Jack Whyte - Uther

He need not have worried, for if Uric had even thought of the journey from that viewpoint, he must have dismissed the thought immediately as irrelevant. He had far more important matters on his mind. His only words to Uther were instructions to go at once to the head cook and ask him to fill Uther's saddlebags with enough provisions to keep the two of them, father and son, well fed for the next forty-eight hours. And as soon as he had the supplies, including a plentiful quantity of drinking water in skin bags that they could hang about their ponies' necks, Uther was to arm himself with a full quiver of arrows for his bow—a boy-sized version of the huge Pendragon longbow made especially for him by his grandfather's own bow-maker—and rejoin Uric at his tent as quickly as he could. Uric wanted to be away and headed for home within the quarter hour, he said, and Uther needed no further urging.

Once on the way, they rode hard, pushing their mounts for maximum speed but taking great care at the same time not to overtax the beasts, as they had but one animal each. Since the actual hunting was done on foot, they had taken one horse each along with them purely as a measure of luxury and self-indulgence. Now they rode in a way calculated to cover distance most economically without exhausting their ponies, riding at a walking pace for a mile or two, then increasing their gait to a canter for a similar distance and then to a loping run for an equal space, avoiding any flat-out gallop that would tire the animals unduly. And for one quarter of every hour, they would dismount and allow the animals to graze and refresh themselves.

Uther had hoped to be able to talk to his father at greater length and more intimately once they were on their own, away from the others, but he could see that his father's attention and concerns were focused elsewhere. Most of the questions he asked Uric in the first hour of their journey were met with grunts or with utter silence, and the few responses that he did receive were distracted and practically incoherent. Uther soon accepted his father's preoccupation and fell silent, riding thereafter with his own thoughts for company.

It was plain to him that his father was very deeply troubled by the tidings that had come from Tir Manha, although Uther himself could see nothing dire in the message he had heard. Grandfather Ullic had fallen from his Thinking Stone and injured himself, but there seemed to Uther to be no reason for great concern in that. Uther had seen the Thinking Stone a thousand times and had clambered all over it when he was no more than an infant, and the thought of anyone, and most particularly his Grandfather Ullic, hurting himself badly through a fall from its edge to the ground seemed ludicrous to the boy. No more than five days earlier, Ullic himself had sat on the very edge of the Thinking Stone with his buttocks on the stone itself and his feet on the ground, resting his hands on his bent knees while he talked with Uther. At its centre the stone was probably the height of one tall man sitting on the shoulders of another, but its top surface was enormous, easily ten long strides across and almost twice that in length, and gently rounded like a huge, smooth egg. It would be impossible, Uther knew, to fall directly to the ground from the boulder's highest point. And yet, Ullic's advisers would not have sent the runners looking for his father without good cause. Ullic himself would have chewed holes in their hides if they had.

Uther could see worry stamping itself more visibly into Uric's face. His grief and his concern for the King gradually became so evident, and his impatience and frustration with the slowness of their progress so pronounced, that Uther eventually found himself anticipating the worst and beginning to come to terms with the formerly inconceivable notion that King Ullic Pendragon might actually be in danger of dying as a result of unimaginable injuries.

In Uther's short lifetime he had known three invincible, unmovable, impermeable personalities: Ullic Pendragon, Uric Pendragon and Garreth Whistler. All three of these men were his heroes, and their indestructible permanence anchored his own identity. He had never ever considered any of them to be capable of dying.

When they reached home, they found their worst fear confirmed: the King was dead.

As was the custom in such cases, and hard on the heels of Uric's formal confirmation that the dead man was his father, Uric was taken to attend a gathering of his clansmen and was formally named the new Chief, assuming his father's duties and the Chief's chair left empty on Ullic's death. He was distraught, his mind overwhelmed by his loss, and he showed little appetite for the tasks to which he was being appointed and no interest at all in the ceremony surrounding the event. The Druids were prepared for that, however, and moved around and about him as though he were functioning as normally as they were so that the rites and legalities of succession were quickly observed and ratified by Druidic custom. King Ullic Pendragon had been dead for three days, and Uric was now Chief of Pendragon, the rightful occupant of the Chief's chair.

All of these thoughts passed through Uther's mind now as he sat staring at the bier and the armoured corpse displayed upon it, laid out for the burial rites. Ullic Pendragon—if this were really he—lay flat on his back, his eyes held shut by two small, flat pebbles and his hands crossed on his abdomen, loosely clasping the hilt of his sword, a Roman short-sword made for him personally by his close friend Publius Varrus of Camulod, Uther's other grandfather. Publius Varrus himself was there too, sealed across the bier from Uther with his wife Luceiia Britannicus Varrus by his side, both of them gazing at the corpse on the bier and thinking their own thoughts, paying their respects in silence.

Finding himself in the intimate presence of death for the first time and looking at the corpse of his beloved grandfather, Uther discovered that he seemed to be incapable of the kind of grief he could see overwhelming everyone around him. He had no time for grief, it seemed to him, and no capacity for grieving. The body, laid out in all its finery upon the bier in the Great Hall, surrounded by heaps of fresh-cut blossoms and aromatic herbs and pine boughs, looked quite like someone else's notion of King Ullic. Uther could hardly believe that it was really his Tata. The nose was too sharp-edged and bony, for one thing, and the cheeks too grey and sunken, creating hollows in the face of this fellow that were never visible in the laughing face of Ullic Pendragon. And this man, whoever he might have been, was visibly smaller, over all, than Ullic Pendragon. His arms, despite their familiar, silver-chased leather armbands, were far slighter, much slenderer than Ullic's massive forearms, and his hands looked skeletal, bony and thin-skinned, with brownish blotches on the backs of them. Ullic's hands were enormous and filled with life, strong and deft in everything they did. Even the dead man's beard looked different from Ullic's. Ullic's beard was iron- grey and rich, a dense and bristling bush concealing his mouth, chin and neck from the wind and other people's eyes. The beard on the dead man was a wispy, sad thing, unkempt and unimposing.

Uther was far from convinced that the dead man was King Ullic Pendragon.

He could see, nonetheless, that everyone else believed it. His mother's eyes were swollen and red from constant weeping. She had been weeping when he and his father arrived home from their journey, and she had not ceased since. His father had been weeping too, and although Uther found that hard to credit, there was no doubting the evidence of his own eyes. Uric's eyes were as red and as swollen as his wife's, and his cheeks were grimy with smeared soot from the fire, where he had sat huddled for hours, shrouded in whirling smoke and staring into the coals, occasionally wiping tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand.