Jack Whyte - Uther

"Gut," Balin said. "Dried animal gut. Swine, I believe, or perhaps it is sheep gut. It is an Erse harp. I found it last time I was over in Eire and bought it from the man who owned it. The fellow couldn't play it at all. He kept it because it had belonged to his first wife, who had died while yet young enough to be lovable. And you are barely listening to what I am saying. What is it that distracts you?"

Uther looked up and smiled. "I was thinking about how surprised I am that you are not angry. I thought you would be."

"Angry? And why should I be angry?"

"Because of what I told you . . . about Lot."

Balin shook his head and flapped his hand in dismissal of that. "What happened between you and Gulrhys Lot was personal, and it happened long ago. I see no reason in that for me to grow angry thinking about it. . . do you, really?"

"No, Lord Balin, I do not, now that I think about it in that light. It—"

"But I could grow angry, I believe, were I to allow myself to dwell upon the ideas you formed and the conclusions you drew from that long-ago confrontation."

Frowning, Uther started to say something else, but Balin cut him off again, raising one hand swiftly, palm outward. "No, it is true. You emerged from that encounter with Gulrhys Lot fully convinced that everyone from Cornwall is as he is and behaves as he behaves, and you have not changed your thinking on that in—how long ago was it, three years? For three years you have walked around with poisonous nonsense flowing through your mind, and it sprang out of you the moment I mentioned that I am from Cornwall. You looked at me as though I had become a writhing serpent. Do you deny that?"

Uther shrugged his shoulders, feeling his face flush with discomfort. "No, I cannot."

"But why would you even think such a thing? Lot may be as evil and pernicious as you think him to be. But why should I and every other person from Cornwall be so vilely tainted by your memories of that one man?"

"Because my memories of him are vile and bitter."

"I have no doubt of that, Uther Pendragon, and you are not alone in feeling as you do. My loyalty is to his father, the Duke Emrys, and there it ends. I bear no allegiance at all, of any kind, to Gulrhys Lot, and I swear there have been times when I would have happily wagered that Emrys himself cannot stomach the boy he fathered . . ." He paused, gazing at the boy who stood watching him, his face troubled. "I think I am going to have to teach you a little about Cornwall, Master Uther. Sit down now and drink your wine while I tell you about my nephew, who is older than you— three years older, in fact, since he is of an age with Gulrhys Lot. His given name is Lagan, and Mairidh tells me that in recent months he has won the name Longhead, by virtue of his intellect and his far-sightedness. By some strange coincidence that I have never quite understood, he and I ended up married to sisters. His wife, Lydda, a beautiful young creature no more than a year or so older than you are, is Mairidh's youngest sister, so Lagan is not only my nephew by blood, the son of my elder brother, but he is also a relative of some other kind by marriage."

In the course of the half hour that followed, Uther learned much about the young man known as Lagan Longhead, and in listening learned much, too, about the customs and rituals that governed the passing of boys into manhood in Cornwall.

On the other side of the wall, Mairidh smiled and closed her eyes, listening with pleasure as her husband spoke of home and family.

Chapter TEN

Nemo saw Uther as her personal champion, and so she was unsurprised when, in the time of her greatest need, he appeared. She would have expected nothing less.

It happened early in the autumn of the year she passed seventeen, when she walked blithely into peril in a way that her younger self would never have permitted. Three men, travellers passing through Tir Manha, had noticed her shortly after the midday meal when she walked by them heedlessly, daydreaming of Uther, who was due to return home from Camulod that day or the next. Nemo had long since learned to keep herself clean, acutely aware that Uther set great store by cleanliness, thanks to his long Roman- influenced periods in Camulod, but she had never come to realize that her cleanliness now gave her a distinctive scent that could be alluring and arousing to rough men passing by in a condition of enforced abstinence. Watching her, the three paid no attention to her heavy facial features or the rough texture of her hair. Instead, they smelled sexual challenge in the clean, alluring scent of her and saw it in the firm young strength of her limbs and buttocks and in the thrust of her seventeen-year-old breasts.

Having noticed her, they followed, watching her closely, wailing for a suitable time and place. Then, when circumstances seemed right, they attacked her like wolves, leaping from behind and bundling her into the long grass by the roadside, pulling her quickly and quietly down out of sight into concealment among rank growth and thick shrubs.

It was not the first time Nemo had been waylaid by sexual predators, however, and her ferocious, silent and deadly response took her three attackers unawares. Extremely strong and implacably savage by nature. Nemo was a burly badger of an opponent, and she fought them as any wild thing fights confinement, single-mindedly seeking to save her own life and to inflict maximum damage on her tormentors in the process. Hunched over and battling grimly, making the most of her solid bulk and her low centre of gravity, she refused to yield or submit in any degree, so that even outnumbering her, her opponents had great difficulty in subduing her. So great was their difficulty, in fact, and so total their concentration upon immobilizing and holding her down for their gratification that all of them failed to notice the approach of the fast-moving horseman who came charging down at them from the hillside above.

Nemo was on her back, fighting for her life, hemmed in and confined, it seemed to her, by an entire forest of men's legs. She kicked and chopped and gouged fiercely, catching one man in the groin with a hard-swung but glancing blow and dropping him to his knees. One of his two companions who had stepped back from the fray, pulling at his breeches to free himself in preparation for claiming the first fruits of her, saw the man drop and looked towards him, grunting and starting to laugh barely a moment before Nemo lunged at him and snatched at his rigid phallus with rending, long-nailed fingers. His laughter turned to a scream as those fingernails dug deep, drawing blood, and Nemo's thick, muscular fist closed around his hardness, wrenching violently, twisting downward and inward hard, pulling him towards her as her other fist smashed brutally upward into his exposed and unprotected scrotum. His knees, too, gave way, and he collapsed on top of her, barely conscious, just as young Uther Pendragon, screaming a war cry of some kind, threw himself from his horse's back directly into the middle of the struggling knot of bodies.

He landed on the shoulders of the only one of the trio who had been able to grasp a firm hold of Nemo. With his arms around her waist from behind and his crashing weight, Uther took the hunched figure of the man and the woman beneath him face downward into the grassy bottom of the ditch. Then, before anyone else had a chance to react or move, the long, single-edged dirk in Uther's hand rose up and plunged down again to bury itself between the fellow's shoulders. The stabbed man reared up violently, almost throwing Uther completely off his back, and then he stiffened and gave out a wet, gurgling sound before falling forward, dead, covering Nemo completely so that she had to fight to crawl out from beneath the weight of him.