Jack Whyte - Uther

There were no crushing reversals for Uther's Dragons, no battles lost or defeats sustained by his forces, and most of the talk about the campaign, among the allies from Cambria and Camulod, continued to focus on the undeniable success of Uther's ideas about combining infantry with bowmen and cavalry in carefully planned manoeuvres against enemy forces that ought to have been overwhelmingly victorious simply by virtue of their numbers. Apart from that, however, things were going annoyingly wrong for Uther in other areas—piddling, insignificant little areas—and he became increasingly unable to understand why. It seemed to amount to no more than trivial annoyances at first, gadfly occurrences that demanded to be scratched: spies and scouts being caught and killed when they ought to have been safe and free from threat; messages and messengers going astray and never arriving at their destinations; shipments of supplies arriving from Camulod partially spoiled and in one instance totally unusable.

Hand in hand with that kind of thing, indications of incompetence and mismanagement among his own forces began to come to his notice. In the space of a single month, he received four separate reports of inaccurate information being provided to troop commanders and then acted upon without any attempt to obtain verification, resulting in time and effort wasted and men endangered without valid cause. On the worst of those occasions, a ten-man troop had been dispatched to scout a pathway through a dense growth of forest in the northernmost part of Cornwall, assured by their chief scout that the terrain between their departure point and the edge of the forest was wide open and free of hostile forces. It was not, on either count. Reconstructing the scene afterward, the troop commander had found clear indications that the troop had been ambushed by a party of not less than a hundred men who had left ample evidence to establish beyond doubt that they had been living openly and for some time in caverns among a jumble of large rocks close by the road the troopers used. All ten troopers had been killed and their horses stolen.

Incompetence and mismanagement, deplorable though they may be, are remediable, and Uther made it his prime urgency to put a stop to it. The remedy involved close scrutiny of several of his individual commanders, the execution of his chief scout, who was proved to have lied in order to cover his own laziness, and two swift demotions of intermediate commanders to the ranks, where they fared badly at the hands of their former subordinates. That not only clipped the pinions of the officers involved, it also served notice to everyone that high rank, forfeited, entailed a long, hard fall.

Against what most people called sheer misfortune and plain bad luck, however, Uther, like everyone else, was impotent: a scouting troop of twelve mounted men, caught unexpectedly in a narrow valley by a large band of Lot's mercenaries who ought not to have been there, broke and ran down the valley to the eastward in the reasonable hope that their horses' speed would carry them to safety. Instead, it led them into a dry, brush-choked ravine in which they all died when the enemy fired the brush with burning arrows. In another incident, an entire squadron of cavalry, thirty-six strong and operating independently of other support, found itself wiped out when one of the horses came down with some unknown kind of fever and infected all the others. The pestilence spread through the horse lines in the space of two days, and twenty-eight of a total of fifty horses died. The remaining twenty-two animals had all shown symptoms of the illness but had recovered by the end of the fifth day. The squadron commander, a young man called Rollo who had been born and raised around the stables of Camulod, had not dared assume the risk of taking potentially lethal animals back into the healthy herds remaining in Uther's base camp. Upon his own initiative, he ordered that every one of the surviving animals be slaughtered, and he and his men walked back twenty-three miles to rejoin the army, carrying their saddles and equipment.

It gradually became apparent to Uther and to those around him who enjoyed his confidence that something fundamental had changed within his army during the course of the year's campaigning. Had anyone chosen to consider such things prior to the start of that campaign, they might have said that Uther's was a lucky army; everyone had taken that for granted. During the latter part of that summer, however, that perception changed radically, and "Uther's Luck," as it came to be known, was regularly talked about around his army's campfires. The rate at which his best intentions and most careful planning went wrong soon began to generate a plainly noticeable kind of superstitious awe among his followers, and Uther himself eventually reached the stage where he could not blame his people for what they were thinking. He could not charge them openly with disloyalty, either, for the truth was that he, too, suspected some malign, supernatural intervention in his affairs.

From that first night with Ygraine, it seemed to him later, nothing that he planned had ever come to full fruition in quite the way he had envisioned, and he convinced himself eventually that lying with Ygraine had been the very worst thing he could have done. He was incapable of forgetting that Ygraine was sister to Deirdre, who had been Merlyn's wife and was now dead, and that before all that, Deirdre had been Cassandra. Forgetting the pleasure of their coupling, he could not banish the shame of having used his captive for his own desires, in contradiction of everything he had been taught about honourable conduct, acting in the basest possible way, giving full rein to the darkness in him. He felt sure he was being punished for this transgression with the falseness of those around him. And deep in his soul, it sometimes rankled when he gave way to his despair and remembered how he had renounced all his boyhood ties to Cambria—even to being Pendragon—because of his loyalty to Merlyn and to Camulod. A sacrifice that big. made in the name of loyalty, he told himself on the few occasions when he allowed himself to wallow in self-pity, should protect anyone against disloyalty in others . . .

Most of the time, however, Uther would have nothing to do with such thoughts. He had little patience for those who were forever looking back over their shoulders. Only at night would the shadows overtake him, subjecting him to superstitious fears and reminding him of the darkness he acknowledged in himself. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that he seldom permitted himself to dwell on such things, forcing himself instead to remain in the bright light of the approval of his people.

Chapter THIRTY-ONE

In the autumn of the year, towards the end of the campaigning season, an unknown warrior on a tall red horse rode into Uther's camp one evening and demanded to speak with King Uther Pendragon. He was detained but not disarmed, while Nemo, who was decurion of the guard that night, set out to find Uther. But Uther had seen the man arrive and had already come himself to find out who would dare to ride so boldly into his camp alone and on such a magnificent mount.

The King strode quickly towards the group clustered about the newcomer, and the stranger began to step forward to meet him, only to be seized and forced to his knees by the zealous guards. Uther barked an order, bidding them step away and allow the stranger to rise. The man then rose to his feet, squaring his shoulders and holding his head high, glaring around defiantly at his captors.

Uther walked right by him, ignoring him completely, and went to examine his horse, instead. He inspected the animal's teeth and ran his hand expertly over its withers, then turned to its master.

"A fine horse. Unusual for us to see horseflesh as good as our own in this part of the world. I'm Uther Pendragon. Who are you?"