Jack Whyte - The Lance Thrower

“I continued to believe, throughout the months that followed my dream, that contrary to logic and to all the laws of probability and possibility, Bishop Germanus came into my tent that night and spoke to me. I believed it happened. And I believed he had come there to tell me I had to come here, seeking you. And thus, I suppose I believed I had experienced a miracle. It was a wonderful sensation, although almost frightening, for as long as it lasted.”

“And do you no longer believe it was a miracle?” Merlyn was looking at me now through narrowed eyes, and I shrugged dismissively in response.

“How can I, now that I know the truth? Miracles are miraculous, Master Merlyn. They are supernatural occurrences originated and performed by God Himself, often through human intermediaries. They are ungovernable and inexplicable under the laws or the expectations of mankind—Bishop Germanus’s own words. That says to me, by extension, that they must therefore be incapable of error. If that visitation had been truly miraculous—had Germanus somehow found, or been divinely granted, the ability to travel mentally and incorporeally to Britain for the sole purpose of visiting me in my sleep—then how could he not have known that the coronation ceremony, which was his primary concern, would take place in Verulamium and not in Camulod?

“My dream of Germanus sent me off across Britain seeking you after you had already made extensive preparations to have everything take place in Verulamium, for all the best and most logical and obvious of reasons. Your letter to Enos, outlining your wishes in what was to take place within his jurisdiction, as well as describing all the arrangements that you had already set in motion long before then, must have arrived in Verulamium within mere days of my departure. In other words, your letter had been written and sent off to Enos, and all your arrangements had been decided upon and their organization delegated to those responsible for them, long before I had my miraculous dream. Ergo et igitur, as my old teacher Cato would have said, there can be no talk of miracles in this, because a Germanus possessed of miraculous powers would have known what you proposed to do, and would have been aware of everything you had arranged. He would not have dispatched me on such a worthless chase as the one I have been pursuing ever since then.”

Merlyn had been sitting with an elbow on the arm of his chair, supporting his chin on his hand as he gazed at me and listened to my rant. Now he sat up straighter, releasing a deep, pent-up breath. “Is that really what you think Germanus did? Do you honestly believe he would send you off on a worthless chase?”

“No, Master Merlyn, not at all. What I believe now is that I had a vivid dream that night, and because the details of it remained with me the next morning—which is unusual in itself—I chose to allow myself to become obsessed with what I had dreamt. All the foolishness that has followed since then has been my own fault, attributable to my own overheated imagination and to nothing else.”

He sat looking at me, unblinking, for a count of ten heartbeats, then grunted deep in his chest. “Hmm. So you believe that everything you have done since leaving Verulamium has been futile, a waste of time.”

It was more a statement than a question, but I felt myself rearing back in surprise. “How could it be otherwise? Our pursuit of you, sir, achieved nothing but disappointment and ever-increasing frustration. Acting on the single trustworthy report we had received about where you might be found—a report from a wandering priest who had not known we were seeking you—I traveled directly from Verulamium to Caerdyff, in Cambria. I arrived there to find that you had departed more than a month earlier, to travel west along the coast to the Pendragon stronghold at Carmarthen. I followed you then to Carmarthen, by road, only to find that you had long since left there, too, again by sea, accompanied this time by the Pendragon clan chiefs and their warriors, to sail across the river estuary to Glevum, on your way home to Camulod. But that departure, I discovered, had occurred even before our original arrival in Caerdyff, and so our entire journey to Carmarthen had been futile and we were already more than a month—almost two months, in fact—behind you.

“Even then, however, I would have followed you directly, but your departure with the Pendragon levies had stripped the entire coastline of large vessels, and we wasted four more days trying in vain to find a ship capable of carrying us and our horses. And so we had to make our way back by land, along the entire length of the south Cambrian coast and up the river until we could find a way to cross to Glevum, losing more time and distance with every day that passed. By the time we finally arrived at Glevum, with several more days yet ahead of us before we would reach Camulod, we had lost twelve more days in addition to the time that had elapsed between your leaving Carmarthen and our reaching there.

“I had estimated by then that we were at least two months behind you, and as it transpired, I was correct. We were two and a half months late. And I have since found out—because everyone we met along the road is bursting with the tidings and talking about the wondrous and magical events the ensued—that in the course of those two months you returned to Camulod and then traveled immediately onward to Verulamium with the Pendragon clans in the wake of Arthur’s armies, which had marched there earlier. And once there, you crowned Arthur Pendragon as Riothamus, High King of Britain, with God Himself apparently blessing the event and bestowing upon the new King a miraculous new sword.

“You then sent the new King off to fight a great battle, at the head of the largest army ever assembled in Britain since the Romans first arrived with Julius Caesar. He won the battle, of course, and it was a great victory, which people think will be but the first of many, and flushed with the fruits of success, all of you have now returned home to Camulod, where I am finally permitted to find you and meet you to present my respects and admit my shame at having been so far removed from everything of importance that has happened in this land since I first set foot in it nigh on a year ago.”

The anger that had been smoldering inside me was now threatening to spill over, and I was aware that I needed to bite down on my ill humor. Evidently the man across from me felt the same way, because he raised one hand quickly, palm outward, stemming my flow of words with a peremp tory gesture born of years of command. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. Merlyn met me eye to eye.

“Germanus is dead.”

I blinked hard, I remember, because I felt I had been staring for too long and my eyes had begun to tingle strangely and then I shook my head, slightly confused, and cleared my throat. “What …? Forgive me, what did you say?”

“Germanus is dead. He died in Italia, after his meeting with the Pope and his fellow bishops. The word was brough to us a month ago, in a letter sent to Bishop Enos by Lu dovic, Germanus’s secretary. You know the man?” I could only nod, the import of what Merlyn was telling me begin ning to penetrate my awareness. “Aye, I thought you might He has been with Germanus for more than thirty years.”

“Forty,” I whispered. “Ludovic has been with the bishop for forty-three years. He is the bishop’s secretary, but they are close friends, too. They started out as students of law to gether, Germanus told me. He became a successful advo cate, but Ludovic quickly found that he preferred building cases to disputing them in open court, and so the two men became associates and remained together ever afterward.”