but it seems to me that no part of it can be nonsense when so much of it is potent. If you dreamed of Ironhair being here, then in some way he must have been here."

'Tress thinks the same. She believes the meaning of it will become clear to me, eventually."

"What was that?"

I cocked my head, wishing for the hundredth time in my life that I had the sharp hearing of my brother Ambrose. "I didn't hear anything."

"I did. There it is again. It's the others, finally."

Sure enough, moments later, I heard the first sounds of our approaching reinforcements making their way up the hillside to where we waited.

As soon as they arrived—Philip and some forty of his infantry, with Arthur and Bedwyr in the lead on horseback—we split them up into groups of six and led them into the forest, following the clear-marked blood trail of the wounded beast. Those of us who had been mounted left our mounts tethered in the clearing, safely distanced from the bloodied area where we had found Rufio. Philip walked by my side at the point of the hunt. The others, seven groups of six, spread out behind us, each successive pair of groups farther out on the flanks of those ahead, so that we formed a sweep that would have been a hundred paces wide, had we been able to proceed in order. The steeply pitched hillside, however, densely treed as it was, made any kind of orderly progress impossible.

"What's that?" Philip had seen something, and I turned immediately to see where he pointed. I saw the gleam of metal in a thicket that our quarry had charged through, arid we had found our missing sword. From the streaks of blood on the blade and the increased profusion of blood on the grass all around, it was clear that the cross- hilt had snagged in the bushes and been wrenched free as the bear passed on.

"It has to be dead," Philip muttered. "It must be. This blood's been here since yesterday and there's too much of it around for the thing to have survived. And look, when the sword came out of the wound, it must have split it wide open. Look how the blood is so much thicker here, beyond the point where we found the sword." He glanced at me. "Don't you agree?"

I nodded, and he raised his voice, shouting to his men. "Stay sharp! The animal's close by. Logic says it must be dead, but until we've skinned the carcass, take nothing for granted."

We found it less than fifty paces farther up the hill, and it had been dead for a long time. It was enormous, humpbacked—fully as large as the behemoth I had faced outside the walls of Athol's fort in Eire—and it was ancient. One of its eyes had been lost in some long-ago battle, and its thick, matted old coat, where we could see it beneath the blood that clotted it, was criss-crossed with long-healed scars and battle wounds. Its coat was hoary, almost silver with age; only its three remaining paws were still black as night.

I stood there, gazing at it as the others crowded around, exclaiming with awe. Where they saw size and incredible strength, however, I saw only mystery and enigma. I saw Ironhair, plainly, in the colour of the great beast's coat, and yet I wondered, still, at my own translation. Had I seen the bear, early in my dream, and its colour made me think of Ironhair? Or was there some other, supernatural connection? Did this bear, somehow, represent Ironhair, or the threat of Ironhair? I had no way of knowing. I had never been a believer in the supernatural, and I was loath to begin to give any credence to the matter then, at that stage of my life.

One of Philip's men had a long skinning knife and was stropping it against the tautened end of his belt as he stood gazing down at the dead animal.

"Well," Philip asked. "What do you think?"

The man grunted and leaned down, grasping a handful of the animal's thick coat and tugging at it. "Nah, this thing's been dead for almost a full day. My guess is it'll be a waste of time to skin it, though it's a pity. Too late to cure the hide—it's too far gone. The hair'll fall right off it, now, no matter what you do." He glanced up again, at Philip. "I'll go ahead, though, if you want me to."

Philip looked to me, and I shook my head.

"He's right. It's too far gone by now. Leave it to rot, and let's go home." ·

We turned and left it there, with its three fearsome sets of claws, and as we made our way back down to where we had tethered our horses, the talk among the men was all of Rufio and his chances for survival. My mind, however, was filled with Peter Ironhair.

The final and most astonishing incident in the Autumn of the Beasts occurred the very next day. Even now, recalling it once more as I have so frequently in the years that have elapsed, the memory of it fills me with wonder and even religious awe.

Much of what people regard as Fortune, whether good or ill, depends upon the recipient's being in a particular place at a specific time. I once saw a horseman killed by a lightning bolt that struck a tree beneath which he was passing. The impact of the bolt shattered the tree and he was killed by a falling limb. I had been watching his progress, for he was one of my men, on his way to me with a message, and afterwards it became clear to me that his death occurred by the merest, most random chance. His horse's gait brought him to that place at that time. Had his mount been travelling more slowly, he would have survived, but his chosen speed brought him beneath the tree at the precise moment when the lightning struck, and his horse was still rearing in terror when the limb fell.

We had begun to quarry the friable local stone from an exposed hill face above the fort the previous summer, using the material we dug out to make repairs on the most dilapidated stretches of the fort's wall and several of the corner towers. The local stone fractured easily, splitting naturally into long slabs that varied in length and width but maintained a uniform thickness, anywhere from a thumb's length to a handsbreadth in size. The entire fort of Mediobogdum had been built of this stone, save only for the main gateposts, which were of quarried red sandstone blocks shipped down to Ravenglass from farther up the coast.

The work of refurbishment, small in scale though it was, was not strictly necessary to our welfare but had been undertaken for one excellent and self-evident reason: the garrison soldiers tended to grow bored up here on our rocky platform, miles away from Ravenglass, and the hard labour of their compulsory daily stint in the quarry kept them out of mischief and in good physical shape. Rome's legions had built the great Wall of Hadrian across the north of Britain centuries before for precisely the same purposes.

Benedict's garrison troops were now the third such body to be employed in our quarry, and the scope of the work had been extended to accommodate the increased manpower made available by the additional infantry contingent. Our other communal workplace, in the forest where we had set up our timber-felling operations, lay about half a mile downhill and to the west of the quarry.

My recent decision to leave Mediobogdum in the spring had called the need for all such labour into question, but I had insisted that it be continued, reasoning that we might return here some day in the future, and that the work of repairing the walls and trimming, shaping and dry-stacking the timber baulks we had cut would fend off boredom during the winter ahead. No one questioned my decision, and the work continued in both locations.

On the day when the events I am about to describe took place, I had ridden up to the quarry with Benedict and Philip, simply to review the situation up there and to pass the time of day with our troopers, from the viewpoint of keeping up morale. It was a fine day, with the definite snap · of the first, mild frosts of autumn in the air. Philip became involved in a technical discussion with the overseer of the quarry, an engineer from his own company, concerning the effects of frost on lines of cleavage or something equally incomprehensible to us, so Benedict and I left him to it and set out to stroll together down the half-mile-long stretch of open hillside to the forest clearing, where the rest of our work parties were sawing lumber. We left our horses at the quarry and walked.

We talked about Rufio and his condition. Lucanus's extraordinary skills had given us hope that our old friend might survive a series of wounds that ought to have killed him. No one was yet making any wagers on Rufe's chances either way, but everyone was convinced that his carefully cozened survival had been little short of miraculous. His right arm and shoulder had been badly mangled, the flesh shredded from the bones by the bear's razor-sharp claws, and he had four enormous puncture wounds in his left shoulder, two in front and two behind, where the animal's monstrous canine fangs had sought to crunch clean through him. His right femur had been broken cleanly, and several of his ribs crushed, but his skull appeared to be intact and the only other wound he had incurred was a deep, clean slash, probably caused by a claw, on his right thigh.

Luke's own prognosis was cautiously optimistic. His major concern was the danger of infection in the bite marks and claw cuts, but he had cleaned the wounds thoroughly and carefully, making liberal use of powerful astringents that, he assured me, Rufio would have been unable to bear had he been conscious at the time of their application. If Rufe could pass the next few days without developing a fever, Lucanus now believed he would probably survive, although he might never swing a sword again.

As we walked away from Philip and the others, picking our way carefully among the stones that littered the sloping ground, Benedict began reminiscing about some of the exploits that had kept Rufio consistently in conflict with his superiors—of whom I had been the senior—in earlier times. I was half listening to him, smiling as I remembered some of my own experiences with Rufio's antics and trying to avoid falling on the loose stones underfoot, when Benedict suddenly stopped walking and raised one hand to press it against my chest, stopping me, too.

"Hey," he said. "Look at this."

I turned to look where he was looking and for a few moments, before some inner alarm began clanging in my breast, I did not know what to make of what I was seeing. I know that the events that followed occurred very quickly, but each time I relive them in my mind, and I do so frequently, everything seems to happen very, very slowly.

We were not yet out of the small quarry. The cut itself was at our back, with one steep face—the cliff that had attracted us to begin quarrying here—directly to our left; the short, mountain grass, scattered with shrubs, resumed again some twenty paces below the point we had reached. There was an animal, a small fox, trotting up the hill directly towards us, its tongue lolling sideways from its mouth as it approached. My first thought was that it had somehow failed to see us, for foxes are timid creatures that avoid any contact with mankind, but I quickly dismissed that idea, since the beast was staring directly at us.

'Tame little bugger, isn't he?"

Benedict's question chilled me abruptly, for no truly wild animal is tame. I looked again, much more sharply now. The fox had halved the distance between us and I could hear it growling as it came, its-pace unvarying directly for us. I looked again at its open mouth and lolling tongue and saw thick, ropy saliva slavering from its jaws.

"No, Ben, it's not tame, it's mad—rabid! It's attacking and if it bites one of us, we're dead. Quick, up the cliff. Mover-

Benedict stood there, hesitating, his hand starting to move towards the hilt of his short-sword, but I punched him on the arm then grabbed him, propelling him in front of me towards the cliff face. "Climb, dammit! You'll need both hands. Get up there!"

I was less than half a pace behind him as he reached the base of the cliff and began scrambling upward, scrabbling for handholds. I scooped up a large flake of stone.

The fox was still coming directly for us, no more than twenty paces distant. I hurled the stone, but the animal gave no sign of having seen it. Belatedly I remembered the long cavalry sword hanging between my shoulder-blades. No time now to unhook it, unsheathe it and prepare myself. I launched myself at the cliff after Benedict.

"It might follow us up, if it's strong enough to climb! If it does, be ready to kill it when it reaches the top. Don't try to stab it—cut the damn thing in two!"

The cliff we were scaling was perhaps fifteen paces high at this point, sloping steeply and not difficult to climb, either for us or for the fox.

"Whoreson's coming up," Benedict gasped.

"Let it come! Keep climbing."

I grasped an outcrop of rock and it broke off in my hand just as I was hauling my whole weight up on it.

I knew instinctively that I would fall. And I knew, too, without looking, that the rabid animal was immediately beneath me. For a long moment I hung there, clawing at the cliff before I toppled. Somehow I twisted around as I fell, to slither down on my back, jarring myself painfully during my descent.

Then several things happened simultaneously: the point of my sword lodged in the cliff face, ripping its retaining hook from the ring between my shoulders. The fox suddenly appeared level with my eyes, slashing at me. I jerked my arm away from the thick rope of saliva that looped itself the length of my forearm, away from the gnashing teeth. And I swept the beast's front legs from under it, so that it fell with me, end over end.

I landed at the bottom on my feet, hard, hands at my back, catapulted myself forward into a rolling dive and slammed my shoulder against a large stone. Then I was on my feet again, running, looking back over my shoulder. The fox was already coming after me.

Vaguely aware of voices shouting above and beyond me, I threw myself headlong over the uneven ground. I may have managed a score or more long, bounding paces before my ankle twisted on an outcrop and sent me sprawling, slamming down hard. Slightly stunned, I whipped myself around, onto my elbows and backside to face my fate.

The fox was leaping for my throat, yellow teeth bared, when the shadow glided over me. There was a mighty slamming of bodies together, like a fist striking flesh, and an enormous eagle hung just above the ground before me, gripping the limp body of the fox in its powerful talons.

For a moment, the bird hung there, stationary before my eyes, its huge wings measuring strong, steady beats. Slowly, firmly, it stroked the air, its pinions nearly brushing the ground, holding it and its prey aloft. Three, four long, deep strokes gradually propelled the two upward, further into the eagle's own element, away from the earth. Each ensuing beat drew them higher, hauled them deliberately forward and away from me, above the trees.

I pushed myself to my knees, panting, and then to my feet to watch each surge of those mighty wings. My salvation, the magnificence of the eagle, the miracle of its intervention transfixed me. I strained to follow the bird's unhurried progress, watching it rise higher and higher above my head, in great, soaring circles, until it appeared to be the size of a tiny sparrow. And then it released the fox, and I watched the animal fall to earth and heard it smash among the rocks behind me moments later. The eagle was now a mere speck against the blue firmament, moving away, towards the distant Fells.

What had brought this eagle to this place at this precise moment? Perhaps God truly did watch over the lives of individual men, as the Church taught. Had the eagle been sent expressly to save me? The sane, rational part of me rejected the notion as nonsense, yet I could not help but wonder whether I had been spared for some specific purpose.

The arrival of my friends interrupted my reverie. They were as full of wonder as I was at what they had seen, so I said nothing and pondered all these things in my heart.

Late that afternoon, during the general discussion before dinner, when everyone had gathered around the big fire outside the main gates, Shelagh and Donuil came to where I sat with my arm about Tress's waist.

"It's a beautiful evening, Cay. Why don't we go for a stroll?"

Her tone was anything but casual, and I looked from her to Donuil, and then to Tress, who had already moved away from me and was standing, pulling her shawl tight across her arms and shoulders. Clearly, they had something to say to me that they wanted no one else to overhear. I simply nodded, saying nothing, and stood up to join them. We made our way down towards the road, Shelagh and Tress chatting animatedly between themselves and Donuil and I strolling in comfortable silence.

When we were a good hundred paces from the nearest of our neighbours, Shelagh moved next to me, linking her arm through mine.

"What's this about?" I asked her. She tilted her head back and looked up at me in wide-eyed, exaggerated innocence, but I cut her off before she could form any kind of reply. "Don't throw that wide-eyed look at me, Shelagh, I know you too well. You and this innocent-looking woman here, not to mention my good friend and sometime adjutant, have words to say to me and you've plotted this, to get me here alone with the three of you, so that I'm the only one who doesn't know what's going on. So talk. What's this about?"

She grinned, but then her expression grew serious immediately.

"Dreams, Caius, what else?"

"Go on."

She ran the tip of her tongue across her teeth, making her upper lip bulge out as her tongue moved, then she made a "tutting" sound and plunged ahead.

"Do you remember the first dream you and I discussed?"

I nodded. "Of course I do. It was in Eire, the first night we really met, when your father and the others went off to look for the fellow Rud, who had disappeared in the forest ... "

Shelagh had been terrified that I would expose her secret—that she too had prophetic dreams—and that she would be banished from her home and people for sorcery. It had been difficult to convince her that her secret was safe in my keeping, but once I had done so, she had told me everything, without reservation.

She had dreamed about a bear, a boar and a dragon that battled. Only the bear survived. It rode on the back of a white bull and it met another bear. All three then fought among themselves in a ring of wolves. The first bear was badly wounded and thought to die, until a great eagle rode in on a broadening beam of light. The eagle attacked the wolves and scattered them. It killed the dominant wolf and ripped the coat from its back, exposing the crimson scales of a dragon beneath. Finally, Shelagh saw me, watching from the shadows, and saw the crimson dragon settled on my breast and the eagle come and sit on my shoulder.

I recounted this to Shelagh, speaking straightforwardly, omitting nothing, and when I was finished no one rushed to break the silence.

"Hmm," Shelagh said, eventually, "Your remembrance is surprisingly complete after ten years."

I smiled as I contradicted her. "Nothing surprising there at all. You were the only person I had ever met who dreamed like me, and your dream was about me. Of course I remembered every detail. But why would you ask me about it now?"

I saw that I had really surprised her now. "You really have to ask me that? Can it be possible you see no connection between that dream and what happened today?"

I fought to keep my face clear of expression, not wishing to hurt her by seeming to scoff at her, for in truth, even now, I could see no connection. The eagle in her dream had slain a giant wolf. Mine had killed a tiny fox. "I can see that you do," was all I said.

"Of course I do, and so should you. But you should know, too, that the dream came back to me, two nights ago, and this time it was different."

I frowned, wondering where she was going with this, the civilized, sceptical Roman within me—the fearful cynic who shied back from recognizing potency in dreams—warring with the superstitious but unwillingly credulous Celt. I kept silent, however, seeing the tension in her and knowing she had more to say but would not speak it until I asked her to. "How, different, then—and how different?"

She paused, watching me closely, then continued. "I have never forgotten that dream, Cay. It seemed too ... portentous ... too important to disregard, and in the years that have gone by since then, I've made some sense of parts of it, at least."

"How so? I never have made sense of it, save for the obvious—but then, I have not thought of it in years."

She said nothing for a count of five heartbeats, then cocked her head to one side. '"Save for the obvious,' you said. What was obvious?"

"I was. The bear is my emblem—Camulod's emblem, if you like, as the dragon was Uther's and therefore Cambria's. Together, Camulod and Cambria destroyed Lot, the boar of Cornwall. That much was obvious. But the ring of wolves and their giant leader? There, I confess, I lost the track, other than knowing that the wolves are enemies and encirclement by such threatens destruction ... The White bull means nothing to me, either. Nor does the eagle, other than that it signified the Roman legions, long since gone and never to return."

Shelagh nodded her head, glancing at Donuil arid Tressa, both of whom were listening closely. "I've seen more, since yesterday—found more to understand—than before."

"Like what? Tell me, now that you have me ready to hear."

"Well, the white bull, and perhaps the eagle."

I thought of the forces allied to and opposed to my own, considering their emblems, and suddenly much became clear to me. "Of course! How blind can I be? The eagle is from the Pendragon! Their War Chief wears the eagle-crowned helmet. I remember Uther's grandfather, Ullic Pendragon, wearing that emblem.

"Aye, but it's more than that, Caius. Many of the Pendragon Celts are warriors, who worship the white bull of Mithras, the warrior's god. No—" She raised her hand to silence me before I could protest. "Mithras was not a Roman god. The Roman soldiers worshipped him, but Mithras was ancient before Rome was built, and he has had many names throughout the ages. But by them all, he is the' white bull god."

"Wait you now." I accepted her words on Mithras completely, but I still had doubts. "I'm growing confused. How can the Pendragon be both bull and eagle, in your dream?"

"I did not say they were. You said that. I think the eagle in my dream is young Arthur. Listen, now, to how my dream the other night was different. In it, the bear and the dragon fought and killed the boar, but only the bear survived. If we accept what you call the obvious, then that must be immutable, for Lot and Uther are both dead. The bear then rode upon a white bull's back to meet another creature, something like a bear, that was yet not a bear ... something far more fearsome and savage, as though a bear had mated with a wolf, or some other dire beast. It was a ... " She hesitated, seeking a word that she did not possess.

"A chimera," I said.

"A what?"

"A monstrous, mythical creature, fashioned of different parts of savage beasts."

"Aye, then it was a ... chimera."

"And what befell when these things met?"

Shelagh raised her chin and met my eye.

"They fought in the ring of wolves, among waterfalls of blood ... and when the fight was over, the bear was sorely wounded. He thought to die alone, but then a sudden darkness descended, and with it, launched from the shoulders of the bull on a broadening beam of light, came the eagle to save him, and the ... the chimera withdrew, and all the wolves were scattered."

I nodded, swallowing an urge to grin at the awestruck expression with which Donuil was staring at his wife. Instead of smiling, I made my voice more jocular than I had meant to.

"And so the bear recovered. So I live?"

But Shelagh had no smile for her response. "No, Cay. The bear did not recover. It fell dead. And yet I saw it rise again from within itself—one form supine and dead, the other, identical, rising from it whole and alive, to walk away. But as it went, it changed before my eyes into a dragon with bright-gleaming scales. And then there you were, as in my former dream, the dragon on your breast, the eagle on your shoulder, and yourself fading away into the gathering darkness ... "

"I see," I muttered eventually, although in fact I saw nothing. Any meaning that she might have expected me to draw from what she had told me was completely obscure to me. "So what you are telling me is that your dream would make of me some Christ figure, rising from the dead?"

She shook her head, not in denial, but in acknowledgment of her ignorance, and for a time we all stood silent.

It was Donuil who spoke next, his pragmatic sensibilities unmoved by all this talk of dreams and omens. "We'd better head back. They're getting ready to serve the food, and I'm famished. If we're late, we'll be likely to go hungry."

"Hardly that," Shelagh replied, turning to smile up at her hulking husband. "What you really mean is that if we're late, someone else will be ahead of you in reaching the prime cuts." She looked back at me. "Anyway, that's what I wanted you to know. My dream was different the second time, and although I don't know the significance of all the changes, I do know, deep inside, that they are important. And the similarities between parts of that dream and what happened to you today are too striking to ignore. Your emblem has always been the bear. The danger you faced today wasn't from wolves, but it was from a rabid canine creature, and the eagle saved your life, destroying the creature in the process. That is not coincidence, Cay."

'Then what is it, Shelagh? Magic?"

She squinted up at me, cocking her head to one side, then shrugged one shoulder. "It might be. Who am I to know, or even you?"

"It doesn't matter," Tress said, speaking for the first time. "What it is, I mean—magic or not. Something has changed, and it's clear to me that you're the victorious one, Cay, since the eagle saved your life. What it really means will become clear, in time."

"You, too?" I smiled at her. "Ah, well, I'll take your combined word for that. And I'll heed your warning, Donuil, for I'm half starved, too. Let's eat."

It would be years before I learned that Horsa called his savage Danes his Sea-Wolves and took pride in being their Wolf King. That knowledge alone, had we possessed it then, would have gone far towards explaining the chimera in Shelagh's dream. But had we known it then, it might also have terrified and awed us to the point at which we would have become impotent to act the way some power had ordained we must.

By the time we entered the dining hall, many of our companions had already filled their platters and seated themselves at the long tables with their food. We crossed directly to the serving tables and mingled with the people there, and Tress and I ended up being separated from Donuil and Shelagh. I helped myself to a broad, wooden platter and laid a large, thick slice of fresh-baked bread on it, completely covering the flat surface. One of the women serving us that night—a red-cheeked, smiling matron in her late thirties whose name was Monica—waved me forward and sliced a succulent, dripping slab of beef, marbled with fat, from the huge roasted hindquarter in front of her. She placed it on top of my bread and then poured a thick, steaming gravy of onions, greens and salted beef juice drippings over the whole, more than doubling the weight in my hand. I thanked her and moved away, looking over my shoulder to make sure that Tress was behind me. Most of the places at the closest tables were already filled, and Tress nodded to one in the far corner, where Hector sat by himself. We made our way to join him, and for a time thereafter none of us spoke, each intent on the business of eating.