Jack Whyte - The Lance Thrower

“Well, the new muster arrived, on time and as promised, and from that moment onward the die was cast. Clodas began training his command to serve his own ends. He was his own master, in all respects, and he arranged his affairs accordingly and in complete secrecy. Even the senior officers supplied by Garth suspected nothing, for their tasks were straightforward—to drill and supervise the training of the newly mustered mercenaries until they were battle ready. It was no great feat on Clodas’s part to conceal the fact that when his troops were battle ready, they would be ready to attack their own allies.”

“May I ask you something, Magister?”

“Of course.”

“What did he do to my mother? Before her death, I mean. What did he do to her?”

“What d’you mean? He did nothing to her. If he had actually done something, we would have taken care of it then and there, and what transpired would never have happened as it did.”

“But he must have done something, Magister. The King told me that he changed from the moment he first set eyes on her. How could anyone have known that? How could King Ban identify the time and place if nothing happened to mark it?”

The skin across Chulderic’s cheeks seemed to tighten and he gazed at me fiercely, his eyes narrowing with what I took to be anger. He started to say something but caught his breath and stopped himself, turning his head away abruptly and tilting his chin up as he stared away into the distance. Then he swung back to face me, releasing his breath noisily. “Damnation, boy, I wish you were older. You’re too damn young to know about the politics of men and women … and that is as it should be.”

I had absolutely no idea what he meant, but I schooled my face to remain blank and nodded knowingly.

“It was your mother who first noticed that there was something wrong about Clodas. None of us noticed anything, but then, we were only men. Your mother, with her woman’s instincts, detested him from the first moment she met him, although she said nothing for a long time afterward. She sensed something in his attitude that was offensive, and she felt it down deep in her gut. She felt it in the way he looked at her, and in the tone of his voice when he spoke to her. In the months that followed, she heard her husband speak of him often, but she said nothing, merely avoiding the man and hoping that your father’s business with him would soon be done.

“But then Clodas confronted her again, appearing unexpectedly one day when she was alone in the household, your father off on a hunting trip and me with him. Nobody knows what was said on that occasion, but there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Clodas had offended the Queen. She called her guards, and she defied him openly in front of them, forbidding him, upon pain of banishment, ever to return to Ganis while her husband was away from home. Then she had him marched out of her gates and sent on his way back to Rich Vale. Everyone who was there heard her clearly. A public rebuke was probably not the cleverest thing she could have done to a proud and self-absorbed man, no matter what the provocation he provided, but she reacted as she saw fit at the time.

“What he said to her that day she would never discuss, not even with your father, but she called Clodas high-handed and self-serving and noxiously full of self-love, and she told her husband to beware of him and to trust him in nothing.

“That put your father in a vise, right there, because he had already committed himself, publicly, to trusting Clodas in matters of both import and consequence, and to withdraw that trust purely on the unsubstantiated opinion of his newlywed wife would have caused Childebertus much embarrassment. And yet his wife’s opinion was of great value in his eyes and in his heart. He knew she would never lie to him and he could not say the same about Clodas. Had your mother told us what really happened between her and Clodas that afternoon, of course, that might have been the end of all of it, then and there, and your parents might still be alive today. But she held her peace, and thereby tied your father’s hands, and that led to tragedy.

“I’ve been thinking about it now for years, wondering why I didn’t cut the serpent down myself, simply for causing me to try to imagine what he might have said or done, or even tried to do. But that’s a fool’s task, because I did nothing. Nor did anyone else. She was stubborn, Elaine of Ganis, and she kept her secret, no doubt for what she thought were excellent reasons.

“Afterward, both of them behaved in a very civilized manner to each other, knowing that everyone was watching them and waiting for some sign of hostility, and eventually the tension eased and seemed to die away completely. Then, a full year and more after the upheaval, the Lady Elaine announced herself to be with child, and from that moment the priorities of all of Ganis changed visibly. Everyone breathed more easily. Clodas had long since withdrawn into Rich Vale to tend to his own affairs, and your father spent most of his spare time with his wife, anxious to be with her as much as possible while she was carrying you … . That situation, an appearance of peace, lasted for a whole year, from the end of one summer through the beginning of the next.”

In the silence that followed, a skylark broke into song and spiraled upward, its miraculous voice defying comparison with the size of its tiny body, and I listened to it distractedly as I waited for Chulderic to resume speaking. But the silence extended until I grew concerned that he would say no more, and finally I could wait no longer.

“And then what happened, Magister?”

“Everything, at once.” It was as though he had been waiting for me to ask, because his voice betrayed no surprise at my question. “The world fell apart in the space of one afternoon, and the calamity was over almost before anyone realized it had begun.”

“But you knew.”

“Aye, I did. At least I was among the first to learn of it.” I realized afterward that Chulderic might have construed my comment as an accusation, but his response was instantaneous, a straightforward acknowledgment of truth. “But I was too late even then to stop any of it. As his Master-at-Arms, I should have been there by your father’s side, to guard his back and see to his welfare, but no, I was miles away, playing the fool with a woman while my best friend was being murdered—the man who had given me everything I owned and who had entrusted me with his life and his family’s safety.”

Although I was still only a child of ten, even I could see that this confession was a bitter and heartfelt one, wrung out from a deep well of pain, and I felt sorrow for the powerful Master-at-Arms. I resisted the urge to say anything, however, fearful that I might say exactly the wrong thing and offend him without wishing to.

“I was in love, you see … or I thought I was. You were about six weeks old at that time, perhaps eight weeks, and your mother was in fine health again. She had fed you from her own breasts for the first month of your life, but then something happened and her milk dried up—don’t ask me what it was; I have no knowledge or understanding of such things. But the upshot of it all was that a wet nurse had to be found—a woman who had lost a child of her own and had milk to feed a starving babe whose own mother could not give him suck.

“They found two, both of them, by sheer coincidence, recent widows. One was called Antonia, a comely little thing, young and well bred of solid Roman stock. Her elderly husband had been a landowner and some kind of local magistrate. The other was called Sabina, a widowed woman from Ganis. Both lived within a day’s journey of your grandfather’s castle, both had lost their babies in childbirth, and both were in milk. Antonia had a fragile air about her, but Sabina was all woman, beautiful and self-assured and sultry looking. Sabina was also closely connected to some of the senior Salian chieftains—her dead husband, a warrior called Merofled, had been one of Clodas’s closest friends—so the matter of the politics had to be considered in the choice.