Jack Whyte - Uther

"I saw you die. They killed you."

He shook his head again, his face now betraying impatience. "No, you saw me fly, not die. They threw me off the cliff, and you thought I must be dead. So did they. But the fool threw me too well-—too hard and too far. I flew out and missed hitting the stones of the riverbank. Instead, I fell into deep water and landed on my belly. It drove all the wind out of me, but I swim like a fish, and I made it to shallow water. When I finally was able to walk again, I climbed back up, but you were gone. Here, take my hand, and put these clothes on."

Mairidh took his hand and forced herself to rise, leaning heavily on his supporting arm and weaving gently backwards and forwards until she felt confident enough to release her grip. He was staring at her, his eyes wide and concerned, and she forced herself to look away, back to the clothes he held.

"You brought my robe."

"I knew you'd need it."

She held up the other garment and saw that it was ruined, torn and stained with earth and blood, and she looked down again at her battered body.

"Why did you follow us? You didn't have to . . . You didn't even have a weapon, did you? I know, because the Pig took your dagger."

The boy shrugged. "No, no weapon. But I knew I could steal one from them if they gave me the chance."

She shook her head slightly, as though dismissing some minor confusion, then looked back at the torn tunic and began pulling it over her head. The boy straightened up while she did so and stood gazing back the way he had come, his entire body radiating tension. She spent a moment trying to get the torn shoulder of the tunic to hang properly, then dismissed it and wrapped the long robe about her. It was clean, and it was soft, and it covered her completely.

When she looked up from tying the sash about her waist, he had vanished again. For a flashing moment, filled with fear, she thought she must have imagined his being there, but she was free and alone, and the clothes she had put on were real—her own clothing. Weaving on her feet again, she looked around, but there was no sign of him, and she sat back down against the bank to wait, convinced that he would return for her. Moments later, he did, reappearing silently from the fringe of bushes on her left.

"Can you walk?"

Mairidh nodded meekly. "I think so, but I don't know how far I can go."

"Far enough to stay alive?" He smiled again, a small, very tentative smile, but she was amazed that he could. "We need to put some space between us and the shore over there, and between us and those two dead men."

She looked at him and nodded her head again, still uncertainly. He was wearing his own clothes again—the rich, white woollen tunic and the leather overshirt that had first caught her eye and which the Pig had stuffed into a sack before fleeing the scene of what she had thought to be the boy's murder. The sack itself now lay at his feet, stuffed with whatever contents the Pig had found to cram into it. The boy had also cleaned the axe and thrust it into his belt, and he had recovered his own long dagger from the Pig's belongings and his bow and arrows from where they had lain beside the other dead man. The dagger now hung at the boy's left hip, opposite the axe, and he had slipped the strung bow and the full quiver of arrows over his shoulders with the taut bowstring and the strap of the quiver crossing in the centre of his breast. The right side of his tunic was thick with blood, and he glanced down as he saw her notice it, touching the clotting mass with the pad of one fingertip.

"It's not mine," he said. "I'm not hurt at all. Ready?"

She drew a deep breath and nodded firmly, and he reached out to take her hand and pull her to her feet before leading her away from the clearing, deep into the undergrowth. There they found a wide and well-used game path that led them through the densest thickets of the forest. They made good time then, and the urgency of their progress diminished as the sea coast fell steadily behind them, so that the boy eventually stopped pulling her along and fell back to walk behind her, allowing Mairidh to choose her own pace.

Mairidh's exhaustion waxed and waned as she moved forward, sometimes threatening to overwhelm her completely and at other times fading into the background of her awareness. As long as their route was level and straightforward, she could function with an appearance of ease, but whenever the going became heavy, when they had to force their way uphill or through brush looking for another trail, the weight of her legs and feet seemed to increase dramatically, and the sound of her heartbeat grew loud in her ears.

At those times, she wanted merely to fall down on the grass and sleep, and invariably, when she was close to yielding to the temptation, she found herself wanting to weep. Yet it was that very awareness of her own weakness that forced her to keep forging ahead each time she had determined to give up.

At one point, on the summit of a low hill that had seemed far higher when they were climbing it, she stopped and turned to the boy.

"How long have we been walking?"

He glanced around him and shrugged. "Three hours . . . something like that. It's mid-morning."

"Then we must be almost there."

"Almost where?" He was gazing at her quizzically.

"Back. Where they found us. I gauged we had travelled for about four hours yesterday before they made camp."

He shrugged his shoulders and nodded. "Hmm, but we're on a different route, and we've been moving at about half the speed they maintained yesterday. Remember, they had a horse."

"Remember? I had to run behind the thing. But why are we not riding it now? Why did you leave it behind?"

"Think about that for a moment, and you'll know the answer. If we had taken the horse, we would be tied to the road or to pathways that the horse could use. Once those raiders find their dead companions, they'll turn the place upside down looking to discover who killed them. We have left no tracks behind us, but had we taken the horse, we would have, and they would have come running after us."

He stopped talking and stood squinting at her. Mairidh could barely keep her eyes open. He nodded. "Hmm. You need rest."

"No, rest is not enough. I have to sleep, even if it be for no more than an hour. I barely slept at all last night and had no real rest. Now my body is screaming for sleep. Please?"

Again he looked around him, as though checking for signs of pursuit, and then he grunted and nodded, looking down into the valley ahead of them, then up to the sky, where the rain clouds that had threatened them all morning were beginning to scatter, showing broad tracts of blue.

"Aye. We'll be safe enough now. I know where we are, but we're still half a score of miles and probably more from where we want to be. There's a pool down in the valley there that you will love, I promise you, and you can sleep there for a few hours. While you are doing that, I'll find us something to eat."

Chapter EIGHT

It was the smell of food that finally awakened her. Mairidh lay for a long time, watching the boy as he crouched over the fire he had built. Above it, on a framework of green twigs, he had skewered a hare. As she watched, he reached out and carefully turned the spitted meat above the flames, and she heard the hissing sound of fat dripping into the coals. Her mouth filled with saliva, and she swallowed, but she took care to make no move that would alert him to the fact that she had finally awakened.

The boy had stayed with her while she bathed in the miraculous pool of naturally hot water that he had promised, which welled from an underground spring like the famous one she had visited in Aquae Sulis many years earlier. She had been incredulous, at first, watching the wisps of steam that rose from the gently roiling surface of the water, and the boy had told her then how he had sat in it one day, warm and wonder-struck as snowflakes drifted down from above and chilled his skin with tiny icy pinpricks.