Jack Whyte - Uther

Uther sat staring at her again, and then he reached out and squeezed her shoulder. "Well, look, Nemo, here's what we'll do. We'll wait him out and tell no one where you are. You stay here, and I'll go back to Tir Manha and fetch you enough food to last you for a day or two. This Druid won't stay long, you'll see, and he won't be looking for you. He probably thinks you died in the forest somewhere. I'd wager he has even forgotten that you ever lived."

"Someone will tell him my name."

"But what did he call you when you lived at home? He didn't call you Nemo, did he?" She shook her head, on the point of telling him that her real name was Jonet, but he was charging ahead. "Of course he didn't. I know that's not your real name. So how could this Druid ask about you? D'you see what I'm saying?"

Responding to the tone of his voice, Nemo looked at him, then sniffed loudly and even managed to smile, tremulously, wiping her nose with her sleeve.

"Good, then bear this in mind from this moment forward. The Druid might be your father. There's not much you can do about that. But he is not your keeper, so stop worrying about him coming back and claiming you as some kind of slave. I won't allow it. And if I have to I'll complain to my father about him, and to Daris, the High Priest." He broke off, grinning at her. "On the other hand, there's nothing much I can do about your brother. You're stuck with him, I'm afraid." The grin faded from his eyes. "He's a nasty little brute, though. He had a dead rat in his scrip. I saw him take it out when he thought no one was looking, while his father was talking with another Druid, waiting to see Daris. He took this thing out of his scrip, then cut one of its legs off and dropped the rest of the carcass back into his scrip. Then he started playing with the severed leg, trying to skin it with his lingers. Filthy little toad."

Uther was completely oblivious to the shudder that shook Nemo when she heard him use that expression. His mind was still busy with thoughts of young Carthac.

"What happened to him, anyway? What happened to his head?"

"He was born that way. It happened during the birthing. Everybody thought he would die. But he didn't." Even as she said the words, Nemo recalled seeing Carthac earlier that day and thinking immediately that he looked far worse than she remembered.

Uther was rising to his feet. "Well, he's an unsightly little monster, and not so little either. How old would he be?"

Nemo shrugged. "Younger than me. Younger than you, too. I think I was three when he was born . . . that's what I remember being told."

"So, if I'm two years younger than you are, and he's a year younger than me, he's nine . . . He's huge for a nine-year-old."

Nemo shrugged. "Yes," she said, "he's big."

No more was ever said, but Uther's stature as her guardian, protector and benefactor was forever fused into Nemo's consciousness that day. He had soothed her and relieved her of her fears without either scorn or ridicule, and he had personally guaranteed her safety, offering to enlist his father the King, and even the Chief Druid, on her behalf. Nemo thanked him simply and accepted the truth of everything he had told her, and eventually her life resumed its normal round.

Leir left again shortly afterwards, following a stay of mere days, leaving Carthac in Tir Manha with Daris, the High Priest. Before he could return at summer's end, word came back that he had fallen prey to a sudden, raging fever and had expired within a matter of days, frightening everyone with fears of plague and pestilence. Carthac was left an orphan, and no one was quick to offer to lake on the responsibility of looking after the misshapen boy. But word passed among the people, subtly reinforced by the authority of the High Priest, that as the son of a Druid, the boy was entitled to a measure of support from the clan at large, and lodgings were eventually found for him until he could be apprenticed to another Druid. The waiting period was short and unhappy, but Carthac was placed with another Druid from the north and soon moved on.

Chapter FOUR

In her entire life prior to arriving in Tir Manha, no one had ever taken the time to speak civilly to Nemo, so it had quickly become one of her greatest joys that the boy Uther would often talk to her, sometimes for hours on end, looking her directly in the eye from time to time and speaking urgently and for her ears alone, without a hint of cruelty or derision. No one observing the two of them at such times would ever have thought to call what passed between them conversations, for Nemo never said a word, never made any attempt to respond to anything Uther said. She was content to listen and to enjoy the recognition in being spoken to, and it would never even have occurred to her that Uther spoke to her thus out of any feeling of fraternity or equality. She simply accepted the situation and enjoyed it, knowing that the boy spoke to her only because she remained silent, listened avidly and made no effort ever to interrupt him. Whenever he felt the need to hear himself think aloud, she was there, willing and available to serve as his audience.

Uther had been born into a family wherein the men were accustomed to thinking aloud and did so all the time. His grandfather and his father were both celebrated, among a people who placed great value upon such things, for their oratory and the soaring music of their voices. In matters of debate and dialogue, in argument, arbitration and level-headed negotiation, they were renowned talkers, powerful persuaders and manipulators of multitudes.

Young Uther had known, however, from the earliest days of his childhood, a truth that most people did not: that the liquid flow of persuasive urgings that spilled from the mouths of the male elders of his family was anything but spontaneous. The sweeping, seemingly fluid exhortations to their clansmen and kinsfolk were carefully and painstakingly structured, then rehearsed and polished for days prior to being delivered. Uther's childhood had been filled with instances of seeing his grandfather, especially, pacing the floor for hours, shoulders hunched in concentration as he muttered for his own ears the words and arguments he would later pour out for the attention of his assembled people. It had taken Uther a long time to realize and accept that the passionate flow of eloquence spilling horn King Ullic's lips was made up of the same words to which he himself had been listening for the previous few days or sometimes weeks, whispered or muttered almost inaudibly as the King moved from room to room, or from corner to corner, deep in concentration.

When the time came for the words to be said in public, however, all of the repetitive work of stringing them together in the first place came to fruition, so that the speaker, knowing the words fluently, could concentrate upon delivering them to maximum effect, using tone, pitch, rhythm and cadence to sway his listeners. Once he had learned that lesson—and he had shivered with an overwhelming rash of gooseflesh when it finally sank home to him— Uther had been stricken with awe at the combined powers of words and forethought. From that moment forward he would never lose sight of the importance of knowing in advance exactly what he would say when presenting an argument or defending his opinions on a particular topic.

Uther came to seek Nemo out more and more often, until what had begun as a whimsy had become a habit. The habit bred a strange form of dependency upon her presence, so that after a relatively brief period of time, Nemo, in a strange and uncritical way, had become Uther's Witness. She became a part of his audience, openly or in concealment, every time he had important things to say to anyone, and since in those youthful days that usually meant to his family— particularly to his father and his grandfather—it also meant that Nemo had to listen from some hiding place. Neither of those two august beings, Ullic and Uric, would have been likely to accept the presence of a common urchin like Nemo. And so it came to pass that Nemo became an expert at concealment, hiding herself securely far ahead of time whenever she had to witness Uther speaking out on anything important. Uther, in turn, had come close to the point of losing conscious awareness of her presence, even when they were alone together, and he frequently spoke to her as though he were musing aloud to himself.