Jack Whyte - Uther

Owain stood speechless after that, his eyes shining with what Uther assumed must be gratitude, and then he stooped and kissed Uther's hand before turning and striding quickly from the room. Uther glanced inquiringly at Garreth Whistler, who merely raised an eyebrow and shrugged before following Owain.

Alone again, Uther sat back down by the brazier and stared into the glowing coals for a long time, until the candles on the nearby table had burned down and begun to flicker and the fire itself was buried in glowing ash. Then, coming to awareness again, he rose to his feet and went to bed.

He slept very badly, plagued by formless dreams and imaginings, and when he got up the next morning, feeling as though he had not slept at all, Owain of the Caves was no longer in Tir Manha. He had left the previous night and had told no one where he was going. Uther said nothing when Garreth told him the news, but he felt abandoned, and he saw Owain's departure as an evil omen.

It was closer to fourteen days than to ten by the time Uther returned from his journey to Carmarthen, but he was well satisfied with what he had achieved there. The young Chief Dergyll ap Griffyd, whose home base Carmarthen was, had been made paramount Chief of all the Griffyd clans a year earlier and was quickly proving himself to be a superb warrior and leader. A handsome, broad-shouldered young man—Uther estimated his age at no more than twenty-three or twenty-four—of moderate height, strongly muscled and of slim, supple build, he was supremely confident in his own abilities, yet still blessed with an appealing sense of fun. His people looked up to him and admired everything about him, and from what Uther could gather, the man had no visible flaws and no discernible weaknesses. Uther and he had known and liked each other briefly in boyhood, but many years elapsed before each set eyes upon the other again, this time at the funeral of the veteran Chief Cativelaunus of Carmarthen. Uther had known that the old Chief had had a protégé called Dergyll, but it had never occurred to him that it might be the same Dergyll who had been his companion during one of the long summers of boyhood. He knew three other men called Dergyll, and had anyone asked him, he might have admitted to being prepared to dislike a fourth, simply for bearing the name of the three he knew.

As a fighter, Dergyll ap Griffyd had built himself a fearsome reputation, and he had the skills of a commander to match those of a warrior. Uther had left him in charge of the preparations on the ground above and surrounding the invasion beaches that Cerdic and Tewdric would use. He had left Huw Strongarm there, too, attached to Dergyll's command to back him up with a four hundred-strong contingent of Pendragon bowmen who, properly positioned exactly where Uther had ordained, would be able to decimate the invading troops who escaped Dergyll's first reception and might be foolish enough to seek to attack Carmarthen anyway. The position held by the Pendragon force, less than one-third of the way along the only route that led to Carmarthen from the landing beach, could not be avoided or evaded; any troops destined for Carmarthen would have to pass through the valley that Uther's bowmen had claimed as their killing ground.

Uther knew that the western invasion was well in hand. The enemy, anticipating no opposition, would land suspecting nothing, and no move would be made against them until they were all ashore. Only then, once they were disembarked and preparing to march eastwards to Carmarthen, would Dergyll's trap be sprung. They would be hit hard and continuously by a powerful army that had materialized, it would appear to them, from nowhere, and whose existence they could not have dreamed of. With Dergyll's Griffyds, Huw's Pendragon bowmen and the Llewellyn warriors who would be sent to reinforce them, the Federation's waiting army would number close to six thousand men, all of whom would be defending their homeland against an enemy taken by surprise and caught flat-footed with their backs to the sea.

Uther was far more worried about what would happen with the two armies destined to fall upon Camulod, one from the south and the other from the east. He felt consumed by the need to reach Camulod quickly to check on their defensive plans and progress there, for the war that Camulod would fight would be a demanding one. They would be lacking their natural leader, Caius Merlyn, and be sorely in need of greater assistance than Uther could offer them. Before he could leave for Camulod, however, he had affairs to tend to within his own Pendragon Federation.

He had summoned the Llewellyn Chiefs to join him in Tir Manha to discuss the final arrangements for their participation in the spring invasion, including the number and disposition of the warriors they would send to Carmarthen. The Chiefs were Cunbelyn and Hod the Strong, both of whom had voted in the Choosing of Uther as King of the Federation, and a younger man. Brochvael, who had succeeded the dead Meradoc as Chief of the largest Llewellyn clan after the Choosing ceremony. There was no love lost between Uther and any of the three Llewellyn Chiefs, thanks to the confrontation he had had with Meradoc, but neither was there any overt hostility between them. The Llewellyns had done whatever had been required of them since Uther had become King and had behaved themselves appropriately, and with that Uther could have no complaint.

In due time the Llewellyn Chiefs arrived, and Uther talked with them for a full day, outlining the exact dimensions of the threat the Federation faced and detailing the requirements he would have of their combined clansmen. There were a few questions raised in the opening stages, primarily by Hod the Strong, concerning the source of Uther's information and the reliability of his informants, but Hod was that kind of man, bluntly asking the questions that came into his mind and uncaring of the subtleties involved. He was prepared to accept that there were things Uther could not tell him, for fear of endangering his friends in Cornwall, and he professed to have no need of anything other than to be convinced that he could believe what he was being asked to believe. Apart from that, however, he wanted to be assured that he was not being asked to endanger his people needlessly. Uther addressed each of his questions openly, refusing to name names or to say anything that could be hazardous to his friends, but stating his reasons forthrightly each time he had to do so and otherwise concealing nothing.

In the end, they agreed that the combined Llewellyn clans would field a force of two thousand men to reinforce Dergyll ap Griffyd's four thousand and Huw Strongarm's four hundred-man force of Pendragon bowmen in Carmarthen. Brochvael, the young Chief, about whom Uther knew little, was displeased over what he perceived as the apparent lack of Pendragon commitment in the Carmarthen campaign, a mere four hundred bows as opposed to the Llewellyn thousands, but it was Hod himself who surprised Uther and laid those concerns to rest by pointing out that one Pendragon bowman, given a strong position with a decent field of fire and sufficient arrows for his longbow, was worth any ten, perhaps twenty warriors that he himself could put into the field. Four hundred such, he pointed out, strategically placed as Uther had described to them, would have the power to win an entire battle on their own without help from anyone else, providing a supporting force at the enemy's back could keep the enemy from running away from the long and deadly Pendragon arrows.

Brochvael seemed unconvinced, and Uther was on the point of showing his displeasure when it dawned on him that, astonishing as it might seem, Brochvael had never seen Pendragon longbows used in war. As soon as he realized that, he nullified the problem quickly by arranging a demonstration for the following day.