Jack Whyte - Uther

Uther gazed, stricken with horror at what had happened. The blade of the borrowed sword had twisted and bent with the impact of his deliberate blow, the dubious quality of its temper mercilessly exposed in this sudden, violent encounter with obdurate stone. And despite the numerous washings that the piece of coal had undergone, the impact had generated a small cloud of fine black dust that hung in the air, almost motionless, hovering as though to draw attention to the fact that Uther had just failed at something else, although no one could have guessed what that might have been.

Uther stood there, unable to move, his head lowered, his mind filled with dull, sluggish echoes of the sickening sound the sword had made against the coal. He would tell Nemo later that a hundred different thoughts swirled through his mind in the few moments after the sword landed, and most of them were questions: What happened? What went wrong? What had he been trying to demonstrate? What had he hoped to achieve? How could he have gone ahead with it without letting anyone know what was involved? How could he have been such a fool as to attempt this thing in public—not merely in public, but in full view of his grandfather's scowling Council of Elders, all of whom disapproved of him? Why didn't the coal split as it ought to have? Why hadn't he tested both it and the flawed sword earlier? Why, why, why, why?

As he stood there, frozen, Uther heard a swell of sound as his audience began to stir and to talk among themselves, quietly and with decorum because they were in Council. It would have been a grievous insult to the King had anyone permitted himself to laugh aloud or to voice his scorn of something that the King himself had authorized. And so they kept their voices low, their disapproval muted.

Uther's eyes moved to meet his grandfather's, and he saw the old man's hand come up, finger pointing, ordering him to leave the Council chamber. He nodded and began to turn away, but Ullic's voice stopped him.

"Take the weapon."

Uther stooped and retrieved the useless sword, seeing only now the rust that pocked it and the tawdry workmanship of the warped and twisted blade. Then, carrying the thing in both hands, he trudged from the Hall dejectedly, crushingly aware that his humiliation was not yet complete. He would have to face his grandfather later in the day, and probably his father, too, and attempt to explain what it was that he had been trying to do. Had he really tried to split stone with a sword? What practical purpose had he thought to achieve in doing such a thing? Uther writhed inside himself with shame and humiliation that he could ever have been so scatterbrained and so irresponsibly precipitate. He had failed again, utterly, to govern his compulsive enthusiasms, and he had failed to do an advance investigation of possibility and probability, when even a cursory investigation could have shown him that their hard, local Cambrian coal, dug from the exposed seam that surfaced close to their village, would not split as readily or cleanly as the softer coal used in Camulod. Uther knew he could blame no one but himself. He had walked—no, he had almost forced his way— into his grandfather's presence while the King was in Council, and he had used his status as a family member to gain his grandfather's attention. And then he had proceeded to humiliate himself, begging everyone there to witness his apparently mindless destruction of what must have seemed to them to be a perfectly good sword. It must have looked to everyone like a ceremonial sacrilege, some kind of inane, insane rite devised simply to outrage all of them.

His friends were waiting for him when Uther reached the doors and closed them behind him, but after one look at his face, none of them sought to join him as he strode past them and away. For his part, he did not even notice them. His mind was filled with the vision of his Grandfather Ullic's face and the stern disapproval that had filled it as he had glowered down from his dais.

As Uther was striding away, fleeing to hide his shame and humiliation. Nemo was witnessing an altogether different aspect of what his demonstration had evoked, one that would have confounded the boy had he known of it. She had been leaning forward, peering between two rafters in order to watch him as he walked away, carrying the sadly twisted weapon he had used in his "demonstration," and as the high doors closed behind him, she became aware of the deep silence that now held sway in the room below, one that no one seemed eager to break. She shifted her position, moving her head from one side to the other of the rafter she was straddling. Below her and to her right, the King still stood in front of his ceremonial seat, a thoughtful expression on his face as he gazed at the doors through which his grandson had made his exit. Every other eye in the room was fixed upon him, and Nemo had the feeling that everyone down there on the floor was holding his breath expectantly. The silence stretched and grew, and no one made a sound or moved to take a seat. Eventually, however, Ullic Pendragon turned his head back towards his expectant advisers and waggled his fingers in their direction.

"Sit," he said. "Sit down."

As they did so, the King moved slowly down from his dais to where Uther's lump of coal lay on the floor. He stood gazing at the coal for the space of several heartbeats, and then he slowly backed away from it until he was close to the main doors of the Hall. He turned and pulled them open, and as the doors swung wide, Nemo saw one of the guards outside twist in surprise. Then the King said something and held out his hand.

Ullic approached the coal again, this time carrying a sword he had taken from the guard. While everyone gazed silently, he stood for some time looking down at the black mass. Then he sank to one knee, shifting the sword to his left hand and reaching out with his right to touch the tip of his middle finger to the deep score that Uther's blade had made on the black surface. His gaze sharpened, and he leaned closer to the lump of coal, spreading the fingers of his hand wide over the surface for a moment and peering closely at something. Then gently, tentatively, he drew his thumbnail straight down along one of the fine lines he had detected.

Nemo heard him mutter something to himself at that point, but his voice was pitched too low for her to hear. It was obvious, however, that something had occurred to him. He straightened his back, still on one knee, and took the sword back into his right hand. He held it point down, like a dagger, and braced his fist against his shoulder as he used his left hand to position the point of the blade very carefully against the coal. When he was satisfied that it was properly in place and would not slip, he brought his left hand up and cupped it over his right fist, and then he thrust downward, hard, using the strength and weight of his arms, shoulders and torso to drive the sword point into the coal. A sharp crack, and the lump split cleanly into two flat-sided parts, almost throwing the King off balance with the suddenness of its division. Ullic threw out one hand to retain his balance, and then tested the smoothness of the split sides with his open hand. He nodded his head wordlessly, and then rose to his feet again with a loud sigh, brushing his left hand against his tunic to wipe the coal dust from his palm. He turned next towards the open doors where the guards stood gaping and held out the hand with the sword. Its owner immediately came forward to retrieve it.

"My thanks," the King told him. "Close the doors again when you go out." He watched the doors as they closed behind the departing guard, then made his way back up onto his dais, where he faced his Councillors again.

"If I have learned nothing else about my grandson Uther," he said to them, "I have learned this: the boy, young as he is, is no fool. What you saw him do today might have looked foolish to you, but that is only because none of you knows what he was attempting to do.