Jack Whyte - The Lance Thrower

“No, Brach. You could not have killed him and lived with yourself thereafter.”

He looked me straight in the eye, and every vestige of warmth had gone from his voice when he replied, “I should have accepted the burden gladly. Now Theuderic is dead at his hands and he was ten times the man Gunthar could ever be, even were he not crazed. Now he threatens not only me and Samson, he threatens our mother!” He stopped, evidently with an exercise of will. “Now, what of you? What will you do? You can’t stay here or he’ll kill you, too, if he can. I swear on my mother’s eyes, he’s a rabid animal. Will you return to Auxerre?”

“No, I’m staying here to fight with you. I’ve been well trained in warfare these past six years, as both a cavalryman and an officer, so if you will have me, I’ll attach myself to your troops and you can judge me for yourself and use me as you see fit. Does that sound fair? And I have Ursus with me, too, who is worth five men—hunter, warrior, fighter, mercenary, and loyal and true as the day is long. Someone in the family has to bring about Gunthar’s end, and since it is already too late for that person to be Theuderic, I will make a perfectly acceptable substitute.”

“Fine. Accepted. But what do we do now? When will Chulderic and Samson reach home?”

“Today, perhaps tomorrow. But what happens when they arrive depends on Gunthar. I left ahead of them to overtake Beddoc and bring word of the King’s death to the castle, to you and Theuderic and your mother at the same time as to Gunthar, but none of us foresaw the possibility of finding the castle all but abandoned. Chulderic and Samson would have made their way homeward, expecting me to have carried out my task and informed everyone of the King’s death at the same time, permitting no advantage to Gunthar. By now, however, Gunthar might well have returned to the castle and taken possession of it. If he has, then he has already met Beddoc and knows that the King is dead and that he dispossessed Gunthar before he died. And if that is the case, Gunthar will throw any remaining caution to the winds. He will be prepared to go down to his death fighting.

“Now, if he already holds the castle, then Chulderic and Samson are stuck outside, with nowhere near sufficient men to lay siege to the place. The truth is that there are not enough men in all of Benwick to lay siege to Ban’s castle. Our friends then will have no place to go, and there are too many of them to come here. This place is formidable but it couldn’t accommodate a hundred people, let alone five hundred. How many are here now, two score?”

“Aye, somewhere in that region. Chulderic and Samson have five hundred between them, and then there are another four hundred in the east, the remains of Theuderic’s force.”

“How many men can Gunthar muster?”

“Probably about the same as us, according to the last information I received. About a thousand. But that was a month ago, perhaps longer, so the numbers may have changed by now. He had a thousand then only because there were no more available for hire, according to my sources among his people. He may have added others since that time. I simply don’t know. However, we have the edge on him in horsemen. The largest part of his force is made up of foot soldiers—infantry and all mercenaries, mainly Alamanni, with a few contingents of Burgundians.”

“Alamanni and Burgundians … ?” I had been on the point of asking if Gunthar had gone mad, but of course he had. In his need to secure his own kingship, he would care nothing for where his fighting men came from or who they were. He would hire mercenaries from anywhere that he could find them. And that made me think on something else.

“Where is his money springing from? How can he afford to pay mercenaries?”

Brach twisted his face into what might have been a smile, but was utterly lacking in amusement. “Nobody knows. There are rumors. They seem unbelievable, but I’m inclined to think they could be true. Tales of theft on an enormous scale. One tells of a coterie of pederasts who lived together in a villa near Lugdunum about six years ago, just when you were going off to school. All elderly, all wealthy and all depraved … what else would you expect of pederasts? Anyway, they could afford to indulge themselves in their degeneracy, bringing in traveling entertainers from all over the empire. One night, they were all killed in their beds, fifteen to twenty of them plus all their servants, and the entire villa was emptied of its treasures. People spoke of tracks a handspan deep, left in bone-dry ground by the wheels of heavily laden wagons.

“Then there was the incident of the talents of gold. Two entire talents of gold bullion, in bars, all stamped with the head of the Emperor Honorius and escorted by an entire cohort of Imperial Household Guards on its way from Carcasso to Massilia, to await shipment to the imperial treasury in Constantinople. Three years ago. They had barely traveled thirty miles, two days into a five-day journey, when they were attacked at night and wiped out … all of them … and the gold vanished, never to be found again.”

“ You think Gunthar was responsible for those things?”

Brach shrugged his massive shoulders. “Someone arranged those robberies and carried them out successfully, and whoever it was, he had access to enormous resources in men and logistics. Think for a moment about what would be involved not merely in attacking but in overwhelming and annihilating a full cohort of Imperial Household Guards engaged upon the personal affairs of the Emperor … and then add the additional difficulties of stealing and transporting two entire talents of solid gold—box upon box upon box of gold bars—and making them simply vanish without trace, permanently.

“But those are only two instances—admittedly the most spectacular two, but over the past five years there have been others, at least half a score of them, similar crimes equally bold and impressive, involving vast sums of money, usually in gold. Now, there is one additional fact here that is worthy of consideration—very few people use money nowadays. Silver and copper coins are mere curiosities, save in the largest cities, where the merchants can still operate, but absolutely no one outside of the portals of power uses gold for mere purchases. Gold is used only for major acquisitions and most of those occur within the Empire, for imperial purposes. Whoever they are, these thieves, they are bold and aggressive in their greed. Gunthar was always the boldest and most brilliant of all of us. And he is an astoundingly gifted strategist. The kinds of operations we are discussing here would be simple for him.”

I was stunned, bereft of words by the dimensions of what he had suggested. It was one thing to acknowledge that my own cousin Gunthar, whom I had never liked and had never really known, besides being the firstborn son of King Ban of Benwick was also homicidally insane and a fratricide. It was something altogether different, however, to acknowledge that he might also be a criminal genius of long standing.

“I know how to get inside the castle.” I had not known I was going to say it, but suddenly I heard myself speaking the words aloud.

Brach stopped short and looked at me. “What did you say?”

“I said I know how to get inside the castle … without anyone being able to prevent us, I mean.”

“That’s impossible. Even before my father built the drawbridge, there was no way into the castle once the gates were closed.”

“No, not true. Far from true, in fact. There is a very simple way into the castle, penetrating all of its defenses, and the knowledge of it has been a secret in your family for generations.”

Brach was frowning at me now. “A secret in our family for generations? According to whom? I’ve never heard of that before. How come you to know of it, when I do not?”