Camulod Chronicles Book 9 - The Eagle Read online

  "How do you feel!' he asked then, all traces of levity gone as he leaned forward to peer closely into my eyes. I had had a deep-seated headache earlier in the day, probably caused by over-tiredness born of little sleep in the previous three nights, but it had abated steadily as we traveled and now my head was clear. I reached down for our helmets and clutched my own under one arm as I held the King's out to him.

  "I'm fine now. But I'll feel better when I'm warmer."

  Our horses were ground-tethered just outside the cave, still saddled. We brushed the melting snow off our saddles and remounted, then made our way down the slope to the wooded area at the bottom.

  Within an hour we were back inside the cave and had a healthy fire crackling between us, its light sending shadows dancing high on the vaulted ceilings at the very rear of what had turned out to be a huge and ancient cavern. I was conscious of the melted snow steaming gently around the periphery of the fire pit. It was snowing harder than ever outside now, the swirling flakes agitated by a keen, biting wind that had sprung up just as we put our horses to the upwards slope of the hillside. Each animal had dragged up a large, rope-tethered bundle of dead branches, and we had scampered uphill beside them, clutching their bridles and slipping and sliding on the treacherous slope.

  Once back at the cave, our first concern had been to light a fire, and I had spent some time attending to that, working carefully in a corner far from the gusting winds, plying flint and steel against dried moss and wood shavings until we had a flame that would not go out. As soon as we were sure we could leave the fire to burn safely on its own, even though it was not yet as alive as it ought to be, we off-saddled and led our animals into the rear of the cave, where we rubbed them down and left them with their nose bags on, contentedly chewing on a double handful of oats apiece while we busied ourselves in the main cabin, seeing to our own comfort. Arthur wielded my battle-axe expertly, chopping our hard-won fuel into manageable pieces while I laid kindling for a second fire, this time in the shallow pit inside the cave that had been well used for the same purpose frequently in the past. I then carried the live coals from the first fire, over in the sheltered corner, to ignite the main one. The wood we had found was dry and well seasoned, so it burned almost without smoke, and the little smoke that there was drifted straight up and disappeared into some kind of natural flue in the overhead rock.

  Warm and reasonably comfortable now that our work was done, we sat with our saddles bracing our backs, eating cold rations together in companionable silence, aware, because we had checked carefully to be certain of it, that no hint of our fire could be detected from the darkness outside the cave.

  I could tell from the expression on Arthur's face that something was troubling him and I knew him well enough by now to know, too, that whatever it was, it was far from being a casual, passing annoyance. I said nothing, however, knowing from four years of close friendship with the man that he would speak when he was ready.

  Finally he sniffed and folded the remains of his meal into a square of cloth before stuffing it back into the leather scrip at his waist.

  "Chariots, you said. What about them?"

  I knew better than to comment on the fact that more than an hour had elapsed since I last mentioned them. "I've never seen a war chariot before. Thought they were used only by the ancients. But I counted nigh on a score of them out there this morning, and they're impressive, dangerous-looking things. Where would Horsa's Danes have found such things here?"

  "Here?" Arthur's lips turned down in doubt. "They might not have. I've never seen any here. They probably brought them over with them when they came." He picked up a heavy section of branch and thrust it deep into the flames. "They break down easily enough for shipping, despite the solid look of them. Wheels and axles come apart and are easily stowed, and the bodies are no more than strips of hammered leather, woven over sturdy frames. They'll stack one atop the other. Those Danes riding in them today could have brought the things over years ago—no telling when—and the horses could have been stolen from anywhere. These great Roman roads of ours have reversed the wheels of time, providing causeways to permit our enemies nowadays to put their weapons to the best use they can make of them, with little peril."

  "But they look unassailable, Arthur, and most of them had blades attached to the wheel hubs. They will cause havoc among our horsemen when they join battle, with their weight and bulk and speed."

  The King pursed his lips and nodded agreeably, looking remarkably unperturbed, it seemed to me, considering the gravity of what he was acknowledging. But as I was about to learn, he knew more than I did about this topic.

  "Aye, they might," he said quietly, "were they ever able to reach our Horsemen. But they won't be." He brought both hands up in front of him, arms extended, and mimed the actions of pulling a nocked arrow back to his ear. "No chariot builder, here or anywhere else, ever thought to encounter a weapon with the strength and accuracy of our Pendragon longbows, Clothar. You wait and see. My bowmen will kill every single charioteer before any of them can come within a quarter mile of our ranks. No gamble involved, either, my friend—at least, not on our side. An attacking charioteer, whipping his team straight forward towards combat against us, is a dead man. I don't care how gifted or skillful he may be, or how much he weaves and wavers in his approach. Sooner or later, simply because he is steering a chariot, he will have to turn it around and steer it straight towards us in order to attack. And then he will die, before he ever comes within striking range of us. You wait and see."

  Twice in that little address he had told me to wait and see, and I grinned. "I might have to." I waved towards the now-dark cave entrance behind us and beyond our sight. "If the snow keeps falling out there, we won't be able to move, let alone fight a battle tomorrow, so the wait might be a long one before we see anything."

  I estimated we were about three, perhaps four, miles distant from our army, an hour's ride in normal weather, but we had not anticipated the snow coming so early or so heavily, and now I found myself wondering if we could reach our encampment at all, with darkness falling so quickly. We had left our forces camped in a valley to the south that morning, while we rode up into the hills to spy on the enemy formations heading southward towards our position. We had been playing cat and mouse with them for a long time now, remaining ahead of them and keeping out of their sight until we could find a suitable spot in which to bring them to battle on our own terms.

  Arthur shrugged as well as he could beneath armor and cloak. "We may not be able to move, but neither will they, Clothar. Neither will they. Our enemies and their chariots will be immobilized."

  "Hmm."

  "What d'you mean, 'Hmm'?" He turned and frowned at me. "Do you think I'm wrong?"

  "No, not at all."

  "Then why do you sound so doubtful?"

  I spread my hands, palms upward. "I'm not doubtful, Arthur . . . It's simply that I detect a hint of doubt in you yourself." I held my hand up now, to prevent the angry retort I knew would spring to his lips, and spoke before he could deny what I had said. "A hint, I said, the merest hint, and shapeless, I will admit . . . but a hint nonetheless. I sense a doubt in you, my friend."

  "Then damn you for having eyes too sharp for your own good. Now look to your own affairs and talk about something else."

  "And how might I do that, my lord? My affairs are all your affairs. I have none of my own and nothing else to talk about. You know that."

  "Then find some."

  "Of course. I shall. Immediately. As soon as the snow stops,", and with that I set aside the remnants of my own meal and pushed my saddle backwards, away from the fire, then stretched myself out to sleep on the opposite side of the fire pit from him.

  2

  There was no anger in what I said or did in response to Arthur's terseness; we had been friends now for too long for any kind of pettiness to come between us. But Arthur always had much on his mind, far more so than I, and that was only right, since he was the High Ki
ng, with priorities and concerns the like of which I never had to imagine, let alone grapple with. And so I had quickly learned, on the infrequent occasions when his concerns caught up with him and made him less than normally communicative, that the best thing I could do for him was to leave him alone to think a situation through and work out his own solutions. There had been times, too, when, in order to make it possible for him to do that, I had gone so far as to shut him off from other people, fending off and even threatening anyone who sought to interrupt his thoughts, and pointing out that he was the High King after all and had a need to be alone sometimes, simply to think.

  I was almost asleep, drifting in that half world between waking and dreaming, when he spoke again, and I had to shake my head to clear it. I turned as far as I could towards him, hampered by my blanket and twisting my neck around until I could see him. "What did you say?"

  He had been holding a forked twig, twirling it between his finger and thumb, and now he flicked it into the fire at my back, out of my sight "I said we should not have lost Eleron today. That was bad."

  I made no attempt to answer immediately but struggled instead to sit up, making heavy work of it by pulling and tugging at the blanket that restricted me until it finally came free, allowing me to move. Arthur watched in silence as I hurriedly organized myself, sitting upright and then reaching to throw fresh fuel on the fire, which had died down. I was thinking furiously, knowing now at least a part of what was troubling him, but floundering still, unable to see why this one thing should disturb him so deeply. I knew he hated losing men—any commander did—but Eleron had not been killed. Or rather, he had not yet died.

  Eleron was one of our brightest and youngest officers, a brilliantly gifted cavalryman whose like I had seldom seen, even among my own people in Gaul. That afternoon, in a skirmish with a roving group of bandits that should never have occurred had our own guards been properly distributed, he had taken an arrow in his chest, just beneath the cage of his ribs. The shot, hard fired, had burst right through his cuirass, penetrating multiple layers of boiled and hammered leather that should have deflected the arrow's point like solid iron. But the leather at that point in his harness had been imperfectly prepared, brittle and weak where it should have been solid and resilient, and the arrowhead had cracked it and plunged through, its impact lifting young Eleron bodily from the saddle and throwing him backwards over his horse's rump to land on his head.

  The medics had all been poring over the lad within moments, but no one knew if Eleron would survive, and the five interlopers had all been shot down and killed before anyone had a chance to think of questioning them, so it was not known, either, if their presence there at that time had been accidental.

  I wiped the last remnants of the gathering sleep from my eyes with the heel of my hand. "Eleron's not going to die, Arthur. We haven't lost him, not completely."

  He pursed his lips, gazing at me through the smoke that was rising now from the new wood. "He will not ride with us against the Danes, tomorrow or next week or whenever it is to be that we can meet them. So we have lost him, Clothar. And that is one loss too many, after so long."

  I knew what he meant. It was already October, and we had been on campaign without letup or release since the middle of March. Our losses had not been particularly heavy, but their cumulative leaching had been discouraging. We had fought five separate enemy forces in the past seven months, three of those being substantial armies of more than a thousand men, and we had beaten all of them. But each of those defeated forces had withdrawn to some form of refuge afterwards, to lick its wounds and heal itself, whereas we had moved on to deal with the next threat, with no time to heal or to reinforce our strength, absorbing new casualties on top of those that had gone before in other fights. That situation was made worse by the fact that we had won all five of those victories within a mere four months—an astonishing feat that we had only been able to achieve through a once-in-a-lifetime combination of good weather, wonderfully fortuitous timing and a series of geographical coincidences that placed us on three occasions within easy reach of foes who knew nothing of our nearness.

  By the end of the fifth battle, we had felt invincible and believed that God truly was watching over us, and precisely at that time we had received authoritative information that Horsa the Dane was on the march from the eastern territories of the Saxon Shores at the head of a great army and was making his way westwards across the breast of Britain, directly towards our victorious army.

  Horsa was now the paramount chief of all the Danes in Britain who had been clients and landholders of King Vortigern before Horsa killed him and usurped his lands and title. Arthur believed the Danish leader to be the most dangerous of all his enemies, a beacon luring all the disaffected and dispossessed elements in the province the Romans had called Britannia.

  Flushed with our successes until then, we had quickly agreed to support the King in a bold attempt to stamp out this enemy while we could, and we had been playing a complex game for three months since then, attempting to lure the Danes within striking distance of our cavalry without alarming them or alerting them to our presence here in this rocky-hilled region so far away from Camulod.

  We had been falling back before them for weeks now, proceeding with great caution and hiding like timid deer as we tried to lure them into a trap we had devised, but the constant and unrelenting need for caution and secrecy had been wearisome and tedious, and our soldiers—warriors first and above all else—were rapidly losing patience with such interminable prudence. They wanted to fight, to bring matters to a head and have done with delicacy. And then had come the infiltration of our camp today and the attack that struck down Eleron, and hard on the heels of that, this snowstorm that now threatened to make all our careful planning worthless.

  Lost in these thoughts, I suddenly saw that Arthur was staring at me, waiting for me to say something, and I looked away from him, casting my eyes about the shadow-filled walls of the cave. His sword still stood where he had leaned it, my own weapon, less visually impressive but no less lethal, standing beside it. Finally I turned back to him and spoke the words in my mind.

  "It's not simply the loss of Eleron, Arthur. There's more to whatever is upsetting you than that. Eleron is only one man—a good one, certainly, and he might yet live to become one of the best of us, but he is still only one man, and I have the feeling your concerns are more widespread than that."

  He rose to his feet, throwing his blanket over his shoulders as he did so, and walked away, towards the mouth of the cave, where he leaned against the wall and stood staring out into the blackness at the whirling snow. I followed close behind him and joined him in the doorway. The wind had died, and for a spell we stood together side by side, gazing out at the snow and listening to the death-deep silence beyond the threshold. So quiet was the night in front of us that we could clearly hear the hiss of sap in a piece of the wood burning behind us.

  "The men are losing heart, Clothar. I can feel it."

  There. It was out in the open now. It was a starting point, and one that I could address, for I had been thinking about that very point for some time now—for months, if the truth be told—and I had almost brought the matter up to him before this. Now, instantly, I was glad I had said nothing earlier, because the correct words had only now come to my mind and to my tongue, upon hearing him say what he had said.

  "They're only human," I murmured.

  He cocked his head slowly sideways, looking at me askance. "That is . . . profound," he said, his voice dripping sarcasm. "Have I given you any indication of expecting them to be otherwise?"

  I held out one cupped hand to capture a large snowflake. "No, you haven't. I know you know they are human."

  "Thank you, for that."

  "But they don't think you are, not quite."

  He frowned, but said nothing, clearly thinking about what I had said, and I left him standing there in the entrance while I went back into the cavern to where his sword stood prop
ped against the rock. I picked it up by the middle of the sheath and held it in front of me, conscious of his eyes on my back, and then I spun and tossed the weapon towards him. He caught it easily.

  "There is your problem, and also your answer to what ails you and your men."

  He gazed at me for long moments, hefting the sheathed weapon in his hand and looking from it to me and back again. "Clothar," he said eventually, his voice pitched so low that I could barely hear it, "I've told you before that you're a clever lad, but I have absolutely no idea of what you are talking about, so that must make me very stupid."

  "No, not at all, master King. You don't know what I'm talking about because you have never thought about what I am thinking of."

  "Which is . . .?"

  "Magic, Arthur. Invulnerability."

  "Explain." He would no longer give me the satisfaction of seeing him at a loss for understanding. I smiled.

  "Your men, all of them, saw you endowed with that magic sword you're holding now. They saw it come into your possession miraculously, on the day of your coronation, when you drew it from the stone."

  "That is ridiculous. There was nothing miraculous involved. It was mere mummery, designed by Merlyn for effect, no more than that."

  "Then it was wondrously effective. It worked better than well, for it convinced the world."

  Arthur glanced sideways at me, as though to gauge the strength of my belief, then shook his head in terse denial. "Not the world Clothar. The watchers there, perhaps, those who saw it." He raised the sword up in front of him so that he held the cross hilt at the level of his eyes, showing it to me as though to prove a point. "But this is what they saw that day: a sword, no more than that, and much like any other, save that its blade is different. It's an extraordinary sword, I'll grant you, but there is nothing magical about it. It was made by my own great-grandsire, Publius Varrus of Camulod, a sword maker, and it has been in my family's possession for decades, long before my coronation."