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

Ravenglass

ONE

We stood together on the forward deck of a galley that moved slowly forward through a bright, still September morning, mere months after the murderous incident that had prompted our departure from Camulod. The large, square sail sagged limp in the languid, early-morning breeze that wafted the fog softly from the surface of the bay into which we drew, dispersing its drifting wreaths into nothingness. The oarsmen who propelled the vessel did so cautiously, their eyes intent upon the boatmaster, Tearlach, who directed them with arm and hand movements, his own eyes fixed on the wharf that stretched to meet us.

I stood on the stern deck with the galley's captain, Connor Mac Athol—Connor, Son of Athol, Son of Iain. Connor's father was the King of the Scots of Eire, the people whom the Romans had called the Scotii of Hibernia, and Connor of the Wooden Leg, as his men called him, was the king's admiral in the Southern Seas. I followed his gaze now to where two other galleys, one of them dwarfing its consort, lay already moored at the long wooden pier, on the side farther from us. They were unmistakable—warships like the one in which we rode, sleek and deadly in their aggressive lines—and I could tell from Connor's face that they were not his. They seemed to be

deserted, their massive booms angled at the tops of their masts and their sails furled and bound. Beside them, the score or so of fishing boats that shared the anchorage, at that main wharf and at the smaller pier built to the south, seemed tiny. I glanced back to Connor.

"Whose are they?"

His face betrayed nothing of what he thought, but his tone betrayed tension. "They are Liam's. The Sons of Condran."

"What will you do?"

"Nothing. Ignore them. Then leave before they do."

"That one is huge, larger than this."

"Aye, it ships forty-eight oars to our thirty-six. That's Liam's own galley."

"And? Will you fight them?"

His features creased in a wintry little smile. "Probably, but not here. Not in Ravenglass. This is neutral ground."

"Forgive me, I don't understand. What does that mean?"

He turned his head now to look at me. "Simply what it says. This is the only harbour in the entire north-west where ships can call and provision themselves in safety. It has always been that way, since the day the Romans built the fort. All warfare ceases once a ship enters this bay, otherwise it is denied entry. The fort, there, as you can see, is walled and occupied. It can't be taken from the sea, nor can it be surprised from overland, so it sits inviolate and inviolable, and all men use it as a base for gathering provender. We'll rub shoulders with Liam's men inside the town, but we'll ignore them, as they will ignore us. If any trouble does break out, the party causing it will be denied re-entry in the future. No trouble ever surfaces within the town." He smiled again. "Of course, when two groups such as ours meet here, it creates a certain tension when the time arrives to leave."

"How? You mean there's an advantage to being? the first to leave?"

"Aye, there is. The same advantage that the smith has over the iron he works. He may swing his hammer as hard as he wishes, and the iron is pressed flat against the anvil The coast becomes the anvil when you are the last ship out."

"But you have three ships to their two."

"I do, and that may make the difference. We'll see."

He turned his head now, his eye seeking Tearlach, and then he nodded and returned to the side rail, where he leaned forward, his attention focused closely on the spot we would occupy here in the harbour called Ravenglass. It was clear to me he had dismissed me from his mind for the time being, absorbed now in the berthing of his long, sleek craft, which had borne us swiftly and effortlessly northward. We had skimmed around the coast of Cambria from the estuary south of it by Glevum, skirting Anglesey, the sacred Isle of the Druids, to seaward before swooping back to the coastline, driving north-east again to where the rugged coast of the region known as Cumbria waited to receive us, across from the humped shape on the horizon that Connor called the Isle of Man.

Accepting that other priorities had claim on him, I turned away and looked towards the prow, where my own party stood gazing forward as raptly as Connor to the new land ahead of them. These were my friends, my family and all my world, now that we had left Camulod behind us in the distant south. Others there were who had set out with us, and those were split between the two galleys that rode as escorts at our rear, but these eleven were my special ones.

The youngest of the men, a giant who towered a hand's width over even me, was twenty-four years old and brother to the galley's captain, Connor, although no stranger would ever have taken them for such. Where Connor was black- haired, blue-eyed and dark of skin in the pure Celtic way, his younger brother Donuil was fair-skinned and light- haired. His face was clean-shaven in the Roman style, like my own, and his eyes seemed to change from brown to green, depending on the light.

Connor was no small man. He was above average height, huge in the shoulders and deep through the chest. Great, sweeping moustaches drooped below his chin, emphasizing the thickness of his neck, a solid pillar of muscle, and directing attention to the heavy tore, an ornate, intricately worked chieftain's collar of solid gold, that encircled it. Yet even Connor appeared small when seen beside his younger brother. Donuil's great height—he stood a full head taller than most full-grown men—combined with the graceful proportions of his physique to belie the true bulk of the man. His shoulders were broader than his brother Connor's, yet seemed slighter; his chest was larger, yet seemed not so deep; and he seemed slender where his brother appeared broad and bulky—all due to his height.

Looking at Donuil now, and seeing the ease with which he stood, one arm about the waist of his wife, Shelagh, as they gazed together at the scene ahead of them, I wondered again, as I had a hundred times, about the influence this clan of aliens, this single family of Scots, had exerted upon my life.

Athol Mac Iain had not lacked progeny. All of them had, however, been born in Eire, far from where I had grown up in Camulod, ignorant of their existence. One of them, his youngest daughter, Deirdre, had become my wife and had been killed while pregnant with my child. Long before her death, however, her brother Donuil had become my hostage, captured in war and held against his father's promise of non-intervention in our ongoing conflict with the warlord Gulrhys Lot of Cornwall. None of us knew of the link that bound us until I eventually brought my wife home to Camulod and Deirdre and Donuil were reunited, each stunned by the other's reappearance.

Another sister, Ygraine, had been wedded to my archenemy, Gulrhys Lot, to bind the early alliance between her father's people and Cornwall. Angry and disgruntled at the treatment she endured from her inhuman spouse, she willingly fled with my cousin Uther Pendragon during a long campaign, and the two became enamoured of each other, producing a bastard son. It was I who later found Ygraine on a lonely beach on the Cornish coast, being violated by a man who was wearing my cousin's armour, stripped from Uther's corpse. I held her as she died, and I barely managed to rescue her infant son, Uther's son. I leaped aboard the boat where he lay crying and drifted with it, helpless, out to sea, where we were found by yet another brother, Connor, dispatched by his father the king to meet Ygraine and bring her safely home to Eire. That same boy, Arthur Pendragon, my lifetime charge, now stood by his Uncle Donuil's side, peering towards the land.

Remembering, I shook my head again at such a host of wild improbabilities. But I no longer thought or sought to question them. I am a Christian, by birth and upbringing, but I am also a Druidic Celt, trained by my mother's people, the Pendragon of Cambria. The Celtic half of me has always believed in fate and the inevitability of things decreed by minds greater than human. The Christian,

Roman-British half of me, thanks to my great-aunt Luceiia Varrus, has come to believe the same: some things are meant to be and will come to pass, despite the blinking disbelief of humankind. That thought brought a smile and a stirring of goose-flesh as I stared forward now to the wooden wharf that drew closer with every gentle stroke of the oars, for there stood the crowning proof of what I had been thinking.

The man who slew Uther Pendragon and stripped him of his armour was a man I had met before—an enemy, but not a mortal foe. I believed him when he told me he had not known Uther's identity when he killed him. His surprise at learning he had slain Uther Pendragon was too genuine to doubt. And so, sickened by the carnage I had seen throughout the final battles of the campaign in Cornwall, I made no effort either to fight him or to detain him that day. I simply watched him ride away unscathed. His name was Derek, and he called himself the king of Ravenglass. Now, many years later, I recognized him easily among the crowd thronging the wharf.

The great galley slid smoothly to the side of the long, wooden pier, propelled by one last sweep of its thirty-six oars. The oarsmen brought their long sweeps up in unison, scattering drops of water inboard as they held the oars briefly at the vertical then brought them down, blades forward, lowering them hand over hand with the skill of long usage and dropping them in overlapping rows along the sides of the craft, atop the rows of benches. Two men crouched at prow and stern, poised to throw mooring ropes to eager hands waiting on the wharf. Four others hung far overboard, positioning great pads of hempen cushions to protect the vessel's side against damage from the barnacle- encrusted timbers of the pier. The galley slowed, its forward motion bleeding away with the dying impetus of that final thrust until it barely moved through the water, and a stillness fell as everyone waited. Then came a gentle nudge as ship met moorings. Ropes flew outwards and were seized by willing hands, and an involuntary roar of approval came from the watching crowd, which surged forward in welcome. Crewmen leaped down onto the dock to secure the heavy gangplank, which was already rearing high above the galley's side, hoisted by ropes and pulleys from the recessed well in the central causeway that housed it. Momentously, ponderously, one end swung outward over the rail and was lowered gently to the dock where, in moments, it was safely grounded and secured by the waiting crewmen.

Satisfied that his vessel was securely berthed, Connor turned away from the rail and moved towards me, walking effortlessly despite the carved and tapered wooden cylinder that had replaced his right leg from the knee down. He was smiling, taking no notice now of the crowd bustling on the wharf.

"Well, Yellow Head," he said to me, "I'm first ashore, by custom, so you have a few moments to collect your thoughts." His smile broadened. 'This is the worst part for me—the transition from ship to shore, from sea legs to land legs. It's bad enough on two feet." He stamped his peg leg against the decking. "I've ended up on my arse more than a few times. You'll notice that my men take care not to look at me until I call to them." He shook his head, his smile now one of self-deprecation. "I'll see you over there."

As he spoke, a rope came swinging, apparently out of nowhere, and he raised his hand to seize it, almost without looking. I spun to see whence it had come, and almost before I'd had time to realize that it dangled from the same pole that had hoisted the gangplank out from the ship, Connor had grasped the rope in both hands and quickly placed his foot in the loop at the end of it. Immediately, he was snatched upward, swinging smoothly out and over the side to be lowered gently to the dock. There he removed his foot from the loop and stood slightly spread-legged, retaining his hold on the rope, which remained taut, until he had achieved balance.

I glanced around me, and it was true: none of his fierce- looking crew was watching him. A moment longer he stood there, swaying slightly, and then he released the rope.

'Take it, Sean!" he roared, and it swung inboard again as the captain turned towards the onlookers On the shore, who had watched all of this with curiosity. He threw his arms wide in a gesture of triumph and greeting and was immediately engulfed in a crowd of welcomers.

Now the galley was suddenly filled with the moving bodies of the oarsmen, who normally sat in serried, disciplined ranks for hours on end, working or resting. Released from their oars, they appeared to fill the ship beyond its capacity as they crowded towards the gangplank in a noisy, undisciplined tide. I could see there was no point in attempting then to walk the length of the vessel to my own party on the foredeck, so I resolved to wait and go ashore with my people at the end of the exodus and with a modicum of dignity. As the thought occurred to me, I heard Tearlach, the boatmaster, call to me.

"Merlyn! Come you forward now and we'll clear a way for you."

I shook my head, smiling at him and holding up my hand. "No, Tearlach, not yet. Let the men go first. I have to talk with the boy before we leave the ship."

Tearlach shrugged and shook his head. "Please yourself," he muttered, and he swung away to start shouting more orders.

I turned my eyes back to the crowded wharf, seeking the man who called me "Yellow Head," but my view of him was obscured by the oarsmen filing down the gangplank, their brightly coloured Celtic clothing ablaze in the early-morning sunlight and their weapons and armour glittering and gleaming where they caught the light. These men were warriors, with a wildness in their looks and in their bearing that boded ill for any who might seek to bar their way. And yet it was evident from their demeanour that they were at ease, that this was not their first time here. None sought to flee their presence, and there were many, indeed, who greeted individuals by name and bade them welcome.

As the crowd swirled upon itself, Connor's head came into view again and I found him looking at me. He nodded, raising one hand to me casually, unseen by his companion, Derek of Ravenglass himself, who stood with his back to me. Another group moved down the gangplank and my view was obscured again. I glanced to my left, into the body of the ship, and saw that fully half the men had gone ashore and that I could now begin to make my way towards the prow. I set off, moving slowly along the central causeway, pausing occasionally to allow crewmen to pass in front of me from one side of the vessel to the other.

Ahead of me,, the oldest member of our group, my closest friend, Lucanus, watched me and nodded, one eyebrow raised sardonically in an amused half-smile as I approached.

"Well," he murmured as I reached him, "Derek of Ravenglass has weathered the years well since Verulamium. A bit stouter, much greyer, but I recognized him instantly. Has he seen you yet?"

"No. Connor has managed thus far to keep him from looking up here, but he will not be able to for much longer. I had best get down there."

"Hmm. Are you sure you would not like me to come with you?"

"Quite sure, but thank you. I must go alone. Whatever comes of this visit must take place between him and me. I want no other eyes or ears there in the first few moments."

"So be it, then." Luke's eyes were on the crowded scene below. "But bear in mind, my friend, that if he refuses it will be a setback we are already prepared to take in stride. The arrangements are in place for us to travel onward if we must."

"Aye, but let's hope we need not travel so far, Luke. Arthur!"

At my call, the boy stopped what he was doing and turned towards me instantly, his large, wide-set eyes reflecting golden in the low-angled, early-morning sun. I beckoned, and as he reached my side I nodded towards the wharf. "I'm going ashore to speak with the man talking to your Uncle Connor. He is the king I told you about, and he may wish to meet you, since he met your father once. In the meantime, whether he does or not, I want you to wait here patiently and behave like a grown man. Will you do that for me?"

The boy smiled at me, showing far more maturity than his eight years might indicate. He said nothing, merely nodding his head.

"Good lad!" I ruffled his hair and made my way directly to the gangplank, aware of all their eyes watching me. I was aware, too, of the spring of the down-sloping passageway beneath my feet, and of the fact that the press of bodies on the wharf had thinned out greatly. But with all of my being I was aware of the broad shoulders and imposing height of the man Derek, who stood with his back to me, waving an arm to emphasize what he was saying to Connor.

As I drew near them, Connor grinned at me over Derek's shoulder, then stretched out a hand to grasp the other's arm, silencing him.

"Your pardon, Derek," he said, smiling still. "I have brought a good friend with me, whom I believe you know already."

Arrested in mid-word, Derek of Ravenglass swung around to face me, and I watched as a series of expressions swept rapidly across his face: puzzlement, followed quickly by recognition, surprise and finally a close-guarded look I could not define. I saw suspicion there, and a hint of fear or defiance.

"The Dreamer," he said, frowning.

I nodded, "Merlyn Britannicus."

"Aye, I remember. Cornwall, by way of Camulod. The first time we met, you used another name."

"I did. Ambrose of Lindum."

"That was it. You're Roman."

"No," I shook my head. "No more than half, and that in name alone. I'm British."

"British, what's that?" The scorn in his question made it plain that Derek was far from intimidated by my sudden reappearance.

I shrugged. "The other half of me is Celt, like you. The combination makes me British, since I am neither one nor the other, yet was born here in Britain."

"You're a talker, I recall that from our first meeting, when we were on the road to join Lot's army."

"You were on the road for that purpose. We merely rode along with you."

"Aye, you did, then disappeared." He paused. "Your physician paid me gold to take your wounded through the meeting place that time, to safety beyond Lot's army."

That was true. He had taken the gold, but then had failed to fulfil his end of the bargain in entirety. That no ill had befallen our people had been due only to Lucanus's quick thinking on that occasion. I knew I would have to speak with care here if I were to avoid aggravating the situation by stirring up feelings of guilt on his part.

"What was his name, that physician of yours?"

"Lucanus."

"Aye, Lucanus. Did he survive?"

"He did, with all his men and wagons."

"Ah, he did. Good, that pleases me. I've often wondered about that."

This was not what I had expected. I had been attempting to analyse his tone, listening for signs of truculence or real hostility.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

He looked me straight in the eye, then sniffed, glancing sideways at Connor.

".It was a foul-up, all around." He cleared his throat. "We came to Lot's gathering place without problems, but instead of proceeding clear through, we had to stop when I was summoned to a meeting of commanders. Some fool had seen us coming and passed the word that I had arrived. We left your people on the outskirts of the encampment— couldn't very well take them with us, right into Lot's camp, could I? Anyway, the gathering was enormous, and I rode on in with my men to find the rest of our contingent, most of whom had come down the coast by water, ferried by Lot's galleys.

"As things turned out, Lot wasn't there and never did appear, and one thing led to another and I couldn't get back that night—held in a so-called planning session all night long. A dog-fight was what it was, more than anything else. With Lot away, everyone wanted to be a general, even though most of them couldn't find a latrine if they were standing in it. Later that evening, when I finally realized how things were going to be, I sent some of my people back to find yours and lead them on through, but by the time they reached the spot where we had left them, your people were all gone. No sign of them at all. My own men thought nothing more of it, and I didn't hear of it until the following day. Didn't know what to do then. I asked some questions but found no answers, and I didn't want to be too specific. I heard nothing about any disturbance or fighting or disagreements over wagons, and so I let it go. But I've often wondered what happened to them, how they got away."

I was smiling by this time, feeling much relieved. "Why don't you ask Lucanus how he did it? He's here, on the galley." I nodded towards where Lucanus stood on the foredeck, watching us. When he saw the astonishment on Derek's face, Luke smiled and nodded a greeting.

"Well I'm damned," Derek muttered. "And there's that other one, too, the one who rode with you. The big Scot."

"That is my brother Donuil," Connor said.

"Is it, by all the gods?" Derek turned back to us, his eyes moving from me to Connor and back to me. "Why are you here, Merlyn the Dreamer? What do you want from me?"

"Nothing that may not be within your power to grant or to withhold," I responded, smiling and shrugging my shoulders. "Food and lodgings, for the night at least, for me and mine, and perhaps sanctuary."

"Sanctuary?" He frowned as he repeated the alien sounds. "I don't know that word."

"It means shelter, respite."

"Respite from what? Or from whom?" He glowered now at Connor, his face clouded with suspicion. "There will be no trouble here. You know Liam, Condran's admiral, is here?"

Connor nodded. "Coincidence," he said. "Nothing to do with anything. Liam has never seen or heard of Merlyn, and is no part of his cares. The rules apply, as always."

"Hmm." Apparently mollified, Derek looked back at me. "So? Respite from whom?"

I shrugged. "It is a long story—not long in the telling, but complex. I would be happy to tell it to you."

"Hmmph." He looked away again, towards the galley. "You have women with you, and children. How many?"

"Twelve, counting myself, aboard the galley."

"Aboard the galley ... And elsewhere?"

I indicated the two escort galleys that held their place outside the harbour. "Six more, split between the other vessels."

"Why do they stand off like that, Mac Athol? Afeared of the Sons of Condran?"

Connor smiled and shrugged his great shoulders. "Not since they learned to stand on two legs. Simple courtesy, my friend. We had no knowledge of the enemy's presence until we arrived, but it makes no difference here. They merely wait to be invited to enter. Three galleys at one time might have seemed too much like an invasion."

Aye, well, signal them in They are yours, and therefore welcome. Feargus, is it?"

"Aye, and Logan."

Derek spoke again to me. "The hospitality, for a night at least, presents no difficulty. It would have been extended anyway. Further, I'll not commit. But your story should be interesting." He paused. "Tell me, do you still dream?"

"From time to time," I answered, smiling. "I dreamed of you less than four weeks ago. That is why we are here."

He sighed deeply. "I was afraid you would say something like that."

"I saw you wearing Uther's armour," I said. "Do you still have it?"

"I do." His voice was level.

"When did you last wear it?"

"Not since I returned home, after we last met. I had my belly filled with war, and I thank the gods I've not had to take a sword in my hand since then. Why do you ask?"

"Is it in good condition?"

"Aye, perfect. I could strap it on again today if the need arose. Is that likely?"

My smile widened to a grin and I shook my head. "No, but I might like to buy it back from you some day, were you willing to sell it."

He gazed at me for some time, sucking on the inside of one cheek, before he responded. When he did, his voice was thoughtful. "Someday, you say? And how far off might that day be? I warn you, it could make a difference to my decision and to my price." He glanced back towards the galley and then nodded to me. "Bring your people ashore and come you with me. One of my men will conduct them to a place where they can rest and clean themselves. We have a Roman bathhouse here, if they would like to use it."

"You mean a working bathhouse?"

"You think I'd offer you a broken one?" The big man was glaring at me from beneath lowered brows, but I saw the glint of humour in his eyes. "Should I be thinking now you are surprised to find we might be clean, or clever enough to maintain a furnace, even though its Roman owners are long gone?"

"No, by all the old gods," I demurred, straight-faced. "Such thoughts would never have occurred to me."

"Hmm. Well, bring your people off."

I beckoned to my party on the galley and they gathered together immediately, moving towards the landing planks, already prepared to disembark. Connor cupped his hands and called to Tearlach, bidding him summon Feargus and Logan inshore. As men began moving about, preparing the signal to the waiting galleys, the first of my group, Dedalus and Lucanus, stepped onto the wharf together and made their way to us, followed by the others.

"Lucanus," I greeted him. "Derek remembers you from the road to Aquae."

"As I do him," Luke answered, smiling slightly. "You look well, Derek, little changed in twelve years. Who would have thought you and I would ever meet again?"

"Not I, but you are welcome here, Physician. Merlyn tells me you brought all your people home, that time, even without my help." His eyes moved from Lucanus to Dedalus. "Derek of Ravenglass," he said, nodding.

"Dedalus," the other answered, nodding in return. "I am a friend of Merlyn's."

"Aye, from Camulod. I can see that. You're no physician."

Ded's mouth quirked into a half-smile. "No, I'm a centurion, but not from Rome."

The others had joined us by that time and I introduced each of them, including the boys, to the king, their host at least for the night, and told them that arrangements would be made for all of us. Derek had been joined by a man whom he introduced to us as Blundyl before instructing him on the housing and distribution of our group. When he had finished, Derek took me by the arm.

"Come. You and me. Blundyl will see to the others for now. I want to talk to you."

He walked away immediately and I followed him, exchanging expressionless looks with Lucanus and Shelagh as I went. We walked the full length of the wharf, apparently ignored by all, except that I was conscious of a curiosity in many of the people, who took pains to show no awareness of our passing.

Once through the portals in the central gate-tower of the western wall, I found myself in a Roman fort the like of which I had never before seen. It was a standard cohortal fort, built to house and maintain a garrison of five to six hundred men. I had been in several similar places over the years, all of which had been in varying stages of ruin and decay. Most of them had been abandoned and deserted many years before the start of the legions' withdrawals from Britain, during my father's boyhood. Compelled by harsh economies, thanks to a total lack of reinforcements from beyond their shores, the central garrisons of the province were being remanned and reinforced at the expense of lesser, more outlying forts. Such had not been the case, though, with Glannaventa, as this fort had been called. A garrison had occupied this place right up until the final days of the withdrawals, during my own boyhood, and because of the importance of the natural harbour, the place .had been reoccupied by the local folk the moment the legionary garrison abandoned it. It was like stepping backwards into the time when, in forts like this all over Britain, the life of the country was maintained and closely governed in good order.

All of the barracks buildings that had housed the garrison were still in use and still in good repair, their log walls tightly mortared and their tiled roofs free of moss, betraying no sign of rot or sagging. A number of new doors in the long walls indicated that they were occupied today by families, rather than by military squads. These buildings, six of them, each constructed to accommodate close to a hundred men plus their centurions, were laid out laterally in two blocks of three. Behind each block, looking very similar to the barracks buildings but serving another purpose altogether, were two more long, low buildings, dedicated to the service of the troops and housing smithies, tanneries and a variety of other manufactories. One block of four of these buildings lay on each side of the wide central road that joined the main gate behind us to the east gate in the opposite wall more than three hundred paces distant, and the eight of them completely filled the front half of the fort, the Praetentura, the section that lay closest to the main source of enemy attack. In the case of Glannaventa, that source had been the western sea.

Now, as we walked swiftly along the straight, wide avenue towards the stone-built central buildings that had once housed the garrison's administrative centre, I stared about me avidly, curious to learn all that I could about the life Derek's people lived here in this ordered place. Derek himself was striding ahead of me, immersed in his own thoughts. As he drew abreast of the end of the last barracks block, I lengthened my stride to catch up to him.

"I'm impressed," I said. "You modified the barracks into family units."

He looked at me and then beyond me to the building on my right. "Aye," he growled. "That was a nuisance at first, until it became clear we had to do it properly. At first it was a haphazard thing, people doing what they wanted to do, whether they were capable or not. Then others started carping because some people had more space than they had, and that was true, but it seemed there was nothing to be done by then. And then one fool ripped out a wall and brought down an entire building—killed four people. That's when I decided something had to change, and the changes had to be according to a plan."

He stopped, abruptly, and turned to look back the way we had come. "That one there," he said, indicating the second building on our right. "That's the one that collapsed. Never know it now, would you?" He did not wait for an answer. "After that, I put every builder in the place to work, systematically. Some of them, most of them in fact, had worked for the Romans, so they knew what was required and how to do what needed to be done. We gutted the interiors, divided them equally with new walls, cut doors in the outside walls and turned each building into housing units for twelve families. No more problems after that."

"All the units are the same size? What about the centurions' quarters, on the ends here? They look larger."

"They are. What of that?"

I shrugged. "You said you had no problems. How did people decide who lived where?"

He spat into the road. 'They didn't. I decided, and no one argued. I'm king here." He turned on his heel and began to walk again. "Most of the people who live in these buildings are our best artisans and their families. Their workshops are here, too, in these last two buildings, courtesy of Roman efficiency—smithy and foundry, cobblery, barrel-maker's cooperage, carpenter's yard, pottery and tilemaker, stonemason's yard. All in one location, everything the garrison needed. Clever whoresons, the Romans. I could see no point in not using these places for ourselves."

We had now arrived at the central rectangular space containing the three main buildings of this and every other Roman military installation: the commandant's house, the headquarters building, and the central granaries and storage warehouses known as the Horrea. These stone buildings sat apart from all others, isolated by the main lateral roadway, the Via Principalis, which crossed in front of them, and the second-largest street, the Via Quintana, at the rear. Since time immemorial, these two lateral streets had divided the interior of every Roman military camp, regardless of size, into the front half, the Praetentura, and the rear half, the Retentura. "That where I live." Derek pointed his thumb towards the massive commandant's house.

'The Praetorium? You live there?"

"It is my house."

"Aye, I suppose it is. You are the king."

I examined the Praetorium as we approached it, but could see little to indicate that it was a king's house now rather than a Roman commander's. High walls surrounded it, pierced by one large, central double portal, the doors of which stood open but were cloaked in shadow. I could see no guards anywhere and reflected that this king must have no need of such.

We cut diagonally across the main road in front of the king's house and he led me into the building flanking it, the former Principia, or garrison headquarters block. This had changed greatly since the legions left. It had been built originally around an open quadrangle containing a fountain, with the main entrance facing the cross-street. The principal part of the building, at the rear, occupied more than a third of the total area of the block and had once housed the garrison's most precious properties: the regimental chapel where the standards, colours and battle honours were stored, the regimental .paymaster's vaults and the personnel records office of the regimental clerk. This part of the headquarters block also contained the tribunal briefing room, where the officer commanding, down through the centuries, traditionally received his staff at formal meetings, addressing the assembly from the rostrum of the tribunal at the far right of the long room.

The building's open quadrangle had once been the off- duty domain of the garrison's officers. Wide, colonnaded walkways on both sides and on either side of the main entrance gave access to a series of lesser offices around the building's exterior. Sometime within the past three decades, after the departure of the Romans, the open space of the quadrangle had been roofed, leaving only a large rectangular hole in the centre to vent the smoke from the enormous firepit that had replaced the obligatory ornamental fountain in the open yard. Great beams of hand- hewn oak now spanned the space, supporting a second framework, less massive, that reared above them to hold a peaked and gabled roof of heavy thatch, open around the overhanging eaves to permit the passage of air among the rafters. This roof was intricately built, evidently engineered and erected by a master carpenter, but I thought it a pity that it should shut out much of the light along with most of the bad weather. Gazing up at it, it struck me as the local equivalent of King Athol's Great Hall in Eire.

All of this I saw as I strode at Derek's heels, for he made no attempt to play the guide for me. Matching him step for step, I followed him as he swung right, up to the colonnaded walk, and proceeded to the first door on his left. The bottom half of this door was closed, a hinged flap on its back raised to form a broad counter behind which stood a man evidently on duty of some kind. As Derek spoke with him, exchanging muttered greetings, I edged forward curiously to peer into the dim room at his back. It was a spartan place, bare of furnishings, with high, deep shelves lining every wall.

"Weapons," Derek grunted. I stared at him blankly. "Your weapons, take them off. They stay here until you leave."

"What, all of them? Am I to go unarmed among strangers?"

"Aye, along with everyone else, so you won't be lonely. That's the law in Ravenglass—no weapons. This room is for your people. Condran's crowd left theirs in a room on the other side. If someone else arrives while you are here, there's place for their things, too."

I had already loosened my swordbelt, catching it up and wrapping the loose ends around the scabbards of my long sword and my dagger. "How long has that law been in place?"

"Ever since this port was opened up to passing ships after the Romans left. It saves a lot of strife and bloodshed."

"I'm sure it does, but don't you find enforcing it to be a little ... hazardous?"

His teeth flashed in a tiny, swift grin. "No, not at all. You don't want to comply, you leave, assisted or otherwise, and you don't come back. "

I could only shake my head as I passed my bundled weapons over the counter to the custodian. "Different, " I muttered.

"Healthy, " the king responded. "Come on, then. "

He led me once more through the courtyard to the main entrance, where he turned sharply and made his way between the walls bordering his own house on our left and the headquarters building on our right. We emerged on the other cross-street, the old Via Quintana, which we crossed to continue moving towards the eastern gate now visible ahead of us. In this portion of the fort, too, most of the buildings had been converted into living quarters, although I could smell fresh-baked bread and other delicious aromas which spoke of the enterprises being pursued here. I noticed another stone building, close by the rear wall.

"Is that a hospital over there?"

"It was, but there's no need of it now, and no surgeons to use it. it's more living quarters. "

"What about the stables? What happened to them?"

"Outside the walls, now. We needed the living space. "

We were close to the rear wall now, and I looked up to the empty parapet walk between the turrets. "You don't post guards up there?"

"Against what? My people are farmers. They have their fields to tend, beyond the walls, and the only threat to us would come from the sea. " He nodded towards the distant mountain peaks that reared up inland. "We have the Fells, there, at our back, and only one road through them, impassable in winter and easily held, if need be, in the summer.

We have no need of guards. I told you, I have not had a sword in my hand since I came home, seven years ago."

"Seven? It was eight years ago we parted, and you were homeward bound then."

"Aye, I was, and it took me the better part of a year to walk from there to here. I lost my horse soon after you and I parted company."

We passed through the double gates in the eastern tower, and I stopped dead in my tracks.

"What's wrong?" Derek had stopped, too, and was staring questioningly at me over his shoulder, shouting above the noise that had suddenly engulfed us.

I shook my head. "Nothing," I cried. "I'm surprised, that's all. I did not expect this ... It's bigger, far bigger than I would have thought."

He looked around him. "It may be," he shouted back, "but it's still too small. We have no room to build, and no good stone to build with."

Somehow, arriving from the sea and entering the bustling confines of the high-walled fort, my mind had formed the notion that the fort was all there was. I had expected to emerge into open farmland beyond the walls. Instead, I found myself at the edge of a thriving vicus, the township that had grown around the fort for hundreds of years until it stretched farther than the eye could see, in the shape of a large funnel, its narrow spout blocked by the eastern wall of the fort itself and its swelling shape defined by the steep, tree-clad hillsides stretching up and away on either side.

We were standing at the edge of a congested marketplace, the tables of the closest vendors 'placed against the walls flanking the gates at our back, and chaos swirled about us. The air was filled with the sounds and smells of animals and poultry, the voices of the crowd that thronged around and between the stalls and the cries of the vendors whose wares were everywhere in evidence, in an enviable display of prosperity and wealth. There was fresh produce of all descriptions, from onions and fat leeks to green- leafed clumps of growth that I had never seen before. The smell of fresh-baked bread came from my left now to mingle with the odour of fish from somewhere ahead of me. I smelled the heavy musk of frying garlic, and saw a stall with deep, metal dishes and a stone-framed fire on which a woman fried fresh shrimp, stirring the mass of them with a large, heavy wooden ladle. Saliva spurted from beneath my tongue, reminding me that I had not eaten since the previous night.

"Market day," Derek grunted, needlessly. "Come on." .

I stayed close to him as he picked his way among the crowds, nodding from time to time and sometimes returning a spoken greeting to those who called him by name. Ahead of us on our left and towering above the intervening stalls, I saw the sandstone walls and arched roof of yet another Roman building. I caught his arm.

"What's that place over there?"

"The bathhouse. That's where we're going."

Moments later, I heard my own name shouted. Sean the navigator grinned at me from behind a baker's stall, where he stood clutching a steaming pasty. I waved to him then had to hasten to catch up with Derek, whose height alone had prevented me from losing sight of him among the press of bodies.

I now began to notice others of our crew among the crowd, but few of them saw me, and those who did ignored me, apart from an occasional cool nod. The Sons of Condran were there, too, I saw, but neither group paid the slightest attention to the other, and when I jostled one of Liam's men by accident, he passed me by with no more than a grunt and a surly look. From then on, I concentrated only on keeping Derek in sight.

TWO

The crowd thinned out as we approached the bathhouse, the densely packed stalls giving way to pens and larger, open spaces containing livestock: cattle, swine, goats, horses of the local mountain breed known as garrons and unkempt, brown-wooled sheep, as well as flocks of hens and geese and ducks and one gathering of regal swans, their wings evidently clipped to prevent them from flying.

"Over here." Derek made his way directly to a dreary- looking collection of flimsy buildings. The bathhouse's western and southern wings defined a bare, open, L-shaped space that sheltered a herd of shaggy garrons. A humpbacked little man with violently crossed eyes, working among the horses, saw me and came scuttling to meet me, scowling as he weaved between the bodies of the animals that prevented him from seeing my companion. As soon as he recognized Derek, however, he stopped, then turned about and disappeared again among the horses.

I glanced at the king. "Do many people react to you that way?"

He almost smiled. "That's Ulf. He never speaks."

"Never? Is he mute?"

Now he did smile. "Only when he's sober. He has a tongue like a pike's jaws when he decides to use it. Most of the time, thank the gods, he chooses to be silent." He said no more, turning away to look about him, and I began idly counting the horses, but I lost track of the milling bodies before I reached twenty.

"Are these all his? For sale?"

Derek grunted. "They're mine. He tends them for me." As he spoke, the little man re-emerged from the depths of the herd, leading two bridled garrons. He handed one set of reins to each of us—flat-braided ropes attached to simple head stalls with metal bits—and vanished silently again.

Derek led his horse to a nearby block of wood and used it to mount, swinging his leg easily over the horse's back from the top of the block. I followed his example. It had been too many years since I had vaulted to the bare back of a horse, and I had no wish to make the attempt here and fail. I dug my heels in gently and the animal beneath me twitched his ears, plainly wondering if the stranger on his back could be ignored or should be heeded. I reined him sharply, pulling his head down as I kicked again, letting him feel the strength of my legs, and he moved forward contentedly, leaping ahead to catch up with his companion.

At one point, as we rode past a long, low building almost on the farthest edge of the town, I saw something that caught my attention. A man had suddenly stopped moving, on the point of entering the building. I looked directly at him but saw only a dirty, yellow tunic and a full beard before he pushed the door open and went in. Nevertheless, I knew he had been staring at me, not at Derek.

'That place over there on our left, what is it?"

Derek glanced where I was pointing. "An alehouse."

"You mean a tavern?"

"That's what I mean."

Moments later we had passed beyond the limits of the town and were riding among dense trees that grew right to the edges of the road on either side. Derek kicked his garron to a canter and mine stayed with him without urging. Soon we passed out of the trees into an area of open fields through which the road ran arrow straight. The few buildings I could see on either side were evidently storage sheds and shelters, and the borders between individual fields were difficult to define, consisting mainly of slightly differing patterns of growth. In the continuing silence from my companion I looked about me curiously.

The valley through which we now rode was perhaps a mile in width at this place, and had obviously been reclaimed over a span of ages from the forest that wooded the steep hillsides to left and right. Ahead of us, on either side, the hills rose higher as they marched inland, until the highest I could see, in the far distance, were crowned with crags and rearing cliffs, some of them shrouded in what was either cloud or snow.

"How far does the valley extend, Derek?"

He glanced at me, frowning slightly at my interruption of his thoughts. "About six miles. To the edge of the mere."

"The mere? What mere is that?" I asked from pure contrariness.

"The mere. It has no name. It's just a mere like any other."

"Six miles. And the farmland extends all that way?"

"No, only as far as the soil permits. The land rises and the rock breaks through about four miles from here."

We had reached a division in the fields on our left.

Ripening grain gave way abruptly to a crop of coarse- leafed plants I recognized as being some form of kale. Derek swung his mount off the road, leading us along a narrow, well-beaten path between the two crops, heading directly for the treed hillside about half a mile distant.

"Where are you taking me?"

"To a place where I can think and we can talk."

We rode thereafter in silence broken only by the plodding of hooves and the song of birds, until the narrow track reached the end of the field at the entrance to a vee-shaped notch in what I had assumed, from the moment I first saw it in the distance, to be a chest-high wall of stone running the entire length of the valley. As we approached, however, it became apparent that what we were facing now was not so much a wall as an accretion—I can think of no other word—of stones, some of them barely larger than pebbles, others that looked large enough to defy the powers of a single man to move them. All of them had been piled haphazardly to form a barrier I now realized was no less than twenty paces thick. As I stared, my mind numbed by the enormity of this rock pile, Derek's horse entered the passage that pierced the middle of the heap, and mine ambled contentedly after him.

"Where did all these come from?"

"From the ground, the fields." Derek drew rein and hitched himself around to look back at me. "We have a local jest that we grow more, and bigger, stones than we do crops. They work their way up to the surface every winter. Our people spend months each year clearing them out and dragging them over here, and the next year there's a brand new crop of them. It never ends. It's been going on since before the Romans came."

I looked at the stones piled on my right, some of which reached higher than my head. "I can see that, but that's more than four hundred years!"

"Far more. Our people were farming here a long time before that."

"Is it the same on the other side of the valley?"

"It's the same everywhere."

"I don't understand—you said you had no stone for building."

Derek threw me a scornful look. "I said nogood stone. I meant sandstone, stone that can be quarried, cut and dressed. Most of what you see here is useless for building. It's too small, too loose, too brittle and too much trouble. Hurry."

The trees began again on the other side of the barrier, and our path took us up and beyond the crest of the hill to where, just below the summit, the hillside terminated in a high cliff. Beyond it lay another valley, this one still choked with trees, and on our left stretched the sea.

Derek sat still for a few moments, admiring the view, then dismounted and tethered his horse, nodding for me to accompany him as he led the way to a shallow, grass- floored shelf above the cliff's edge, where he seated himself comfortably, his back against the bole of a tree. I found a spot by his side, wedging my back comfortably between two thick clumps of grass on the hillside behind us. Thereafter, we sat in companionable silence for a spell, gazing out across the valley and squinting against the glare of the sparkling sea in the distance, each of us composing in his own mind, I had no doubt, the words that he would use to frame his ideas most persuasively. We had come here to think and talk, after all, not merely to enjoy the vista. Derek's voice broke in on my thoughts.

"Sang ... Sank ... What was that word you used?"

"Sanctuary."

"Sanctuary, aye ... You said it meant shelter or respite, and I asked you from what. Now I'm asking you again. No one will interrupt us here." He looked sharply at me. "Why are you smiling?"

I shook my head. "It occurs to me that we are totally unable—any of us—to anticipate what's going to happen next at any time. Last night, when we dropped anchor outside your harbour ... even this morning as we approached your wharf ... I had no idea in my head about what kind of reaction the sight of me might provoke in you. I was trying to prepare myself for anything—from outright violence, to disinterest, to a refusal of permission to land."

He had been plucking at the end of his moustache, eyes narrowed in concentration, lips pursed as he watched me speak.

"Why would you expect violence? You and I have never quarrelled."

"No, but neither have we shared a common cause. Nominally, on the two occasions when we met, we did so in enmity as warriors of Cornwall and Camulod."

"Aye, well, that was one-sided on the first occasion. I thought then that you were with us. It was not until we met the second time that I knew otherwise. Frankly, you didn't cross my mind between those times. I thought about you often after our second encounter, though. I was damned glad to get away from you on that beach."

"How so?"

"I thought you would kill me."

"Kill you? You threatened to kill me, if I fought you."

"I did. And I'd have tried. But I'm a mere man, no match against a warlock." There was absolute sincerity in his voice and in his eyes.

"Warlock? I am no warlock, Derek. I'm an ordinary man like you."

"Hmm. An ordinary man who .sees his friends die in his dreams and knows the timing and the exact style of it, describing the scene and the weapon used long afterward, when he was nowhere near the place. That's far from ordinary in my mind. I told you that day on the beach you'd been touched by the gods and I wanted no dealings with you. And here you are again, except that this time you come seeking me after a dream. I warn you, others have dreamed of me, ere now—enemies who dreamed and schemed while they were yet awake. They are all dead. Why should I regard your dreams as different from theirs? It takes no great intelligence to see that you have schemes in mind, as well as dreams, since you are here."

"My presence here bears no menace for you, Derek. You'll take no harm from my arrival. I come as a supplicant, seeking assistance that I think lies within your power to grant."

"My power ... " He shifted his body and dug a pebble from beneath his hip, flicking it out and away and watching as it fell into the abyss in front of us. "You know, a wise man once told me that the most vicious enemies a king can make are those he once contrived to help. That sounds strange, eh? It did to me, at the time, for I was young. I asked him what he meant, and I've never forgotten his answer. He said that kindness frequently breeds hatred—that there is a type of man—and woman, too—in whom resentment simmers all the time, like an evil brew, and nothing brings it to a fiercer boil than feeling obligation." He waited, watching me closely for a reaction.

"I can see some of what you mean," I began, "but not, I think, the depth of it. Judging from your words, it seems you would apply the measure to everyone you meet, whereas I see its application in only a few. Wherein lies the difference?"

He sniffed, then made a clicking noise with his tongue "We are wandering from our track, but perhaps it's worth it. Tell me, Merlyn Britannicus, how often do you dream these wondrous dreams of yours?"

"Not often. Once every year or so, perhaps even less."

"They always involve people?"

I had to think about that. "I don't really know. I think so."

"Do you like people?"

"Like people? You mean people in general?"

"That's what I mean, people in the mass."

"I've never really thought about that, but I suppose I do."

"Well, I don't. I like my friends, I like my family— some of them, anyway—and I like a number of people I have come to know casually without befriending them, if you know what I mean. But I find the mass of people, the faceless, impersonal herd, to be unlikable. They are generally mean-spirited, envious, grasping, untrustworthy, unclean and vicious."

I listened in amazement, recalling the last time I had met this man and watched him violate and slaughter an injured woman, my own wife's sister, Ygraine, on a beach littered with corpses. I knew, however, that this was no suitable time to recall the incident to his attention.

He had fallen silent, his eyes on my face, searching. "What are you thinking?"

I shrugged elaborately, but I knew I had to respond honestly. The king of Ravenglass was no man's fool, and I knew I had not yet begun to penetrate the depths of him.

"I'm surprised to hear you say the words you've spoken. The image they suggest does not fit with what I saw in Ravenglass today."

"I don't follow you."

"Well, I'm not sure where I'm leading, but it seems to me that if you truly feel the way you say you do, if your dislike of others is as deep as you describe, then that would inevitably be reflected in the way you govern your people. And yet I saw no signs of fear of you, or of dislike, among the people I saw today."

He grunted deep in his chest. "That simply proves my point. They are untrustworthy."

I looked him straight in the eye. "That's not true, and you don't even expect me to believe it. Do you?"

When he answered, I detected a glint of humour in his eyes. "Go back to what I said before," he said. "I like some people I have come to know casually without befriending them."

"A whole town full of them?" He shrugged and I continued. "Perhaps a kingdom full?"

"No! Stay with the town, for now. Those who live there are those with whom I can live."

"And the others, beyond the town?"

"In the farms, you mean? Those too."

"So? That would make you a good king, Derek, not a cynic or a misanthrope."

"A what?"

"Someone who hates everyone."

"Aye, well, Fortune has made me a king, and so I can have those people I dislike stay far away, as long as I possess the strength to hold them off."

"And the seven years?" I saw from his expression that he had not understood me. "You told me you have not had a sword in your hand for seven years. That indicates a lack of need for harshness."

"Does it? I think not. I said I had not held a sword. I didn't say I've lost the ability to swing one."

I smiled and raised my hands in surrender. "So be it. You said at the start that we were drifting off topic. Now we've done it again. Why did you ask me about liking people?"

"Because we were talking about resentment. I was seeking it in you. I choose to believe that the majority of people are ruthlessly self-centred. That ruthlessness is all- important to a man in my position, to be ignored at his peril. People like those I'm speaking of, the resentful ones, see kindness in others—or call it tolerance, compassion or forbearance, what you will—as a weakness to be exploited. Yet at the same time—and here is where it made no sense at all to me at first—they perceive that acceptance of any kindness indicates a weakness in themselves. That means the wise man should be wary of those to whom he has shown favour in the past, because such people will convince themselves that, in preferring them, he has somehow demeaned them."

I sat staring at him, greatly impressed by wisdom I had never thought to find in such as he, but before I could respond in any way he spoke again.

"And that brings me back to you, and the request you have not made. What will you ask of me, and how will I respond, and how will this new word ... this 'sanctuary' ... affect my life in time to come?"

I made no move to respond. He had more to add.

"You and I don't know each other, Merlyn the Dreamer, but I find myself wondering what you must think of me, and I'm concerned ... And that surprises me, because I seldom think about such things. Why should I bother with what others, strangers, think of me? We've met but twice before, and each time then I was my warrior self. My other self, the man who rules and governs his people, you have never met. I know you are Roman, in background at least, and that leads me to suspect you might think you have some advantage over me, a plain, untutored Celt. If that is true, then be aware of this: the word you spoke to me today is new to me, but the application of it exists already, here in Ravenglass. Liam, the son of Condran, will eat and drink and sleep tonight with all his men, cheek by jowl with Connor, son of Athol, and all his. In Ravenglass alone and nowhere else I know of in all these lands could such a thing occur without blood being shed. That, I believe, is a form of sanctuary. But it is one they may enjoy only by obeying" my laws: no weaponry, no fighting, and no harm to me or mine. Transgression earns immediate banishment with forfeiture of privilege, and there is no appeal or possibility of leniency."

I nodded my head, more and more impressed with each observation I heard from this man's lips.

"That is exactly as it should be," I said, soft-voiced. "I have been thinking of it ever since surrendering my own weapons, and I can see no other means of ensuring your own safety. You offer a privilege, as you have said, and privilege entails an obligation to the privileged. Abuse of it is, by definition, unforgivable. The fact that your community should benefit from it is incidental, yet part and parcel of the arrangement."

"Good. So you are a man of sense, as well as dreams. You accept, then, that you would be bound by my laws in return for whatever privilege it is that you seek."

"Of course."

"Of course? Without knowing those laws?"

I shrugged. "I've heard enough of your ideas to know that whatever laws you impose would be sane and, in all probability, sensible."

"Hmm," he grunted. "Seek, then. What is it that you want?"

I pondered my answer, then spoke briefly.

"A place to rear a child in safety."

He made no immediate response. Instead, he turned his gaze away from me to stare out across the valley where, at a level only slightly above our heads, a bird of prey made lazy circles against the clear blue sky, planing on rigid wings that caught the air and bent it to the creature's will. Three times we watched it circle in widening loops until, without warning, it tucked in its wings and fell like a stone. After it had vanished, lost to view beneath the lip of the cliff, my companion remained motionless for moments longer, and when he spoke he did not look at me.

"What kind of child requires the shelter of an unknown land to grow in safety?" I knew immediately that I had phrased my plea as badly as was possible, but he was still speaking. "Don't tell me, for I have no wish to know. I think the knowledge might be perilous."

I grimaced, knowing he could not see me, and tried to keep my voice calm. "How so?"

"How so?" He turned back slowly towards me as he repeated my question. "Well, let's suppose—let me suggest—some ways in which that might be so ...

"Suppose a child lives in the care of a man like yourself, a man of substance, wealth and influence who is concerned for him. And let's suppose this man to be a friend of someone like your friend Connor Mac Athol, who has lands in Eire, and even newer lands far to the north in Alba—that land you call Caledonia. Would it not seem reasonable that this friend might undertake to offer shelter to the child, in either place? Ample space in each to raise a single child, you'd think ... Unless the child's own parentage might imperil his very life among Connor's folk. That makes the child a threat, dangerous to others.

"But more than that, suppose this child is unsafe in his home ... in Camulod ... He must be, else why the need to shelter him elsewhere? Now, were I you and had to hide a child for any reason, I would hide him close to home. A child's a tiny thing, beneath most people's notice, so I would spirit him away, perhaps far away, but into some neighbouring region. Not east or south, for fear of Saxons and the like. More probably to the south-west, to Cornwall perhaps, now Lot is dead. Most of all, however, were I you I would be tempted to the north and west, to Cambria, to the Pendragon lands, among my own allies. There I could find some safety for the child ... Unless, of course, his parentage—and hence the very threat of his existence— were such that he might meet his death there, too."

The silence grew long before I broke it.

"How much do you know?"

"Among all these suppositions? I know nothing. I did not even know you were alive until I saw your face this morning, and I suspected none of this before you told me what you want." He shook his head and puffed his breath out through swollen cheeks.

"Merlyn, I did not become king of this place by being stupid. Who is this child? It must be a boy, a son and heir, but whose? It's the distance that concerns me. Surely you see that."

"What distance?"

"From Camulod to here! Why not Cornwall? You never fought there. You have no enemies in Cornwall, or had none when I met you there. Has that changed?"

"Indirectly."

Derek frowned. "What kind of an answer is that? Do you or don't you?"

I shrugged. "I do, but that is not the problem. The child has."

"So I was right. The child is endangered because of who he is. Who is this prodigy? And why should I imperil any of my own to succour him? Are you surprised that I should ask? If he has enemies swarming in such numbers and in so many places while he's but a brat, what will the future hold for him as he begins to grow?"

I pushed myself to my feet and moved away from him, presenting him with my back as I leaned against a tree close by the edge of the abyss. I was shaken by the accuracy of his conjecture and by the ease with which he had recognized and grasped the difficulties facing me.. From my single statement, which I had foolishly thought to be innocuous, he had instantly inferred the essential truth of all that my presence in his lands implied. I had come to Ravenglass in response to the promptings of a dream, expecting, I now realized for the first time, to gull a man I had assessed to be a lumbering, untutored, semi-savage oaf. Instead, I had found myself assessed and accurately classified by a clever and subtle mind at least the equal of my own.

One thing I saw clearly: Derek's knowledge, incomplete as it was, now constituted a grave threat to my designs. I would have to defray the damage done so far, and without lying.

"I'm impressed," I said, turning to him and attempting a smile. "From one comment you have built a remarkable structure. Within that, your suppositions are close to the mark in some respects—far off in others. Overall, nevertheless, they are entirely misdirected. The dangers you divined from Connor's folk do not exist. Refused a lodging here, we are prepared to go with him to Eire. I was born here in Britain, however; as you know, and would prefer to stay here if possible. The same holds true for the new lands of which you spoke, in Caledonia. But the holdings there, I'm told, are small and new—primitive islands in the western sea. I prefer comfort.

"As for the south-west, you have the gist of it, but not the whole. I have an enemy there now, a man I banished into exile, one Peter Ironhair." I went on to tell him of Ironhair, his eviction from Camulod, his flight and his unsuccessful bid for power in Cambria as champion of the demented prince Carthac Pendragon, and his subsequent alliance with the new ruler in Cornwall. I did not lie, but I confined my truths to my own dealings with Ironhair, making no mention of the boy.

Derek listened in silence, and when I had finished, he sat watching me, gnawing on the inside of his cheek.

"So this Ironhair seeks vengeance on the boy?"

"No, he seeks revenge on me. He knows my feelings for the boy and knows the duty I have undertaken to see him into manhood and into his inheritance. The boy will rule in Camulod one day. He's my only heir, though not my son. Ironhair knows he could damage me more by harming the lad than ever he could by killing me, in any fashion."

"Who is the boy?"

"My cousin Uther's son, Arthur Pendragon."

Derek had been scratching his beard, but his fingers stilled as I spoke and his eyes grew wide. "Uther Pendragon, the man I killed?"

"Aye. The boy is heir to Pendragon, thus this Ironhair perceives him as a threat to his own power, his eventual kingship there. The man is mad. You could become king of the Pendragon before Ironhair could."

Derek had been shaking his head as I said the last words, barely listening to me, but now he looked back at me in outrage.

"You say this Ironhair is mad, and yet you ask me to give shelter to a boy whose father died at my hand? What does that make you? Or me, were I fool enough to listen? You would expect me to spend the remainder of my life waiting for him to grow up and claim the blood price?"

"Not true! Of course not! That would never happen, and the boy will never know."

"Never?" Derek's voice was swelling with scorn and an anger born, I felt sure, of guilt. "How not? You know, I know, the gods know! And who else might know, only the gods can tell! But one of them—someone—will tell him, soon or late."

"I would not, nor would you. And no other knows."

"Pah! And I should accept your oath on that?"

"You should, it's freely given."

"You take me for as big a fool as you. Why should I?"

"Perhaps because you owe him a life, in return for his father's."

He sat gaping at me, speechless, then grunted explosively and hauled himself to his feet.

"You leave tomorrow," he growled, and he made his way directly to his horse.

I followed Derek in a curious frame of mind, in part disappointed by my failure to enlist his aid, but also relieved at my success in diverting his attention from the truth he had come so close to grasping. That danger, I now felt, was safely past, and with its passing my own task of finding safety for the boy had been simplified. The very name of Pendragon of Cambria, son of the ravager of Cornwall, was proof enough for him, I knew, of my need to hide the child. I could live easily with Derek's knowledge of that portion of the truth, since it entailed sufficient complexity to satisfy his curiosity, and that, in turn, satisfied me. I knew he would seek no other explanation and that the secret of the rest of the boy's parentage and his claim, through his mother, to Cornwall and to Eire would be safe.

As I rode down the narrow hillside track behind him, I found myself wondering how angry Derek really was, for I could discern no stiffness in his posture. He rode easily, slouched on the garron's back, his weight inclined towards me and against the slope, allowing the horse to pick his own route downward. I made no attempt to speak to him, contenting myself with going over all that had been said and wondering how I might have presented my petition more effectively. And in thinking of that, I began to imagine his reaction could he have known the true danger I . might represent to his people—a danger that had nothing to do with the boy, or with who I was, but far more with what I suspected I was.

I had a skin disease of some kind, and I had come to believe, despite the derisive guffaws of my good friend Lucanus, our beloved and much respected physician and surgeon, that it was leprosy. Lucanus had thought me mad and deluded, initially, upon hearing of my suspicions, and had been predisposed to make light of what he called my fanciful imaginings, until he realized how deeply concerned and afraid I was. Once he had seen my fear, he set out to calm and reassure me. He had worked among lepers all his life, he told me, gazing deeply into my eyes, and in the space of decades at the work had never known a single person to become afflicted after only a short exposure to the disease. My exposure to it, and to lepers, he insisted, had been less than one day, and I had had no physical contact with any of them.

I listened to him despairingly, yearning for comfort, but I remained unconvinced, because my affliction, whatever it might be, evinced itself incontrovertibly in the form of a dry lesion, a single blemish—on the right-upper quadrant of my breast—that bore all the classic signs of being leprous, according to Lucanus's own description. It was an area of deadness on my chest, less than the size of the ball of my thumb, white in the centre and reddish around the edges. It was impervious to pain, or to any sensation at all, and the hairs that grew within its borders were white, too. Peering closely at this phenomenon, Lucanus agreed that it might, indeed, be a leprous lesion, but then he sat back on his heels and blithely rattled off a long and reassuring list of other things it might have been, ticking each off on his fingers as he named it.

At that point, relieved beyond description, I told him dispassionately about my unsuccessful attempt to rescue his friend Mordechai Emancipates, a physician who had contracted leprosy from his own work with lepers, from the hillside crevasse into which he had fallen. I told him about my own injuries and my useless attempts to save Mordechai's life, and about how I had finally emerged from that place, covered in his blood and my own, leaving Mordechai's body behind me. In telling this story, I saw the first flicker of doubt on my friend's face. He asked me again how much blood had been spilled there, in the crevasse. How much of mine and how much of Mordechai's? How much of Mordechai's had spilled on me?

I had no way of answering his questions accurately, for the night had been dark and wet and cold and I had been unaware, much of the time, that we were even bleeding, but I could see that die awareness of what I had described was troubling my listener. He confessed to me that the mingling of tainted blood with healthy caused him some concern, although he could not be certain why. He had once found and purchased an ancient treatise on this very topic, he said, a scroll written many years earlier by a noted physician and scholar, but he had never studied it, or even taken the time to really read it thoroughly. The mention I had made of mixing my blood with Mordechai's had recalled it to his mind. He would make shift to find the scroll, he promised me, and to master its contents, but he had been searching for it fruitlessly ever since our conversation, unable to recall what he had done with it or when he had last seen it. Until he found it, Lucanus would withhold his final diagnosis and judgment on my condition, and the threat of leprosy would hang over my head like Damocles's sword.

The illness—the leprosy, in my stubborn conviction— was not fatal in or of itself as I had always, in my ignorance, believed. It was a disfiguring disease, and horribly so, involving as it did the gradual disintegration of the digits and limbs and the facial features, but it did not cause death, save in the bleakest cases, When people died of hunger through an inability to feed themselves.

Leprosy! In spite of my revulsion at the thought of it, I found myself, incredibly, smothering a smile at the thought of what Derek's reaction to such knowledge might have been had I mentioned the matter during our discussion.

Derek and I had reached the edge of the trees and were now on the point of entering the pathway through the piled up stones bounding the cultivated fields. Derek grunted and straightened up to his full height, abruptly reining his horse to a halt and craning his neck to gaze along to the left of the line of stones. My own mount stopped when he was nose to tail with the other, but Derek was already moving again, turning his horse off the track and into the boulder- strewn ground among the trees. Curious, I followed him, our progress slow as our garrons ventured forward delicately and with great care on the uneven, treacherous ground.

"By the light of Lud," Derek growled. "Look at the size of that whoreson."

On the lower edge of the miles-long pile of stones, concealed from me until now by Derek's bulk and the bole of a silver birch, a great, gaunt wolf lay sprawled in death, its back arched violently against nature in the extremity of its last convulsion. Its enormous front toes were spread wide like the fingers of some hairy giant's hand, and its entire hindquarters, including its heavy tail, were stiff with blackened blood. The air was filled with the hum of the thousands of green and blue flies that swarmed upon the carcass.

Derek had already swung down from his horse, and I watched as he made his way cautiously over the loose- piled stones to where he could reach the dead beast. Ignoring the swarming flies, he bent his knees and grasped the front and hind legs closest to the ground, then straightened with a grunting heave, throwing the carcass onto its other side. The cause of death came into view at once: a flighted, blood-encrusted arrow protruding from the right side of the belly, its smooth shaft slashed and gouged by the frantic creature's snapping teeth. The wolf, a full- grown male, was larger than any I had seen in the southern regions, and it was grey, with whitish tinges in its coat. Standing on its hind legs, I thought, this thing could have rested its elbows on my shoulders and its maw would have engulfed my face.

"Gut shot," Derek said. "Owen was right." He stretched a hand to run his fingers through the ruff of fur beneath the massive neck. "Fine pelt. A shame to lose it. This one was in his prime. Look at that."

"That" was the creature's canine teeth, bared in its dying snarl ..They were long and shining white, unmarred by stains. Derek straightened up and moved back to his horse.

"Who's Owen?" I asked him. He kicked his horse into motion, leading the way back to the track again.

"My son, my first-born. Shot at this thing last night, just at dusk, about two miles from here, along the valley. He was in the fields. It was running along the wall there, on the other side. Couldn't tell whether he had hit it or not—grey light, grey wolf, grey stones. Couldn't find his arrow afterwards, of course, but that meant nothing. He shot into the stones, so it could have deflected in any direction. He'll be glad to know he shot the beast, but he'll be sick when I tell him how big it was. A good robe wasted, that's all he'll think of."

We rode clear of the stones and his garron broke into a loping gallop, challenging my own to keep up with him, and for a space we let them run. When they finally slowed their pace, I rode up alongside the king again.

"How many sons do you have, Derek?"

We were close to the road by this time, and he did not respond until we had reached it and turned right, towards the town.

"Eleven," he said eventually. "And many daughters."

I was amazed, for I had guessed his age to be no more than six or seven years greater than my own. He must have noticed my reaction. "Out of five wives," he added.

"Five? You have had four wives die?"

He looked at me then as though he thought me mad, and then he laughed. "No, Christian" he said. I have had five wives pregnant much of the time."

I winced at my own clumsiness. Polygamy was not uncommon among the pagan people in the isolated parts of Britain.

"How old is Owen?" I asked! attempting to gloss over my gaffe.

"Seventeen."

"And your youngest son, how old is he?"

"Nine."

"Just slightly older than young Arthur." He threw me a sidewise look and I hurried on. "How many daughters have you?"

"Too many. Which one is Arthur? There were three with you."

"Four. Arthur is the oldest, the one with the gold- coloured eyes. He's eight."

'That one. I thought it would be him. I saw the eyes, like a young kestrel's. Is the woman his mother? The good- looking one with the face of a hawk?"

"Shelagh, you mean. No, she is Donuil's wife. Donuil is—"

"Aye, Connor's brother. I recalled him from our first meeting. What of the other woman?"

'That's Turga, the boy's nurse."

"Nurse? At eight he requires a nurse?"

"No, of course not, but he is all she has, and they are close."

"Where is his mother, then?"

"Dead, long since." I tried to shut out the image of her death on the beach in far-off Cornwall, and the sight of Derek rising to face me from his interrupted rape of her, his moist, erect phallus gleaming in the afternoon light. He had no idea who she was, or that his horse had crushed her skull thereafter.

"Hmm ... So you are father and mother both. You feel responsible for him?"

I looked at him, wondering at the question, unsure where it was leading.

"Yes," I said, nodding. "I am ... aware of a responsibility."

"Try being a king some day, my friend, then talk to me of responsibility. It pains me, I'll admit it, to refuse what you have asked of me, but I see no other choice. Danger to myself I could accept, but to endanger my people needlessly by taking on the risk you represent would be unforgivable ... If there were even half a chance the child might escape detection I might consider otherwise. But the son of Pendragon, escorted by Merlyn of Camulod? No I cannot take that risk."

I nodded once again, recognizing and accepting the finality of his decision. "So be it," I replied. "I understand your situation."

For the remainder of our ride back into Ravenglass my mind was busy with logistics. I suspected that Connor's crew might already have unloaded our possessions and supplies from his galley, at least, and perhaps from one of the other two. If that were the case, we would have to stand guard by them overnight and reload them come morning.

We returned the garrons to Ulf, their keeper. I thanked Derek for his time and took my leave of him, promising to join him that night for dinner. I then set out to find Connor immediately, making my way directly through the still- bustling marketplace, and thence through the fort to the gate leading onto the wharf.

Connor was in conference with the two captains of his other galleys when I arrived, the tiny Feargus, who was not much taller than the boy Arthur, and his incongruous companion Logan, a giant as grotesquely tall as Feargus was small. Feargus's galley, with the reddish sail that distinguished it even when furled, lay prow to stern with Connor's, filling the length of the wharf. Logan's had been lashed alongside it, so that his crew must cross Feargus's deck to reach the land. All three men turned at my approach, alerted by Logan, who had seen me emerging from the town gate, and when we had exchanged greetings the two captains left me alone with Connor. I came to the point at once, telling him all that had transpired between me and Derek. He took the information philosophically, even smiling in admiration of Derek's acuity, and when I had fallen quiet again he grinned and slapped me on the upper arm.

"Eire it is, then, my friend—or the northern isles, if you find them more to your liking. I had a feeling Derek might not take to your ideas, so I decided not to unload any of your cargo before you returned. We'll rest here tonight and leave with the morning tide. "Don't look so doleful, Yellow Head. You'll see, everything will work out for the best."

I grimaced. "Aye, no doubt you're right, but sometimes I wish life could be more simple. Have you seen Donuil since I left?"

Connor nodded. "Aye, he was here a short time ago. You must have passed him on the way. Said he was going to meet Shelagh and the children in the marketplace."

I thanked him and retraced my steps through the fort to the rear gate, still going over in my mind the changes and the difficulties we faced now that we would have no base in Britain. As the crow flies, there was little difference in the distances from Camulod to Cumbria or to Athol's kingdom in Eire. But the Eirish distance was across the high seas, and thus fraught with hazards that did not pertain to the Cumbrian passage. Travel between Eire and Camulod could not be lightly undertaken. But that was not my main concern. The foreignness of Eire depressed me more. Arthur's future prospects, I was convinced, would suffer were he removed from Britain, from his home.

As I approached the double portal in the rear wall of the fort, I was roused from my musings when a man emerged from the shadowed entrance and then stopped and turned away abruptly, hurrying back the way he had come. Had he not done so I would have passed him by without noticing, but the speed with which he whirled and made off caught my eye, and the sight of his retreating yellow tunic reminded me of the man who had stopped to watch me from the tavern doorway earlier in the day.

Curious, I lengthened my stride slightly and passed through the portal, looking idly for him as I broke into the sunlight of the marketplace beyond, but he was nowhere to be seen. Puzzled now, I grasped a pole supporting the awning of a stall and stepped up onto an empty wooden crate, peering over the heads of the crowd until I saw the fellow scuttling hurriedly off to my right, about four stalls away. As I saw him, he looked back over his shoulder at me, and his alarm was instantaneous. He broke into a lurching run, dodging to his left out of my sight beyond the corner of another stall, and suddenly I found myself giving chase, thrusting people aside as I ran after him, fully aware now of the absent weight of my swordbelt at my waist.

As I swung around the corner he came into sight again, still running, and I lengthened my stride again to close on him. Once more he swung out of sight and again I plunged around a corner after him, nearly sprawling over a pile of empty poultry baskets. Now I heard voices raised in angry protest, but all at once I was beyond the confining stalls and into an open, widening space where a well-trodden path led between tall banks of grass towards a stand of trees. There my quarry vanished. Running flat out now, I passed between the first two trees and had to leap immediately to avoid a narrow, steep-sided ditch that traversed the path. I landed safely on rising ground and several steps later found myself at the top of a shallow incline that sloped down to where I could hear the sound of hard- running feet. Pausing only to collect myself and make sure there was only one way down, I launched myself after him again, completely unconcerned by now that I knew not who the fellow was or why he was fleeing from me. His flight alone was reason for pursuit. I dashed headlong downhill, swerved around a tree and was sent sprawling by a foot that hooked my ankle as I passed.

I landed hard, the impact driving all the air from my body so that I writhed helplessly on the ground, blinded by pain and gasping as I fought to draw a breath. Above me, to my right I thought, someone laughed quietly and the sound chilled me. I tried to tense myself against further violence, but nothing happened and the sound was not repeated.

When I began to breathe again, I sucked air into my outraged chest with great, painful whoops. I already knew from the ripping, lesser pains in my face and hands that I had landed among brambles, and I kept my eyes squeezed shut as I waited for strength to come back to me. Somehow, I managed to struggle to my knees, my head bowed and my arms clutched protectively about my ribs, my ears straining to hear any sound of movement around me. Silence.

Soon I straightened up, uncrossing my arms and opening my eyes, and as I did so, someone kicked me violently in the midriff, knocking me backwards into the thorns again. I found myself seated this time, my back and shoulders supported by the thickness and springy strength of the weave of stems behind me.

The man who had kicked me loomed over me, moving closer, and I saw two others behind him, one on each side. All of them were grinning at the prospect of what they would do to me now, three against one. But I was already moving again, thrusting myself up into a kneeling posture, ignoring the ferocious barbs that cut against my hands as I hauled and pushed myself upright. I saw surprise on my assailant's face as he noted the speed of my recovery, and then he moved more quickly, taking a long step closer and aiming another kick, this time at my head.

He was too slow, despite his advantages, and I managed to avoid his flailing foot. I twisted my head forward and to his right and threw up my arms to cross my wrists above his ankle, pulling his heel down hard against my right shoulder and throwing myself to my left and down towards him. Off balance and caught unawares, he fell heavily beside me on his back. I heard the breath whooshing from his lungs and a satisfying grunt of pain. Releasing my hold on him immediately, I swung my left fist over, driving it hard against his nose, and felt the gristle flatten beneath the overarm swipe. Then I stretched and stiffened my hand, chopping its rigid edge against his stretched throat. It was clumsy, and my strength was hampered by the position I lay in, but the blow had its effect. I rolled away from him as quickly as I could then to deal with his companions, who had been slow to adjust to my surprise.

As I came upright again on one knee, my left foot finally firm beneath me, one of the two caught me high on the left cheekbone with a long, raking swing. I heard the distinctive sound of bone snapping as I went asprawl again, my eyes shut tight against the stunning ferocity of the impact. I rolled quickly, expecting at least another kick from the third man, but instead I heard a keening howl and the sound of other blows, none of them close to me.

Scrambling to my knees again and shaking my head to clear my vision, I saw a sight that would have made me laugh at any other time. The second man, the one who had punched me, was the source of the howling. He was hopping wildly around in a circle, his face screwed up ludicrously in pain, his left wrist clamped tightly beneath his armpit and the first finger of his left hand tilted grotesquely backward. The bone I had heard breaking was his. Beside him, flat on his back, legs scissoring weakly while his hands clutched at his throat, lay my first assailant. Beyond both of them, the third man was being systematically punished by Donuil Mac Athol, who towered above him, maintaining a judicious distance from his victim as he pounded him deliberately with his hands and feet. I watched, unable to make a sound, as the man's knees finally gave way and he toppled slowly to lie face down.

Donuil turned away from him to the second man who was still prancing about, clutching his injured hand. He walked towards the man, seized him by the hair and jerked the fellow's head backward to smite him with an awesome, straight-armed blow to the forehead with his clenched fist, swung overhead from his full height. The man fell like a slaughtered bullock. Donuil then turned to where I stood swaying, watching him.

"Dia!" he said, conversationally. "Look at you, then. Flayed alive and like to drown in your own blood! Lucky for you I saw you running by. Who are these?"

I shook my head, looking at my attackers closely now and seeing no yellow tunic among them. "I don't know. I was chasing someone else. I've never seen these three."

He was frowning at me. "Who were you chasing?"

"I don't know, but whoever he was, he knows me. He saw me twice today and obviously didn't want me to see him. The second time I caught his eye he ran, and I followed him."

"Aye, and he led you right to these beauties, Liam's cattle."

"How do you know they're Liam's?"

"By their clothing, and they're carrying no weapons, which means they're visitors like us.'*

"Thank God for that!"

"Thank Derek."

The man whose throat I had chopped began to Recover now and pulled himself up until he was sitting, his hands still at his throat. He hawked painfully and spat, and Donuil walked towards him. Before he could speak to the man, however, another voice intruded.

"Well, what have we here? Bloodshed in Ravenglass?"

We spun to find ourselves surrounded by five men, all of them with drawn swords and wearing metal breastplates. I recognized the one who had spoken as Blundyl, the lieutenant whom Derek had entrusted to find lodgings for us. I was still reeling, and now I sat down, resting my back against the bole of a tree. Donuil had not moved. Blundyl's eyes moved around the clearing, taking note of everything.

"Don't you people know the law in these parts?" There was no acrimony in Blundyl's tone, but neither was there any hint of warmth.

I cleared my throat and answered him. "Aye, Blundyl, we do. Weapons are banned in Ravenglass, among visitors at least, as is bloodshed. Failure to keep the peace earns banishment."

"Instant banishment," he added, frowning at me. "Who are you?"

"We met earlier," I told him. "I was with Derek. But there has been no breaking of the law here. No blood has been shed, and no weapons drawn."

"No blood? Look at yourself, man!"

I looked down at my hands and winced. They were ripped to shreds, torn front and back by the vicious barbs of the bramble briars. I knew my face was in the same condition, for every scratch seemed to burn with its own separate fire and my eyelids were sticky with blood.

"This is blood drawn, not spilt," was all I could think to say. "I am not wounded, only scratched where I fell into the brambles there. My name's Britannicus and we arrived today with Connor Mac Athol. This is Connor's brother, Donuil. Since our arrival I have been with your king, Derek. After I left Derek, I met a man who recognized me and ran away. I ran after him to find out who he was." -

"We know you ran," Blundyl said, his voice heavy with sarcasm. "You demolished half the market in passing." He looked at the three downed men. "Which one were you following?"

"None of these. I told you, I don't know them. The man I chased was wearing a yellow tunic of some kind. He ran past here too quickly, I imagine, for these three to stop him, and I came close behind. They stopped me. We had an altercation and Donuil, here, arrived in time to help me end it."

"Hmm." He turned to Donuil. "They're not yours then, these three?" Donuil merely shook his head, his lips pursed. "Then they must belong to the other bunch. Only two lots in port." He moved quickly beyond the sitting man to the nearest of the two bodies, where he knelt and felt beneath the jawline for a pulse. Satisfied that the man was alive, he turned him over on his back and searched him, one-handed, for weapons. That done, he moved to the last of the men and did the same, heaving this one over onto his face. Finally he straightened up and approached me.

"Show me your hands."

I held out my hands and he sheathed his sword before taking hold of my wrists, turning them over and scanning the long scratches on both sides.

"You're going to have fun, bathing those." He squinted at my face. "Not going to be too pretty for a day or two, and you're not going to be seeing too much, either." He reached up and touched my left cheekbone. I winced involuntarily, hissing and pulling my head away. "Aye, that's a beauty."' He turned away and scanned the clearing again, clearly deliberating, and then he turned back to me. "I'll be reporting this to the lord Derek as a marginal incident, barely within the law. A brawl, rather than a fight. But I am stretching a point here, you understand me? You are fortunate that there was no damage done in the marketplace. You have used up your credit. Do you understand what I am saying? No more leeway. Behave yourself in Ravenglass from this time on, or suffer the consequences. Now get out of here."

I glanced at the three others. "But what about—?"

"Leave them to us. They're for a night in custody. On your way!"

I limped away at Donuil's heels. Neither of us spoke until we had crossed the transverse ditch at die top of the rise, just inside the trees, where we could see the marketplace beyond.

Donuil broke the silence. "How do you feel?"

"Chastened, like a schoolboy chidden by his master."

"Aye, but I meant bodily aches and pains."

"I have only one, but it's all over me. I feel as though I've been to war."

He grinned. "You have, and look it. I don't think I've ever seen a worse black eye. Can you see out of it?"

I covered my right eye with one hand and tried to see him with my left, but it was swollen shut and throbbing painfully. I shook my head.

Donuil grunted. "Well, we had better find Lucanus right away. As for the other business, with Blundyl, forget it. He did his duty and did it leniently, for we were in the wrong. Connor has told me about this place, and no fighting means no fighting, just as it does in Camulod. Blundyl did, as he said, stretch a point for us. I was surprised."

We spoke no more of the affair until after we had found Lucanus and my scratches had been washed and salved. Blundyl had quartered all of us in the same building, one of the residential blocks in the Via Decumana at the rear of the central administrative block, and we did not lack for space in spite of the overcrowding Derek had mentioned to me. None of my abrasions was deep enough to warrant stitches, but they all stung abominably, and I spent a most uncomfortable afternoon. My left eye was swollen completely shut and more than simply tender to the touch. It had already turned a deep and glowing black, with red and yellow edges. The four boys gazed at me wide-eyed with wonder, but none of them dared ask me what had happened. Derek himself came by late in the afternoon and, upon being shown to the room in which I sat before a brazier, stood facing me without speaking, his face troubled.

"What was the cause?" he asked eventually. I shook my head and told him of the man in the yellow tunic, reminding him of my question about the alehouse when we had passed it that morning. He listened in silence until I had finished.

"And this entrapment, it was deliberate, you think?"

"No, it couldn't possibly have been. The fellow didn't know he would meet me. How could he? I arrived there at the gateway by chance as he came through. It was only his reaction that caught my eye. After that, everything happened quickly—he had no time to arrange anything. My explanation to Blundyl must have been correct. He flashed by those three, angering them, and I came after him. There is no other explanation that makes sense."

"Unless he already knew they were there and led you right to them, calling for help as he passed."

"Then why didn't he come back and join them afterward, once they had me down?"

Derek shrugged. "I don't know. You said he didn't want you to notice him. Perhaps that hasn't changed. Did you recognize him?"

"No, I didn't manage to get close enough to see him clearly. But he didn't look familiar, even from what I saw."

"And yet he knew you."

"Aye, it would seem so."

Derek sighed and scratched at his ear. "You make my point for me, Merlyn, confirming my judgment. Here you are, less than a day in Ravenglass, and already trouble follows you. Will you still be able to dine with us tonight?"

"Aye, where?"

"In my house, beneath the thatch." He saw my blank expression. "I roofed the central space in there, too, just like the court of the administration building. It's not as high a roof, or as big as the one next door, but it keeps the rain and snow out of the house and provides me with high storage and drying racks. And it's mine alone, not a public space."

"I'll be there. Put your mind at ease, Derek. We have made arrangements to sail come morning."

"I know. Connor told me. I'll see you at dinner."

Derek had barely left the room when Shelagh entered, her face twisted in a scowl of concern. I had not seen her since leaving the dock with Derek earlier that day. Now she stopped on the threshold and stared at me. I glanced down at the bandages that swathed my hands and waited for her to speak.

"Why?" she asked. "Who was it?"

I raised my head to meet her gaze. "Didn't Donuil tell you? I don't know who they were. Nor do I know why they chose to attack me."

She stepped into the room, looked around to find a chair, then dragged it to where I sat by the brazier. She leaned close, assessing the extent of my injuries.

"Lucanus told me what happened. I haven't seen Donuil since I got back. We waited for him at the market, and when it finally became clear he was not coming, I sent the children home with Turga. Since then I've been with Logan, down at the wharf. Tell me about it."

I told her, omitting nothing, and when I had done she frowned and reached out to touch the tips Of her fingers gently to the, swelling on my cheek, wincing in sympathy with me as I flinched. "Is it that bad?"

"No " I admitted, "but it is painful. It'll mend."

"You really don't know who these people were, or why they attacked you?"

I shook my head. "Donuil told me they were Liam's men, because he recognized their clothing. It was obvious they were outsiders, since, like us, they had no weapons. Other than that, I have no idea who they were, or why they were there at that time."

"Hmm." She stood up. "Here, take this." She reached behind her back to the waistline of her skirt and pulled out one of her throwing-knives, a wickedly sharp weapon with a heavy blade a handspan long. I gasped at the sight of it. 'Take it," she insisted.

"How—? What—? "

"Oh, for the love of Lud, man, will you take it? Hide it behind your waist, the way I did. No one will know it's there but you, and if you need it you'll be glad of it."

"Shelagh, it's against Derek's law to carry weapons in Ravenglass, and we are his guests."

"We are, but we are also responsible for the safety of others, some of them children. You would not dream of crossing Camulod without a sword. Are you really stupid enough to think you might not have need of a blade in Ravenglass, swarming as it is with strangers, some of whom have already attacked you? Take it!"

I took the knife and weighed it in my hand. "How come you to have this?"

"Because it takes more than the threats of a foolish man to make me part with it, or any of the others," she snapped, her eyes flashing. Then she smiled. "Appearances, Merlyn—everything in the world of men is concerned with appearances. You're far worse than women. When Connor told me of this damnable requirement to surrender our weapons, I removed my belt and strapped it about my waist, covering it with a shawl. Then I bared my breasts a little more. No one here sees me as a warrior, and no one thought to ask me for my knives."

I shook my head in admiration, but I held the knife out to her again, hilt first. "My thanks, Shelagh, but I can't take this. There is honour involved."

"Och, a curse on you strutting men and your stupid notions of honour. I am telling you there's danger involved, too, Merlyn! Why won't you believe me? I can feel it, smell it, in the air of the place."

I nodded, my eyes on the knife I yet held. "I believe you, Shelagh, but this knife would change nothing, even could I accept it. It's a throwing-knife and I lack the skill' to throw it. Nevertheless, if it will make you happier, I'll keep it here in my room, beside me when I sleep. I' won't carry it abroad, but the only time I won't be here between now and tomorrow morning will be while I'm at dinner beneath Derek's thatch tonight. There I'll have a dagger at table, as will everyone else. Nothing will happen there, and we'll be leaving in the morning."

I stood up and crossed to my cot, slipping the knife beneath my pillow. She watched me, pink-faced with suppressed anger and scorn, then turned and left. I returned to sit by the brazier, fingering my scratches gently and smiling to myself at the temper of the women Donuil had wed.

THREE

There were almost a hundred people beneath Derek's thatch that night for dinner, some twenty of them women, the wives and sweethearts of the senior men of Ravenglass, and all of them had been fed by the time trouble broke out. This was no banquet, butan ordinary meal, although on a large scale. Drink had been flowing freely for hours, however, and many of the guests were already sprawled head down across the littered tables. My swollen eye was causing me difficulties, watering annoyingly and smarting painfully from the drifting smoke that filled the hall, much of it blown downward by the contrary winds that were' supposed to vent the upper roof space. As Derek himself had told me, his roof was neither as high nor as large as the one in the administrative building next door, and the reduction in scale seemed to me to have entailed a reduction in the efficiency of the ventilating system, trapping and re-circulating much of the smoke that should have been dispersed high above the diners. The place, as it functioned now, provided an object lesson in why the Romans had left their central courtyards open to the skies.

It had been an uncomfortable dinner for me, involving much twisting about, since my injury made it impossible for me to see any of the people seated on my left without turning my head completely around. I was sitting on Derek's left, however, so I could see him clearly, and Blundyl sat next to me on my left. I had found him to be a pleasant companion during the meal, akin in temperament and outlook to our own Dedalus.

Lucanus sat on Blundyl's left, between him and Derek's eldest son, Owen, with whom he had been deep in discussion since sitting down. On Derek's right sat Connor, flanked by another of Derek's people whom I did not know, and next to him sat Tearlach, Connor's boatmaster. Donuil and Shelagh sat at the closest table in front of us, to my right and beneath the level of our table on its dais, and with them were Feargus and Logan, Dedalus and Rufio, Sean the navigator and several others of Connor's senior crewmen.

Others of our following sat scattered throughout the hall, although not all were present. The ordinary crewmen were abroad, finding their own pleasure in the hostelries. Those who were here, however, senior crewmen and minor officers, mingled with Derek's own. Liam, son of Condran, was not present, nor were any of his people. They had shared the hall with Derek after their arrival the previous night, according to custom, and now fended for themselves.

We had discussed my misadventure of the early afternoon, dealing with it briefly. Blundyl and his men had questioned my attackers after releasing me, without discovering anything about the reasons underlying the attack on me, and had then thrown them into the cells where they would be held overnight. From there, the conversation had gone on to talk about fighting and brawling in general, with Blundyl admitting that, even in a rigidly controlled location such as Ravenglass, there were times when a brawling fist-fight could not be avoided. From there, Derek had drifted into detailing his experiences in what he called Lot's wars, eating mightily throughout and talking much of the time with a full mouth. I had stopped eating long before, and sat watching him in awe as he consumed enough to last me for a week. He bent forward again, digging into the depths of the heavy, black iron skillet that had been used to roast an enormous rack of ribs with herbs and vegetables and had been brought to our table for his personal consumption. He pulled out the last remaining piece and ripped it in half, one thick, meat-covered rib in each hand.

"Here, eat the last one." He dropped one rib back into the pot and pushed it in front of me before sinking his teeth into the dripping meat and ripping a mouthful from the bone.

As I grasped the handle of the pot, shaking my head and smiling to myself, the main doors burst open and a struggling knot of men spilled in. Blundyl was immediately on his feet, frowning with incomprehension, his eyes squinting as he tried to pierce the smoky gloom to see what was amiss. I heard a loud, anguished voice calling Connor's name urgently and looked in time to see the man who had shouted slaughtered from behind, the point of a sword blade emerging suddenly from beneath his chin, violently thrust by one of the newcomers surging through the doorway. Some people at the rearmost tables, closest to the open doors, began to cry out and several Sprang erect, but as each rose to his feet he was shot down by arrows fired from lethally close range. Six or seven men died thus in moments.

All noise and movement at the tables ceased and everyone sat watching in stunned disbelief as Liam Condranson strode into view, teeth gleaming whitely in a wide smile beneath his moustache as his men moved swiftly behind him, spreading out along the walls flanking the doorway at his back. Most of these men held drawn bows, menacing the assembly. Liam carried a broad-bladed sword easily in his right hand, and a round shield covered his breast. He walked forward boldly, his eyes on Derek, glancing neither right nor left as he made his way down the length of the hall between the two central banks of tables. At his back came a wedge of armed and armoured men, twelve of them, who upended the tables as they passed, throwing them aside to widen the aisle and herding the former occupants to either side of the hall. Beside me, Blundyl, clearly seeing the value of discretion, since he was weaponless like us, subsided slowly into his chair.

Liam came to a halt when less than one-third of the length of the room remained between him and the dais. As he stopped, two of his retainers flanked him, drawn bows levelled at Derek, who stood rigid, half crouched, his fists clenched in impotent fury. Somewhere at the back, a woman began to wail; then came the sound of a chopping blow, and the voice was cut off. Now the stillness beneath the high thatched roof was absolute. I felt the tension in myself, half crouched, half seated, half blind, clutching the heavy iron pot, and I willed myself to relax.

Liam's voice was pitched so that every ear in the crowd could hear him.

"The trouble with good ideas and good intentions, Derek, is that they encourage smugness. Do you know what I mean?" Derek made no response. "I mean, if you are going to take the weapons away from your visitors, then you had better be aware that some of them, at least, might want to have those weapons back, d'you follow me? Now, I'm prepared to believe you might have been aware of that, at one time, but you've fallen into evil ways since then.

Eight guards, indeed! They were dead, all of them, before they knew we had come calling."

Now Derek drew himself up to his full height. "You are a dead man, Condranson."

Liam Condranson checked himself dramatically, raising his sword arm high and half turning to appeal to one of the bowmen who flanked him, taking care to keep his voice raised so that it remained audible to everyone in the hall: "Ah, would you listen to that? I am the dead man, and him with arrows slavering for his heart's blood! Sit down, King Derek, and shut your mouth. Sit, sit, sit, sit. Sit!" He bent forward and almost barked the last word and, aware of his helplessness to do anything else, the king sat, bidden like a mongrel dog.

The Erse admiral looked about him then, eyeing everyone, beginning with the group at the dais table. His gaze lingered on Connor, who glared back at him, aware that one of Liam's hulking guards had passed behind him and now stood with a bared blade right at his back, covering him and Tearlach. Another stood behind me and Blundyl. Liam sneered, and his eyes moved on to big Tearlach, who also sat rigid. But the insult proved too much for another of Connor's men, who leaped to his feet with an oath and died there, his throat shattered by an arrow before his words were fully formed. Liam ignored the interruption and continued his perusal of the room, turning now slowly and completely until he faced the dais again, where his gaze fastened upon me.

"That's a wondrous eye, you have there, big fellow. You must be the one who debated with my men this afternoon. Merlyn, from Camulod. I'd welcome you to my new stronghold, to my new kingdom, since it seems to be the king's own duty to welcome guests, but I would be lying.

You have the stink of Athol's Gaels about you, for all your yellow hair, so you're bound for the fire with the rest of his carrion." He broke off suddenly at a sound from Derek and turned to face him. "What is it? You have something that you wish to say? Your last pronouncement as a king?"

"You are mad," Derek growled. "My people will eat you."

"Eat me?" Liam whooped with delight, but then his expression hardened into a hateful mask. "What people? You ruled a flock of sheep, old man, a herd of cattle! Or have I overlooked your thousands hiding in the forests? I have taken your stronghold with one half of the crew of my own galley. Three-quarters of my men are still unarmed, playing the fool with yours, getting them drunk and legless. Later tonight, when they have all passed out—-your men, not mine—we will complete the ... conversion. My fleet arrives the day after tomorrow. You may blame your swinish friends, Mac Athol and his vermin, for cutting short your kingship by one day. Had they not come, you ·could have reigned until tomorrow night. Their presence, all unarmed while rooting at your tables, is a mere windfall, unlooked for and unplanned but very welcome." He stopped, and his face and voice underwent a startling transformation, assuming once again a specious goodwill.

"Now, here's what will happen next. Some friends of mine are waiting with the children and one of the women brought today by your new guests. I see the other Woman here, so there's nothing lost of that encirclement." He nodded pleasantly to Shelagh, who sat wide-eyed beside her husband, gazing back at Liam in loathing, and then he continued, addressing Derek again. "Now, you have to understand the mettle of my men. I've been affronted by their bad behaviour often in the past, and they're not good with children at all—I think it might be better if we all remain aware of that ... So, after you, the former king, are dead, your guests—by all the gods, man, have you no sense of shame at all, to sit with such as these? Your guests will come with me, as hostages, in silence. Is that not right, Connor Mac Athol?"

Connor said nothing and merely glared his defiance until a smashing blow from the man behind him sent him reeling and his face hit the table top. Liam waited until Connor straightened up again, shaking his head to clear it.

"I said, is that not right, Connor Mac Athol?" Another silence and another blow, this one heavy enough to shake the table when Connor's body fell against it. Another pause, and then, "I said, is that not right, Connor Mac Athol?"

"In the name of Lud, Connor, answer him!" This was from Shelagh. Connor gazed down at her for long moments, his eyes glazed, and then nodded his head in Liam's direction.

"What was that? I didn't hear you?"

Connor mumbled something and another smashing blow sent him reeling again. This time it took him longer to recover, but when he did, now bleeding from the nose, he spoke.

"Aye, it is right, Liam Condranson."

"Good! Good, good, good, good, good. D'you see, Derek? I knew I was right." He turned his back on us now, addressing the crowd. "All Mac Athol vermin will accompany us, their willing presence ensuring the lives of their beloved leaders. The rest of you will remain here, to keep some of my fellows company and to make sure no one's sleep is disturbed before morning. Tomorrow will be time enough for you to think of how you may welcome me as your new king."

Now he turned slowly back towards us, pausing to point his sword at Donuil,

"You, the big one. Get up there by your peg-legged brother. Move!" Threatened by tight-drawn arrows, Donuil stood and moved to obey, his passage to the dais followed by the watchful eyes and aimed weapons of several bowmen, one of them the man on Liam's left who had previously been aiming at Derek.

Liam's eyes moved to Shelagh. "You, the whore, come here." Shelagh, too, rose to her feet, then made her way slowly to stand in the aisle, some ten paces in front of him. "Closer." She took another step, almost hesitantly, and as she did so I felt my heart leap into my throat, sensing what was coming. Her hesitancy was a sham, I knew. "That's far enough. Kneel."

Slowly, gracefully, her back to us, shoulders square and head held high, Shelagh sank to her knees. Liam looked at her appreciatively.

"You're a comely bitch, aren't you? Lift up your skirts, let's have a look at what you've got between your legs." He flicked a glance towards Donuil and Connor on the dais. "Watch those two," he said, and looked back to Shelagh. "Well? Will you keep me waiting?"

Shelagh bent her head and began to shift from knee to knee, gathering her skirts from beneath them in both hands, then raising them, slowly and deliberately, to her waist and bringing her hands behind her, stretching the stuff of her skirts tightly across her belly. Liam's were not the only eyes that followed her movements—even the aiming bowmen looked away from their targets in slit-eyed lechery. I watched Donuil, saw him brace himself and grind his jaw at the outrage being perpetrated upon his wife. Surprisingly, however, it was Derek who broke first and bounded to his feet. "Animal!" he roared.

Liam's eyes flickered to the dais and he jerked one hand in a signal to the ready bowman poised on his right, who released his shaft immediately. As the arrow sliced towards Derek's breast, I braced my wrist and thrust the heavy black iron skillet against the king's chest, aware only of the thought that I was grateful not to be defending against a Pendragon longbow. The brutal, clanging concussion of the hard-shot missile against the iron pot ripped the handle from my hand and sent the vessel clattering to the floor. Derek was knocked sprawling backwards, over his chair and off the dais, but alive.

Liam's eyes went wide. He threw out his arms in a crazed shout of laughter just as Shelagh's knife, thrown with blurring speed as her arm whipped up from behind her waist then down again, took him full in the neck. He shuddered spastically, arms and legs jerking like a man in a convulsion, and his chin snapped down against the hilt that suddenly protruded from his throat. The sword fell from his hand and Shelagh dove to snatch it up, stabbing upward with it at the man closest to Liam, a bowman who had not had time to notch another shaft and was now staring in uncomprehending horror at his stricken chief. The man went down, clutching uselessly at the blade that pierced him, but Liam himself refused to die. Stiff- legged, and gurgling loudly through a froth of bloody bubbles, he teetered on his heels, eyes bulging, tongue protruding from his open mouth, his arms waving, fighting for balance as he fought for life. He swung himself around, turning like an automaton to face the crowd behind him, arms spread-eagled and his shoulders swaying almost comically in his struggle to remain erect. And then he fell, face down. His men stood appalled, gaping, stunned and incredulous at the speed with which their chief had been destroyed. Not so us.

Donuil, Connor, Feargus and Logan had all known what was to come when Shelagh walked forward, and they had exploded into violent action before the shock she caused had even registered. Connor whirled to sink his table dagger into the breast of the guard who had abused him- Donuil surged forward to grasp the edge of the heavy dais table and heave it forward and down to the floor, clearing the way for him to leap forward, his fingers spread like talons for the throat of the nearest of Liam's bowmen. I snatched the iron skillet up again from where it lay behind me and swung it to crush the skull of the other dais guard, with whom Blundyl was already grappling.

Logan, Feargus, Dedalus, Rufio and Sean had thrown themselves against the enemy, too, and as they moved, others stirred to life and moved with them, angry and vengeful now, brandishing the knives with which they had earlier fed themselves. Liam's men, their superiority supreme mere moments earlier, now found themselves assailed and overwhelmed from every side, hampered by lack of space, their bows and swords instantly useless. Chaos was the only word to describe the scene, but it was over in a matter of moments, so that when the guards outside threw open the doors to enter, they were hauled in, engulfed and slaughtered as quickly as their fellows, slain by their own weapons.

Derek was sitting up already, breathing hard and rubbing at his chest. Donuil meanwhile was involved with Shelagh, his arms about her, hugging her as if he would crush her to death, and she bent backwards over his encircling arm. It was Connor who reached the main doors first and closed them, calling for order at the top of his voice. By the time I turned around, he was standing on a table, overlooking everyone. Silence fell quickly. He wasted no time making his dispositions. Six of his people were sent running to make sure no more of Liam's kerns remained beyond the door. They were warned to be careful and to allow no one to escape to raise the alarm, but equally to be quiet and attract no attention to themselves. Then, speaking quickly, and telling off his points on the fingers of one hand, Connor outlined our situation to the rest of us.

The short-term chances favoured us, he said, if we moved quickly and quietly to take advantage of this development. He pointed out that we were probably alone within the fort, save for a few of Liam's other men, like those who held the children and the weapons rooms in the next building. Everyone else in Liam's force was likely to be outside the walls, in the outer town, doing their part to cover up their master's treachery inside, and by Liam's own admission, he reminded us, those men were still unarmed. They were now leaderless, as well, and would remain so until such time as Liam's death had been clearly established. We could and must use that time to our advantage.

The dead men's weapons were collected and distributed among the Mac Athol warriors and the fighting men of Derek's folk, and Connor detailed twenty men, under Donuil and Shelagh, whose sons were being held, to seek the children and take them to safety aboard his galley and to seize Liam's two galleys at the same time. As those chosen left the hall, twenty more, commanded by Tearlach, were selected to make their way quietly and in stealth to secure the room that held our own weapons. These, too, Connor sent out at once, bidding them be quiet and cautious, and emphasizing the importance of alerting the rest of us—the unarmed mass of us—as soon as the way was clear for us to come and collect our weapons.

When these parties had gone, Connor spoke urgently to those of us who remained. Clearly and precisely, drawing upon his knowledge of the outer town from previous visits, he made incisive dispositions of our remaining forces, delegating authority to men whose local knowledge matched his own. Those of us from Camulod, being strangers here, would follow their leadership. As soon as we could reach the weapons store, he told us, each of us must arm himself with at least three swords, one for each hand and another to be sheathed by his side. We would then spread out, in four large groups led by Connor himself, Derek, Blundyl and Owen. We would move throughout the recognized quadrants of the outer town, passing out weapons to our own as we encountered them. Tearlach and his score of guards, soon to be reinforced to fifty, would remain in place in the administrative building, guarding against any new attempt by Liam's men to seize the place and facilitating the distribution of weaponry to our own people.

Connor had barely finished outlining his strategy when a runner arrived from Tearlach with the word that his men had won their skirmish and now held the armoury. They had found fourteen of Liam's men in place there and had lost seven of their own in recapturing the building. Liam's people had fought hard. Moments later, word arrived from Shelagh that the children were safe and had been rescued unharmed.

I attached myself to Derek's group and spent the next period of hours embroiled in the grim struggle to recapture Derek's autonomy in his own town. It was bitter, dirty work, but having seized the initiative, we pursued it grimly, and by the end of the first hour there was no question of our victory. The Sons of Condran showed themselves doughty fighters, despite their awareness that their plot had failed and that their admiral prince had gone down in death at the outset. They fought with die suicidal madness of desperation, refusing to surrender and often grappling barehanded in total darkness with the baleful, outraged men who swung their swords mercilessly, seeking vengeance for treachery.

, Late in the proceedings, we found ourselves on the outskirts of the town, close to the tavern where I had first seen the man in the yellow tunic. Someone had overturned a lamp at some stage of the fighting and the burning oil had set the entire tavern ablaze, so that its hectic glare lit up the night. As we approached, a knot of running men broke from the space between two buildings and came pouring towards us, seeing us only when they were almost upon us, and then veering to attack us immediately. They were five against our four, although others of our group were close behind. One of them came for me directly, his teeth bared in a scream, swinging a heavy-headed axe. Checking my instinctual urge to jump aside, I stood still and waited for him to swing his weapon. Still running, he chopped at me two-handed, aiming to cleave me from left shoulder to breastbone. I avoided his stroke by leaping forward to my left, beneath his axe. Then I thrust my sword point beneath his exposed shoulder, bracing my left knee to check my momentum and throwing my weight backwards, leaning deep into my thrust. The weight of his falling body dragged me around with him, and as I struggled to free my sword, pushing him off the Wade with my foot, I saw Derek rolling on the ground beneath another of the men, clutching the fellow's wrist in both hands as he fought to keep the point of a long, sharp knife away from his throat. I reached them in one long stride and swung my foot, kicking the knife- wielder beneath the chin and knocking him backwards. I finished him with a hacking, overhead slash. And then we were alone in the street, Derek and I, both of us panting for breath as we looked around us.

I heard a commotion in the shadows of a neighbouring passageway and started to head towards it, but I stopped to make sure that Derek, who had regained his feet, was unhurt. He was more winded than I was and bent over, gasping for breath, but he waved me away, indicating that he was well enough. I ran towards the noises and heard him begin to follow me, but we were to fight no more that night. Silence had fallen by the time we reached the end of the passageway, and we found some of our. companions collecting themselves and congratulating each other.

We returned immediately to the burning tavern. Derek was fearful that the flames might spread to other buildings, but there were no other buildings close enough, and as we stood there looking at the flames and counting the bodies visible in the firelight, a heavy rain began to fall. We regrouped and set out to search elsewhere, but the rain, at first refreshing, soon became a curse. We were relieved to find that the fighting was over and order was being restored everywhere. Ours had, apparently, been the last skirmish, and no Sons of Condran remained in Ravenglass.

Next we organized work parties to help with our wounded and to begin collecting corpses, transporting them, in what had become torrential rain, to a designated area close to the bathhouse. While we were doing that, Rufio brought word from Lucanus that he had established a temporary infirmary in the central court of the administrative building, the largest single space he could find that was uninhabited. Derek immediately passed the word to tell our walking wounded to make their way there for assistance, and he sent runners to the other three quadrant commanders, to pass on the information and instruct each of them to appoint litter- bearers to carry their more gravely wounded to the new field hospital. There were no walking wounded among Liam's people. Those few who had survived the conflict were all gravely injured and close to death.

At length, satisfied that everything that might be done was being done, the king and I went looking for Connor. We found him where I had expected to find him: outside the western wall on the wharf, in conference again with his captains, Tearlach, Feargus and Logan. He dismissed them as he saw us approach, resettled his sodden cape about his shoulders and sniffed loudly in disgust at the weather.

"Is there any place in this town that is dry?" he asked as we arrived.

"Aye, there is, and we were just about to go there," Derek answered. "My house. The place should have been cleaned up by this time, but even if it hasn't, there are some rooms where carnage was shut out. Come with us, we have much to talk about."

A short time later, pleased to see that the space beneath the thatch had been cleared of bodies, and the blood cleaned up and covered with fresh straw, Derek led us into a pleasant room in his own living quarters, where a fire burned brightly in an open grate. Once we had shed our soaked outer clothing and settled by the fire, clutching mugs of mead, he wasted no time in coming to the point.

"You will not be leaving in the morning now, I hope?"

Connor, seated in the middle, looked at me and winked surreptitiously before he turned to face the king. "Why not? There's nothing to stop us now, is there?"

Derek had the grace to flush with discomfort. "No, I suppose not ... " Neither Connor nor I made a sound. "But ... I hope you'll stay."

"For at least two days more, you mean, until Liam's fleet arrives?"

"Aye. They are your enemies as much as mine."

"True, but self-serving, Derek." Connor's nod was judicious. "They have been my enemies for years and I know how to deal with them on my own terms. They have only been your enemies, openly, for hours. It's fortunate for you and yours that we were here at all, today, and you'll admit you've given us little encouragement to remain ere this. Besides that, they are a fleet—thirty of them at least, where I have but three galleys. If I leave with the tide tomorrow as you originally suggested, I'll be well clear of the threat of them by the time they arrive."

"Five, if you'll stay."

"What?"

"Five galleys. Liam's two are now mine, by forfeit. I'll give them to you if you'll stay to help us."

Connor nodded again. "That is appealing, I will admit, although in truth it was my men who took them. But still ... five galleys, manned by the crews of only three, against thirty ... " He grimaced and shook his head.

Derek stood up and began to pace. "Look you, it's not your galleys I need, it's your men, up on my walls, to stand them off."

"I don't follow you." Connor was frowning. "You want me to place my men on your walls, and leave my galleys floating empty in the harbour to be burned?"

'They won't be burned!"

"How so?" Connor's tone became scornful. "They are made of wood, dry and well seasoned. Have you never seen what burning, pitch-wrapped arrows, shot from afar, can do to a floating hulk? No, Derek, that's too much to ask. I'll not desert my ships. Mine is a naval force, it functions well only at sea."

"We'll hide them! We have all day tomorrow to conceal them, and I know a perfect place, an inlet, completely hidden from the sea and sheltered from the winds, with a shelving beach and a high tide. Your galleys will lie safe there for as long as must be and none will know they're there."

"Hmm ... " Connor thought for a long moment, considering that, then sucked a tiny breath between his teeth. It was a gesture he shared with his father, Athol, one that both men used when they were thinking deeply. "How close is this place? Can I go there tomorrow, to see it for myself? I take no man's word at face value where my galleys are concerned."

"Aye, you can go and look. It is close by. Less than two miles along the coast to the south, but cunningly disguised and invisible from offshore. I know, for I have tried to see it for myself, and I would never have found it had I not known where to look."

Connor was still unsure. "That's as may be, Derek, but I mislike the thought of simply going off and leaving my craft lying there untended. It takes long years to build a galley, but only moments to burn one." He stopped, evidently having come to a decision. "If I agree, how would my men get back from there to here?"

"We'll ferry them, in our fishing boats."

Connor turned to me. "Merlyn, what do you think?"

I shrugged my shoulders. "One thought came to me immediately. Suppose we drive these Ersemen off, convinced they cannot take this place from the sea. What might they do then? Sail straight for home? The probability is that they would, knowing their leader Liam to be dead. But would they know that?" Both men were staring at me, their faces blank. 'Think of it! Liam is dead. You know that and .so does everyone here. But you are discussing the removal of Liam's galleys, the only sign his fleet will have that he is here. By removing them, you are also removing the proof of his presence, and of his failure. The men in his fleet, believing him—as he himself believed—to be immortal, will merely guess, when they arrive to find his galleys absent, that he has changed his plans for some reason and postponed his attack. They're bound to have at least one able captain among them, someone clever enough to see that, since his plans involve treachery, the postponement of them must entail continued amity between themselves and Ravenglass. They'll have no reason to approach us at all, and every reason not to. So they will sail off again to look for him elsewhere, believing him to be close by, and they'll search the coastline to the north and south carefully, seeking a hiding place such as you describe. They'll find your galleys."

"Aye, they will." Connor was gazing at me narrow- eyed. "You have a subtle way of thinking, Yellow Head. I'm glad you're not my enemy. I can't argue with your logic, so that means Liam's galleys must stay here and take their chances of being destroyed or recaptured. They are the bait to draw the animals in close. Hmm ... " He scratched his chin. "I'm glad I asked, but that wasn't the reason for my asking what you think. You have your own responsibilities, and my sworn duty to my father commits me to your needs before all else. That is why we're here, when all is said and done." He raised his hand now from his chin to scratch his temple gently with a middle fingertip, winking at me again from behind its shelter. "I think this whole affair of Liam's fleet too dangerous and certainly not your concern. What say you?"

"Wait!" Both of us turned to Derek, who was red-faced and looking ill at ease. "Before you respond, Merlyn, hear what I have to say."

I looked back at Connor, raising my eyebrow, and then nodded, gesturing to Derek to continue. He cleared his throat, his thoughts evidently racing with each other as he sought the words to sway me.

"I was at pains to explain my reasons for refusing your request today, and I believed you understood them, at the time."

"I did."

"Aye, well they have all changed, thanks to this treachery of Condranson." I waited. He flexed his shoulders, glancing again at Connor. "You spoke of duty to your father and its binding you to Merlyn, here. I was unaware of that. How is Athol Mac Iain beholden to Camulod?"

Connor looked blank, and I answered for him. "He is not. He has ... an interest in the welfare of the boy who is in my care."

"What kind of interest?" Derek's sudden frown was speculative, his eyes glinting with curiosity.

"An abiding one, let us say."

"Abiding ... You mean ongoing? Active?"

"Most assuredly." Connor's voice was dry now, almost ironic. "I think it might be better if you spoke your mind, rather than attempting to be circumspect. What is it that you want to know?"

Derek braced his shoulders, facing Connor squarely. "I want to know if Athol extends real protection to the boy, or merely friendly interest. There's no point in my denying it, this thing with the Sons of Condran spells disaster for my people and my town. This was unknown to me when you arrived, and it changes everything. I need an ally now, a strong one, with a fleet of galleys. If I offer sanctuary to Merlyn and the boy, as I was asked to do, then may I rely on you and yours to extend protection to my folk as part of the agreement? That is what I need to know."

"That's plain enough. You mean afterwards, in time to come. Not merely when Liam's fleet arrives the day after tomorrow. You still need help with that."

"Yes." ·

"Hmm." Connor snatched a deep breath and blew it out through pursed lips. "I have the feeling, Ravenglass, that you would make me earn those two galleys."

Derek almost smiled. "They're Condran's best. His admiral's own ships. And they're undamaged."

"No thanks to you." Connor looked at me. "There was a holding crew aboard each one. They tried to fire them when they saw us coming. Almost succeeded, too." He turned back to Derek. "The bargain—especially this latest element you've added, of ongoing help—still weighs too heavily in your favour, my friend. Where will you lodge Merlyn and his people now if I accede? Because if all things are changed in your condition, so, too, are the requirements for their safety."

"I know that." Derek turned to me. "How many people are there in your group? In total."

"Eighteen."

He looked at me for a long time, nodding slowly. "I have the perfect place, I think."

When it became clear that he would say no more without prompting, Connor supplied it. "Another perfect place? Where? You have a suitable house?"

"No, I have a suitable fort." He rose to throw some fuel on the fire, leaving us to wonder. When he was satisfied that the fire would burn well, Derek returned to his chair.

"The road out of our town is the Tenth Iter. Does that mean anything to you?" Both of us shook our heads, and he grinned at me. "Well, you once told me you knew your Britain—at least the Roman part of it—but now I can tell you something you didn't know. The Tenth Iter is the only road in all this region that penetrates the heartland from the coast. Very important road, it was, to the Romans, built during the period after they abandoned the other wall they built, up in Caledonia."

"The Antonine Wall."

"Aye, that's the one. Anyway, they built this road, the Tenth Iter, to transport supplies from Ravenglass, here, which they called Glannaventa, traversing the passes through the Fells to the garrison at Galava, which means "by the side of the vigorous stream." We call the stream the Amble. Anyway, the road's more than thirty Roman miles long, and it had three forts, the two at each end and another they called Mediobogdum—don't ask me what that means—in the middle, on a plateau at the top of the highest pass through the Fells."

"It means 'in the river's bend.' Isn't it on a river?"

"No, it's on a mountain top, but there's a river in the valley below, the Esk, and it bends around the fort, right enough. The fort was a camp for summer garrisons, never occupied in winter, since the road was impassable." He looked from one to the other of us. 'That means no town ever grew up around it. Who would want to live up there year-round? You, for all of that, might find it appropriate for your own reasons, but you'll be the first ones in nearly two hundred years, according to our Druids. It lies something over ten miles from here, and it's been abandoned for longer than anyone's ever been able to recall. I think, though, with a little hard work and willingness, it could be made habitable, even now. I was there last summer and spent two nights. The walls ate sound—they're built mostly of local stone—and some of the buildings are strongly roofed. There's water and wood in abundance and even a bathhouse, though what condition that's in is something I can't guess at. The site itself is protected by high peaks and by thick forest, and few people use the road nowadays. Those who do come from inland: No one uses it from here, except in the summer, when we post lookouts in the pass up there to guard against intrusion from inland. But we've had no trouble now for more than twenty years."

Connor was looking at me, his lips pressed together. "What think you?'

I shrugged. "I'd like to see it: It might serve."

"Hmm." Connor sat silent for a spell, plucking at his pursed lips as he stared into the fire, and I sat motionless, watching him and waiting for the outcome of his thoughts. Finally he straightened up, his eyes seeking mine. "Very well, here's what we'll do. Tomorrow, Derek, you'll supply a man to take me to this place where we can hide our galleys. We'll take wily our own three, leaving Liam's here to be seen by his fleet. We'll need only half-crews, and we'll leave the vessels in this inlet you know of, providing that I'm satisfied it's as safe and well hidden as you say it is. Afterwards, your fishing fleet will pick my men up and bring them back here. That means when Liam's vermin come, · they'll see their admiral's galleys and be sure he's here. But they will see their accursed admiral, too ... I want to be quite certain of that." He drummed his fingertips against his lips, his eyes on me again, his thoughts evidently elsewhere.

"Derek, last time I was here Blundyl took me around the town and showed me all kinds of wondrous things. One of them, I recall distinctly, was an old cargo shed, still sound and weatherproof, sitting all alone beyond the end of the western wall, facing the harbour. It was full of heavy, hand-forged lengths of rusty iron chains, enormous things. Do you know what I'm talking about?"

"Aye, I do. The Romans made them. Used them to fasten great logs together, a floating boom, strung from the mainland to the island in the bay to seal the harbour against surprise attack. There's one at the other end, too."

"Are they still there?"

"Aye, they've been lying in there for years. We've had no need of them ere now, although we might hereafter." He gazed at Connor, speculatively. "You want to use them? Re- string the boom? There's no time. We'd have to cut the logs."

"No, I want to join the lengths together and string them, secured by heavy spikes, along the top of your wall facing the harbour ... the full length of the wall. Then, using the chains as an anchor, I want to hang the corpses of every one of the Sons of Condran slain last night, with Liam in the centre, so that they'll be the first thing our Erse visitors will see when they arrive. That will give them something to choke over. They will also find the walls well manned, with my hundreds supplementing your own men. They'll be too far away to recognize any of us, and they'll assume us to be your people. If they come too close, we'll throw some fire at them. You still have the Roman catapults up on the walls, I know. Are they serviceable?" Derek nodded. "Good. Make sure they're freshly greased and tightened, or whatever has to be done to them, during the day tomorrow. Merlyn will help you. He knows about such things. Liam's fleet will be here with the sun the next day, and they'll expect to find the town already in their possession. They'll choke on their own vomit, but I hope they'll approach close enough to suffer when we open fire on them.

"We should be able to savage them badly and send them home with their tails between their legs, bearing the news of gentle Liam's death. They might return seeking vengeance, or they might not. In either case, they won't be coming back soon, and when they do, they'll find Mac Athol taking interest in their movements. As soon as they've gone, you will take Merlyn and me to see this fort of yours. What did you call it?"

"Mediobogdum."

"Aye, Mediobogdum. An outlandish name, even for Romans. Are we agreed?"

"We are." Each man spat into his hand and we clapped our palms together to seal the bargain.

Some time close to dawn, dirty and weary, I made my way to my own cot and fell across it, hurting my face in the process so that I realized I had completely forgotten my bruised eye and cheekbone. In spite of my exhaustion, or perhaps because of it, I lay awake for a short time, half- consciously recalling sights and incidents from the night's alarums and reflecting on the way things change in life, never remaining constant for any appreciable length of time. I saw Liam die again, spraying blood from his mouth, and the last thing I thought of was Shelagh's other knife, still concealed beneath my pillow.

FOUR

The rain, which had been diminishing in volume all morning, finally stopped shortly before noon. I pulled back my hood and combed my fingers through my hair, welcoming the cool air about my head. Beside me, Shelagh stood, thoughtful, chewing on the inside of her lip. The two men who had been helping me stood silent, awaiting further instructions.

"He isn't here," Shelagh said.

I turned to her, shaking my head. "How can you know that?"

"I know it."

"How, Shelagh? How can you know it, when I can't? I don't even know who I'm looking for. The single thing I am sure of is that I can't identify him."

Shelagh simply gazed at me, saying nothing more. We were standing by the bathhouse, beside the neatly ordered, rain-soaked rows of the Sons of Condran who had died in the previous night's fighting. I found myself curiously unmoved by the sight of them, even after watching them turned this way and that to expose their faces to my search. Their exposure to the hours of steady, heavy rain had robbed them of all semblance of humanity, leaving them pallid and waxen, their exposed skin cleansed of clotted blood. The casualties from Ravenglass and Connor's crews, by comparison—there were none among the group from Camulod, for which I thanked God—had been sheltered, laid out in a large storage shed behind the bathhouse itself, and their corpses, coated and caked with crusted blood, somehow made them appear more pitiable.