Jack Whyte - The Lance Thrower

Tristan nudged me as the wagons left and nodded toward Bors, who stood forlorn, gazing hopelessly after his disappearing love.

“Look at him, poor fellow. I remember how that feels, to watch your first love ride away forever. But he’ll get over it quickly. We all do.” He looked back at the retreating wagons. “That’s quite the young lady. I don’t think I have ever seen anything quite like her.”

I managed to find a smile to mask my disagreement. “Cynthia? She’s unique, I’ll grant you, but I think I may not die of grief if I never see her again.”

He grunted, a single, muffled bark of amusement and agreement. “I believe you there, but I wasn’t talking about the beautiful Cynthia. It was her sister I meant.”

“Who, Maia the Brat?” I laughed aloud. “She is a delight, I’ll not begrudge her that. And she’s quick, and clever, and has a mind of her own. But she’s just a child, for all that, a little girl.”

“A little girl … aye, right. You come back and tell me that in three or four years, if we ever run into her again. I guarantee she’ll be the loveliest creature you’ll ever have seen. She’ll bewitch you, just as her sister bewitched Bors.”

I laughed again. “Not me, Tristan. I’m unbewitchable.”

“She doesn’t think so now, not that one, believe me. She likes you very much, and not in the way you obviously expect of a twelve-year-old.”

“Maia? Come on, man, I’ve barely spoken to the child, and when I did we talked of throwing spears.”

He shrugged elaborately and held up his hands. “Your pardon then, forget I mentioned it, but I know more about that young woman than you do.”

I looked at him in surprise. “You do? How can you?”

He grinned at me and danced away, his arms raised defensively as though he expected me to pummel him with my fists. “I ask questions, and I listen to the answers, and so I learn much more than those who never ask and far, far more than those who ask but never listen.” Knowing he was baiting me, I refused to rise to his goad, but he kept going anyway. “The young woman has a mind of her own … but she has secrets, too. And she would rather be a boy, at this stage in her life, so she trains with weapons when she is at home in Chester, where all her people love her. And her name is not Maia, although she wouldn’t tell you that.”

Suddenly I found that I had lost patience with his bantering. “Don’t play the fool, Tristan, of course her name is Maia. I had it directly from her mother.”

He sobered instantly, looking at me eye to eye, the smile on his face fading as swiftly as the humor left his tone. “Stepmother, Clothar. Demea is her stepmother. The child was born on the first day of May—hence the name, Maia. And Demea and Symmachus met and fell in love in the month of May when the child was three, and they were wed the following May. But only after that did Symmachus start calling the child Maia, to please his new wife and to ingratiate her to the child. Little Maia’s name had been the same as her real mother’s prior to that, and the Lady Demea preferred not to be reminded of that name or to have her husband reminded of it. The child’s real name is Gwinnifer. Mind you, she seldom uses it, save among friends.”

Gwinnifer. I had never heard the name before but it resonated, somehow, in my breast. I swung around on my heel to look after the cavalcade, but they had long since passed out of view, and the road lay empty.

IX

MERLYN

TELL ME ABOUT THE DREAM you had … when Germanus spoke to you.”

I sat gaping at my questioner, wondering how he could have known of such a thing, and he smiled and waved a hand toward a table to his right, where papers and parchments were strewn in apparent chaos.

“Enos sent me a letter telling me about it and alerting me that you were on your way here. He had no way of knowing which of you would find me first—you, personally, or one of his priests—but he sent the letter anyway, anticipating that one of his people might reach me and warn me of your coming. So, when was this dream?”

I shrugged and leaned back into my chair. “I cannot say, with any certainty, Master Merlyn. It was at the end of the winter. Most of the snow had vanished, and Bishop Enos had finally been able to go out into the countryside, about his work. The earliest bloom of flowers had come and gone again … it was the end of March, perhaps early in April.”

I was sitting comfortably, in a folding, curule-style armchair that had a leather seat and back, and the man across from me, in an identical chair, almost smiled, the right side of his mouth twitching upward. “Do you mean to say that you had lost track of time?”

“Completely. It sounds ludicrous, I know, but it is true, nonetheless. We were very bored in Verulamium and it was a long, harsh winter. We would have left much sooner than we did, purely for the sake of moving, had it not been for Perceval’s injury. We were held down by that, waiting for his leg to heal.”

“It did heal, though, and remarkably well.”

“Aye, considering the damage he did to it. He walks now with only the slightest limp, and that will soon be gone. He grows stronger every day. But it was fortunate that his brother Tristan was there with us and knew what needed to be done.”

“Aye, it was indeed. Now tell me about this dream of yours, if you will.”

I shrugged again. “It was a dream, what more can I say? I dreamt it.”

“But it had a salutary effect upon you, did it not? Greater than any dream you had ever known. You told Enos that it was the most realistic dream you had ever had, and that it had forced you to change your plans. It sent you off to look for me, did it not?”

“Aye, all of that is true.”

“And why was that? What made it so different? You will forgive my insistence, I hope, but the matter is important to me.”

I sucked in a deep breath and sat straighter, stifling my impatience with this man whom I had met less than an hour earlier, after pursuing him three times across the width of Britain.

We had arrived back at the gates of Camulod without giving anyone warning of our arrival, but our presence had been noticed even before we reached the outer perimeter of the territories ruled by the colony, and as we approached the castellum , it was to discover that we were expected. Merlyn Britannicus, I was told then, had convened a gathering of Camulod’s senior strategists earlier that day and would be unable to join us until the meeting was completed with its agenda satisfied. Fortunately, the guard commander told me the assembly had been in session since shortly after dawn, and no one expected them to take more than another hour to conclude their business. In the meantime, we were taken to the bathhouse, where we cleansed ourselves of the accumulated dirt of ten days on the road, and then to the refectory, where we stuffed ourselves on freshly prepared food far richer than any rations we could ever carry in our packs.

Sure enough, soon after we left the cookhouse with our bellies full, a soldier came looking for me. Merlyn had emerged from his conference and invited me to join him in his private quarters. I went with the messenger immediately, my mind swarming with thoughts of finally meeting with the man I had come so far to see.

I had heard many things about Merlyn Britannicus in my travels across Britain and some of them were simply incredible, defying both logic and belief but titillating and terrifying the very folk who whispered of them. Merlyn Britannicus was a sorcerer, these people said, perhaps the blackest sorcerer ever to live in Britain. Even his clothing proclaimed the fact that he was a practitioner of the black arts, a familiar of the gods of darkness. He dressed in loose, long-flowing robes of deepest black, and no man or woman was permitted to look upon his face. But then, the person speaking always added, who would want to? This was Merlyn Britannicus, of Camulod, a man whose death at the hands of his archenemy hundreds had witnessed. And then, after his death, they had continued to watch in horror as the head was struck from his corpse with his own sword.