Jack Whyte - Uther

In most instances, though, Garreth said, things never got quite so serious. Small numbers brought small outcomes. It might take lime to resolve those differences and settle all the fears attached to them, but usually the differences came to be first accepted, then ignored and then forgotten altogether.

After that conversation, thinking about what Garreth had said, Uther began to see things in a different light, and he did not like what he saw. He found his memory teeming, all at once, with remembered insults—freely offered by unsmiling men—that he had absorbed and ignored at various times over the previous few years, failing to recognize the barbs for what they were. And all of them, he saw quite suddenly, had had to do with Camulod and with his yearly journeys there to visit his mother's childhood home and live among her people. Each time he returned from Camulod, and for a period each year before he left Cambria to go there, he had been forced to swallow and ignore more than a few sneering comments and cruel jibes that cast slurs upon himself and upon his mother's people.

That recognition hit him hard and unexpectedly, and it left him with absolutely no understanding of how he had incurred such ill feelings. He had never knowingly done anything that would give offence to any grown-up person, and he could not see how his annual stay in Camulod could be harmful to anyone. But the truth was that the men of Cambria, and most particularly the older men, strongly disapproved of the time Uther Pendragon spent in Camulod. And, naturally, that gave rise to the question of why this should be so . . . a question that Uther, a small boy, was unqualified to answer.

With a few more years behind him, however, Uther became utterly convinced that the Cambrians' scorn of Camulod and all things Camulodian was built upon envy and plain jealousy. In terms of all the finer things of life, Camulod had everything that Cambria lacked. As he grew older and used more and more of the facilities that Camulod had to offer, Uther came to appreciate his annual half-year there more and more, and to look forward to his return to his own home less and less. Each year, he was more and more hard-pressed to guard his tongue every time some smug clansman cast a slur upon his absence, or his friends, or where he spent his time away from Cambria. These slurs were usually couched in the kind of question that asked, "What have they got there that we don't have?" and, "Why would you want to waste so much time with them?"

In response, Uther would have given anything to be able to shout out the list of truths that would answer such smug questions: that Camulod had baths and hot water and steam, and that the people there looked clean, were clean and smelled clean, so that he didn't have to hold his breath when he first met them in order to give his stomach time to settle at their stench; that Camulod had large and spacious buildings and houses filled with clean, warm air, centrally supplied by furnaces that burned all year long; that the cattle in Camulod were kept in barns, in stalls and stables, and did not live in the houses with their human owners; and that Camulod had smart, uniformly armoured soldiers—disciplined garrison troops and cavalry, mounted troopers trained to work and fight together as invincible military units.

None of these things did he ever say to any of his father's people, but all of them remained in his mind every day while he was at home in Tir Manha, because he pined for Camulod, with its baths and horses and troopers, its rolling grasslands and lush forests, and perhaps most of all for its carefree laughter and light- hearted camaraderie, so dyed-in-the-wool different from the scowling dourness that was normal among the dark-skinned people of his own mountainous homeland. He pined for those things, and as he grew older month by month, he writhed with guilt because of that, but he kept the guilt well hidden, and not even Garreth Whistler suspected its existence.

One day, when he had been feeling particularly disgusted with himself for what he had come to perceive as chronic and shameful disloyalty to all that was his own, Uther asked Garreth Whistler to tell him what he had been thinking of on that first day years earlier when he had decided to look out for the small boy he had found in the cattle byre.

Garreth's tuneless whistle died immediately, and he stopped what he was doing. Caught off guard by the sudden, unexpected question, he gazed speculatively at his young charge.

"What's making you itchy, then? You've never asked me that before." Uther shrugged but made no attempt to respond, and Whistler's eyes narrowed. "Are you feeling all right? You look . . . different. Are you coming down with something?"

Uther shook his head. "I don't think so. I feel the same as I always do. What did you think that day?"

"How d'you expect me to remember that after all this time? Can you remember what you were thinking on any particular day that long ago?"

"Yes, I remember thinking that you would laugh at me when I saw you coming into the byre."

"Do you, then?" Garreth's pause was less than a heartbeat in length. "Well, you were wrong, weren't you? I didn't laugh at you."

"No, you didn't. But what did you think?"

Garreth had been scaling rust from an iron breastplate that someone had unearthed from a patch of ground outside the walls, close by the main gateway to Tir Manha. It was the front half of a Roman cuirass and it had been buried for a long time, so that Garreth was not sure he could salvage it. But well-made iron armour was invaluable, and so he was trying, rubbing the pitted, scaling metal industriously with an abrasive mixture of sand, wood ash and tallow. Now he placed his tools carefully on the ground beside him and wiped his tallow-slick fingers on a rag tucked into his belt.

"Well, let me think . . . I saw another small boy crying close by here last week some time. Are you sure you wouldn't like me to try to recall what I thought then, too? I've seen a lot of small boys crying over the years."

Uther nodded, his face serious. "I believe you. But what did you think of me that day?"

"Well, it might be easier if I start slowly, remembering what I saw before I get to what I might have thought." He paused, frowning deeply and staring into nothingness, and Uther waited, intent on his answer. "I think . . . I think I remember being absolutely astounded to see a small, grubby boy with a squished-up, dirty face encrusted with snot and large, bleeding cuts and bruises on his skinny little shins. I looked at him, and now I remember thinking, What an ugly, ill-featured, misshapen little brat! And that was but my first thought . . . Are you sure you want to hear more?"

Finally Uther broke into a grin. "No," he said, "I want to hear no more of that rubbish."

"Very well, then." Garreth Whistler nodded his head with finality. "You tell me why you want to know, and I'll tell you."

Uther looked away, unwilling to meet Garreth's eyes. "I . . . I don't really know why I want to know."

"No, of course you don't. . . not any more than you know why you would expect me to believe such an obvious lie. Well, when you do know, come back, and I'll think about telling you."

The boy threw up his hands. "Very well, I'll tell you." He paused to collect his thoughts. "I was . . . I was feeling lonely, I suppose, and sorry for myself. I've been feeling that way quite a lot recently. And I suppose, too, that made me think of that day you found me, which had been among the very worst days of my life until then. I could remember how I felt, and I could guess how I must have looked to you, the King's Champion, and so I wondered what you could possibly have thought to make you behave towards me as you did."

Garreth Whistler shrugged his broad shoulders, then picked up the rusty breastplate again, although he made no move to start work on it. "Have you considered the obvious answer to that?" he asked. I was the King's Champion, as you say, and you were the King's small grandson. Perhaps I saw immediately that I could do myself some good in my patron's eyes by doing some small good for you."