Jack Whyte - The Lance Thrower

“I refused to believe what the woman had told me, hoping against hope that something might have served to warn and therefore save Garth and his people, and so I set out with Fallo, Quentin, and some others we had found to ride to warn the King of what had happened, and I had you with me, carefully wrapped and tied into a saddlebag that was strapped across my shoulders. But before we had traveled halfway, the word met us coming from Ganis. The King was dead; Clodas had claimed the throne; his army, far larger than the mercenary force your father had provided the previous spring, had moved into Ganis early that morning in overwhelming numbers; everything was chaos and the King’s leaderless army had been disarmed and rendered useless.

“I immediately pulled our little party off the road. We had nowhere to go that might be safe for us, and none of us was of the type that would consider surrendering to Clodas. Besides, we had a nursing infant with us and no way to feed him. Much as I hated having to take the time to do so, I rode apart from the others and sat down alone to concentrate on what we should do next. Your life and safety was my first priority, above and beyond all other considerations. My negligence had made you an orphan, I believed, for I did not know yet that your mother had survived. Now you were the only living remnant of your family’s blood, and I knew my immortal salvation depended upon my keeping you alive, to grow to manhood and claim vengeance for your parents’ deaths. I had never been more than a nominal Christian until that point, but I became devout thereafter, for a while, believing that I had to expiate my sin of negligence.”

“So what did you do, Magister?”

“D’you remember my mentioning Antonia, the other Roman woman who had lost her baby?”

I nodded, wondering what she could have to do with any of this, and he grunted. “Aye, well, I remembered her, too, and I went searching for her, hoping that she might still be in milk, for months had elapsed since I last saw her. She was not difficult to find, for she yet lived in the same house, and she was still producing milk like a brood cow, for she had taken in another baby, younger than you, whose mother had died at the birthing. She remembered me, and when I told her what had transpired with you she volunteered immediately to take you into care. I left you with her and rode off to see what might be done about Clodas and his treachery.”

“Did you fight him?”

“Fight him? I could not draw within a mile of him. He was surrounded by his own people, all of them heavily armed and far more vigilant than I had ever seen before in such a large body of men. Their lord and master had just committed a series of heinous sins, including regicide and the mass slaughter of people who had shown him nothing but kindness. It was reasonable to assume that someone would come seeking vengeance and redress sooner or later, and that the avengers might come from any direction, and so the new ‘King’ had let it be known that he would be openhanded in rewarding any who identified such trouble in advance of its occurrence. Naturally, every man in his army and not a few of Garth’s former people were anxious to qualify for such rewards.

“I had to split my group asunder, to take their chances each man for himself, for had anyone seen us together and failed to recognize us as allies, or, God forbid, had seen and recognized us as Childebertus’s men, we would all have died instantly.

“I remained in Clodas’s camp for more than a week, asking questions, learning little and watching what was going on, and as the days passed I grew more and more discouraged. I discovered that your mother was, in fact, alive but was being kept under constant guard. Clodas, I was told, took pains to visit her twice each day, morning and afternoon, between sessions of governing. That information surprised me, for it had not occurred to me that Clodas might actually seek to govern Garth’s kingdom, but as I watched the comings and goings of the various identifiable officials thereafter, I found myself admitting, however reluctantly, that Clodas was far more of an organizer and administrator than I would ever have believed before that time. By the end of ten days I was forced to accept that I was powerless, as things stood, to do anything to revenge myself on Clodas—I had been entertaining fantasies of sneaking into his quarters and waking him up, making sure he knew who I was and why he was about to die, and then slitting his throat. I was equally incapable of doing anything to help your mother in her captivity, for my face was too well known for me to risk discovery trying to approach the quarters where she was being held.

“That’s when I decided to ride south to Benwick and enlist Ban’s aid in rescuing your mother. But then, before I could leave, your mother took her own life. They told her you were dead, and presented her with evidence of what they said, and that took all the will to live away from her.”

“What kind of evidence?” What, I wondered, could Clodas have said or done to convince my mother of my death while I was yet alive? Such is the innocence of extreme youth.

“The foulest kind,” Chulderic replied. “False evidence. She had been grieving deeply for your father, I was told by my informants. I had made a few good contacts during my stay among Clodas’s forces and had ample access to information, but none of it was straightforward. My informants, apart from being the enemy, were not close associates of Clodas but simple soldiers, with all the limitations that entails.

“From their conversations I knew that Clodas’s prisoner had been prepared to suffer and wait, as long as she believed her son was safe and alive. She believed, too, that Ban of Benwick, her sister’s husband, would ride to her rescue. That would take time, she knew, but she was so confident that he would come that she made no secret of it, warning everyone what would happen to them when her brother-in-law came to Ganis.

“Clodas must have heard of this, and connected it with her belief that you had survived his plotting. He did not know you had survived, in fact, but he knew your mother believed you had, and so he told her you had been slain that same afternoon when your father died; that your nurse Sabina had arranged the trap and led them into it.

“Your mother refused to believe that Sabina would be capable of killing you, after having suckled you for months, and of course Clodas could not present Sabina to prove it one way or the other. But three days later, he had one of his creatures present your mother with the dirt-encrusted corpse of an infant that had been butchered and left in a shallow grave for days. It was the same age as you and had your coloring, but otherwise it was not identifiable. Apparently the mere sight of it was sufficient, however, to unhinge your mother’s mind, and she hanged herself that same night, with the cord from one of her robes.

“Even Clodas’s own were disgusted by that piece of work. No one knew who the child had been or where he came from, and many of them thought it truly was Elaine’s own child, but it was common knowledge among some of Clodas’s troops that the word had come down to find a suitable child and use it a-purpose.

“That was the night before I heard the tale whispered around a campfire, and the talk was all of Clodas’s anger after she was found dead. They said that he was livid with anger, but that no one had dared to ask him why he was so surprised, after what he had done to the hapless woman. Anyway, his fury was ungovernable, and he had all of her guards executed within an hour of hearing the report of her death, even those who had not been on duty that night. He then rode off, still raging, with a small group of his closest cronies and did not return that night. I waited two more days, but he still had not returned and there was no way of knowing when he might even be expected.