Jack Whyte - Uther

The huge Roman siege engines had never been designed to travel great distances. They were massive, cumbersome affairs constructed for strength, stability and endurance, built with solid wheels to provide them with a degree of mobility but intended in that respect purely for positioning each apparatus and, in the case of the artillery pieces, for altering the field of fire they commanded during battle. They were meant to be manhandled but had never been intended for overland travel.

Duke Emrys had acquired them somehow at the time of the Roman withdrawals from Britain, and knowing their worth, he had taken them into his custody and guarded them against a future need. They had been dismantled carefully, the component pieces clearly marked and numbered for reassembly, but they had been in storage for decades since then, split up for safety among Herliss's four coastal forts. In the intervening years the enormous wagons originally used to transport them had been used for other purposes, scattered and eventually lost. In consequence, Herliss faced an enormous task, and he dared not take the risk of mixing or misplacing the component parts of each device, be it ballista, catapult or storming tower, for the men who would transport and reassemble them had had no training in such things.

The time flew by, so that Lagan quickly found himself on the wrong side of Lot's ten-day division, with yet another two weeks' work to go, according to his father, before all the individual pieces would be ready for moving. He had spent all of his time on the south coast moving among the four forts, and by the time he realized that he would have to return with the unwelcome word of delay to Lot, he had not yet found time to visit Queen Ygraine in his father's home fort of Tir Gwyn some twenty to thirty miles inland.

Reluctantly, without having seen or spoken to the Queen, he bade his father farewell and set out again for Lot's stronghold of Golant, bearing the news that Herliss would be ready to move northwards with his treasures in no less than two weeks. Lot, Lagan knew, would not be happy with the tidings. But then, he reflected, Ygraine the Queen was likely to be even less happy at the prospect of being reunited with her husband. According to Herliss, Queen Ygraine did not hold Gully in high regard.

So busy was Herliss that he barely noticed his son's departure. His mind was too full of logistical concerns to leave time for family matters. He was content, knowing that he would follow Lagan within weeks and would finally be rid of the wearying responsibility for all Lot's stored goods.

As for the Queen, Ygraine, she remained unaware for days that her husband had taken note of her again and summoned her to Golant, or even that Lagan had been in the south. The word of her imminent journey came to her eventually from Herliss, whom she had grown to regard almost as a father. Ygraine listened to what he had to say but made no complaint. She understood all too well that Herliss had no choice but to deliver her upon Lot's instructions, and so she accepted the inevitable. But she could find little in his tidings to look forward to, and so filled was her mind with the unwelcome prospect of being reunited with her estranged spouse that it would never have occurred to her to wonder about her own safety on the journey from Herliss's stronghold to Lot's.

Chapter TWENTY-THREE

The ambush, swift, terrible and thorough, was rendered all the more terrifying by the small amount of blood actually shed. And in the duration of it, within the space of moments, Ygraine's status changed from Queen to hostage. Caught completely unprepared, her escort, strong though it was, had no chance of counterattacking. One moment they were marching in good order through a wide, shallow valley under bright, early-spring sunlight, and the next they were caught squarely between two parallel masses of alien warriors, grim- faced and silent, terrifyingly different from any she had known before. They had literally sprung from the ground on either side of the narrow road, already grouped in attack formations and aiming hundreds of great longbows in massed ranks.

She was amazed, however, at how clearly she was able to see what happened in the momentary chaos that followed. Her escort had already begun to surge into a disciplined but already useless attempt to rally some kind of defensive formation, and in the middle of the protective swirling of her own personal bodyguard, at the time when the first hail of arrows should have been wreaking ruin and havoc amongst her protectors, Ygraine, Queen of Cornwall, daughter of Athol Mac lain of Eire, perceived clearly and unmistakably that someone, for some unknown reason, was withholding death and mass destruction.

Only one group of warriors, under the personal command of Gylmer, her husband's most faithful and hotheaded captain, succeeded in forming a shield phalanx and moving forward to engage the enemy on the sloping hillside above. They had barely left the road, Gylmer on his mountain pony riding in their centre, rallying them, when they were slaughtered, all twenty of them obliterated instantly by a lethal rain of long, deadly arrows, fired with appalling accuracy from the other hillside, behind them. Ygraine heard the missiles hissing overhead, moving from right to left, and spun to look, thus avoiding the actual sight of the death that fell upon her quickest men so suddenly, and she was stunned to see that none but the farthest ranks on the right of the hill behind her had fired, in response to some hidden, but deadly signal. They were already stringing new arrows when she swung back to see what they had done. Not a man of the twenty remained standing. And no single bowman in the ranks facing the slaughtered men seemed to have loosed a shot.

The warning was not lost on anyone, including Herliss, the grizzled veteran commander entrusted by her husband with the task of shepherding his Queen and a valuable train of goods and provisions between two of the royal strongholds that dotted his territory. As Ygraine caught sight of Herliss now, his yet-unhelmed head flung back in outrage and his right hand raised above his head, fist clenched, to rally his forces, she recognized the fury and hopelessness that swept across his face as he slowly lowered his hand.

Herliss, the only remaining mounted man in the train, was stunned by the swiftness of this defeat, by its totality and by his own helplessness. They had sprung from the ground like devils, pouring up out of holes and trenches dug in the soft hillsides on either side of the narrow, rutted road, the only warning of their coming the sudden, shocking sight of rectangular sections of grass- covered ground being lifted up and thrown aside to give them passage. And as they came, they had drawn their bows, arrows already nocked, forming themselves with daunting speed into solid blocks of death: tight, disciplined, inexorable; ranks spaced far enough apart to enable each to fire over the heads of those beneath them; drawn weapons pointed grimly down towards the long train reeling in disorder and panic below. Young Gylmer, as usual, had been the first man to react, kicking his pony forward with a shout and attracting the attention of his men before panic could overwhelm them. But Gylmer had died for his decisiveness, and his men had been struck down with him, destroyed by a response so quick and so complete that every man who saw it knew it had been planned for just such a move.

Now Herliss looked about him, assessing his ruin. Men hung in impossible postures of indecision everywhere he looked, as though frozen in place in the blink of some mad god's eye. Among them, in the very centre of the roadway, the Queen's group of women eddied, as yet too stunned to have begun screaming. Behind him, he could hear wails of panic rising from among the wagon-drivers. Only the Queen's personal bodyguard of Ersemen seemed prepared to match the threat of the massed ranks above. They had formed a circle, their shields a solid wall behind which they now crouched, grim-faced and prepared to die about their lady.