Uther

It was Uther Pendragon's uncaring irresponsibility that grated on the Chief Druid. Daris himself had always been responsible, aware of his calling even as a child. Many of the boys with whom he had been apprenticed to the Druidic brotherhood had been there because they were placed there, committed by their families for any of a hundred reasons, from dire poverty to some bright, attractive talent noted and remarked upon by one of the Grey Brotherhood, as the Druids were called among the people.

That was not the case with Daris. He had been born to the Brotherhood. His idolized grandfather was one of the greatest Druids the people had known, and he had never, throughout his entire life, considered any other way of life. He studied hard at every task to which he was set, absorbing the arcane mysteries and knowledge of the priesthood as eagerly as he learned the great songs and sagas that were in the Brotherhood's safekeeping as guardians of the history of the people. Daris had long since lost count of the number of these sagas he had committed to memory, but he never ceased to be grateful for his own capacity to store them in his mind and recall them at will. Retention of the tales, and absolute fidelity to the ancient form and content of them, was but one of his responsibilities. Daris knew duty and fidelity to duty, what it was and what it entailed. And in his eyes, Uther Pendragon did not.

Meradoc would be a less than perfect King, Daris was sure. Outwardly he was upright and straightforward, if somewhat too loud and aggressive, and no one could deny his prowess as both warrior and strategist in war. In peace, he applied himself judiciously to being amiable and wholesome, despite the difficulties caused for him by his own disposition. He was not an easy man to like, lacking both in humour and in patience for the weaknesses of other, lesser men. And it quickly became evident to anyone who looked that Meradoc perceived all men as lesser men, despite the pains he took attempting to hide and disguise that fact. He had wealth of many kinds, and he showed no scruples over using it blatantly to buy the good opinion of his men. He failed, however, save in the most lurid ways, to purchase the opinions of their women. Women did not like Meradoc; they distrusted him instinctively. Daris did not know why with any certitude, since women, in the main, would not confide in him, a Druid, but the knowledge added to his misgivings about the Llewellyn Chief.

One more thing bothered Daris greatly. Meradoc kept a small crew of men about him who dwelt in fear-shrouded shadows, part of, yet apart from, his household forces. These men, newcomers all, were seldom seen, yet they were dreaded by the people. Informally known as the Chief's bodyguard, they were forbidding, solitary men who kept themselves apart from all contact, save when they accompanied their Chief on his travels. But they were rumoured to deal out sudden and secretive death to any, it was said, who failed to please their leader or sought to obstruct his designs. Daris had seen them and spoken briefly to a few of them—a series of wordless grunts on their part in response to his words. He disliked them and what they represented in their sullen surliness, but he did not know how much of what was said of them was true, and lacking proof of any crimes, he could not but ignore the hearsay in his assessment of Meradoc as a potential King.

Nevertheless, Daris was convinced that Meradoc was filled with wrongness. The Chief Druid had no other word to apply to what he perceived in the Llewellyn Chief. And yet, despite all that, he knew that Meradoc, as King, would rule his people, and he would do so here in Cambria, and that was more than could be said for the Pendragon. Uther, Daris felt, had been too long absent—in his person and in his heart.

Thinking about that now as he walked towards the others, Daris found himself almost glad that Uther had not come. For if Uther were somehow to emerge as the Chosen King, then, Daris believed, the destruction of the Federation would begin. Uther, despite any protestations he might make at the Choosing, would surely find himself drawn back to the comforts of Camulod and the life it offered. Then Cambria would be without a King, although its King remained alive, and there would be a jealous, angry and ambitious rival left at home to stir up anarchy and civil war.

"That is the fifth time I've seen Meradoc smile since we arrived here, and it's been what, an hour? Less than that."

Daris turned to smile at his old friend Cativelaunus of Carmarthen, amused as always by the elder man's acerbity. "He does seem to be trying very hard to be pleasant."

"Aye, but five smiles in an hour from that one tells me we all ought to be looking about us. Something's in the wind, and if it pleases him, I know I'll retch when I snout it . . . So, there's been no word of Uther?"

"Not a sound. Nothing at all. I think I'm relieved, too—at least, part of me is."

The old Chief looked at the High Priest sideways, one white, bushy eyebrow raised high in scorn. "What part of you is that? Can't be your reason—it's plain that's gone. You're glad the Pendragon's not here? When did this madness take you?"

"Shush!" Daris glanced towards the others, thinking some of them might have overheard what Cativelaunus said. They were all watching Meradoc, however, seeming to hang on his words, and the hectic flush on the Llewellyn Chief's wide-cheeked face showed that he was enjoying being the centre of attention. Cativelaunus blinked with surprise at being told to shush and started to draw himself up defiantly, but then he hesitated and nodded, dropping his voice and slouching his shoulders.

"What, too loud? Well, I'll tell you, my old friend, if this one comes to be the King, we'll all be whispering from that moment forth. Step outside with me. I need clean air."

As Cativelaunus spoke, Brynn of Y Gaer, the other Griffyd Chief and second only to his friend in age, walked up and spoke almost into his ear. "Clean air?" he said mildly. "I'll come, too."

"No, that you'll not," Cativelaunus said, without even turning to look at him. "You'll stay here and keep their thoughts away from what we're up to. If all three of us walk out, we'll be followed. If you stay here without me and make yourself seen and heard, they might not even notice I'm not here. Talk to them about the Choosing and find out how they all stand, as if we didn't know. I need to speak with Daris."

Brynn pursed his lips, ducked his head in a gesture that clearly said, "Very well, I'll try," and sauntered away again, headed directly to the group surrounding Meradoc, where he shouldered his way gently into the press. Someone spoke to him, asking him a question, and as he began to respond Cativelaunus caught Daris's eye and nodded his head slightly towards the open half-door of the stonewalled hut. The two moved slowly out the door into bright sunshine and walked away until a good twenty paces lay between them and the doorway.

The stone hut they had just left was the only permanent building in the smaller encampment known as the Chiefs' Camp, and it had been built in the distant past for private meetings of assembled Chiefs. Its doors were never guarded, for there was no need. For generations past, the hut had been the Chiefs' precinct alone, and no others ever approached it without being summoned.

There were people moving about in the bright afternoon, but none of them paid any attention to the Druid and his white-headed companion. Cativelaunus stopped and looked about him.

"This is far enough. I don't care if they see us speaking, so be that they can't hear us. High Priest and Chief, we two can talk all we want, but if Brynn joined us, those idiots would smell a plot. . . Tell me, then, what are we to do tomorrow noon without Uther? Withhold our votes? Meradoc would take that ill. Might as well stick out our necks for sacrifice. Or should we simply vote for him and accept that, at the end, our lives and our beliefs and all the things we've ever stood for or represented have been worth nothing and we have chosen a bad King through fear alone?"

Daris frowned as he listened. He had known that Cativelaunus had no great love for Meradoc, but this was more than he had expected. The old man's eyes were hard and grim, and his questions were delivered as a verdict rather than a query. Daris shook his head, searching for words.

"I don't think it will be that bad, old friend. He'll not be perfect, I'll grant you, but what King ever is? I've thought long and hard on this, and have decided—unwillingly—that he's the lesser of the two evils—"

"Lesser of the two—? Daris, you are mad! How could you even begin to believe that? Pendragon is—"

"Pendragon is absent, 'Launus. And that is by his own choice. Uther wants no part of being King. That is obvious. Had he felt otherwise, he would be here today."

"He's been delayed! Something has kept him back."

"No, I will not accept that! His father has been dead these past weeks, 'Launus. The summons went out to you and all the others a fortnight past. And it is four days, at most, from Camulod to here. Uther Pendragon is not here because he does not want to be here."

"Then why has our messenger not come back to tell us that? Knowing what must happen now, he would be bound to let us know as soon as he knew."

Daris shrugged. "The only thing I know is that Uther Pendragon has not come, and now he is too late."

"He's not too late. The Choosing won't begin until tomorrow noon. He could be here come morning."

"Aye, and what would he achieve? Which of the Chiefs would choose him now?"

"I would!"

"I know that. You would vote for him, and so would Brynn. What then?"

"Young Huw Strongarm would vote for him. He's Pendragon."

"Aye, that he is, and his vote, with Uther's, would give you four of seven, beyond doubt or dispute . . . but I doubt now that Huw would vote for Uther. My gut tells me he might not."

Cativelaunus was outraged and made no attempt to hide it. A man of ancient honour and tradition, he found it inconceivable that blood would not speak out for blood. In words that dripped scorn, he poured abuse on his High Priest for daring to suggest that young Huw Pendragon might be seduced away from the strict path of honour.

Daris stood listening until the old Chief ran out of words, and then he nodded. "Tell me," he asked mildly, "what is the sworn duty of each Chief on the day of the Choosing?"

"To pick the best man present to fill the King's seat." The answer was immediate, without the slightest hesitation.

"And how do you—you personally, I mean—decide whom to vote for?"

Cativelaunus hesitated now, scowling. "I . . . I judge each candidate, and then I pick the one I've decided is best."

"The very best, or the best present ?"

"Damn you, Daris, you know as well as I do. The very best might be a thousand times better than the next in line, but if he's not there for the Choosing, then he might as well be dead. The Chiefs assembled are constrained to choose the best man there. That's why I'm so angry at Uther."

"Forget Uther, for the moment, 'Launus. Think about young Huw Strongarm. His duty is the same as yours: to judge the man he believes best suited for the kingship from among those present. Family loyalty can play no role in the Choosing. It never has before; it should not now. Huw, just like you, must make a choice and vote on it according to the prompting of his honour. I believe he has done so and that his choice has fallen upon Meradoc. Huw is young and headstrong and impressionable, but he's no fool. He sees strength in Meradoc. And I believe he sees weakness in Uther."

"How can you say that?"

Daris shrugged. "I have heard Huw speak on this matter, and he professed grave doubts about Uther's suitability as a King."

"Pshaw! And what about Meradoc's lacks? The gods all know there are enough of those."

"The criteria Huw was applying to his measurement of Uther were ably answered in Meradoc. Huw was concerned mainly about Uther's constant absences and about his lack of responsibility for his own duties even now. He wondered how such things would affect Uther if he were King."

"Hah! That's just Huw's youth—that and the lack of having Uther here. There is no weakness in Uther Pendragon. He is his father's son and Ullic's grandson."

"And he stays far away from their kingdom! Huw Strongarm, Pendragon though he is, can see that fault in Uther, and I believe he has decided against Uther because of it. I admire him for that. It is you who really surprise me. Do you really believe Uther would be a better King than Meradoc?" Daris could see from the old man's fierce eyes that he was not going to deign to answer, so he pressed on.

"Understand me clearly, 'Launus, for I am not disputing that Uther might be the better man, but this concerns kingship and the welfare of this land and its people. And so I ask you whether—despite the man's long record of ignoring everything that happens here, and despite his full-time residence in this Roman place called Camulod— whether you would really vote for him over Meradoc, who, despite his faults, is always here, doing his duty as he sees it?"

"Aye, I would, without a moment's thought."

"That is what I fear most. . . your lack of thought." Seeing that he had offended his old friend, Daris quickly held up his hand. "Forgive me, 'Launus. I know you've thought about this long and hard but—" He broke off in mid-thought, then resumed without changing expression. "We're being watched by one of Meradoc's bodyguard."

"Let him look, then." Cativelaunus made no move to turn his head. "Where is he?"

"In the doorway behind us. He's doing nothing, just watching us . . . Now he's coming over."

Cativelaunus turned then to watch the man approach, but neither he nor Daris made any move to welcome or rebuff the newcomer. He was an unprepossessing character, tall and dark- haired, with a clean-shaven, scowling face and a small, lipless slash of a mouth framed between deep-lined, sunken cheeks. A short cloak was looped over his shoulders and beneath that he wore a cuirass of unpolished leather, bossed with iron studs. Heavy boots covered his legs to just below the knees, and beneath his tunic his thighs were covered by some kind of knitted leggings. A wide, thick sword-belt girdled his waist, supporting a heavy-looking short-sword with a riveted, wire-bound wooden grip and a long, one-edged stabbing dirk.

The man came to a halt a good two paces in front of them and then stood for several moments looking at the old Chief and ignoring the Druid completely. Finally he nodded slowly in an acknowledgment of Cativelaunus that was an insult in itself, and raised one hand to his waist, hooking his thumb around the hilt of his sword.

"Meradoc wants you to join him."

Daris drew in his breath to speak, but Cativelaunus waved him to silence. "Does he now?" he answered, his voice quiet and calm. "And who are you to call a Chief of Griffyd to your master?"

The other glared at him, clearly disconcerted, but said nothing. Cativelaunus spoke again.

"I asked you who you are. You have a name, I'd wager on that. When I know what it is, I might speak with you. Until then, I'll speak to you when I wish, and you will not speak to me until I ask you to. Come, Daris."

He turned to look at the High Priest, and the stranger spoke, his face flushed with anger.

"Petifax. Men call me Petifax."

Cativelaunus turned back and looked him up and down from head to foot, and then he nodded very gently. "Petifax. Good. Well, Petifax, tell Meradoc we'll be along when I've finished talking with the Chief Druid."

"He wants you now."

Cativelaunus ignored the man and turned to walk away, stretching his arm out to take hold of Daris's arm, but the stranger's hand was faster. He swooped forward and gripped the Chief by the wrist.

"I said now, old man!"

For half a heartbeat, Daris could not absorb what was happening. He saw Petifax's right hand, his sword hand, fasten on the Chief's left wrist, jerking it downward and back towards him. And then Cativelaunus was moving far more quickly than Daris could credit, spinning quickly inward, towards Daris and then past him. He heard a lightning-quick metallic slither as the old man's Roman short-sword hissed from its sheath, and then came the sound of an impact and the grating sound of a wide blade sinking deep into flesh. Cativelaunus took a long step backward, tugging his left wrist free of the other man's suddenly impotent grasp, and then he braced himself and leaned forward again, twisted his wrist hard and jerked his blade back sharply, with the confident strength of a man three decades younger.

Horror-stricken, Daris swung around to see Meradoc's man stagger forward, pulled by the sword blade, and then stop, hunched over and teetering for balance, his eyes gazing incredulously at the blood that was pulsing, spewing from the hole beneath his breastbone. The sword had passed clean through the leather of his breastplate, and the turn of the old Chief's wrist had spread the edges of the leather, letting the blood escape. Slowly, the man cupped his hands together in front of his breast, as though he were trying to catch or staunch the flow, and he raised his eyes, wide-staring, to look at Cativelaunus. His lips moved and his mouth worked, but no sound emerged. Cativelaunus stood watching him, balanced on the balls of his feet, his sword arm cocked as though for another blow.

"Aye, fool," he growled in a voice that seemed to lack all anger, "you're finished. He sent you out to fetch the old man, didn't he? And you, like all your witless kind, thought you could have some sport with someone who could not fight back. I am a Chief of clan Griffyd, you mindless animal. That means I am not as old and done as other old men are."

The dying man's eyes filled up with hate, and he fell to his knees, but even in the falling he gathered his spittle, blood-flecked on his lips, to spit his defiance. Cativelaunus struck first, however. The flat of his blade clanged solidly above the kneeling man's ear and Petifax toppled slowly sideways to sprawl in the dirt with the ungainliness that always distinguishes a corpse from a living man. The old Chief bent over and wiped his blade on the other's short cloak.

"Petifax. What kind of name is that? The place is full of heathens and Outlanders nowadays. You'd think someone would warn them of the penalties for laying hands upon a Chief, wouldn't you?" He looked up at Daris. "Are you going to puke?"

Daris swallowed hard and shook his head, gathering his wits. "No, no, I'm not. You know me better than that. It was . . . It just happened very suddenly. I had not expected it."

He looked around, feeling his heart hammering and expecting an uproar. There were people watching, standing motionless all around them, their attention attracted by the short, sharp scuffle, but no one made any move to interfere or to question what had happened. The fallen man was a stranger to all of them, and as such, he held no great interest.

"Why should you have expected it ? You're a priest. You don't deal in such things—not at first-hand, anyway. But you see what I meant earlier by what I was saying."

Daris frowned, looking back to the dead man. "I don't follow you."

"This filth." Cativelaunus spurned the corpse with his boot. "He was no kin of ours, and there's too many of his kind about our would- be King. This is what we can all expect if Meradoc is chosen. 'Come here, now! Do this! Do that! Be here when I command! Come kiss my Kingly arse!'There'll be no life for any of us here, Daris, and little peace in years to come if he is chosen, because I, for one, won't suffer him or any man to dictate my comings and goings. And neither will any of the others. Cunbelyn and Hod might think now that they'll love having a Llewellyn in the King's seat, but they'll be marching to another drummer within months, you mark my words. We choose that one, we'll be at war within the year, and it won't be with Cornwall or any other Outlander. Our wars will be among ourselves."

Daris was staring at his friend now, appalled, recognizing the truth as he heard it. "That was the single strongest reason for my fears over Pendragon," he said finally. "I had it reasoned out that if Uther were King, and then went off to Camulod for any time, Meradoc would foment civil war."

"And so he would. You're right. But he'll do it anyway even as King, and if he's King, he'll be stronger than ever. So we have to decide what to do if Uther stays away."

"What can we do?"

"We can declare an interregnum."

Daris's jaw dropped. "How can we do that? We have a candidate."

"Aye, but he could be dead by this time tomorrow. That wouldn't surprise me at all. Men die all the time. Look at poor Petifax here." The old Chief grinned suddenly. "Shut your mouth, Daris, before something flies into it. I was but jesting. You don't think I'd mention it to you, the Chief Druid, if I was serious, do you?"

Daris turned his face away to cover his confusion, and then he stiffened. "Another one. Now the trouble begins."

"What trouble? He attacked me."

Cativelaunus turned and looked to where another man had emerged from the doorway of the hut and now stood staring at them, his eyes moving from the two standing men to the body sprawled at their feet. They both saw his eyes focus low down on Cativelaunus, and the old man bent forward to look down at himself. "Damnation, I've got blood all over my leg. Didn't jump back fast enough." He looked back up to where the newcomer stood watching, unmoving, but then the other man turned and walked away without a backward look.

"There's interesting, now. Who was that fellow? Another of Meradoc's animals?"

"Aye, but I know him. He's a Northerner. Owain of the Caves, they call him."

"Another foreigner. They're all foreigners. I wonder why he walked away like that? You'd think he'd be curious about his friend here, not to mention the excuse to raise a few voices. And where did he come from? He wasn't in there earlier."

Before Daris could answer, Brynn of Y Gaer emerged from the doorway and stood blinking in the sun. He saw them quickly, and they saw the shock on his face as he noticed the dead man. He glanced once over his shoulder to the door behind him, and then moved directly towards them.

"Watch this old rogue," Cativelaunus murmured. "Did you see how his jaw fell when he saw sweet Petifax here? Watch you now, by the time he reaches us, he'll have us believing he sees dead men lying at my feet every day." He raised his voice. "Have you been sent to fetch me too?"

Brynn reached them and sniffed gently, glancing casually towards Petifax's body. "Not if it means sharing that one's bed tonight. What happened?"

"He laid hands on me. Thought I wasn't being quick enough to please him or his master."

"Hmm. Well, his master's pleased enough right now. He just announced that he'll be King tomorrow. Uther won't be coming. He offered to take wagers on it."

"Did he, by the gods? What happened?"

"I don't know. Some fellow walked in and stood against the wall and—"

"Was it that fellow yonder? The one walking away, over there in the green?"

Brynn turned and peered in the direction of Cativelaunus's pointing finger, squinting against the sun's brightness. "Aye, that's the one. Who is he? Do you know?"

"That's not important. What did he say?"

Brynn shrugged his shoulders, dipping his head to one side as he did so. "Nothing, didn't say a word. He simply walked in and leaned against the wall for a space, then went out again as soon as Meradoc had finished speaking. I happened to be looking towards the door as he came in, else I might not have noticed him. Didn't pay much attention to him, either, except to wonder who he was that he could simply stroll into the Chief's hut like a Chief himself. Then I realized he must be one of Meradoc's crew . . . his special ones. So I turned back to Meradoc, and that's when he saw the fellow too. He stopped in the middle of what he was saying . . . something about Lot of Cornwall . . . and next thing I know, he's announcing that Uther Pendragon will not be coming for the Choosing. The word had come to him this morning, he said, that Uther remains in Camulod and has no interest in being King in Cambria. I tell you, it was strange."

"What was strange, Brynn?"

Brynn of Y Gaer turned to look at Daris. "Everything, Daris, everything. He said he'd received word this morning, but it seemed to me that he was making an announcement of something he had just learned. You know, the way he spoke, blurting it out like that when a moment earlier he'd been talking about something else altogether. It didn't make sense."

"Ah, but by the gods it did!" Cativelaunus's voice was low, angry and filled with tension. "The message was delivered when that other whoreson walked in through the doorway. He didn't have to speak, I'll wager. If he had been sent to get rid of Uther Pendragon, then all he had to do was show his face to announce it done. Whoreson!"

Cativelaunus began to walk, moving quickly, his jaw set. Daris reached out and caught him by the sleeve.

"'Launus, wait! Where are you going? You can't just walk in there angry and confront Meradoc with your suspicions. He has his men about him, and you don't. They'd cut you down before you could say anything."

"You take me for a fool? I don't want to breathe the air that whoreson breathes. I'm going to find some of my own men, and then we're going to find that other whoreson—what did you call him?"

"Owain. Owain of the Caves."

"Aye, him, and once we have him, we'll have what he knows, because he doesn't have the balls to stand the kind of pain I'm going to put him through without spilling his guts. And once we have his story on Uther's death, then Meradoc's dead too, and we have interregnum. Come on, Brynn."

Daris stood and watched the two old men sweep away towards their own section of the camp, moving with a speed and determination that belied their age.

Chapter SEVENTEEN

Meradoc was aware that Cativelaunus had not come at his summons, but for the time being he cared little. The other old fool, Brynn, had wandered outside to join his friend, so by now he would have told Cativelaunus the news about Pendragon, and it really made no difference whether the old Chief came or not. His good opinion was no longer anything for Meradoc to fret over. It was already too late for anyone—even the oldest, most respected Chiefs—to alter tomorrow's outcome. Meradoc would be chosen with his majority of four votes. The votes of the two old Griffyds were now worth no more than gusts of hot air.

Meradoc turned away from the others, moving towards the cask of ale that sat against the wall behind him and leaving Chief Cunbelyn talking to himself and blinking his bulging eyes as he accepted the fact that Meradoc had snubbed him once again. Meradoc was unconscious of the insult he had given. In his eyes, Cunbelyn had always been a fool and always would be, and Meradoc avoided him, except for those times when he needed the man's support as a Llewellyn Chief. Now he hail more important things than Cunbelyn's witless prattle to think about. Tomorrow Cunbelyn would cast his vote in favour of Meradoc, and after that he would be expendable again, practically useless.

Meradoc had not known how concerned he was over Uther Pendragon until Owain of the Caves had walked through that door and sidled sideways to lean his back against the wall. No smile, no recognition, no acknowledgment, no hint of satisfaction—merely the simple fact of his being there. That was Owain, blunt to the point of absolute silence. "I'm here," his presence said. "Make your own judgment on the how and why of it."

Meradoc had made his judgment immediately, surprised to feel his heart bounding beneath his ribs in profound relief. He had been talking at the time, he recalled, but no longer had any idea what he had been saying. Whatever it was, it had lost all significance beside the import of the Cave Man's appearance. He had stopped, he knew, in mid-word, but then he had resumed almost immediately, making the transition smoothly, he believed, as though catching up with his own thoughts. He had mentioned only casually that he had been informed earlier in the day that Uther Pendragon should no longer be considered in contention for the King's seat. Uther had announced his decision not merely to absent himself from the Choosing, but to remain as far away from the Pendragon lands as he could. His home, now and forever, would be Camulod. Meradoc had been casual in his announcement, almost offhand, he reminded himself now, amazed at his own reticence when he had wanted to leap into the air and scream in triumph, trumpeting the Pendragon's death to the world.

Now he could take time to savour the satisfaction, and in the act of pouring a mug of beer, Meradoc suddenly realized that he was ravenous. He gulped at the foaming beer, then put it down again and ripped a wedge of bread from the large loaf on the table in front of him. digging a hole in the soft centre with his fingers and stuffing it with several of the small, crisp-skinned, strongly smoked fish he had loved ever since early boyhood, feeling the saliva spurting beneath his tongue as their strong, salty odour filled his nostrils. Clamping the folded wedge of bread tightly, he raised it to his mouth, but before he bit into it he caught sight of Janus, his most trusted man, watching him from his position against the far wall of the room. Meradoc paused, anticipating the bite he was about to take, and beckoned the man over with a toss of his head. Janus was beside him in two strides.

"I sent Petifax to fetch the old man, Cativelaunus. He hasn't come back. Find him and send him to me. Then find Owain. Tell him I want to see him within the hour in my tent. But find Petifax first."

As Meradoc was speaking, a shadow darkened the doorway as Daris, the High Priest, paused awkwardly on the threshold. Meradoc watched him step inside, silent, wondering what had made the Druid stop the way he had. Daris had seen him and was looking at him strangely.

"He is dead," the Druid said.

Meradoc blinked, uncomprehending, wondering it' by some freak chance Daris had heard about Uther's murder.

"Who is?" he asked, aware that he still held the bread up in front of his mouth.

"Your man, Petifax."

"What?" Meradoc had heard the words, but their meaning had not yet penetrated.

"Petifax is dead. Cativelaunus killed him."

"Cative—?" Meradoc stood staring, his thoughts tumbling over each other. All sound in the room had died and he knew that everyone was listening, waiting for his reaction, but for long moments he had no words with which to respond. Finally he jerked his head in a short, sharp negative. "That can't be. I sent him to bring the old man to me."

"I know, and he tried too hard. He laid hold of 'Launus and tried to drag him here. 'Launus killed him where he stood."

"By the swarming gods! Where is he?"

Daris raised an eyebrow. "Who, 'Launus or Petifax? 'Launus is gone, I don't know where, but your man Petifax is lying out in front of the hut."

Meradoc threw his untasted bread onto the table and strode to the door, shouldering Daris aside as he passed, aware of the others crowding behind him. He saw the sprawled body immediately from the doorway and stopped short, so that someone following too close behind bumped into him, pushing him forward through the exit. Ignoring the jostling, Meradoc gathered himself, taking a firm grip on his shock, and made himself walk forward slowly, ignoring the others as his eyes swept the space ahead of him.

There were several people standing around gaping, but the body lay in a space of its own and was very obviously lifeless. Meradoc kept moving, more and more slowly, until he was within touching distance of the dead man. Someone else passed by him and stopped even closer to the corpse. Because he was looking down at Petifax, Meradoc could only see the other's lower legs, but he knew it was young Huw Strongarm.

"He's dead, no doubt of that." The young Chief's voice was very mild.

"Aye," Meradoc muttered, his voice choked with fury. "And I'll be—"

"And so he should be, the fool."

Meradoc glanced up, his eyes wide with disbelief. "What do you mean?"

The Pendragon glanced quickly at him, and then his eyes returned to the body at their feet. "What kind of fool lays unwelcome hands on a ruling Chief ? A soon-to-be-dead fool! This idiot obviously thought he was dealing with an impotent old man. Hah!" The bark of laughter was savage, belying the age of the boy from whom it issued. "Old 'Launus, impotent? I'll wager Petifax didn't even see the stroke that killed him. He was lucky. Cativelaunus could have had him flayed alive, as an example to others. I once watched my father chop the hands off a drunkard who attacked him on a dark night, not even knowing he was a Chief. It's the one law that no one ever is allowed to break: lay hands on a Chief and die."

Meradoc was staring wide-eyed at the younger man, gritting his teeth and forcing himself to quell his anger. Huw Strongarm's conviction was absolute, and Meradoc knew that he himself, despite his fury, was going to have to accept the younger man's judgment as the verdict of all other thinking men. What Huw had said was true, and had the dead man not been one of Meradoc's own closest and most trusted confederates, then Meradoc himself would have been the first to condemn him and swear that Petifax had earned the death that claimed him. But Petifax had been his man! And so this killing was a challenge to his strength and should be—must be—punished. But there were politics involved, matters of great delicacy, so this was not the time to rant and rave.

The Llewellyn inhaled deeply, straightening his spine, stretching his head high and turning his eyes towards the others who now surrounded them, being careful to keep his face calm and empty of expression. Vengeance he would have, he swore to himself; Cativelaunus would die for this, but later, and in secret. In the meantime, he had spent too much time courting and cultivating Huw Strongarm's good regard to jeopardize it now. Even the thought of risking the young man's vote chilled him as it occurred to him. An abstention by Huw Strongarm, combined with the antipathy of the two old fools from the northeast, would make three votes against his three Llewellyn votes and give the final Choosing vote to the High Priest. The thought of that was not pleasant, for Meradoc knew in his deepest soul that even without Uther Pendragon's competition, Daris, given the chance, would cast a vote for interregnum before he would back Meradoc. He let out his breath slowly, then reached out one foot and slid his toe beneath the dead man's wrist before pushing the lifeless arm to lie closer to the body.

"Aye," he said quietly. "Petifax was hotheaded, and sometimes foolish because of it. He was ever . . . obedient, nonetheless, and I had sent him to bring 'Launus to speak with me. I meant, of course, that he should ask the Chief to join me, but I might not have made that clear enough. Who would have thought I'd need to? But Petifax was not of our people, and so I sent the poor fool to his death . . ." He stopped, then shook his head sorrowfully for the benefit of those around him.

"Farewell, then, Petifax. I prized you for your loyalty, but never for your brains."

No one else spoke, and Meradoc looked over to where some of the loiterers stood watching the gathering of Chiefs. He pointed to the largest of them.

"You there, the big fellow. Pick out a couple of your friends to help you take this body and dispose of it. Bury him deep, and then report to me for the reward you will have earned. And mind you treat him well—he was a faithful follower of mine. Handle his body with respect and bring his weapons safely back to me. I'll pay you well." He swung back to the others. "Come, my friends," he said, his voice filled with sadness. "There's naught more we can do for Petifax, except remember him. He fell foul of the law and died for it. Come you and drink with me to Petifax's death and to the life he led."

As the group filed back into the stone hut, Janus sidled close to his Chief.

"You still want me to find Owain. Master?"

"I do, but I will meet him later, now that this has happened. Tell him to come to me after the evening meal."

The drinking to the memory of Petifax grew into an evening- long carousal, and Daris left early, knowing he had a hundred things to do before the fall of night.

Sometime after the Druid's departure, Janus returned with word for Meradoc that Owain of the Caves was nowhere to be found and had evidently left the encampment. Meradoc was angry at first, but he soon convinced himself that he should be tolerant of his servant's laxity. The man had done good work, and he had been gone in the doing of it for a month. He deserved a night to himself. . .

Cativelaunus of Carmarthen and Brynn of Y Gaer remained absent and unregretted at the festivities.

Meradoc struggled awake and pushed himself up onto one elbow, blinking at the shadowy shape that towered over him in the grey light. Then, recognizing the Cave Man, he shook his head in an attempt to clear his mind and winced at the hammer blow of pain the movement caused. Cursing and groaning, he struggled to sit up, spitting to clear his mouth. Owain of the Caves made no sound but simply stood there, slightly hunched, beneath the sloping roof, staring down at him.

The sound of heavy rain battering at the leather of the tent above Owain's head set the Chief's teeth on edge. Through the partially open flaps he could see shimmering puddles of rainwater being whipped by the force of the downpour. He squinted and spat again, then pulled his knees up until he could sit straight-backed.

"How long has it been raining?"

"Most of the night."

"By the swarming gods, I must have drunk the entire cask last night. Where were you?"

The big Northerner shrugged. "I had things to tend to. I thought you'd have no need of me, and I'd been long without a woman."

"Hmm. What hour is it?"

"Just after dawn. I thought you'd want to be astir early today. I brought water, in case you need to wash the sleep out of your face before going out."

Meradoc looked to where Owain was pointing and nodded his head, seeing the leather bucket that hung from the pegged frame at the foot of his cot. "Good. Where's Janus?"

"He was here when I arrived. Don't know where he is now, but he probably went looking for food. There are no cook fires this morning. I'll be outside when you're ready."

Meradoc watched the tall man leave, stooping to clear the flaps as he went, and then he dragged himself free of his sleeping skins, stood up and stretched. His head felt awful and he reeled, staggering sideways for half a step until he regained his balance. Mumbling curses to himself, he scratched at his groin, aware that it was past time for another delousing, and then he stooped to fling cold water on his face, scrubbing at his eyes and then rinsing his mouth. Shivering from the shock of the water and the dampness of the morning, he dried his hands and face on a sour-smelling piece of rag and then dug into a chest of clothes, pulling out a warmer tunic than the one in which he had slept. He pulled the soiled tunic over his head, noticing the stink of stale beer that clung to it, and shrugged into the heavier one, tugging and pulling at it until it hung comfortably, then strapping his sword belt over it. When he had finished, he glanced up again at the roof of the tent, noting the shiny wetness of the saturated leather, then peered blearily about him, searching for his campaign cloak. It lay in a heap on the floor in the corner where he had dropped it several days earlier. Moments later, safely muffled in the heavy garment, he thrust aside the tent flaps and stepped out into the torrential rain.

There were upwards of half a score of men standing about, all evidently waiting for him to emerge, and he blinked at them, failing to recognize them immediately since they were all swathed in protective, heavy-weather cloaks of wax-scraped wool. Owain of the Caves he recognized, since he had seen him mere moments earlier, and Huw Strongarm was there too, his beardless face setting him apart. He recognized Cunbelyn next by his elaborate cloak, despite the fact that its bright colours were rain-sodden almost to the point of blackness. He recognized the other Llewellyn Chief too, his own cousin. Hod, by the width of his enormous shoulders. Then another of the watchers raised his hand and pulled his hood back from his face, revealing himself as Cativelaunus, which meant that the smaller man behind him must be Brynn of Y Gaer.

"What's going on?" Meradoc demanded, his face flushing in a frown as he looked from face to face. "Where's my man Jaiius?"

"Trying to find a pool that's still enough to let him see which of his two faces is redder," someone said, joking about the two-headed Roman god who could see past and future at the same time. But no one laughed. "In the meantime, we came to help you welcome the Choosing day."

Meradoc turned to face the man who had spoken, knowing that something was badly wrong. "Garreth? Garreth Whistler, is that you?"

"Aye, it is, wishing a good day to you, Meradoc."

"How came you here today?"

"He came with me."

The voice was deep, its tone emotionless, and its owner, a tall, broad-shouldered man who had been standing farthest away at the very rear of the crowd stepped forward as he spoke, throwing the hood back from his head. Meradoc felt his heart freeze as he recognized Uther Pendragon. And beside Uther, Owain of the Caves stood motionless, staring at Meradoc with his arms crossed over his chest, hands tucked beneath his armpits for warmth, his face expressionless. Owain wore no cloak, and the shoulders of his tunic were sodden. Meradoc gaped from Uther to Owain and back to Uther. Uther did not wait for him to find his tongue.

"We arrived late last night, long after everyone had gone to bed, so we made no noise, wishing to disturb no one. Are you not glad to see me, Meradoc? I almost missed the Choosing. That would have been shameful, would it not?" He waited for the space of three heartbeats and then spoke again. "What, have you nothing to say?"

Meradoc made to speak, then coughed to clear his throat, determined to brazen this out despite the fact that he had no idea what had gone wrong. "Well." he grunted, "I'll not pretend I'm glad to see you, Pendragon, for I'm not. We had received word that you would not be coming."

"No, Llewellyn, not so. Word that I was dead is what you had, and you believed it. Because when Owain here came back yesterday, you assumed he had done what you sent him to do, which was to kill me, in much the same way you had my father killed." The pause that followed was very slight, but Meradoc felt the world crash down around him then at the flat, truthful accusation in the Pendragon's words.

"Except, of course," Uther continued, "Owain's arrow would not have been tipped with venom. Owain does not deal in poisoned arrows—has no need to."

Meradoc tried to swallow, to clear his mouth, but his throat was swollen with panic, and the beat of his heart was hammering loudly in his ears. He tried to conjure a way to win back the initiative as Uther continued speaking, but the words hit him hard, falling like hailstones about his unprepared ears.

"But the gods permitted me to save Owain's life, and so, being a man of honour, he made no attempt on mine. He knew you'd have him killed for that, though, and he was prepared to leave Cambria in order to save his life. Until I offered him a place with me. He liked that, because he knows he'll be in less peril with me . . . I do my own killing, unlike you."

"You're mad, Pendragon." Meradoc's fingers closed around the hilt of his sword beneath his cloak.

"No, Llewellyn, that I am not. You suborned some of my father's guards, and they allowed the Cornish bowman to sneak through our lines and kill their King, my father. Then you killed the guards before they could be questioned and condemn you."

Meradoc had no way of knowing that Uther Pendragon was merely provoking him, quoting what he had been told without a feather's weight of proof, for what he had said was the complete truth. And so Meradoc moved, leaping towards the Pendragon, screaming denial and whipping his sword from its sheath, thrusting the folds of his cloak back over his shoulder to free his arm. But he was far too late. As his weapon swept up and down in the killing stroke, Uther's sword arm emerged from beneath his cloak to block the blow, his long cavalry sword already bare, and the blades clashed and then slid together loudly as they met. Each man leaned into his blow, absorbing the strength of the other's strike, so that they strained together for long moments, face to face and chest to chest. Then Uther spun sideways and away, leaving Meradoc to sprawl forward onto his hands and knees while he himself sprang backwards, shrugging his loosened cloak so that it fell behind him, leaving him unencumbered. He stepped carefully away from the wet, discarded cloak, leaving it well clear of his feet, and then began to circle, half crouched, as he watched Meradoc struggle to his feet and divest himself of his own cloak.

Uther was in no hurry. He was quite content to give Meradoc all the time he needed to collect himself and prepare to die. The others moved to form a wide ring about the two, and as they did so the rain stopped falling, so suddenly that the absence of its noise seemed louder than the noise had been, and the sound of squelching feet was loud.

Meradoc hefted his sword in his right hand and pulled his long, one-edged dirk with his left, then began circling too, his narrowed eyes fixed on Uther's. Both men were renowned warriors, both champions, and none of the watchers made any attempt to wager on the outcome of this fight.

Meradoc made the first move, darting forward and swinging his sword upwards in a backhanded, lethal slash that Uther blocked easily. But in the moment of the block Meradoc changed his thrust, pulling his sword away and twisting his body to the right as he brought the dirk in his left hand up in an underhand thrust that should have disembowelled the Pendragon. Uther, however, had been waiting for him to do precisely that. He had seen Meradoc fight before, and as the wicked, stabbing thrust arched towards him, Uther rose to tiptoe and bent sharply at the waist, twisting away and sucking in his gut so that the blade slid by him, catching its point in his tunic. His left hand dropped to catch Llewellyn's left wrist and he pulled sharply, swinging his weight and dragging the other man across in front of him, then smashing him savagely on the back of the head with the pommel of his sword as he passed by.

The Llewellyn Chief went to his knees again, his hands in the mud, his grip on the dirk lost as he fell, and Uther moved quickly, stepping sideways again until he stood alongside Meradoc's left shoulder. The desire for this man's blood, the blood of his father's murderer, was a hammering urgency that threatened to overwhelm him, and he came close to ending it then and there, raising his long sword to plunge its point between the other's shoulder blades and into his heart. But that would have been too easy, too swift. He screamed his hatred and kicked Meradoc hard in the side of the head instead, knocking him over onto his side in the mud, and then he stepped away again, grounding his sword, and waited for him to get up.

Behind his back, someone in the circle muttered something indistinct, and suddenly Uther was facing the onlookers, ignoring Meradoc as he searched their faces in the strengthening morning light, his sword point weaving in front of him as he silently challenged any of them, all of them, to come against him. But no one moved, and nothing else was said, and so he turned back towards his enemy. The Llewellyn was up on his knees again, shaking his head, trying to clear it. He had lost his sword as well as his dagger. Uther saw both weapons, the dagger lying close to his own feet. He stooped and picked it up with his left hand, then threw it gently so that it landed with a clank across the blade of the sword. When he spoke, his voice was calm and quiet, betraying no hint of the rage in him, and because of that his words were more chilling than they might otherwise have seemed.

"Two weapons, Meradoc. There they are. Yours to use on me, although from the way you keep losing them, I begin to think you've lost the knack of how to employ them. Too many others have been doing your killing for you recently. Pick them up, whoreson, and clean them, so they won't slip in your grasp. Take your time and gel your wind. I want you to be well aware of what is happening when I kill you. My father's blood demands more punishment than a swift stab in the back. Get up and fight, for you have no other choice. Owain of the Caves now stands with me, and all your other creatures are dead, so there's no hope of further treachery saving you."

The taunts brought Meradoc to his feet, where he stood swaying, blood and spittle drooling from his broken mouth. He wiped his face roughly with a sleeve and then bent slowly to retrieve his weapons, never taking his eyes off Uther, expecting to be attacked when he was most vulnerable. But Uther merely stood waiting, making no attempt to close the distance between them. Meradoc cleaned the hilts of both weapons on his outer tunic, then grasped them firmly, hefting them, testing their weight and breathing deeply until he had regained his wind. Then, crouched and silent, he moved forward.

The fight went savagely after that, neither man taking the slightest risk of losing his footing on the treacherous ground. The sound of clanging blades seemed to go on forever as they dodged and weaved, each seeking the advantage and neither seeming able to gain sufficient momentum for a clean killing stroke. The watchers made no sound, aware that they were witnessing an epic struggle, their eyes constantly shifting from one to the other of the two superb fighters. Meradoc was grim-faced, frowning in concentration, calling up every vestige of his renowned skills in what he knew was his only opportunity to salvage anything of honour, or even life. He cursed monotonously under his breath as he sought, time after time, to win the advantage promised to him by having two blades against Uther's one. Uther, on the other hand, showed no emotion at all. His face was impassive, the planes of his cheekbones and forehead almost polished in their smoothness. Only his tight, seemingly lipless mouth and glittering eyes betrayed the implacable anger that consumed him. He moved on his toes, with the confidence and strength of the great red dragon that was his emblem, his every movement precise and dangerous, wary and murderous.

And then, after one breathtaking display of stroke and counter- stroke, Uther jumped back, blood streaming from his left arm, where the edge of his opponent's blade had nicked him deeply above the elbow.

He held his arm up, showing the blood to all of them but speaking to the Llewellyn. "Feast your eyes on it, whoreson. It is the last Pendragon blood you will ever see."

He leaped forward and the angry clangour of iron began again. This time, however, it ended quickly when Uther's scything blade struck Meradoc's sword arm, cleaving it above the wrist and almost severing the hand completely. With a strangled cry, Meradoc dropped his other weapon and clutched at the upraised stump that was already jetting bright life blood, and as he strained there, mouth agape, Uther stepped in and stabbed hard, thrusting with his entire weight, his blade plunging into the soft flesh beneath the other's sternum. The Llewellyn Chief screamed, choking, and Uther raised one foot high, placed it on Meradoc's chest, pulled his weapon free and then stepped back. Meradoc hung there, gaping and gasping, unable to utter a sound, then fell to his knees, head down, staring at the hole in his chest.

Calmly, his face expressionless, Uther stepped forward again and took a position by the kneeling man's side. His sword swept up once more, high over his head, then hissed down with all his strength behind it. The blade sliced cleanly through the Llewellyn's outstretched neck, severing his head, and a fierce jet of blood gouted three times before the headless body fell to earth.

Uther had turned away before the corpse collapsed, crossing directly to where the other Llewellyn chiefs, Cunbelyn and Hod, stood stunned by the swiftness of their kinsman's death. The Pendragon came close to them, facing them directly, his right arm extended slightly to hold the tip of his red-dripping blade above the wet earth, not threatening anyone directly but visibly in evidence. More blood dripped from his other arm, this his own, but he ignored it completely.

"Cunbelyn," he said, "Hod, do I yet have living enemies among Llewellyn? Does either you feel any need to avenge your kinsman's death as I have avenged my father's?"

Cunbelyn merely shook his head, unable to find words, but Hod the Strong lived up to his name. He drew himself erect and looked the Pendragon Chief straight in the eye. "No," he growled. "I see no need to fight with you. You challenged him on what you had been told. He drew his blade on you and we all witnessed it. The fight was fair, and more than fair. You won. And if the information that you threw at him was true, he deserved what befell him."

"It was true. And he made no attempt to deny it, because he knew whence it came."

"Aye." Hod the Strong turned his head slightly to look at Owain of the Caves, who stared back at him. his face expressionless. "But we'll never know for sure, will we?" He glanced back at Uther. "Very well, then. I'll tell my people what occurred, and I'll make no attempt to stir them against you, but I can't speak for Cunbelyn."

The other, hearing his name, held up his hand palm outward and shook his head. "Nor I," he said. "Nor I."

"So be it." Uther turned away from the two Chiefs back towards the other witnesses, who were now standing in a quiet group.

"Have someone clean that up," he said to no one in particular, nodding in the general direction of the headless corpse, and then he stalked away, still carrying his bloody sword, followed by Garreth Whistler and Owain of the Caves. He had taken no more than four steps, however, before he stopped and looked back over his shoulder to where young Huw Strongarm stood watching him. For a short while he stood there, staring deliberately at the younger man, and then he dipped his head in the tiniest of nods.

"You'll yet have some questions to ask me, I think, eh. Cousin? More than had occurred to you when we spoke earlier, no? Come then, if you like, and I'll try to answer them for you."

Young Strongarm nodded in return, then threw his cloak backwards, over his shoulders, drew a deep breath and stepped forward to accompany the trio.

Cativelaunus watched them leave and then threw off his hood and shook out his long white hair before turning to Brynn of Y Gaer.

"So," he said. "There's an end to uncertainty! No interregnum. Daris will be happy. Let's go and tell him." He snapped his fingers to attract the attention of one of his own minor chieftains, then waved towards the body of Meradoc.

"Throw this in a hole with the others—a deep hole. Three bodies, four heads. Make sure you plant them well, too, because we don't want to be snouting them later." He stopped short, staring at the man to whom he had been speaking, then leaned slightly forward and repeated himself more slowly. "Three bodies, I said— four heads. Count them if you don't believe me. Meradoc, Petifax and Janus the two-faced Roman!"

Chapter EIGHTEEN

Huw Strongarm felt very strange. He would be hit with an overpowering urge to laugh, shout and leap around, and then within the space of a few heartbeats, he would want instead to weep like a child—although his dignity as a warrior and a Chief would never have permitted any possibility of his being able to do either. Nonetheless, his breast felt tilled to bursting with tumultuous feelings, all of them demanding some kind of violent, demonstrative, physical outlet. Rather than give in to any of them, however, Huw forced himself to walk stiff-legged, taking great strides, chin pulled in to his chest, fists clenched, arms pumping, his eyes fixed on the path ahead of him, following the tracked footprints in the mud.

Huw Strongarm, Chief of the northern Pendragon clans, was not yet seventeen years old, a boy in all but size and rank. But no one who knew the youth had ever doubted his natural leadership. Even in childhood, he had outstripped his cradle-mates at every stage of growth and development, being the first among them to crawl, and then to walk, to talk and even to reason coherently and with logic. By the time he was eleven, approaching twelve, his voice had begun to break, and long before his thirteenth birthday he had acquired a coarse body hair. But even so, no one, himself included, had been prepared for the incredible growth that he experienced in the two years, that followed. Almost overnight, it seemed, between one season and the next, the boy exploded in size, outstripping his own friends almost visibly day by day, until he towered even over his father's chieftains, some of whom were the largest men in the Federation.

Encouraged by all the wonders that were happening to him so quickly, he might easily have become a bully or a loud-mouthed, unpopular, opinionated lout. But Huw did neither. By the time his beloved father drowned, just prior to his son's sixteenth birthday, Huw had completely endeared himself to all his people simply by being himself—modest yet confident, admirable and unmatchable in everything he did. He had undergone the Manhood Rites at the age of fourteen, a full year ahead of his birth-year brethren, going alone into the forest to subsist by his own wits for two long weeks, and then returning with the skins and pelts of creatures he had hunted and killed during that time. Among those had been the pelt of a black wolf and the tail and knife-edged tusks of a wild boar. Few men in living memory had returned with two such trophies from a single foray, and only one boy entering manhood had ever equalled either kill in size, by bringing back the skin of a large bear.

Huw knew that there were some who sniggered behind his back at the enormous spurt of growth that had shot his body into a man's size, and who claimed that his mind had been weakened accordingly by deprivation, but most of the time he was able to ignore such things completely, being clever enough to understand that the disdain of his detractors was born of jealousy. They called him a freak, envious of his size and strength, and some of them even whispered that his shocking growth had been magical, achieved through sorcery. For many months now. however, no one had dared say or even whisper such things within range of his ears . . . not since the day he had been pushed too far and had thrashed two of his own cousins, breaking bones, blackening eyes and drawing blood from both, despite the fact that they were both half a decade older than he was.

As he walked now, Huw smiled, remembering that occasion. People thought he had lost his temper that day—the first time in years that anyone could remember Huw Pendragon having done so—but Huw himself knew differently. What he had done was deliberate, carefully considered and planned in advance, and then carried out with precision and dispatch. He had even manipulated the circumstances, staging the event so carefully and completely that not even the principals, two bullying louts from another branch of his clan, had suspected that they were being used. Huw had contrived matters so that his cousins had ended up taunting and challenging him in a public place, raucously belittling his unseemly size. The punishment he had then meted out was swift, thorough and well-deserved, and a clear warning to others to respect the matter, and the manner, of the differences that set him apart.

In the aftermath, while they were still dazed and uncomprehending, he was deeply solicitous, apologizing for his loss of temper as he saw to the tending of their injuries.

Since that day, there had been no challenges of any kind issued to Huw in any way. Upon the death of his father earlier in the year, the elders of his clan had ratified Huw's succession to the Chief's chair, ignoring his extreme youth and honouring instead his physical prowess, his natural sagacity, astounding in one so young, and his unfailing goodwill.

Now, Huw's conflicting moods were born of the knowledge that he would be one of the six men personally responsible for raising Uther Pendragon to the kingship. Part of him—the better, more realistic part, Huw knew—was convinced that he would be doing the right thing and that Uther would make a fine, perhaps even a magnificent King—a natural champion of truth and honour, seeking and achieving nothing but the best for the people who were his responsibility.

Another part of Huw, however, was less than convinced of that. That jaundiced, less trusting and more cynical part of him lay deep down, hidden at the very bottom of his mind, sullied and stained by the impressions of the trampling, careless feet of those who had disappointed and disillusioned the young man during his boyhood— ambitious men to whom truth and honour were worthless things, sacrificed early in the struggle to realize their own designs. That such men were everywhere, and that they were not always easy to identify, Huw was acutely aware. One of them, Meradoc, lay newly dead, and until a short time before his death, Huw had been completely in his thrall, convinced that the Llewellyn Chief was the man who should be the chosen King and that Uther Pendragon was an enemy to the good of the Federation.

Huw was forced to admit to himself that he had permitted Meradoc to treat him as a foolish boy, easily gulled. By following Meradoc's suggestions uncritically, Huw had unwittingly condoned the man's treatment of him, making himself appear foolish and justifying Meradoc's outrageous belief in his own rightness.

It was only when the young Chief had stopped short, gazing wide-eyed at the bloodied corpse of Meradoc, that he had felt the truth of that.

Huw was now making his way back to his own tent, his mood still swinging wildly from elation to consternation each time he remembered an important question he should have asked Uther but had forgotten. He felt the weight of responsibility that came with his vote, and a new feeling that one could never be certain about any man while the course of his life and the tests of his character still lay ahead of him.

He did not see the young woman who stood waiting for him until he had drawn level with her and heard her call his name, but then he swung towards her and his face broke into a great grin of welcome.

"Glynda! What are you doing out here? I thought this was your day to work with Balin, slaving over accounts and reckonings?"

"It is—I mean, it was—but he didn't want me there today. They're all too excited about the Choosing, so Lord Balin let me go free."

"You mean Balin admitted that there are some things more important than teaching my little sister to read and write? I find that difficult to believe."

"No you do not, you beast! You are simply being nasty because you have a mean and vicious nature and you cannot resist being deliberately cruel and unpleasant when you find someone who cannot stand up to you."

His sister's laughing eyes belied the apparent harshness of her words as she swung towards him, linking her arm with his and then pulling him into a spinning, dance-like turn that threatened harm to his dignity. For the space of two heartbeats Huw tried to resist, and then he threw back his head and laughed, taking her hands in his own and dancing with her, throwing himself into the spin and leaning back against the pull of her weight as he swung her around, hard. Five, six, seven times he swung her in a circle, faster and faster each time around, until her toes seemed barely to touch the wet ground and she was in as much danger of flying off her feet as he was of slipping on the treacherous wet earth. Huw nonetheless continued to swing her at hurtling speed for four more turns before slowing down gradually until he could safely release her. As soon as he did so, both of them checked themselves and laughingly attempted to stand erect, but dizziness sent them staggering helplessly until they fell to the muddy, rain-soaked grass and sobered rapidly with the shock of the cold earth.

"Huw, you oaf!" Glynda shrieked. "Help me up, quickly!"

Huw, however, was incapable of helping her. Twice he tried to struggle to his feet, only to fall back each time, laughing helplessly and spreading his hands to indicate his powerlessness to help his sister, whose disgust seemed to increase from moment to moment. He referred to her constantly as his "little" sister, but Glynda was, in fact, older, a half-sister, born to another of their father's wives, who had also borne a stillborn son a year and a half later, mere weeks before Huw's arrival. The two children, although born eighteen months apart to different mothers, had grown up together, because their mothers had become close friends during the common time of their pregnancy and that friendship had endured, with Huw's mother supporting Glynda's after the loss of her stillborn child and sharing her own newborn, Huw, with the other woman, easing her loss. As a result, the two children grew to be in each other's company almost constantly and to develop much closer bonds to each other than most of their true siblings had. Two members of an enormous number of the Chief's offspring, with Huw the eldest son, they had also benefited from the fact that their numerous siblings were grouped apart from them in age. Many of the girls were far older than "the two close ones," as their father called them, and a few brothers and sisters were much younger, born to their father Caerliss's last and youngest wife. Caerliss himself, half-brother to the mighty Ullic, War Chief and King of the Pendragon Federation, had been Ullic's youngest sibling and a potent, productive Chief of his own clan, fathering no fewer than twenty-seven children upon five wives.

Before Huw could catch his breath, Glynda was back on her feet, brushing at her clothing while she pretended to be angry.

"Look at me, I'm soaked through to the skin, and you're no better, Huw Pendragon! Have you no sense at all, knocking me off my feet like that to land in a puddle?"

Huw's mouth gaped. "Knocked you off—? I didn't knock you off your feet, you fleering little devil. You fell down with no help from me. You were the one who set about me, pulling me into your wild dance, and me with a Chief's matters to attend to." He pulled himself up to his full height, crossing his arms on his chest and thrusting his chin into the air. "Now behave yourself, woman, and guard your tongue."

She blinked at him. "Guard my tongue? Against what?"

"Against arrest. If you keep this up, you will force me to summon my guards and have you locked away where your nagging won't deeve me . . ."

Quite suddenly, however, the bantering mood had passed, and now Glynda was looking down at herself in dismay. "Look at me, Huw! Now I'll have to go and change everything before I can go to the Choosing. These clothes are destroyed."

"No, they are not. They're line—they'll dry out directly and you'll never be able to see they were wet."

She looked at him as if he were demented. "I can't be seen looking like this! What will people think?"

Huw was half laughing, looking slightly bewildered. "They'll think what they want to think, and who among us cares? If you do, it'll be for the first time ever. If anyone asks you what happened and how you got your back all wet, tell them it might have happened one of two ways: either you were rutting in the rain with a stranger, or you were dancing on the wet grass with your brother and you slipped. They think we're both mad enough, anyway, and they all love to be able to shudder in outrage at the antics of me, who should be a sober Chief always."

Glynda was standing almost on tiptoe now, pulling at the cold, wet material of her bodice where it clung to the shape of her waist and belly.

"What's he like, Huw? Is he lovely?"

"What's who like?" For a moment Huw had no idea what she was talking about.

"Uther! Uther Pendragon. He's to be King, after the Choosing, isn't he?"

"I can't tell you that, can I? The Choosing hasn't happened yet. The voting hasn't taken place."

"Phah!" The noise his sister generated between pursed lips was extremely vulgar. "There's a nonsense . . . Meradoc is dead, is he not? And Uther killed him. There were only two of them eligible for the Choosing, apart from you, and you are too young for it. Now there's only one of them eligible, so why do you even need to vote? A blind man could see that Uther will be the new King. But what is he like? That's what I want to know."

"Well, I still say I can't tell you that."

"Dia, and why not? You've been with him all morning! There must be something you can tell me."

"Something like what? Is he lovely? That's what you asked me, is it not? Men are not lovely, Glynda, not to other men, at least." He paused, hesitantly, then continued, grinning slightly. "Well, he is certainly not unpleasant to look at. Anyway, he is much too old and far too important to have time for you, dear Sister, so you'll have to wonder in vain."

"Oh!" Glynda swiped at his shoulder with an open hand. "You are a beast, Huw Pendragon, and when it comes my turn to wed I shall make life miserable for you, mark my words."

Huw threw up his hands in surrender. "Very well, as you will it! He is a man, and thus he has two eyes and ears—two of almost everything in fact, except one nose and one head. And he speaks normally, shouting seldom. He smiles from time to time, and he might even laugh, though not too often, I should think, after slaying someone a short time earlier—" He broke off, raising his eyebrows dramatically. "Or do you mean how does he appear, in physical terms, in terms of what young women wish to see? Well, let's see . . . I suppose he is fair to look upon. He stands tall, as tall as me—and that's unusual—perhaps even slightly more, for I fancy I had to look up into his eyes, and I am not accustomed to doing that. Oh, and his eyes are bright blue. I mean they are really bright. . . the colour of them jumps right out at you."

"Like periwinkles," his sister supplied. "I've heard tell of his blue eyes. They are the blue of periwinkles."

"Good, then, if you say so. His hair is black, almost blue in the sunlight in fact, so dark is it, and he wears it long, down to his shoulders, which marks him, even among his short-cropped horse troopers, as one of us, despite all his Roman trappings. And it is clean. His hair. I mean. It is so clean that you can see each single hair shining—no matting, no tangles. He must wash it regularly."

"Aye, some of us do things like that. The people in Camulod certainly do. It makes you smell better. You should try it. Brother." Glynda saw that Huw was preoccupied with some thought that had occurred to him and had not even noticed her jibe, and so she continued. "And'? What more can you tell me? Surely you can do better than that!"

The young Chief shot his sister a sidewise glance and looked impatient for a moment, as though he might take issue with her over such silly questions.

"Very well, he is strong and well-made, his arms and legs as sound and solid as my own. He is huge across the shoulders and deep through the chest. He has a cleft chin, and a long, straight nose, and he keeps his face clean-shaven, in the Roman style, save for a moustache framing his mouth."

"His teeth?"

Huw grinned. "As white, clean and regular as yours, and he has all of them. Now, tell me, because the question just occurred to me a moment ago. Who was it told you about his periwinkle eyes?"

His sister flushed immediately, a tide of rosy colour sweeping upwards from her neck to stain her face. "That is none of your affair, Brother," she snapped, clearly disconcerted by what had been an obviously unexpected question. Then, suddenly, she was turning to leave. "I have work to attend to now. Fare thee well."

Huw stood gaping in astonishment as his mercurial sister turned her back on him abruptly and flounced away to disappear quickly in the direction of the encampment. Then he remembered where he was and what he was about, and he made his own way towards his preparations for the day's ceremonies.

The Choosing flowed smoothly and without incident, despite the fears of those who had expected the untimely death of the Llewellyn Chief to provoke his followers to violence. No such thing occurred, and it quickly became apparent that Cativelaunus's opinion had been right: Meradoc had been less loved than he himself believed, and his death had plunged no one into inconsolable grief.

The ceremony itself was solemn and impressive. The ruling Chiefs, now six in number, were led in procession into the sacred precincts of the temple by an escort of Druids to the accompaniment of a throbbing rhythm of massed drums that resembled the pulse- beat of a human heart and quickly took on a numbing, hypnotic resonance. No other sound marred the silence of the occasion, and the watching crowd stood motionless. No one stirred or spoke or sang, and there was no sound of movement, for all the participants in the procession walked barefoot in ancient tradition and none carried weapons on this sacred occasion.

Daris, dressed in his finest ceremonial robes and surrounded by his most senior priests, stood high above everything at the outset, gazing down on the procession from the top of the ramped earthen wall that protected the inner temple. From where he stood, a pathway six paces wide lay open, stepped with temporary stairs for the occasion down to the temple floor, and on either side of this aisle, packing the ramped sides of the high wall on either side so that they circled the temple completely, the common people of the Federation served as witnesses to the day's events.

Daris watched the procession circle the temple, weaving in and out among the pillars and pausing each lime the vanguard reached one of the Chiefs' chairs set between alternating pairs of the standing stones. There, on each occasion, the Chief whose chair this was would step out of the procession to be flanked by a pair of red-robed priests who led him to his seat and then stood behind him, one by each shoulder, once he was seated. When all six surviving Chiefs were finally seated, the two remaining chairs sat conspicuously vacant. One of them would be filled within the week by Meradoc's chosen successor, since the dead man had had no son of his own old enough to inherit his position. The other, largest of all, would soon hold the new King.

Daris raised his staff in a signal, then slowly turned his back on the temple below as a series of horns began to sound, their differing, brazen tones blending into a fiery, somehow majestic crescendo that announced to all the world that something signal was about to take place within these precincts. Daris luxuriated in the sound of the horns, allowing its reverberating potency to wash over him and raise the skin of his arms up in gooseflesh. He stood motionless, facing directly east, his head thrown back to welcome the sun and his eyes closed against its blinding brightness. Three times the swelling crescendo of the horns was repeated, and then, as the sequence began again for the fourth and penultimate time, the High Priest turned towards the temple again and began to make his way down the narrow stairs. It was a sequence he had practised many times, and his timing was sure enough that as the crescendo gave way once more to the fifth and last repetition, he reached the ground and walked slowly and with conscious dignity towards the centre of the sacred circle, followed by his twelve senior priests, pacing himself to arrive just as the soaring notes reached their final climax. As the trumpets fell silent, the last echoes fading away into stillness, Daris came to a hall in the exact centre of the temple.

There, in his strongest oratorical voice, he asked the assembled Chiefs why they had come to this place on this day, and with that question and its shouted response, "To choose the King," the Choosing ceremony began. It was brief and solemn, and by the time it was over, less than half an hour from the outset, Uther Pendragon had been selected by the unanimous choice of the Chiefs as High King of the Pendragon Federation.

It was Daris's last duty to make the formal announcement of the result to the assembled witnesses, and he did so four times, from the exact centre of the temple floor, turning to all compass points, confident that the acoustical excellence of the temple would carry his voice easily to every listening ear. The crowd, knowing the protocols involved, waited for him to finish the fourth repetition before reacting, but when they did, there could be no doubting the overwhelming approval in their cheers, which seemed to grow even louder as Daris and the five remaining Chiefs led the new King to the King's seat before bowing deeply to show their commitment to his kingship.

Remaining seated, Uther received the oath of support and loyalty from the five individual Chiefs, taking each man's hand and clasping it between both of his own as the other undertook to assist the King in the legal governance of the land and its people. That done, he then rose and bowed deeply towards Daris, paying his own homage to the gods in the person of the High Priest, after which he continued to stand bareheaded in front of the King's seat, listening to the roars of approval. Finally he turned again to Daris, pitching his voice to carry to the Druid's ears over the noise of the sustained cheering.

"High Priest, the central spot from which you spoke, may I use it to speak to the people?"

"Use it?" Daris knew he was being dull, could hear it in his own voice.

The King pressed on. "May I speak to the people from your spot in the middle of the temple? Is there any law that says I would profane the temple by so doing?"

"No, no. none at all."

"Good."

Uther was already moving to the central spot, and when he arrived there he held up his hands, supplicating the crowd for silence. It took some time to come, but when it did, it was absolute. The new King cleared his throat, then spoke out strongly, turning himself casually from side to side as he spoke, so that his voice rang out clearly around the arena formed by the banked walls. He wasted no time attempting to thank or to flatter the crowd but cut directly to the meat of what he wanted to say.

"You know me, all of you, by repute if in no other way. I am Uther, son of Uric, son of Ullic Pendragon, and I stand here as chosen King in their name and in yours . . ." His voice faded away and none sought to break the silence that followed. He allowed his listeners to absorb what he had said and then he spoke again.

"From this day hence, my home is here among these mountains with you, my people. When I leave these hills, it will be because you, the people of our Federation, need me to go, to safeguard our well-being."

Again he stopped speaking, unhurried, allowing what he had said to sink home to his listeners, and as he waited he turned slowly in a complete circle, looking up into the throngs that packed the ramped walls. Finally, when he gauged that they had absorbed what he had said and were on the point of starting to discuss it among themselves, he spoke again, his voice loud and confident, carrying clearly in the silence.

"I have gained knowledge and learning from my lime in Camulod, and the lessons I have learned I will put to work here in our lands. Like every whole man here, I am a warrior. But unlike most of you, I have learned to fight as the Romans fought, and then, in Camulod, I have learned to light as the Romans never thought to fight—from horseback. I have learned crafts and skills in fighting that we here, among our mountains, have never known, and I have not learned those skills and crafts alone. I had companions with me there in Camulod, lest you forget. . . Pendragon companions from among your ranks, who learned the same lessons with me, by my side, and who are now possessed of knowledge their forefathers never had. Knowledge of horses and of saddles with stirrups and of the use of them in war. Knowledge of ways of waging war never known in Britain until now, because they never existed until the warriors of Camulod brought them into being. This new knowledge, all of it, will keep our Federation safe and strengthen it against those who would seek to harm us."

He spun quickly around so that he was suddenly facing the crowd that had been at his back, raising his voice as he turned, so that he could still be heard by everyone.

"My men are here among you today and will remain here, and some of them are Camulodian. Talk to them, speak with them.

question them on anything that interests you. You will find them still to be much like yourselves, I promise you . . . Many of you gathered here today have been in Camulod. at some time in the past few years, and you know the people there are all our friends. We have had dealings with them in true and open friendship since the days of my Grandfather Ullic.

"There might be some among you, however, who condemn them still for not being Pendragon, as though that marks them as somehow inferior to us. Well, I will admit that they are not Pendragon, which means that they are different, but what of that? They are the next best thing to being Pendragon! They are friends of Pendragon, and have demonstrated that for almost three entire decades now. And far from being inferior in any way, they have shown themselves, time and again, to be our equals in a host of ways that we cannot begin to emulate— allies, proven in the fires of war against the invaders, whether those be Saxon Outlanders or Hibernian pirates or Cornish boars.

"The Camulodian people stand with us against our enemies. There is nothing Roman about Camulod. The people there were all born and bred here in Britain.

"I wear the armour of Camulod for but one single reason—I wear it because it works! There is no stronger, tougher or more effective armour in the world. It will turn any blade, deflect any missile, save for a well-shot Pendragon long shaft. It is the finest armour ever devised by man, and I trust in its strength and its utility. I wear it not because it makes me feel better than you or different in any way from any of you. I wear it because it makes me feel safe to know that if anyone wishes to kill me, they are going to have to face me, eye to eye, and carve or hack their way through my fine armour before they can succeed." Again he paused, looking around him, then continued.

"We have a war to wage, as you all know, against Cornwall. The leader there, a pestilence called Gulrhys Lot, is a human serpent. He sent his murderers, bearing poisoned arrows, to shoot down your King, my father. Uric. He did the same in Camulod, where his creatures used the selfsame venom-bearing weapons to bring about the death of Picus Britannicus, the Legate Commander of Camulod and son of its founder, Caius Cornelius Britannicus. This Gulrhys Lot is an evil man and a craven one. He will send others to do what he dare not attempt himself, and he is afraid to show his face to any of us in the light of day, but he will strive to destroy us all, to serve his monstrous lusts. This is a creature of darkest night, and he is hungry for this land of ours . . .

"I swear to you . . . I swear to you . . . he will have none of it! His armies might come swarming to our shores, but we will meet them and destroy them as they come. And as we meet them, Camulod will guard our back, its cavalry, invincible in war, committed to our use when we have need of it, as our longbows will be committed, too, to their defence. Together, we will stamp out Gulrhys Lot and sear the name and memory of him from people's minds. Cornwall will regret the day he moved against Pendragon."

Someone at the back of the huge crowd, high up on the ramped walls, called out Uther's name, repeating it in approval, and scores, then hundreds of voices added their weight to his, so that the thunder of the chant soon became overwhelming. Uther raised both hands in acknowledgment and turned slowly in a circle, mouthing his thanks and keeping his hands extended, as though in a blessing, until he had completed his turn and stood facing the front once again. And as he turned, his eyes scanned the crowd constantly, so that each person there felt that, at least once, he had made eye contact with the new King and that the King had been speaking directly to him or her at that time, offering his thanks.

At least one of those people, Huw Pendragon's sister Glynda, sat entranced, wide-eyed with adoration. And when Uther had stopped speaking and the assembly was dismissed, she turned to her companions with sparkling eyes.

"Isn't he wonderful? Mairidh, would you not love to meet him and to know him? You could, you know, I am quite sure of that. Lord Balin here is an important man, an ambassador. I am sure you could arrange to meet King Uther easily."

Her listeners exchanged knowing glances as she was speaking, and now Mairidh smiled gently at her young companion, seeing the innocence in the girl's young eyes. "Child," she said, "we already know Uther very well, and have known him for years. Our friendship with his family reaches far, far back, before you were born."

Glynda went slack-mouthed with surprise. She turned her gaze from Mairidh to Balin, seeking reassurance. "Is that true. Lord Balin?"

She was completely unaware of casting a slur of any kind on Mairidh's veracity, and the old man smiled and shrugged. "Aye, child, as far as the friendship goes, I have known Uther's grandfather, Ullic Pendragon, for many, many years—in fact I have been privileged to know all of his grandparents, save one. His Pendragon grandmother, Ullic's wife, was long dead ere I even met Ullic, but Publius and Luceiia Varrus of Camulod, the parents of Uther's mother Veronica, have been friends of ours for many years. But then, I am an old man and I tend to dwell in the past, as all old people do. The friendship with young Uther, to which Mairidh refers, was more hers than my own, but it has lasted—how long now, Mairidh? Ten years?"

"At least that long, my love." Mairidh smiled again at Glynda. "He saved my life once, did you not know that?" Glynda's eyes became enormous with wonder and Mairidh nodded in confirmation. "It's true. I was abducted by a raiding party and Uther happened to see it. He followed us and saved me heroically while my abductors slept. He is your King now, but he was my saviour then, and no more than a mere boy at the time, almost a child, perhaps younger than you are now."

"How? Oh, my lady, do tell me about it, please."

Mairidh shook her head at the anguished urgency in the young woman's voice. "Ah, my dear, it was a long time ago, and it is a very long tale. Perhaps later tonight, after dinner. We shall see."

And so it was left, with Glynda fretfully wondering whether she would ever get to hear the story, and Mairidh reflecting yet again upon how she had really met Uther Pendragon for the first time. She would never, could never, forget any detail of that first meeting, or of any of the many that followed it, but she felt no tiniest portion of guilt at having deceived her young friend, however gently, regarding the details.

As she and her party joined the departing throng and began making their way towards the exit from the temple, the woman called Mairidh walked with her head down, ignoring everyone around her and allowing her memory to drift back across the years.

Chapter NINETEEN

July was supposed to be a month of blue skies and summer breezes, but this year it had been more like late November, with dull, leaden skies, heavy with rain-filled clouds, and cold, howling winds that could cut through the warmest clothing and chill a body right down to the bone. The current storm, the latest in a series, had begun the day before, buffeting Nemo with cold, blustery winds and torrential rain. She had been drenched and chilled within an hour, the thickly woven, waxed wool of her heavy, hooded campaign cloak soaked through, so that it became an added burden to be borne, dragging at her with its sodden weight. And she was still a full day's ride from Camulod.

A year had passed since the Choosing, and nine months since Uther had driven Lot's forces back to Cornwall, and the time had been swallowed by the crises and small miseries of everyday life. A harsh winter had hit them hard in Tir Manha, diminishing their stores of corn and provender with frightening speed, and now summer was bringing little relief, its sullen, rainy malevolence threatening the harvest yet to come.

For hours she rode though the trees, away from the deserted road, hoping to find shelter of some kind, but there was nothing, not a cave or even a large animal burrow into which she might crawl. An enormous fire had burned the entire forest several years earlier, and nothing had had time to grow again to any decent size. The solitary ruined hut she found in a narrow ravine on a hillside that had somehow escaped the blaze had been completely useless to her, abandoned for decades, its roof long vanished and its decayed walls incapable of sheltering her from the howling wind.

She struck out directly for the only place she knew of that would offer her at least a rudimentary roof over her head: a ruined stone cattle shed, abandoned countless years earlier, but which still retained a remnant of a once good, thick roof of sod laid over rotted logs. If the remaining portion of the roof had not collapsed since the previous winter, it would offer her at least the opportunity to try to build a fire.

It had been dark for more than an hour by the time she finally crossed the ten or twelve miles and reached the crossroads close to where the shed lay. It took her another hour after that, working in the windblown darkness, to locate the ruined building—the roof, such as it was, was still in place—and then to find a spot within its walls where, by tenting her soaked cloak as a barrier against the gusting wind, she could create sufficient shelter to strike sparks into tinder and finally kindle a tiny flame strong enough to feed with twigs, huddling over it constantly to protect it from the cold, questing breath of the destructive wind.

Only when the tiny fire was burning briskly did she reach into her scrip for the thick tallow candle she always carried, and she lit it carefully with a flaming twig. Then, carefully guarding the candle flame in the hollow of her arm beneath her upraised cloak, she was able to move sufficiently far away from the fire to see and reach the supply of old, sun-dried wood, whitened with age, that lay against one of the walls, used and replenished by travellers like herself. Cautiously then, pre parcel to react at any moment to threats from the wind, Nemo set about building a real fire, feeding the dried-out lengths of wood one at a time to the hungry, growing flames. Her mood improved from moment to moment as they began to leap and dance vigorously, filling the angle between the ruined walls with flickering shadows and yellow brightness, and at last defying the wind to do its worst.

Nemo stood up and removed her sodden cloak, then reached behind her back with her left hand and grasped the naked blade that hung there, flipping it strongly, straight upwards, with an easy, accustomed movement that allowed her other hand the purchase to draw the long cavalry sword that hung through an iron ring between her shoulder blades, its hilt projecting high above her right ear. As soon as the sword was free, she reversed her grip on it and thrust the blade into the dirt floor. The sound of its point grating into the soil pleased her, and she gazed at the long, deadly weapon swaying there within her reach before she reached down and picked up her shield, a wooden disk covered with iron-studded leather. Slowly then, taking pains to position everything correctly, she lowered the loops at the back of the shield down over the hilt of the sword so that it hung securely, anchored to the pommel and the boss of the hilt by its own weight against the tension of the straps. Then, satisfied, she gathered up her cloak again and hung it carefully over the framework she had formed, where it could be dried by the fire's heat. She checked it to be sure that the cloak would not fall down, and then she moved away reluctantly, loosening her short-sword in its sheath, and went to look after her horse.

Strictly speaking, as a cavalry trooper, she knew she should have attended to the horse's needs before her own, but she was chilled and exhausted, close to the end of her resources, whereas the horse was still in good condition—cold and weary, perhaps, but yet far better able to withstand the ravages of the weather for another hour than she was. There was no place to stable him, for the broken roof that sheltered her was barely large enough to cover her and her fire, but she led her mount into the lee of the building's wall, out of the worst of the wind.

Working quickly, she first removed her precious saddlebags and the iron flail that she carried so proudly, hanging from a hook beside her saddle horn exactly as Uther's hung from his. Then she took off the animal's saddle and its thick saddle blanket, the latter amazingly warm and dry where the heavy saddle had sheltered it. The big gelding tossed his head and snorted his relief, flexed his back muscles and turned his hindquarters directly into the wind, lowering his head in search of grazing. She knew he would not move away before she returned.

She draped the blanket and saddlebags over the saddle and hitched it up until it rode on her left hip. Then, picking up the flail in her free hand, she carried everything over to the fire, where she positioned the saddle with care and spread the blanket out over it to dry out. From the saddlebags she removed the equipment she carried for the horse: a cylindrical leather nosebag, folded flat, a set of leg hobbles, a wide, stiff-bristled grooming brush and a leather bag of oats, sealed by a drawstring, that was about one-quarter full. From the other bag she produced a tightly folded and bound one- man blanket, woven of thick wool yarn that had been brushed and coated lightly with a scraping of wax. She also removed her most precious possession, a leather boiling bag, given to her years earlier by Uther. Its edges had been carefully stretched and sewn over the rim of the wide iron ring that formed its top, and she checked carefully, as she always did, to make sure that no damage had been done to it in her travels. She laid the bag aside, along with the long, slender, hand-crafted legs of the collapsible iron tripod on which it was made to rest. Within the leather of the boiling bag itself reposed another, smaller bag, this one containing a spoon and a cup, both made of horn, the cup itself containing a measure of salt wrapped in a twist of cloth, and several individually wrapped plants and herbs: small onions, cloves of garlic and dried mushrooms. Nemo ignored the cooking items for the time being, taking out only the horn cup and replacing everything else where it had been, except for the folded and tied blanket, which she stowed carefully for safekeeping beneath the curve of the saddle by the lire.

She filled the nosebag with oats, then scooped up her metal helmet and removed its leather liner. A steady stream of rainwater poured from one end of the sagging remnant of roof, and Nemo moved towards it, holding her helmet upside down to catch the falling water. When it was almost completely filled, she held it carefully in the crook of her elbow and bent to pick up the nosebag, and then she made her way around the sagging wall to the rear of the building.

The horse was used to being hobbled and made no attempt to move away as Nemo knelt awkwardly, fighting the stiffness of her armour as she fastened the restraints around his forelegs; he knew that as soon as she had finished with the hobbling, she would stand up and remove the bridle and the hated bit from his mouth. Moments later, his head was free and he was slurping noisily from the water in the helmet. He was not very thirsty, however, and he soon tossed his head to show that he had had enough. Muttering softly to him, allowing him to hear the comforting sound of her voice rather than any kind of sensible words, Nemo strapped on his nosebag and left him to eat. He tossed his head gently and stomped about a little until he had himself placed the way he wanted, rump firmly presented to the unfriendly wind, and then he lowered his head and its hanging bag to the ground and settled down to eat his oats. Nemo watched him for a moment or two and then collected her helmet and left him there.

Back by the fireside, Nemo sat on the saddle and undid the fastenings of her armoured coat, then spread it wide, throwing it open to allow the heat to penetrate her damp, quilted tunic. She reached beneath her right arm to pull out the thick leather wallet that she carried there for safety, protected, like her heart itself, by the thick armour of her fighting coat. The wallet contained the dispatches that Uther had entrusted to her care for delivery to Merlyn, and she peered down at it closely to make sure that it was still securely closed. Then she tugged hard on the strap that crossed her chest and held the wallet firmly in its place, testing it, too, before thrusting the wallet back into place beneath her arm. She used the blanket from her saddlebag then to dry her face and neck as well as she could, towelling her short-cropped, wet hair. Stripping completely to dry herself properly would have meant stripping off her armour, and when it was cold, wet and stiff, removing armour became a formidable task. Putting it back on quickly would have been simply impossible, and there was something too intimidating about exposing herself naked to anything that might be out there watching in the night, seeing her barely sheltered by broken walls and a sagging fragment of roof, and lit up by the fitful, flickering firelight, with the darkness pressing in upon her from every side.

When she was as dry as she could be, she propped the damp blanket up beside the fire, one end of it weighted and secured on the ground by a few large stones, and the other raised towards the fire on two long sticks stuck into the dirt. She sat beneath its shelter then and fed herself slowly, cutting pieces of smoke-cured, salted venison from the supply she carried in one of the pockets of the deep leather scrip that hung by her side. She chewed each piece slowly, savouring the deep, smoky tang of the meat and feeling the warmth of the fire slowly begin to penetrate the quilted thickness of her tunic. After attending to her horse again, she finally lay down beneath the blanket lean-to and slept fitfully, waking every now and then to feed the fire, prompted by fears of what she would have to go through to light it again if she allowed it to die out completely.

In the morning, she was still cold to the bone, shivering in her wet clothes and heavy, chafing armour. The daylight, uninspiring as it was, nevertheless encouraged her to take thought for herself and her welfare, and she swallowed her misery and went back out into the rain to gather more armloads of firewood to replace what she was using. She then built the fire up into a roaring blaze and stripped naked in its warmth, towelling heat and life back into her body with the warm blanket. She warmed most of her cloth garments close by the fire while she sat huddled nearby, wrapped in her blanket, planning how she would handle the day ahead of her. As she did so, she ate a dry breakfast of roast grains, shelled hazelnuts and chopped, sun-dried fruit. After leaving the shelter briefly to relieve herself, she squatted naked for a while in front of the flames, holding her blanket wide open and allowing the radiant warmth to wash over her until every bit of her felt stretched and tingling with the heat. Then, precisely at the moment when she felt she could absorb no more without burning up, she turned away and pulled dry, light underclothing from her saddlebag. After that, she slung her precious dispatch wallet across her chest and tucked it beneath her arm again before pulling on her damp, heavy tunic and leggings, her heavy woollen socks and iron-studded boots, and dashing out quickly to bring her horse into the building itself. Beneath the roof and out of the rain, she rubbed him down as well as she could, leaning heavily on the stiff-bristled grooming brush and taking plenty of time as she squeezed and combed the night's moisture out of his heavy coat, taking particular care with the broad expanse of his back, where the chafing weight of the heavy cavalry saddle, imperfectly placed, could quickly make the animal's discomfort intolerable.

After she had saddled her mount, she laid her main armour—a heavy leather coat and wide, trousered leggings of the same leather, all sewn with thousands of tiny, overlapping metal rings—across the saddle and lashed together her shield, helmet, cuirass and thigh guards, using their own leather straps and buckles to join them to each other, before laying them over the ring-mail and covering them with her heavy woollen cloak.

A wide, strongly made sword belt supported a sheathed Roman- style short-sword that hung by her right side, its handle projecting just behind the large leather scrip that also hung there, and a matching dagger rode by her left hip. Attached to the sword belt in two places, ahead of and behind the dagger on her left side, another belt of the same weight and thickness rose diagonally between her breasts and crossed her right shoulder. Fastened to the back of it, between her shoulder blades, hung the wide iron ring that supported her sword. Nemo pulled the long cavalry sword from where it had stood in the floor all night supporting her cloak and used both her hands to guide it into place. Satisfied with the feel of it then, she took hold of the horse's bridle and led it out into the weather, where she turned her face in the direction of Camulod. She decided to walk, to keep herself warm and conserve the animal's strength, since she herself was unencumbered by armour and therefore able to move more quickly and easily.

Almost six hours later, Nemo was beyond weariness. Her entire attention was focused solely upon reaching Camulod and its hot baths as quickly as she could. The rain had stopped more than an hour earlier, and encouraged by a break in the clouds and a flash of blue sky that she had seen off to her right, she had stopped in an empty cattle byre and dressed herself again in full armour, prepared to ride into Camulod properly attired. But no sooner had she pulled herself back up into the saddle after that than the rain began again, heavier than ever. Her final reserves of patience vanished almost immediately, although now she could almost see the topmost towers of the rear walls of Camulod as she spurred her horse to scramble up the steep slope at the back of the hill. The walls were very close, but they were almost completely obscured by a billowing, low-lying cloud that shrouded the entire hilltop, it's sullen weight spewing rain.

Cursing and muttering to herself, Nemo urged her horse forward along the path that was now growing rapidly less steep. As she looked up into the slanting rain, she heard a sentry's challenge and the blowing of a trumpet to summon the guard commander.

"Who goes there?"

Nemo cocked her head, hoping to identify the voice, but it was unrecognizable.

"Nemo," she shouted back. "Decurion. Uther's Dragons. From King Uther, with word for Merlyn Britannicus. Nemo."

There was silence for a spell, and then a new voice, one she knew well, came down to her.

"Nemo? Is that you? What did you do last time when you came back from Glevum ?"

"Chain duty. Four months you gave me. Centurion Dedalus. You know it's me. Let me in."

The heavy gate swung open and Nemo spurred her horse forward, passing through the entrance and the narrow new curtain passageway that had been built inside it after Lot's first, near fatal assault. She glanced up at the faces of the guards looking down at her front the high walls, recognizing a few of them and seeing for the first time how effective this winding passage was. Anyone attacking through this door in future would have to fight their way through a narrow, high-walled tunnel lined with defenders above them at every step.

"Hey, Hard-Nose, you look as though you've been out in the rain!"

Nemo ignored the taunt and all the others like it as she made her way through to the end of the curtainway. There, in a wider but still confined courtyard, she was met by Dedalus and a trooper who stepped forward to take her horse. She raised her hand to wave the trooper away, but Dedalus forestalled her.

"Let him take the horse. Nemo. You look as though you'll have enough to do taking care of yourself. My advice would be to stop at the bathhouse before you go anywhere or do anything else. It should be quiet there at this time of day."

Nemo hesitated, looking at him with a scowl, and then she shrugged her broad shoulders and reached for her saddlebags, slinging them over one shoulder and relinquishing the horse to the trooper with a surly nod.

"Merlyn Britannicus?"

Dedalus knew what she meant. "He's out on patrol, but not a long one. He'll be back later this afternoon. They're getting ready to leave on an expedition to the other side of the country, Verulamium. to attend a meeting of churchmen."

Nemo was not interested in churchmen. "I have messages for him from King Uther."

"I know, I heard you. He should be back by the time you have thawed out. Do you have any dry clothing with you? No? Then go ahead and warm yourself back to humanity. You can eat later, once you feel better. In the meantime, I'll send someone to the laundry to find you some clean clothing. He'll bring it to you in the bathhouse. I'll tell him to shout out your name and leave the new clothing in the dressing rooms. Leave your armour there for him, too, he'll pick that up at the same time and take it to one of the smithies to dry out near the forges before it can start to rust."

"It won't rust. The rings are bronze."

Dedalus twisted up his face and shook his head as though in pity. "Nemo, do you really think I didn't know that? Go now. Away with you." He paused, eyeing her as she turned to go, and called her back. "No, wait you, Nemo . . . Before you go to the bathhouse, you might feel better to know that your dispatches for Commander Merlyn are safe. Where are they?"

Nemo glowered at him, then reached across with her left hand and patted her armour on the right side. "They're safe."

Dedalus grinned. "Aye, safe now, but will you take them into the hot pool with you?" He watched her blink, then start to frown, her scowl deepening by the moment, and he took pity on her. "What you need to do, Nemo, is find someone that you can trust . . . and if there's no one you can trust, then find someone you know Uther would trust. Were I you, I'd take my dispatches into the administration building and leave them with one of the senior legates there before I went to bathe. Titus or Flavius, doesn't matter which. They are equally trustworthy."

Nemo looked at him narrowly and then looked down at the arm still stretched across her breast. She hovered indecisively for several moments, and then nodded once and made directly for the administrative building.

An hour later, having made her progress through the intermediate baths. Nemo was luxuriating in the calidariun, the deep hot pool, and deliberating with herself whether or not she would make the effort to climb out and make her way into the curtained-off sudarium, the steam room, where the tiled walls and hanging leather curtains contained the roiling clouds of vapour that belched out of floor-level vents, heated to boiling by the furnace below the bathhouse. She decided to remain where she was, thinking that she could never have enough of this magnificent hot water and remembering, too, how she had believed, only short hours before, that she might never again be warm.

There were only two others in the bathhouse with her, and two more had been leaving when she arrived. All of them had known and recognized her, and had acknowledged her with nods. None of them had attempted to speak to her, and none had paid any attention to her sex, elaborately ignoring her nakedness as though it were as unremarkable as their own. Nemo had barely noticed. She had settled all of that kind of nonsense very emphatically long years before.

Apart from the most basic and obvious evidence of her femininity, her appearance was very masculine. She had always been short and squat of stature as a child, with immense strength for her size and age, and by the time she had volunteered for Uther's cavalry force, her arms, chest, back and shoulders were massive and dense with muscle. Her breasts and pectorals were less feminine than many a man's, except that they were hairless and tipped with large and obviously female nipples. Her hips and buttocks, belly and thighs, were lean and hard. Only the black-haired cleft at her centre ruined the illusion of swarthy, virile strength and male vitality.

And yet, there had been some among the troopers of Camulod who had insisted upon seeing only the woman in her. purely from the perspective of male rut. Her female body, unused, was an insult to their manhood. Many ventured to deal with her as they thought appropriate, singly and in groups. And all of them failed, humiliatingly and publicly, because, brutal and debased as they might have been, they could not conceive of, let alone match. Nemo's implacably savage response to their assaults. Where they had sought to bully and conquer her as a woman, she had responded as a threatened man, maiming and disabling, so that invariably they went reeling and limping, broken and bleeding, in every direction. Two of these died, killed in the struggle when a group of six of them jumped her here in this very bathhouse. One of those deaths came from a straight-armed smash with Nemo's open hand, the heel of which drove one attacker's nose bone into his brain. The second was caused when another assailant slipped and fell, trying to dodge a flying kick that would have unmanned him. He landed strangely and crushed his skull between the corner edges of the deep pool. Two more of the surviving four had been grievously injured, one with a broken leg and the other with shattered ribs, before the other two fled, unsatisfied.

The official inquiry into the matter exonerated Nemo. She had acted in self-defence, it was said, and therefore legitimately. Merlyn Britannicus had raised a questioning eyebrow on more than one occasion as the inquiry progressed, but he had invariably bowed to the judgment of his cousin Uther, who stood staunchly behind his subordinate and insisted that she be treated as a trooper, first and foremost, and as a woman only incidentally and under protest. And whenever one or another of the Roman-trained officers of Camulod questioned the propriety of having women in the ranks, as several of them did, Uther withered them with scorn, citing the names of Boudicca and a dozen other notable Celtic women, all of them renowned as warriors, and several among them Pendragon chieftains. He rattled off their names with impressive speed, proclaiming them unimpeachable examples of how the women of Celtic Britain had always fought as equals with their men.

After that, the realization had sunk home to everyone that Nemo was not to be trifled with. If you had to fight her as you would a man in order to possess her, the common wisdom of the day held, then she was a man—and what did that say about you? Thereafter, she mingled freely with the other troopers, going naked among them in the bathhouse, and only newcomers took notice of her—and then only for a short time, until they could be taken aside and warned.

Later, dressed from the skin out in fresh, clean clothes and wearing only the light, dress armour of the Camulodian garrison troopers, Nemo stepped out of the bathhouse to discover that the storm had passed while she was indoors and the entire world about her had changed. The sky over her head was bright blue and cloudless, and the air was clean-scented and warm with the appropriate warmth of July. Even the muddy cobblestone street was drying rapidly.

A pair of troopers came towards her, evidently headed for the bathhouse, and she saw at first glance that they had just returned from a patrol of some kind, for their cloaks were wet and travel- stained. She held up one hand to attract their attention and asked them if they knew whether Merlyn had returned. They both nodded and one of them waved his hand in the general direction of the administrative building.

Nemo strode past the guards and through the doors directly to the desk of the Officer of the Day, where the Legate Titus was deep in conversation with another travel-weary newcomer. Titus saw her approach from the corner of his eye and without interrupting his conversation reached sideways beneath his table to pick up the wallet she had left in his care, then held it up above his head for her to take from him in passing. She collected it and moved straight on past the desk towards the door that was Merlyn's day-room, where she stopped on the threshold and knocked.

"Come!"

Inside, Merlyn Britannicus slouched in a high-backed, armless chair by a long work table in front of a high, double-arched window. He was reading something, a document of some kind, holding the cylindrical scroll up to the light with both hands and frowning as he whispered the words to himself. He paid no attention to Nemo until he had finished, and he allowed the scroll to spring shut before throwing it onto the tabletop.

"Damnation," he muttered, looking up to see who had come into the room. When he saw Nemo, he frowned and cocked his head to one side in a gesture that said plainly that he ought to know the person he was seeing but could not put a name to him. Then he stood up. quickly, the frown on his face deepening.

"You're one of Uther's people, are you not? The one called Nemo . . . That's right. . . Is your master here? In Camulod?"

Nemo held herself at attention but shook her head, unwilling as always to speak aloud. Instead, she held out the leather document case and stepped quickly forward. Merlyn moved to take it, slowly, his eyes searching her face, but as soon as his hands had closed over the case she relinquished it, took one step back and snapped into a cavalry salute before spinning on her heel and beginning to march out.

"Wait!"

Nemo stopped dead. Turned around.

Merlyn was still frowning at her, his expression speculative. "Is Uther well?"

Nemo nodded again, and Merlyn's frown grew deeper. "What's the matter, can't you speak?"

Nemo cleared her throat. "Aye, sir . . . Commander. King Uther is well." Her voice sounded rusty and unused.

"Good. And he is still in Tir Manha?"

"Aye, sir."

"And how goes his kingdom nowadays? Is all well? It has been what, a year, since he was chosen? As King? Aye, it must be, and nine months since he threw Lot's crew out of Cambria and chased them screaming back to Cornwall. Has he no plans to visit us here soon?"

Strange thoughts were passing through Nemo's mind. There was something in the tone of Merlyn's voice as he spoke to her that set her instincts aquiver. Looking into his eyes, she felt that Merlyn meant the opposite of what he was saying, and that he would be perfectly happy never to see his cousin Uther again. It made no sense to her, and she could see no reason for it, but she knew that Merlyn Britannicus had no wish for Uther ever to return to Camulod.

She said nothing but only stood staring at him, holding herself upright and at attention, her helmet clutched in her bent left arm. Nothing of what she was thinking showed on her face. Her expression remained unchanged, her close-set black eyes unreadable beneath the frowning, unbroken bar of her thick brows.

"Well? Does my cousin plan to visit us?"

Nemo blinked, aware of a need to answer. She nodded her head. "Don't know, sir. Doesn't speak to me. Not of plans."

"Hmm. Very well. My thanks for bringing these." He held up the leather wallet. "Are you instructed to wait for a response?"

"No, sir."

"Good. You may go."

Nemo saluted smartly and spun on her heel, then marched away as though she were on parade, feeling his eyes on her until she had marched out of the building and into the sunlight again. She turned right, and then as soon as she was out of sight of the administrative building, she broke step and put her helmet on, tapping it firmly down over her brows with the flat of one hand. Then she fastened her chinstrap and adjusted her cheek-flaps before walking on normally, her mind seething with unaccustomed, troublesome thoughts of Caius Merlyn Britannicus.

She had known Merlyn for years, ever since his boyhood, but he had never come to know her at all, and she and Uther had both preferred to keep it that way for their own reasons. Now she sensed instinctually a very real menace emanating from Merlyn Britannicus and directed towards Uther.

Merlyn had changed. His attitude to Uther had changed. He no longer bubbled with that warm, open, pleasure-filled joy of companionship and brotherhood that had always made her feel jealous and left out when the two were together. Merlyn no longer loved Uther. That made her blink. Did she truly believe that? She was unsure. But Merlyn no longer laughed with joy at the thought of seeing Uther, and she would happily swear to the truth of that.

For the space of half a heartbeat, she wondered which way to go, and then she turned sharply right, simply because Merlyn and the administrative building lay to her left. She took one quick step and collided immediately with a woman who had been walking towards her. The frail figure practically bounced off the solid bulk of her body and fell backwards, a flailing bundle of blue-clad limbs. Nemo hurled herself forward instantly, her arms scooping in front of her, and managed to catch the reeling woman before she hit the ground. The woman's eyes were wide with shock and incomprehension, and the cowl that had covered her head and concealed her face had fallen away to reveal long, once-black hair, heavily shot through with grey, and wide, startlingly blue eyes. Nemo recognized her, and her heart leaped with fright at the thought that she had almost killed Uther's grandmother, Luceiia Varrus.

Luceiia made it clear that she was uninjured and would like to be allowed to regain her feet, and Nemo released her awkwardly, helping her to stand up before doing so. Then the old woman nodded and brushed herself down, absently patting the arm of another, younger woman who was her companion, reassuring her that she was uninjured. Now Luceiia composed herself and turned back to Nemo, nodding her head and looking up into her eyes.

"Thank you, young man," she said. "I know not how you managed to move so quickly, but I am very glad you did. I find that I am very slightly out of breath, but otherwise none the worse for wear. Hitting you was rather like hitting a wall, I believe, although I never have hit a wall quite that hard." She stopped and looked around, aware for the first time of the crowd of onlookers who had stopped to gawk at her. "Thank you all," she said in a tone that was eloquently dismissive. "I am quite well now and have suffered no harm, thanks to the quick-wittedness of this young man. Please go about your affairs now." She stood and watched the people hesitate and then move on, and then she turned back to Nemo, cocking her head to one side. "That is the uniform of the Pendragon Guards, is it not? The Dragons?" Nemo cleared her throat but could only nod. The old woman blinked at her. "I thought so. I should know my own grandson's emblem. And your name is?"

Again Nemo cleared her throat, and then she spoke in her deepest voice, keenly aware that Luceiia thought she was a man. The words resonated inside her helmet, sounding distorted to her own ears. "Geddius, Milady. I'm Geddius." The lie was out before she knew it was there, but it was born of an irrational fear that Luceiia might complain to her grandson that she had been jostled by one of his men. Had this been anyone else in the world. Nemo would have been contemptuous, but she was well aware of the incomprehensible awe and love that Uther held for his aged grandmother.

Luceiia was peering sharply at her, trying to make out the features beneath the full face-guards of Nemo's huge trooper's helmet, but Nemo knew that the old woman could see little more than the gleam of her eyes.

"Have you brought messages from Uther?"

Another nod. "Yes, Milady. Dispatches for Lord Merlyn."

"I see. Well, I trust we shall find out what my grandson has to say before the morning's done. For the time being, once again, I thank you, young man. But perhaps in future you might pay more attention to your surroundings as you make your way. Good day to you. Come, Deirdre."

Nemo stepped back, watching with awe as the old woman began to move away, and only at the last moment did her eyes move to the younger woman whom Luceiia Varrus had called Deirdre. She found the woman gazing back at her, the tiniest frown marring the smooth skin between her brows, and something about the sight of her brought Nemo snapping back to awareness. She knew this woman, but she had no idea from where. Then, as Luceiia Varrus took the other's arm and they began to move away, she saw the huge swelling of a late-term pregnancy showing unmistakably beneath Deirdre's gown.

Nemo stood in the middle of the roadway and watched the two women head towards the entrance of the administrative building, seeing the almost reverential way in which the ordinary people looked at them in passing. A trio of off-duty garrison troopers standing talking near the doors stopped their conversation and held themselves at respectful attention as the women passed by them, and only resumed talking after Luceiia and her companion had disappeared inside.

Nemo wandered over to where they stood, schooling her face to appear no more than casually interested. The troopers paused as she drew near them, and one of them nodded courteously. Nemo nodded back and used her "man's" voice.

"Just got in from Cambria. Who's the woman with the Lady Luceiia?"

The man who had nodded to her grinned. "That's the Lady Deirdre, Commander Merlyn's wife."

"Hmm." Nemo jerked her head in a nod of thanks and farewell and walked away, her head spinning with speculation.

Chapter TWENTY

"That's the Lady Deirdre, Commander Merlyn's wife."

The words echoed in Nemo's head as she walked away, following the slight, naturally declining gradient of the hilltop until she found herself approaching the main gates of the fortress. They were wide open at this time of the day, and she noticed that the guards on duty, none of whom she recognized, were having an easy time, lounging indolently as they supervised the few vehicles that came and went while keeping a wary eye alert for approaching officers.

She had almost drawn level with the gates when she became aware that someone behind her was calling her name repeatedly, and she turned her head to see who was shouting at her. When she saw the waving hand and its owner's grinning face, with its artificially enhanced colouring and enormous, Hashing eyes, she grew angry at herself immediately for even looking, and for not recognizing that distinctive voice immediately. It belonged to Nennius, one of the masseurs who worked in the bathhouse. Sexuality of any kind was immaterial to Nemo, whose interest in such things was virtually nil, so she had no difficulty with the knowledge that Nennius's preference was for boys and men, but the fellow was an inveterate talker who was incapable of keeping quiet and had an unquenchable thirst for other people's business, and his incessant chatter always threatened to drive her mad.

Nennius, however, had been indefatigable in pursuing Nemo's friendship ever since the earliest days of her arrival in Camulod and he had steadfastly refused to take offence or to be discouraged by her continuous and ill-mannered hostility towards him. How could he take offence, he had asked her repeatedly, when he understood too well the pain with which she had to live incessantly, day in and day out? They were two of a kind, he assured her, but of different aspects, like the two faces of a coin. Nemo was a man cursed by some malign fate to live his life inside a woman's body, whereas Nennius was a woman walled up inside the body of a man. So brazen had Nennius been in his pursuit of Nemo, and so unfailingly charming and attentive to her, that even Nemo's immeasurable fund of ill nature had eventually been exhausted, and she had begun to develop a tolerance for his attentions, accepting and eventually even coming to enjoy his therapeutic ministrations in the massage room after she had bathed and sweated the soreness out of hard-used muscles, nevertheless insisting upon what was, for Nennius, an almost unbearable degree of silence.

Today, Nemo had neither time nor patience to spare for Nennius, and she waved him away with a deep scowl that even Nennius, thick-skinned as he was, had no choice but to accept. He held up both hands in a gesture of apology and then stood there watching Nemo as she strode away through the gates.

Merlyn Britannicus had taken a wife, and he had said nothing about it—had sent no notice, either before or after the event—to Uther Pendragon. The insult was unforgivable. Nothing on earth. Nemo knew, would have kept Uther from attending his cousin's nuptial feast had he known of it. Nemo felt the unmistakable stirring of nausea in her guts and sucked air in deeply, holding it hard and willing her insides to settle down, but her head felt light and giddy and there was a high-pitched whining in her ears. No matter what she thought of Merlyn Britannicus personally—and she had held many different feelings for him in the years that she had known him, ranging from admiration to dislike, from envy to indifference and even to blind jealousy—he was one of the underlying constants of her life. His life, in many ways, defined hers. His behaviour had always had a beneficent influence on his more volatile cousin, and Nemo had benefited directly from that. In consequence, the information she had just received, deepening her conviction that something had gone seriously wrong in Merlyn's dealings with Uther, was devastating.

And this was all because of a woman. That information taunted her, spinning slowly in the air slightly beyond her grasp. An unknown woman was threatening all that Nemo held to be of value. A complete stranger, a creature who had sprung out of nowhere and was completely unknown to Uther Pendragon, whose world she was about to destroy by depriving him, for her own selfish reasons, of his lifelong friend and closest companion. By destroying Merlyn's trust in Uther, which she had evidently begun to do already, this woman would surely demolish Uther's ability to trust anyone else in future. By stealing Merlyn's friendship away from Uther, with neither reason nor provocation, this woman had demonstrated that, whoever she might be, she was a self-centred and remorseless thief.

Nemo had spent her entire adult life among rough and violent troopers, and she had heard all of them talk at one time or another, some with cynical amusement and others with angry scorn, about how a woman—any woman—could divide and alienate the best and oldest of friends and set brothers at each other's throats, all because of that terrifying thing called love. A hundred times and more she must have heard those tales, and she had always doubted them, taking them, as men say, with a grain of salt to help her swallow them.

Now. however, she had no choice other than to face this reality, and so she began to plan. She had never been in a similar situation before, but she was not completely without direction on how to proceed, for one of the first and best-learned lessons she had absorbed from Garreth Whistler, while he was teaching it to Uther Pendragon, was that no one, no commander of any rank or stature, should ever commit his resources to a fight or a struggle without first finding out everything there was to know about the forces against which the fight would be waged.

"Know your enemy." As soon as Nemo remembered the instruction, she immediately began to wonder where she might start digging for information on this Lady Deirdre. No sooner had she asked it of herself, however, than she answered it with a response that surprised her with its simplicity. Nennius the masseur would know everything there was to know about Merlyn Britannicus's new wife, simply because that kind of information was precisely what Nennius thrived upon. The woman was young, pregnant and newly, suddenly arrived. Nemo was sure of that, because there had been no sign of anyone resembling a Lady Deirdre the last time she had been here bearing dispatches from Uther to Camulod, and that had been less than four months earlier. So, this Deirdre had sprung out of nowhere and captured the love of Merlyn Britannicus. Where could she have come from? And when could he have met her? Nemo knew that Nennius would have done everything in his power to satisfy his insatiable curiosity on such important points.

Moments later, she was striding towards the bathhouse again, her fingers fumbling with the clasp of her cloak as she prepared to throw it off, along with the rest of her clothing and her boots, and to pass as quickly as she could through the intermediate pools to the rear room that held the stone-built plinths of the masseurs. As she shed her clothing she made her way to the steam room, calling for Nennius to alert him that she would have need of his talents.

It turned out to be more difficult that she had thought it would be to simply lie there quietly, saying nothing while Nennius kneaded and belaboured her like a large lump of dough, talking all the time as though his tongue and his breathing were irreversibly interconnected. Several times, Nemo had to restrain herself forcibly from turning on him to rend him with her tongue for fear that this time he might take offence and refuse to speak to her again. She was burning with the need to talk to him about what troubled her, but she knew that would be the worst thing she could do because, Nennius being who and what he was, she could afford to give him no slightest inkling of a suspicion that she was even remotely interested in Merlyn Britannicus's new wife. Accordingly, she gritted her teeth and tried to shut out what he was saying to her. Occasionally, she grunted with pain for, kindred spirit or no, Nennius was being anything but gentle with her. Nemo recognized that he was punishing her, albeit very slightly, for her earlier discourtesy.

On arriving, she had grunted an apology to him, muttering that she had had important matters on her mind. Nennius had waved that aside as being of no importance, and had then launched into his normal chronicle of news and information from all over Britain, collected from every conceivable and available source to which he had access. Nennius was very proud of what he called "my people," the network of informants who kept him supplied with information, and he liked to convey the impression that if he did not quite know anyone and everyone who was worth knowing, he at least knew someone else who did.

It had been no accident that she had apologized for her rudeness by asserting that she had important matters on her mind. Nennius was well aware that Nemo was King Uther's most trusted personal messenger, and that every time Nemo came alone to Camulod, it was to deliver dispatches from Uther to Merlyn. He had never been able to gain the tiniest insight from Nemo in the past regarding what she carried or what her dispatches might portend, but Nennius was a creature who lived in hope, and this was the first time he had ever seen or suspected Nemo to be disgruntled with any aspect of her tasks. Finally, and with what he imagined to be great subtlety, Nennius manoeuvred the conversation to the point where he could ask, with the disdainful tones of utter disinterest, what it was that had upset Nemo so visibly earlier that afternoon.

Nemo grunted and turned her head to look up at him. raising an eyebrow, openly intimating that the question was impertinent.

Nennius then shrugged and went on to point out that he had no interest in the specifics of anything, but was merely curious as to why his friend Nemo should have been so put out that she could then be rude to a perfectly inoffensive friend who merely happened to be passing by and waved to say hello.

Nemo nodded at that, muttering that Nennius was right and that there had been no call for her to be so rude. She had been angry, she- said, because she had gone to call upon Commander Merlyn at the administrative building and had been kept waiting for the longest time because the Commander was closeted with some young woman— some woman on the verge of having a child. She would not normally have minded being kept waiting. Nemo said, but she had arrived only a short time earlier and had gone directly to deliver her dispatches.

which she had been told were urgent. What that urgency might imply, she had no idea, but King Uther had been specific in his instructions. Nemo had been told to waste not a moment in delivering the wallet containing the King's messages into the hands of Merlyn Britannicus. And she had found it galling that, after riding day and night through foul weather to carry out his orders, she should then be forced to stand around and wait for such a length of time while Commander Merlyn took his pleasure with some young wench.

Nennius listened to this open-mouthed, his huge, lustrous eyes glistening and gleaming above the lines of black kohl painted on their lower lids. He made no attempt to interrupt Nemo, but as soon as the other had finished speaking, he waved a hand expressively and nodded deeply, saying he could understand perfectly why Nemo should have been so upset. But really, he added then, his eyes gleaming wickedly, it was not really accurate to speak of the young woman as "some young wench." Her name was Deirdre, and she was the Commander's new wife.

Pretending to be startled. Nemo raised herself up on one elbow, her face, as much as she could make it, a picture of astonishment. The Commander's wife? Commander Merlyn was married? When had that happened, and how? Ten days before, Nennius said, smiling still at the effect of his announcement . . . No, Nemo had heard absolutely nothing, had known nothing. If word had gone to Cambria, to King Uther in Tir Manha, then it had clearly passed Nemo on the road. Ten days since the wedding? But the woman was big . . . about to give birth. Where had she sprung from? Where had Merlyn Britannicus been hiding her?

Nennius threw up his hands and shook his head before slapping Nemo on the bare flank to indicate that their session was at an end. The birth was far from imminent, he said, despite appearances. From what he had been told, there yet remained at least two months of carrying time before the Lady Deirdre's burden would be dropped. But then, as Nemo sat upright on the edge of the stone plinth, tucking the large towel into place about her hips, Nennius admitted that, to his great frustration, he had been unable to unearth any information from anywhere about the woman's former whereabouts. She was from Eire, the daughter of some heathen Eirish King, that much he could affirm, for she had turned out to be the sister of the Eirish Prince Donuil, the big fellow Merlyn had taken as a hostage two years earlier during Lot of Cornwall's first attack on Camulod. She could not have come directly to Camulod from Eire, however, gravid as she was, not without dire sorcery of some kind being involved, for Merlyn had not been away from Camulod for longer than two or three days at a time in more than a year.

Whence, then, had come the pregnancy? As far as Nennius had been able to discover, and as plain logic dictated, the Lady Deirdre must have been living somewhere nearby throughout the entire year, at least. Yet no one in Camulod—no one anywhere, for that matter— had ever seen her before the day she had ridden into the fortress, close on a month earlier, blooming with health and beauty and yet nonetheless as ethereal as a mountain sprite, riding on a light cart and accompanied by Caius Merlyn and his great-aunt, Luceiia Varrus.

Nemo expressed surprise then, in her usual surly manner, that Nennius had not been able to worm some kind of information about the young woman from some of her servants or associates. She must have said something in the course of a month to indicate where she had been and where she had come from . . . unless she was mute.

But she was mute, Nennius replied, and Nemo felt as though every vestige of air in her lungs had been kicked out as her mind made a sickening series of connections and a number of things all fell into place at the same time.

The Cassandra woman! No wonder the Lady Deirdre hail looked so familiar at first sight—though the well-dressed, high-born lady with the hugely swollen belly bore but little resemblance to the pallid, emaciated waif Nemo had found kneeling in the forest so many months before. How long ago had that been? Nemo thought back quickly and realized that nigh on three whole years had passed since then.

They had found the girl, an insipid, lacklustre little thing, while on a routine perimeter patrol of the Colony, and she had ridden back to Camulod behind Uther's saddle, with her arms clutching him around the waist. In lime they had discovered that she was mute, and they had called her Cassandra. Three years ago!

Realizing that she had stiffened into immobility and that Nennius was watching her closely, his head tilted to one side with the force of his concentration, Nemo made an enormous effort to relax her body and breathe normally while she simultaneously fought to school her face into betraying nothing of her shock. She muttered something barely audible about mute people, and then, suddenly inspired, she looked Nennius in the eye and asked him if mute people could hear anything. His eyes flew wide and he spread his hands, suggesting that he did not know, and Nemo nodded her head sagely and walked away slowly while he was still confused, offering her thanks as she left. Then, highly pleased with her own unusually glib performance, she dressed quickly and left the bathhouse, her mind teeming with thoughts of the Cassandra woman.

Cassandra . . . the very name twisted Nemo's guts, because it struck directly to the root of the trouble between Uther and Merlyn. She remembered that night . . . in the private quarters Uther and Merlyn once referred to as their games room. Nemo had never been able to discover precisely what had occurred, because only Uther and Merlyn were present at the time and neither of them spoke of it afterwards. The waif Cassandra had been there too, however, along with a small number of other women, all of whom disappeared from public sight the following day, permanently, leaving Camulod in a covered cart.

Nemo had witnessed only a few important scenes of the drama: Cassandra bursting from the games room, apparently running for her life. Merlyn appearing at the door a few moments later, unclothed, but ducking back inside and closing the door when he saw the guard watching him. Uther storming out, clearly in a fury. She discovered later that Uther, accompanied by a small group of his Dragons, rode out of Camulod then and returned home to Cambria. The girl Cassandra had been abducted that same night and dragged or carried into a barn, where she had been beaten, ravaged and brutalized, and then abandoned by her attacker, who had clearly thought her dead, and whose identity was never established.

Cassandra had been discovered the following morning, barely alive, and Germanus, the senior military physician in Camulod, had worked hard for hours to save her life while Merlyn Britannicus, as Officer in Command during his father's absence on a patrol, fearing for the young woman's safety, arranged to have her placed under heavy, constant guard. And then, in the middle of the following night, the woman called Cassandra had disappeared without a trace, evidently by sorcery, from a building that was heavily guarded inside and out.

Rumours had flown in all directions for a long time after that, including one that Merlyn had foreseen Cassandra's disappearance in a dream. That rumour formed the basis for the other whisperings that Merlyn was a sorcerer of some kind. Nemo had also heard a rumour, believed by some, that Uther had been responsible for beating the girl, but that was clearly so foolish and so contradictory to the facts that Nemo merely shook her head and disregarded it completely.

One thing she did know, however, and it came from no rumour. The lifelong bond between Merlyn Britannicus and Uther Pendragon was broken that night of the fight in the games room. From then onward, the two men, who had been inseparable for so long, were seldom in each other's company again.

Nemo had never dared come out openly and ask Uther what had happened between them that night, and he had never offered to tell her, but she had been convinced then, and was still convinced, that the woman Cassandra was at the bottom of it. Before Cassandra had been found in the forest, Uther and Merlyn had been closer than brothers for five and twenty years, but then, within three days of her appearance in their lives, that bond had been severed.

It had taken no great leap of imagination at that time for Nemo to connect Cassandra with all the kitchen tales of witchcraft and malice that she had absorbed during her miserable childhood among the Druid's people, and she had quickly come to perceive her as a witch, sent to destroy the bonds between the two magnificent young men who had become known throughout the countryside as the Princes of Camulod. How else could she have escaped, unseen, from a guarded room? Once convinced, Nemo had then spent months looking for the woman, determined to force the creature, somehow, to undo the damage she had done, or failing that, to ensure that she would no longer pose a threat to Uther Pendragon. But Cassandra, it seemed, had indeed vanished, swallowed up and absorbed by the darkness of night.

After a year had elapsed without further sight or sound of her, Nemo had eventually forgotten her. More accurately, she had ceased to think of Cassandra as a real, living person, but she remained aware of the damage the witch had done.

And now, after three years, Cassandra had returned, carrying Merlyn's child. How it had been made was a mysterious matter, and Nemo's blood chilled as she thought of the old women's tales she had heard in her childhood, tales of enchantment and witchcraft, sorcery and the seldom mentioned magic, the arcane, terrifying, secret lore that was named for the learned men who practised it, the magi. She had heard the tales about Merlyn, too, since her arrival in Camulod, tales that whispered that he was a magus, a practitioner of the dark arts, and Nemo was not one to dismiss such a possibility out of hand.

Nemo was convinced that Cassandra, or Deirdre as she apparently called herself now, was a witch, returned as a different person to ensnare Merlyn with the lure of her young body. And that she had clearly been able to do so, in utmost secrecy, was fundamental proof to Nemo that she was right in her suspicions. Merlyn had fallen to the witch's lure, and because of Merlyn's weakness, Uther's peace of mind would soon begin to crumble, and with that her own life would crash in ruin once the word of what the witch had wrought was carried home to Tir Manha.

Nemo knew she had but little time remaining in which to counteract Cassandra's evil, and so she bent her mind to recalling what she could of the kitchen lore she had heard years before regarding the killing of witches. She remembered some fat old woman from her childhood bending over a bubbling pot of stew that steamed deliriously, sprinkling a handful of chopped herbs into the pot and declaring to all the world that there were only two means of inflicting death upon witches without taking the risk of their returning to drag you, screaming, to the fiery underworld. One was fire, the old woman had said, tugging at a burning log and causing an explosion of fierce heat and whirling sparks and embers. A witch burned was a witch destroyed. The other means involved the use of iron, but Nemo could not recall what the old fool had said about it or how it was supposed to be used. The only other thing she could remember from the old woman's ranting was that the iron used to kill a witch could never again be used by human hand. That made no sense to her, now that she came to think of it again, because the iron weapon of any man's choice would be a sword . . . sometimes a spear, perhaps, or an axe, but in most cases it would be a sword. And what fool would risk attempting to kill a witch, knowing that if he were successful he would lose his most valuable weapon? But the task of grappling with that thought was too taxing for her, and so Nemo stopped thinking about it. Either way, she decided, using fire or iron, she would find a way to defeat the witch's designs. She would watch carefully and wait, and then take any option offered to her.

Two days later, Merlyn Britannicus left Camulod at the head of a large body of troops made up of four cavalry squadrons, each forty troopers strong, plus all the support equipment and personnel required to keep such a force in the field for a month or longer, including commissary wagons, a water wagon and extra horses. There were one hundred and seventy-five fighting men in the group, including officers and exclusive of the commissary staff and herd boys, who brought the overall number up to just over two hundred. The expedition made a fine and imposing spectacle as the troopers rode out through the main gates of Camulod and down the winding roadway to the plain beneath, but they were not riding to war. They were headed for the distant town of Verulamium to attend a debate between Christian bishops that would supposedly decide on great and important matters having to do with the gods and how the workings of men's minds in that regard would be judged in times to come. Nemo had had it explained to her by several people, but it all sounded to her like wasted time and effort, and it made her glad she was no Christian. But thanks to all of that, Merlyn had gone from Camulod, leaving his wife behind.

Witnessing the departure that day. Nemo turned her face to where Cassandra, the Lady Deirdre, watched her husband ride away and waved to him each time he turned back to look at her, and her guts burned with loathing, as though she had eaten something indigestible.

She found it surprisingly easy to remain in Camulod unnoticed for the week that followed Merlyn's departure. Nemo was under no great pressure to return to Tir Manha, and so she had no reason to concern herself over being late in reporting there. Her face and uniform had become sufficiently familiar within Camulod to enable her to remain hidden there in the fortress in plain sight simply by drawing no attention to herself and taking great care to remain out of the path of anyone in authority who might wonder why she was lingering so long after she had delivered her dispatches and fulfilled the tasks allotted to her. She simply left the fortress each night and camped, either on the hillside beyond the walls or in the woods by the edge of the training ground below, and it quickly became apparent that as long as she changed her campsite every night, never remaining in the same place twice, she could remain completely unnoticed. She re-entered the fortress each day through the main gates, but revolving duty guaranteed that the guards were never the same from day to day. Her daily visits to the bathhouse were the only part of her routine during that week that had consistency, and they were noticed only by Nennius, who, if he thought at all about the length of Nemo's stay on this occasion, made no mention of it.

For the entire week during the daylight hours, she charged herself with watching the house of Luceiia Varrus, wailing for the Lady Deirdre to emerge and then following wherever she led. The witch seldom ventured out alone, but she came out at least once a day, either with the Lady Luceiia or with one or other of the women of the Varrus household. Even when she did move abroad alone, however, she kept to the busiest public thoroughfares, and Nemo never had the slightest chance of approaching her.

But then, at the end of the week, something different occurred, and watching it unfold. Nemo realized she was watching something that had been planned, and her heart began to race with excitement. The witch, dressed in a gaudy robe of brilliantly bright yellow, rode out of Camulod alone, mounted on a small, light cart with high, narrow wheels, pulled by a single horse. Nemo watched from a distance as a procession of servitors from the Varrus kitchens loaded the cart at mid-morning with a variety of foodstuffs and provisions—clothing and blankets and bedding—and she estimated that the cart contained enough resources to last two people comfortably for perhaps a week. But no second person emerged to join her, and Nemo finally began to hope that this would be her opportunity. Then, sure enough, as noon approached, Luceiia Varrus herself emerged from the house and embraced the other woman, then stood watching and waving as Cassandra rode away alone, handling the reins herself and making a leisurely progress through and beyond the main gates, where she proceeded down the hill.

Nemo followed on foot as far as the gates and watched the cart as it turned onto the eastward road towards the great Roman high road that ran north and south the length of Britain. Then she went directly to the stables and saddled her own mount. After that, it took only a few moments to collect her kit from where she had left it in care of the stableman, and she was soon on her own way, occasioning neither notice nor comment as she walked her horse out of the gates and down the hill. Only when she had reached the bottom of the hill did she kick her big bay gelding into a canter and then to a full gallop, allowing the animal to stretch its muscles while it devoured the distance separating its rider from her quarry in the light cart ahead of them.

Moving at full speed, Nemo missed the place where Cassandra had swung off the east road and headed southward, to her right. Fortunately a brief glimpse of startling yellow attracted her attention as she galloped past. She then hauled hard on the reins, bringing her horse to a skidding halt, and stood up, first in her stirrups and then climbing up onto her saddle, to see better over the bushes that intervened between her and the spot where Cassandra, still moving at the same leisurely pace, was disappearing into a grove of trees, headed towards the low hills.

Aware that she would never have seen where Cassandra had gone had it not been for the brightness of the other woman's clothing, Nemo realized that she had best take care that nothing about her costume betray her in the same way. It was a summer afternoon, and her armour, cuirass and helmet were of burnished metal. A flash of reflected sunlight could easily indicate her presence. Moving quickly then. Nemo removed her helmet and hung it from her saddle horn by its chin-strap. She then unrolled her long, thick riding cloak and wrapped it about herself, covering the shiny parts of her armour completely. She wrapped one end of the cloak around the dangling helmet, covering it and tucking the material between the helmet and her saddle. That done, she struck away from the road again, pushing her horse hard towards the spot where she had last seen Cassandra.

For two hours she followed Cassandra high into the hills, far from any path, noticing how faint and indistinct were the signs that even narrow, iron-tired cartwheels left in the hard ground. Unwilling to trust in Cassandra's supposed deafness. Nemo rode quietly throughout her pursuit, as careful to make no sound as she was to remain unseen, and kept far away from her quarry. But then Cassandra vanished, and Nemo thanked the gods that she had been watching when it occurred. Had she not, she might have fled in superstitious terror when her quarry vanished between one heartbeat and the next. What she saw was Cassandra and her cart apparently sinking into the earth, turning backwards as they did so. Frightened, Nemo nevertheless gathered her reserves of strength and crept forward, using extreme caution and preparing herself to flee at every step, to investigate what she had seen, and when she reached the point where Cassandra had vanished, she sat high in her saddle, looking down at the entrance to a steep path that doubled back on itself, shrouded on either side by dense bushes, and descended rapidly into a declivity impossible to detect from more than ten paces distant. She pulled on her reins and raised herself until she stood fully upright in her stirrups and gazed around her, her head tilted backwards in an attempt to gauge, from the height and density of the bushes and trees in front of her, just how large and deep this fold in the earth might be.

She sat for a few moments, her eyes unfocused, gazing into the middle distance, and then, afraid to hesitate any longer, she breathed in deeply through her nostrils, gritted her teeth and then used both hands to draw the long sword from between her shoulders, reaching back with her left to push the blade upwards behind her back and then drawing it down and forward over her shoulder with her right. She hefted the weapon for a moment, feeling its balance, and then she kicked her horse forward slowly down the steeply sloping path.

Within moments she was completely shut in by the growth around her, as the bushes on either side of the narrow track shot straight up and then arched beneath their own weight to meet over her head. Summer leaves filtered out and almost quenched the afternoon sunlight, so that Nemo and her mount moved downward through a thickening, green-tinctured gloom. She moved her head constantly from side to side, her nerves stretched tighter than she could ever recall, but there was nothing untoward to see. The ground rose steeply on one side of her and fell away at the same angle on the other, and the dense growth of long, rank clumps of grass, spindly saplings and springy undergrowth seemed to creep towards her from both directions.

She could see that the track she followed now had once been wider, but its edges had been swallowed by the encroaching grass and twiggy bushes, so that in many places the narrow wheels of Cassandra's coach had straddled the pathway completely, leaving tracks in the long grass on either side and sometimes even stripping the bark from fragile saplings. Nemo reached out with her sword, and half of its blade was among the bushes before her arm was fully extended. She knew immediately that she had drawn the wrong weapon and that her sword was useless here, its blade too long for such thick growth and cramped quarters. She reined her horse to a halt and replaced the long blade carefully in its harness, trying to move without making a sound and grateful that she was wearing the long cloak to muffle the grating sounds of iron upon iron as the sword slid down into the ring between her shoulders. When it was safely lodged in place, Nemo bent forward slowly and gathered up the heavy iron flail that hung from a strong hook set into the frame of her saddle close by her right knee. It was an invention of Uther's, a treasured gift to her. She had even painted it a dull, deep red to match his exactly. She slipped her right hand through the leather strap and grasped the weapon's thick wooden shaft, clasping it close to the bottom end, where the iron ring that anchored the short chain was riveted to the wood. Holding it thus, she could feel the weight of the heavy iron ball at the end of the chain, dangling at the level of her right stirrup, pulling her arm straight down by her side. She felt better holding the flail than she had felt with the sword. She kicked her horse forward again and rounded the next narrow bend in the track with less trepidation than she had felt before.

After negotiating several more bends and the steepest part of the incline—a straight, plunging slope of at least forty paces that turned back on itself and stretched as far again without relief—she eventually arrived at the bottom and moved slowly forward until she could look through a screen of trees into a small and very pleasant valley, whose existence she would never have suspected or believed.

It was neither very long nor very wide, probably less than sixty paces at its longest axis, she estimated, and perhaps as long again on its widest, but it was deep and well hidden, steep-sided and secure and filled with trees, mainly birch and willow, as far as she could see. The centre of the place was taken up by a tiny jewel of a lake that seemed to be fed by a sliding fall of water that ran almost soundlessly down the full length of the steep rock face that formed the far side of the depression. From the plunging angle of the rock face's descent, Nemo could guess that the lake, while small, was very deep and probably extremely cold even in summer. A narrow shelf or ledge of beach ran along the water's edge closest to where she sat on her horse, and in the distance, almost completely screened by the trees that flanked it, someone had built a tiny stone hut. The scene was idyllic, and her first sight of it banished any doubts Nemo had held about where Merlyn had hidden Cassandra for so long.

As the thought occurred to her, the door in the stone hut opened and Cassandra herself emerged, holding a basket of some kind that she carried towards a spot that was marked by fire-blackened stones. Kneeling down carefully, she set out very conscientiously to build a fire, and Nemo watched her, fascinated, as a spark instantly— perhaps magically—leaped to flame, reminding her of why she was there. Her chest filled up with fear again. Nemo believed, with all her being, that she was about to die, here in this hidden place, but she was determined that she would die as Nemo the Dragon and that she would take the witch with her into the other world.

Now she lowered her helmet over her head and hooked together the cheek-flaps that would protect her face. Then she hefted the dangling ball of her flail and kicked her horse forward, out of concealment, rowelling the beast savagely with her spurs. Startled, the animal stomped and snorted, leaping sideways and attempting to rear up in protest, but Nemo reined it in brutally, pulling its head hard down and forcing it forward.

The woman in the distance looked up and froze for a moment, attracted by either the noise or the horse's movements. Nemo neither knew nor cared which; she knew only that she had been seen and that her life was now in dire peril. Digging her spurs deep, she launched herself towards the woman at the far end of the beach.

Cassandra watched her coming for what seemed an age, and then she turned and began running as quickly as she could in her swollen condition towards the cart, where the horse yet stood between the shafts. Nemo spurred harder, believing somehow that if Cassandra reached the cart before she reached Cassandra, then her life would be over and Uther's would be forfeit. As she thundered up to the cart, she hauled herself up in her stirrups and swung the heavy flail over her head, whirling it twice and then smashing it down in the killing stroke.

As the lethal ball came whistling towards her, Cassandra lost her footing and fell on one knee. The ball missed her, hissing over her right shoulder and striking the side of the cart, where it tore one of the thick oak side panels loose from its mountings, splintering the wood and twisting the iron bar that secured the panel in place. Whimpering with terror, Cassandra turned and stooped lower, scrambling beneath the belly of the enormous horse that reared above her. She threw herself sideways, to her right, as Nemo's horse reared and turned in the opposite direction. She turned again, this time to her left, and ran away from the water towards the trees.

Nemo's blood pounded in her ears and a wild cry rose from her throat as her horse, with a thunderous hammering of hooves, struck the witch's right shoulder, throwing her forward and off balance.

Nemo's heavy, hard-swung iron ball caught her beneath the right collarbone with massive, crushing force and lifted her into the air, throwing her as though she were weightless back towards the water's edge. She went spinning through the air until she hit a willow tree by the waterside and fell sideways across a low branch, to hang there like a sagging, swollen sack from which blood poured to the ground in thick, ropy runnels.

Cassandra was dead with that first fearsome blow, but Nemo took no chance of failure. She wrenched her horse around and brought it up again onto its hind legs, where she could brace herself in the stirrups and create sufficient momentum to deliver a full swing, and this time the killing ball crashed into and through the swollen lump of belly that contained Cassandra's unborn child. The force of this terrible blow knocked the body into the shallow waters at the lake's edge.

Then, her vision blurred and her heart banging against her ribs with terror, Nemo clambered down from the saddle and fell to her knees, where she swayed for long moments before falling forward to lie full length, face down upon the grass, shuddering and shaking.

Later, much later, when she had convinced herself that she was still alive and had won the battle with the witch. Nemo began to wonder at the ease with which she had achieved her victory. She had expected unearthly powers to come against her from the underworld, She had expected to be faced with fire-breathing furies and the powers of the damned. She had expected to be exhausted by the effort required to fight, let alone kill, a witch. And she had expected, most of all, to die herself in her quest for victory. But none of those things had happened. She was still alive and still breathing, and slowly, frighteningly, she was beginning to regret the lack of all of the things she had expected . . . beginning to wish she had felt even one of them. Any one of them.

At one point, before she could clench her jaws and close her mind and thrust the disturbing thought aside, it occurred to her that her victory could hardly have been easier had the dead witch been an ordinary, pregnant, helpless woman.

And once that thought had entered her mind, it refused to leave again, and she had to force herself to go and examine the dead witch.

Nemo knelt above the shattered body and gazed at the destruction she had wreaked. She tried to tell herself that this was Cassandra's witchcraft, that she could bend people's minds and make them believe that what they saw was different from what it actually was. This woman, had she been allowed to live, would have been a danger and a threat to Uther, and so to all that Nemo held to be of value. But gazing at the dead woman, who lay on her back in the shallow waters of the lake's edge, her face above the surface, eyes closed and skin unmarred in any way, she found herself amazed at its beauty and at the serenity stamped on it, despite the awful fury of her death. The dead face bore no trace of pain or fear, as though someone had come along and soothed her terror at the moment of her passing. Nemo found herself staring at the gentleness of that face, afraid to think of what she was thinking. She forced herself to stand upright and walk away, and as she went, the flail that still hung from her wrist by its leather loop dragged behind her through the water and then bumped on the narrow strip of sandy grass that formed the beach.

Two ways to kill a witch: fire and iron. But the iron used may never again he used by human hand.

Nemo spread her feet, slipped her hand free of the leather loop and swung the iron flail over her head until she could hear it hissing through the air and doubted that she could swing it any harder. Then, at the top of her swing, she opened her hand and released the weapon, knowing that it would soar and fall into the centre of the little lake and be lost in its depths. But she had misjudged her throw. The weapon, released, flew for more than twenty paces, but to her right rather than forward, so that it struck the water quite close to the bank, yet sufficiently far from the body of the woman to escape detection.

She walked over in that direction to see if she could see anything, but there was nothing visible. The flail had landed in a bed of reeds and had plunged deep into the muddy bottom. It was no great loss, other than in the fact that it was the first such weapon ever made. Since then, however, it had become quite common to see troopers riding with them hanging from their saddles. Once Uther and Merlyn had begun to use them, others had rushed to copy their design, because the things were far less difficult to make than a good sword. Nemo would quickly find a new one.

She turned and walked back to where the body of the witch Cassandra lay sprawled in a shapeless, sodden tumble of bloodied limbs. The edges of her clothing drifted and eddied in the shallows and the surrounding water had turned pink with blood, so that the skin of the dry, upturned face was creamy white by contrast. Fascinated, Nemo stared down at it for a long time, reminding herself of all that had occurred. Finally she nodded, satisfied that what she had done was right, and as she did so, she caught a movement from the corner of her eye. It was completely unexpected and her startled reaction was out of all proportion to what she had seen.

It was Cassandra's horse tossing its head, and now Nemo wondered what to do about it. It was still tethered between the shafts of the wagon, and she knew it would be cruel merely to leave it behind that way. And yet if she were to release it or even leave it harnessed to the cart, the animal would eventually make its way directly home to Camulod, where its arrival would set alarums clanging and precipitate the discovery of the witch's death. She heaved a deep sigh, knowing she had no options, and crossed to where the beast stood waiting for her, twisting its head to see her as she drew close to it.

The long cavalry sword made a slithering sound as it cleared the iron carrying ring at her back, and she held it out at arm's length, aiming it at the downward sloping column of the horse's neck. But then she thought about the bones and muscles in that massive neck and changed her mind, deciding to use her wickedly sharp double- edged dagger instead. She bent forward slightly, reaching completely beneath the horse's neck, and then plunged the pointed blade upwards into the animal's jugular on the other side with all her strength. Then, gripping the hilt strongly with both hands, she pulled the long blade back strongly towards her, slashing and slicing hard and deep. The horse barely made a sound, beyond an initial grunt of pain, and its leap of surprise was stillborn. Blood sprayed everywhere and the animal fell immediately to its knees and died quickly, still between the shafts.

Nemo stepped away from it and looked down at herself, shaking her head in disgust. Her entire lower half was drenched in blood. She found a length of white cloth in the back of the cart and carried it to the water's edge, well clear of the spot where the dead witch lay. There she soaked it and used it to clean the worst of the blood from her armour, scrubbing at the tiny bronze rings that covered the heavy leather leggings of her armoured trousers.

When she was finished, she dropped the cloth in the water and left it there. She then took one last look around the lovely little valley, noticing that the mid-afternoon sun had already started bending the shadows slightly towards the east. She glanced once more time towards the body in the water, wondering how long it would be before someone found it, and then she sighed and spat loudly before crossing to her horse and pulling herself up into the saddle. She had decided not to return to Camulod for the evening meal, as she had originally planned, but to strike out immediately for Cambria and home instead, pitching her camp that night wherever sunset found her. Within three days she would be in Tir Manha again with Uther, secure in the knowledge that the threat to him had been removed and that he and his cousin Merlyn could be friends again.

Chapter TWENTY-ONE

Within an hour of Nemo's departure from Camulod in pursuit of Cassandra, Uther himself rode into the Colony from the west, accompanied by a small group of hand-picked companions. It was obvious from their appearance that he and his party had been riding hard and taking little or no time to rest, because their horses were lathered and caked with dust and sweat and their riders looked little better. Uther rode through the main gates at a fast trot, barely nodding an acknowledgment to the guards on duty, and made his way directly to the administrative building, where he strode to the Duty Officer's station and demanded to see Merlyn Britannicus immediately. The Duty Officer that day was Jacobus, a junior decurion, an officer trainee, which was not unusual, since there was seldom any need for seniority in making the kinds of decisions that were called for in the middle of a normal working day in the administrative building.

From the way Uther phrased his demand to see Merlyn, Jacobus knew that his response was not going to be well received. Snapping to attention and saluting Uther, he spun and clicked his fingers to attract the attention of one of the runners on duty, knowing as he did so that the gesture was unnecessary. The runner was already standing by his side, gawking from him to Uther and back, waiting for an explosion. Jacobus sent the fellow running to bring the Legate Titus, the Commander of Camulod in Merlyn's absence, then cleared his throat and informed Uther that Merlyn had left Camulod several days earlier to ride eastward into the Saxon-occupied area of Britain known as the Saxon Shores in order to attend a debate among Christian churchmen in the old Roman town of Verulamium, approximately thirty miles northwest of Londinium, the former administrative centre of Roman Britain. Jacobus awaited the explosion, but it did not come. Uther drew in his breath sharply, making a tiny, sucking sound of annoyance between his teeth, and then nodded abruptly.

"I'll wait for Titus. Where should I wait?"

Jacobus indicated the cubiculum against the outer wall of the building that contained the commanding officer's table and chair and was illuminated by a long, low, shuttered window. Uther nodded his thanks and asked the young man for his name before he made his way inside to wait.

Moments later. Titus himself swept in from the courtyard outside and joined him, closing the door behind himself and leaning back against it, slightly out of breath.

"Titus." Uther nodded, smiling at his old friend. "You look well, but you sound a little puffed."

"Age, Uther, age. I don't have the resilience I once had."

Titus straightened and crossed to embrace Uther with both arms. Then he stepped back and held the younger man by the shoulders to peer up at him. "It will hit you, too, one of these days, no matter how immortal you believe yourself to be. Before you know it, the masseurs will be plucking grey hairs out of your head, and your joints will be starting to feel stiff on cold mornings."

"They already do, my friend. How long do you expect Merlyn to be gone?"

"At least a month. Why, what's wrong?"

Uther's face had darkened, his anger, always sudden, ignited by this unexpected complication.

"Everything. Everything's wrong, damnation! Can we send after him, bring him back?"

"Not easily. We don't know with certainty what route he'll follow. He is on his way to Verulamium for a debate with a party of two hundred . . . more of an ambassadorial journey than anything else, really. His mission is to demonstrate Camulod's strength to whoever might turn up for this debate among the bishops."

"What debate? And what in the name of all the gods at once is Merlyn doing among bishops?"

"I'll tell you in a moment, but first tell me what's going on and why you're here. I understood you had no plans to leave Tir Manha this year. What changed your mind?"

Uther moved around behind the table, punching one hand into the open palm of the other. "Gulrhys Lot, what else? Nemo had barely left with my last dispatches for Merlyn when I received word that Cornwall is seething with armed men again. Where is Nemo, by the way? Is she still here in Camulod?"

Titus shrugged. "I have no idea, but I doubt it. She delivered the dispatches a week ago."

"Word came in to Tir Manha that Lot might be making a nuisance of himself again, that Cornwall is an armed camp. My first reaction was to ignore it. It didn't seem to me that Lot could have raised another army in so short a time after the thrashing we gave him less than a year ago. But then I remembered the nature of the beast, and so I sent out scouts. Didn't waste any time. I sent them on the run, the same day the report came in, with orders to examine anything unusual that they could find down there and then bring the information back to me as quickly as they could. I sent two scouting expeditions, one by sea and the other overland. The overland group was a squad of my own Dragons, some of my very best.

"The seagoing party, two galleys, came back first, within a week. They had barely crossed the river estuary before they saw action, and they didn't even begin to approach the open sea. They were fortunate to escape capture as it was. According to the two captains, the entire northern coast of the peninsula down there is alive with shipping, so it's a safe wager the south coast will be, too. They told me there are vessels arriving from every direction every day, filling up every little bay along the shoreline and unloading men, then setting off again, presumably to transport more.

"That was all I needed to hear. I know Lot inherited his father's love of assembling mercenaries from beyond the seas, so I decided to ride over here myself and get our joint preparations underway without any waste of time. But even before we could leave to come here, the other scouting party came back, too . . . or what was left of it. They had set out to ride directly southwest into Cornwall, travelling cautiously and hoping to attract no unwelcome attention, holding to the west of Isca where the land is bleak and barren. But they were less than sixty miles into Lot's territories when they were found and challenged and forced to turn back. By that time, fortunately, they had seen all they needed to see, but they had to fight every mile of the way home, and they lost more than half their number.

"Lot has a large army gathering down there, Titus, and there's only one way for him to bring it out, as you and I both know. I don't think we have any time at all to waste sitting around talking. But I haven't even mentioned the most important information we uncovered with our overland expedition. The army my people found down there—the southern army, I've been calling it—is only half the story. According to the prisoners taken and questioned by my men, the call has gone out for an enormous assembly of men, all under Lot's banner, to take place to the northeast of here close by Aquae Sulis. When they are all together, they will start a systematic devastation of the towns in this region, beginning with Aquae itself and Glevum."

"What? But that's insane! There's nothing left in Aquae Sulis to plunder, nor in Glevum. Twenty years ago, even ten years ago, there might have been some point to that, but the towns are empty shells nowadays. Lot must know that."

Uther nodded, his face expressionless. "He probably does, but it won't make any difference to him. He is selling the idea of plunder for the taking. The picture of fat towns waiting to be sacked and looted is what he's using to raise his army, and you can be sure the rabble he's attracting have no idea his promises are empty. When they find out the truth, they'll be murderous, but Lot will be back in Cornwall by then, and we'll be the ones left to deal with it, on top of everything else."

"Hmm." Titus's face was still, his eyes narrowed. "What do your people tell you about Lot's preparations? Are they far advanced? And are any of his forces trained?"

"If any of them are, they'll be units who have fought together before now, on the continent, for the Romans, and they'll be in a minority. The vast majority of his people, as always, will be savages. Fearsome enough in hand-to-hand fighting, but totally lacking in any kind of co-ordinated skills. As for how close they are to being ready to move, your guess would be as good as mine. But simple prudence would dictate that we take no chances and incur no risks by being complacent."

Titus nodded. "Look, we can't rely on catching up with Merlyn and bringing him back here. He has been gone too long. My people would not even know where to begin searching for him. We know that he headed east originally, by way of Sorviodunum and Venta, but that is really all we know. He intended to improvise from then on, depending upon what he discovered along the way, and there is no certainty that he would even stay on the main roads if he encountered trouble at any point. So you and I had best decide on a campaign of our own, lacking his involvement."

Uther grimaced. "So be it. I don't like it but there seems to be no other choice. Tell me about this gathering in Verulamium . . . what did you call it, a debate?"

"Aye, that's what it is . . ." Titus launched into a brief description of the issues at stake among the Christian community in Britain, reminding him of the visiting monastic priests who a few years earlier had threatened all the people of Camulod with excommunication and damnation if they did not immediately renounce all their former beliefs and do as they were bidden for the salvation of their souls. Merlyn's father, Picus Britannicus, had refused to be bullied or browbeaten by the zealots and had expelled them from the Colony, declaring publicly in Council that he would make no decisions regarding the safety and welfare of his people's immortal souls until he had heard the reasoning underlying such sweeping changes clearly defined by a source possessing more authority and dignitas than a herd of unwashed, intolerant, wandering priests.

A debate to address this question was to take place within the following month in the great Roman theatre of Verulamium, and Merlyn had decided to attend the gathering, as his father would have, in order to keep track of what was happening within the Church's teachings and equally to ensure that the bishops making these decisions should be aware that there was a strong Christian centre of influence in Camulod, far to the southwest.

Uther himself had never been more than nominally Christian, seeing no more appeal in the Christian god than he found in any of the other, older gods of Cambria and Britain, or even Rome. He had been baptized a Christian years earlier, but that had been to please his grandmother. It had nothing to do with any feeling of personal conviction. Now he looked at Titus, his arms crossed tightly over his chest, frustration stamped on his features.

"You believe this journey of his—this expedition all the way into foreign, hostile territory—is worthwhile, even though it calls him away when he is needed here by his own people? This is not merely grandiose nonsense?"

Titus shrugged. "What should I know of such things? Is it not enough that Merlyn thinks so?"

For a few moments, Uther looked as though he would answer that with an angry negative, but then he sighed and accepted the inevitable.

"Yes, well, I suppose we will leave him to get on with it, then, for lack of any real alternative, and we will make our own plans for how we defend ourselves during his absence." Uther dragged a hand wearily down his face, closing his eyes as though to banish his frustration and focus his thoughts, "We should be combining our forces, Camulod and Pendragon Cambria, more than we have ever done before, melding bowmen and infantry in an army group consisting of two or possibly three compact, sell sufficient armies, just as Picus Britannicus described to us a thousand times. Each army will be self- reliant and will have set battle tactics, but all three will function as a solid legion whenever the need arises. And surrounding and protecting them, heavy cavalry strike formations, mobile and hard-hitting, radiating in all directions, but always launching from the central hub formed by the army. What think you?"

Titus smiled. "I think Picus Britannicus taught you well. And you know I would never disagree with a style of warfare I was taught to fight in boyhood. Fortunately, we have already begun training more of our people to fight together, combining their different skills, after last year's events. I see no great difficulty facing us there, other than the obvious lack of time to prepare. Let me send for Flavius. I have the feeling we're going to need his input right from the outset."

Uther remained in Camulod for three days on that occasion and slept on each of the three nights in the home of his grandmother. From Luceiia, during one long evening's talk, he learned the story of Deirdre's pregnancy and Merlyn's marriage, and if he felt any pain over his evident exclusion from his cousin's nuptials, he said nothing of it, remembering the suspicions Merlyn had harboured over the night Deirdre, who at that time had still been called Cassandra, had been attacked and brutally raped. He also heard from his grandmother the strange story of how Deirdre's real name was discovered when she was reunited with her brother Donuil after years of separation.

The remainder of Uther's time in Camulod was spent in conference with the interim Joint Commanders Titus and Flavius and the senior staff officers of the armies and garrison of Camulod, drawing up plans to deal with the invasion they all believed would come from Cornwall and trying to cover as many contingencies as they could envision. By the time he left to return to Tir Manha on the fourth morning after his arrival, it had been decided that Uther would command an entire brigade of heavy cavalry, one thousand strong, during the coming campaign. In the meantime, he must return to Cambria and raise as many Pendragon bowmen as he could within the month, bringing them back to Camulod to train with the infantry for as long as circumstances would permit.

Before Uther had even departed from the fortress, the hard-core training of both infantry and cavalry had begun, and the great plain at the base of the hill of Camulod was once more obscured by clouds of dust from dawn until dusk each day.

As soon as he returned to Tir Manha, Uther rode out again, this time to raise warriors from the westernmost territories of the Griffyd clans, where another young Chief called Dergyll ap Griffyd, who was not much older than Huw Strongarm, had succeeded Cativelaunus of Carmarthen. The old man had fallen into an icy mountain stream swollen with melting snow at the end of the previous winter and died. Uther and Dergyll had known each other very briefly during one boyhood summer long before and had formed a mutual liking and admiration at that time, so it was easy for them to get along with each other again after a gap of many years. The expedition was a great success, and Uther returned to Tir Manha accompanied by Dergyll himself and a large company of several hundred warriors.

He arrived, however, to discover that fresh word had come from Camulod and that his mother, Veronica, wished to speak with him immediately. Intrigued, he went directly to his mother's house, and she told him about how Merlyn's young wife Deirdre and the babe she had been carrying had been murdered. A courier had arrived from Camulod three days before, bearing a letter from Luceiia Britannicus in which she described the little that she knew about what had happened. She had known where Deirdre was, and in fact had planned the expedition with the girl, who had been pining for the solitude she had loved while living in her secluded valley for months, and so a week and more had passed without Luceiia being unduly worried. But when the younger woman had failed to return as promised during the second week, Luceiia had grown concerned and asked Daffyd, Merlyn's Druid friend, to visit the young woman and make sure that she was well.

Daffyd found a scene of carnage: Merlyn's young wife slaughtered, her unborn babe destroyed with her, her decomposing body floating in the lake, bloated and ravaged beyond recognition. By Daffyd's initial estimate, later confirmed by other findings, Deirdre had been dead for at least a week, perhaps longer, by the time he found her, and the cause of her death had been a brutal battering, administered by someone of great strength. Daffyd discounted a sexually motivated attack from the moment of his first objective assessment of the crime, judging by the fact that the corpse was still fully clothed, even to her loincloth and other undergarments. And yet robbery could not have been the reason, either, as nothing had been taken from the wagon.

Daffyd judged then that it would be best for everyone—he was thinking most particularly of Luceiia's sensibilities—if he were simply to bury the sad remains of both mother and unborn child as close as possible to where he had found them and to recommend them to the gods as creatures worthy of respect and kindness. Having laid them to rest beside the lake beneath the sacred trees— all trees were sacred in the eyes of Druids—he then searched the entire locality thoroughly and painstakingly, looking for signs or traces of the unknown assailant. He found nothing, however, apart from an area of scuffed and trampled earth that might have been torn up by the hooves of an attacker's horse or, equally likely, by Deirdre's own cart horse, which lay close by, dead in its harness.

He stood vigil by the young woman's grave that night, praying over her, and then, convinced that there was nothing further to be learned at the scene, he returned to Camulod bearing his tragic news.

Luceiia withdrew to her rooms, where she remained in mourning for two days, greatly distressed by the knowledge that word could not reach Merlyn in Verulamium in time to bring him home ahead of his scheduled return. By the time the messengers crossed the entire country to reach him, if they survived the journey at all, it would already be nigh on the time for him to set out for home on his return journey.

Uther sat listening in silence as his mother told him the story and read to him from his grandmother's letter. When she had finished, he rose to his feet and stood over her for a while, gripping her shoulder tightly with one hand, incapable of speech. Then he turned away and walked from the room.

Concerned by the look of him as he walked away, Veronica rose quickly and followed him, watching as he left the house and made his way directly to the cluster of long buildings that had been erected several years before as stables for his cavalry mounts. The sullen trooper Veronica disliked, the woman-man called Nemo, had been standing outside the house, waiting for him to come out, but he waved her off impatiently, and she instantly fell back and walked away, plainly knowing her superior well enough to gauge his mood and know she was not welcome for the present.

Veronica stayed back and waited and watched until her son emerged again from the stables a short time later, riding his huge chestnut gelding, and as he disappeared towards the main gates of Tir Manha, looking neither to right nor left, she turned and signalled to a passing trooper, bidding him find Garreth Whistler and bring him to her house immediately.

"Are you ever going to speak again?"

Uther turned his head very slowly and threw Garreth Whistler a long, considering look, then turned back and kicked his horse forward, down the sloping bank to where the narrow river bustled through its gorge.

Garreth dipped his head in a private gesture that said. Well, I tried, and followed horse and rider down the steep incline. He had caught up to Uther easily, within five miles of Tir Manha, because Uther had been making no attempt to move quickly, but he had made no effort thereafter to impose himself upon the King, content simply to ride along half a length behind him and wait to be noticed. Uther, however, had paid him no attention, apart from a swift glance to determine who it was that had followed him, and more than an hour had elapsed since then. Garreth could tell, however, that Uther was not displeased by his presence.

They had been sitting side by side for almost half of the past half hour, simply gazing down at the torrent in the gully below, and now Uther was approaching the edge of the fast-flowing stream and rising in his stirrups prior to dismounting. Garreth waited until he had dismounted completely and moved to sit on the trunk of a fallen tree by the riverside, and then he swung down from his horse, too, and dug into one of his saddlebags. From it he withdrew a cloth containing a cold fowl, a loaf of bread and a small, stoppered horn filled with salt, all provided by Uther's mother. He carried the bundle lo where Uther sat on the tree trunk and perched beside him, placing the cloth between them and untying its knot.

"Here, eat. Your mother told me what happened. She also told me you must be starved."

Uther glanced down at the food and shook his head, still apparently not ready to speak.

Garreth shrugged and ripped a leg off the bird, then sprinkled it profligately with salt and bit off a succulent mouthful. He chewed with relish for a while, then stuffed the meat into one cheek and spoke around it. "You're acting as though this was personal to you . . . as though you had known the woman herself . . . What was her name? Deirdre?"

Finally, Uther spoke. "Deirdre, yes, but she was Cassandra before that. You never knew about the fight we had, Merlyn and I, the night Cassandra was attacked, did you?"

"No, not really. All I know is that after a lifetime of seldom being more than an arm's length apart, you two spent nigh on a year without seeing each other."

Uther shook his head and heaved a great sigh. "Do you know, Garreth, that to this day I regret that night. But even at the height of it, while Merlyn and I were almost at each other's throats, I had no notion of how great the rift would grow to be between us . . ."

Garreth's voice, when next he spoke, was pitched low. "The two of you were at each other's throats?"

"Aye, almost, or I was at his. I was in a foul frame of mind that night, spoiling for a fight."

Garreth said nothing, made no move that might interrupt the mood as Uther continued, speaking as though to himself.

"That was the night Cassandra was attacked—raped and beaten so badly that she almost died, and for days everyone thought she would. You were in Tir Manha when that happened, not in Camulod. I can remember how glad I was to see you when I rode home. I was still angry, still bitter, still seeking to find blame in others for what I myself had done."

"That sounds ominous. What had you done?"

"Everything that I ought not to have done. I vented my anger on a little girl, for one thing. That was my first wrong step."

"I don't follow you."

"Cassandra, the girl. I abused her, treated her abominably, tried to thrash her. That's when Merlyn and I first locked horns. He knocked me down and pinned me there until the girl could run away to safety."

Garreth made no response to that, other than to raise his eyebrows in a silent, cynical query.

"On my life, Garreth, it is no jest."

"Hmm. Then I think you had better tell me about it. What did you do to the girl?"

"Ahh . . . well, it was . . . You know the kind of thing. Merlyn and I were in the games room with a few willing girls, and everything was . . . as usual. But then I noticed . . . I noticed Cassandra's mouth. She was there in the room with us. Watching us, watching everything." His voice tailed away into a long silence. "I noticed her mouth, and once I had noticed it I could not rid myself of the thought of how it would feel. . ."