Jack Whyte - Uther

"No," Uther replied. "I don't believe that. Do you want to know what I think? I think you simply chose to help me because you wanted to. What I am curious about is why you would have wanted to."

Garreth dropped the cuirass to the ground again and stood up quickly, inhaling deeply through his nostrils and placing his hands on his hips as he gazed off, head high, into the distance, his broad back to Uther. The boy said nothing, having learned long since to wait until Garreth was prepared to end a silence on his own, and eventually the tall, golden warrior turned back to face him.

"Do you recall my telling you that I am an Outlander?"

"Aye."

"And did I mention that I was orphaned twice, once at my birth and then again when my adopted father, Dunvallo, died?"

"Aye, you did."

"Well, I was eight, not quite nine, when that happened, and I was left to fend for myself. I did it successfully, too. But I know now that I could not have done it without the goodwill of the villagers. It was they who sustained me and kept me fed . . .

"Not all the villagers were supportive of me, though, and their sons were definitely not. I was an Outlander, and I looked different from anyone else, and that meant I was fair game for anyone who cared to hunt me. And they hunted me, Uther. Not a day went by without my being thrashed by someone, and usually it was a group of someones. But that is where, and how, I first learned to fight. I was fortunate in being tall and strong for my age, but that only brought me into conflict with bigger boys, who would not have bothered with me had they not been provoked by my size, my height. And then I was befriended by a man who saw something in me that no one else had seen. He took me into his household and placed me under his own protection, and my days of being persecuted were at an end. Can you guess who he was?"

"My father, Uric?"

Garreth smiled. "No, for he himself was barely beyond boyhood then. It was your grandfather, King Ullic, and I have been grateful to him ever since." His smile died away. "Thanks to his good regard, I was able to train properly and become the warrior I am today, and my duty is total loyalty to the king. But I never forgot how it felt to be as unloved as I felt before your grandfather found me. I never forgot the misery of being hated and abused for no good reason. I never forgot the pain of being rejected or the other pain, far worse, of being scorned and ridiculed. So when I saw you there that day, hiding in the byre, it seemed but natural to do the things I did and to offer you some comfort and understanding, because believe me, Uther, I knew exactly what you were feeling and thinking. So how can you ever repay me for such kindness? Well, you'll know when the opportunity comes along, and when it does, you won't have to tell me what you did, because I will know. Now, you tell me . . . why have you been feeling so low for the past week?"

Uther shook his head. He wanted to confess his feelings to Garreth about Camulod and Cambria and his disloyalty, but the time was not right, not yet, and so he shrugged away from any satisfying explanation and felt yet more guilt for knowing that Garreth knew he was being evasive.

Chapter THREE

Nemo did not often feel the need for solitude, for she never thought very deeply about anything. She had never felt a need to avoid the company of others in order to debate within herself on anything, and she had no training of any kind in structured logic or formal analysis.

On those very few occasions when she did have things to think about, however, Nemo had discovered a place where she could go to be alone and undisturbed. She thought of it as the Place of the Bows," a name given to it by her alone and known to no one else. It bothered her not at all that it was one of the most sacred places in all of Pendragon Cambria, access to it forbidden to all but the King and the Druids. She had no interest in harming or changing or defacing anything there, no interest in the normal purposes

for which the place was used and no interest in making anyone aware that she might venture there from time to time. The Place of the Bows was Nemo's private spot, and she worked hard to ensure that no one ever saw her there or saw her approaching or leaving the area.

It had originally been a grove of three ancient oak trees, the only trio of such trees in a region that was generally too rocky to support anything other than hawthorns, scrub willows and stunted birch, which was why it was a hallowed spot, sacred to the Druids. But one of the venerable trees had been sundered by lightning ages earlier, and little remained of it now but a blackened, shrunken stump. A second tree had died much later of natural but undetermined causes, and most of that one remained in place, its mighty branches dried and cracked, stripped of all traces of bark and weathered by long, withering decades of rain and snow, frost and blistering sunshine. Only the third of the trio remained intact and alive, and its upper branches were choked with clumps of mistletoe so thick and luxuriant that they could conceal all signs of human presence were anyone to crouch up there among them. Nemo frequently did exactly that, having found a high crotch among the clumps where she could rest unseen and in great comfort, reclining on a couch of springy, strongly anchored mistletoe and looking down on the neighbouring area. And it was there that King Ullic's bowmen practised daily, all day long, firing their long, carefully fletched arrows at the targets they had made from bundles of tightly packed straw, bound together with leather thongs and draped with cloth coverings marked in concentric rings.

Between this practice area and the tree from which Nemo watched them, a stand of bushy young evergreens served as an extra screen, separating the practice area from the sacred grove. The saplings, she had discovered, were yew trees, and they were tended jealously by the Druids, watched over and carefully nurtured, trimmed and pruned. Each one of these young trees would some day grow to reach the size at which its limbs could be cut, then individually dried, shaped and carved to form one of the mighty, man-high bows of which King Ullic's people were so proud. Pendragon longbows, they called them, and never had the world seen such weapons. An arrow fired from one of those bows, even at a distance of two hundred paces, could pierce a tree—or an armoured man—with ease, and transfix either, protruding front and rear. Nemo knew this was true; perched high up in her oak tree, she had seen the evidence with her own eyes.

Uther loved the Pendragon longbow; while he was in Cambria he spent hours each day practising with the huge weapon, and Nemo spent those same hours watching him. Nemo was not interested in the bows, however. She would rather have spent her time among the men and the horses of Camulod, the cavalry, as she had heard Uther name them. Those she could have watched all day and all night, too, for everything about them excited her: the size and sheer brute strength of the great animals and the beautiful leather-and-metal harness that they wore; the height and bearing of the riders; the splendour of the weapons they carried; and even the glittering armour they wore, burnished and blazing, blinding in the sunlight and twinkling with reflections in the light of the moon. But wherever Uther Pendragon went, Nemo followed. Uther was her single, all-consuming interest. She thought of him all time, believing, ever since she had first met him, that he was the biggest part of her destiny—the only person who had ever looked beyond her startling ugliness and seen a person worth tolerating hiding underneath.

Jonet the Toad, they had called her in the days before she met Uther, and she had answered to the name, believing it to be apt and no more than she deserved. Her raw, unleavened ugliness had always weighed upon her like a yoke carved from stone, blighting her with the guilt of her appearance. She had always been aware of it, always felt its presence, always acknowledged her duty to grovel to the world because of it.