Uther

Chapter ONE

Even when he was a small boy, no more than four or five years old, Uther Pendragon knew that everyone around him believed that his mother, Veronica, was different from everyone else. They even had a special name for her: the away one. It didn't make sense at first. After all, his mother had never been away from him. Veronica was and had always been a constant in his young life, along with his nurse, Rebecca. Those two women, between them, had made their presence absolute in everything young Uther did during his earliest years, while he was yet too young for his presence to be noteworthy to others. In the beginning, there were only those two.

One of the very first newcomers to join this tiny group was a woman called Henna, who had been assigned by Uther's grandfather, King Ullic Pendragon, to cook for the newcomers at the very outset of Veronica's life in Ullic's stronghold, eight months and more before Uther was born. Henna had quickly warmed to the King's new daughter-in-law, despite the younger woman's alien upbringing and Outlandish behaviour, so that, for one reason and another, she had never stopped cooking for her new charges and had been completely absorbed into their new life as a married couple. By the time Uther grew old enough to look about him and observe his surroundings, Henna the cook was a fixture of the household in which he lived. And after he had learned to run and to talk, he quickly learned that if he ran and talked to Henna, she would give him wondrous things to eat.

Henna was the first person Uther ever heard using the term the away one to describe his mother, and although he did not know then who the cook was talking about, he knew that there was no slight or disparagement intended in the strange-sounding name. He understood right away that the away one was a woman, unfortunate or afflicted in some way. And as he grew older, and he heard the name repeated more and more often by people who thought he was too young to be listening, he soon came to understand that this mysterious woman was different in some important respect from "normal" people. He knew that all of the women who gathered in Henna's kitchen liked the away one and held her in high regard—that was plain in the tone of their voices when they spoke of her—and he knew, too, that they all felt sorry for her in some way. But for a very long time he was unable to discover the woman's identity.

On one occasion, frustrated by something particular that he had overheard, he even asked his mother who the away one was, but Veronica merely looked strangely at him, her face blank with incomprehension. When he repeated the question, articulating it very slowly and precisely, she frowned in exasperation, and he quickly began to talk about something else, as though he had never asked that question in the first place.

Despite having broached the question with his mother, however, he had never been even slightly tempted to ask Henna or any of her friends, because he knew that would have warned them that he was listening when they talked, and they would have been more careful from then on, depriving him of his richest source of information and gossip. And so for long months he merely listened very carefully and tried to work out the secret of the away one's identity by himself, looking more and more analytically, as time went by, at each of the women with whom he came into contact in the course of a day. He knew that there would have to be something about this particular woman that set her noticeably apart and gave others the impression that she was never quite fully among them; that her interests held no commonality with theirs; that she was someone who was not wholly there.

He floundered in ignorance until the day when, in the middle of talking about the mysterious woman, Henna suddenly hissed, "Shush! Here she comes"—and his mother walked into the kitchen. Uther was stunned by the swiftness with which the truth dawned upon him then, because it was immediately obvious that Veronica met all of his carefully defined criteria. His mother did not associate with Henna and her people in any capacity other than that of the mistress of the household, aloof and set apart, issuing commands, expressing her wishes and expectations and occasionally complaining and insisting upon higher standards in one thing or another. And yet it was plain that they all liked her and that they respected her integrity and her natural sense of justice.

Uther had developed the ability to reason by the time he was five and now, having discovered at six years of age who the away one was, he felt immensely proud of himself for having solved the mystery all on his own. His pride, however, was short-lived, because within the month he overheard another conversation in which a newcomer to Ullic's settlement, a weaver woman called Gyndrel, asked Henna why they called the mistress the away one. Henna, a woman who loved to answer a question with a question, promptly asked Gyndrel why she thought they would call her that. Gyndrel's first response was that the name must have come from Veronica's obviously foreign background, from the fact that she came from someplace away from Cambria, but Henna snorted with disgust almost before the words were fully out of Gyndrel's mouth. Veronica, she pointed out, might have begun her life as an Outlander, but she was now the wife of the King's eldest son, and no one in the entire Pendragon Federation would dare to insult or defame her nowadays by hinting that she might be anything less than acceptable. Henna then told the woman, her words dripping with disdain, to stop drivelling and use her mind for once.

Sitting on the far side of the fire from the women, concealed from their direct view by a pile of firewood, Uther nodded smugly to himself as Gyndrel eventually answered with all the plausible reasons he would have given in her place. But his head jerked up in shock when Henna dismissed all of them with a scornful laugh.

Nah, she scoffed, pulling her shawl tightly about her shoulders and shifting her large buttocks in search of comfort. When Gyndrel grew more familiar with this family and what went on under this roof, she would soon learn that the away one meant simply what it said: the mistress was all too often away in a place of her own within her own head, far from Cambria.

That dose of information gave young Uther much more to think about than he had ever had before, and he began to watch his mother closely, examining her behaviour for any sign of these "absences." but of course it was useless to attempt anything of the kind, because his mother's behaviour was no whit different than it had ever been, and he had never seen anything strange about it before. Nevertheless, he remained alert after that for signs of awayness in her.

After that day, he took special pains to safeguard and protect Ins virtual invisibility in the kitchen while the women were gossiping, removing himself from view whenever the conversation promised to be especially enlightening, and he never failed to keep one ear cocked for any mention of his mother's "other" name. He learned much over the course of the ensuing four years, and he began to recognize the "away" intervals in his mother's behaviour, but he never did learn anything in the kitchens about the underlying cause of Veronica's supposedly strange behaviour, and he eventually became convinced that Henna herself did not know the truth, no matter how hard she tried to appear all-knowing.

The first plausible explanation that Uther ever heard came years later, in a conversation between his father and his mother's father, Publius Varrus. It took place in Camulod in the early spring of one year. Uric had brought his wife to visit her parents, Publius and Luceiia Varrus, and to collect his son, who had spent the entire winter in his grandparents' home with his "twin" cousin, Caius Merlyn Britannicus. The two boys had been born within hours of each other on the same day, albeit miles apart, one of them in Cambria and the other in Camulod. They were very close—in blood if not in temperament—and they had been the best of friends ever since they had grown old enough to recognize each other. Caius's father, Picus Britannicus, had once been a cavalry commander—a full legate—in the Roman legions under the great Flavius Stilicho, Imperial Regent and Commander-in-Chief of the boy emperor Honorius. When his wife was killed by a madman, shortly after giving birth to their only son, Picus's Aunt Luceiia, Uther's grandmother, adopted the infant Caius as her own charge in the enforced absence of his father.

When the two boys were very small, barely able to walk and run, Uther's mother Veronica had insisted that they spend as much time as possible in each other's company, for both their sakes and for the good of the family, and so it had become normal for Uther to spend much of each winter down in Camulod, and then for Caius—or Cay, as he had come to be known by his friends—to return with him to Cambria for much of the summer.

On this particular afternoon, Uther was once again playing the role of invisible listener, his eavesdropping skills long practised and honed by his years of hiding in Henna's kitchen. It was a dismal, rainy day, and the boys had been playing indoors in the old Villa Britannicus, once the ancestral home of Caius Britannicus, Caius Merlyn's grandfather, but now used as quarters for visiting guests, since the family had moved up to live in the new fort at the top of the hill less than a mile away.

Uther had been hiding from Cay and his other friends, well concealed behind a curtain in his grandfather's favourite room. When he heard the sound of approaching footsteps, he remained utterly still, believing it was his companions come looking for him. It wasn't until he heard his grandfather Publius begin to speak that he realized his error, and he began to emerge from his hiding place, but almost immediately, perhaps by force of habit, he hesitated.

Uther's father had followed Publius into the room, and his grandfather asked his first question without preamble. It was suddenly too late, and so Uther remained where he was and listened.

"You can tell me to mind my own business if you wish, but there's something wrong between you and Veronica, isn't there?"

Uther stood motionless, holding his breath as he waited to hear his father's response. The silence that followed seemed to last for an age. Then Uther heard the sound of slow footsteps and the scraping of wood on stone as someone moved a chair.

"Has she said anything to you?" his father asked.

"No, she has not. . . not to me or to her mother . . . but neither one of us is stupid, Uric, and Veronica is not a facile liar, even when she keeps silent. The trouble's not ours, for all that we love our daughter . . . it's yours and hers. A daughter and a wife are two distinct and very different creatures, coexisting in a single woman. But, as I said, if you don't wish to talk about it, I'll respect that."

Another long silence stretched out and was shattered by the brazen clash of a gong, making Uther jump, so that for a moment he was afraid he might have betrayed himself. Nothing happened, however, and as his heartbeat began to slow again, he heard another voice, this one from the far side of the room.

"Master Varrus, what may I bring you?"

"Ah, Gallo, bring us something to drink, please. Something cold."

Gallo must have retired immediately, because the silence resumed, and then his father spoke again.

"I don't really know what to tell you, Publius. Something definitely is wrong, and it has been wrong for a long, long time. There's a part of me that thinks it understands, but even so, it doesn't really make sense even to me, so how can I explain it to you?"

It was some time before his father spoke again.

"Not that we are unhappy, you know . . . It's simply that . . . well, we sleep together and behave as man and wife, but I know—" Uric Pendragon broke off and then continued in a rush. "She won't have any more children. None, Publius. And I don't mean she is incapable of having any more. I mean she will not have them. Doesn't want them, won't hear talk of them. She takes . . . she takes medicaments and nostrums to guard against becoming pregnant. Gets them from some of the old women who live in the countryside beyond our settlement, the ones who are supposed to be the priestesses of the Old Goddess."

"The Old Goddess? You mean the Moon Goddess?"

"Aye, the greatest of all our gods and goddesses, Rhiannon. She is very real and very present out there among the people of the mountains and the forests."

"Why on earth would she go to such lengths to avoid having children? That does not sound like the Veronica I know. All she ever dreamed of as a girl was having a brood of children of her own. You must have—" Varrus broke off and cleared his throat. "Damnation, it's difficult to say some things without sounding wrong. I'm not blaming you for anything, yet . . . Have you any idea what happened?"

Uther heard his father sigh, a great, gusting breath.

"It has to be connected with that first night we arrived in Cambria, newly wed, and the debacle that took place there, the deaths. By the time I discovered what was going on, it was already too late to prevent it. I tried to hide it from her, to take her away and protect her from it, but I couldn't, and I know it frightened her badly . . .

"But then, over time, once all the excitement had died away, she seemed to settle down and gradually grew more calm. I tried to explain it to her—all the whys and wherefores of how it happened. But she merely listened, and finally I stopped talking about it altogether. We never spoke of it again. I thought she had forgotten it at last."

They were interrupted at that point by the return of Gallo, evidently accompanied by another man bearing a tray of drinks. Uther felt his bladder stirring faintly and resolutely ignored it, concentrating instead upon the muttered, indecipherable mumbles of small talk and the clinking of dishes. Moments later, he heard the sound of liquid pouring from one container into others. He translated an inarticulate grunt from his father as a wordless acknowledgment of gratitude, and then someone—he assumed it was his grandfather because it was he who spoke next—replaced his cup audibly on a surface of some kind.

"So, you were saying she recovered from her horror, eventually . . ."

"Aye, I thought she had. She was terrified at first. I think she believed that the things she had seen were common—probably thought we burned all our enemies alive. There was a time afterwards when she was so . . . I don't know . . . so gone from me that I was afraid I had lost her and her love forever. Then Uther was born, and we were lost in the wonder of watching him grow stronger and more beautiful each day.

"Months went by, then years, and I began to fret over her failure to have another child. It was not for the lack of trying, and so I began to worry and to question myself. She'd had no trouble conceiving when we were first wed . . . in fact, I believe she caught with child on our wedding night. But then when I began to harp on that to her, wondering why it should be so, Veronica reacted strangely. She grew hostile and refused to speak of it, turning away from me each time I raised the subject. And that was when I began to be aware that something was badly wrong between us . . . That would have been . . . what? Four years ago? No, closer to five. I knew I had done nothing to cause any such wrongness . . . nothing harmful . . .

"I've never doubted that she loves me, but there is a deep, deep sadness in her all the time, Publius, a well of grief. And I feel powerless to help her. As I said, she won't even consider having any more children. Not at all."

"And you don't know why?"

"No, I do, it goes back to that first night, the night of the fires. The last time we fought, she said she would never bring another child into this world to be betrayed and blackened by the Druids."

It took his grandfather some time to respond to that.

"I think, Uric, I would like to hear what really happened on that occasion. By the time we learned anything about it in Camulod, it had all been over for months, and everyone was trying to forget it, stepping over and around it and saying as little as possible. I know there was an uprising of some kind among the Druids and that many of them were killed, and I know that several other people died in a fire. But what did Veronica actually see that night?"

Another long silence ensued, and Uther stood motionless, trying not to breathe too loudly lest the sound of it be noticeable to the men on the other side of the curtain. Every time they paused, as each man thought deeply before saying what he had to say next, it left a silence into which he was afraid the sound of his breathing or his heartbeat might easily intrude.

Finally his father spoke.

"She witnessed a burning."

"A burning . . . What does that mean? Are you telling me it was deliberate, that she saw someone being deliberately burned to death?"

"Aye . . . more than one."

"How many more, in God's name?"

"Thirty-two."

"By the Christian Christus! Thirty-two men? She was barely sixteen years old! You allowed her to watch thirty-two men being j burned alive?"

"No, of course not! I allowed nothing. But there was nothing I could have done. Even my father was powerless to stop it. We arrived in the middle of things, with no warning."

Another long silence and then the sound of footsteps pacing up and down When his grandfather's voice came again, Uther could imagine him looking out and away, with his back to Uric. "And what was going on, Uric? Tell me about it now."

"There's not much to tell. It all came to a head while we were here in Camulod for the wedding feast, but it had begun a long time beforethat—a plot born and nurtured in secrecy, protected by blood oaths and the fear of visitation by demons. What forced it into prominence, however, was sheer circumstance and coincidence. While the King and his strongest supporters were away in Camulod making merry, a force of Ersemen raided our southern coast. Four boatloads of them. By the merest chance, we had a force of our own down there at the time, under the command of Powys, one of my father's best captains. By the time Powys learned of the enemy presence and caught up to them, however, the raiders had burned four settlements along the coastline. Powys fought them as soon as he found them. Caught them away from their boats and cut them off, then slaughtered them—or most of them. Not enough of them, as it turned out. We found out later that Powys had been spending time in the company of certain of our Druids, and because of that, instead of simply killing the raiders out of hand as he ought to have, he brought them back as prisoners."

"Why would he do that? Your people don't take slaves, do they? And you've no place and no time for prisoners. In any case I thought your Chief Druid was with us in Camulod at that time. Was he not the one in the red robes, officiating at the nuptials along with Bishop Alaric?"

"Aye, he was. Llew was his name. He's dead now and was replaced by a man called Daris five years ago. The trouble had begun elsewhere among the Druids, long before my marriage to Veronica, with a group of disaffected malcontents known as the Black Brethren. These people thought they could break away from what they saw as weaknesses in the faith and re-establish the ancient ways—or their ideas of the ancient ways. They revived the traditions whispered of in the tales of the great human burnings, when captured enemies were offered to the gods in sacrifice and Cambria was strong and proud. Such tales as those you have probably never heard, for nothing of the kind has happened in more than half a thousand years. But the stories persist among our people, and the tradition has never been forgotten.

"These mad priests used their power and their place within our lives to instill deep fear of the ancient gods in those people who would listen to them. And many people did, many people from all levels of our folk. Powys was not the only Chief or lesser chieftain they seduced. And they moved quickly, once they had decided to go forward with their plans. They enforced their viewpoints and their commands in secrecy, using blood oaths and dreadful threats of punishment for betrayal, exercising fear as the potent force that it is. Their movement, if you could even call it that, was a kind of insurrection against Llew the Chief Druid and his ways. It came to naught, as it turned out, because that single incident of the Tir Manha burning brought about their end.

"When we arrived from Camulod that night, sunset had caught us within several miles of home, but since we anticipated no danger there in our own lands, we decided to press on in the darkness and sleep in our own beds in Tir Manha . . . You can have no idea how much, or how often, I have regretted that decision."

"No, I believe you. But wait you . . ." There came another silence, and then Uther heard the sound of more footsteps approaching from a distance.

"Caius?" he heard his grandfather ask, his voice tight with irritation. "What are you doing in here? You know you're not supposed to bring your friends clattering through the house like raiding Outlanders."

"We're looking for Uther, Uncle."

"That matters not to me, lad. If you have eyes in your head and the sense with which to use them, you will see that Uther is not here. Now, off with you and seek him somewhere else. Your Uncle Uric and I are trying to talk, so away you go and leave us to our affairs. But go quietly, because if your Aunt Luceiia finds you charging through the house like that, you'll all be in trouble. And close those doors as you go out, if you please."

Moments later, after the footsteps had retreated more quietly than they had approached, Varrus spoke again.

"So, I gather that you arrived home to find this sacrifice already underway. But you must have known what was happening, from all the light and the activity. Surely you could have spirited your wife away from all of it? The glow from thirty-two fires must have been bright indeed."

"Thirty-two—? No, there was but one fire, Publius, in the burning pit. The prisoners were all confined in cages, suspended above it." In the space of a few stark moments, Uric outlined the sight that had awaited the returning party on their arrival, and Uther listened, fascinated, as his mind tried to recreate what the scene must have looked and sounded like.

When Uric had finished speaking, Publius Varrus remained quiet for a while, absorbing what he had been told.

"By the Christ," he said eventually in a flat, stunned voice. "I remember your father describing this pit to me, years ago. But he made no mention of that kind of thing. This is barbarism beyond anything I have ever known or heard of. And Ullic did nothing to stop it?"

"He was as confused as all the rest of us. Nothing like that had ever happened in living memory, and none of us really knew what to expect."

"Your Druids must have known!"

"Aye, the dark ones did—the Black Brethren—but they were the only ones. And they had had time to work on those of us who had stayed home by invoking the three-day law. The prisoners had been captive for three days by then, you see. And our ancient laws decree that if a prisoner is to die, he should be killed within three days of being taken. Failing that, he should be kept as a working slave or else set free. If he is killed after three days, however, his spirit remains to haunt and terrify his murderers."

"That is nonsense."

"No, Publius, that is our ancient law . . . Druidic law."

"Based upon fear and superstition."

"Based upon our beliefs. Cambria isn't Camulod, Publius." Uther heard his father pacing anxiously and the exasperation in his voice when he spoke again. "You have open spaces, high walls and Roman comforts. You have warmth and light in abundance—line, pure tapers and candles of beeswax, with bright, coal-burning braziers and blazing torches fuelled by carefully rendered tallow and clear oils. Not so with us. We are ruled by the night and the darkness, and our people fear the beings that infest the night. You, with your Roman-bred beliefs, you can smile at us for being superstitious, but we must live with who we are and what we know. We believe that the spirits of the dead walk freely among us in the dark of night, and that only the goodwill of our gods keeps them from terrorizing us. When the gods are not pleased, we are at the mercy of the night. We are Celts, Publius, not Romans. That is not superstition to us . . . it is the very stuff of life and truth, and believe me when I tell you it is difficult to feel that you are being foolish and superstitious when your blood has turned to water and your bones to jelly because of the blind terror that has eaten you whole."

"Aye, I suppose . . . and your Druids encourage you in all of that"

"Of course they do. They are our priests."

"So what of this Llew, what did he do that night?"

"Nothing. He was overpowered and knocked unconscious by the rebel priests as soon as he arrived, captured out of our sight and carried off before any of us knew what was going on. Then my father's father's councillors came to us, suborned as they had been by the black priests, and convinced him that it was the will of all the gods— and all the Druids—that the sacrifice proceed and that the spirits of the prisoners be freed, since plainly we could not turn them all loose or keep them all penned up as slaves and prisoners. My father saw the truth of that and thus permitted them to proceed, albeit with great reluctance, and the sacrifice began. Only then did I begin to realize what was really happening.

"The burning pit had always been there, since before I was born, and I had seen it used on several occasions to burn the remains of high-born men, chiefs and Druids. But I had never known of its being used to burn the living. I tried to take Veronica out of there then, finally aware of what might happen, but in seeking to protect her, I made the mistake of not telling her what was really taking place, and so she balked and ran away from me towards the fires and the smoke and the sacrifice, not knowing what was there . . ."

"And . . . ?"

"It was a full month and more before she spoke another word, to me or anyone. It was as though she lay in a trance, even though she ate and drank when meat and drink were offered her. I almost lost my wits before the end of that."

"Why did we hear nothing of this?"

"Because that was how Veronica wished it to be. As she recovered, she decided that it could serve no useful purpose to upset you and her mother with word of what she had endured. And by that time, she was well swollen with little Uther and no one wanted to talk much of anything other than that."

"Aye. And your own people, how did they react to what was done that night by these Black Brethren?"

"Well, talking about offering a human sacrifice and actually performing a human sacrifice are not at all the same thing. Once our people saw the smoke and heard the screams and smelled the stink of charring flesh, they quickly lost all their lust for the old days. Tir Manha was a quiet, shame-filled place for long, long weeks after that night."

"And what about the priests, these so-called rebels who dreamed up this thing?"

"Well, we found out by the following morning what had been happening, and we found them on the point of killing Llew just in time to stop them. Then we killed them all."

"How? You burned them, didn't you? Threw them into their own pit?"

"No, Publius, we did not burn them. That thing, that burning was . . . there is a Roman word for it I've heard you use . . . an aberration. It was an evil thing, born of a few evil men who made it happen through fear. We Pendragons are not a wicked people, Publius, and we are certainly not evil. You know that. We have never burned another person since that night, and we never will. We simply cut the rebel priests down wherever we found them. No ceremony involved. That would have made them seem important. We simply killed them out of hand. And then we filled in the burning pit completely and used it for their common grave, leaving it unmarked. There were forty-four of them in all in our lands. More than a few, but not enough, in the long run, to generate any significant threat to Llew, his brethren and their teachings. There might have been others of their kind elsewhere, beyond our territories, but if there were we heard nothing of them once the word had spread of how the Black Brethren in King Ullic's land had died."

"Aye, well . . ." Publius Varrus sighed deeply. "Uric, I know you are not evil, nor is your father. But I tell you honestly, I cannot conceive of such a thing happening ever, under any circumstances, among our people in Camulod or elsewhere in any other place that I know of. There is something fundamentally, intrinsically wrong with people who could do such things, no matter what the provocation."

Uther listened, his chest tight, waiting for his father to digest those words and then respond to them. And for the longest time, it sounded as though no answer would be made. But then his father spoke again, his voice little more than a whisper.

"You're right, Publius, you're right. There is a darkness within our Cambrian spirits that permits us, as a folk, to do such things. We did them in the dim and far-off past, in the smoky shadows of black night and at the urging of our priests, and we have shown that we could do them still today, given the proper drive. It is cause for deep shame."

"No, son, it is cause for awareness and great care in future time, but not for further shame. As you have said, you've never burned a man, and you never will. Be sure to remind your people, though, that they did once, and that they regretted it. But Veronica—tell me truly, what has this to do with her wanting no more children?"

When Uther heard his father's voice again, it was filled with certainty and conviction. "I believe she is determined that no child of hers will ever grow to live in Cambria among the Pendragon and offer human sacrifice. I think she blames all of my people for what happened that night. She has made friends among us I have no doubt of that, but she will never fully trust any of us ever . . . I believe, too, that something has gone wrong within her mind, and because of that, she fears now that any other children she might have with me will be infected with the darkness that lies in our past and in our blood. That, I truly believe, is the root and cause of her refusal to have more."

Another pause as his grandfather pondered, Uther supposed, and then a sigh. "I think the same, Uric. And I believe it rests with you and me to help her forget all about this." Uther could imagine the two men sipping thoughtfully from the cups they held. Then, "One more thing. What about the boy?"

"Uther? What about him?"

"How does she feel about him?"

Listening breathlessly, Uther knew the time that elapsed then must have been short, but to him it seemed endless as he waited for his father to reply.

"What do you mean?"

He had a mental image of his father's face creased in puzzlement.

"Well, if she is so upset over the thought of having more children to be corrupted by your Druids, or whomever else she sees as being responsible, then it seems to me that it might be because of something she has seen, or thinks to have seen, in young Uther.

You did say that for several years she gave no indication of her fears. Something, then, must have triggered them, and it occurred to me it might have been the boy."

Uther could barely understand what his father was being asked. Was he being accused of hurting his own mother? Apparently his lather was equally confused, because it was some time before he answered, and then he said simply, "Publius, he's your grandson."

"I know he is, and I could not love him more were we twins. But Uther possesses all the attributes that any other, future child of yours might have . . . and that means he has all the failings and the flaws, as well as the strengths. It is those flaws and failings-—how did you refer to them earlier, as a darkness that lies within your past and in your blood?—that Veronica claims to fear. How, then, does she perceive her son? Is she afraid of him or for him?"

"No, of course not! Neither one nor the other. She loves him. I swear it, Publius. Veronica loves Uther."

To Uther's ear, however, his father's words rang unconvincingly. There had been a pause, a hesitation, that lasted a tiny moment too long. His grandfather thought so too.

"I think you're wrong there, Uric, and I think you know it, down in the depths of you. Oh, not in the part about her loving him, for I believe wholeheartedly that my daughter loves her son—it shines out of her like a pure light whenever she sees him. But I believe in my gut that Veronica fears deeply for the boy and always has, ever since his birth, and probably for months before that. I believe that is why she has always insisted, ever since the boy was old enough to walk, that he spend as much time as he does in Camulod with young Caius. I'm beginning to suspect that Uther would be sent to Camulod each year even if Caius were not there."

When next he spoke, Uric sounded unsure of himself. "If what you say is true, there is no logic in it. I had never thought of it before now, but Uther himself ought to be a shining reason for Veronica to want more children. There's nothing wrong with him."

"But we are not discussing logic here, Uric. We are discussing women, their ideas and their instinctual fears. It is not her unborn children that threaten poor Veronica, it is the dread of what evil men might do to them, and therein lies her folly and her sickness, for if all women were to shut themselves up as she has, refusing to bear children for fear the world might damage or corrupt them, then our whole race of men would soon die out and leave this world to the beasts . . .

"Our task, as I see it, is to work from now on to convince your wife that her own teachings will be stronger than the urgings of evil men. She is the one who, as a mother, will show her sons and daughters the light of hope and goodness that burns in the deepest darkness. You agree?"

"Yes . . . yes, of course I do."

"Good, then let's go and make a beginning."

When the two men had gone, Uther emerged, holding the edge of the curtain carefully and lowering it gently as he left his hiding place. He moved slowly across the room towards a large padded and upholstered armchair facing the stone hearth in the end wall, stopped when his hip bumped against it but made no move to sit. Instead, he stood staring sightlessly into the empty fireplace, his eyes unfocused as he grappled with the strange and troubling new thought that had been implanted in his mind: his mother feared him. His mind had accepted what it heard, because there was no logical reason to do otherwise . . . the two men speaking had not known that he was there, so they'd had no reason to speak other than truthfully. But his young mind, overwhelmed by that sudden realization, had also failed to establish any distinction between his mother being afraid of him and afraid for him.

Uther Pendragon was now a very different person from the carefree boy who had dashed into the room a half-hour earlier. Then the biggest and most immediate problem in his mind had been the need to find a perfect hiding place. Now he had been changed forever and had aged immeasurably. Now he was fighting to accept, and to adjust to, the awareness that his own beloved mother was afraid of him, afraid of some dark side of him, some elemental thing that lay imbedded in his very nature, some aspect of his being that she had learned to fear and distrust long before he was born, when she herself was a young girl, not many years older than he was now. Whatever it was, that thing had terrified her thoroughly, enough to alter her lifelong determination to mother an entire brood of children.

Uther discovered that he had no wish to know what that thing was, for if it had the power to terrify his mother, he knew it would frighten him beyond bearing. He hated the thought that his mother might be afraid of him, but he hated even more the suspicion that she might distrust him in some basic, formless way. He knew she loved him. He had heard his grandfather say that her smile lit up the room whenever she set eyes on him, and he knew that was true because he had seen it with his own eyes. How, then, could she be afraid of him? What was there in him, in his very nature, that could make even his mother fear him?

That was a question Uther Pendragon would never be able to answer, for he could never know that what his Roman-bred mother feared lay not within him, but in the very nature of his Celtic people.

Chapter TWO

Garreth Whistler might never have heard the sound had he not been in love. As it was, his mind was so full of thoughts of the woman called Laminda and the risk he was taking, meeting her in broad daylight with her husband close by that he was temporarily incapable of whistling, and he strode quietly across the meadow surrounding the King's House, hearing only the sound of his own feet swishing through the long grass that awaited the scythe. As he neared the ancient stone-built cattle byre beneath the large oak tree on the southeast corner of the King's Holding, the portion of land allocated to the King by his people for his living, he hesitated, wondering which of two possible routes might offer him the best chance of reaching his assignation unseen. And in that moment of utter stillness he heard a stifled whimper coming from the ruined building.

When he stuck his head around the corner and saw the tear streaked, dirt smeared face of a small boy who huddled against the wall there, wrapped as nearly into a ball as he could achieve, his arms clasped around his upraised knees and his shins oozing blood, Garreth experienced a lucid moment of decision that would surprise him later when he considered what it might have cost him. He recognized the child, saw his misery, in the same instant had a vision of Laminda amorously awaiting him—and he chose immediately to comfort the boy.

Uther? Is that you? What's wrong, lad?"

Uther's eyes flew wide, and his seven-year-old heart quailed as he saw the hero who towered over him. Garreth Whistler was his grand- lather Ullic's greatest champion, a mighty warrior whom no one could best with sword or battle-axe, and who could wrestle and beat any other two of King Ullic's Pendragon warriors at any time. Uther was appalled to think that this man, of all men, should be the one to find him cringing and cowering, bawling like a baby and girlishly nursing his hurts. But Garreth Whistler had already propped his shield and his two-headed iron axe in a corner and was now down on one knee in front of him, gently pulling his arms away to uncover the lacerated shin bone that still oozed blood. As he looked at the swollen bruise and the blood that trickled from its centre, the big warrior's frown deepened and his long white moustaches seemed to bristle.

"What did this, a stone?" The child shook his head, gulping. "What then? A stick?" Another shake of the head. "Did you fall? Let's have a look." He raised the boy's leg and peered at the abrasion closely. "It's a cut, a straight edge. Looks like a blow. You didn't hit anything, something hit you." He paused and glanced up at the boy's face. "Something like a leather-soled boot?"

Uther nodded miserably.

"Who?"

"Ivor."

"Ivor? Cross-Eyed Ivor?" Again the child nodded. "But he must be, what, three years older than you? He's twice your size." Uther said nothing.

Garreth sighed and braced himself with one hand, then twisted down and around to sit beside the boy, adjusting his short, wide- bladed sword so that it lay comfortably on the ground alongside his thigh before settling his back against the rough stone wall.

"Well," he said, "I've always got time for a good story, and I suspect you have one to tell. So let's start right at the beginning— tell me why a great lump like Cross-Eyed Ivor would want to kick a bright little fellow like you."

The boy sat silent for a while, staring down at the ground, and Garreth made no effort to speak, allowing the silence to stretch until it became clear that the boy would not break it. When he felt it had been long enough, he moved to rise again, speaking as though to himself.

"Well, if you don't want to talk, I'll be on my way, then, and leave you to your sorrows—"

"No!" The boy was evidently so shocked at his own vehemence that he sat blinking at his temerity in using such a tone when addressing the King's Champion.

Garreth ignored the look. "No? Does that mean you want me to stay?"

"Yes."

"Fine, then I'll stay a little longer, but what good will that do if you won't talk to me?"

"I'll talk to you." The words were barely more than a whisper.

"Then why don't you start by telling me why Cross-Eyed Ivor kicked you." Before the boy could even begin to respond, Garreth held up his hand, palm outward, to silence him. "Wait, I want you to listen to me carefully first, and take note of what I have to say. Will you do that?"

The boy nodded, mute.

"Good. Now you are probably thinking that I won't believe what you tell me and thinking, too, that you will be shaming yourself by even talking about it . . . and you might even be thinking that I'll think you are making everything up. Are you? Is that what you're thinking?"

"N-no."

"Are you sure about that? You don't sound very sure."

No, I'm sure." The boy's voice was growing stronger and more confident.

"Well, I'm very glad to know that, because here is what is really in my mind. You are cut and bleeding, and I can see plainly that someone has been beating you . . . beating you fairly thoroughly. Even before you told me who it was, I knew it must have been someone older and bigger than you are, because I know you are your father's son and your grandfather's pride and joy, and I know you would never stand still and allow anyone to do that to you unless he was much bigger and older than you are. Am I correct?"

Uther nodded hesitantly, his eyes wide with amazement at hearing praise and encouragement where he had expected scorn.

"I knew it. And it was only one boy, wasn't it? It was only cross-Eyed Ivor who hit you?" The boy nodded again, but this lime his eyes remained cast down, and Garreth went after the information he suspected would be there. "Am I correct? Or were there others there? Were there others with him?"

This time the nod of Uther's head was very small.

"Aha! And did any of the others hit you?"

"No, only Ivor. But they watched, and laughed."

"Why? Why were they tormenting you?"

"They don't like me."

"Well, I don't know about that. . . For all we know, they might be afraid to show Ivor what they really think of him, in case he turns on them. He's a big strong clod, isn't he?" The boy nodded, and Garreth tilted his head in agreement. "Yes, well, it wouldn't be the first time people have ganged up on someone else, someone smaller than they are, to protect themselves from being tormented by a big strong clod of a bully." Garreth Whistler let that sink home for a few moments and then continued. "Why were they tormenting you, anyway, do you know? Did they tell you?"

The boy mumbled something.

"What? I didn't hear what you said."

Uther cleared his throat and then spoke again, more loudly. "They called me an Outlander."

"An Outlander? Hah! They must be mad. You're no Outlander, you're the King's own grandson, born and bred right here in Tir Manha. Of course, your mother might be called an Outlander . . . Hey, hold on there! Do you intend to fight me, too? I only said she might be called one . . ."

The boy had blanched and started to struggle to gain his feet, his full lips pulled into a grimace and white with rage.

"She is not! My mother is not an Outlander."

"I know that, lad, I know! Listen to me!" Garreth had gripped the boy by the wrists, imprisoning his hands and restraining them effortlessly. As the man's words penetrated his rage, Uther slumped back and relaxed, and as soon as he did, Garreth released him.

"That's better. I thought for a moment there that you were going to injure me. Are you going to be quiet now? Am I safe?" He examined Uther's expression closely and then nodded, apparently satisfied with what he saw. "Good lad. Now look here, let's be truthful about this, you and me. Your father, Uric Pendragon, is the King's firstborn son, isn't that so? What that means, then, is that had your mother been an Outlander of any kind, then your father, as the King's son, could never have wed her. You know that's true, don't you?" Uther nodded. "Good. We are agreed on that, and therefore we can agree, too, that it doesn't matter what any other fool might have to say on the matter. So now you can settle down and chew on some of these."

He reached into the leather scrip that hung from his waist and produced a bag of shelled hazelnuts. The boy took it hesitantly, shook out a small portion of nuts into his palm and began to pop them into his mouth one by one. Garreth did the same, crunching the nuts audibly and with relish between strong, white, even teeth as he continued speaking.

"Now me, I'm a real Outlander, you know, because of my father—my real father, I mean. I was born here, too, but the man who raised me was not my real father. Nobody here ever saw him or knew who he was or where he came from. But with just one look at me, they can tell he was an Outlander from far away." He laughed, disparaging himself, and Uther did not know how he should react. Garreth Whistler looked very different from everyone else, but Uther had never heard anyone mention the fact aloud. Then, incredulous, he heard the big man say, "You and I have many things to tell each other, Master Pendragon."

They sat in a more companionable silence for a time until they had eaten all their nuts, and then Garreth ventured a little further.

"That was it, wasn't it? Ivor was saying things about your mother and you fought him."

"Yes." The voice was soft again, almost too quiet to be heard.

"That's what I thought . . ." He reached into his open mouth with his right pinkie and delicately picked a piece of nut from between two teeth. "It's a necessary thing for a man to defend his mother's name and honour. But a clever man ought to stop and think before throwing himself into a fight he can't win. You didn't think about that, did you?"

"Yes, I did. I didn't want to fight. But they made me. They found me and made me fight."

"You mean they made you fight by laughing at your mother and saying bad things about her?"

"Yes"

"Where were you when they found you?"

"Hiding."

"Hiding from them? Why would you do that?"

"Because . . . because I was afraid. They always beat me." The boy hung his head, peering down at himself, the very picture of shame and dejection.

Garreth Whistler kept his voice pitched low when he spoke again. "Hmm. I know what you mean. Being alone and surrounded by enemies makes you really afraid. I know the feeling well."

At the edge of his vision, Garreth saw the boy's head come up and swivel towards him, the eyes wide with disbelief, and he swung his own head to return the look.

"What? You don't believe me? You think I'm lying, is that what you think? You think that because I'm the King's Champion I've never been afraid?" He sat up straight, bent his knees, reached down with one hand and pushed himself up easily from the ground. Then he reached down again and helped young Uther to his feet.

"Come on, let's take a walk, you and me. I have to meet someone, but you can come with me. It won't take long, and on the way back we'll get you cleaned up so that the sight of you won't frighten your mother." He paused and squinted down at Uther's bleeding shins. "How are the legs? Can you walk on them, or should I carry you on my back like a baby?" His tone was jocular, teasing, and the boy rewarded him with a shy smile.

"I can walk."

"Magnificent!" Garreth Whistler busied himself for a moment adjusting the hang of his sword and collecting his axe and shield, and then he stood upright again, looming over the boy who now stood gazing up at him. "There, that's better! Now, young Uther, let us walk together, the two of us, and share ideas."

Uther Pendragon thought his heart would burst with pride as he walked solemnly towards the village in the company of his new and unexpected ally. Garreth Whistler was the most highly regarded warrior in King Ullic's entire domain, a naturally gifted fighter of exceptional speed, grace, strength and stamina. His skills were admired by everyone, envied by most and equalled in no one. He was not yet twenty years old, but he had been recognized as a paragon of military prowess since long before his formal coming- of-age four years earlier. He was too young yet to lead armies, people said; he lacked experience in dealing with large numbers of men. But even Uther, who was seven years old, knew that when it came to single-handed feats of arms, Garreth Whistler of the Pendragon had no peer and would bow the knee to no man except his lawful king, Ullic Pendragon.

Garreth was also beautiful, Uther knew, at least in the eyes of women, for he had heard Henna and her friends in the kitchens discussing the King's Champion in great and lurid detail, praising his hair and his perfectly muscled body. Uther found himself almost walking sideways, peering up at the very tall man who strode beside him. As Garreth himself had observed a short time earlier, he was startlingly different-looking. And he was mysterious because of that, for no one could point a finger towards his origins and say that was where he came from. Henna had said that his mother, whose name was Bronwyn, had been born and raised in Tir Manha, but she had been abducted in a raid just prior to being married to a man called Dunvallo, one of the clan's most prominent warriors. Dunvallo had been severely wounded in the same raid. Many years later, without explanation of any kind, Bronwyn had returned to her homeland, unable to speak because her tongue had been cut out during her captivity. She had been far advanced in pregnancy when she arrived, and Dunvallo, her former husband-to-be, who had never married because of the wounds he had received in the raid that snatched her away, took her into his home without hesitation and looked after her until she gave birth to her son. Bronwyn did not survive the birthing, and she had never been able to communicate the secret of her child's paternity, and so it fell upon Dunvallo to name the babe and care for him during his infancy, in ignorance of whether the child had been the fruit of a loving relationship or a casual, brutal rape. Dunvallo did all that needed to be done for the child whom he named Garreth, and did it very well, until a lethal, lingering fever drained the life from him when the boy was eight years old. Orphaned then for the second time in his short life, Garreth managed to survive on his own.

Local lore, however, remembered that Garreth had been born a mystery and remained that way. There was no doubt that he was an anomaly among this race of thick-set, dark-skinned, raven-haired mountain dwellers. Garreth's tangle of long blond curls, almost snow-white in colour, and the pale blue eyes that blazed prominently beneath a high forehead and white eyebrows, seemed to heighten and intensify the golden colour of his tanned skin. Where most of his compatriots were long-lipped, flat-faced and snub- nosed, Garreth Whistler's nose was long and straight and narrow, his cheekbones were high and prominent, and his jaw was almost square, sloping down to a strong, deeply cleft chin. Uther's Grandmother Luceiia Britannicus had once told his Grandfather Ullic that Garreth Whistler looked like a Hellene, with his long limbs, golden looks, white hair and Grecian features. Uther asked what a Hellene was, and Ullic told him that it was an Attic Greek. That was the end of that conversation, and although Uther clearly remembered the description, he had not the slightest knowledge of what an Attic Greek was or what it meant.

And now this golden man Garreth Whistler, the King's Champion, was walking slowly by Uther's side, talking to him as though Uther Pendragon were his equal. He had even slowed his pace unobtrusively so that Uther could keep up with him without having to run or even trot.

They made one foray into the dense woods together. Garreth bade Uther wait for him, and then went forward to meet a woman whose face Uther could not see and whose voice was too low for him to recognize. As Garreth had promised earlier, the meeting did not take long, and the King's Champion soon returned, shaking his head ruefully.

"I hope that by the time you grow up, young Uther, and arrive at the knowledge of women, you will have arrived also at an understanding of women. I never did, and I suppose I never will. Women are utterly unfathomable creatures. I thank all the gods, though, that they exist! Now let's head back and clean up your combat wounds, for that's what they are: wounds acquired in defending your mother's honour. But first I have to pee."

When he had finished, the tall man turned back to his small companion and they resumed walking.

"You do know that everyone in the world has to pee every day, don't you?"

"Yes, and cack."

Exactly. Everyone does . . ." They walked on in silence for a while, then, "Have you ever had to pee really badly and not been able to because you were in a place where you couldn't just untie your flaps and do it?" Uther nodded gravely, ignoring the fact that until his seventh birthday he had gone uncovered much of the time. "Hmm. Where was that, d'you recall?"

"In the King's Hall, when the Druids were offering sacrifice."

"That was just last month."

Another grave nod. "I know."

"How long did you have to hold it, a long time?" The boy nodded. "That can be very painful, having to hold it in for too long. Did it hurt much, that day?" Another nod. "Aye, I'll wager it did. It always does, you see, and it doesn't get any easier as you grow older. When you are an old man, even older than your Grandfather Ullic, there will still be times when you have to pee really badly and for one reason or another you won't be able to. So you'll hang on to it and hold it in until you think you have to burst, and it really, really hurts . . . Fear is like that, too."

"What?" The boy stopped dead in his tracks and stood staring up at the tall golden man.

"I said fear's like that, like having to pee. Everyone in the world has to pee—even women—and sooner or later, everyone in the world has to put up with the pain of not being able to do it when they want to. Same thing with fear, young Uther. Come on, keep walking.

"Everyone in the world suffers from fear, sometimes every day. And fear hurts; don't you let anyone tell you otherwise. It doesn't stop hurting as you get older, either. It still hurts me as much as it did when I was your age. Sometimes it even gets worse. You just have to learn to deal with it."

"How?"

"Ah, how . . . now there's a question difficult to answer. You see that piece of rope there, lying on the ground?"

They were passing by one of the stables on the outskirts of the village now, and Uther looked to where Garreth pointed.

"Yes"

"Then tell me quickly, how long is it?"

"How—? I don't know."

"What d'you mean, you don't know? It's a piece of rope, isn't it? You've seen pieces of rope before, haven't you?"

"Yes." Uther was frowning slightly, wondering what Garreth was talking about.

"Well, then, my question was simple enough: How long is it?"

Uther was now completely mystified, but he drew a deep breath and answered firmly, "I don't know. No one could tell, until they had measured it. They're all different. Every piece of rope is different."

"Good lad, you are absolutely correct! Every piece of rope is different. And so is every piece of fear. That's why the question you just asked me is so difficult to answer. How does a person learn to deal with fear? There could be a thousand different answers to that, because one man can have a thousand different fears, all of them biting him at the same time. He might be afraid of falling from high places, and he might be afraid, too, of drowning in deep water. Can you see how that might work? Good. But at the same time on the same day he might also be afraid of being punished by the King for something he did, and of being punished differently by the one of the King's advisers for something else that he forgot to do. He might be afraid, too, of going home to face an angry wife that night because of something he did earlier that day or the night before, and afraid, at the same time, of his neighbour's dog because it always growls at him when he passes by. He might be afraid of thunderstorms and lightning, and afraid of being made to look foolish in front of his friends. You see what I mean? Being afraid can be really complicated. Here, let's stop by the trough there and clean some of the blood off you."

As Garreth carefully cleaned the cuts and scrapes on his legs, Uther thought about all he had learned that day. Most of his attention, of course, was taken up with what was happening right there, with people stopping and staring and whispering among themselves, some of them speaking to Garreth Whistler, although none of them had the courage to come right out and ask Garreth plainly what he was about.

Finally Garreth straightened up again and dried his hands by rubbing them against his leggings.

"There," he said, his eyes still on the job he had done, "that's better. Now, I've thought about a way to answer your question." He turned and began walking again this time slinging his light, circular shield so that it hung down his back from his left shoulder, and Uther fell proudly in step beside him. They walked again until the crowded village square with its staring busybodies, as Garreth called them, had fallen far behind them. Then Garreth led Uther over to the base of a large old elm tree, where he lowered himself to the ground between two moss-covered roots and rested his back against the trunk.

"Suppose there was a place—a very special place—where you went to do the same thing every day. What do you do every single day without fail? Can you think of something, something you always do—other than peeing?"

Uther thought hard for a few moments, then slowly nodded his head. "I always look each morning to see if I can see the top of the Dragon's Head."

The Dragon's Head was the highest headland to the northwest, closest to Tir Manha, and local lore had it that if the peak were visible in the morning, free of clouds, the day would remain fair.

Garreth nodded. "Where do you look from?"

"In front of our house."

"Is that the best place to see it from?"

"No. I like to see it from the top of Denny's Hill; it's clearer form up there."

"That's good. Now suppose you were in the habit of going there every single morning, up to the top of Denny's Hill to look at the Dragon's Head, and then one morning you found a big dog up there, a very unfriendly dog who had decided to live there and did not like you intruding. Suppose you tried to win him over and befriend him, but he wouldn't have it, and he attacked you every single morning without fail and eventually started biting you. What would you do? Remember, he's a very big dog."

"I. . ." Uther bit down on what he had begun to say, and instead thought quietly for a long time. Garreth waited patiently, and eventually the boy nodded to himself. "I . . . I would find some other place where I could see the mountain."

"Aye, and so would most other people. But there's something wrong with that solution. Can you tell me what it is?"

Uther sat staring, his eyes troubled and his brow slightly furrowed, and Garreth tried a different tack.

"Would you be happy with your new viewpoint, think you?"

The boy sat mum, considering that, then shook his head. When he spoke, he sounded unsure of his answer. "No . . . I don't think so . . ."

"Of course you wouldn't, because what you did was run away from a brute beast! You are more clever than all the dogs that were ever whelped, so how could you possibly be happy about having let one beat you at anything? Now, suppose that, instead of running away, you had gone looking for a good solid stick, like a club, and carried it with you, so that every time the dog attacked you, you whacked it, just once, really hard across the snout. What do you think would happen then? I'll tell you what would happen: that dog would soon stop attacking you, because it would learn, very quickly, that attacking you earned it a sore snout every time. Dogs can be stupid, just like people, but unlike a lot of people, they do learn lessons.

"So here is what we are going to do, you and I. We are going to teach you to how fight against big dogs. We are going to see to it that no matter who attacks you in the future, he'll go running off with a bleeding snout and his tail between his legs. You wait and see; it won't take long. But, first, we have to ask your grandfather the King to permit us to work together. I am his personal champion, after all, so I can't really teach you unless he approves. Shall we go and find him?"

From that day forward a great part of Uther's life, and perhaps the most important part, was spent in the company of Garreth Whistler, who taught the boy not only how to fight, but also how to live his life, first and foremost as the grandson of King Ullic, but then as a future warrior, approaching the world with decency, honour and a sense of responsibility for himself and his own actions.

King Ullic, seeing the advantage to be gained from the bond between his champion and his young grandson, soon appointed Garreth to be responsible for Uther's overall moral and military development, transforming him from teacher and trainer to bodyguard and mentor.

With Garreth's help, by the time Uther turned eight, he had earned the opportunity to begin a formal cavalry-training program during the summer months he spent each year in Camulod with his cousin Cay, starting out at the very beginning as a stableboy and groom. And so when Uther's burning desire to become a Camulodian trooper overcame all else in the boy's awareness, Garreth Whistler decided, with a strong degree of reluctance, that, as an extension of his duties, he too should learn the elements of horsemanship and cavalry warfare in order to maintain his authority over his young charge. To his surprise, however, he discovered that the discipline of horsemanship brought him new and demanding challenges and a fierce enjoyment the like of which he had never known. Consequently, he threw himself into it with more enthusiasm than anything he had ever undertaken before, so that in less than half the time normally required to train a trooper, Garreth Whistler had surpassed his training mates and gained the right to seek promotion.

He held back from that, however, because he was a Cambrian warrior first and foremost, and he knew he could never be a Camulodian. Garreth Whistler knew exactly where his loyalties lay.

Uther, unfortunately, did not. But then, Garreth was twenty-two when he first learned to ride a cavalry horse, whereas Uther, achieving the same feat, was barely nine, his entire world filled to the exclusion of all else with the pressing need to learn and to master kills that intrigued and excited him. Uther had no consciousness of arcane things like loyalties.

Uther lived—or so he had always implicitly believed—in the best of all possible worlds. Ever since he had been five years old and able to think for himself, he had lived in parallel states of euphoria. Each year he would be shipped off from his home in Tir Manha to spend the late autumn, winter and early spring months with his maternal grandparents in Camulod, along with his first cousin, Caius Merlyn Britannicus. Then, in the full flush of late springtime, when the Cambrian mountains were finally free of snow and the rugged countryside around his parents' home was decked in its brightest, most promising greenery, Cay would accompany him back to Tir Manha to spend the remainder of the spring, the seemingly endless summer and the early autumn months in the Cambrian mountains among Uther's father's folk. Over the space of three long boyhood years, this was how his life had been lived, and as far as Uther and Cay were concerned, so it would continue forever.

To Uther's mind, each of the two places had its own delights. Camulod, in his eyes, was more of a temple than a fortress, a place dedicated to the military virtues defined and epitomized by men like his uncle, Picus Britannicus, the Legate Commander of the Forces of Camulod, and the heroic officers and troopers who served in his command. It was a light-filled world of superb horses, fine armour and disciplined, military training—a paradise for a boy like Uther. There everything existed in a carefully prescribed manner and for a set, clearly defined purpose. Even the buildings, beginning with the magnificent Villa Britannicus, contributed to the nobility of the place. They were spacious, elegant and luxurious, with central heating and sophisticated bathing facilities. Each time Uther went to Camulod, he embraced it with a delight that was sustained by the excitement of the place until the very day he departed. And each time he left, he marvelled again at the paradox that governed his leaving, his grief offset by the gut-level excitement he felt to be escaping its stringent disciplines and returning to the freedom of a carefree boy's life in his father's home in Cambria, with ghostly stories at night around the fire and wild, unsupervised adventures among the mountains and forests where his father's people lived.

Camulod and Cambria were both home to the boy, and he was equally welcome in each of them, but he had always been aware of the significant differences between the two places, for they were poles apart in almost everything, including the way the people dressed. Each time he made the transition from one place to the other, he would find it jarring for the first few days. He wondered, from time to time, if Cay felt the same way, but he had never discussed it with his cousin, feeling, somehow, that by speaking of it he would be demeaning himself in some strange fashion. Every time that thought popped into his mind, he ignored it until it went away. But it persisted, and it always made him feel guilty and somehow disloyal. Cambria suffered, in many ways, by comparison with Camulod, and Uther was afraid that if he once gave in to the folly of examining the differences too closely, they would overwhelm him.

Strangely enough, however, all the differences that concerned him were physical. He had never believed that the actual people of Camulod and Cambria were different from each other in any major respect until he heard some of his Cambrian elders, clearly disgruntled, muttering darkly about "them others, in that damned Camulod place . . ." and he came to wonder how and why some people seemed to delight in making an insult of the word.

He asked Garreth about it one day. The King's Champion looked up from the sword he was sharpening and stood thinking for a long moment before nodding his head and returning to his task. Watching the big man and thinking that he was going to say nothing more, Uther rephrased his question, offering it this time as a comment rather than a direct inquiry. Garreth, however, had merely been considering how to answer, and now he nodded towards a high-legged stool, indicating that Uther should perch on it. When the boy was seated, Garreth inspected the sword blade closely, then laid it carefully on the bench at which he had been landing, and he pulled another stool over close to Uther.

He had been expecting this kind of question for some time now, he told the boy, surprising him greatly.

"Otherness . . ." Garreth began. "Well, people like to be surrounded with things they know." They were most comfortable, he explained, with familiar situations, and they felt best when they were dealing with people and circumstances they knew and understood from past experience. So anything unknown . . . anything unfamiliar was unwelcome and untrusted. Strangers to any group were always regarded initially with fear, suspicion and hostility. Even among animals, a single, differently coloured whelp among an entire litter would be singled out by its litter mates and killed. People who were noticeably different from their neighbours usually suffered because of it. It might be the occupants of a single house or it might be a gang of boys or even an entire clan, and occasionally it might expand to include an entire people, like Cambrians as opposed to Ersemen or Caledonians. And then the result would be war.

In most instances, though, Garreth said, things never got quite so serious. Small numbers brought small outcomes. It might take lime to resolve those differences and settle all the fears attached to them, but usually the differences came to be first accepted, then ignored and then forgotten altogether.

After that conversation, thinking about what Garreth had said, Uther began to see things in a different light, and he did not like what he saw. He found his memory teeming, all at once, with remembered insults—freely offered by unsmiling men—that he had absorbed and ignored at various times over the previous few years, failing to recognize the barbs for what they were. And all of them, he saw quite suddenly, had had to do with Camulod and with his yearly journeys there to visit his mother's childhood home and live among her people. Each time he returned from Camulod, and for a period each year before he left Cambria to go there, he had been forced to swallow and ignore more than a few sneering comments and cruel jibes that cast slurs upon himself and upon his mother's people.

That recognition hit him hard and unexpectedly, and it left him with absolutely no understanding of how he had incurred such ill feelings. He had never knowingly done anything that would give offence to any grown-up person, and he could not see how his annual stay in Camulod could be harmful to anyone. But the truth was that the men of Cambria, and most particularly the older men, strongly disapproved of the time Uther Pendragon spent in Camulod. And, naturally, that gave rise to the question of why this should be so . . . a question that Uther, a small boy, was unqualified to answer.

With a few more years behind him, however, Uther became utterly convinced that the Cambrians' scorn of Camulod and all things Camulodian was built upon envy and plain jealousy. In terms of all the finer things of life, Camulod had everything that Cambria lacked. As he grew older and used more and more of the facilities that Camulod had to offer, Uther came to appreciate his annual half-year there more and more, and to look forward to his return to his own home less and less. Each year, he was more and more hard-pressed to guard his tongue every time some smug clansman cast a slur upon his absence, or his friends, or where he spent his time away from Cambria. These slurs were usually couched in the kind of question that asked, "What have they got there that we don't have?" and, "Why would you want to waste so much time with them?"

In response, Uther would have given anything to be able to shout out the list of truths that would answer such smug questions: that Camulod had baths and hot water and steam, and that the people there looked clean, were clean and smelled clean, so that he didn't have to hold his breath when he first met them in order to give his stomach time to settle at their stench; that Camulod had large and spacious buildings and houses filled with clean, warm air, centrally supplied by furnaces that burned all year long; that the cattle in Camulod were kept in barns, in stalls and stables, and did not live in the houses with their human owners; and that Camulod had smart, uniformly armoured soldiers—disciplined garrison troops and cavalry, mounted troopers trained to work and fight together as invincible military units.

None of these things did he ever say to any of his father's people, but all of them remained in his mind every day while he was at home in Tir Manha, because he pined for Camulod, with its baths and horses and troopers, its rolling grasslands and lush forests, and perhaps most of all for its carefree laughter and light- hearted camaraderie, so dyed-in-the-wool different from the scowling dourness that was normal among the dark-skinned people of his own mountainous homeland. He pined for those things, and as he grew older month by month, he writhed with guilt because of that, but he kept the guilt well hidden, and not even Garreth Whistler suspected its existence.

One day, when he had been feeling particularly disgusted with himself for what he had come to perceive as chronic and shameful disloyalty to all that was his own, Uther asked Garreth Whistler to tell him what he had been thinking of on that first day years earlier when he had decided to look out for the small boy he had found in the cattle byre.

Garreth's tuneless whistle died immediately, and he stopped what he was doing. Caught off guard by the sudden, unexpected question, he gazed speculatively at his young charge.

"What's making you itchy, then? You've never asked me that before." Uther shrugged but made no attempt to respond, and Whistler's eyes narrowed. "Are you feeling all right? You look . . . different. Are you coming down with something?"

Uther shook his head. "I don't think so. I feel the same as I always do. What did you think that day?"

"How d'you expect me to remember that after all this time? Can you remember what you were thinking on any particular day that long ago?"

"Yes, I remember thinking that you would laugh at me when I saw you coming into the byre."

"Do you, then?" Garreth's pause was less than a heartbeat in length. "Well, you were wrong, weren't you? I didn't laugh at you."

"No, you didn't. But what did you think?"

Garreth had been scaling rust from an iron breastplate that someone had unearthed from a patch of ground outside the walls, close by the main gateway to Tir Manha. It was the front half of a Roman cuirass and it had been buried for a long time, so that Garreth was not sure he could salvage it. But well-made iron armour was invaluable, and so he was trying, rubbing the pitted, scaling metal industriously with an abrasive mixture of sand, wood ash and tallow. Now he placed his tools carefully on the ground beside him and wiped his tallow-slick fingers on a rag tucked into his belt.

"Well, let me think . . . I saw another small boy crying close by here last week some time. Are you sure you wouldn't like me to try to recall what I thought then, too? I've seen a lot of small boys crying over the years."

Uther nodded, his face serious. "I believe you. But what did you think of me that day?"

"Well, it might be easier if I start slowly, remembering what I saw before I get to what I might have thought." He paused, frowning deeply and staring into nothingness, and Uther waited, intent on his answer. "I think . . . I think I remember being absolutely astounded to see a small, grubby boy with a squished-up, dirty face encrusted with snot and large, bleeding cuts and bruises on his skinny little shins. I looked at him, and now I remember thinking, What an ugly, ill-featured, misshapen little brat! And that was but my first thought . . . Are you sure you want to hear more?"

Finally Uther broke into a grin. "No," he said, "I want to hear no more of that rubbish."

"Very well, then." Garreth Whistler nodded his head with finality. "You tell me why you want to know, and I'll tell you."

Uther looked away, unwilling to meet Garreth's eyes. "I . . . I don't really know why I want to know."

"No, of course you don't. . . not any more than you know why you would expect me to believe such an obvious lie. Well, when you do know, come back, and I'll think about telling you."

The boy threw up his hands. "Very well, I'll tell you." He paused to collect his thoughts. "I was . . . I was feeling lonely, I suppose, and sorry for myself. I've been feeling that way quite a lot recently. And I suppose, too, that made me think of that day you found me, which had been among the very worst days of my life until then. I could remember how I felt, and I could guess how I must have looked to you, the King's Champion, and so I wondered what you could possibly have thought to make you behave towards me as you did."

Garreth Whistler shrugged his broad shoulders, then picked up the rusty breastplate again, although he made no move to start work on it. "Have you considered the obvious answer to that?" he asked. I was the King's Champion, as you say, and you were the King's small grandson. Perhaps I saw immediately that I could do myself some good in my patron's eyes by doing some small good for you."

"No," Uther replied. "I don't believe that. Do you want to know what I think? I think you simply chose to help me because you wanted to. What I am curious about is why you would have wanted to."

Garreth dropped the cuirass to the ground again and stood up quickly, inhaling deeply through his nostrils and placing his hands on his hips as he gazed off, head high, into the distance, his broad back to Uther. The boy said nothing, having learned long since to wait until Garreth was prepared to end a silence on his own, and eventually the tall, golden warrior turned back to face him.

"Do you recall my telling you that I am an Outlander?"

"Aye."

"And did I mention that I was orphaned twice, once at my birth and then again when my adopted father, Dunvallo, died?"

"Aye, you did."

"Well, I was eight, not quite nine, when that happened, and I was left to fend for myself. I did it successfully, too. But I know now that I could not have done it without the goodwill of the villagers. It was they who sustained me and kept me fed . . .

"Not all the villagers were supportive of me, though, and their sons were definitely not. I was an Outlander, and I looked different from anyone else, and that meant I was fair game for anyone who cared to hunt me. And they hunted me, Uther. Not a day went by without my being thrashed by someone, and usually it was a group of someones. But that is where, and how, I first learned to fight. I was fortunate in being tall and strong for my age, but that only brought me into conflict with bigger boys, who would not have bothered with me had they not been provoked by my size, my height. And then I was befriended by a man who saw something in me that no one else had seen. He took me into his household and placed me under his own protection, and my days of being persecuted were at an end. Can you guess who he was?"

"My father, Uric?"

Garreth smiled. "No, for he himself was barely beyond boyhood then. It was your grandfather, King Ullic, and I have been grateful to him ever since." His smile died away. "Thanks to his good regard, I was able to train properly and become the warrior I am today, and my duty is total loyalty to the king. But I never forgot how it felt to be as unloved as I felt before your grandfather found me. I never forgot the misery of being hated and abused for no good reason. I never forgot the pain of being rejected or the other pain, far worse, of being scorned and ridiculed. So when I saw you there that day, hiding in the byre, it seemed but natural to do the things I did and to offer you some comfort and understanding, because believe me, Uther, I knew exactly what you were feeling and thinking. So how can you ever repay me for such kindness? Well, you'll know when the opportunity comes along, and when it does, you won't have to tell me what you did, because I will know. Now, you tell me . . . why have you been feeling so low for the past week?"

Uther shook his head. He wanted to confess his feelings to Garreth about Camulod and Cambria and his disloyalty, but the time was not right, not yet, and so he shrugged away from any satisfying explanation and felt yet more guilt for knowing that Garreth knew he was being evasive.

Chapter THREE

Nemo did not often feel the need for solitude, for she never thought very deeply about anything. She had never felt a need to avoid the company of others in order to debate within herself on anything, and she had no training of any kind in structured logic or formal analysis.

On those very few occasions when she did have things to think about, however, Nemo had discovered a place where she could go to be alone and undisturbed. She thought of it as the Place of the Bows," a name given to it by her alone and known to no one else. It bothered her not at all that it was one of the most sacred places in all of Pendragon Cambria, access to it forbidden to all but the King and the Druids. She had no interest in harming or changing or defacing anything there, no interest in the normal purposes

for which the place was used and no interest in making anyone aware that she might venture there from time to time. The Place of the Bows was Nemo's private spot, and she worked hard to ensure that no one ever saw her there or saw her approaching or leaving the area.

It had originally been a grove of three ancient oak trees, the only trio of such trees in a region that was generally too rocky to support anything other than hawthorns, scrub willows and stunted birch, which was why it was a hallowed spot, sacred to the Druids. But one of the venerable trees had been sundered by lightning ages earlier, and little remained of it now but a blackened, shrunken stump. A second tree had died much later of natural but undetermined causes, and most of that one remained in place, its mighty branches dried and cracked, stripped of all traces of bark and weathered by long, withering decades of rain and snow, frost and blistering sunshine. Only the third of the trio remained intact and alive, and its upper branches were choked with clumps of mistletoe so thick and luxuriant that they could conceal all signs of human presence were anyone to crouch up there among them. Nemo frequently did exactly that, having found a high crotch among the clumps where she could rest unseen and in great comfort, reclining on a couch of springy, strongly anchored mistletoe and looking down on the neighbouring area. And it was there that King Ullic's bowmen practised daily, all day long, firing their long, carefully fletched arrows at the targets they had made from bundles of tightly packed straw, bound together with leather thongs and draped with cloth coverings marked in concentric rings.

Between this practice area and the tree from which Nemo watched them, a stand of bushy young evergreens served as an extra screen, separating the practice area from the sacred grove. The saplings, she had discovered, were yew trees, and they were tended jealously by the Druids, watched over and carefully nurtured, trimmed and pruned. Each one of these young trees would some day grow to reach the size at which its limbs could be cut, then individually dried, shaped and carved to form one of the mighty, man-high bows of which King Ullic's people were so proud. Pendragon longbows, they called them, and never had the world seen such weapons. An arrow fired from one of those bows, even at a distance of two hundred paces, could pierce a tree—or an armoured man—with ease, and transfix either, protruding front and rear. Nemo knew this was true; perched high up in her oak tree, she had seen the evidence with her own eyes.

Uther loved the Pendragon longbow; while he was in Cambria he spent hours each day practising with the huge weapon, and Nemo spent those same hours watching him. Nemo was not interested in the bows, however. She would rather have spent her time among the men and the horses of Camulod, the cavalry, as she had heard Uther name them. Those she could have watched all day and all night, too, for everything about them excited her: the size and sheer brute strength of the great animals and the beautiful leather-and-metal harness that they wore; the height and bearing of the riders; the splendour of the weapons they carried; and even the glittering armour they wore, burnished and blazing, blinding in the sunlight and twinkling with reflections in the light of the moon. But wherever Uther Pendragon went, Nemo followed. Uther was her single, all-consuming interest. She thought of him all time, believing, ever since she had first met him, that he was the biggest part of her destiny—the only person who had ever looked beyond her startling ugliness and seen a person worth tolerating hiding underneath.

Jonet the Toad, they had called her in the days before she met Uther, and she had answered to the name, believing it to be apt and no more than she deserved. Her raw, unleavened ugliness had always weighed upon her like a yoke carved from stone, blighting her with the guilt of her appearance. She had always been aware of it, always felt its presence, always acknowledged her duty to grovel to the world because of it.

One of the very first truths that she had been conscious of was that she was different, in some unknown but unpleasant way, from other children. Her earliest lessons, overwhelmingly repeated and reinforced, informed her that she was an unlovely and unlovable creature, unacceptable, unfit and undesirable. It never crossed her mind that those surrounding her in her first days were all male, since she had no mother and no female intimates, or that they were much older than she was. It never occurred to her to doubt them, or to question their views of her, or to challenge their dictates. They were her judges, her accusers and her condemners, and that was made obvious by the way they acted and by the fact that no one ever contradicted anything they said or did. Many of them were her half-brothers and many more were cousins of varying degrees of consanguinity, but all of them were united from the first in decrying and condemning her unique unloveliness.

It had been hammered home to her ever since she was old enough to walk and listen and understand that her appearance and her looks were offensive. The girls of her own age were all prettier than she, even the plainest of them, and they all liked to make themselves feel prettier by laughing and jeering at her lack of anything that might be called attractive.

So one of the first things she ever learned was that she must never cry, because whenever she did, whenever she allowed her tears to flow and to be seen, it brought her more grief and more trouble. She might be beaten or more cruelly used, or her tormentors might laugh at her and throw things at her, or they might take away from her whatever she was holding or clutching at the time. Once they had killed a wounded crow that she had found and nursed almost back to health. When they saw how deeply she grieved for the dead bird, they laughed and took note and waited for her to betray a fondness or a liking for some other creature, and then they killed that, too—a rabbit she had raised from babyhood, and then a goat she had been set to guard one summer's afternoon.

The boys, some of them her brothers, had beaten and abused her that day, tying her up and jeering at her as they killed the goat out of sheer, pleasurable malice, and after it was all over and they had all run away, the uncle who had set Jonet to the task beat her with a heavy stick for having lost his goat. It was plainly her fault the goat was dead, and everyone agreed. No point in seeking to place blame on any of the boys; no one expected anything better of them. But Jonet the Toad was neither boy nor girl. Jonet was simply there, available and unsightly, blameworthy by her very appearance.

After that day, Jonet had refused to be a victim any longer. Thereafter she had shown no kindness to anyone, shown no concern for any creature, nor had she ever permitted herself to weep openly again. By the time she was seven, she had not shed a tear for anyone to see for almost two whole years.

Of course, she wept sometimes, but only when she was alone. At such times, although she herself could not have said why the tears flowed from her, she wept for herself and for the creatures for whom she dared show no affection. She wept, unknowingly, out of loneliness and heartache, out of friendlessness and despair, and out of a cruel awareness of her own unsightliness and ugliness, but always she wept in the privacy of some deep nook she had created for herself, far from prying and unfriendly human eyes. She trusted no human being to deal with her without causing grief or pain.

Even her father had called her a foul toad and kicked her away from him one day when she had been beaten by one of her brothers and had vomited from a punch to her gut, fouling the front of her rough smock. So for a long time after that, Jonet had thought of herself as a real toad, a cold and slimy nasty thing beloved by no one, and she had examined herself carefully for similarities to the creature she believed she resembled.

She took note that her whole body was stocky and thick-set. Her limbs were short and burly, her legs bowed and muscular, and her arms, hands and fingers as stubby, thick and strong as any boy's. Her hair, too, was thick and coarse, wiry and ungovernable even when it was clean, which it seldom was. In fact, her body was compact and strong and dense with muscle, but she would have found no pleasure in those attributes, even had she been aware of them or paused to consider them. Compactness and strength were not what she required of her body, and those elements she longed for and would have given anything to have long legs and silky hair, blue eyes and white, even teeth—were simply not hers. Jonet was a toad.

And then one day she heard someone, some old woman in the village, say that toads had wondrously beautiful, liquid brown eyes—the most beautiful eyes in all the world of animals, and she grew excited with the hope that she might own something, one physical attribute, that others might admire and envy. But of course, she had to find some way of seeing her eyes for herself.

Jonet had never seen a mirror, but she knew that such things existed, and that you could see your entire face in one of them. In a village as poor as hers, however, no one was wealthy enough to own one. And even had there been several, the very thought of how people would ridicule and torture her if they even suspected her of wishing to look at her own face was enough to frighten her into immobility. And so she learned to be content to close her eyes and simply dream that she possessed the most beautiful eyes in the world.

Leir the Druid, the man who had fathered her, was one of the most powerful members of the Druid confraternity in southern Cambria, which meant that he spent much of his life conferring with his priestly colleagues, travelling between and among the various communities for which he held a shared responsibility. While doing that, of course, he spent little time in his own home—a fact that provided his daughter with one of the few pleasures in her bleak life.

One day he returned home from one of his long journeys, however, accompanied by a new wife, and Jonet chose to disappear for a while, as she often did, in the hope that her father's travels had merely been interrupted by this marriage and that he might still depart again, with or without his bride.

Even at the age of nine, Jonet was well aware that Leir's wives were generally short-lived. Her own mother, whose name had been Naomi, had apparently lasted little more than two years, dying quite suddenly shortly after Jonet was born and leaving the baby to be cared for by an adolescent servant girl called Tamara. Barely two years after that, Tamara herself—whom Leir had taken to wife within months of Naomi's death, and who would be the closest thing to a mother the infant girl ever knew—also died in childbirth, sacrificing her own life to give life to Jonet's loathsome half- brother Carthac. Leir, Jonet knew from the village gossip she had listened to so avidly, had not even bothered to visit Tamara during the final months of her pregnancy, and it was common knowledge that he had shown no grief at all when she died.

Since then, Leir had taken five more wives, and all of the five were dead, as were the three who had preceded them. There had been a first wife, before Jonet's mother, but Jonet had never known her name. Then had come Naomi, then Tamara, then the following five, which made the new wife number nine. Three of those latter five had borne children to the Druid, and one of those three had died in childbirth. The other two had simply died, somehow, once Leir had begun to tire of them. Of the remaining two, who had not borne children, one had died of a broken neck after falling from a low wall on a dark night, and the other by drowning in a flooded stream bed during a sudden mountain storm. Jonet could not even recall their names. She had neither known nor cared for any of them. She believed implicitly, though, that her father, the Druid, had killed all of them.

He was a frightening man, Leir the Druid, with empty, loveless, even lifeless eyes. Jonet would watch him closely as he sat alone, staring into the distance, even in a tiny, lightless room, muttering to himself in strange and meaningless words. At such times, she knew, he was oblivious to who and where he was. And even though she had no proof that such a thing was true, she knew beyond doubt that he would kill anyone who disturbed him then. He would snuff out their lives without remorse and without pity, simply for having brought themselves to his attention when he wished to be alone. That, she was convinced, was what had happened to his wives.

Of course, Jonet knew, too, that no one would ever dream of voicing aloud any thought that Leir might be a murderer. He was far too powerful for anyone to take the risk of thus offending him. Jonet seldom thought about such things, but she had not the slightest doubt that he would kill her, too, if she were ever foolish enough to bring herself again to his attention.

So, on that day of the advent of the ninth wife, Jonet moved quickly away from her home into the forest before she could be noticed. She went almost without forethought, unaware that day that she would never return to her home village. With her she carried, as she always did, her small travelling pack containing the line sharp knife she had stolen the year before from a neighbour's house, together with a length of strong, stout twine she had pilfered months earlier from a visiting peddler and three barbed iron fish hooks she had found stuck into the clothing of a long-drowned man whose corpse had washed up on the bank of the river close to the southern end of the village when Jonet was eight and long since inured to the sight of violent death. The fish hooks had been rusted, but she had known their usefulness and had salvaged them carefully from where they had been securely fastened into the left foreshoulder of the dead man's tunic. She had then cleaned them patiently and carefully, rubbing them delicately with a fragment of a broken, fine-toothed file that she had found outside their local smithy's two years before.

Once safely away from the Druid's house that day, she walked less quickly, but still covered the ground at a good pace, trying not to think of the Druid or what his return entailed, forcing herself to dwell on enjoying the peaceful warmth of the day and listening to the singing of the birds until she gauged that she had walked ten miles, perhaps more. She was truly beginning to believe herself alone and safe when she heard and instantly recognized the discordant, squabbling voices of the boys who goaded her constantly, and so she ran from the path to hide from them, cursing her own stupidity. She had thought herself far enough from home to be safe from her tormentors, but they were ranging as far afield as she was this day, and the realization of that made her think about how everything in her life was tied to the starting point that was the village into which she had been born. Wherever she could go, anyone else from the village could go too—if she could travel as far as she had this day in the space of a single forenoon, why should she be surprised to find the village boys in the same place? The boys reached her hiding place, though they did not discover her, and there they settled down to rest and while away the afternoon, playing their noisy games and boasting and squabbling among themselves while Jonet crouched above them, high in a huge old elm tree.

By the time the boys eventually left, evening was approaching rapidly, dusky blue shadows were beginning to gather among the trees, and Jonet had made several important discoveries. The first of those was that it was already too late for her to return home that day, unless she wanted to run and catch up with the boys from whom she had been hiding all afternoon. The second was that it was almost too late for her to find a suitable stream and a spot where she could fish for something to eat that night. But the third discovery was momentous, and it involved the new awareness that if she failed to return home she would be able to start the next day's journey from wherever she had spent the night—far, far ahead of anyone else starting out that morning from her village. Her heart swelled and pounded with excitement as she made the next mental step towards acknowledgment that if she were to do the same the following day and the day following that, she would soon be so far from her village that no one, not even the Druid, would be able to find her.

Jonet travelled for several days—she soon lost count—and gradually, as she put more and more distance between her and the village, she became suffused with an easy, unaccustomed sense of well-being. Then one day while she was creeping through deep woods to check a snare she had set for rabbits, she came face to face with herself in a woodland pool.

Jonet had never thought to see herself so perfectly reflected anywhere, but the stark, bare, incontrovertible reality of what she saw struck her to the very soul, so that she could say or do nothing other than stare, immobilized and helpless, at her own face, noting and memorizing every flaw and imperfection.

Her eyes were small, and they were dull, lacking any spark or twinkle of originality or verve, and even she could see that they were set too close together on either side of the bridge of her nose. She bent her face closer to the pool, searching for a demarcation line between the blackness of her eyes' centres and the muddy brown darkness of their irises, but the two areas blended together so that each eye seemed to be no more than a deep, black hole set in a muddy, brownish expanse of white. Above the eyes, her brows grew together in a thick, heavy bar, with no visible line of separation. Her entire face seemed to hang slack and heavy, and her full lips appeared to dangle pendulously as she leaned forward on stiffened arms, staring down at herself.

Slowly, as she hung there looking at herself, a great ball of grief and sorrow welled up inside her, weighty and palpable as a physical growth, threatening to cut off her breath. And then she was on her feet, running headlong through the thick woodland, completely blinded by tears so that she ran with her eyes closed, her face whipped and lacerated by twigs as she increased her speed, miraculously avoiding trees and boulders until she reached the precipitous edge of a deep, rain-scoured ditch and plunged out and down, head first, stunning herself and driving every vestige of wind from her lungs with the jarring impact of her fall.

For some time after that, she was utterly confused, fluttering between consciousness and oblivion. She had landed face down, and the pain in her chest, born of the inability to breathe, was an agony the like of which she had never known. After a time her breathing began to return to normal, so that she was able to release the cross-grip of her arms on her own chest and to straighten her back and shoulders without increasing the pain that racked her. All of those ills were physical, however, and she could cope with and adjust to them. What caused her real concern and confusion was what seemed to be happening outside and beyond the cocoon of sudden, crippling pain that had enveloped her. There she saw, through eyes swimming with outraged tears, a boy looming over her, a strange face intent with . . . what? Something. Anger?

When next she opened her eyes, briefly, the face was gone and she was apparently alone, squirming in solitary agony. But then someone turned her over, and she felt strange hands—large, male hands—on her legs, pulling them straight and spreading them. She kicked out wildly, spitting and screaming because she knew what that portended, having seen it happen many times to others. But her flailing kicks were smothered effortlessly by stronger arms. And then there was another pair of arms about her shoulders, crushing her and pinning her arms to her sides as someone, some third person, knelt over her. Cold water splashed against her face and a cool, moist cloth wiped her eyelids free of whatever had been blinding them so that she could see.

For a moment she lay motionless, blinking up at the three shapes that towered above her. Three men—no, two men and a boy, all kneeling over her. The man behind her held her clutched against his lower body, her shoulders pressed against his thighs, her neck bent forward by the push of his chest against the back of her head. The man by her feet sat back on his legs, holding her more gently now, and he was smiling. Between these two, the boy knelt at her left side, holding the cloth with which he had wiped her face. All three were staring at her, but she had no thought of reading their expressions. Instead she began to fight again, kicking out strongly with more aim than before and squirming like one possessed to escape.

She almost succeeded, too, for the savagery of her attempt caught them unawares just as they had begun to relax, thinking her calmed down. The man holding her legs lost his grip on them and Jonet swung her right foot strongly upwards, aiming at his mouth, hoping to kick his teeth out. Briefly she saw blood on her own leg, much blood, and then the man reacted, blocking her scything kick with his forearm and clamping his great hand on her leg again, this time above the knee, digging deep and agonizingly with hard fingers so that her leg straightened involuntarily. As it did so, he caught her with his other hand, this time seizing her by the ankle and forcing her leg back down until he held it flat against the ground. Raging, she tried to kick out at him with her other leg, her left, but for some reason she could not make it move at all, and a sudden fear welled up in her. The man above her released the grip of his right hand above her knee and grasped her other ankle effortlessly, pulling it down and out until he held her still. She felt it move, but otherwise felt nothing.

'Talk to her," the man grunted, forcing the words out between gritted teeth.

"Listen to me!" It was the boy who spoke, the urgency of his tone cutting through the rage in her so that her eyes went without volition to meet his gaze. His face was tight with strain.

"Stop fighting us. We don't want to hurt you. You need help."

Jonet spat at him, her saliva spraying up and then falling back onto her face. The boy gazed back at her, looking right into her eyes and shaking his head.

"Spit all you want," he said then, "but listen to me. I don't know you. I don't know your name, and I don't care what it is, but we don't want to harm you. You've hurt yourself badly enough. I saw you running, just before you fell, and then you ran right off the edge of the ditch there, and fell down here. You landed on a fallen tree . . . smashed your head and gashed your leg on a broken branch. I tried to help you, but when I saw the depth of the hole in your leg and how much blood you were losing, I ran to fetch Garreth, and Glenn came back with us. Garreth will stop the bleeding and bind your wound, if you'll let him, but you have to stop fighting. Nobody's going to hurt you. I am King Ullic's grandson, Uther Pendragon, and Garreth is Garreth Whistler, the King's Champion. I swear you will not be harmed. But that wound is bad. You could die of it. Look at it. Look at it!"

The arms holding her about the chest relaxed so that she could move, and she looked down to where the boy was pointing. Both her legs were drenched in blood, but it was the left one, the one she had been unable to move, that looked so gory. There was a great hole torn high up on her thigh, and deep inside it she could see the gleam of pinkish white bone, but below the point where the bone was visible, bright red blood welled profusely. The sight shook her from head to foot, and every vestige of fight went out of her. The man behind her caught her as she sagged back against him, and then her head began to spin and she lost consciousness, the last thing in her awareness being the boy's face frowning down at her, his huge eyes bright and troubled.

For a time after that, Jonet seemed to hover between sleep and wakefulness, and sometimes she dreamed long dreams. Amid all of that, she knew she was in a hut, and in a bed, sheltered from the weather, which she also knew was foul, because every time she awoke she could hear the howling of the wind and the incessant pounding of driving, torrential rain. Two men were looking after her, one or the other of them always present when she woke up. The larger of the two men, she learned, was the one named Garreth . . . Garreth Whistler. The other man, smaller and quieter, was called Glenn. Neither of them spoke much to her, but neither of them showed her any cruelty, either. Whichever one of them was there when she awoke—and sometimes they had to waken her solely for this purpose—would change her bandages, removing the soiled dressing and setting it aside for later disposal, then washing her wounded leg in hot, stinging water before poulticing the wound anew and binding the whole in fresh, clean dressings.

In time, she seemed to sleep less often and for shorter periods, and in that same time the frightful hole in her thigh, its edges sewn together somehow by Garreth Whistler, scabbed over and began to heal, so that eventually the pain of it was replaced by an incessant itch that Garreth told her was a sure sign of healing.

She could not have said how long she remained there in that bed, in that small hut, but she knew that the boy did not come back to see her again. For a very long time she said nothing, telling herself she didn't care whether he ever came or not, but as time went by and he continued to stay away, she found herself growing angry again, and beginning to believe that he was just like all the other males in her life, hard and cold and uncaring. But then Garreth and Glenn were men, and they too had once been boys. And they had done nothing to hurt her or torment her. They did not say much to her, but they spent all their time looking after her.

And then one morning Garreth came early and proceeded to remove her bandages as usual, but when the poulticed dressing peeled away this time, it took the thick, black, shrunken mass of the scab with it, leaving her thigh clean and new-looking, the length and width of the newly healed wound showing as a bright, broad patch of shiny skin.

Garreth sat back and smiled at her. "There you are, good as ever. Now all you have to do is learn to walk again, and you'll be free of this place."

Jonet scowled at him, not because she was angry but because her face knew no other expression. "Learn to walk again? That's daft. I can walk."

His grin didn't falter. "I know you can. And you know you can. But your legs don't know. They're weak now, no strength in them, because you've been in bed for more than a month, and in all that time you haven't used them. You don't believe me? Very well, let's see."

He stood up and walked away from the bed, turning back to face her when he had gone three paces. Then he held out his hands to her.

"Come then, Nemo, walk to me."

"What?"

His head tilted to one side, unsure of what she meant.

"What did you call me? You called me something."

"Oh, Nemo." He laughed. "It's a Roman name, and it means 'No One,' or 'No Name.' We didn't know your name and we needed to call you something, so Nemo seemed right. Don't you like it?"

She swung her legs clear of the bed and sat there motionless, facing him, saying nothing.

"Nemo it is, then. Come on, stand up and walk to me. It's not far, see, and I'll hold out my hands. Don't be afraid. If you fall, I'll catch you."

Still she made no move.

"Come on, what are you waiting for? You can't be afraid, because I know you aren't afraid of anything. How old are you, ten or twelve? Big, strong legs. Come on, up you get, only three steps to me."

Jonet stood up—and promptly sat down again when she felt the floor buckling beneath her feet. Thoroughly frightened by the sensation, which was unlike anything she had ever experienced, she sat there for a time, clutching the bedclothes tightly and staring down at the floor. It was of hard-packed earth, swept clean, and in all the time she stared at it, it didn't move. Finally she drew a deep breath and tried again, this time managing to remain erect for three or four heartbeats while the entire hut swayed about her.! On her third attempt, she managed to remain standing, although her legs refused to move when she told them to. She had a brief, flashing vision of the way her wounded leg had refused to respond to her attempts to kick Garreth on their first meeting, and her belly heaved in panic. Her right foot left the floor and moved to complete her first step, and then her entire leg folded beneath her as it met the floor again, and she pitched forward face first, Garreth caught her almost before she could begin to fall and picked her up easily, spinning with her to lay her back upon the bed.

"Now do you believe me? Don't worry, it won't last. We'll try a few more steps again later today, and then tomorrow morning and afternoon, and by the following day you should be moving about quite normally. Uther will be back by then, too. He'll be glad to see you well again."

"Who?"

"Who what?"

"Who will. . . be back?"

"Uther. You remember Uther. He's King Ullic's grandson."

"The boy."

"That's the one."

"Where is he?"

"He's in Camulod. Has been since the day after you fell. But now he's coming back. He's due home tomorrow or the day after that, depending on the weather. No one would want to ride in weather like this if he didn't have to, and Uther doesn't have to. So they may wait until the weather breaks and then come up when it's finer."

She lay silent for a few moments, digesting that before asking, "Camel . . . What was that place you said?"

"Camulod."

"Where is it?"

"It's where Uther's cousin Cay lives, and his grandparents on his mother's side. Uther spends much time there with his cousin, living with the Lord and Lady Varrus, and then the two boys come back here and spend an equal period here in Cambria with King Ullic, who is also Uther's grandfather, but on his father's side."

And listening to his lulling tones, exhausted from her exertions, she fell helplessly asleep.

When Jonet awoke, alone now, she lay wondering at all Garreth had told her. The boy had not been to see her, but it was not because he did not want to come. He had been far away since then with his grandparents on his mother's side. She frowned at that, wondering what it meant. She had never had a mother, so she did not know what a mother's side was, let alone a father's side . . . Her own father, even had she felt like asking him, could have provided her with little insight, she felt. He had never given her anything that she could remember, other than the two things that had led jointly to her being here in this hut: confirmation that she deserved the name by which they called her—the Toad—and a final incentive to escape, to run far from her miserable home in the silent, unformulated hope of finding a better life.

She was beginning to realize that these men would not hurt her, and she wondered whether she ought to tell them her real name, but one night she had a vivid and frightening dream in which the Druid, searching for her, found her by her name, which she had casually given to a stranger. So, for now at least, she would be Nemo, and her real name would remain unknown. She, on the other hand, knew the names of one boy and two grown men who had done nothing to cause her any hurt or pain, and one of those, the boy called Uther, would be coming back the following day or the day after that. She decided that she would not learn to walk properly again until the boy came back, because if she could walk before he came back, she would have to walk away.

Despite her wishes and her best resolve, however, she was thwarted simply because Garreth Whistler had been right. No one was keen to travel in the kind of foul weather that covered all of southern Britain at that time, and those fortunate enough to be able to postpone their travels did so. Among those was the party travelling from Camulod to Ullic's Cambria. They remained in the warmth and comfort of their home base for ten days before the weather broke, far longer than they had originally intended, and by the time they arrived in Ullic's territories, she had regained her full strength and moved out of Garreth's care, since she no longer had reason to stay. She did not stray far, however, for she had no desire to live alone in the woodland again, and since she had no intention of returning to her former home, the woodland would have been the only option available to her. Instead, filled with single-minded resolution, she set about making herself useful to the villagers, beginning with those who lived closest to Garreth's hut. These were the only people she had been able to observe—and she had watched them closely—during the final days of her recuperation. One of them, an old, bent woman, lived alone with no man to look after her, and Nemo had seen that Garreth treated the old woman with courtesy and kindness, carrying burdens for her and stopping to speak with her almost every time he passed her door.

On the first day of her new life, she approached the old woman and offered to work for her in return for a place to sleep. The old woman accepted her offer, but wanted to know her name, and Jonet, with barely a pause for thought, told her that her name was Nemo. The old woman then provided her with a pallet in one corner of her single-room dwelling, close by the fire. She was grateful, and even more so when the old woman spoke well of her to her neighbours. Within a matter of days, thanks to this kindness, she had managed to ingratiate herself with several other people, establishing that she was a hard and willing worker, providing real value for the pittance in food she consumed and the space she occupied at night. She was feeling better about herself, too, by that time, for the name Nemo had reminded her of her own mother's name, Naomi. She had never known her mother, but she liked the sound of the name, and it was close enough to Nemo to be remarkable to the girl, so that, in the quiet safety of her own thoughts, she began to call herself Naomi and to think of herself by that name—very tentatively at first, and then with increasing pleasure and confidence as she grew used to it. Naomi was a beautiful name, and she simply knew that no person with such a name could ever bear any resemblance to anyone known as Jonet the Toad.

Thus she was at hand, known to all the villagers as Nemo, when Uther Pendragon returned and came seeking Garreth Whistler, and she watched the boy, wide-eyed with surprise over how young he was. She had remembered him as being her own age or older, but in fact he was considerably younger than she was . . . almost as young as her disgusting half-brother Carthac, although bigger and far better-looking. Carthac had been damaged at birth, in the act of being born, and his entire skull was deformed, flattened on one side so that the features of his face were all askew. While she would freely admit that she herself was unsightly, there could be no question that Carthac's ugliness went beyond that: he was grotesque. Nine children out of ten would not have survived such a birthing, but Carthac seemed more cruelly strong and healthy because of the disadvantage with which he had to contend.

She sidled closer so she could see Uther more clearly. He waved a greeting of acknowledgment and recognition, smiling briefly at her before turning his attention back to his hero, Garreth, and she felt her face flush and prickle with a rush of blood that confused her sufficiently to make her hide herself again.

Nemo made her home in Tir Manha after that, and was accepted as a useful presence, willing to do the work that others thought unpleasant and tiresome. She was still, from time to time, an object of ridicule because of her appearance, but she was long accustomed to keeping her head down, and as time passed, these instances of cruelty and mockery grew less and less common. In any case, the only person whose opinion truly mattered to her was Uther, and his acceptance of her, even when it manifested itself as benign indifference, was like a balm to her soul. She was by now completely besotted and obsessed with him, and within the narrow confines of the world in which she lived and dreamed, she believed, without conscious thought, that Uther was just as aware of her.

Nemo was ever determined to be of service to Uther in return for the kindness he had shown to her. Sitting one day in her high perch in the Place of the Bows, she had heard Garreth telling King Ullic that one of the local boys, a hulking bully called Cross-Eyed Ivor, whose father was one of King Ullic's warriors and councillors, had taken it upon himself to make young Uther's life a misery since his return from Camulod, knowing his own father's rank would protect him from any grave consequences of his bullying. This Ivor, who was of an age with Nemo, almost two full years older than Uther and therefore much bigger, had gathered a large following of younger boys, most of whom were terrified of him and hoped that by toadying to him they might escape having his nastiness focused upon them.

Uther, seven at the time but big for his age, had ignored Ivor for as long as he could, according to Garreth's account of what had happened, but ignoring the lout had been the worst possible course of action. Uther had ended up with a bruised and bleeding leg.

Nemo was outraged to learn that Garreth had not immediately gone looking for the boy called Cross-Eyed Ivor and punished him. But it was not and could never be his place, Garreth said to King Ullic, to intervene physically in this affair between boys. That was something Uther must resolve alone and in public view. Garreth could not be seen to be involved, because he believed that any intervention by him, the King's Champion, would surely destroy any chance young Uther had of escaping from the older boy's tyranny through his own efforts. If Uther were to gain the respect <>l his peers in this, he could do it only by standing alone against the bully. And so, Garreth informed the King, he had advised Uther to cut the bully down to size by approaching him again directly and tackling him immediately when he, Uther, was ready to fight, instead of waiting for Ivor to come to him when Ivor was ready.

Nemo listened carefully as Garreth Whistler reported to his patron how he had spoken to Uther of honour and duty, of commitment and dedication, and of the urgency of knowing how to distinguish friends from enemies. He had talked to the boy, he said, about degrees of enmity and friendship, defining them clearly and using, in some instances, words that Nemo had never heard. A friend he defined as anyone who reacted benignly to a leader's presence, plans, actions, results and ultimate objectives. An enemy was anyone who did not. And, Garreth had insisted, the only way to deal with an implacable enemy was to convert him to a friend—or kill him, if that was the only way of gaining his compliance. Nemo took clear and careful note of that. He should do all in his power to endear himself to friends, Garreth had explained. And if he did it well enough, he would have no living enemies.

No sensible man ever likes or chooses to light when there is no need, Garreth had told the boy, for lighting always entails the risk of serious injury and death. But once a man decides that he must fight, then his commitment should be total, and his attention to the outcome—his eventual victory—should be tightly focused upon that end alone. Any man who fought without that kind of dedication was a fool, Garreth said, and deserved to die.

A few days after she overheard that conversation, the seven- year-old Uther, this time armed with a heavy stick and accompanied only by his cousin Cay, once again went looking for the bully Cross-Eyed Ivor and found him in the market square, surrounded by his entire crew of sycophants. Wasting no time, Uther shouted a challenge at Ivor across the intervening space and then ran directly to the attack. Cay moved aside, interposing himself between Uther and the onlookers, keeping one eye on the fight and the other, more warily, on Ivor's cronies, lest any of them be tempted to take Ivor's side. His presence was unnecessary. Those who witnessed the fight reported that Uther's ferocity made him seem like a madman, heedless of danger. His face distorted with rage, he ignored the blows being directed at him, using his stick two-handed, as a club at times, to keep the larger boy beyond arm's reach. At other times he also used his stick as a lever, with which he eventually tripped his opponent. He brought him crashing down on the cobblestones of the market square and then thrashed him until he howled for mercy. But as soon as he, and all the others watching, could be sure that Ivor was beaten, Uther stopped the punishment and stepped back, calmly lowering his weapon to his side. Ivor rolled over, sobbing and blubbering at first, but gaining more control of himself as he pushed himself upward to his hands and knees, where he remained for a while, head downward, drooling blood and spit onto the cobblestones.

Uther watched him for a space of heartbeats, then stepped forward again, placing the thicker end of his stick on the other's back, between the shoulder blades.

"Ivor," he said quietly but clearly. "You and I should be friends, for the time will come when I will have no living enemies. Think on it." Uther Pendragon then turned slowly, eyeing each of the watching boys individually. Many of them had never harmed him, but some among them had been quick to torment him in the past at Ivor's urging. Few of either kind would meet his eye, however, and so he nodded to Cay and then turned and walked away, swinging his stick. Cay, grinning with delight, followed him in silence.

To celebrate Uther's victory, which in his eyes marked a momentous step forward in the boy's life and training, Garreth Whistler decided that he and his new student, accompanied by some of Uther's friends, should go fishing. They left that very afternoon and were gone for seven days.

Ivor the bully might have thought afterwards on what Uther Pendragon said to him concerning friendship, but no one would ever know, for in the course of that same night someone, or some supernatural agency, introduced a deadly adder, Britain's only venomous serpent, into young Ivor's bedding, and in his thrashing to escape from the embrace of the sleeping skins in which he had wrapped himself, the boy was bitten many times. He died before the sun rose, and Uther Pendragon, ranging the forest riverbanks that morning fishing for silver trout, had no idea that his lifelong reputation had been initiated.

Nemo would smile, thinking of that, hugging her secret to her bosom, exultant in the knowledge that no one, not even Uther himself, knew that it was she who had exacted revenge for him and started building the name that would keep all men in awe of him and his prowess. From then on, they would say of him that he was one who had no enemies—alive.

Nemo followed Uther around closely whenever he was in his Cambrian grandfather's lands, arranging her itinerary from day to day so that she could always be somewhere near to him if possible. And during those dreadful occasions when he would disappear for long months, detained by his relatives on his mother's side in far-off Camulod, Nemo would hold herself tightly in control throughout his seemingly interminable absences, swallowing and ignoring her frustrations with great difficulty, thanks only to her certain knowledge that King Ullic would never permit his grandson to stay away from Cambria for too long.

Nemo knew in her heart that Uther would always be her champion, no matter where he went, and he never failed her. Not even on the day, years later, that she had thought would be the end of the world.

She had left the hut early on a bright morning in early summer, the year she turned twelve, making her daily journey to the well, carrying a brace of water pails mounted on a yoke across her shoulders. She had passed the corner of the barrel-maker's shed and was angling to her left, towards the well, when a man came into view on her right, cutting diagonally across her path from the gates leading into the village. She glanced at him incuriously, attracted more by his movement than anything else, and then she froze in mid- step, her mouth falling open and her heart leaping up into her throat in fear. The man was Leir the Druid, her father, and slightly behind his tall, stooped figure, she saw the smaller, shambling shape of her half-brother Carthac, his gross cranial deformity visible even from a distance.

Certain that she had been seen, and overwhelmed by panic, she hid behind the barrel-maker's wall and stood motionless for a long time, her heart hammering at her rib cage. There was not the slightest doubt in her mind that they had discovered her whereabouts by some gross mischance and had come to take her home with them. There was also not the slightest doubt in her mind that she would die here in Tir Manha rather than go with them.

She let the heavy wooden yoke fall from her shoulders, its pails clattering in the morning stillness, and fumbled for the short knife she carried at her belt. It was scarcely a dagger, but it was all she had, and she ran the ball of her thumb nervously over its sharp edge, looking around her to see who else was watching. Not another person moved anywhere in sight. She strained her ears for the sound of approaching footsteps but heard nothing, and eventually, in spite of her terror, she approached the blind corner of the barrel-maker's shed and slowly poked her head around the corner.

The streets lay empty on both sides, and for a moment she was tempted to believe that she might have dreamed it all. But she knew she had not. Leir the Druid was in Tir Manha somewhere. He had found her, and soon the entire village would be turning out to look for her, to send her home with him. Fresh terror flared up inside her. He could be anywhere now, from the King's Hall to a neighbour's hut or even inside the shed she was leaning against. The sole place she could rely on his not being was behind her.

Slowly, taking one step at a time and leaving her pails and her wooden yoke abandoned where they lay, Nemo began to back away, feeling her entire body vibrating with tension, expecting at every moment to hear her name shouted with a command to stop where she was and give herself up to her father's care. But the shout never came, and no one came close to where she walked, so that she made her way unnoticed across the entire space of the rear half of Tir Manha until she could turn and run, fast and far.

The previous month, she and Uther had found a bear's winter den on a heavily treed hillside in the forest, less than a mile from the walls of Tir Manha. They had stumbled upon the place by accident while trying to locate Uther's best hunting arrow, which had brushed a sapling branch and been deflected high and to their right to disappear among a jumble of broken slabs of rock on the side of a steep, moss-covered cliff that was literally held in place, slabs and all, by the massed and massive roots of ancient oak and elm trees. Nemo had climbed higher than Uther at one point, attracted by a faint pathway descending from the upper edge of the cliff and disappearing behind one ledge of the green, moss-encrusted rock lace. The path had been beaten by a large bear whose tracks, made months before, were still visible, set in dried mud in front of the hole that led into a small but deep, dark cave. Since then, the two of them had used the spot as a private meeting place, telling no one else about it. She knew that Uther would know where to find her once it had become clear that she had disappeared.

Nemo reached the bottom of the cliff and within moments had reached the entrance to the cave. It was summer, but nonetheless she threw a large stone through the entrance and waited, listening closely, before she moved to enter the den. She heard nothing, and nothing came charging out at her, but even that did not mean the cave was empty. She knew that the proper thing to do would be to light a fire and then to throw a lighted brand into the blackness. That would bring out any frightened animal that might be crouching in there. But Nemo had neither the time nor the patience to go looking for the materials to build a fire. She drew her small knife and sucked in a huge breath, then stepped inside. For the space of a heartbeat she held her breath, her face a rictus of anticipation, but then she relaxed. The cave was empty.

She turned and looked for signs of her passage, but none could be seen. Because it was still early summer and the heat had not yet had a chance to penetrate the depths of this ancient stretch of forest, everything visible, the entire enclosure of the sylvan world stretching in front of her, was still painted in shades of green. High above Nemo's head, the towering treetops were crowned with a thick canopy of leaves, and even the great, thigh-thick ropes of root looping the cliff face all around her were covered with a greenish, mossy growth.

Uther would be coming sooner or later.

Nemo looked down at the ledge she was standing on and then lowered herself to sit with her legs dangling over the edge, her back comfortably lodged against the cliff face by the cave's entrance. The air was warm; the sun filtered through the leaves. She finally closed her eyes and allowed herself to think, without panic now, about her narrow escape from the Druid.

Uther did arrive in the middle of the afternoon, and she watched him as he climbed silently and swiftly up to where she sat. When he reached her perch, he stood looking down at her for a while, his face expressionless, and then he dipped his hand into his scrip and pulled out a wedge of cold fowl, leg and thigh, wrapped in a clean piece of cloth, handing it to her silently. Nemo took it with a nod of thanks and attacked it. She had eaten nothing since the previous night, and she was ravenous. When she had finished, Uther stood waiting, leaning indolently against the rock face with his left shoulder, his weight braced on his right foot, his head cocked to one side. He had learned long before that day that words were a commodity she used but sparingly, and sometimes heeded even less, and so he was content to wait, knowing that she had something to tell him.

She finally tilted her head back and looked up at him, wiping her lips with the sleeve of her tunic.

"They came for me."

Uther frowned. "Who came for you?"

"The Druid and the boy."

Uther was plainly perplexed. "The Druid ? You mean the new fellow? The one who came this morning? Why would he come for you? Why would you even think such a thing? He came to see Daris. All the Druids come to see Daris. He is the Chief Druid."

"The boy."

"What about him? He's the Druid's apprentice."

Nemo shook her head. "No, no, he's not."

"Come on, Nemo, of course he is. He's an ugly whoreson, but an apprentice is probably the best thing he could be, with that face of his."

Nemo frowned. "He's my brother, Carthac. My brother. And the Druid's name is Leir. He is my father."

Uther sat down beside her rather suddenly, as though his legs might have given way, and sat staring at her for what seemed a very long time, while Nemo kept her eyes fixed on the emptiness ahead of her in the middle distance. Finally she heard him snort, and from the corner of her eye she watched him draw up his knees and wrap his arms around them.

"The Druid is your father . . . What did you say his name is? Leir? Your father?" Nemo made no response, and he continued as though talking to himself. "Very well, then. And the boy is your brother." There was another long pause, and then he moved again, turning himself sideways so that his legs hung out over the cliff like hers. He slipped his hands flat, palms downward, between the backs of his thighs and the hard stone of the ledge.

"Why did you run away?"

Nemo thought about that for a moment. "Because I was afraid of him. He came home with a new wife, and—"

"No, I don't mean then, I mean today. Why did you run away from him today, from Tir Manha?"

Nemo sniffed and turned to look at Uther. "Because he had found me. He—"

"He had not found you, Nemo. He had no idea you were there. He still has no idea."

"He would have asked for me."

"What would he have asked about, then? A runaway daughter? A child? A slave? If he had wanted to find you he could have done so easily, long before now. He is a Druid, after all . . ."

They sat silently for a time, and then Uther asked, "You hate him, don't you?"

She nodded, and he nodded back. "Aye, I can see that. But why? What did he do to you? Did he beat you?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "Sometimes. Mostly he frightened me. I knew he was going to kill me one day. He killed my mother, and he killed all his other wives, too. Nobody ever spoke of it, but I knew . . ."

Uther sat staring at her again, and then he reached out and squeezed her shoulder. "Well, look, Nemo, here's what we'll do. We'll wait him out and tell no one where you are. You stay here, and I'll go back to Tir Manha and fetch you enough food to last you for a day or two. This Druid won't stay long, you'll see, and he won't be looking for you. He probably thinks you died in the forest somewhere. I'd wager he has even forgotten that you ever lived."

"Someone will tell him my name."

"But what did he call you when you lived at home? He didn't call you Nemo, did he?" She shook her head, on the point of telling him that her real name was Jonet, but he was charging ahead. "Of course he didn't. I know that's not your real name. So how could this Druid ask about you? D'you see what I'm saying?"

Responding to the tone of his voice, Nemo looked at him, then sniffed loudly and even managed to smile, tremulously, wiping her nose with her sleeve.

"Good, then bear this in mind from this moment forward. The Druid might be your father. There's not much you can do about that. But he is not your keeper, so stop worrying about him coming back and claiming you as some kind of slave. I won't allow it. And if I have to I'll complain to my father about him, and to Daris, the High Priest." He broke off, grinning at her. "On the other hand, there's nothing much I can do about your brother. You're stuck with him, I'm afraid." The grin faded from his eyes. "He's a nasty little brute, though. He had a dead rat in his scrip. I saw him take it out when he thought no one was looking, while his father was talking with another Druid, waiting to see Daris. He took this thing out of his scrip, then cut one of its legs off and dropped the rest of the carcass back into his scrip. Then he started playing with the severed leg, trying to skin it with his lingers. Filthy little toad."

Uther was completely oblivious to the shudder that shook Nemo when she heard him use that expression. His mind was still busy with thoughts of young Carthac.

"What happened to him, anyway? What happened to his head?"

"He was born that way. It happened during the birthing. Everybody thought he would die. But he didn't." Even as she said the words, Nemo recalled seeing Carthac earlier that day and thinking immediately that he looked far worse than she remembered.

Uther was rising to his feet. "Well, he's an unsightly little monster, and not so little either. How old would he be?"

Nemo shrugged. "Younger than me. Younger than you, too. I think I was three when he was born . . . that's what I remember being told."

"So, if I'm two years younger than you are, and he's a year younger than me, he's nine . . . He's huge for a nine-year-old."

Nemo shrugged. "Yes," she said, "he's big."

No more was ever said, but Uther's stature as her guardian, protector and benefactor was forever fused into Nemo's consciousness that day. He had soothed her and relieved her of her fears without either scorn or ridicule, and he had personally guaranteed her safety, offering to enlist his father the King, and even the Chief Druid, on her behalf. Nemo thanked him simply and accepted the truth of everything he had told her, and eventually her life resumed its normal round.

Leir left again shortly afterwards, following a stay of mere days, leaving Carthac in Tir Manha with Daris, the High Priest. Before he could return at summer's end, word came back that he had fallen prey to a sudden, raging fever and had expired within a matter of days, frightening everyone with fears of plague and pestilence. Carthac was left an orphan, and no one was quick to offer to lake on the responsibility of looking after the misshapen boy. But word passed among the people, subtly reinforced by the authority of the High Priest, that as the son of a Druid, the boy was entitled to a measure of support from the clan at large, and lodgings were eventually found for him until he could be apprenticed to another Druid. The waiting period was short and unhappy, but Carthac was placed with another Druid from the north and soon moved on.

Chapter FOUR

In her entire life prior to arriving in Tir Manha, no one had ever taken the time to speak civilly to Nemo, so it had quickly become one of her greatest joys that the boy Uther would often talk to her, sometimes for hours on end, looking her directly in the eye from time to time and speaking urgently and for her ears alone, without a hint of cruelty or derision. No one observing the two of them at such times would ever have thought to call what passed between them conversations, for Nemo never said a word, never made any attempt to respond to anything Uther said. She was content to listen and to enjoy the recognition in being spoken to, and it would never even have occurred to her that Uther spoke to her thus out of any feeling of fraternity or equality. She simply accepted the situation and enjoyed it, knowing that the boy spoke to her only because she remained silent, listened avidly and made no effort ever to interrupt him. Whenever he felt the need to hear himself think aloud, she was there, willing and available to serve as his audience.

Uther had been born into a family wherein the men were accustomed to thinking aloud and did so all the time. His grandfather and his father were both celebrated, among a people who placed great value upon such things, for their oratory and the soaring music of their voices. In matters of debate and dialogue, in argument, arbitration and level-headed negotiation, they were renowned talkers, powerful persuaders and manipulators of multitudes.

Young Uther had known, however, from the earliest days of his childhood, a truth that most people did not: that the liquid flow of persuasive urgings that spilled from the mouths of the male elders of his family was anything but spontaneous. The sweeping, seemingly fluid exhortations to their clansmen and kinsfolk were carefully and painstakingly structured, then rehearsed and polished for days prior to being delivered. Uther's childhood had been filled with instances of seeing his grandfather, especially, pacing the floor for hours, shoulders hunched in concentration as he muttered for his own ears the words and arguments he would later pour out for the attention of his assembled people. It had taken Uther a long time to realize and accept that the passionate flow of eloquence spilling horn King Ullic's lips was made up of the same words to which he himself had been listening for the previous few days or sometimes weeks, whispered or muttered almost inaudibly as the King moved from room to room, or from corner to corner, deep in concentration.

When the time came for the words to be said in public, however, all of the repetitive work of stringing them together in the first place came to fruition, so that the speaker, knowing the words fluently, could concentrate upon delivering them to maximum effect, using tone, pitch, rhythm and cadence to sway his listeners. Once he had learned that lesson—and he had shivered with an overwhelming rash of gooseflesh when it finally sank home to him— Uther had been stricken with awe at the combined powers of words and forethought. From that moment forward he would never lose sight of the importance of knowing in advance exactly what he would say when presenting an argument or defending his opinions on a particular topic.

Uther came to seek Nemo out more and more often, until what had begun as a whimsy had become a habit. The habit bred a strange form of dependency upon her presence, so that after a relatively brief period of time, Nemo, in a strange and uncritical way, had become Uther's Witness. She became a part of his audience, openly or in concealment, every time he had important things to say to anyone, and since in those youthful days that usually meant to his family— particularly to his father and his grandfather—it also meant that Nemo had to listen from some hiding place. Neither of those two august beings, Ullic and Uric, would have been likely to accept the presence of a common urchin like Nemo. And so it came to pass that Nemo became an expert at concealment, hiding herself securely far ahead of time whenever she had to witness Uther speaking out on anything important. Uther, in turn, had come close to the point of losing conscious awareness of her presence, even when they were alone together, and he frequently spoke to her as though he were musing aloud to himself.

Never again would Nemo be open to such a profusion of lessons to learn and profit from. Every day she spent watching Garreth Whistler and his friends or listening to Uther, either in private or in public, brought her new awareness and important knowledge of the world in which she now lived. Thus it was that she learned of Uther's insecurity over the regard in which he was held by his Grandfather Ullic. Uther walked in absolute awe of the King, and for a long time Nemo found that puzzling, since she could see nothing awe-inspiring about the old man. Ullic was big, certainly—bigger than any other man Nemo had ever seen—and even among a proud and warlike people whose facial hair could be intimidating, his great, wild beard made him look ferocious enough to frighten anyone. But she had never heard anyone complain about the King's ill temper, and she had never seen him beat anyone. Indeed, she could remember no single instance of complaint about his behaviour. Ullic Pendragon merely looked ferocious; he did not behave ferociously. And he was old, his beard shot through with streaks of grizzled, wiry grey hair.

Through Uther's commentaries, however, Nemo soon came to see the Pendragon King in a different light. The boy loved his grandfather deeply, to such an extent that he was almost afraid to approach the old King too closely, lest he do something boyish and ill-considered—and Nemo quickly discovered that Uther believed he had a natural talent for such things—that might displease the great man. Uther always strove to keep himself close enough to be able to watch and see, hear and admire the King's feats, his opinions and judgments, formal and informal, and yet he remained far enough removed from the proceedings most of the time to be able to slip away whenever he wished, without having been noticed.

It took her a longer time, however, to realize that Uther had a deep-rooted and very real fear that his grandfather, his beloved and revered Tata, disapproved of him. This confounded Nemo, for even she could see, as unobservant and incurious as she was, that Ullic Pendragon, not the kind of man to dote on anyone, was fiercely proud of Uther. Uther himself, however, was absolutely incapable of seeing or believing anything of the kind. In his own eyes and for his own reasons, he judged himself unworthy of his grandfather's respect and admiration, and so he condemned himself to a life without either. He believed his grandfather disliked him, and he hurt himself so badly with this misguided conviction that he found himself driven constantly to attempt impossible things in order to win recognition and approval from the old man.

Because he was yet very young, however, Uther invariably failed to see the vainglorious aspect of all the wild things he tried to do, and because he never liked to talk about anything he found even slightly discomfiting, let alone embarrassing, he seldom spoke to anyone about what he was trying to achieve at such times. As a result, what his father called "Uther's escapades" usually ended in failure and dejection, the pain of them amplified because invariably King Ullic saw only what he believed to be the harebrained results of his grandson's mercurial nature.

One such incident occurred in the early autumn of the year Uther was ten. He had returned from Camulod sooner than was usual that year, and for some reason, unknown and unimportant to Nemo, Cay had not come with him. Uther had been different when he came home that year: he had grown considerably during the summer months and was far bigger than he had been when he left, but Nemo also noticed that he was more confident, and that was not quite so readily apparent to others.

He came home that year enthralled by several things he had learned from the craftsmen in the Colony, and one of these was the phenomenon of lines of cleavage, the almost magical divisions known only to jewellers that exist between the planes and structural elements of natural crystals, enabling a knowledgeable man to split a precious stone into smooth-faced, multi-faceted portions with one sharp, well-placed tooled edge and a few gentle taps.

Uther, who had always been a creature of great burning, but short-lived, enthusiasms, had seen this feat performed by a veteran craftsman called Murdo, a native from some far northern clan who made silver jewellery and decorated it with bright yellow and purple stones, clear as glass, that he brought from his homeland. Before seeing the man himself, Uther had seen a sample of Murdo's work, a large, circular and splendidly imposing brooch with a huge yellow jewel at its centre, and he had dismissed the jewel as a pretty but worthless piece of coloured glass. One of his companions had corrected him, however, insisting that the decoration was, in fact, a real jewel that the craftsman had cut from an ordinary stone and faceted with his own tools.

Uther's rejection of such an outrageous claim was instant and raucous. Any fool, he said, could see that the jewel was made of glass, the same kind of glass that had been used to make the yellow drinking cups owned by his Grandmother Luceiia Varrus in Camulod, and he had seen for himself how those were made when his grandfather took him to the glassmakers foundry. The glass was beautiful, but it was made in a furnace and then rolled and shaped while it was soft and ductile—he had used that word impressively, taught its meaning by his Grandfather Varrus, the smith, although none of his friends had paid it any attention—but at no point in its production did anyone cut it or split it with a blade. His friend was adamant, however, and totally unimpressed by Uther's vehemence, refusing to be shouted down and insisting that he had heard his father tell how Murdo the Bauble-maker had learned his craft as a boy, at the Emperor's court in Constantinople, and had then come home to Britain to practise his craft for more than twenty years in Londinium, prior to the departure of the legions.

Such a spirited defence of Murdo, with its absolute defiance of Uther, constituted a serious challenge and called for an absolute resolution one way or another. And so the entire troupe of boys, nine in all, went directly to Murdo's hut and demanded that he show them one of his rough, unpolished stones, and then show them how he split and shaped and polished it to make such a jewel as the one in the brooch.

Watching as Murdo did what they asked—he was only too happy to reward their interest in his skills—Uther found himself totally engrossed in the procedure that unfolded before his eyes. From the moment the dour-faced Murdo first produced an ordinary- looking, rough-textured pebble the size of his fist and held it up beside a much smaller, many-faceted jewel of what appeared to be blazing yellow glass, claiming the two were one and the same substance, a material called topaz, Uther's imagination was in thrall to what he was being told and shown. He watched, spellbound, as Murdo cleaned the rough stone of surface impurities, immersing it time and again in a bath of some bubbling, caustic fluid, then withdrawing it, using long, tapering pincers, and vigorously rinsing it clean in water. In the intervals when nothing particular seemed to be happening and waiting was all there was to do, he asked Murdo, insistently sometimes, about the sources of his skills and knowledge. The man sought to avoid and deflect the boy's questioning at first, but Uther Pendragon's was not the kind of personality that accepted dismissal easily, and the craftsman's reluctance, once overcome, soon gave way to the pride every artisan takes in explaining and demonstrating his abilities to people who are both less gifted and genuinely intrigued.

Uther's friends were not interested, beyond the first novel and introductory stages of the cleansing process, and they soon drifted off to amuse themselves elsewhere. Even Cay went away with the others, unimpressed by what he had seen to that point, but Uther remained behind, his attention focused entirely on what Murdo was doing, and under the boy's watchful gaze, the jewel-maker eventually buckled down to doing real work, rather than simply seeking to amuse the lad. As Uther watched, frequently holding his breath with the intensity of his concentration, Murdo unveiled some of the true secrets of his craft, gripping the rough, uncut stone securely in the jaws of a jeweller's vise and then cutting the stone to expose the glowing treasure at its heart, working roughly at first in the initial, shaping cuts, and then refining his approach and the size and temper of his cutting tools as he approached the finer elements of his task.

Uther remained with Murdo for the entire day, and at the end of it he went away unable to think about anything other than the amazing transformation he had witnessed. He returned the following day to pester the craftsman into showing him the process time after time and explaining the logical processes and techniques involved. And when he wanted to try it himself, Murdo allowed him to do so, knowing what the result would be. But then, in a natural act of kindness after Uther's stone had been smashed to dust by an over-enthusiastic hammer blow and the boy's chagrin knew no bounds, the veteran craftsman took Uther aside and showed him the lines of cleavage in a large piece of the soft coal they used in Camulod to feed the central heating furnaces. The coal was extremely soft and quick-burning, but because of its very softness, Murdo was able to split it with his hands along the natural lines of cleavage formed in its beginnings, millions of years earlier. He showed Uther how the black stone split into layers and how, with a modicum of care, anyone who knew what he was doing could split the fuel into impressive-looking flakes.

On his return to his grandfather's territories, Uther told Nemo what he intended to do and what he hoped to achieve. His primary objective, as always, was to impress his grandfather the King, this time by demonstrating how, with the edge of a sword blade, he could split a stone—represented by the large piece of coal he had chosen—by striking it once, cleanly and without great effort. Nemo listened closely to Uther's long and rambling explanation and understood almost nothing of what he was saying. Uther had been home from Camulod for more than ten days by that time and had been separated from Murdo for almost twice that long, so that his memories of what the old craftsman had told him and taught him were beginning to grow hazy around the edges. He knew beyond dispute, however, that Murdo called his jewels "stones," and since Murdo's stones all contained invisible lines of cleavage, it seemed to Uther that all stones must contain them. His stone for the demonstration would be a large piece of coal. He was familiar with the attributes and qualities of coal, and it would suit his purposes perfectly.

Nemo was determined that she would be present in the Great Hall to witness the proceedings when Uther demonstrated his feat to the King's Council. Though most of the dwellings in Tir Manha were round-houses with thick walls of mud mixed with willow laths and low roofs thatched with straw, there were other, larger structures too, most of them the rectangular buildings known as post houses because of the way they were constructed around and upon strong sunken pillars. The Great Hall was by far the largest and the most impressive of these, an enormous, rectangular structure with timber rafters mounted upon gigantic tree trunk pillars, its walls constructed of shaped and layered logs, sealed and weatherproofed with mud and Roman mortar. Nemo knew that women were forbidden by ancient custom to attend Council gatherings and that not even Uther would dare to flout that law. She had spent days, however, searching for the perfect hiding place, and because she had no fear of heights, she had finally located the ideal spot, high among the rafters that spanned the enormous interior, in a deeply shadowed corner beneath the roof.

The interior walls were lined with woven screens of reeds covered with dried, smoothly plastered mud, and they were impossible to climb, but not so the exterior walls. Nemo quickly identified an easy route, using the roofs of several outbuildings abutting the Great Hall that would take her up within reach of the high ventilation windows under the thatched eaves of the main building. The massive hall stood in the middle of Tir Manha, and because it had never been intended as a fortification, no attempt had been made to secure it from penetration from outside. She made her way unseen up to the window she had chosen as offering the easiest access, and slipped inside, delighted to discover there that she could make her way with ease into a corner that was fortified with angled beams and was far safer than the ample crotch of the great oak tree she frequented in the Place of the Bows. Satisfied then, she made her way out, content to wait in silence until it was time for her to climb up there again.

At dusk, on the night before the meeting of the King's Council, Nemo made her way up into the rafters, this time carrying a leather satchel that contained some food and water, a woollen blanket and a covered earthen pot to hold her own bodily wastes, should she become sore set. She slept well, high in the roof, and climbed out of the window again before the dawn broke to relieve herself in safety on the crest of a rooftop in the darkness. Then she climbed back into the building and made herself comfortable again, dozing intermittently until the Council began to assemble below her, the sound of their assembly and the swelling volume of their voices forcing her to lean forward and concentrate hard on one small group at a time, trying to overhear what they were saying. The noises of voices and movement blended together into a chaotic meld that rose directly upwards to where she watched and listened, and it was impossible to hear anything clearly, let alone understand what was being said.

By the time King Ullic entered the Hall and called the Council to order, Nemo had begun to regret having wasted so much time and effort in climbing up to her high perch, but then Uther entered the Great Hall a very short time later, and she suddenly found herself perfectly situated to observe what happened and able to hear every word perfectly.

Two of Uther's companions entered behind him. They were carrying a flat board between them on which lay a very large, obviously heavy piece of coal from which every trace of dust had been carefully removed; the entire surface had been burnished to the semblance of a gloss. They placed the coal in the middle of the floor and then withdrew. Painfully aware of all the eyes focused on him and the intense curiosity—some of it hostile—that was being directed his way, Uther stepped forward and asked his grandfather's permission to bring a borrowed sword into the room in order to make his demonstration. It was the law that no weapons were ever permitted in the Council chamber, and Uther's request was therefore received, after an initial concerted hiss of indrawn breath, in a scandalized silence. King Ullic nodded in acquiescence, however, humouring his grandson and saying nothing to dissuade him. Another of Uther's companions who had been waiting outside the doors brought in the sword and handed it to Uther, then left hurriedly.

Uther drew a deep breath and then looked about him at his grandfather's assembled Councillors. Among them he saw his lather, but he looked away quickly, refusing to meet Uric's eye and forcing himself to review instead what he was to do in the following few moments. Before coming here, he had thought about a number of things he might say to King Ullic to explain what he was doing and what he had discovered, but then he had dismissed all of them, convinced that actions would speak more clearly than any words. Now, trying not to acknowledge the fluttering hope that he had been right, since it would indicate that he might possibly be wrong instead, he made no attempt to speak before stepping forward to stand in front of the large lump of coal. He gripped the sword tightly in both hands and bent close to the coal, narrowing his eyes as he carefully laid the edge of his blade along one of the thin, almost invisible lines that marked the outer surface. Every eye in the gathering was on him, and he felt the scrutiny of each of them. No one spoke and no sound marred the perfect silence in the Hall.

Sucking in a deep, silent breath, Uther drew himself erect slowly and raised the sword carefully above his head, keeping his arms stiffly extended and his eyes fixed on the target lines he envisioned. Then his blade slashed swiftly, sibilantly downwards, a strong, clean, accurate blow that produced a dull, clanging sound. But instead of falling apart in neatly severed sections, the large piece of coal remained stonily intact, save for a number of flint-like splinters that broke off and whizzed away in all directions, clattering and sliding across the floor.

Uther gazed, stricken with horror at what had happened. The blade of the borrowed sword had twisted and bent with the impact of his deliberate blow, the dubious quality of its temper mercilessly exposed in this sudden, violent encounter with obdurate stone. And despite the numerous washings that the piece of coal had undergone, the impact had generated a small cloud of fine black dust that hung in the air, almost motionless, hovering as though to draw attention to the fact that Uther had just failed at something else, although no one could have guessed what that might have been.

Uther stood there, unable to move, his head lowered, his mind filled with dull, sluggish echoes of the sickening sound the sword had made against the coal. He would tell Nemo later that a hundred different thoughts swirled through his mind in the few moments after the sword landed, and most of them were questions: What happened? What went wrong? What had he been trying to demonstrate? What had he hoped to achieve? How could he have gone ahead with it without letting anyone know what was involved? How could he have been such a fool as to attempt this thing in public—not merely in public, but in full view of his grandfather's scowling Council of Elders, all of whom disapproved of him? Why didn't the coal split as it ought to have? Why hadn't he tested both it and the flawed sword earlier? Why, why, why, why?

As he stood there, frozen, Uther heard a swell of sound as his audience began to stir and to talk among themselves, quietly and with decorum because they were in Council. It would have been a grievous insult to the King had anyone permitted himself to laugh aloud or to voice his scorn of something that the King himself had authorized. And so they kept their voices low, their disapproval muted.

Uther's eyes moved to meet his grandfather's, and he saw the old man's hand come up, finger pointing, ordering him to leave the Council chamber. He nodded and began to turn away, but Ullic's voice stopped him.

"Take the weapon."

Uther stooped and retrieved the useless sword, seeing only now the rust that pocked it and the tawdry workmanship of the warped and twisted blade. Then, carrying the thing in both hands, he trudged from the Hall dejectedly, crushingly aware that his humiliation was not yet complete. He would have to face his grandfather later in the day, and probably his father, too, and attempt to explain what it was that he had been trying to do. Had he really tried to split stone with a sword? What practical purpose had he thought to achieve in doing such a thing? Uther writhed inside himself with shame and humiliation that he could ever have been so scatterbrained and so irresponsibly precipitate. He had failed again, utterly, to govern his compulsive enthusiasms, and he had failed to do an advance investigation of possibility and probability, when even a cursory investigation could have shown him that their hard, local Cambrian coal, dug from the exposed seam that surfaced close to their village, would not split as readily or cleanly as the softer coal used in Camulod. Uther knew he could blame no one but himself. He had walked—no, he had almost forced his way— into his grandfather's presence while the King was in Council, and he had used his status as a family member to gain his grandfather's attention. And then he had proceeded to humiliate himself, begging everyone there to witness his apparently mindless destruction of what must have seemed to them to be a perfectly good sword. It must have looked to everyone like a ceremonial sacrilege, some kind of inane, insane rite devised simply to outrage all of them.

His friends were waiting for him when Uther reached the doors and closed them behind him, but after one look at his face, none of them sought to join him as he strode past them and away. For his part, he did not even notice them. His mind was filled with the vision of his Grandfather Ullic's face and the stern disapproval that had filled it as he had glowered down from his dais.

As Uther was striding away, fleeing to hide his shame and humiliation. Nemo was witnessing an altogether different aspect of what his demonstration had evoked, one that would have confounded the boy had he known of it. She had been leaning forward, peering between two rafters in order to watch him as he walked away, carrying the sadly twisted weapon he had used in his "demonstration," and as the high doors closed behind him, she became aware of the deep silence that now held sway in the room below, one that no one seemed eager to break. She shifted her position, moving her head from one side to the other of the rafter she was straddling. Below her and to her right, the King still stood in front of his ceremonial seat, a thoughtful expression on his face as he gazed at the doors through which his grandson had made his exit. Every other eye in the room was fixed upon him, and Nemo had the feeling that everyone down there on the floor was holding his breath expectantly. The silence stretched and grew, and no one made a sound or moved to take a seat. Eventually, however, Ullic Pendragon turned his head back towards his expectant advisers and waggled his fingers in their direction.

"Sit," he said. "Sit down."

As they did so, the King moved slowly down from his dais to where Uther's lump of coal lay on the floor. He stood gazing at the coal for the space of several heartbeats, and then he slowly backed away from it until he was close to the main doors of the Hall. He turned and pulled them open, and as the doors swung wide, Nemo saw one of the guards outside twist in surprise. Then the King said something and held out his hand.

Ullic approached the coal again, this time carrying a sword he had taken from the guard. While everyone gazed silently, he stood for some time looking down at the black mass. Then he sank to one knee, shifting the sword to his left hand and reaching out with his right to touch the tip of his middle finger to the deep score that Uther's blade had made on the black surface. His gaze sharpened, and he leaned closer to the lump of coal, spreading the fingers of his hand wide over the surface for a moment and peering closely at something. Then gently, tentatively, he drew his thumbnail straight down along one of the fine lines he had detected.

Nemo heard him mutter something to himself at that point, but his voice was pitched too low for her to hear. It was obvious, however, that something had occurred to him. He straightened his back, still on one knee, and took the sword back into his right hand. He held it point down, like a dagger, and braced his fist against his shoulder as he used his left hand to position the point of the blade very carefully against the coal. When he was satisfied that it was properly in place and would not slip, he brought his left hand up and cupped it over his right fist, and then he thrust downward, hard, using the strength and weight of his arms, shoulders and torso to drive the sword point into the coal. A sharp crack, and the lump split cleanly into two flat-sided parts, almost throwing the King off balance with the suddenness of its division. Ullic threw out one hand to retain his balance, and then tested the smoothness of the split sides with his open hand. He nodded his head wordlessly, and then rose to his feet again with a loud sigh, brushing his left hand against his tunic to wipe the coal dust from his palm. He turned next towards the open doors where the guards stood gaping and held out the hand with the sword. Its owner immediately came forward to retrieve it.

"My thanks," the King told him. "Close the doors again when you go out." He watched the doors as they closed behind the departing guard, then made his way back up onto his dais, where he faced his Councillors again.

"If I have learned nothing else about my grandson Uther," he said to them, "I have learned this: the boy, young as he is, is no fool. What you saw him do today might have looked foolish to you, but that is only because none of you knows what he was attempting to do.

"No more do I. But I know that he had a purpose in coming here today, and I know that he would never set out to make himself look foolish before me or before any of you. Think hard upon that before you give voice to scorn when you leave here. You are the King's Council, and when you gather here to advise me, as you do from time to time, your dignity is guarded carefully, and the respect shown to you is unique. How many grown warriors do you know who would dare to walk into your gathering and demand your attention?

"The boy had something in mind with this . . . this thing that he attempted. Clearly, it had something to do with what I did a moment ago, splitting that coal with a blade. I want no sneering stories of what happened here to make their way beyond this Hall. Is that clear? I will not tolerate being crossed in this. We will not punish the boy, even by silence, for one error, no matter if it be of judgment or execution or of simple nervousness. If our young people show self-reliance in any way, we must encourage them, not laugh at them or scorn them." Ullic broke off and looked around at the faces watching him. "I've no doubt, either, that there are some of you sitting here listening to me now and thinking me a fool for saying the like. Well, if you are thinking that, keep the thought to yourself. It would not please me to hear it said aloud or even whispered, and I doubt I would even like to see it showing in your eyes . . . Think me foolish if you will, but keep your thoughts inside you and your faces schooled. And know I believe that we would be the fools to punish any of our bright young lads for trying something new or differed "Now, we have important matters to discuss, so let's be about them."

Chapter FIVE

Uther paused in the empty vestibule that lay inside the massive outer doors of the Great Hall, wiping his sweaty palms as he fazed up at the tall interior doors to his grandfather's Council chamber for the second time in one day. He swallowed hard and drew a deep breath, willing himself not to shudder with dread. He was alone in the vestibule, the guards having been dismissed when the Council gathering ended more than an hour before. Desperate for an excuse, any excuse, to postpone opening those doors and entering the Hall to face his grandfather, he allowed himself to think for a moment about the Guards of the Great Hall, as they were called. They were proud and independent Pendragon warriors, not soldiers like the garrison guards in Camulod, who were allocated guard duties in strict rotation by their officers. Those who stood on guard for the King's Council in Tir Manha did so voluntarily, and the rotation by which they took their turns to serve was an informal one, an honour shared among equals in recognition of time-hallowed custom.

One of the two who had stood guard earlier in the day had been sent by Ullic Pendragon to find the King's grandson afterwards and hid him return to the Hall, and Uther had followed him with leaden footsteps. The time had come for him to explain himself and accept responsibility for his behaviour, which he knew his grandfather and his father must be considering inexcusable. He drew one more deep breath, squeezed his eyes shut and then reached out for the iron handle on the right door, twisting it firmly.

"Uther!" The cry, urgent and muted, came from behind him and he hesitated on the point of pushing the door wide open. He knew it was Nemo; he had recognized her voice immediately. He paused, wavering, as she called his name again, then turned to see her running hard towards him across the cobblestoned yard outside the massive doors of squared oak beams that always stood open on the days of Council gatherings. Frowning and shaking his head, he waved her away. She had no right to approach the King's Hall—as a woman, she would be trespassing.

Nemo saw the anguished look on his face and the peremptory way his hand came up to stop her, and she slid to a halt, leaning against the edge of one of the huge, grey wooden doors, her heart pounding and her breath catching in her throat from running all the way around the buildings to reach the only entrance to this courtyard. She had taken the risk of being seen and caught only when she had heard King Ullic say to the Chief Druid, who had been the last man to leave the Council chamber, that he expected his grandson at any moment.

Moving as quickly and silently as she could, she had then climbed back through the window under the eaves and made her way to the ground, although much more slowly than she would have wished. It had rained only a short time before and the surfaces she had to cross were slippery and treacherous. Then, as she had dropped cautiously down the last, dangerous slope of the lowest outhouse in her "ladder" of roofs, she had seen Uther pass by in the distance, evidently headed to meet his grandfather.

Now he stood glaring wildly at her, his face a grimacing mask, waving her away with one hand. Pitching her voice so that he alone might hear her, she called to him, "He's not angry, Uther! The King's not angry." But before she could finish, he stepped inside, and the door closed behind him.

Uther had heard what Nemo said, however, and he found himself instantly angry at what he saw as her presumption in daring to tell him something that he knew to be untrue. But then he saw his grandfather, and all thoughts of Nemo were dashed from his mind.

Ullic stood with his back to the doors, so that Uther saw only the imposing height of the old man and the enormous breadth of his back and shoulders. He suspected his grandfather knew he was there, but he could not be certain.

"Tata?"

"Come over here. What were you trying to do?"

Uther's heart sank at the directness of the question. This was going to be even more difficult than he had feared. He moved forward, speaking to the back of Ullic's head.

"I don't know."

The King swung around to look at him. "What's that supposed to mean? Of course you know. I know, so you must. Look here."

Uther stepped to the old man's side and looked at the piece of coal that lay in front of him, cleanly split into two pieces. His jaw dropped open in astonishment.

"I didn't do that."

"No, I did it. But it's what you were trying to do, isn't it?"

Uther nodded, unable to take his eyes off the split coal. "Yes."

"Good, then we both know what you were trying to do, so perhaps I asked you the wrong question. Let's try again. If you had succeeded in splitting this the first time, what else would you have done, afterwards?"

"I don't know . . . I'm not sure."

Ullic Pendragon said nothing for a long time, standing with pursed lips, gazing down at the sundered stone, and then he looked again at his grandson. "But you did think it was important . . . that you could split this thing?"

"Yes . . "

"Why? And don't tell me you don't know again."

The boy bit back the words that had been rising to his lips and stood quietly for a moment. Then he frowned in puzzlement and looked up at the old man who towered above him.

"You're not angry."

"No, I'm not angry. Should I be? Or do you intend to make me angry, insisting that you know nothing about why you interrupted my Council this morning?"

"No, I'll try not to . . . But I might not have the right words."

"Well, you won't be the first man I've listened to who suffered from that complaint. Why did you attack the thing the way you did? And where did you get that awful weapon?"

"The sword? I borrowed it from my friend Lucius. His uncle gave it to him. It was not a very good blade."

"It wasn't a blade at all. The thing split and broke like a dried- out branch. If that's the best you can do on your own behalf, I'll have to make sure you get a decent blade. But why did you swing the thing over your head like that? Why not simply split the coal the way I did? Come and sit down with me. I'm getting too old to stand all day on a stony floor."

He led the way up onto the dais that held the King's heavy seat of ornately carved oak and sat down, thrusting a footstool towards Uther with one foot as he did so. Uther caught the stool, hooking it with his foot, and pulled it over to him to sit, avoiding his grandfather's eyes while his head spun with wonder over so much ease and friendliness where he had expected bluntness and pain.

"So," his grandfather continued, "why the overhead swing?"

"Forgive me, Grandfather, but this time I truly don't know, save that it seemed to be the right thing to do at the time. But of course, it wasn't. How did you split the coal?"

"With a blade, the way you tried to do it. But I used the point of mine like a wedge and forced it into the crack with the weight of my body." Ullic leaned back until his shoulders found the comfort of his deep chair, then crossed his arms, lowering his chin onto his chest as he stared at his grandson. "I'll admit, you had me wondering for a moment or two if you had taken leave of your senses . . . especially when I saw what happened to the blade of the sword. I just about had you thrown into a cell then to teach you a lesson about good manners. Only one thing stopped me. Can you guess what it was?"

"No, Tata."

"The coal. Had you merely wanted to look like a fool and humiliate me and your father, you could have chosen any old stone on which to break that sword, but instead you chose a piece of coal— black, dirty, hard to find. And soft—softer than any other kind of stone. Once I began to think about the coal, I couldn't stop. So I went and looked at it. Your blade hacked a big chip out of it, destroying itself in the doing of it. But I could not make myself believe that you would go to such pigheaded lengths simply to destroy even such a poor weapon. It seemed beyond belief that you would be so stupid and vicious. So I told myself that you must have had a reason for doing what you did, even if I could not imagine what it was . . .

"And then I saw the lines running along the coal from one end to the other, and I remembered the care with which you took aim, the way you bent down and laid the blade so carefully against the stone before bringing it up to strike. You did all that slowly and with great concentration. And so I guessed that what you were trying to do must have had something to do with those lines. They looked strangely familiar, even though I had never noticed any- thing like them before, and the only thing I could think of doing with them was to split them, to force them apart, and so I did that. I drove the point of a sword blade hard into one of the lines, and the entire block fell apart in two pieces."

Ullic stopped and looked appraisingly at his grandson. "I was impressed that you would have known that would happen, even if you did not know quite how to achieve it. But tell me, if you will, man to man, why you did it. What do you think is so important about being able to split coal?"

"Nothing, Tata . . . I mean, there's nothing important about doing it with coal. Coal is easy, or it should be easy. What I didn't know until this morning is that there are different kinds of coal. I know now."

"What d'you mean?"

The boy shrugged. "The coal they use in Camulod is very different from ours. It is shinier and cleaner-looking, almost polished, if you know what I mean. And it's lighter, too . . . easier to carry and easier to break apart. I never thought to ask about that, and I never thought to question the weight of the piece I brought here today. I knew it was heavier, and I knew it was duller, and I knew it was dirtier. . . dustier. . . but it never occurred to me that it could be a completely different kind of coal."

Ullic sat staring at his grandson for a moment and then shrugged, frowning slightly. "I know what you are saying must make sense to you, but I have no idea what you are talking about. You began by telling me that coal is unimportant, but since then all you have talked about is coal."

"Oh . . . well, yes, I know it must sound strange. But you see, it's the stone and cleaving it that matters . . ."

King Ullic Pendragon stood up and raised his arms high in a mighty stretch, yawning and rising to his tiptoes as he did so. "I'm hungry," he said. "You must be, too. Come with me and we'll pass by the kitchens and find something to eat, then you and I will walk for a while and talk, and perhaps by then you'll be able to tell me sensibly about what's in your mind."

Within the space of the hour that followed—thanks to the pleasant distractions afforded by visiting his grandfather's kitchens and procuring an entire feast, comprising a hot, freshly spit-roasted hare and a cloth-twist bag of salt, a loaf of fresh bread, a damp cloth full of soft, new-made cheese, a small raw turnip cut into wedges and a jug of cold beer—Uther went from being angry and afraid to feeling completely at his ease. He and his grandfather shared the load as they carried their meal with them, sauntering at their leisure through the King's Holding and into the woods outside Tir Manila. Only three men attempted to approach King Ullic in that time, and he waved all of them away, growling an explanation that he was spending time with his grandson and did not wish to be interrupted. Uther said nothing about that, but he was highly conscious of the honour being accorded to him and, in consequence, even more appreciative than his boyish appetite would normally have made him when the two of them finally sat down side by side on a fallen tree trunk and shared the delicious meal.

By that time, he had also come to accept that his grandfather, far from being angry at him, was honestly interested in what Uther had to say. As a result, when the time came to start from the beginning and explain all that had been going through his mind in recent weeks, he found that every trace of complexity had vanished, and he was able to tell the story fluently and without pause, going from his first encounter with the old craftsman Murdo in Camulod through all that he had learned from the old man and almost successfully through the ensuing labyrinth of thoughts, many of them contradictory, that had brought him to this day's doings.

When he had finished talking, his grandfather sat staring at him for some time, then sniffed and made a low throat-clearing sound somewhere deep in his chest.

"Very well," he said. "I think I follow you . . . At least I know what lines of cleavage are now. Here I am, more than five times your age, and I never knew that before. So. You hoped to split the coal—or the stone, if you prefer—with your sword. Why? What would that have proved?"

"That it could be done."

"What d'you mean?"

The boy shrugged. "It would have amazed you, Tata, don't you see? Because you didn't know it could be done. Do you think any of your Councillors would have known, when you didn't? What would you have said, or thought, if I had been able to do it . . . if the stone had split clean in two?"

Ullic Pendragon nodded and actually chuckled. "You're right, I would have been amazed. And I might even have been amused, too. But what makes you think I would not then have thrown you out for interrupting my Council?"

"Because I did it with a sword."

"A sword . . . I don't follow you. You're ten years old, and you've lost me. What are you saying?"

"I don't know, Tata—I know you told me not to say that but it's the truth. It's a—I had a vision, I think."

"A vision. I see. What kind of a vision was it?"

"It happened one afternoon last week when I was thinking about Murdo's chisel striking one of his big, yellow topaz stones. I le always does it—splitting a stone, I mean—with great care, and lie spends ages studying each stone before he can decide where to place the chisel blade. If he selects the wrong spot, or if he strikes too hard or not hard enough, he can destroy the stone, smashing it into powder. He let me try it once, and I ended up with a small pile of yellow dust and splinters. But when Murdo does it right, Tata, he splits the stone cleanly, and each side of the split is smooth, as though polished, like the glass in Grandma Luceiia's window in her family room in Camulod. And then I thought of something that I hadn't thought about before . . . and I saw it again today when I came back into the Council chamber and saw how you had split the coal . . ." His voice died away and he looked up into Ullic's eyes.

"And what's that?" the King asked. "What did you think?"

"I thought—no, I knew—that a stone struck properly like that is split forever. It can never be put back together again."

"I see. That was your vision?"

"No, in my vision I saw a sword splitting a stone. And then the stone became an army, divided by a sword stroke. And then, instead of a sword, I saw a force of Camulod's cavalry, a wedge squadron formation, striking an army and splitting it apart."

"So it could never be rejoined . . ." The King's voice was quiet, and he had a far-away expression in his eyes. "Hmm!" Ullic sat up straight and wiped his hands on the bottom of his tunic. "So you brought your idea to me. Good. But you should have brought it sooner."

"Why?" Uther now sounded depressed. "My idea didn't work, and I broke the sword. And besides, we don't have any cavalry like Camulod's, so it won't do us any good."

"Aha, so that's what you're thinking, is it? Well, lad, you're wrong. What's important here, it seems to me—although, mind you, I'm naught but an old man—what's important here is that I broke the coal. Don't you agree?"

"Yes, I know you did, Tata."

"Aye, but did you hear what I said? I said that was the important thing."

"I know, Tata, I heard you."

"Good, then you can tell me why it was important."

"I . . ." Uther sat silent, blinking, and his grandfather took pity on him.

"It was important, Uther, because what you had done, or tried to do, set me thinking about it. . . And so I was able to do it, after I had thought about it for a bit. But I would never have thought about it at all if it hadn't been for what you did. It would never have occurred to me to try such a thing, even if I lived to be twice the age I am now, if you had not provided the original idea. Do you hear what I am saying to you, Uther?"

Ullic waited, peering into his grandson's face, but then, seeing that the boy had not understood, he kept talking. "The idea, Uther, the idea was yours, and that is more important than the success or failure of what you tried to do with it. Once the idea has been put forward, someone will always come along to make it real, to make it happen, but it need not be the person who first had the idea. There are very few people in this world who can do what you did in this—who can conceive ideas, lad—who can come up with the original thought required for progress, and the knowledge that you, my own grandson, could be one of those few people makes me very proud." Again Ullic waited, and again the boy did not respond the way the King wanted.

"But I failed, Grandfather. I didn't do it."

"Dia! Very well, let me think about this for a moment. . . Here, try this. You admire your Grandfather Varrus, no?" Uther nodded. "Of course you do, and so you should. And the reason you had that thought of cavalry splitting an army is because you admire the cavalry at Camulod almost as much as you admire Publius Varrus, am I right?" Again the boy nodded. "Good then. So you must be really proud of your grandfather's prowess as a cavalry leader, and of the way he looks on horseback, all decked out in his fine armour on his huge cavalry horse, right?"

Uther was shaking his head, frowning. "No, Tata, Grandfather Varrus does not ride. I've never seen him in armour on horseback. He is not a cavalryman."

"What? But he commands all Camulod's cavalry, does he not?"

"No, he does not. He used to be the Commander, but he gave that up to Uncle Picus when Uncle Picus came home to Britain."

"But why?"

"You know why! Uncle Picus used to be an Imperial Legate, the supreme cavalry commander in Britain, before I was born."

"I see. So you are saying your Grandfather Varrus is a failure." The boy's eyes went wide with shock and outrage, but before he could respond in any way, Ullic held up his hand to forestall him. "No? That's not what you are saying? Then what am I to believe? Why would Varrus relinquish his own power to another man—any man?"

"He did not, Tata! Uncle Picus is not just any other man! He is Tana Luceiia's nephew, and he is a great commander of cavalry, better than Tata Varrus could ever be. Tata Varrus would have been stupid not to allow Uncle Picus to take over the command, because Uncle Picus does that best, and Tata Varrus had other things to do."

"Aha! Other things, you mean, that he could do better and more profitably, making better use of his time."

"Yes. That's what I mean."

"Excellent, then let us move on. No, stay where you are," Uther had moved to stand up. "I meant let us move on in our discussion. We can do that here.

"I want you to think upon these things. You swung your blade; I used the point of mine. You picked a point to hit among the lines on the coal, then took your blade away, allowing it to waver as you moved it. I inserted my point firmly and kept it there. You risked everything on a wild swing with an inferior blade. I concentrated all my force and weight behind a single, firmly held point. You assumed, wrongly, that you were dealing with the same kind of coal you had used in Camulod and that it was soft and would break apart easily, whereas I, knowing nothing about coal, only looked for what I could find within the coal that lay in front of me.

"So you failed on every count, and I succeeded. But look at the reasons for your failure, Uther. You used a different kind of coal, because you didn't take the trouble to make sure it was what you thought it was. That is an error you probably will never make again. You learned through bitter experience that you can never afford to assume anything, and from now on, I would dare to say you'll always check to make sure that things that might be important to you are, in fact, what they appear to be. Am I correct?" The boy nodded. "Good. Next, you took careful aim, and then you swung your blade up over your head, and that cost you everything you had gained in taking careful aim. Lesson: you may do that when you are swinging at something large, impossible to miss and undefended, but when your target is as tiny and difficult to hit as a thin line drawn on a stone, why, then you must use your head and find a different way to hit it. Then, too, the poorness of your blade was self-defeating. Nothing ever will be more important to you in a struggle than the quality of your weapons. In almost every instance of hand-to-hand fighting, your life will depend, almost absolutely, upon your having the best blade. Never keep or use an inferior weapon. You might as well chop off your own hands.

"So, those were the points that governed your failure in Council today, would you not agree? I thought so. Well, were you faced with doing exactly the same thing tomorrow, and if you look to those same points, remembering what happened today, you would surely succeed. And you could do it time and time again thereafter and succeed every time, because you have learned your lessons. Do you understand me?"

Uther nodded his head wordlessly and Ullic repeated the gesture. "Good. Now let's look at my successes in the same light. I succeeded in splitting your stone, but I didn't know what I was doing, and I did not know what was going to happen. I did all of the right things, but I did them all because I came to them with curiosity and time to study them. I had no pre-formed notions of what I was about or of what I thought to achieve. I was merely inquisitive and curious. But I would never have done anything at all, boy, had you not brought that piece of coal, together with a blade, to my attention. So, hear me on this, Uther, and hear me clearly.

"Your Grandfather Varrus is a very clever and admirable man, and he has no fear of assigning work to other people who are suited for it. That is a Roman idea, called delegation—I'm sure you must have heard the word in Camulod. It means work allocated to someone by the direct order of his legate, his commander, along with the authority and responsibility to complete it properly. Delegation, through what the Romans refer to as the chain of command—from legate to tribune, to junior tribune, to centurion, all the way down to the common soldier—enabled men like your Uncle Picus and his father, Caius Britannicus, both of whom were Roman legates, to build an empire. You spend almost half of your time in Camulod, and you're a clever and observant lad, so you already know much of what I am telling you, but from now on, keep that word in your mind . . . delegation. It's something we here in Cambria are not good at. In fact, it does not exist here. We Cambrians have too much foolish pride to let ourselves be seen to delegate tasks, because it might appear that we are shirking doing them ourselves; and we have too much pride, as well, to submit ourselves to being selected to perform them, lest we appear to be inferior and too easily led. We suffer greatly by such stupidities, and you'll see that as you grow older.