Jack Whyte - Uther

The second injury, much more serious than the first, had severed the large muscles in Cirro's thigh, depriving him of the ability to walk and thus destroying his ability to command in the field. But the hardened old soldier had refused to yield to his pain and surrender himself to Mucius Quinto's medics before passing over his responsibilities formally to Uther and to his own second in command, the veteran Dedalus, who had terrorized Uther and Merlyn during their early training. Dedalus, while primarily a cavalryman, had nonetheless extensive experience as a commander of infantry and was above all a sound judge and leader of men. Uther had great respect for the man, remembering him as a stern and unforgiving, but absolutely just and impartial tutor. Despite that, however, Uther found it difficult to accept or even to envision Dedalus in the place of Cirro. and it took him long moments to overcome a sense of unreality about what he was seeing transpire.

Popilius Cirro, one of the last surviving veterans of the imperial legions left in Britain, was one of the few men in the world whom Uther Pendragon regarded with awe. Ever since Uther had been a snot-nosed boy, he had walked in fear of the big man, whom he had never seen in any condition other than impeccable, whether that referred to his uniform dress, his dignity or his conduct and deportment.

Now Uther found a Cirro he had never seen before, stripped of his polished armour and wearing only a white, knee-length tunic that was torn and heavily stained with blood. His hair, normally covered completely by his heavy, ornate helmet, was thick and completely white, matted and plastered to his scalp with sweat. The senior centurion was propped up stiffly in a camp chair, his back against the bole of an enormous oak tree, his face pale and haggard and his eyes sunken and feverish, the skin beneath them beaded with sweat. His entire left thigh was swathed in thick, blood-blackened bandages and his right arm was tightly bound and strapped against his chest to keep it immobile, but the steadfast old campaigner was deep in conference with the senior officer cadre of the army. The group surrounding him, gathered in a semicircle beneath the boughs of the oak tree, included Strong- arm and Whistler, representing the Pendragon bowmen and Dragons respectively, and his own Camulodian cavalry and infantry commanders headed by Dedalus.

Most of the officers turned to look at Uther as he approached, then turned quickly back to Cirro, as though afraid to look away from him for too long, lest he expire between one breath and the next. Cirro himself was the only one who did not look away again from Uther. He merely stared, solemn-faced, and nodded in greeting as the King approached.

Uther knew that everyone there was aware that he had brought hack women and a baby to join their party, and he knew, too, that their curiosity about who these people were and why they should have come with him must be immense. He himself had offered no explanation to anyone and had warned his own people to keep silent. Now he fully expected that Cirro, despite his obvious pain and exhaustion, would demand to know what was going on, as was his right as commander of the Camulod contingent of the army.

Uther marched directly up to the older man, laid a friendly hand on his shoulder and asked him how he was feeling, knowing that the question was stupid and yet unable to stop himself or to think of anything more appropriate to say.

Cirro waved away Uther's concerns with a gesture of his left hand and then surprised him by making no reference at all to Uther's absence or to the newcomers he had brought back with him. He had more important matters to communicate and discuss before relinquishing his command.

They had defeated the German mercenaries, he reported, speaking sibilantly through clenched teeth, but had lost more than a hundred men in the encounter and almost as many again with serious wounds. More than sixty of their casualties had been infantry soldiers, but twenty of them had been Pendragon bowmen, isolated and cut down by unexpected enemy manoeuvres. Another half score and more had been cavalry brought down by arrows or, in a few instances, by the axes and spears of the enemy. Almost before the echoes of the fighting had died away, however, scouts from the rear had come running to report the advance of another, far larger host from the north, this one apparently composed entirely of Erse Galloglas. The veteran German mercenaries who had caused them so much trouble had numbered in the region of seven to eight hundred men, according to Cirro's best estimate, but the new force streaming towards them appeared to be almost twice as large as that.

Listening to the infantry commander's report and recognizing the effort and the pain involved in making it, Uther sucked in his breath and held it, realizing that he had committed a great error in judgment. He had assumed, when the German mercenaries attacked with so much strength and purpose, that this was the army he had been warned about, and that the earlier identification of it as an Erse force had been wrong. Now, faced with the reality of a second, larger host where he had anticipated only one, he was forced to reassess the odds he might be facing, and he was daunted by his own sudden uncertainty and his ignorance of what was really happening. This second army had to be the Galloglas enemy that Ygraine had named earlier, the Ersemen who called themselves the Sons of Condran, and they must have been landed, exactly as she had described, from a large fleet of Erse galleys somewhere to the northwest above the Shelter. Visualizing that, Uther felt the first, unfamiliar sensations of panic in his breast, stirrings that he grimly fought down, forcing himself to consider his revised options as dispassionately as he could. Turning his back on Cirro and the others, he reviewed the possibilities now swarming in his mind.

It now seemed highly unlikely to him that the mercenary force he had been fighting, which had come from the same northerly direction, could have been an advance unit of the Galloglas army. The temptation to accept it as such was strong, but when he looked squarely at the evidence, the combination of disciplined, battle- hardened imperial mercenaries and undisciplined Erse warriors in the same force was too alien to imagine. Besides, he told himself, he had been engaged with the mercenaries for a day and a half. Had the Ersemen been part of the same force, no matter how dilatory, undisciplined or unwilling, they would have caught up to an advance guard long before the end of that encounter.

Whence, then, had the Germans come, and where had they been going? And if Ygraine's report was accurate and yet another licet had now landed Lot himself on the coast nearby, where had it originated? It hardly seemed possible that it could be part of the same Erse fleet. But then, if it was another fleet entirely, who commanded it, and how large a fighting force had it disgorged on his western flank?

Compressing his lips into a thin line, he swung back to face Cirro and the others, who had all been standing silent, waiting to see how he would react to the word of this new threat. Wasting no words, he told them that the women he had brought back with him were Lot's Queen, Ygraine—the real one this time—and her companions. In clipped tones that permitted neither interruption nor comment, he explained, to the astonishment of most, that his spy in Lot's camp had been the Queen herself, and that she was sister to Merlyn's Erse friend and former hostage Donuil, and also to Merlyn's own dead wife, Deirdre. She had a child with her, Lot's acknowledged heir, Uther said, declining for the time being, on a sudden impulse, to name the child as his own. He told them that Ygraine was to be picked up from the southwest coast by her brother Connor, who commanded the fleet of galleys owned by their father, King Athol Mac Iain of the Erse Scots, and that he, Uther, as commander in chief of the combined Camulodian and Cambrian armies, had undertaken to get the Queen to the meeting place safely, both in reward for her loyal and dangerous aid to this point and in order to keep the Erse King neutral in this war, and in recognition of the strength and the bargaining power Lot's legitimate heir would offer them as a hostage.