Jack Whyte - Uther

"By the henge, Derek, this whoreson's as big and heavy as you!"

"I know that. That's why I'm taking his armour. Now do as I bade you and move him over by the tree. He deserves to lie in dignity. Drag him if you have to, but lay him down carefully. Don't abuse him. He was a line, strong fighter and he died honourably. 'Twas not his fault that his leg would not hold him up."

As his men carried out his bidding. Derek of Ravenglass finished dressing himself in Uther's clothes and armour, placing the great Roman helmet on his head last of all. Everything lilted him as though made for him, save that he was very slightly smaller in the head and thicker through the waist than the armour's former owner had been. Nonetheless, Derek was delighted. He went next to the dead man's horse, which still stood where it had been left, it's reins trailing on the ground. He saw the richness of the red roll of cloth tied behind the saddle and unfastened the bindings, shaking out the huge red cloak and whistling at the sight of the golden dragon sewn into the cloth.

The two men had come back, having thrown Uther's body beneath the tree—Derek had not been watching in the end, and they had thrown the corpse asprawl onto the ground, as they would any other piece of offal, so that it lay awry, one bent knee hooked over a fallen branch. Now they stood wide-eyed, looking at the war cloak.

Derek of Ravenglass fingered the golden dragon. "I wonder who he was, this Chief."

The smaller of the two shook his head. "That's a King's cloak, Derek, and that helmet came straight from Rome. Could this be a Roman King?"

Derek snorted. "The Romans don't have Kings, man, they have Emperors!"

"Maybe it was Uther of Camulod," the other man said. "He's a King, isn't he?"

"Aye, that's what they say. Uther of Camulod's a King . . . a powerful King, like Lot of Cornwall. Think you then you'd find him in hole like this with only thirty men? His armies number in the thousands, man. No, this was no King, but perhaps a King's Champion. We'll never know. But at least the whoreson was big enough to bring me my new armour. Now let's go and find these women."

EPILOGUE

As Derek of Ravenglass spurred his newly acquired warhorse to overtake his men, a solitary figure, dressed all in black, with polished leather and burnished silver armour, an enormous, double-arched bow slung diagonally across his shoulders over his cloak, emerged from the valley less than two miles to the north of him and resolutely turned his mount westward along the riverbank towards the sea. Merlyn Britannicus, fully and painfully restored to conscious awareness after a two-year hiatus, had no knowledge of his exact location. He knew only that his cousin Uther was somewhere ahead of him, and that some time soon he would find him and confront him before taking vengeance for a murdered wife and child.

For more than a week now, Merlyn had been riding south and west through the war-ravaged peninsula of Cornwall, following the wide-trampled path of large bodies of men moving ahead of him. Who these men were, and whether or not the groups were large enough to constitute armies, he could not tell, but he knew beyond dispute that his cousin's original army had been harried and beset at every step of their journey. The bodies strewn along his present route, some of them charred beyond recognition as friends or enemies, bore eloquent testimony to the hard-fought progress Uther Pendragon had won.

Until he rode into the devastation of the battleground to the north two days before, however, Merlyn had believed in the myth of his invincible, implacable cousin. He had been completely unprepared for the story of Uther's ignominious Might from the battlefield, and the two reports he heard, from Mucius Quinto and Popilius Cirro, the two senior surviving officers among the battered remnants of the Camulodian army, were sufficiently similar, in one overriding respect, to close his mind to other disparities.

Both men described how Uther had fled the battlefield, accompanied by a party of captured, high-born women, one of them Ygraine, the wife of Gulrhys Lot himself.

Merlyn had been confounded and outraged to hear of this new evidence of his cousin's perfidy, for as soon as he heard Ygraine's name, he knew who she was: the sister of his own murdered wife, Deirdre, whose brutal death he was now riding to avenge, convinced that it had occurred at the hands of Uther. That Uther should now have abducted Ygraine, insult upon infamy, hardened Merlyn's heart completely against the man who had once, and for so long, been nearest and dearest to him. Had any doubts lingered in his mind about the Tightness of his mission, these tidings of Ygraine had destroyed them.

It mattered nothing to Merlyn that Mucius Quinto had suggested, not unreasonably, that Uther, by his flight, had saved the lives of all the men yet living in the valley. Nor, by the same token, did it cross his mind to doubt the surgeon's accuracy when he told Merlyn that his cousin had ridden off at the head of a thousand mounted men, the entire cavalry complement of the force with which Uther had left Camulod. Merlyn had no interest in explaining, excusing or justifying his cousin's apparent cowardice. He wanted only to overtake the red-and-gold-clad King and bring him to justice. Every other consideration was superfluous beside that driving need. And so he had taken leave of the two veteran Camulodians and gone hunting once again for Uther, his armour and equipment clean and sparkling, unsullied by the dirt of either battle or long travel.

The following morning, he found the Cornish King, Gulrhys Lot himself, recognizable even over the gap of years since Merlyn had last set eyes upon him, hanging at the end of a rope thrown over the bough of a huge tree, but so great was his urgency to overtake Uther that he barely took time to examine the corpse or wonder who had hung it there. He was mildly mystified, certainly, by its mutilation and by the fact that its severed hands and feet had been stuffed into a large, richly brocaded bag that bore the crest of Pendragon on its face. Strangely, the King's great seal, a solid mass of gold, had been left intact upon the finger of one hand. He took it as proof of the man's death, but wasted no time being curious about the why or wherefore of the execution. Nor did he pay the slightest attention to the ruined, skull-cleft corpse that lay nearby at the edge of the clearing. Gulrhys Lot, he knew, had richly deserved to die a hideous death, and there must have been hundreds of men who would have been happy to provide one.

Turning to leave, however, he hesitated and then swung back to face the dangling corpse, suddenly filled with a swelling, angry resentment. This dead and bloodless hulk was the miscreant responsible for the war that had blighted and blasted southwestern Britain, but far worse than that, this corpse had been the dictator of countless deaths, among them the murder of Merlyn's own father, Picus Britannicus. That in itself demanded some form of vengeance, even post mortem. Merlyn kicked his horse forward, dismounted and began to build a pyre beneath the body, beginning with a tiny blaze and then feeding it until it roared so that he could scarcely approach it. There was no lack of dead wood lying close by, and so he soon had a huge conflagration blazing, the flames reaching as high as the corpse's waist, burning its clothing and licking at the rope across its chest. Merlyn sat his horse and waited until the rope gave way, dropping the body into the inferno, and then he turned and rode away, his mind fixed once again upon his cousin.

The riverbank pathway Merlyn now followed was narrow and dangerous in spots, but it was the only path available, and he could see plainly that it had been taken by scores of riders ahead of him. He rode forward attentively, keeping his horse tightly reined, and soon came to a place where an ancient, enormous tree had fallen clean across the river, bridging it from bank to bank, its ruined top blocking the path and forcing him to dismount and lead his horse around the obstacle.