Jack Whyte - The Lance Thrower

I took him at his word and did as he suggested, and this time, as he had indicated I might, I came to terms with something that had been troubling me without my being really aware of it. I would be seventeen years old on my next birthday, which meant that Clodas of Ganis-had been ruling in my father’s stead, unchallenged, for that length of time, and my parents were still unavenged.

I was a man now, I realized, fully grown and very different from the boy who had traveled south from Auxerre mere months earlier, and all the impediments to my ability to seek my vengeance had been removed by the simple passing of time. Now Brach was King of Benwick and I had proved my loyalty to him, time and again. I had little doubt that he would demonstrate his loyalty to me by rewarding me with an escort of warriors to help me to reclaim my own throne in Ganis.

I returned to seek Brach out, filled with enthusiasm, and to his credit, he made me welcome and honored his promise to listen to whatever might have emerged from all my thinking. That evening, after the main meal, he dismissed all his attendants so that the two of us could be alone while he listened closely to everything I had to say. When I had finished speaking, however, instead of leaping to his feet and wishing me well as I had anticipated he would, my cousin, in his new role as King Brach, sat silent, musing and nodding his head. Impatient as I was to gain his consent and blessing for the expedition I was planning, I nonetheless saw that he had more on his mind than I knew about and so I disciplined myself to sit in silence and wait for the cousin who was now my King to arrive at a decision.

Brach did not keep me waiting long. He rose quickly to his feet and began to pace back and forth in front of me, talking more volubly and fluently than I had ever heard him speak in all the time I had known him.

He knew my intentions concerning Clodas of Ganis, he told me, and he remembered and acknowledged his father’s promise to assist me in bringing the usurper to justice for the slaughter of my family. That would happen, he told me, and he promised that I would be well supported by warriors from Benwick when the time came for me to march against Clodas. Now, however—and he asked me very graciously to try to see this situation from his viewpoint—was not the time.

Were I to strike out northward now as was my right, he told me, Benwick would not be able to offer me any assistance in my quest. As King of Benwick, he was now constrained by the same concerns that had beset his father, Ban, years earlier, in that he had a domain to govern and a people to serve and sustain and feed, and both kingdom and people were ravaged, weakened, and depleted by war. The hostilities were ended, certainly, but now the entire kingdom had to be rebuilt and returned to its former condition of wealth and strength. He looked me straight in the eye at that point and told me there was a task for me here in Benwick, and that if I would accept it, he would undertake to equip me, once it was completed, with the men and resources I would need to press my campaign against Clodas in the north.

I found no difficulty in seeing things from his newly acquired viewpoint and agreeing that his suggestions were both sensible and worthwhile. Clodas had spent seventeen years in ignorance of the fact that he would die at my hand, and I saw no great hindrance to my plans in permitting him to live a little longer while I attended to other duties. And so I threw myself into rebuilding the affairs and the welfare of our little kingdom—although it seemed anything but little to me at that time—as wholeheartedly as I had committed myself to the war that had ravaged it. Rebuilding, however, meant in this instance exactly what it said, and it involved the physical labor of working side by side with the ordinary people of Benwick, most of them farmers, reerecting the buildings—and sometimes that meant entire villages—that had been destroyed or damaged during the conflict. It was brutal and difficult work, but greatly satisfying in that the results achieved were plainly visible, and somehow another three months slipped by while I sweated and strained and labored with my hands just as painfully and exhaustingly as any farmer who ever cleared a patch of land by cutting and uprooting trees.

I had seen my Aunt Vivienne several times since my uncle’s death, but not often and not with any kind of regularity, and although she invariably treated me with great kindness on those occasions when we did meet, it was plain for me to see that the special relationship I had enjoyed with her during my childhood had faded and been forgotten by her. She had become an old woman in the meantime, as Brach had warned me, and the traumatic events of the brief war between her sons had greatly affected her.

It was Aunt Vivienne, nevertheless, who first reminded me, after Gunthar’s War, that I had promised Germanus I would return to Auxerre, and on that single occasion there was nothing at all about her, either in appearance or demeanor, to suggest that she was in any way less in command of herself and her emotions than she had ever been. On the contrary, she struck me as being very much in command of herself and completely recovered in every way from the outrages perpetrated upon her well-being by her husband’s firstborn son. I had met her by accident that day, passing through an open area within the castle walls on my way to meet Brach. The sun was shining and the air was balmy, and my aunt was sitting alone in a sunny area in one corner of the enclosed yard, near to where I was passing. I had not. seen her at all before she called my name, because I was distracted by my own thoughts, my mind full of the things I had to tell Brach in the course of the brief meeting I had been able to arrange with him, and when I heard her voice, close to me and completely unexpected, it brought me up short, so that I had to grapple with my surprise before I could say anything sensible.

“Aunt Vivienne! What are you doing here?” That wondrous question popped out before I could contain it, and it betrayed the depth of my momentary confusion.

My aunt smiled at me warmly, disconcerting me even further. “I live here, Clothar. This is my home. What else need I be doing, other than being here?”

Her gentle irony brought me to my senses and I felt the blood flushing my cheeks. “Forgive me, Aunt Vivienne,” I muttered, embarrassed without reason. “I simply had not—”

“—expected to find me here,” she completed my thought, smiling again. “Well, I felt no surprise, because I was sitting here thinking about you when you walked through the gateway over there.”

“You were thinking about me? But—” She gave me no reason to embarrass myself further, however, for with both hands she was already holding up an unrolled papyrus. “This is a letter from Germanus, from Auxerre. It was delivered to me yesterday by a traveling priest who carried it from Lugdunum. It was written some time ago, I fear, and he had only then heard of … of the death of the King.” I had noticed, as we all had, that since her husband’s death, Queen Vivienne—she bore the honorific still, at the specific wish of her son Brach—had not spoken Ban’s name, referring to him only as the King. Now I merely noted her use of the term but otherwise ignored it completely, along with the hesitation that had preceded it, and she continued. “The purpose of his letter was of course to express his sympathy and condolences on our loss, and he described for me some of his oldest and fondest memories of the times he and … the King spent together. He is a wonderful writer, you know. But before he finished his letter he wrote at some length about you, and about the plans he has for you.” At that point, very much the Queen I remembered, she paused and tilted her head to one side, as though reconsidering me from some new viewpoint.