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

SEVEN

By the time winter finally began to whisper among the browning foliage in the mountain glens that year, we had made huge inroads into the daunting tasks that had faced us so sternly mere months before. September had smiled upon the land, so balmy and benevolent that the trees had barely thought to begin setting their leaves to dying. October had crept in and gone without a hint of frost, and it was late in November before the morning air began to draw vapours from our mouths, harbinger of the frigid weather to come.

By then, we were well ensconced, and the tang of fresh woodsmoke lay everywhere within the fort, by day and night, redolent of warmth and ease and comfort on the long, autumnal evenings. The raw, sappy smell of new- felled, freshly worked timber was everywhere, as well, and three of the six long barracks-blocks had been rebuilt—torn down and burned, and fresh walls of square- hewn logs raised into place, then weather-proofed with mortar and strongly roofed. The windows, which were large and wide, were shuttered in two fashions: an outer set of solid oak closed like doors and could be barred, and an inner set, made by Mark, our master carpenter, were fashioned of narrow, hand-planed slats of beech wood that swiveled up and down to admit, filter or block out the light. These were hinged on both sides, allowing them to be opened wide on summer days. Solid, double partitions of strong planks, fitted tongue-and-groove and solidly nailed to a central frame, the space between them stuffed with layered straw and wood-shavings to conserve heat and stifle sound, divided the space into capacious, comfortable living units, each with its own entrance and windows. The floors were of the original concrete, still strong and sound, and covered with woven grass matting for comfort.

The forest around us had supplied most of our raw building materials, but Derek and his people had been magnificent in their assistance to us, supplying a minor army of men and women to help with the work and a plenitude of material and supplies with which to build, and live. In return, they had been guaranteed the aid from Eire that was so crucial to them. They had already taken in, on their own behalf as well as ours, the cargoes of three convoys from the west, dispatched by Athol, including livestock, weapons and trade goods captured in his recent wars.

Then, early in the winter, just before the onset of the first snow, came our first grand celebration as a newborn community. Dedalus, grinning a sooty grin of sheer delight, approached me casually around noon on a frosty day and, leading me beyond the walls, pointed wordlessly to the smoke issuing from the chimney of the bathhouse furnace, on which he and his men had been labouring mightily, and utterly without commentary, for months. Their task was now complete: the waters were heating above the hypocausts, and the first wisps of vapour were already beginning to filter through the pipes and into the steam room. After an interval of silent centuries, the baths at Mediobogdum would soon echo again with the sound of voices, songs and laughter.

I went with Dedalus immediately to tour the renewed facility for the first time in months, and I made no effort to restrain the praises that swarmed upon my lips, for him and for all his people. The hole that had sagged in the corner of the floor above the furnace was gone as though it had never been, and every surface in the entire place gleamed with sparkling brightness and vibrant colours. To formalize my extreme pleasure, I declared the following day a holiday and sent word to Derek in Ravenglass to bring his folk to join our celebration.

Lucanus, more than anyone else, was delighted by the news of the bathhouse's completion, for the military- trained physician in him had been concerned for months by the necessarily lessened standard of hygiene within our small community. Cleanliness to Luke meant more than the mere absence of offensive smells; it meant health and fitness. He expanded visibly with Ded's news, when he came outside the walls to see what all the commotion was about, and set about immediately to incorporate a formal opening of the new facility into the following day's holiday activities.

I walked back to Luke's quarters with him, and I enjoyed our august surgeon's uncharacteristic excitement as he prattled non-stop all the way, enthusing over the meticulous detail of the renovations Ded had shown us. Once inside his comfortably furnished and partitioned room, however, I refused the cup of wine he offered me, and his ebullience vanished instantly, his observant eyes narrowing to their normal, analytical keenness.

"What's the matter, Cay? You seem ... upset over something."

I demurred, shaking my head and shrugging my shoulders at the same time, but he was well used to my every mood and refused to be deflected. "Pardon me," he insisted, enunciating each word clearly and carefully, as though speaking to a small boy, "but am I suddenly aged and infirm, losing my faculties? I can see your distress—it is as evident as the colour of your hair—so I shall ask you again, and I trust you'll honour me by answering truthfully. What is the matter?"

I shrugged again, and rubbed my hands as though washing them. "Nothing, Luke," I protested. "There's nothing wrong. I'm simply envious about the baths, that's all."

His eyes widened and he looked at me as though I had lost my wits and uttered something nonsensical. While he sought the words with which to respond, I became incongruously aware of our hands: mine rubbing themselves together in an extremity of nervousness; his motionless, holding two cups of wine, one of them still partially extended towards me. By the time he spoke again, he was frowning. "Envious? What kind of word is that to use in such a case? What, in the name of Aesculapius, do you have to feel envious about?"

I had been holding my breath, and now I exhaled through my pursed lips, in a controlled hiss. "About the companionship in the bathhouse. Because I'll miss it."

"Caius, what in the world are you talking about?"

"About me, Luke!" Suddenly my tight control was gone, and all my fears and my bitterness came swirling to the surface, clearly astounding my friend, if the expression on his face was anything by which to judge. "I'm talking about me! About my condition ... about this—this cursed, damnable thing on my chest. I'm talking about leprosy!

Leprosy, Luke, and the evil of it! If that's what this thing is, this mark on me, this blemish—and you've said nothing to convince me that it isn't—then I'll never step inside those baths, because to do so would be murder. There's no other word in me to say it better. It would be murderous of me to incur the risk of spreading my contagion on to others. That's what I'm talking about, Lucanus, and I'm amazed that you should take so—"

"You are spewing shit!"

His interruption, loud, vicious and whip-like, robbed me of all impetus, so that I hung there, mouth agape. In all the years I had known Lucanus, I had never heard him utter so much as a mild profanity.

"Listen to yourself, man! Listen, for one moment, to what you are saying, and ask yourself how you dare! Do you really have so little regard for my concern, for my knowledge, for my skills? And do you really think me so uncaring about your condition that I would simply leave you floundering in fear and ignorance?"

Abashed now, and suddenly conscious of how rude and hectoring and condemnatory my angry outburst had been, I shook my head, mumbling, and totally unable to look him in the eye. "I ... No. No, forgive me, Luke, I had not thought to imply any of that ... " I could hear misery and something approaching too close to self-pity in my own tone, and my voice dried up. He moved towards me and thrust the cup of wine he still held into my nerveless fingers.

"You had not thought—you have not yet thought clearly in several respects, my friend. That much I can easily perceive. Here, take this. Now drink. And sit. Sit over there." He pointed to a chair against the wall.

When I was seated, he raised his cup towards me, holding it high until I returned the gesture, and then we both sipped. I had no consciousness of the taste of the wine, but I watched him as he moved to pull another chair out from the table to my left and turn it towards me, standing behind it. He drank again, the tiniest of sips, then leaned forward to place his cup on the chair's seat, after which he stood looking at me, leaning his weight forward onto his hands which gripped the chair's high back. The light in the room settled on the arched plane of his forehead, beneath the pronounced widow's peak that crowned it, making the tight, translucent skin of his high brow gleam and throwing a shadow into the dip of his left temple and the hollow of his cheek, so that I became aware of his age again—aware that Lucanus was no longer young. The silence stretched between us until I could bear it no longer.

"Luke," I began, but he waved me to silence before I had even begun. When he did speak, his voice held all of the detachment of his professional persona. My friend Luke was silent; my other friend, Lucanus the surgeon and physician, was speaking.

"You told me once, Caius, the last time we had words, that there is no need for apologies between us when we spark differences occasionally. That applies now ... But I deserved your reaction there, for my own carelessness in failing to be aware how concerned you are, still, about this—condition of yours. I know it frightens you deeply, but you conceal your distress so well that I had lost sight of it. So, we shall address it now. Undo your tunic."

"Why? You looked at the damned thing this morning."

"I did, but now I require you to look at it with me. Humour me. Expose it."

I did as he requested, laying bare my breast so that The Mark, as I had come to think of it, lay open to his scrutiny and my own, foreshortened as that was by the awkward angle from which I had to peer at it.

Lucanus moved close to me and reached out, pinching the flesh of my breast, then stretching it between finger and thumb so that the skin around The Mark whitened almost to the colour of the dead patch at the centre of the blemish itself.

"Does it hurt?" I shook my head. "Can you feel it at all? When I pinch?"

"No."

"Very well, now think carefully, has it changed in any way—shape, colour, sensitivity, anything at all—in recent months?"

I thought about it, stifling the immediate negative that sprang to my tongue. The blemish had not, in fact, increased in size since it had first appeared, so that I still could cover it completely with the pad of my thumb. "No," I said, eventually. "You know it hasn't."

"Correct, I know it has not, but we are conducting this particular examination for your benefit, not mine. So, there has been no change: no proliferation, no spread, no swelling, no soreness, no pus and no breaks in the skin; no leaks of fluid of any kind, and no itching. Correct?" I nodded again. He straightened up. "Good. Now cover yourself up again and listen to what I have to say to you." As I rearranged my tunic he went back to the chair opposite me, picking up his cup and sitting down to face me.

"As you know, I am familiar with what frightens you most: the disease of leprosy, and the very idea of it. I have worked with it, and among lepers, for many years. I believe, utterly and with totality, Cay, that this—manifestation, of whatever it is you have, is not a leprous lesion. It could be any one of a hundred other things, some known, some unknown. I'll know more when I lay my hands on that scroll I mentioned. If I'm right, it's in a chest that I once gave to your Aunt Luceiia. I've written to Ambrose and asked him to look for it. If he finds it, he'll send the entire contents of the chest to me by the next vessel of Connor's that calls in there. But!" He stood up again and crossed to stand directly in front of me, looking down at me. "But. Your fears, my friend, those fears that just now spilled from you, are groundless. Listen to me. Even if whatever it is that you now have were to become leprosy at some future date, it is harmless, at this time, to others. Do you understand that, Caius? It is harmless. To cause contagion, of any kind, it would have to be active ... to be leaking, to be exuding poisons, to be sweating secretions of some kind. That is not the case, with you.

"I have never lied to you, my friend, and I will not begin to do so now, over this. What you have on your skin, this mark, is merely a deadened surface area bearing some slight, arguable resemblance to some forms of leprous lesions. And the important word in all of that is 'lesions' ... plural. You have only one mark, and it has been unique since it appeared, almost a full year ago. It is my firm opinion, based on a lifetime of medical study and practice, that there is not the slightest possibility that you are capable of presenting any threat, of any kind of contagion, to any person. And that embraces, most specifically, your presence in the bathhouse. Have I made myself clear?"

"Yes."

"And, more important, do you believe me?"

I thought about all he had said, weighing not merely his words and his credibility but his tone and demeanour, and I felt relief and gratitude well up in me, so that a smile came easily to my eyes and lips, and my entire chest expanded with well-being. He was watching me closely as I nodded, very gently at first, then with increasing conviction and gratitude. I raised my cup again, this time anticipating the fullness of the wine.

"Aye, Luke. I believe you. So be it."

Before the following day had run its course, my acceptance of Lucanus's opinion was challenged directly. I was relaxing at the time, sprawled out in company with Lucanus, Donuil and Derek in the quiet of the refurbished steam room after the hustle and bustle of the long, holiday afternoon of athletic events and speechmaking. Conversation had been desultory, all of us lulled and lethargic with the heat and humidity, but Donuil eventually sighed and stood up and left us, having volunteered to go and find out when the evening meal was to be served. Lucanus lay, apparently asleep, on the marble bench along the side of the room to my right, and I was lazily watching the steam eddies, enjoying doing nothing, when Derek suddenly leaned towards me and threw me into a complete panic.

"What's that mark there, on your chest? Some kind of scar?"

I closed my eyes quickly, drawing a great, deep breath, forcing myself not to stiffen and gathering myself to be able to look down casually. The Mark stood out plainly in here, against the natural darkness of my skin, its whiteness emphasized by the additional whiteness of the chest hairs that grew within its borders. Now I gazed down at it again, keenly aware of Luke's unmoving presence against the wall.

"No," I heard myself saying, almost musingly, "it's not a scar. It's some kind of skin ailment. Lucanus is fascinated by it, whatever it is ... he's forever poking and prodding at it. But it doesn't hurt, doesn't itch, and doesn't get any bigger. He expects it simply to disappear some day, like a wart."

"Hmm." Derek, I saw gratefully, was not really interested. His curiosity had been nothing more than momentary notice of an anomaly. "I had a wart, once, that used to bother me. Huge damned thing, it was, with hairs on it, and it was ugly. Can you believe that, on a body like mine? Women didn't like it, I can tell you. Had it for years, right here." He arched his back out from the wall and pointed a fingertip to the area beneath the swell of his great, hairy belly, just above his pubis. There was nothing to be seen there now. 'Then one day it was gone, just like that." He tried to snap his wet fingertips. "Don't know how quickly it went, or why, or even when ... I just looked, one day, and it wasn't there ... Hector really succeeds, doesn't he?"

The non sequitur left me floundering. "What are you talking about?" I asked him. "That doesn't make sense. How did you include Hector and warts in the same thought?"

Derek stretched mightily, yawning, and then stood up and began to sweep the streaming moisture from his great frame with the edge of one hand. He saw me glance idly at his genitals and grinned, hitching his belly up with both hands and bending forward to peer down.

"Don't see that too much, nowadays," he drawled. "But I don't use it as much as I used to, either. Must be growing old, but it doesn't seem as important as it used to be." He released his belly and reached behind him for a towel. "I said Hector succeeds, that's all. Nothing to do with warts. I was thinking about how you've managed to disguise yourself, and I'm not even talking about the beard and the hair-colouring."

I had grown a full beard and darkened my hair artificially shortly after moving up into the hills to live in Mediobogdum, and sufficient time had passed since then that I gave the transformation little thought. Derek did not even glance at my hair as he continued.

"You've effaced yourself completely. I really noticed it today, during the celebrations. Everyone here knows who you are, but they all call you Cay, and they all treat Hector as though he's the leader of your group. He even believes it himself, or he seems to. Damnation, I even think of you as Cay nowadays, and I know damn well who you are. Three or four months ago, when you first arrived, I would have sworn that was impossible ... unachievable. But you've done it. Merlyn of Camulod has disappeared."

"Good," I replied. "That's as it should be. And the longer he remains absent, the better it will be for the boy."

I had followed Shelagh's inspired suggestion long since, and arranged my own disappearance, making sure that everyone in Ravenglass had seen Arthur and me sail away with Connor. What no one knew but us, however, was that Connor had landed us again, no more than a few miles farther along the coast, safely out of sight of Ravenglass and its people. We had then returned here and become the childless Master Cay and his young apprentice.

I had not moved from my original position facing him, and now I wiped the heavy perspiration from my face, blinking the sting of it from my eyes and thinking we had almost been in the steam room too long. When I opened my eyes again, Derek was still standing there, gazing down at me, his towel hanging from his hand, and Luke had shrugged himself up into a seated position, bent forward with one elbow on his knee while he wiped his face with the towel he had been using as a pillow.

"What?" I asked. "What's wrong? What are you staring at?"

"May I ask you a question?"

I glanced at Lucanus, surprised that Derek would even think to seek permission before blurting his question out. "Of course."

"Do you trust me? That's not the one, not the question, I mean."

I smiled up at him and then rose to my feet. "Let's get out of here, before we melt. Of course I trust you. How could you even need to ask that, after all this time?"

Lucanus stood aside to allow us to pass him, then followed us out into the dry, cool air of the pool-room suite. All three of us plunged quickly into the cold pool, which had the effect of ice on our overheated bodies, and climbed quickly out to towel ourselves down briskly until our skins were glowing with cleanliness and health. By common consent, none of us spoke until all three were dry, and then we made our way to the changing rooms, where we began to dress. Lucanus was the first to speak," uttering his first words since entering the bathhouse, more than an hour earlier.

"I can't believe we're the only ones here."

Derek glanced at him beneath raised brows. "Believe it, they're all stuffing themselves. We'll be lucky if there's anything left for us to eat by the time we get out there." He began moving towards the door.

I felt at peace, not the slightest pang of hunger gnawing at me, and I ignored their efforts to leave, choosing instead to speak with Derek when there were no other ears about to hear me. "You were going to ask me a question, moments ago. But why did you ask me if I trusted you?"

Derek stopped, with his hand on the door, and then turned about and came back, sitting down squarely on the seat across from me. "Because your answer would decide the form of my next question. I knew you trusted me with this secret ... the secret of your whereabouts and your identity—because you know you're safe there. My existence, and my people's, depends on my good faith in that. But I meant, do you trust me beyond that?"

I could see from his face that he was serious, that he expected me to respond, and that he was watching me closely enough to discern the truth were I to attempt to dissemble in any way. I stared back at him, narrowing my eyes and nibbling at the inside of my lower lip. He waited, staring at me as I sought the words I would use. Finally they came to me.

"Yes, Derek, I trust you, far beyond that. I always have, though for no logical reason. I simply have, and that's all there is to it That's why we came to Ravenglass in the first place. I came in answer to a dream that told me I might trust you. I'll admit openly to you now that there have been times I have wondered at myself, and debated the wisdom and the folly of my own feelings, but I chose to remain here, for all that, with my people, and in trust, and have never regretted it. We have all found you to be a true and loyal friend, these past few months. Luke, here, agrees with me. We spoke of this only a few nights ago ... What's the matter? Did I say something to displease you?"

Unaccountably, his face had darkened into something resembling a perplexed scowl. Now he shook his head. "No, but I find that difficult to accept," he growled. "I mean. Your loyalty is all to the boy, and I killed his father. How can you trust me that much, knowing what I said to you when you first came here?"

"Why should I mistrust you? Here, I'll trust you even further, with this knowledge ... " I paused, watching his face as keenly as he watched mine. I had been keeping back a truth from Derek. I knew him, now, to be a just and honourable man, and until that moment I had been loath to tell him what I knew about his full role in Arthur's fate: how his passing lust had left the boy not merely fatherless, but motherless. Now, I believed, the time had come to tell him. Perhaps it would bind him further to us and the success of our mission.

"Not only did you kill the lad's father, you killed his mother, too."

He jerked back from me as though I had slapped him across the face, his eyes flaring wide with angry disbelief. I held up my hand to quell his response before it could reach his lips. "It's true, Derek!" He checked himself, then sat as though turned to stone, even the motion of his eyes suspended. I continued, keeping my voice level now. "The woman on the beach—the one you were ... employed with, when I arrived. Do you recall?"

"The red-haired one ... " He glanced sideways quickly; guiltily, to where Lucanus stood listening, as though expecting Luke to assail him next.

"Aye, the red-haired one," I confirmed quietly. "That was Ygraine of Cornwall, Lot's wife and Uther's mistress ... Arthur's mother."

Derek of Ravenglass seemed to shrink as though all the air in him had been released, and as he did, I saw credence growing in his eyes. But then he shook his head, a tiny gesture of bewilderment. "But ... I didn't kill her. She was alive! I threw her aside when you rode up, but she was unhurt"

I nodded, still speaking gently. "That's true, Derek, she was. But then you mounted your war horse, to meet me man to man, and in the mounting, your horse kicked her or trampled her, I know not which. She lay dying when I found her, her skull crushed. And the child, Arthur, was in the birney."

In the silence that followed, Lucanus moved to Derek's side and placed one hand on his shoulder. "That was an act of God, my friend ... the killing ... We both know that. No blame in it accrues to you. You took the woman as a prize of war, against her will—that's normal in such cases. You had no intent to kill her, did you?"

Derek shook his head, his eyes filled with confusion and a suggestion, at least to my eyes, of regret and even pain. "No," he murmured, his big voice now barely audible. "She was ripe and lush. I wanted her, but I had no thought of killing her ... And yet I killed the others. Some of them ... one of them. She fought me, to keep me from the red-haired one. She seized my dagger and came at me. I turned her wrist and thrust, and pulled her onto the point ... "

"Self-defence," Lucanus said. I was startled that he should condone such things, even obliquely, but I saw at once that he was being politic. "Ygraine, the red-haired woman, is the important one here. You had no thought of killing her, of bringing about her death in any way, had you?" Derek shook his head, and Luke went on.

"You had no knowledge of her death, did you, until here and now? You were unaware your horse had kicked or trampled her in your scramble to mount up when Cay, here, arrived to challenge you, thinking you to be Uther, am I correct?" Again, a wordless nod was Derek's sole response. "Good, then. No willful involvement in the young woman's death may be attributable to you. But there is more, so you had better let Cay tell it to you, and listen carefully."

Derek collected himself and straightened with a deep sigh, looking me straight in the eye again. "There's more? Then best to give it to me quickly. How much more can there be?"

"Not much, but it is vital, and only we two, Luke and I, have knowledge of it. You will be the third, and last, to know the full connection ... how the circle closes. Arthur, I swear, will never know, nor any other, from our lips." I stopped, and glanced at Lucanus, suddenly uneasy. "Luke, if you please, make sure we are alone." He moved immediately to verify that no one was within hearing range, and we waited until he returned, nodding to me that all was clear. I turned again to Derek.

"Ygraine was daughter to your strongest ally, the Eirish king, Athol Mac Iain. She was sister to Connor and to Donuil—sister, too, to my own wife, Deirdre. So you see, the boy is Athol's own grandson, heir to Eire's Scots. He also stands heir to Lot's Cornwall, since Lot acknowledged him and never knew the secret of his true paternity. And he is even heir to my domain in Camulod, in that he is my ward—my nephew and my cousin both. All of Ygraine's kin know that she died in Lot and Uther's war, but none of them, not even Donuil, knows how she died or who killed her. So let it be, and let her rest. Ygraine is dead, she has been mourned, and her son is being protected and well cared for.

"There, if you wish to play the cynic, lies the basis of my trust in you, as yours must lie in me. I've come to know you better since then, and I believe you when you say you'd never do such a thing. But had I so wished, I could long since have used my knowledge to your ruin. You must now believe I never will, and have never contemplated doing so." I paused for a moment to give him a chance to absorb this new information. "And so! Are we at peace with this, we three?"

Once again Derek of Ravenglass heaved a great, long sigh, then stood up slowly, his hand outstretched to me. I rose, too, and shook with him, and felt my own throat clench to see the tears that stood in his fierce eyes. He blinked several times to clear them, and then spoke, gulping air to drive his voice, which came out, nonetheless, sounding infirm and shaky.

"So be it," he whispered. "I swear, on all I hold dear, that the boy will never lack a home, or safety and protection, while I breathe."

Lucanus had placed his hand over both of ours, and now he thrust down, breaking our grip in token of a bargain sealed. "So be it," he grunted, laughing. "Now may we go and eat? I, at least, am famished."

On the third day after that, we awoke before dawn to find the snow holding mastery over our new domain, drifting silently down in the stillness of the dark to lay a mantle of utter quiet upon everything. I had awaited its arrival with trepidation; we all had. Our memories of the recent evil winter were yet undimmed, and so we had prepared ourselves to face all manner of hardships here, so high in the hills. We bought up grain from Derek's people and laid in great stores of food and fuel and fodder for our beasts, all of which were safely housed beneath strong roofs. But that storm was brief, and after it had passed the air grew warm again, and the snow melted, so that we came to midwinter and a new year before we saw another snowfall. This time, however, the snow remained when the storm had passed and the air grew colder, but not lethally so.

The children had a wonderland in which to play, and the boys used the steeply sloping, cobbled surface of the hillside road as a chute. They spent entire days, once Dedalus and Rufio had shown them what to do, hauling heavy, metal shields high up towards the pass above the fort, then sliding down, perched on these precarious chariots, to where a high bank of snow, thrown up by some of the men for that purpose, checked their dangerously swift descent. Turga had been scandalized when she learned what the two men had shown the boys, and Rufio, who spent much time with her, earned the rough edge of her tongue to such an extent that he maintained a wary distance from her for days afterward.

I remember quite clearly that I was of Turga's opinion for a while, since my first sight of the activity had revealed Arthur himself, whirling like a top, his hair flying as he clung fiercely to the edging of a circular, metal-bossed shield within the curve of which he sat cross-legged. His teeth were bared in what I took to be a fearful grimace while the thing spun downward, beyond control, at a speed far greater than any horse could run. As I watched in horrified disbelief, my mouth open in a strangled shout, the thing mounted the snow piled on one side of the narrow road, shot down again and catapulted across to the opposite edge of the road, flying into the air and sending the boy, shrieking, into a snowbank. I began to run towards him, calling for help, but he leaped to his feet and began jumping up and down in glee, screaming to Gwin, Ghilly and Bedwyr, who were still high up at the top of the descent, staring down at him.

Bedwyr, whom I now saw to be holding a rectangular, Roman-style shield, immediately launched himself forward, throwing himself belly down along the thing, and shot down the incline. Feeling distinctly foolish at my own panic, I stopped running and watched the way the boy was controlling his descent, guiding the flying shield with his hands on the two leading corners and throwing his weight from side to side to steer himself at incredible speed around the bends in the road. With a clattering roar, he swept past the point where Arthur had left the road, and no sooner was he gone than Arthur was in pursuit of him, leaping into his circular chariot as soon as its surface touched the snow- packed cobblestones.

A glance upward and to my left showed me Gwin and Ghilly, following both of them at breakneck speed. But where they and Bedwyr rode rectangular shields, and could control them to a degree, Arthur's circular conveyance permitted no such mastery. I watched young Gwin approach rapidly and hurtle by until he was lost to sight, and then, shaking my head, I made my way down the bank in the direction in which they had disappeared, hearing the delight and excitement in their voices as I approached. They were already struggling back up the roadway they had just descended, but now Bedwyr had the circular shield and Arthur the heavy, rectangular scutum. They saw me and called out greetings, and I went down to where they had stopped in the roadway to wait for me.

Their faces were bright red and their eyes sparkling, but I had no thought of their being cold. They were obviously much warmer than I was, and I fancied I could even see steam rising from their skins and from their clothing. I greeted them cordially, masking my concern, then asked them where they had found the shields. At the sound of my question the faces of the three younger boys fell, but Arthur answered instantly.

"From Ded and Rufio. They showed us how to use them. The shields are surplus, Ded said. They belong to no one."

I knew the boy had beaten me. I could not forbid them to use the shields now, for to do so would amount to a public chastisement of Dedalus and Rufio, and it was clear to me the young scamp knew it. I nodded towards the circular one, which rested now against Bedwyr's leg. "That one's not Roman, where did it come from?"

"It's Erse," young Gwin answered. "It's one of the ones taken from the Sons of Condran."

"Ah, I see. You trust it, then?" I saw from their blank expressions that they didn't understand my weak attempt at humour. I looked at Arthur. "You rode it down." My glance switched to Bedwyr. "But you're carrying it up, why?"

"It's my turn!" He was adamant, and I was left in no doubt that possession of the round shield was a privilege.

"Your turn? You mean you prefer an Erse shield to a Roman scutum?"

Arthur grinned at me, his eyes dancing. "For this, yes. It's much more fun, far more thrilling. Would you like to try it, Cay? Ded's really good on it."

I had a sudden vision of myself shooting down that snowy road, clutching the spinning thing and spewing vomit, for I recalled that, as a boy of Arthur's years, I had been incapable of swinging on a rope the way the other boys my age had loved to. An old willow tree, hanging above the deep hole in which we swam, had been the anchor for a long, thick, heavy, knotted rope on which all of my friends had soared to let go and plummet to the water beneath. I had never used it after my first few attempts. On horseback, I had been supreme, because I had control, anchored by the grip of my legs; once beyond that control, however, the swooping thrill of undirected motion nauseated me immediately and violently. Just recalling it, my stomach heaved. I grimaced and shook my head.

"No, I think not. I doubt my stomach could handle it. Beside, it looks too dangerous for me." I could not resist one last, pusillanimous remonstration, however, looking at each of them briefly in turn. "But be careful. If you should hit a rock, moving so fast, you could injure yourself badly."

"No." Bedwyr was grinning now. "You can throw yourself off the shield, anytime. Besides, there are no big rocks close to the road—they've all been cleared."

I surrendered and left them to their games.

Less than a month after that, the thaw set in as spring made its arrangements to arrive early that year.

Short and mild as the winter had been, it had nonetheless deprived us of all contact with Derek and his people since the first snowfall, so that by the time the new grasses began to sprout, we were sick and tired of the sight of our own faces. My announcement that we would all ride together, eighteen of us, into Ravenglass, was therefore received with general delight.

On the eve of our departure, in the short evening just before the sun set, I called all our group together before the evening meal and reminded them yet again of the necessity of keeping up our pretenses on arriving in Ravenglass the following day: I must continue to be merely Cay, to all of them, and Hector must be accorded the deference that once had been shown to me, as Caius Merlyn. The warning was unnecessary by that time, I hoped, but well worth reiterating, since our ongoing safety depended heavily upon the conviction of others that Merlyn of Camulod had sailed away the year before, with Connor Mac Athol and the Pendragon brat.

When the meeting had broken up among a chorus of good wishes for a restful night and some excited speculation about the following day's journey, I set out alone to walk back to my quarters. I had barely gone ten paces, however, when I found myself flanked by Donuil and Shelagh, each of whom linked an arm through one of mine, so that we arrived outside my door mere moments later as a triple entity joined at the elbows—an unholy Trinity, according to my heathen Erse friends, who had picked up enough of the elements of Christianity to be embarrassing when they wished to be.

I stepped inside and busied myself at the fire-pot, blowing the smouldering embers to life and lighting a taper with which to carry flame to the lamps, for though it was yet but early evening outside, the shadows were far-stretched and it was already almost dark inside the buildings. As I bent to the lamp, holding the flaming taper to the wick, I saw that Shelagh had stopped on the threshold, just inside the door, and was looking about her with an air of exaggerated curiosity.

My living space was more than adequate for me. It had originally been the quarters of the centurion who ruled the barracks block, but it was enlarged at the time of the refurbishment of the building since, instead of eighty to a hundred legionaries, the block was now required to accommodate fewer than ten people, some of whom lived as couples. The actual living space seemed smaller than in fact it was, because much of the room was occupied by packing crates, containing some of the possessions I had brought with me from Camulod. The majority were in storage in the Horrea, the building that contained the granary and storehouses, warm and secure beneath a strong roof. Only the choicest items were in my personal possession, including, of course, the case that held Excalibur and the weapons I had chosen to bring with me from Publius Varrus's Armoury. These I could not have suffered to be out of my personal domain. Nor could I have slept secure without knowing that my greatest treasures, the books of Camulod, were safely stowed beside me, beneath my hand and eye. I also had the two heavy, iron- bound cases that had belonged to Lot's Egyptian warlocks, Caspar and Memnon, of evil memory. These I kept with me not for any love of their contents but simply because they were too dangerous to be left lying unprotected where people might be tempted, through simple curiosity if nothing else, to open them.

Shelagh was still hovering just inside the door. "Well?" I asked. "Are you not going to enter? Is my house to be feared?"

"No, not feared, but perhaps fretted over. You lack your servant very visibly, Cay."

Donuil, who had been my servant and my adjutant until I refused his services upon our arrival here in the north-west, began to flush and moved to stand up from the seat into which he had subsided on entering. I waved him back into his seat, keeping my eyes on his wife and smiling because I knew she had a point she wished to make.

"Lack my servant? You mean my adjutant, I presume? Not so, then. I have no need of servants here and am more than capable of looking after my own needs."

She threw me a look of bright-eyed scorn, and her Erse temperament flashed at me. "Oh, I don't doubt your capabilities, Caius Merlyn. It's your concentration that I worry about—that, and your sense of priorities."

I frowned at her through a grin, mocking her fierceness. "What do you mean, woman? Am I going to have to warn you again that your shrewish tongue is for your husband and that I need never hear it? What is wrong with my sense of priorities?"

She flicked her eyes around the room again, a lightning- quick glance into which she managed to compress a world of disparagement. "Exactly the same thing that is wrong with every other man's priorities: they are male priorities."

I raised my hands and brought them together, applauding slowly, knowing it would exasperate her into laughter. She glared at me with narrowed eyes for several long moments, but then she stepped forward into the room and stooped to run her finger along the top of my main table. A long, glowing line appeared where she had stroked, gleaming richly through the dust.

"There you are, look at that! Have you ever seen the like of that before, in the quarters of Commander Caius Britannicus?"

"No, Shelagh, I have not. But there are no military commanders here. These are the quarters of plain Master Cay, a landless farmer, currently inhabiting an ancient and abandoned Roman fort. Who is this Commander Caius Britannicus?"

"Someone I used to know." She stroked her fingers again through the dust that blanketed the highly polished surface of the table. "But I must say the landless farmer Cay owns some very fine furnishings." She looked about her again, sighing. "You need help, Cay, in your simple day-to-day living, as do most of us here in this little, bustling and much-demanding place we have built for ourselves. You are far from unique. But, since you refuse to accept assistance from either myself or Donuil, or from any of the others, I have a suggestion to make."

I placed the lamp down on the table top with exaggerated care and bowed to her, waving my open hand in the direction of an empty chair. "Please, Shelagh, sit down. You'll find you can speak just as clearly from a seat as you can when you are standing, and you will find that I listen with more care when I attend a seated speaker."

She looked at me sidewise, but moved without further protest to sit beside her husband, who sat silent, smiling gently at me. When she was settled, I leaned back in my chair with a smile of my own.

"So, you were saying I need help, as do some others, and you have some suggestions. I would like to hear them."

"Good. Our party needs new blood and new incentives. We are eighteen, here in our high-perched fort: four children, three wedded couples, one unmarried woman and seven single men—you, Lucanus, Hector, Dedalus, Rufio, Jonathan and Mark. Ten men to four women— those proportions are unhealthy. Even removing Rufio, who spends enough time with Turga to be considered wedded, that still leaves six men with requirements that demand attention."

I sat smiling at her. "So, what are you suggesting, Shelagh? That we six who remain should all rush out and find wives for ourselves?"

"Hmm. It would not be a bad idea, were it achievable. But no, that is not what I am suggesting. My suggestion is that when we travel into Ravenglass tomorrow, we make an effort to increase our numbers by judicious recruitment—" She held up one hand to cut me off before I could begin to reply. "I know we decided we've no need of anyone other than ourselves, and that we need to keep our heads low, Cay, but think of this: could there be any better way of hiding among these folk than hiding among these folk?"

I sat staring at her, hearing what she had said but failing to understand it. Finally I squinted at her, to show my incomprehension.

"What?"

"Think, Cay! We are alongside them, separate now, not among them, and they're not among us. I'm saying let's bring some of them up here, men and women, to live and work with us. Derek talks about his town being overcrowded, and we have just discovered, during a mild winter, that we are few and would be glad of others to spend time with us in the short days and the long, dark nights. Here is opportunity to benefit everyone. We could ask Derek to send some of his people up here to live with us, and we could have the right to pick those who would come."

"Hmm." I could see the rightness of what she was saying, and I glanced at Donuil. "It sounds reasonable, put like that. What think you, Donuil?"

Donuil grinned and stretched, yawning elaborately. "I think I'm hungry and I'm glad it's dinner time. I also think my wife is a very clever woman and her suggestion has great merit and I know I couldn't have come up with it."

"Hmm." I looked back at Shelagh, who sat watching me, and nodded to her. "I agree with Donuil. I'll talk -to Derek when we get to Ravenglass. Have you thought about how many of his people we could use?"

"I have. We need craftsmen, and skilled women. I think couples should be counted as one, provided both halves have usable skills. Then we'll need sawyers and more tanners, and we could use a cooper. We are eighteen, but that is really only fourteen, since four are children. We could be fifty, easily. We have no lack of space and accommodation, and there are no problems with feed or water or hunting."

"And you feel sure about being able to select only the kind of people we would require, according to our own criteria?"

"Oh, aye. This place has much to recommend it to folk who live in crowded towns ... especially in spring, summer and autumn. I think we'll have no shortage of volunteers, and strong young men."

"And strong young women, too, eh?"

She looked at me, a look of wide-eyed innocence. "Of course, strong young women. We've lots of work here for strong young backs. And our own young men, like Jonathan and Mark, need to be challenged."

"Challenged. Aye." I sighed, aware that I'd been bested. "Very well, Shelagh. So be it. But we'd best speak to Hector tonight about it, and not leave it till the morning. He has the right to know this information before anyone else. Now, let's go to dinner. He'll be there already."

There was a festive air about our group as it wound its way along the road to Ravenglass the following day. Some of us—myself, Dedalus, Donuil, Shelagh and Rufio—were mounted singly, the boys rode on their matched, piebald ponies, and the other nine occupied our little train of four horse-drawn wagons, empty on the way down but intended to be laden for our return. The day had dawned bright and sunny, warm with more than a mere intimation of the spring to come, so that our sense of well-being expanded remarkably as we came down from the heights, off the flanks of the hills and into the fertile vale of the Esk amid welling bird-song that seemed to hang over the valley like a fluttering fabric.

I rode to the head of the column and then drew my horse aside to watch the remainder of our group as they passed, shaking my head in discouragement to several who would have stopped to talk with me and waving them on in the understanding that I wished to be alone for a spell. The boys, on their ponies, were on the move constantly, ranging far along the road to the west ahead of the slower, more sedate adult party, but returning continually to check our progress, warned as they had been not to roam too far ahead.

As we emerged from the forest into cultivated fields, the skies grew wide above our heads and the trees fell back and away behind us, so that the spectrum of colours surrounding us changed from the deep greens and tranquil browns of the mossy, silent, light-dappled oak forest to the vibrant new green shoots of young, healthy crops against bright, black earth. The branches of the willow trees along the river's edge to the right of us were limned with the yellowish hint of bursting buds, teasing the eye with the faintest, wordlessly suggested promise of new leaves. And then, as we drew closer to the town, we began to encounter people, in ones and twos, most of them working in the fields that bordered the road. Many waved a greeting on seeing us, and occasionally one would approach us to talk, as hungry as we were ourselves for the sight of familiar but long-unseen faces and agog with curiosity about our winter up on the hills.

Derek, by that form of magical foreknowledge that always seems to accompany arrivals such as ours, came out to meet us before we had even entered the town about the fort. He was in fine fettle that day, boisterous and loud, and he made us noisily welcome, sending some of his people running ahead again to prepare quarters for all of us within the fort. Donuil and Shelagh, and Hector and I would stay with Derek, in his own house. The others would be spread among the other buildings. Arthur and the other three boys, along with Turga, their custodian and self- appointed supervisor, would stay with a family who had ten children, among whom four extra faces would be barely noticeable. Dedalus, Rufio and die others would fend for themselves. Before we broke up to go our separate ways, however, Derek insisted on escorting us personally to see to the arrangements for lodging our horses and storing our wagons with his own horse-keeper, the taciturn little man called Ulf.

Ulf's reaction to seeing our big, southern mounts again was as truculent as it had been the very first time. His own beasts were all considerably smaller than ours, and he had dragged our horses away to the back of his enclosures, where they would not be seen by anyone who did not already know them to be there. I would have sworn that first day that he was angry and disgusted with having to accept our horses, but as long as they remained in his care, all of them, including my Germanicus, the biggest of them all, shone like burnished things, their coats groomed to perfection.

I greeted Ulf affectionately, calling him by name, and smiled as he huffed and grunted in disgust, refusing even to acknowledge my presence as he took Germanicus's reins from my hand. Only with the four boys was he less than surly, allowing them to lead their own ponies by their halters as they walked behind him to the rear picket lines where he had decided our horses would be kept.

Late that evening, tired and feeling lazy after a pleasant hour spent listening to the songs of an exceptionally gifted visiting Druid—the man's talent was superb, surpassing excellence—I passed an open doorway and saw Shelagh sitting inside with Donuil and Derek around a glowing brazier. I stopped in the doorway and leaned inside to wish them all a good night's rest, and from the looks on all their faces, I knew they had been discussing me when I chanced by. I said nothing, however, and left immediately, carrying away with me memories of the speculative look in Shelagh's eyes when she turned to me, and the way the fabric of her dress clung to her breasts. I slept heavily that night and did not dream.

EIGHT

Connor's galleys came in with the dawn and were already moored to the wharf by the time I arrived, wiping the last vestiges of sleep from my eyes as I emerged onto the waterfront through the western gate. His arrival, like ours, corresponded with the end of wintry weather and a greater freedom to travel. Though his arrival was thus not entirely surprising, it provided, nevertheless, an unlooked-for and welcome addition to our celebrations. I heard Connor's voice bellowing my name and squinted upwards to where he swung through the air in his unique way of disembarking, his foot anchored in a loop slung from the lading hoist, his wooden leg pointing directly towards me, one hand clinging to the rope as his men lowered him swiftly to the timbered wharf. I reached him as he alit, swaying slightly, gauging his balance before releasing his firm grip on the taut rope, and we threw our arms about each other. He thrust me away and held me at arm's length, then, his hands gripping my upper arms as his eyes swept me from head to foot. I watched his face tighten in mock-horror as he allowed himself to examine my face and hair.

"Yellow Head! You're bearded like a Celt! And what happened to your hair? I'm going to have to call you Brownhair, now. Have you been ill?" He was laughing as he spoke, however, and I knew that he was unsurprised to see the changes in me. Before I could answer him he pivoted on his false leg, using his arm about my shoulders to turn me with him, and pointed up towards the stern deck of his galley. "Look you, up there! I bring you guests."

I was completely astonished to see both Ambrose and Ludmilla looking down at me and waving, their faces wreathed in smiles, and I felt my heart leap with pleasure as I waved back, calling a wordless welcome up to them. They moved back from my sight and I knew they would appear in moments on the gangplank, so I swung back to Connor.

"What is Ambrose doing here? How did he manage to get away from Camulod?"

Connor laughed and made an elaborate display of cautioning me, finger to his lips. "Shh! There is no Ambrose here, Brownhair. The man you waved to is Merlyn Britannicus, Commander of the Military Forces of Camulod. Don't you know anything? He has come here to visit with King Derek of Ravenglass. They are allies of old, you know."

I could only shake my head, accepting Connor's foolery. "Aye, I know. I've heard tell of their great comradeship from Derek himself. And I can't wait to meet this Merlyn Britannicus. But is it true that he comes all the way here in person solely to greet an old friend?"

"Why not?" Connor was still grinning, but his eyes were moving constantly, checking the activity aboard his galley, which was disgorging nets filled with cargo. "When Ambrose received and read your last letter—the one in which you outlined your plans to drop from sight, he approved completely. So excited was he by the thought of what you proposed to do, as a matter of fact, that he read your letter to me—a task not to be lightly undertaken, as my father would say. Your brother has but little skill with the Erse tongue. We had great fun, though, he and I, guessing and translating from the Latin, which is gibberish to my ears, into the Erse, which is gibberish to his. Thank the gods we can both speak the coastal tongue. Anyway, we did it, and we discussed the entire matter in great detail, agreeing that it made a certitude of the boy's safety.

"A short time after that, I left Camulod again and returned to spend what I thought might be the last winter any of us spends beneath my father's roof in Eire. While I was travelling, it occurred to me that if you were successful in your deception, disappearing completely without going away, then Ambrose himself might be able to further and to strengthen your designs by making an appearance here, as you yourself. No one has ever seen him in this part of the world, or even knows of his existence, but everyone saw you and your yellow head, before you 'sailed away' with the boy, aboard my galley. Now they'll see you again, in Ambrose. The gods know the two of you are as alike as two peas in a pod! They'll see Merlyn Britannicus arrive this morning, and they'll see him leave again within ten days, once more aboard my galley. None will doubt that, but what is even more, much more important, is that no one here, among Derek's people, will ever again think to look at you and see Merlyn Britannicus ... unless you choose to reveal yourself again at some future date. Here comes your brother now."

I reached the bottom of the gangplank before Ambrose and Ludmilla had negotiated its springy length, and I embraced both of them, suddenly overwhelmed by emotions that left me incapable of speech. Ludmilla was as beautiful as ever, although plumper, more matronly than I had ever seen her; she asked immediately about Shelagh, and then about Lucanus, Turga and the four boys. I answered her as well as I could, but having taken in her appearance of happy prosperity and contentment, I was now preoccupied in examining my brother. He looked magnificent—an obvious leader in every aspect and in every sense of the word—and I wondered what he was thinking about me, since I knew he was scrutinizing me every bit as closely. The crowds thronging the dockside swirled about us in every direction and we stood there, oblivious to them, the three of us content for the moment to share our own company in friendly, intimate, familial silence.

Still smiling, but assuming a more critical demeanour, Ambrose passed judgment at last on my outward appearance.

'The brown hair is ... nondescript, Brother. I preferred it when you looked much more like me."

"Hah!" I grinned at him and gripped his wife more tightly around her supple waist. "That's merely your opinion, Yellow Head, born of a lifetime of narcissism. Ask a woman who has had a surfeit of blond beauty how she feels about brown-haired and comely men, and I'll warrant you'll receive another answer. Is that not so, Ludmilla?"

She leaned away from me sideways, smiling, and peered back at me down the length of her nose "We-ell, Caius, I would have to say, speaking advisedly and as your sister in marriage, that had you looked this different, this unlike yourself, when you were younger, I might have taken more notice of you ... But then again, I might not. As a brother, however, I will confess that you are unequalled and quite surpassing any other such in all your attributes."

I blinked at her, wide-eyed and solemn, schooling my features into blankness before turning back to my brother. "Did your wife say what I think she said, that I am unique?"

"She may have, Brother, since you are the only brother that she has. I don't know. Then again, I seldom do. Being married to a goddess is a taxing task for ordinary mortals. It places demands upon men they are seldom fit to meet. Like comprehension of their spouses' wondrous wondrousness ... things like that ... "

"Yes ... " I reached out to intercept Ludmilla's fist before she could injure it against his breastplate. "But I think we had best bestir ourselves and go and find the others. Shelagh will be ecstatic to see the two of you. We had no idea you would be coming—" I broke off, my eyes moving from one of them to the other. "Why have you come? Is all well in Camulod?"

Ambrose cut me off again with a smile. "Hush, Cay, think you we would be here if anything were wrong? We came because we could, and for that reason alone. Everything is well, and better than well, at home. We had a rich and bountiful harvest followed by a short, mild winter, and my wife and I have not travelled together beyond Camulod since we were wed. Connor was coming here and had the space, and the time, to bring us with him, and I had messages for you and for Lucanus. So, we came. We will remain until Connor returns to collect us again, which will be, he estimates, within two weeks. Can you bear our company till then?"

"Aye, gladly, and for much longer." I turned to look again at Connor. "But only two weeks, you say? That is not much time, for a double crossing."

He shrugged, frowning. "Why not? It's more than enough ... Particularly since we'll be returning empty."

"Empty? From Eire?"

"Eire? No, we're not going to Eire. I told you, we wintered there, then returned to our holdings near Camulod.

Now I am bound for Alba, for our new holdings in the islands of the north-west, with twelve galleys full of Liam Twistback's cattle." He saw my look and laughed, waving towards the sea. "They're out there, safe out of sight where I left them, behind the island! No point in bringing them inshore to cause confusion, was there? Derek would have had an apoplexy to see them coming around the bank, thinking the Condranson fleet about his ears again. Logan and Feargus are riding with them, playing the sheep- herders to both flock and fleet. I must have speech with Derek—the work of an hour or so—and then I'm away again, before the tide turns. Everything I have to off-load here will be on the wharf within the half hour."

He glanced up towards his vessel again, checking the level of activity, and then reached out to shake with Ambrose.

"Farewell, Ambrose, and may the gods smile pityingly on you, stuck here as you'll be with these savages until I can return." He bowed over Ludmilla's hand. "My lady Ludmilla, I hope you will pass on my best wishes to my good-sister Shelagh, and I'll see you again soon."

He turned and clapped me a mighty blow on the upper arm with his open hand and then swept me into his embrace before stepping back to look at me with a grin.

"Look after these fine folk, Cay Brownhair, and take care they meet no ill, lest you bring the wrath of Camulod about your colourless head."

Then he was gone, leaving us alone on the wharf, listening to the receding thump of his wooden leg.

Knowing that Connor's men would bring their belongings after us, I led my guests towards the gate in the wall and beyond, into the fort and towards our temporary quarters. There, a squeal of delight from Shelagh told us we had finally been seen. From that moment on, everything degenerated into a chaos that endured through Connor's departure on the evening tide and then on into dinner. I had to resign myself to waiting until all the excitement had died down before I heard a single word of news from the south. Even then, I found I had to delve deeply for it, winkling each separate piece of information individually from my brother, who believed, and rightly so as I felt in the end, that there was nothing of real significance in any of it.

By the time we did manage to achieve sufficient privacy to speak with any kind of leisure about events in Camulod, it had grown late, and most of the household had retired. Lucanus had disappeared even before the evening meal, clutching the precious scrolls that Ambrose had brought for him, among them the one particular text that might shed light upon my condition. I was consciously willing myself not to dwell on that. Shelagh and the other women had gone off somewhere with Derek's chief wife, Jessica, after dinner, and had not returned. We men who remained—some score of us—had been left alone in one of Derek's private rooms, well-lit with lamps, tapers and tallow wicks and brightened and warmed in addition by fires in great, open braziers in chimneyed firepits against the walls.

Now the night had advanced, the general talk had been exhausted, most of the others had gone off to bed—some on their own feet, others assisted by friends—and Ambrose and I were the only two left awake, lounging on Roman couches before the one fire that still burned brightly. We were speaking in Latin, the tongue in which we both were most at ease. The talk earlier had all been in the coastal tongue, a language I thought of as being the Britannic vulgate, a seething broth of varying Celtic dialects and tribal intonations that came close, from time to time, to being indecipherable. The local variants, in particular, had left my brother gaping in bewilderment on several occasions. Derek's people had a way of chewing vowel sounds that was unique in my experience. One of the local men had pronounced, on his departure, that he was "g'yaun 'ame." The expression on my brother's face on hearing that phrase had made me laugh aloud, to my own embarrassment when the speaker turned to gaze at me in curiosity, wishing to share the jest.

Behind me, I knew, young Arthur had slipped in a short time earlier to sit quietly against the far wall, evidently hoping to remain unnoticed. He was sleeping in my chamber this night, permitted, as a special privilege, to remain here in Derek's house with the adults on the first evening of his aunt and uncle's visit. I knew he had been abed for more than four hours already; his excitement had evidently prevented him from sleeping with his usual soundness. He had clung like a shadow to his Uncle Ambrose since the moment that morning when his eyes had first blazed with delight at the unexpected apparition of his hero. Remembering my own boyhood, the excitement of returning expeditions and the stories that were told, I decided not to send him away again, but now motioned him forward instead, waving him into a chair close by the fire. As the boy passed in front of him, smiling shyly, Ambrose reached out and grasped him gently by the upper arm, pulling him close and holding him in the crook of one elbow while pretending to pummel his ribs with his other hand before releasing him to pass on, reluctantly, to the seat I had indicated. Then, once the boy was settled, Ambrose began to answer my questions about Camulod.

Life in the Colony continued to progress smoothly, he told us, existence unfolding from day to day in growing peace and prosperity. As a final benison upon what had been a fruitful year in every sense, including the birth of large numbers of babies to our Colonists, the harvest had been huge the previous year, greater even than the three preceding years, each of which had, in turn, surpassed the years preceding it, so that the Colony's granaries, including six large new ones built to hold the year's surplus, were now filled to overflowing. No raids had occurred, even in the Colony's outlying areas, since our departure. I was glad to hear that, since that extended the period of lasting peace from interference to six years. It was always tempting at such times to believe that peace would be everlasting, but that was a foolish presumption. It was miraculous, I knew, that we had managed to avoid molestation in Camulod for as long as we had. True, the presence of our armed strength—and the awareness of it in the eyes of potential enemies—gave us an advantage, since only a heavily armed force would be able to dismiss the prohibitive cost of meddling with our Colony. But there were such forces out there, and their numbers were increasing as strong men—ambitious, successful warlords—grasped at power and gathered loyal men around them.

As for matters originating beyond Camulod, Ambrose said, inactivity and lack of urgency were the prevailing trends in all endeavours. There had been nothing of moment out of the south-west, he told me, with obvious satisfaction, and all of Cornwall lay silent and apparently at peace, despite Peter Ironhair's reputed presence there. From that quarter, he told me, silence was the greatest gift that could be hoped and prayed for. In Cambria, on the other hand, all seemed to be progressing well. Dergyll ap Gryffyd had been made king there, his rule ratified and consolidated now, and he was busily restoring order and prosperity to his Pendragon people. Pendragon longbows were being made again, in greater numbers than ever before, and the territories to the north and west of Camulod were full of groups of young Pendragon, learning the art of bowmanship.

He had heard nothing, either, from Vortigern's country to the far north-east, and so he expected that nothing there had changed. Vortigern, despite his ever-increasing problems with the Outlanders he had brought in years before to help him protect his people, must still be in control there, Ambrose believed, or we would have heard something to the contrary, and that, in turn, meant that Hengist the Dane was yet hale enough to dominate his fractious son Horsa.

Young Arthur sat quietly, listening to what was being said, his narrowed, tightly focused eyes indicating that his interest in what he was hearing was absolute. I noticed his head come up at the mention of Vortigern's name, and I saw plainly, from the look in his eyes, that he wished to speak, although I knew he would never have dreamed of interrupting us.

"What is it, Arthur? You look as though you have something you wish to say."

The boy stiffened and flushed with embarrassment at being noticed, and he began to shake his head, almost squirming in his sudden discomfort and plainly wishing the floor would open and swallow him. Watching him, I divined the source of his discomfiture immediately, and I found myself biting my lip distractedly, somewhat guiltily aware that the lessons I had been teaching him all winter had sunk home too well.

Ever since he and his companions had boisterously broken in on me on one occasion several months before, interrupting me without warning and distracting me greatly while I was in conference with Derek and his advisers on the terms and conditions that would apply to our tenancy of Derek's lands at Mediobogdum, I had taken considerable pains to convince the lad of the need for decorum in his behaviour around grown-ups. I was furious at the outset, and Arthur was made well aware that he had behaved badly that day, and that I had been much inconvenienced and put out of countenance by his thoughtlessness and irresponsibility.

It occurred to me now, however, upon seeing his reaction to my casual comment, that what I had viewed with so much displeasure had been no more than boyish high spirits finding their own outlet as they always have and always will. I had been too hard on the lad, to such an extent, indeed, that he squirmed now upon merely being addressed.

Ambrose looked, in some astonishment, from Arthur's face to mine, raising his eyebrow as if to ask me what in God's name was going on. Stricken by momentary cowardice, I merely shrugged. Ambrose looked back at the boy, whose head was hanging.

"Arthur? What's wrong with you? Do you have to pee?"

The boy looked up, his face flushed, and met Ambrose's gaze. "No, Uncle Ambrose."

'Then what's wrong with you? Didn't you hear what your Uncle Cay asked you?"

"Yes ... He asked if I had something I wished to say."

"And? Do you?" Arthur shook his head, very slightly, and not at all convincingly. "What's that? You have nothing to say?"

"No, Uncle."

"Well, there's a novelty! You have been sitting there listening to us for what, an hour? And you have nothing to say, no questions to ask, no comments to make? Are you Arthur Pendragon? Don't sit there staring at me, lad! I asked you a question. I thought you were my nephew, but now there seems to be some doubt. Are you Arthur Pendragon?"

The suggestion of a smile came and went from the boy's mouth. "Yes, Uncle Ambrose, I am."

"You are, by God! I thought you were. Then what's wrong with you? Why have you no questions in your head, for the first time ever since you learned to say a word? Have you been stricken mute? Have ants devoured your brain? Speak to me, boy! Tell me you are still alive, unchanged, unchallenged and unchained!"

Now young Arthur was smiling widely, his eyes dancing at his uncle's wit and ebullience, but he ducked his head again and deferred to me. "Uncle Cay has told me that young boys' opinions have no place in men's discussions."

"No, Arthur, that is not true—" I broke off, seeing the shocked surprise and disbelief in his startled eyes. I rose and moved to where he sat, laying my hand firmly on his shoulder as I sat down beside him. "Your Uncle Ambrose has no idea what we are talking about here, but you and I do, only too well." I then told Ambrose the story of Arthur and his friends interrupting my session with Derek and his counsellors and the lesson I had tried to teach.

I straightened up and sighed, looking only at Arthur, who gazed back, steadfastly now, into my eyes.

"I set out to teach you a lesson: that boys' voices have no place in men's affairs when and if their contributions are mere boyish noises and ill manners. I can see that you have learned that. But I also see now that you may have learned it too well, and incompletely. Can you see why speaking out tonight would be a different matter, and not an offence to your uncle and me? Think, please, as well as I know you are capable of thinking, about what I have just said." Even as I was saying the words I saw his brow clear and he nodded, slowly. "Aha. You see it now, the difference?"

Again he nodded. "Yes, I think so."

"Good. What is it?"

"Boys' voices have no place in men's affairs when and if their contributions are mere loud noises and ill manners ... " He arched his eyebrows the way he did in class, before he would articulate some thought that had occurred to him. "If that is true, it follows logically, therefore, that boys' voices may have some place in those affairs if they are serious and well informed." His eyes flicked from me to my brother and back to me. "Is that not so?"

"Aye, it is." I could smile again now, and I laid my hand on his head. "Serious is the key word, meaning sober and attentive and respectful. But a serious boy need not necessarily be well informed. Well intentioned might be a better way of putting it, for well-intentioned questions, well presented at the proper time, can lead to his becoming well informed ... Now, if you can remember what you wanted to contribute to this discussion, ask away."

The boy went very still, his gaze sharpening and his brows creasing very slightly as he marshalled his thoughts. Then he rocked from side to side, placing his hands palms down on his seat and anchoring them with his thighs, after which he sat hunched forward, gazing into the middle distance. I looked across his head to where Ambrose sat watching. Our eyes met, and Ambrose raised his eyebrows in a gesture of tolerant amusement, but our boy had now finished his deliberations.

"Not so much a question as a wondering," Arthur said. "I was wondering why it is that every great leader seems to carry the seeds of his own defeat with him, and why some of them manage to avoid having those seeds germinate, while others fail and perish because of them."

It was my turn now to be astonished. From time to time this boy, who lived and functioned as a normal, wild and thoughtless boy from day to day, was capable of coming up with the most astoundingly complex thoughts, observations and conclusions.

"Were we discussing that?"

"No, but you were talking of Vortigern."

"Yes, and where is the relevance to our discussion in your question?"

My tolerant question of the boy drew a disparaging glance and a withering response from the seldom-seen but very impressive man who dwelt inside him. "Isn't that obvious? Vortigern sowed the seeds of his own downfall When he imported Hengist's Danes to stand with him against the other invaders. My great-grandfather, Publius Varrus, wrote about it in his books, and so did Uncle Picus, and so have you, in your writings. In his hope of keeping the foxes away from his ducks, he brought a wolf into his house to live with him. He has committed the same basic error that the Romans did, when they took subject races and trained them in their own way of fighting, teaching them to overthrow the Empire. Alexander the Great, on the other hand, was far more fortunate. His weakness went unperceived."

"Alexander of Macedon?" Ambrose was grinning from ear to ear. "What was his weakness? He conquered the world, so it could not have been an overwhelming one."

"On the contrary, Uncle Ambrose, it could have been— should have been—a fatal one."

My brother frowned as though insulted, then looked at me. I kept my face blank, feeling no need to admit that my ignorance was as great as his. Arthur, in the meantime, was looking from one to the other of us, and I would have sworn he was unaware that neither of us knew what he was talking about. Finally, Ambrose bowed to the inevitable.

"Well, then, I admit you have me. What weakness have you identified in Alexander of Macedon—apart from his cavalry?" He was being facetious, of course, but the boy shook his head.

"No. That was it."

"What are you saying?" Ambrose's expression was ludicrous. "That it was a weakness? His cavalry?"

"No, his Companions."

"His—?" Ambrose threw up his arms in exasperation and looked to me for support. For my part, feeling as bewildered as he was, I schooled my features into calmness and cleared my throat before saying anything else. Arthur looked at me, waiting to hear what I would say.

"Arthur ... The Companions ... there are some who would say ... " I was beginning to feel ridiculous, and I cleared my throat ferociously and began again. "Look, boy, I have no wish to argue with you, but the Companions are generally accepted, by those who know anything about them, as the greatest fighting force of the Ancient World. They were hand-chosen by their king, Philip of Macedon, and they trained with him and rode to battle with him at their own expense, providing all their own horses, armour, weaponry and equipment. Each was an individual champion, a warrior of renown and unimaginable value, and when King Philip died, a victim of assassination, they transferred their entire allegiance to his son, the young Alexander, and conquered the world under his leadership, long before Rome had begun to gain any power of her own. How could they be defined, by you or anyone, as a weakness?"

Arthur grimaced. "Only in error. You are correct, Uncle. I've made the same mistake I made before: inexactitude. But, if I may say it without being impertinent, so have you and Uncle Ambrose. What I said at first was that every great leader seems to carry the seeds of his own defeat with him. It is the idea of the seeds that is important. It was Alexander's Companions who carried the seeds."

"What seeds, Arthur?"

"Their primary weapon of attack, the sarissa."

"The sarissa?" I could feel Ambrose's blank amazement and utter incomprehension mirrored on my own countenance. "Forgive me, lad, but I have no idea what you mean. We have been trying to improve upon Alexander's sarissa, in Camulod, ever since we first began to train our soldiers to ride horses."

"I know you have, and Uncle Ambrose is still working with it. But the design has changed. The weapons that the Camulodian troopers use are not sarissas, and therefore they are not so dangerous. Besides, Uncle Ambrose has also developed the means of counterbalancing their threat, even if it were there."

I looked at Ambrose. "My felicitations on that. What did you do?"

Ambrose shook his head and gestured with his hand to Arthur, attracting his attention. When he had it, he stood up and moved close to the fire, speaking down to the boy. "Tell me, Arthur, where have you learned all this about the sarissa?"

"From the books written by Publius Varrus and Caius Britannicus. The books from the Armoury in Camulod. We brought them with us when we came here."

"I know you did, but I thought I had read all of them, and yet I have no recollection of anything being said, in any of the volumes I have read, about the sarissa being a thing of weakness, or even a seed of weakness, which means I have not read all of them."

"Well, no ... "

"What does that mean?"

The boy shrugged. "That was never said, exactly, in any of the books. It was something that occurred to me while I was reading, and I merely wondered at it, when first I noticed it. I didn't think of it as weakness until much later, about a year ago, when I was thinking about how the Empire collapsed, and the weakness within the system that led to that."

I moved to interrupt him, but Ambrose waved me to silence. "No, Caius, let him finish. This is important, I think. I can see that weakness, Arthur, the Imperial flaw, I mean, but not the Alexandrian one. How—exactly how— did you come to construe the sarissa as a fatal weakness? No one else ever has, to my knowledge. Have you, Cay?"

I merely shook my head. Arthur looked from one to the other of us again, his eyes wide, and then his face split in a wide grin, his lambent, gold-coloured eyes laughing in disbelief.

"You are making fun of me. You know the answer better than I do. That's how you found the solution."

"No, Arthur, I'm not laughing at you, and neither is Caius Merlyn. I cannot see the problem—how then could I have found the solution to it? Tell us, as simply as you can, what you noticed, what made you think of this. We do not know, so you must enlighten us."

"But—"

"No buts! Tell us, simply. Where are these seeds of defeat?"

"In the length of the weapon, and the techniques the Companions used in fighting with it." He stopped again, but neither of us spoke or sought to interrupt him further. "It was a great, long thing, six paces long, heavy and unwieldy. They carried it in their opening charge, the butt end over their shoulders, the metal point angled downwards against the infantry before them. They skewered the front ranks and left the sarissas in the bodies of the men they had killed ... " His voice faltered. "Is that not so?"

"Aye, it is," Ambrose said, quietly. "And a terrifying sight they must have been, charging down upon a line of men on foot. A solid wall of men on heavy horses, fronted by that line of downward angled spears. Little wonder they were invincible."

"But think of it, Uncle! Great, heavy spears, each one six paces long. What would have happened had one man, one clever, brave, far-seeing enemy, ever thought to pick up those abandoned spears, or to make similar spears, and arm his foot soldiers with them, arranging the men on foot into a wall as well? Think of that! A wall of warriors, shoulder to shoulder, using those sarissas reversed, so that their butts rested firm on the ground and their points reared upward and out, towards the charging horsemen?"

The silence that followed that amazing insight stretched for a long, long time as Ambrose and I sat stunned, visualizing what the boy had described—a realization that had escaped the eyes of all the world for seven centuries. Alexander's cavalry had won him the world, but young Arthur Pendragon, had he lived at that time, could have devised the great Macedonian conqueror's downfall.

Faced with disciplined troops, using their own weapon against them, Alexander's cavalry would have been impotent and ruined. Here was an insight that had evaded every celebrated commentator down the ages, and it had been deduced, without assistance, by one small boy, who sat silent now, waiting timidly for his two towering uncles to ridicule his proposition.

I sat staring into the fire for so long that my eyes teared, but eventually Ambrose made his way to the table that held the ewers of beer and mead. There, deep in thought, he filled a cup for himself before turning back to look at the boy, cradling the cup, his drink untasted.

"We use Alexander's techniques in Camulod."

"Aye, Uncle, we do, but not the sarissa. Our spears are shorter—suited to a man on horseback, but not long enough to be used against him in the fashion I described by a man on foot."

"Aye, but you have put the idea into words now, lad, and once that's done, no matter how quietly it may be done, words have a way of spreading. You said I found the solution. If I have, I've done it blindly. What is it?"

"Our bowmen, of course! If anyone should ever attempt to use such spears against our cavalry, they will have to crowd together in a massed assembly, forming a wall and not merely holding, but bracing their spears, and that would leave them at the mercy of our bows. The concentrated fire of massed bowmen, in conjunction with our cavalry as you advocate its use, Uncle, would destroy any such formation before it could become effective. I thought you were aware of that. I was sure that's why you had been so adamant about combining both groups to back up our infantry."

"Hmm!" Ambrose smiled and shook his head, looking at me in rueful acknowledgment of my pride in my pupil. "Aye ... Well, I know it now, and be assured I'll never lose sight of it again." He placed his new-filled cup on the table, untouched. "Gentlemen, I am going to sleep ... I think. I know, at least, that I am going to try to sleep. Whether or not I am successful will depend upon the thoughts you have implanted in my mind this night, young Arthur. It's very late, and you should be abed, too." He glanced at me, his face unreadable. "Much to think about in the meantime, Brother, no?" I nodded, saying nothing. "Aye, much to think about ... boxes within boxes. We will talk more of this, come morning."

We parted company outside the room and Arthur walked by my side as we made our way to my sleeping quarters. I walked cautiously, my hand cupped protectively around the single candle flame we took with us to light our way. My room lay some distance away, and I was not yet familiar enough with Derek's great house to find my way there confidently in darkness, should we lose the candle's light. So deep in thought was I that the boy's voice startled me when it came. I had almost forgotten he was there, so softly did he walk.

"Uncle, what did Uncle Ambrose mean when he said 'boxes within boxes'?"

I coughed, giving myself time to think, unwilling to lie by saying I did not know. "He was referring to the import of what you have said ... what you have discovered, I should say. He was paying tribute to your mind's acuity, Arthur, and I concur in his judgment. That you should perceive this weakness of Alexander's at all is amazing—no one else ever has. But that you should have arrived at the knowledge unassisted, and at such a young age, based only upon your own reading and observations, is quite confounding.

It makes one wonder what other things might become clear to you, thus casually, things that have confounded older, and supposedly more clever, men for years, or even decades or centuries. Upon but little thought, there seems to be no end to the possibilities. That is what your uncle meant, in speaking of boxes within boxes. Do you understand that?"

"Hmm. I think so."

We had reached my sleeping quarters, where a cot had been installed for the boy beside my own, and moments later, both of us were abed. The boy fell into slumber quickly. I lay awake for a long, long time, planning what I would say to Ambrose when daylight came.

As it turned out, when daylight came I had the chance to say very little to Ambrose on the subject of Arthur and his brilliant deductive powers. Shelagh had not been idle, and after enlisting the assistance of Derek's wife Jessica, she had successfully laid siege to Derek's stubbornness on the matter of permitting us to approach his people with a view to finding extra residents for our hill fort. There was no unwillingness on his part to provide us with assistance on principle; he was more than willing to do that. The thing that stuck in Derek's craw, and which surprised me deeply until I perceived the reasoning behind it, was the matter of leaving the choice of who might join us in our hands.

Derek's contention was that anyone who wished to volunteer should be allowed to join us. Shelagh was adamantly against that. We had room, she maintained, for willing, skilled workers in specific crafts, and she named those skills and crafts. Married couples who shared these skills should be given preference, she asserted. In addition to those, she declared, we required a number of women, unencumbered women, to do women's work and to redress the sexual imbalance in our community. It followed naturally from that, she pointed out, that these women should have a certain calibre of Youthfulness, real or apparent, and of basic cleanliness and attractiveness, since their function would be as much social as anything else.

Witnessing—with more than a little detached amusement—the ongoing clash of wills between these two aggressive personalities, I suddenly discerned the true reason for Derek's intractability. Shelagh was declaring and asserting and maintaining and pointing out exactly what followed naturally from what; Jessica was agreeing, silently, but nodding vigorously; and Derek was reacting jealously, feeling outflanked, outmanoeuvred and outgeneraled.

I took Shelagh aside and whispered in her ear. She looked at me haughtily and made a face. Then she dipped her head and went back towards the king, apologizing for her own excessive enthusiasm and deferring belatedly, but charmingly, to his judgment and his wisdom. She played poor Derek like a fisherman playing a large fish, so that he ended up according her everything she had asked for at the outset, totally unaware of having done so. We spent the remainder of that day and night selecting two score new residents for our fort from among more than two hundred applicants who had flocked forward to volunteer their skills and services within the hour that followed Derek's public announcement of our interest.

That we were able to do so with such dispatch was due purely to the fact that everything we sought in this undertaking lay within Derek's own township. Most of the people who lived beyond the town itself were farmers, living close to their fields and crops, and we had no need of such skills on our high, rocky little plateau beneath the mountains' crest. Arable land was something we lacked completely, although plans were already afoot among us to convert some small part of the cleared forest, close to the fort, into something approaching fertile plots for growing vegetables. The people whom we sought were those whose gifts and skills could be adapted to making our seclusion tenable: barrel and pottery makers; shoemakers and boot makers, to provide protection for our feet on the stony mountainsides; cobblers to maintain those boots in good repair; leather-tanners and goat- and sheep-herders; carpenters and stonemasons and smiths; charcoal-makers to supply the fuel for our forges; fletchers to flight new arrows; grooms and farriers to tend our horses. Each time I thought to end the list, I found some other requirements I had overlooked.

Shelagh had a long list of her own that bore little resemblance to mine. She was concerned with finding bakers and cooks and butchers; flensers to skin and cure the hides from the beasts we killed; beekeepers and brewers and makers of mead to augment her own efforts; women adept at needlecraft and knitting, and at carding and teasing the rough brown wool of the native sheep; spinners of fine thread and coarser yarn; weavers of cloth, and people who knew the art of dying those cloths. All of these skills, could we find them, would make our lives much easier in Mediobogdum, for at the present time all of us were having to turn our hands to all the work, and we were poorly equipped to do so.

I chose to take no part in the selection process, content to leave the task to Shelagh and Donuil, Hector and Brunna, Lars's wife, who had long years of experience in the choosing of able workers. Seeing that I was distancing myself from the work in hand, Derek sought me out, in need of some comfort after the savaging he had received at the end of Shelagh's tongue. I commiserated with him shamelessly, agreeing that our Shelagh was a formidable woman with a tongue like a rasp, but pointing out that she was highly thought of by all who knew her well, for reasons he would doubtless soon discover for himself. Mollified by my sympathy and obviously wishing to make amends for his earlier stubbornness, he hesitated only long enough to gain my assurance that his people would remain his people, and that since we would be leaving someday in the foreseeable future, in a matter of short years, he would not only regain their presence but would also inherit the fruits of their labour in the form of a habitable fort here in the mountains. Immediately thereafter, greatly reassured, he threw himself into the task of supervising the selection process, adjudicating ruthlessly whenever there appeared to be a conflict or a choice to make in terms of quality and ability. I derived a great deal of ironic amusement from the fact that Derek immediately became our greatest asset in finding the people who would suit us most. He knew all of his people, of course, and was unblinkered in judging their strengths and weaknesses.

By late afternoon the task was complete, and we had swelled our ranks in Mediobogdum beyond our expectations. Every category we had hoped to fill was filled to Shelagh's satisfaction, many of them with couples who, between them, offered complementary skills. Thirty-eight adults would join us, twenty-six of those being thirteen married couples, including a brewer and his wife, a noted beekeeper. The remaining twelve were nine women, five of them young, and three men. The married couples would bring their families, totalling fourteen children ranging in age from two-year-olds to half-grown boys and girls.

Shelagh and the others were delighted. I was well-pleased. Derek was relieved to have the task completed, and that night we had a feast to celebrate the day's events.

Shelagh approached me in the course of that evening's celebrations, when I was leaning contentedly against a corner wall, eyeing the festivities. Ambrose had left me moments earlier to talk with Ludmilla, who had beckoned him to where she sat with Derek's Jessica, and Donuil was deep in a discussion with Dedalus on the other side of the room.

"Lucanus and Derek are close-huddled over there. I wonder what they're plotting?"

I had not seen her approach and I straightened up immediately, shrugging myself away from the wall and looking to where she was pointing. I smiled.

"They're an unlikely pair, I'll grant you, but I doubt they are plotting anything. They've known each other a long time, those two."

"Aye." She was already looking elsewhere, her glance sharpening, and I followed her gaze to where the two youngest, single members of our party, Mark and Jonathan, were huddled admiringly about one young woman. Her name, as I recalled, was Tressa, and I had met her earlier in the day when she brought me a mug of icy beer, addressing me as "Mester Cahy." She was a striking young woman, far from classically beautiful but gifted nonetheless with youthful beauty and colour, high, cushioned cheekbones, sparkling eyes and strong white teeth. She smiled naturally and often. I had admired her form. She wore a plain white tunic, modelled on the simply draped, classic Roman stola, which showed off her long, slim, graceful neck and the wide, straight shoulders that bore her high, full breasts with pride and artless magnificence. As she had turned to walk away from me, having bowed her head prettily in response to my thanks for her attentions, I had seen, too, that her buttocks filled the lower part of her garment very nicely. An impressive young woman, I thought at the time, and I was pleased now to see my own impression borne out by the attention our two youthful artisans were showing her. She threw back her head and laughed at something Mark said to her, and even from a distance, over the noise of the crowd, I heard the artless sound of it.

"That's Tressa," Shelagh said.

"I know. I met her earlier." I turned and looked at her. "Are you saying—"

"She's one of ours? Of course. Do you approve?"

I looked back towards the tall young woman. "You don't need my approval. Mark and Jonathan approve, I see that plainly."

"Aye. She's a seamstress, and a very good one. Her talents are spoken of with envy by all the women here. Some of the elder ones are jealous of her gifts and have Seen making things difficult for her, so she has much incentive to come to us. We will appreciate her skills without resentment. She'll help you."

"Help me? How, and with what? I need no help."

"Oh, don't you?" She reached out and thrust the end of one index finger through a tiny rent in my sleeve. I had never seen it before, but I knew it was new. I vaguely remembered catching it on something I was passing, earlier that day. "No, it's clear you don't, not even from someone who could keep you clad and mended without your noticing."

"I can take care of such things by myself."

She smiled sweetly at me and straightened up to move away. "Of course you can, Caius. We both know your opinions on that—you need nothing. But that is your opinion. I disagree with it."

Before I could find a response, she was gone, gliding towards her husband, who was smiling at her. Disturbed, somehow, I turned to look again at the young woman Tressa, but she had gone as well, and then I realized that she was close beside me, less than a pace from me, smiling.

"Mester Cahy, c'n I fetch thee to drink?"

Flustered by her sudden proximity, I managed to thank her graciously, refusing her offer, raging at myself internally for the damnable redness I could feel flooding my face. She appeared not to notice; instead she kept her eyes fixed on mine, smiling at me as I stammered out my words. When I had done, she nodded pleasantly, and I had to fight against the urge to watch as she walked away.

A short time after that I saw her again across the hall, talking to Jonathan, and as I looked, she raised her head and her eyes looked directly into mine. Before I could avert my gaze she smiled again and dipped her head in the slightest nod before returning her eyes and her attention to Jonathan. A moment later, while I was still watching her, I heard Donuil's voice addressing me and I turned to find his wife gazing at me from beside him, a small, secret smile on her lips. I felt a strange surge of anger towards her but recognized it as being unreasonable and stifled it. Very shortly after that, I went to bed, where I fell asleep with Tressa's good-natured, disconcerting smile hovering in my mind.

The following morning, as dawn was breaking, we prepared to bid farewell to Ravenglass again and turn our steps towards our hilltop home. Those of our new neighbours who were sufficiently free of duties, obligations and other encumbrances—slightly more than half the newcomers—accompanied us. The others would follow within the next few days, as and when they were able to. Ambrose and Ludmilla rode with us too, both of them keen to see what we had made of our own private fortress among the towering Fells.

As I sat watching our assembling party that morning, my thoughts were split in two directions: the greater part of my attention was bent upon organizing our train, which had now swollen from the four wagons we had brought down empty with us—they were now all filled to capacity—to include the transportation for another thirty- some adults and children. This hotchpotch of vehicles ranged from ox-drawn carts, to wagons drawn by horses and mules, to light carts, with high, narrow wheels that were evidently intended to be pulled along by hand. These latter vehicles, and there were four of them, I eyed askance, thinking it would be a major undertaking to push or pull them up the steep, narrow gradient leading from the river vale to our rocky plateau so far above. I knew, however, that it would matter nothing to me, and these people were native to the land, so I assumed they knew the task that lay ahead of them in climbing up to Mediobogdum.

Conflicting with the need to concentrate on preparing for departure, however, was an equal, or perhaps an even greater need to dwell at length upon the brief discussion I had had, an hour or so before, with Lucanus. My mind had not yet adjusted to the news that he had delivered, and as I sat there on Germanicus, high up and securely mounted in my saddle, I felt a surge of giddiness that might have sent me crashing to the ground had I not braced myself and sucked in a mighty, belly-deep breath.

Luke had approached me as I broke my fast on a mess of boiled wheat and oatmeal with milk and honey, in Derek's kitchens. Returning my nod of greeting, he had sat down across from me and helped himself to a slab of heavy, fresh-baked bread, smearing it with some of the thick honey I had been using to sweeten my oatmeal. We both sat silent for a while, absorbed in the task of eating/Finally, however, Luke sat back, rubbing his hands and wiping a smear of honey fastidiously from the corner of his mouth with the tip of a little finger, and he stared at me wordlessly until I grew uncomfortable, sensing that he had something momentous to say.

"What? What is it?"

"That thing on your breast, the mark."

My stomach swooped and I felt goose-flesh break out across my shoulders.

"What about it? What have you discovered?"

"It's what I thought it was, some kind of skin blemish, almost definitely harmless."

"You have read the scroll, then, the one from the wooden chest in Camulod?"

"Of course, and it contained nothing of relevance to what you described about your experience with Mordechai — nothing at all that might confirm your fears. You have a blemish there, not any kind of lesion, and, in my belief, most certainly not leprosy."

I heard a roaring in my ears and the room began to spin about me, so that I had to grip the edge of the table with both hands and breathe deeply. Luke sat watching me, a faint smile playing about his lips. When I had control of myself again, and my breathing had returned to normal, I let go of the table's edge and sat up straighter, expelling one last, deep breath in a great "whoosh" of air. His smile grew broader then and he clapped his hands together.

"I can see you feel better already."

I nodded, not yet prepared to trust my voice to speak without wavering.

"Excellent, now hear what I have to say. In any normal case, I would have prescribed exposure to the sun and air for such a thing. But your fears to date have rendered your affliction abnormal to the point of precluding such treatment, in addition to which it has been winter, too cold to go bare-chested. All of that has changed now and the warm weather is coming. From now on, as much as you are able in fine weather, I want you to go unclothed above the waist. The browning effect of the sun will likely mend what ails you, no matter what it is, and render the thing less conspicuous."

"I may do that?"

"May? Of course you may! There is nothing wrong with you, Caius, nor has there been. My original diagnosis now holds true. The sum of my experience, and that of my colleagues down the ages, tells me that you have never been exposed to contagion for long enough to have contracted leprosy, so will you accept that now, once and for all?"

I nodded again, more slowly now, aware of the incredible sensations of relief and delivery from danger that were surging riotously through my breast and in my mind. "Thank you, my friend," I said, my voice almost inaudible even to me. "You will never know the extent of my gratitude to know that I am clean and unfouled." An image came into my mind, filling my awareness—the image of his lovely, deeply carved and glowing citrus wood chest. For all this time, throughout my agonized imaginings, it had contained the healing balm that would put my mind to rest. And then my curiosity stirred.

"So what did the scroll have to say about blood and contagion?"

"Nothing directly concerned with your condition, as I said." Luke folded his arms and leaned back against the wall behind his bench. "It was written by a physician called Oppius, Quinctilius Oppius, a renowned and celebrated teacher in the diagnosis of disease, at Alexandria during the reign of the Emperor Galerius, a hundred years or so ago. Oppius was a great admirer of the work of Galen— have you heard of him? Well, Galen was the greatest physician who ever lived, greater even than Aesculapius. He was born in Pergamum, where his father was an architect, and he studied anatomy in Alexandria before going to Rome, where he remained for forty years, first as personal physician to the emperor Marcus Aurelius and then, after Marcus's death, to the emperors Lucius Verus, Commodus and Septimius Severus. Galen was a wondrous writer, inscribing all of his findings and theories on the practice of his art. His treatise On Anatomical Procedure is the greatest medical text ever written, but he wrote also on healing methods, De methodo medendi, and on the natural faculties, and on the movement of the muscles.

"Galen had been dead a hundred years before Oppius began his work, following the great physician's methods and procedures. It was while Oppius was engaged in working in Asia Minor, at a time when a military action concurred with an outbreak of plague and the medical facilities were overwhelmed, that he became aware of an anomaly that caused the spread of plague infection, in a military ward, among legionaries whose wounds should never have become infected. Oppius formed a theory that these infections might have been caused by the overuse of bandage wrappings that had previously been used to bind plague victims. The wrappings had been washed between uses, of course, but apparently they had not been boiled, which would have been mandatory in less hectic times. We have known for centuries that boiling water cleanses it of impurities. Anyway, Oppius launched himself upon a program to explore this theory of his, and later wrote the treatise that I found long afterward, contending that the careless application of bloody, pus-stained bandages, improperly washed, to open wounds could spread contagion."

I sat blinking at him. "Does that sound feasible to you?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "I am not prepared to state an opinion. Pus is part of the healing process, formed by the body's natural purging of the toxins that contaminate a wound or a sore. From that position, knowing that it is an effluent full of contaminants, no sane physician would ever dream of introducing pus from one man's wounds into another's."

"Consciously, you mean."

He stared at me. "Aye. That is what I mean. But the bandages Oppius used in his studies were clean and washed."

"Some boiled, but some not?"

"Yes, and I see what you are implying, but we have only the words of Oppius, written a hundred years ago and more, from which we can infer any difference between the two. And let me be explicit: his findings in this case, and his proposal that the application of heat, in the boiling process, may make a material difference to the dressings, seem outlandish to me."

"I accept that, but ... " I was perplexed, and totally aware that I was beyond my depth in discussing such matters, and yet a point had occurred to me and I wanted to present it.

"We know, Luke, those of us who have any knowledge of the art of smithing championed by Publius Varrus, that the application of heat—extreme heat—invariably has the most salutary effect on iron, the hardest metal known to man. Cold iron is practically impossible to work. Heat it red-hot, however, and you may work your will on it. Heat it white-hot, and you may tie it in knots ... " I paused, considering my own words. "I know that cloth bandages, dressings, have nothing akin to metal in their make-up, but heat applied to them is heat in either instance. Is it not, then, conceivable that the link, if there is a link, may lie in the heat, the temperature itself, rather than in the material being heated?"

Lucanus stood up at that point, smiling broadly and tightening his belt. "I have no idea," he answered. "You may be right, my friend, and you may be completely wrong. Neither of us has the means of gauging the truth, in either direction. Nonetheless, I like the way you think. It has a clarity that is all too uncommon among those around us. I promise you that I will think on this, and try to see if I can find some way to investigate this matter further without endangering the health of anyone. In the meantime, I have promised Shelagh that I will wait on her before first light, before she leaves her rooms to join the excursion. I will talk more of this with you later. In the meantime, try to remember that there is nothing wrong with you. You are completely healthy, without flaw, apart from one small blemish that the sun will obliterate. Farewell." He left me then, allowing me to dwell on my reprieve and on my sudden, swift return to health.

Mere moments later, Ded had stormed into the kitchens looking for Rufio, and I had been up and out into the predawn freshness, joining the bustle already long under way in the crowded street in front of the old Praesidium, so that as the sun arose, it shone directly into my new, unblemished outlook on life.

Now I squeezed Germanicus between my spurred heels and brought him backing around to face the road ahead of us. Shelagh and Lucanus were already in motion, riding together slowly, side by side, towards the distant eastern gate. Ahead of them I could see Dedalus and Rufio riding on either side of Ambrose. Ludmilla sat in comfort on the driver's bench of our largest wagon, beside Turga and Hector, who held the reins, and the four boys on their piebald ponies were lost to view, beyond the gate already. I waved a last farewell to Derek, who stood watching from the forecourt of his massive house, then raised my arm above my head and gave the signal to move out. Twelve miles ahead of us and far above our heads lay Mediobogdum.

NINE

"Very well, I am going to admit defeat before you even challenge me. I confess you have me beaten, outmanoeuvred and outfoxed. I have no hope of guessing what it might be and so I must ask you, what is it?"

I had stopped moving as soon as I heard Ambrose begin to speak from behind me, and now I continued to stand, bent forward slightly, my arms outstretched, my hands loosely cradling the upper end of the length of wood I had been swinging, still breathing heavily from my exertions. I felt my face creasing into a smile as I visualized my brother's possible reactions to what I would tell him. Then I drew a deep breath and straightened up slowly, turning to face him and throwing the object in question to him, underhand. He caught it easily and held it upright at arm's length in front of him.

"You tell me," I said. "What does it look like?"

"It looks like a heavy stick, a branch torn from some old tree, stripped of its bark and dried, possibly in a kiln, then covered with carving. I am tempted to call it a long, purposeless stick, but then I know my earnest, conscientious brother Merlyn would never waste his time with anything as simple as a stick. So I must ask again—what is it?"

"It's a stick, as you said."

"Aha!" He nodded sagely. "But a solid stick, a formidable stick, would you not agree? A stick of substance, long and heavy."

"Yes, I would agree, on both counts, which is why I was using it."

"I see." He nodded again, his face grave, for all the world as though he knew what I was speaking about and we were having a perfectly rational conversation. "Yes, I can see why a rational man might wish to have such an excellent stick, so solid and substantial, of such evident, straightforward purpose. A man could lean on a stick like that, to aid him as he walked, if he were infirm, or older than you are."

"Aye, and if the thing were longer than it is, but it's too short. It is a stick, after all, not a staff. But then, I had no thought of walking with it."

"Hmm. Yes, I could see that. You were ... swinging it about your head, were you not?"

"I was."

"Aye, I thought you were ... Would it vex you if I asked you why?"

"No, it would not. I was exercising my arms—my shoulders, in fact."

My brother stared at me, allowing no hint of raillery to show upon his face. He was seeking a way to lead this strange conversation further, in the hope, I knew, of discovering what I was up to without having to ask me bluntly again. He was holding the stick awkwardly now, uncertain of how to proceed, and I decided to help him out. I bent quickly, flexing my knees, and retrieved another length of wood, almost identical, from the grass at my feet.

"I have two of them, see? Would you like to learn their use?"

His face cleared immediately and his teeth flashed in a broad smile. "I would," he said.

"Good, then I'll show you, but you'll have to remove that cloak, at least until you learn the knack of what we'll be about."

As he fumbled with the fastening of his cloak, holding the stick beneath his arm to free his hands, I removed my helmet, indicating that he should do the same. Moments later, we stood facing each other, each of us wearing a leather cuirass, front and back, over our pleated, knee- length Roman tunics.

"Now, do as I do. This is very simple." I held my arms outstretched towards him, my stick grasped easily in both hands at its ends. He did the same, and I beckoned him towards me until our fists were touching, knuckle to knuckle. Then I raised my arms vertically over my head, feeling my stomach flatten and the flexor muscles of my shoulders stretch, and I watched Ambrose closely as he copied my movements exactly. This was a flexing movement I found easier now than I had a few months earlier, when I first began these exercises. In the beginning, I had cramped quickly, my muscles unused to the contortions to which I was suddenly subjecting them. Now, after months of practice, I was more supple, much more flexible, and I knew Ambrose would already be feeling the strain in his shoulders.

"Comfortable?"

He nodded, the slightest hint of perplexity in his eyes, and while his head was yet dipping I released my left hand, whipping my long, heavy stick around to the right and down from above my head to whack loudly against the thickened hide of his heavy cuirass, sending him reeling but unhurt, releasing his own left hand from its grip on his stick so that his right waved aimlessly, still clutching his "weapon." Before he could recover, I leaped in close and whacked him again, this time with an upsweeping, backhanded blow from left to right that took him viciously beneath the right shoulder, rattling against the covering over his ribs and once again forcing him to fall back. Even as he went I was on the move again, gripping my stick firmly now in both hands and driving the end of it forward, hard and fast, my weight solidly behind it, to strike him clean above the breastbone so that his balance was undone at last and he fell on his rump. As soon as he was down, I leaped back and crouched, facing him, holding my stick firmly in a two-fisted grip, one end pointed unwaveringly at his head.

He sat sprawling backwards, his hands out-thrust behind him. His stick lay on the ground beside him. After a long, silent time, he pursed his lips and began to rise to his feet, his look one of quiet determination as he sought and found the stick he had dropped. Then, holding his weapon like me, in a two-fisted grip, he began to circle me warily, his eyes on mine, waiting for an opportunity to strike a blow of his own.

I moved with him, fading backwards, balanced easily on the balls of my feet, and then I feinted rapidly forward and to my left before snapping back to where I had been. But Ambrose, my wily brother, was not gulled and did not react; he was content to wait. He and I had fought before and he knew many of my patterns, as I knew many of his. In this contest, however, I was confident of winning, for I had been practising this new technique for months, whereas he had never seen it before now. Ambrose was no man's fool, however, and least of all mine ... we were much too alike. I soon saw that we might circle here all day, but that he was not going to commit himself to any attack without having had some opportunity to study the proper moves. Finally I made a throat-clearing noise and nodded to him, coming to a stop.

"Very well, go ahead. I won't move. Hit me."

He looked at me quizzically, his expression sceptical, eyes twinkling. "You won't move at all?"

"I won't move while you're deciding where to hit me. After that, I'll move. You won't hit me."

"Huh." He straightened up and spun his weapon inward, one-handed, so that the end of it came to rest beneath his armpit, and I knew immediately, instinctively, what his next move would be.

Ambrose routinely wore a long, slender sword, modelled on the Roman cavalry spatha, designed purely for stabbing men on foot from the back of a light horse. The spatha was admirable in its originally intended use, but as a fighting sword, for brutal, toe-to-toe conflicts, it was worse than useless. Its blade was overlong and too slight, so that it would bend and even break when used against a better-tempered weapon. In the earliest days of Camulod's conversion to cavalry, Publius Varrus, the Colony's master armourer and my own great-uncle, had designed longer swords than the spatha, with broader, stronger, better- tempered blades. This was the sword Ambrose preferred. Its length and construction almost dictated its use, in terms of technique for a man on foot—hence my foreknowledge of what Ambrose would do next.

Sure enough, Ambrose renewed his stance and his two- handed grip, his knees bent, right foot slightly ahead of the left, his "blade" pointed at my sternum. He froze, his eyes locked in total concentration before he grunted and whipped into a blur of action, his weapon sweeping up and then around above my head and down again in a backhanded slash designed to cut the legs from me. I knew the arc of his sweep, I knew the point at which it would change course and be converted to a stabbing, jabbing lunge before being whipped upward again into an overhand, vertically dropping chop.

Without removing my eyes from his I dropped my "point," sweeping my blade strongly, backhanded, to block his downward slash. Then, before he could reverse into his stab, I grasped my stick in both hands, leaving a space the width of my chest between them, and pushed into his stab, sweeping my hands high and forcing his thrust upward, to graze my face and shoot above my head while I reversed the grip of my right hand, dropped my arms and shoulder and rammed the thick end of my weapon solidly against his ribs, knocking him sprawling for the second time. This time, however, before he stopped rolling, I was above him on one knee, the end of my stick pressed against his neck.

He made no effort to move, content to lie there panting until his breathing had returned to normal, by which time the silence had stretched long. "Shit," he said, eventually, and made to sit up. I heaved myself backwards onto my feet and helped him up, then stood watching him as he dusted himself off and rubbed ruefully at his buttocks.

"Now you know."

"Aye." He looked at me askance. "Practice swords, just like the old Roman ones, but new, and better. When did the idea occur to you, and what occasioned it?"

"Come with me and I'll show you."

I led the way back up the steep hillside towards the west gate of the fort, a distance of little more than thirty paces, and from there we went directly to my quarters. Shelagh and Ludmilla were leaving as we arrived, having delivered, according to Ludmilla, a box of new-made papyrus sent to me from my supplier in Camulod. I politely invited them to stay, but was secretly pleased when they declined. I moved, immediately on their departure, to open a large packing crate that lay against the rear wall, and from it I pulled the smaller case that held Excalibur. I opened the case, withdrew the sword itself and passed it, hilt first, to Ambrose.

"Here. Now I need your help, so swing it a few times. Get used to the weight and the feel of it again, because I'm going to want you to use it in a moment, to demonstrate a point."

As he began to swing the massive weapon, making the light flicker along its long, gleaming blade, I turned again to the larger crate, this time pulling out a long spatha-style sword. It had a boss between the hilt and the blade, in the style of the Roman gladium short-sword; there was no hint of a cross-guard of any kind. Beneath a light coating of reddish-brown discoloration too fine to be called rust, it looked like a fine weapon, very slightly curved, the tip of its blade broadened, flared and slightly elongated, keen- edged and almost leaf-like. Ambrose stopped what he was doing, holding Excalibur's blade vertically as he stared at me and the sword I now held. I reversed my grip and extended the new sword to him and held my other hand out at the same time for Excalibur. We exchanged weapons and he immediately brought the blade of the new sword up close to his eyes, scanning it minutely, pressing the ball of his thumb against the edge of the blade.

"I've never seen this before. Where did it come from?"

"From the Armoury in Camulod. It's a Varrus sword, one of the original prototypes he made with Equus when he was redesigning the old spatha. Before I was born, and years before they discovered the secret of the stirrups,

Caius Britannicus wanted a new weapon, much stronger than the spatha, a cross between a spear and an axe, to be used by a man on horseback against men on foot. A chopping weapon, but he insisted it had to function like a sword."

"This is fine," Ambrose said softly, hefting the thing in his hand and moving his arm slowly through a gliding pass. "A fine weapon."

"I made a discovery about it, later—or, more accurately, about one of its fellows—and now I want you to help me discover if what I suspect is true. If it is, and I do believe it is, then there is something else we must do, you and I, in secrecy."

Ambrose was gazing at me in amusement, a half-smile upon his lips, and now he shook his head. "I do not even wish to ask. I know you'll tell me when the time arrives. In the meantime, how may I help you discover this truth?"

"Take this and give me that." We exchanged swords again, and now I began waving my long, curved blade through the air. I ended up holding it out to my right, inclined slightly upward from the horizontal, clenching the hilt firmly in both fists. Ambrose merely watched, awaiting his instructions.

"This is one of Varrus's best blades, Ambrose. He smelted the metal himself, and tempered it. It's quite superb. But of course, the one you are holding is quite probably the greatest blade ever made by any man, anywhere. Now, I want you to swing your blade as hard as you can and try to knock this one from my grasp. Don't be tempted to use the flat of the blade. It is essential that you use the edge. I have no tricks in mind, I promise you. But strike away from me, because there's no cross-hilt on this sword and Excalibur could take off my arm more cleanly than you could imagine. I will not move, nor will I try to deflect your blade in any way. I am simply going to stand here and hold out this sword, and I'll try to hold onto it when your blow falls. You understand?"

He nodded, stepped back and fell into his fighter's crouch again, concentrating on what he was about to do. When he unfolded again into swooping, powerful motion it was beautiful to behold, and I caught my breath as Excalibur's shining blade painted great, hissing swaths of brightness and glittering colours in the drabness of my quarters. Then Ambrose transferred all of his weight and momentum onto the ball of his left foot and brought that deadly scythe sweeping around to clash against the blade I held extended to my right. I had been awaiting the concussion and was set for it, my muscles braced against the shock that I knew would hammer them, but the thing was dashed from my grip as though I had no hold on it at all. The force of the wrenching impact sent me whirling away backwards and I fell to my knees against one wall as the sword I had held clanged hard against another and clattered to the floor.

Ambrose stood, astonished, as though paralyzed, his face blank with surprise, his eyes shifting between the blade in his hand and the sight of me, sprawling against the wall off to his side. As I moved to regain my footing, bracing myself against the wall with my outstretched left hand and shaking my right arm to banish the numbness, he finally rallied and moved towards me, lowering his sword's point to the floor.

"Merlyn, are you hurt? What was that? What happened here?"

I cradled my tingling right arm in my left, holding myself above the elbow, which felt numbed and dead. "I'm well enough, Brother, an A unsurprised. What happened here is exactly what I had surmised might happen." I nodded towards the long sword lying on the floor against the other wall. "Look at that."

He glanced downward, and I heard the hiss of his indrawn breath. The long Varrus sword lay bent and broken, its finely wrought blade twisted and misshapen. Before he could say anything, I spoke again.

"Check your blade. Is it damaged?"

He whipped Excalibur up, close to his face, and examined the blade closely, but I knew he would find no blemish. "No," he said, eventually. "It's not even dented."

I stooped and picked up the Varrus sword in my right hand, briefly aware of the painful tingling in my fingers as they closed about the hilt. A great, vee-shaped gouge almost severed the blade, the wounded metal glinting, raw and fresh and new-looking, among the rust that covered the rest of it. Excalibur's keen edge had struck deep, penetrating the metal of the other blade as though it were wood or lead, twisting and wrenching it out of shape with effortless force, then lodging firmly enough for the momentum of Ambrose's swing to rip the weapon from my clutching hands and cast it aside effortlessly, ruined and useless forever thenceforth. I held the broken thing up for Ambrose's inspection. Its long blade was twisted and bent far out of true in two directions: one where it had bent sideways around the impact of Excalibur's smashing bite, and the other in a tortured twisting of the very metal surrounding the point of impact, skewing it like wrought iron twisted in a forge. I dropped the now useless weapon to the floor.

"There is the reason underlying my playing with sticks, Brother. The need for practice swords ... or for one specific practice sword."

"I don't follow you."

"I know you don't, but you will. What you have just done defines and underlines my problem. There's no blade in the world that can withstand Excalibur. It cuts through other metals, without losing its own edge. It is unique, and that, I have decided, is its tragedy."

"Tragedy!" Ambrose's shout was a scoffing laugh. "What's tragic about it? The thing is magical and utterly unbelievable. No tragedy there, Brother."

"No, I agree, just as there was no weakness in Alexander's sarissas."

That wiped the smile from my brother's face. "What? There's no comparison. Where can the weakness lie in Excalibur? Most ordinary men, seeing what it can do—like cutting that blade in half—would swear it to be magic and live in fear of it. The warrior who carries it will be invincible, and the envy of the world."

"The king, you mean ... the king who carries it."

"Aye—" he broke off, eyeing me askance. "It is to be young Arthur's, isn't it? You have not changed your mind on that?"

"No, I have not. He is his father's son and heir to the Pendragon lands and kingdom in his own right. I have had no change of heart in any part of that. But I am concerned about training the boy to face the task he must, here in these hills, so far away from Camulod and from others who would bring out the best in him. And if he is to master this new sword of his, Excalibur, instead of merely swinging it, then he must have someone wielding a weapon fit to withstand his, against whom he can practice."

"Well, you will train him, won't you? He'll fight you, and Dedalus and Rufio and all the others. No shortage of trainers, I think."

"No, but you are still not hearing me. Excalibur's weakness is its strength, Ambrose! I have nothing with which to train the boy—no Excalibur against which he can swing Excalibur." I nodded towards the broken thing in the comer. "That was a superior sword, a Varrus blade. It was cut almost in half with one blow. How am I to train the boy to use the weapon adequately when there is nothing comparable to it? It won't ever be enough simply to train him with another sword, a lesser weapon, because then he'll be master only of a lesser weapon, lacking the refinement, the edge, the balance and the strength of this sword, this blade, this excellence."

As I spoke the words, I saw comprehension breaking in my brother's eyes. Almost immediately, he started to smile, and then his smile grew into a radiant grin as he subsided into one of my chairs, grounding Excalibur's point between his feet.

"What?" I asked him. "You can find humour in that? Why are you smiling? What is it?"

He swung the point of the sword up from the floor, holding it now above his head so that the weight of the hilt and pommel pressed into his lap and patterns of reflected light raced along the mighty blade that reared between us. "This thing, Excalibur. Did anyone work with Publius Varrus in the making of it?"

"Aye, of course, his friend Equus. They made the sword together, working alternately on it until it was finished."

"And does anyone yet live who might know how they made the blade?"

"Aye, Equus's sons, Joseph and Carol. They had no hand in the making of the sword itself, but they are both smiths, and I know their father taught them the art of folding and beating metal the way he and Varrus did in making Excalibur, tempering ordinary iron into superior swords. They do it now, to this day. And more than that, the use of moulds to shape and bind the hilts of our weapons to the tangs of our blades has become commonplace in Camulod."

"So they could make another Excalibur."

"Aye, they could, either one of them, if it were possible," I agreed, before I realized what he had said, and then I checked myself. "What? Another—?"

"From the Lady, Cay! The half of her that still remains in Camulod. Isn't that what you told me, that Varrus melted the statue down to make the sword, then remade the statue, smaller and lighter, with the remaining metal? The remaining metal, Cay, the metal from the sky stone! We can make your training sword—another Excalibur, less ornate, but no less magical in its properties, a plain blade with which to test the other."

"By the Christ!" I was thunderstruck. His solution was so crystalline, so perfect and so obvious that I could not now comprehend my own failure to see it for myself.

"Damnation! Joseph is here with you, isn't he? No matter, we'll have Carol make another sword, in Camulod since that's where the statue is, and we'll pattern it upon this one, but as I said, not so grandly and it will be nowhere near as pretty. Is Carol capable of doing this alone?" I nodded, mute. "Good, then. It should not tax him too greatly. What we need here is not another thing of blinding beauty, but a plain, functional weapon of strength and durability that will stand up to this one here on equal terms. We have all the dimensions—all we need do now is have Carol duplicate them, without regard to decoration. What think you?"

I sat shaking my head, overwhelmed by the beautiful simplicity of his instant solution to a problem that had been plaguing me for months. So close had I been to the source of the solution, I saw now, that my eyes had passed over it mentally a thousand times without seeing it. Ambrose was watching me, his eyes aglow.

"You agree?"

"Agree? Of course I agree. It is a brilliant solution, Ambrose! We'll start working on it immediately by preparing a full set of drawings from Publius Varrus's original notations and sketches—I have all of them here. When you return home, you will be able to take written instructions with you, containing the exact dimensions of Excalibur and whatever else Carol's brother Joseph might wish to add in the way of advice on the treatment and melting of the statue's metal and the forging of it into another blade. Of course, we'll have to show it to Joseph— Excalibur, I mean."

Ambrose frowned at me. "Is that a problem? I hear doubt in your voice."

I shrugged. "Well, not doubt, perhaps, but definite trepidation. I hate to do it. Today, only you, Shelagh, Donuil and I know Excalibur exists. That is already far too many people. Every other person who knows about it increases the odds that the secret will be discovered."

He was silent for a while, digesting that, and then he shrugged. "Well then, why does Joseph have to see the thing? As you said, you have all the dimensions, and Joseph's a smith. He should be able to work from those alone. A sword's a sword, and this will simply be a larger, longer, heavier sword than he and Carol have made before. No need for them to see the real thing, is there?"

I smiled at him. "How is Joseph to visualize the sword's reality and depict it accurately and minutely if he has never seen it?" I shook my head. "No, I don't like it, but I think we must show it to him. He is one of us, true to the bone, and his father helped to make the thing, and we are asking him to help us duplicate it. We'll show it to him tonight and swear him to secrecy. Once he has seen the sword, he'll also see the importance of the task. I wonder how long it will take Carol to make the new one."

Ambrose smiled again and rose to his feet, moving to replace Excalibur in its case. 'The only potential problem that occurred to me lay in Carol's capability as a smith, and you have put my mind to rest on that."

"Oh, yes. There is not much to choose between the two brothers in terms of craftsmanship, and Varrus trained both of them himself. If I had to grant an edge to either one, however, it would go to Carol, although I never would say that in Joseph's hearing."

"Good, Carol will be flattered that you should approach him, seeking his help. He'll waste no time and he'll understand the need for secrecy. I would suggest that only Carol be permitted to know the source of the metal, and that he be empowered to make whatever arrangements he requires to melt the statue down in privacy, shaping it into an ingot. Thereafter, the metal will resemble an ordinary piece of iron, save that he alone will work on it. You agree?" I nodded and he continued.

"One truth remains unchanged, Brother. No matter how long it takes to complete the making of this second sword, you'll still have your hands full training our amazing boy. But you have time and to spare. The lad will have to grow considerably before he has the size or the strength to swing such a sword, let alone learn the knack of what you showed me earlier, when you rattled my ribs and set me on my rump. He's a big, strong lad, for his age, and his hands and feet are the largest I've ever seen on a boy. He has the family bulk about him, and he's going to be as big as you and me by the time he's grown, but that time is still far distant." He paused, returning the wooden case that housed Excalibur whence I had produced it. When the lid on the crate was securely closed, he turned back to me again, dusting his hands.

"So, your problem is no longer a problem, but you need not grovel in your gratitude. Now I have to go and find Rufio. He's out in the forest, cutting lumber with Dedalus and Donuil and some others, and I promised him I would come by and soil my noble hands by helping on the ripsaw. Come with me, and as we go you can tell me how the idea for the long sword staves came to you."

I knew that almost all the other men of our party were out on a tree-felling expedition, making a determined assault on a grove of prime oak trees selected and marked for felling by Mark, our master carpenter. Lucanus was an exception; he was still engrossed in his hoard of parchments. And I had opted out of the expedition in order to complete some writings in silence and solitude. Having done what I intended more quickly than I had anticipated, I now found the idea of a spell of good, hard, physical work appealing. I realized it had been too long since I had worked up a sweat. I laughed and clapped my brother on the shoulder, suddenly euphoric, and we made our way to the stables immediately.

Germanicus's winter coat was still long and thick, only beginning to fall away in patches despite Ulf's grooming over the past few days. Mounted, I passed through the main gateway of our fort, following Ambrose and then turning directly to the right, to lead him to where I knew the work party was located that day. It took me several moments to become aware that he had not swung west with me, and when I did I turned around to find him sitting erect in his saddle, staring upwards, to the east, where the high, winding road crested the pass and disappeared beyond the mountain saddle. I turned my horse around and rode back to where he sat.

"What are you looking at?" I asked as I reached him.

'That, up there. Has anyone ever come across there?"

"Not since we have been here, and according to Derek, not for years before that, either."

"What's over there?"

"A valley, like the one below us here, except that it's entirely enclosed. The road winds down from the crest there, along the length of it, and then up the slopes at the far end to another pass."

"A big valley? Have you seen it?"

I grunted, almost but not quite laughing. "Aye, I've seen it, but only from the crest up there. There's nothing to see. It may be three miles long, but no more than that. The whole valley is filled with trees, growing up to the shoulders of the highest Fells, just as they do in the one below us. I didn't go down into it, because if I had, I would only have had to climb back up again. There's nothing down there to see except the road itself and the stream along the bottom of the valley floor."

"So where does the road go? What's the reason for its being there?"

It really surprised me to recognize that my brother knew absolutely nothing of this region or its history, although I was fully aware that I myself had been as ignorant as he mere months earlier.

"Have you ever heard of the Tenth Iter?"

"No, should I have?"

"Not really, but it was widely celebrated once, as the only Roman supply route into the heartland of north-west Britain from the coast. This is it, and it runs for twenty miles, from Ravenglass, up over the pass here and on to the garrison fort at Galava, by the side of the big mere."

"The big mere ... That's what the people here call a lake, is it not?"

"Aye, it is. And a mountain is a fell. We are standing among the Fells."

"Hmm." Ambrose glanced up at the mountains dismissively, plainly unimpressed, his mind elsewhere. "So you have never been to this Galava place? Then you cannot know if it is abandoned, like this."

"No, I've never been there, but it's not abandoned. People live there yet, just as they do in Ravenglass, in the community the local people and suppliers built up around the fort over the years. The road goes beyond there— another road it is, in fact, built at a different time by different legionaries—but it joins up somewhere beyond there, I'm told, at the old fort called Brocavum, with the main trunk road running down the length of Britain."'

"All the way down? You mean you could travel on solid Roman roads all the way from there to Londinium?"

"Aye, that's what they tell me, or to Glevum and Aquae Sulis and thence to Camulod, depending on which fork you take at Brocavum. One road goes almost directly south from there, through Glevum and Aquae all the way to Isca, and another branches east and goes almost directly down the centre of the country to Londinium. You must know it, it passes through Lindum."

"I know two roads converge at Lindum, from the north—one coming directly south, the other from the north-west—but I have never been more than a hundred miles north of Lindum. I did not know the road reached so far into the north-west." Ambrose sounded fascinated, although I could not see why. The water route by which he had come here was faster, more direct and far less dangerous than the overland journey he was now evidently contemplating. Finally my own curiosity overcame me.

"Why are you asking all these questions? Have you a wish to strike out overland from here to Lindum?"

"No, nor to anywhere else, but it's good to know there's a solid, passable route in and out of this place if anything goes wrong at the seaward end."

"What does that mean?" He heard the alarm in my voice and turned towards me quickly, raising a placatory hand.

"Nothing, Caius! I swear it means nothing. I'm but being pessimistic. There is no danger and no catastrophic fate threatening you from the sea. I was merely thinking about a conversation I had with Connor, on my way up here. He told me he has heard nothing of the Sons of Condran since the slaying of Liam and the repulse of their fleet from Ravenglass, and he is intelligent and responsible enough to be concerned over that. Some sort of demonstration of Condran's displeasure should have occurred by now, he thinks, and I agree with him. The fact that nothing has occurred, and that nothing seems to be stirring on or beyond the seas, even to the north by the new lands, is disconcerting. Call me foolish, if you wish, but I have had visions of an enormous fleet of alien Erse sails darkening the horizon, come to burn Derek's halls about his ears. But now I know that if that should occur, and all attempts at succour or rescue fail, you and yours will be able to escape across this pass, and thence to the south and safety."

"I see ... " I faced him squarely, attempting to mask my unease. "Have you really dreamed of this enormous fleet, Ambrose?"

He grinned at me and reached to slap my shoulder. "No, not as you mean it. Not in die way you dream, Brother—no magical occurrences or spectral loomings. No, I'm simply attempting to see what might, could, lie ahead ... And speaking of that, hard labour lies immediately ahead. Where are these carpenters and charcoal-burners?"

"Behind us, about a mile from here" I pulled Germanicus up into a rearing, two-legged turn. It was a move we had practised down through the years and one we both enjoyed, I purely for the skill it demanded and displayed and for die awe it inspired in observers. I noticed Ambrose now sniffing the fresh smell of green wood- smoke borne on a stray eddy of wind. "If we follow our noses, we'll ride them down," I said, and I kicked my horse forward.

It took us the better part of half an hour to cross the distance from the fort's gate to the steep hillside clearing where our men were labouring, and as we went we talked of many things, not least of which was the evident and . startling intellect of the boy who was our charge. I mentioned again to Ambrose my recently born fear that the very place I had chosen for his tutoring—this lonely, isolated fort with its tiny and embryonic society—would prove to be inadequate for the task I had set myself. This sanctuary we had found—safe, it appeared, from the eyes and weapons of potential assassins of all stripes—was yet no place in which to train a future king. This conviction I had come to accept only with the greatest reluctance. That had not been my first opinion, when I was flushed with the challenge of escaping danger and establishing ourselves in safety in the ancient fort. Only as the weeks stretched into months had I come to see how small our outpost was,

here on the edge of nothingness, and how minuscule a template it provided for any parallel study of building and running a kingdom. The boy would have to come to know the larger world of men.

Ambrose listened closely to all I had to say, and when I had finished he reined in his horse and kicked one foot free of the stirrup, hooking his knee over the front of his saddle as he turned to peer at me.

"You think this place is too isolated for the task you've set yourself? And yet you brought him here precisely because of that, and you have effectively achieved a complete disappearance, from Camulod, from your previous life and from all danger to the boy."

"Damnation, I know that, Ambrose, and for months I believed that I had done the right thing. But as I watch the boy shoot upward, growing like a young tree, I grow increasingly afraid that too much of the time he spends here will be time wasted when he could be learning other things, necessary things, elsewhere, in similar safety."

"How so? What could he learn about better elsewhere that he cannot learn here?"

"Life, and the living of it among men of all kinds, venal and noble!" I realized how that sounded and hurried on to negate the insult implied to my friends. "Our people here are good and fine, noble and gracious enough, God knows, and among Derek's Celts the lad will come to no harm. But he is not a normal boy, and that is the crux of all my concerns. We are not raising Arthur Pendragon to be a normal man, Ambrose. Our purpose is to breed a warrior and an enlightened leader. It sounds grandiose and overstated, phrased thus baldly, but it is, nonetheless, the truth.

If the lad is to rule, in Camulod or Cambria or Cornwall, he must learn to be a king—a warrior and a leader, greater than a Vortigern and free of such errors as Vortigern has made—and I believe he will not learn such things stuck here in isolation. To learn, he needs examples—of the weaknesses of men as much as of their strengths—and to find those he must look abroad, in the world of men, where ambition and greed and ruthlessness and petty, thieving treachery are daily things, exposed and shown for what they are by nobility and honour and integrity. Only by seeing such things will he learn how to deal with them and rise above them. I learned them by riding on patrols with Uther, keeping the peace in Camulod and dealing with the people beyond our domain. You learned them by riding to war with your guardian uncle, in Lindum, and with Vortigern, keeping the peace and guarding your king's affairs. Arthur may learn the theories behind such things up here, but he will lack the practical aspect of training. We have no venal traitors in our little group—no monsters like Lot of Cornwall or the demented, deformed Carthac. We lack even a Peter Ironhair."

"I think you are overwrought, Cay." The level tone of Ambrose's voice brought home to me the stridency that had been present in my own. "I can see clearly why you are so concerned. This is a lonely life you lead, up here, and I have no doubt its shortcomings loom more starkly in the winter months, but I think you are worrying unnecessarily. Arthur will come home eventually to Camulod, as planned, when he and his friends are old enough to ride with our troopers. That has already been discussed and agreed upon, and should take place within the next three or four years—perhaps even sooner if the lad continues to shoot up the way he's going. In the meantime, our concern must be to keep him safe, to provide him with a stable, wholesome home, and to teach him all he is capable of learning. Although after what he taught us both a few nights ago, it might be more accurate to say we should teach him all that we are capable of teaching, for I suspect he'll learn much more than that, eventually.

"Here in these mountains you can teach him to fight like a warrior, on horseback and on foot, and to live like a man, in self-sufficiency. You can teach him the lessons learned and taught to you by those who learned them years before young Arthur's father saw the light of day. You can give him enlightenment: the power to read and write, both of them sadly lacking in this land today. The people with whom you have surrounded him are the best teachers he could have, and the boy is highly gifted. He will waste nothing, learning from such as these. So let him learn from them, but expose him to other sources, too.

"Think about taking him away, to Gaul, to spend some time with your friend Bishop Germanus, and let him see how others live in other climes. Maybe take him to Eire, where there are no roads, and to the northern islands his grandfather holds, and let him see how primitive life is in such remote and hostile places. You could take him abroad in Britain, too ... not to Cambria or to Cornwall, or even to Camulod, yet. But across the brow of the country, following the Roman roads you spoke of, to Vortigern for a certainty, I should think, providing the king's peace lasts there, in the north-east. Why not? The boy has no enemies there, nor do you, and Vortigern is kindly disposed to you, as is Hengist. Remember, you are no longer Merlyn of Camulod; you'll travel as a common traveller, in company with others and a boy or two, perhaps even four. You'll both be better for it. His Uncle Connor would be happy to escort you anywhere by sea, even to Gaul, I would imagine."

Listening, I heard the truth and wisdom of my brother's counsel, and sat straighter in my saddle, the cares caused by my thoughts on this over the past months falling away like leaves in autumn. I nodded my thanks wordlessly, and he returned my nod and kicked his horse forward again, towards the woods that loomed a short distance ahead. From then on, we rode in silence, appreciating the beauty of the day and little considering how the Fates themselves would dictate the tempo of Arthur's progress and education.

Not everyone in the hillside forest clearing to which we eventually came was sawing wood. Long before we reached the spot, we could hear the rapid and unmistakable sound of practice swords hammering at each other with the solid, ringing, concussive authority that bespoke a number of mature men belabouring each other mightily. It soon became clear, however, that others were working. Now we could hear the hollow-sounding thock of hard- swung axes and, farther off, the asthmatic rasping of saw blades chewing at green wood.

When we emerged from the woods, we saw that Dedalus and Rufio were the two swordsmen, as I had known they would be, simply from the rattling rhythm of their "blades." Behind them, almost beyond our sight, I could see Mark, our master carpenter, whose skills and knowledge placed him in command of this work group. A team of four harnessed horses was pulling and straining on his right under the urging of one of Derek's men, while the burden with which they were struggling lay somewhere beyond my sight. The man handling the horses turned slightly towards us, and I was surprised to recognize him as Longinus, Derek's artillery commander, who evidently worked as a teamster when not called upon to practise his skills with heavy weaponry.

Off to my left, along the bottom of the slope on which we sat, I could see Joseph and Hector, smith and farmer, working together as a team, driving their axe heads with perfect, flawless rhythm into the solid heartwood of a great oak tree. Lars and Jonathan would be somewhere close by, I knew, working in or around the saw-pit, with a handful of other men, some of them new arrivals, others brought in this morning from Ravenglass to aid with this task of felling and dressing enough trees to keep us supplied with strong, well-seasoned lumber for the next few years.

Dedalus and Rufio had not seen us arrive, so total was their concentration on what they were doing. A moment's carelessness in their pastime could bring great pain. The thick ash dowels from which the wooden practice swords were made were as heavy and unyielding as iron, and both men were wearing only light leather armour. A rap with a hard-swung dowel on an exposed arm could break a bone, so both men were rapt in what they were about. Ambrose sat staring at them in amazement, for there was something here he had never seen before, something completely new that had emerged during the winter past. Neither Dedalus nor Rufio held a shield; instead, each held an ash practice sword in either hand. The swinging, swaying play of the "blades," underlined by the brilliant, rhythmical clattering as they glanced off each other—four sounds instead of two—turned what the two men were doing into an elaborate, bedazzling ritual-like dance.

Dedalus had begun this thing, two summers earlier. He had always been equally gifted with both hands, to the confusion, envy and disgust of his friends, enemies and competitors. After seeing and admiring the dazzling skills of an itinerant juggler in Camulod several years before, Dedalus had developed a game he played by himself, revelling in his mastery of the skills of hand and eye coordination it required. He would control a third sword with the blades of two others, holding it between them and juggling it astoundingly, sending it into great leaps and spinning bounds, throwing it high in the air, spinning end over end, to fall back and be recaptured by the other blades.

Rufio had been impressed, at first, then cynical. But then, never one to lie back and allow another to win all the laurels, he had eventually begun to practise the same game on his own, in secret, until he had become almost as adept at it as was Dedalus. At that point he stepped forward and issued a challenge to Ded. No one could guess how long or how hard Rufio had been working to acquire his skills, but his progress had been astounding. The contest between the two men for championship status was long, close, hard fought and never settled. Many wagers had been won and lost by the time the contest had moved on to its next stage.

Asked about it afterward, neither man could pinpoint the occasion when the next degree of challenge actually emerged. It simply turned out that one day, instead of spinning their third blades, the two men had begun matching their twin blades against each other, testing each other's defensive and offensive skills. From that time on, they never played three blades again; they pitted their skills against each other, and those skills became formidable. No other would have dreamed of standing against either of them.

Sitting beside Ambrose, I told him how the contest had evolved. "That's what gave me the idea for the new sticks." Ambrose merely glanced at me, wide eyed. "The forward leap," I continued, knowing that he had not understood me. "The leap from one sword to two, then to a third, and then to this. For more than a thousand years, men learned to use those wooden swords to perfection. Their weight—twice that of their real, iron swords—meant that the men's arm muscles were huge and agile. Their real swords felt like feathers in their hands, and with them, they conquered the entire world. Gladium and scutum—short-sword and shield. Nothing in the world withstood them for a thousand years. With your gladium in your right hand, your scutum in your left, defending your squad-mate on your right while the man on your left defended you, you were invincible— a Roman legionary. That lasted for longer than a millennium. And now they're obsolete, within the space of our lifetime. The legions are all gone. Their troops are scattered, their techniques abandoned, and their short-swords useless without that man defending on your left, without the legion's hierarchy, traditions and discipline.

"Now men use longer swords, but they don't use them well, because there is no discipline for using them. There's no way of training to fight consistently with them, because there's no consistency in the swords themselves. They're long, but they're all of different lengths and weights, and even shapes. The old techniques of training—one man facing a wooden post, practising cut, thrust and stab—won't work with these long swords. The longer blades demand a wider swing, and therefore they deliver less precision in attack. There is no organized technique for them, no ritual defence, no skilled, detailed procedure of attack.

"And then one day I saw Ded and Rufio using two swords each, two hands, flashing and displaying skills the like of which had never been seen before, by me or anyone. Two hands, two blades—twice the speed, twice the weight and twice the skill. And in my mind I saw, all at once and without warning, a longer stick—a staff—twice as heavy as Excalibur, requiring twice the effort to control its arc and thrust and stab."

Ambrose was staring at me now, paying no heed to the men below, who had stopped fighting and were laughing now together, bent over and wheezing for breath, still unaware of our presence above them. "And?" he prodded.

"And I spoke of it to Dedalus and Rufio." I shrugged. "We made some practice pieces, from some unseasoned wood, then dried some others in a kiln, experimented with the length and weight, trial and error, and evolved the prototypes you saw and used today."

A shout of raucous greeting from beneath told us our presence had been discovered. Ambrose glanced down and waved, smiling, but then turned back to me. "But you used two hands on the stick. You would not do that with a keen- edged sword, not without losing your fingers."

"No, I would not, but a stick is not a sword. These staves of ours are weapons in their own right, as well as practice swords. And as weapons, they have advantages that swords don't have—weight, heft and bluntness. They are clubs, bludgeons as well as swords. Let's go down. We can talk more of this later, with Ded and Rufio. I promise you, you will find great pleasure and great usefulness in this. The simple fact of working consistently with these new things—we have no name for them, we call them simply staves— improves everything in which a fighting man might seek improvement, afoot or mounted: balance, dexterity, weight distribution, strength of arm and leg and wind."

Much good did come of what Ambrose would learn that day, but that day itself was not the time best suited for the learning of it. Ambrose and I ended up, stripped to our loincloths and "assisted" by a highly jocular quartet of sawyers from Ravenglass, working in the saw-pit, occasioning great merriment to all who came to watch, as everyone made sure to do. The saw-pit, as we princes of Camulod discovered, was a humbling place, constituting a rite of passage all on its own.

I know that saws have been around forever, ever since the first men learned how to shape and sharpen metal and make it do what they required of it. The story of the making of the first saw blade is one long lost to history, but, once discovered, the secret swept across the world. Saws earned their place among the most widely used of tools and implements: first they were used on wood, to shape round tree trunks into straight-sided beams, and then eventually, with the development of stronger metals, they were used for cutting certain kinds of stone. Saws became so commonplace that people who were not sawyers seldom took note of them. It must have been similar, therefore, it seemed to me, with saw-pits: they were common things, but seldom noted and widely ignored. Most men might live their lives in ignorance that such things even existed. I know now, however, from my own experience, that no man who has worked in a saw-pit could ever forget or ignore the existence of such places.

Consider the felling of a tree. It has grown to maturity in its own place, while endless generations of men have lived and died, and its heartwood is sound and solid, the finest, strongest material available to men for building their constructions, from huts to barns to houses and great halls, and from wagons and wains to galleys and the great biremes, triremes and quadriremes of the now vanished Roman trading fleets. The time arrives for the tree to be felled, trimmed and fashioned into lumber, squared and planed and shaped to men's requirements. The axes bite and chew, and after time has passed and sweat and toil and keen-edged blades have done their work, the tree falls crashing to the ground. Now the limbs and branches are removed, and the great tree is sawn into log lengths. That part is easy. The difficulty comes in transforming the logs, which are cylindrical, into squared beams or planks.

Thus was the saw-pit created, and it is among the simplest, most functional workplaces in the world: a pit beneath a system of cradles and pulleys for holding logs. Each log is laid above the pit and sawn lengthwise, by teams of men using long, heavy, double-handed saws. One man stands above the log, the other in the pit beneath, and they change places frequently, since the man on top must work harder than the man beneath, pushing downward on the cutting stroke and pulling up on the return. Nevertheless, the man below spends all his time waiting for the moment when he can climb above, because below, he is constantly enveloped in the sawdust from the cutting above. His entire body is a seething mass of relentless itching caused by the sawdust, and the sap it contains, adhering to his sweat-covered skin, clogging his eyes, ears and nostrils, and clinging densely to every hair on his tortured body.

Sawyers love to see a novice approach the pit, and they take intense delight in pointing out how much less work there is in being beneath, and then in gulling the raw newcomer into a rash commitment to remain below for longer than a normal man can stand. Hence the jocularity of our quartet of assistants and the hilarity with which the others all came to watch as Ambrose and I laboured mightily, and sweatily, beneath the constant, clinging, aromatic cascade that blinded us and blocked our nostrils and our mouths and drove us to our knees, coughing and spluttering among the mounds of yielding, treacherous, foot-fouling and sweet-smelling oaken sawdust.

By the time they relented and allowed us to alternate and work above the pit, as well as in it, my brother and I had learned a new analogy to apply to the high and low fluctuations of life and fortune. The effort of grappling with green wood for one short, but seemingly endless day had bred in us a lasting appreciation of well-seasoned timber. That very night, sitting exhausted by the cooking fire outside the fort's front gates, I found myself gazing at the carving on my two-handed staff with more appreciation than I had ever felt before, and testing its strength and resilience in my hands, trying in vain to make it bend or even flex.

Dedalus and Rufio had talked at length with Ambrose and me, in the bathhouse and afterwards, at dinner, about some of the things they had already discovered about fighting and training with the new staves. Both men were very enthusiastic about the potential of this new form of training—for they saw it as training in a new technique, plain and simple—and had no difficulty visualizing armies being trained using the new method to learn the skills that had to be applied to fighting with long swords.

Ambrose, however, was sceptical of that. He believed that widespread use of the long sword would be curtailed by the technological and logistical difficulties of large- scale production. Iron ore was no longer being widely mined and smelted in Britain, he pointed out. With the legions now gone for more than four decades, the industry of forging swords had dwindled to a local skill. We had forges in Camulod capable of smelting ore, could we but procure it, and of turning out long swords by the hundred, but Camulod was unique in that. Ambrose believed that warriors henceforth would carry motley weapons and armour, garnered, bought or stolen from wherever they could be found. Few of those weapons, he felt, would be swords of any description. He believed that clubs and axes would once again become more common than swords, and that the spears of ordinary men would soon degenerate again into long poles with fire-hardened, wooden points.

I sat silent as I listened to him speak of all of this and then, when he had finished, I pointed out that if what he suspected came to pass, it would be to our great advantage, since nothing would then threaten us and there would be no armies to march against Camulod. He sat staring at me for some time, then smiled and nodded, saying nothing more, and soon after that, worn out from our exertions in the saw-pit, we crawled off to sleep. Ambrose and Dedalus and Rufio would be foregathering in the morning, to come to terms on some of the basics of fighting with the ash staff. I had other things to do.

TEN

In the week since our return from Ravenglass, I had thought long and hard about the letter I wished to write to Germanus in Gaul, and what it should contain. Now I set aside the last of several sheets of notes I had made and sat back, rubbing at my eyes and flexing my shoulders. I wondered how much time had passed since I had sat down to my task after leaping from my bed in the pre-dawn darkness to light a lamp and pace the floor, struggling with my unruly thoughts. Instead of writing a letter, I had found myself deeply engrossed in making notations on the topics with which I wished to deal in the missive.

Idly I counted the sheets and found six of them, each covered with densely packed script—too little of it, I knew, touching upon or concerned with the question that plagued me more than any other: the matter of the boy's education. The extent of the boy's potential, his abilities and talents and his astounding, vibrant mind, so far advanced beyond his small sum of years, left me bereft of the words to write of them. On the point of starting to read my copious notations over, I felt a wave of mounting frustration and pushed them away instead, rising up impulsively from my chair and beginning to pace the room as restlessly as I had in the darkness before daybreak, aware of the tension roiling in my chest and tightening the back of my neck.

On one transit of the outer and far larger of my two rooms, I glanced through the open doorway of my sleeping chamber and saw the untidy rumple of my unmade bed, and the sight of it made me stop in mid-step with the realization of how greatly I had changed since coming to Ravenglass and Mediobogdum. Throughout my entire life, raised as I had been with a soldier's discipline, the first thing I had done, every morning, was to straighten, remake or stow away my bed before proceeding to whatever else I had to do that day. It was as natural to me as breathing, something done without consideration or a conscious thought. Now, however, the sight of that unmade bed brought home to me the hugeness of the changes that had swept through my life in recent months and years.

My life, I now realized, was no longer my own in the thoughtless, intimate way it had ever been, even in the days when I lived with the woman I loved as my wife. Now I was living for other people—the most important of them Arthur, but the others claiming my attention and my concern nonetheless. My priorities were theirs; my cares were theirs; and my duties revolved entirely around them. I told myself, as soon as the thought occurred to me, that duties always revolved around others, but the difference was clear and stark in my understanding: the duties I had known before leaving Camulod were structured, military and exact; they were definable and thus predictable; and they entailed a reciprocity in their execution—rewards, in the form of recognition, a sharing of responsibility, and an occasional relief from that responsibility in return for performance. That was no longer true. Nowadays, the responsibility was unrelenting.

Knowing I was being self-indulgent and self-pitying, I stepped resolutely into the bedchamber and reached down to grasp the blanket on my bed, just as someone knocked on the outer door of my quarters.

"Enter, the door is unlocked," I shouted, and then, curious to see who had come calling, I leaned back on my heel, craning my neck. When the door swung open, I was amazed to see Shelagh thrust her head through the opening and call to me.

"Cay? May I come in?"

"Shelagh! Of course you may come in. Since when must you await my bidding?"

The surge of pleasure I felt at the sight of her and the sound of her voice drove every thought of dissatisfaction from my mind, but yet I made no move to go into the outer room. The opportunity to benefit from the fact that I could see her while remaining out of her sight loomed too large for me to ignore, so I remained where I was, watching her through the open door of my darkened bedchamber. She leaned further into the room, keeping her hand on the door handle and looking about her, searching for me, and then, just as her eyes fastened on the doorway beyond which I stood in shadow, I saw that she had someone with her, standing close behind her on the threshold.

I strode out towards her, smiling a welcome, just as she entered, beckoning whoever was behind her to follow. The sight of the newcomer quickly slowed me to a halt, halfway across the intervening space. It was the young woman who had smiled at me the evening of the feast, the one called Tressa, whose high, full breasts and laughing eyes had disturbed me so greatly. Now I found myself confronted by those eyes again, staring at me, wide and alert, as though slightly startled, and I was immediately aware that her breasts were, indeed, high and full and impossible to ignore, causing the clothing that should have concealed them to enhance the sweep of their upper surface instead, and then drape vertically from their points. Shelagh saw none of this exchange of looks, and I was fleetingly aware of feeling grateful for her preoccupation with whatever she was looking at or searching for. She took one last, sweeping look around the room and then straightened, facing me.

"It's dark in here, and even dustier than usual. Merlyn, this is—"

"Tressa. I remember her from Ravenglass. Welcome, Tressa."

The young woman dimpled and flushed with pleasure, buckling one knee and shyly whispering, "Mester Cahy." I turned to face Shelagh squarely, feeling ridiculously aware of the other woman and strangely guilty for that very awareness, as though, in taking notice of her, I had sinned through disloyalty to Shelagh.

"How may I serve you? You must forgive me, I fear I am unused to having women here in my rude quarters."

"Aye, that's obvious." Shelagh was smiling, her eyes twinkling and full of mischief. "I have brought Tressa here to see what she must do. She will be looking after two of you, yourself and Lucanus, keeping your quarters clean and bright and aired, and mending your clothes and whatever else may require looking after."

"But—"

"No, no buts, Cay. That is the law, according to Shelagh, and you will save us all much grief and inconvenience if you will simply accept it as decreed. You men are the great ones for laying down laws, but there are times when women's laws are better and more sensible, and this is one of them. You work on those things that concern you,

and Tressa here will keep your surroundings neat and clean enough to make your work as pleasant as may be. Do you understand me?"

"But—"

"But? Pardon us, Cay, but we came here apurpose. Now, if you will stand aside, I wish to show Tressa her duties. Tressa, come."

I stood gape-mouthed and watched them as they examined every vestige of my quarters, talking between themselves and taking note of everything they thought to change or better. My initial annoyance passed, and soon I found myself taking pleasure in the sight of both of them. Tressa was no beauty, but she was young and radiant with health, buxom and sprightly enough to suffer little side by side with Shelagh's older, glowing loveliness. Both women were round and full where women needed to be both, and as they spoke together, both laughed quietly from time to time. Presently they completed their examination and returned to where I stood by the window.

"Well," Shelagh said, "I've shown Tressa what's in store for her. She'll keep out of your way, as much as possible, doing what she has to do during the day while you're about your business. The only reason you will have to know that she's about will be the uncustomary pleasantness with which you will be surrounded from now on. Good day to you."

Tressa bobbed, with her shy smile, and whispered my name again, her soft Cumbrian brogue doing strange things to the vowel sounds, and then they were gone, leaving me feeling as though I had been paraded, inspected and assessed—all of which was true. I stood at the window, watching them as they went out, and after they had gone from sight I remained there, peering out at the weather.

Between the top of the fort's outer wall and the line of the overhanging eaves above my window, I could see blue sky and small, white clouds scudding across it at a speed that suggested a high, brisk wind. Suddenly the room seemed dark and cold, unnaturally quiet now that the women's voices had been added, then subtracted. I strode to the door, collecting my cloak from a peg as I went outside into the brightness of the mid-morning sunlight.

I found nothing unusual in the silence that greeted me. Even with the recent growth in our numbers, tripling our presence here, fifty people were barely noticeable in a fort built to house six hundred, and the times when all fifty were present within the fort were few and far between. I knew that the wood-gathering party was in the forest again that day, as it had been for the previous seven, so that took care of at least ten men and probably closer to a score. Ambrose was out with Dedalus and Rufio, practising with the staves that fascinated him nowadays. Shelagh and Tressa had disappeared, presumably to join the other women who would all be indoors at their women's work at this time of day, and the boys would already be out beyond the walls, the morning hours of their tuition long over. Somewhere in the distance I thought I heard the sound of high, girlish voices; many of the newcomers had brought young families along with them, and the place was now bright with children of both sexes, where before there had been only the four boys from Camulod. I saw only one other living soul, one of the newcomers whose name I had not yet learned, as I made my way to the northern postern gate. We exchanged silent nods in passing and then I was outside, walking forward the few paces that took me to the edge of the precipice overlooking the valley at the rear of our perch.

Ahead of me to my right, on the far north-eastern side of the valley, the Fells soared up to tower over me. But it was the valley far beneath my feet that drew my attention, because the entire floor of it seemed to be alive, writhing with movement like woven matting covering a swarm of rats. The carpet, as I well knew, was made of enormous oak trees, and the turbulence that agitated them was caused by massive gale-force winds blowing inland from the western sea, twelve and more miles away along the vale of the Esk. Even here, on the heights above, the power of that wind was undiminished, buffeting me with heavy blows as it surged up the unyielding face of the cliff at my feet.

I stepped even closer to the edge, aware of my own foolishness yet seemingly powerless to resist the urge to look down at the cliff face itself. The pressure of the wind increased, becoming a solid, living thing, so that I had to force myself forward into it, leaning out against its power while listening to my mind screaming at me to step back and stop being a fool. It was a strange sensation, hanging there, leaning my weight into that wind for what seemed a long, long time, knowing that if it died without warning I would, too, falling out into the space that taunted me. For long heartbeats I felt convinced that by merely spreading my arms and diving outward I would find the power of flight and might swoop like a bird, in safety, down to the trees beneath. I even raised my arms, holding them out before me and feeling the pressure of the air beneath them filling the folds of my cloak and lifting it to flap like wings about me, before I blinked and stepped back, dropping my hands to my sides and feeling my cloak subside and the hair settle down on my head again as the direct flow of air from beneath was interrupted by the edge of the cliff. As I stepped back, the wind died, without warning, as I had feared it might mere moments earlier. For a count of four heartbeats the air was utterly still and I shuddered with horror, clearly imagining my own body plunging downward into the abyss over which I had so recently been poised. Then the gale returned with a blustering, muffled roar, and I stepped away resolutely, turned my back on the valley and re-entered the fort, making my way straight to the stable where Germanicus was tethered.

Moments later, I left the fort again through the main, southern gate, waving to Lucanus, whom I had noticed walking the interior perimeter road dose against the wall. As I emerged from the gateway and kneed my mount along the approach to the main road, passing the bathhouse and cresting the rise that hid the fort itself from the roadway, I glanced upward to my left, to where the narrow ribbon of the road snaked its way up the final approach to the pass to the next valley, and my eye was arrested by a flash of white. Reining in my horse, I looked more carefully and saw that the whiteness was at least one of the piebald ponies belonging to the four boys, although there was no sign of the boys themselves. Curious, I swung Germanicus eastward when I reached the road and kneed him upward, towards the saddleback of the pass.

I knew the boys came up here often, particularly during the winter months, when they had spent their days sledding down from the heights. I myself had made no attempt to approach the crest of the pass since the first and only time I had been up there, late in the autumn, long before the first snowfall of the winter. I had forgotten how unimaginably steep the incline of the roadway was. As we ascended, Germanicus was forced to lean further and further into each mounting step, battling to force his weight and mine upward, his shod hooves scrabbling and sliding on the hard, slippery, cobbled surface of the roadway as he fought to negotiate each tightly twisting curve on the serpentine slope. I found myself imagining again the agony and grief of the legionaries and wagon drivers who must have sweated and racked themselves struggling to control heavy-laden wagons, drawn by teams of oxen and mules, on such an impossibly pitched surface, only to face even greater difficulties on the downward slope beyond the crest.

As I approached the summit, sheltered now from the buffeting of the wind by the sheer, towering cliffs of the mountainside on my left, I drew rein and dismounted, determined to walk the remainder of the way out of pity for my noble horse. The single pony that had attracted my attention was close by, his reins tethered, I could see, by a heavy stone, and I recognized him as Primus, Arthur's own mount. He looked as though he had been ridden hard, over muddy ground, for all four of his legs, his long tail and the underside of his belly were caked with mud. Of the animal's owner I had yet to see the smallest sign.

Now, however, my eyes were attracted by a suggestion of movement among the short grass on the rocky bank by the side of the road. Only when I took a step closer did I realize that I was looking at the scarcely visible, barely rippling movement of a thin, unbroken sheet of water that was flowing straight down from the last vestiges of snow still melting on the heights far above.

Intrigued, I moved closer still, stepping off the edge of the road into the shallow, pebble-filled ditch and leaning forward to brace my outstretched hand against the rock face, breaking the thin sheet of icy water so that it buckled and surged, shockingly cold against the warm skin of my hand and wrist as I bent forward to peer closely at the vegetation. With a tiny thrill of wonder, I discovered then that what I had thought to be grass was actually an astonishing mixture of delicate, intricately structured mosses of incredible complexity, and tiny, bulbous-leaved plants, many of them bearing minuscule flowers of white, yellow, blue and every colour of red, from pale pink to deep, blood crimson. All of these, in hundreds of thousands,, clung tenaciously to the very surface of the stone, rooted in an endless web of minute fissures in what had seemed a wall of solid rock. Between these fissures, beneath the flowing sheen of water, the stone was coated with lichens in a wondrous range of colours from pale yellows and greens, through ochres and umbers and purples and browns deepening all the way to black—a miniaturized vista of hues and textures the like of which I had never seen or imagined. I remained there, lost in the wonder of my discovery, losing all track of the passage of time, until I became aware, gradually at first and then with increasing urgency, of the loss of sensation in my chilled hand. Smiling foolishly then, I straightened up slowly and, chafing my hand dry with the lining of my cloak, found young Arthur Pendragon staring down at me from the cliff face above me and to my left.

"Merlyn, what are you doing? What are you looking for?"

I nodded a greeting. "Arthur. I came looking for you, first, because I saw your pony from below, but when you found me I was looking at the plants on the stone face, here, and the way the running water covers them. What have you been up to?"

"Nothing." He bent his knees and began making his way down towards me, balancing easily with one outstretched hand touching the stone face behind him.

I turned and climbed the short distance back to where Germanicus stood waiting for me. I gathered his reins and stood again for a spell, staring in wonder at the greenery that had assumed again, from this distance, the appearance of short, bright grasses. Germanicus whickered gently and butted my shoulder with his muzzle, and I turned lazily around to gaze back downward to where our fort lay beneath us, to all outward appearances devoid of life, its walls presenting an aspect of impregnability I knew they could not maintain in reality. There was a fire, as always, in the bathhouse, the smoke from the furnace chimney spilling lazily to pool in a freakishly sheltered pocket and billow there for a while like an errant cloud before being sucked upward at one end of the hollow, into the teeth of the wind, where it curled over the wall and scattered rapidly into nothing.

Arthur jumped down onto the edge of the road with a thump and came towards me, but only when he was almost within arm's reach did I see the swollen bruise on his right temple and the encrusted rims of blood that framed his nostrils. I had not noticed it before because I had been looking up at him from beneath, on the wrong side. Now it was evident that his right eye was blackening impressively, its upper lid swollen and sore looking. He saw me notice, and his face flushed with what I took for discomfort. I stepped closer to him and took his chin in my hand, tilting his head back and up.

"Well, your consolation may lie in the fact that, a month from now, there will be no sign of this. For the next few days, however, your face is going to be a sight to behold. I hope you won?"

His headshake and the way his eyes moved off to gaze into the distance told me he had not.

"Who was it? Gwin? Bedwyr?"

"No." He still would not look at me, even though I held him by the chin. I released my grip and stepped back.

"Who, then?" Even as I asked the question I could see it would go unanswered. There was a stubborn cast to his countenance that was highly uncharacteristic of this normally sunny youngster. I shrugged, to show him I was really unconcerned. "I have no intention of pursuing the matter, Arthur. I merely asked out of curiosity. The damage is already done. It's boys' business and no concern of mine—men have no place in such affairs."

"And yet they take an interest, sometimes." The boy's words came out as a truculent mumble, causing me to narrow my eyes at once.

"What was that? Who takes what? What are you talking about?"

"Men. They sometimes take an interest in the wars of boys."

"Arthur, what are you talking about? You're not making sense." He continued to glower, his young face dark with anger. "Are you saying a man hit you, not a boy?"

"No. I fought with Droc and he beat me."

"I'm sure he did." Droc was one of Derek's eldest sons, at least three years older than Arthur and big for his age, so close to being identical to his own elder brother Landroc that the pair were often mistaken for twins and were inseparable. Arthur was a big lad for his age, too, but his bigness was yet but a promise, and his present frame was long and gangling. I estimated, now that I had reason to think of it, that Droc must be at least half again Arthur's weight. I waited, but it was clear no reaction would be forthcoming.

"What in God's name possessed you to fight with Droc? He's almost as big as I am." The boy made no response at all. "Not going to tell me? Well, then, I'll have to believe it was insanity, although I've never seen the slightest hint of that in you before today. But you said something about men interfering in boys' affairs. Did someone stop the fight?"

"No."

"Well, someone should have. Come on, I'll ride down with you to the fort. Where are the others, Bedwyr and Gwin and Ghilleadh?"

Arthur shook his head. "I don't know. I left them behind, after the fight. I didn't want them with me."

"I see. Were they involved at all?"

Another silent headshake was all I received in answer to that question, and I straightened up, all at once impatient with the boy's unusual reticence.

"Very well, let's be away. Bring your pony, but there's no point in trying to ride down, for the first stretch at least. We'll have to walk."

He collected his pony and we began to wind our way downward in silence, concentrating on where we placed our feet, since the iron nails that studded the soles and heels of our sandalled boots could find no purchase on the hard cobblestones that made up the surface of the road, making every step a matter of careful balance and the threat of a painful fall.

We remounted eventually, once we had achieved the gentler slopes at the bottom of the ridge below the crest, and rode on without speaking, hunched against the battering of the wind. We had almost reached the junction of the roadway and the approach to the fort before either of us spoke again. It was Arthur who broke the silence.

"Ghilleadh found a Roman short-sword—a gladium."

I glanced at him in surprise. "Did he indeed? Where? And how do you know it was Roman?"

"It was lying in the long grass on the hillside beneath the western gate, and it had been there for a long, long time.

Almost rusted away completely, but it was Roman. The hilt was bronze. I've seen dozens just like it in the Armoury at Camulod. Some soldier must have either dropped it or thrown it away, a long time ago. It was probably thrown there, because it was a long way down from the gate and far from any pathway."

"Hmm, I'd like to see that. Will you ask Ghilleadh to show it to me?"

"He can't. Droc took it away from him."

I immediately began to ask myself why a big lad like Droc would be interested in the rusted remnant of an old Roman sword, but then all at once I knew, alerted by the tension radiating from my young companion. Droc had taken it to prove a point of some kind. He had played the bully.

"So that's why you fought Droc. He took the sword away from Ghilleadh."

"Mmm ... "

This time the silence lasted until we were almost inside the fort again. When I drew rein he stopped, too, looking up at me expectantly. I sat thinking for long moments before I spoke.

"Arthur," I said, finally, "I don't want you to think that I am prying, poking my snout into private affairs that -are none of my concern ... " He nodded, a slight crease between his brows as I hesitated. "Having said that, however, I will admit to you that I am more than merely curious. You made a reference, back up there on the hilltop, and from it I suspect that some man, somewhere, has interfered in something that concerns you. I think there is more to this whole affair than you are admitting."

Yet again I paused, deliberately, leaving him ample time to say whatever might have been in his mind, but he guarded his silence, his mouth held now in the semblance of a pout, although no other sign of distemper showed itself upon his open face. I sucked in a deep breath and finished what I had to say.

"There are times when I feel that you and I are more than simply master and student, more than mere cousins, man and boy. At such times, I like to think that we are friends, in the true sense of the word—equal creatures of like mind and temperament, with mutual tastes and complementary opinions and the ability to discuss things openly between ourselves without acrimony or evasion. Do you ever feel that way?"

I felt scorn at myself for my shameless manipulation of the boy, who now sat gazing at me, nodding his head slowly in agreement, his face clouded with the naked need to discuss the matters that were troubling him. He coughed, and then glanced about him, his eyes flitting up to look at the top of the gate-tower ahead of us, and then down again to scan the empty pathway on either side.

"Yes," he said, in a voice that was barely more than a whisper. "I'd like to tell you what happened, but ... not here."

"Of course not. We'll go to my quarters. I have some cold apple juice there, crushed this morning in the kitchens, and some fresh bread. Meet me there as soon as you have unsaddled your pony and rubbed him down. He would benefit from a good grooming."

I stabled Germanicus, unsaddling him without haste and rubbing him down thoroughly with a rough towel, even though he had not even broken a sweat on our short outing. Arthur, I knew, would have a much more difficult task with his own mount, and I knew it was one he would not shirk, for the discipline of caring for their ponies was one that had been painstakingly drilled into each of the boys. Any evidence of carelessness in tending their animals would immediately ensure the dire punishment of forfeiture of riding privileges for anything from a single day to an entire week. When I had finished, ensuring that my horse had both food and drink within reach, I made my way slowly back to my quarters, whistling an old marching tune under my breath and wondering what could possibly have upset the boy so profoundly.

I was still wondering about that, and still struggling against the temptation to think instead of young Tressa and her breasts, when Arthur knocked and entered. About half an hour had passed since we parted, and I saw immediately from his expression that whatever had been troubling him was still paramount in his mind. He accepted the cup of unfermented apple juice I offered him and then sank wordlessly into one of the two large armchairs that flanked the open, stone fireplace against the long wall at the rear of the room. I watched him closely, noting his frowning concentration as I poured myself some wine and went to sit across from him.

Dried kindling and wood shavings were piled carefully in the brazier. The room was cool, almost dark, the slanting light from the mid-day sun pooling on the floor directly beneath the open windows. I stood up again and moved to light a taper from the single lamp burning on my writing table, taking the flame to the brazier. When l was satisfied with the blaze, I straightened up again and moved back to my chair, my feet stretched out towards the leaping flames. Arthur sat staring into the fire.

"So," I began. "What was it that drove you from your friends so early in the day?"

The boy sniffed and his frown deepened, and then he turned to face me, his eyes wide and puzzled. "What gives Droc the right to think he can take Ghilleadh's sword, Merlyn?"

"His size, I should think." I knew the words were ill chosen as they issued from my mouth and immediately wished them unsaid. Here, I knew, was neither the time nor the place for flippancy. To my surprise, though, Arthur did not react to my facetiousness.

"No, that's not enough," he said. "His size gives him the ability to take the sword, but what is it that permits him to think, to believe, completely, that he may take it, as his right?"

I blinked with surprise, and I chose my next words with care.

"Forgive me, Arthur, but I'm not sure I understand you. What are you asking me, exactly?"

"I don't know, not really, but I do know the answer is important. Ghilly found the sword, in the spot where it had lain for years and years. Whoever threw it there has been dead and gone for ages, so it became Ghilly's when he found it. And then Droc saw it and took it away from him. It was an old, dirty thing, all rust, and it was useless, but Droc took it and kept it. Why? Why would he do that?"

I shrugged, mystified. "For the reason I mentioned before, most probably. Because he could. Because he wanted to."

"But why?" The question was almost a shout, the boy's frustration boiling out of him. "Droc has a sword, one of his father's old ones. He has no need of another, especially that old, useless thing of Ghilly's. And yet he took it because he believed he had the right to take it—not because he needed it or wanted it, but because he believed it was his to take. That is wrong, Merlyn. No one should have the right to do that kind of thing. It's ... it's unjust!"

"Well, I can't see that it's worth getting so worked up about. By your own admission, it's nothing more than an ugly of piece of useless, rusted metal of value to no one."

"Ghilly valued it! It was his. He was the one that found it." The scorn and anger in those flashing young Pendragon eyes almost made me flinch, and I suddenly understood that what I, as a man, could accept as being natural, if deplorable, was a source of deep outrage to the boy's sense of justice. I coughed to cover my confusion.

"Well, what did Droc do with the sword, once he had taken it?"

"I don't know. He took it away with him."

"After you and he had fought ... "

"Yes."

"And why did you decide to fight him?"

"I didn't decide. I was fighting him before I knew what I was doing. He bent Ghilly over and beat him with the flat of the old sword. Ghilly was crying, and the next thing I knew, I was on the ground and Droc was kicking me."

"I see. Did you blood him?"

A tiny smile flickered on the boy's lips. "I must have, his nose was bleeding."

"What about the others, Bedwyr and Gwin? Didn't they help you?"