Jack Whyte: Uther

Leir came, eventually, although he had not cared to show his face during poor Tamara's travail, and he spent a long time alone with the child, who was his firstborn son. Everyone assumed that, being a Druid, he must be praying for the infant, but then when he emerged from the room, he refused to let them kill the boy. I know, because I have been told, that the elderwives were much surprised by this and greatly at a loss. It would appear, however, that Leir has great power, sufficiently great, in fact, to flout established custom, although I know not upon what it is based. I do know that no one dared gainsay the man. Uncullic might have, and many here expected him to do so, but for some reason, as King, Ullic chose to ignore the matter, and so the child still lives.

Leir, unsurprisingly to me, has laid all the blame upon the unfortunate woman, Tamara. It is no fault of his, apparently, that there were problems with the birthing of his child; no deficiency could possibly apply where he and his are concerned. It is the woman and her evil, vicious ways that brought the child to grief. The obnoxious creature has ignored Tamara completely since the confinement began. And, if the truth be known, I think it possible that he has ignored her much longer than that. She is disconsolate, of course, but fortunately she is also far too weak to really be aware of what goes on about her.

There is something loathsome about the Druid, and my flesh chills whenever he approaches me. He has a slight cast in one eye and a formless vacancy in his expression. Uncle Caius likes to use the word vacuous to convey this notion of utter emptiness. He told me it means filled with empty nothingness. It is the perfect word for what I sometimes see in this Leir. There are times when, looking at his face, I would swear he is demented. There are very few who will talk about him at all, however, and that really surprises me, for Uric's people are a talkative clan, much given to minding other people's ways. Those few who will do so with caution and then have nothing really substantial to say.

After four days, it now appears that the child, who has been named Carthac, will live, despite the wishes of all who hoped that he would die. Equally, it appears that his mother, Tamara, will die, despite the best wishes of her many friends.

I am not at all afraid that the tragedy of what has happened to her might have any effect upon, or any similarity to, what will happen to me when my time comes within the next few weeks. Tamara's case was awful, but it was bred of her own tiny stature and the leviathan girth, weight and sheer size of the monstrous child she bore. I am much larger than she was, and my child is that much smaller. Besides, I have a husband in whose love I float like rose petals upon water, and he has a father who has known and loved me all my life. No harm will come to me here, and my child will emerge into the love and warmth of all his father's relatives. And he will thrive therein until he has the additional good fortune to encounter, at a very early age, the love of his mother's family, too. We have decided that his name will be Uther.

Kiss my father for me. I will write to you again as soon as I may after your grandson is born. I hope all is as well with Enid as it is with me.

Your loving daughter,

Veronica

Chapter ONE

Even when he was a small boy, no more than four or five years old, Uther Pendragon knew that everyone around him believed that his mother, Veronica, was different from everyone else. They even had a special name for her: the away one . It didn't make sense at first. After all, his mother had never been away from him. Veronica was and had always been a constant in his young life, along with his nurse, Rebecca. Those two women, between them, had made their presence absolute in everything young Uther did during his earliest years, while he was yet too young for his presence to be noteworthy to others. In the beginning, there were only those two.

One of the very first newcomers to join this tiny group was a woman called Henna, who had been assigned by Uther's grandfather, King Ullic Pendragon, to cook for the newcomers at the very outset of Veronica's life in Ullic's stronghold, eight months and more before Uther was born. Henna had quickly warmed to the King's new daughter-in-law, despite the younger woman's alien upbringing and Outlandish behaviour, so that, for one reason and another, she had never stopped cooking for her new charges and had been completely absorbed into their new life as a married couple. By the time Uther grew old enough to look about him and observe his surroundings, Henna the cook was a fixture of the household in which he lived. And after he had learned to run and to talk, he quickly learned that if he ran and talked to Henna, she would give him wondrous things to eat.

Henna was the first person Uther ever heard using the term the away one to describe his mother, and although he did not know then who the cook was talking about, he knew that there was no slight or disparagement intended in the strange-sounding name. He understood right away that the away one was a woman, unfortunate or afflicted in some way. And as he grew older, and he heard the name repeated more and more often by people who thought he was too young to be listening, he soon came to understand that this mysterious woman was different in some important respect from "normal" people. He knew that all of the women who gathered in Henna's kitchen liked the away one and held her in high regard—that was plain in the tone of their voices when they spoke of her—and he knew, too, that they all felt sorry for her in some way. But for a very long time he was unable to discover the woman's identity.

On one occasion, frustrated by something particular that he had overheard, he even asked his mother who the away one was, but Veronica merely looked strangely at him, her face blank with incomprehension. When he repeated the question, articulating it very slowly and precisely, she frowned in exasperation, and he quickly began to talk about something else, as though he had never asked that question in the first place.

Despite having broached the question with his mother, however, he had never been even slightly tempted to ask Henna or any of her friends, because he knew that would have warned them that he was listening when they talked, and they would have been more careful from then on, depriving him of his richest source of information and gossip. And so for long months he merely listened very carefully and tried to work out the secret of the away one's identity by himself, looking more and more analytically, as time went by, at each of the women with whom he came into contact in the course of a day. He knew that there would have to be something about this particular woman that set her noticeably apart and gave others the impression that she was never quite fully among them; that her interests held no commonality with theirs; that she was someone who was not wholly there.

He floundered in ignorance until the day when, in the middle of talking about the mysterious woman, Henna suddenly hissed, "Shush! Here she comes"—and his mother walked into the kitchen. Uther was stunned by the swiftness with which the truth dawned upon him then, because it was immediately obvious that Veronica met all of his carefully defined criteria. His mother did not associate with Henna and her people in any capacity other than that of the mistress of the household, aloof and set apart, issuing commands, expressing her wishes and expectations and occasionally complaining and insisting upon higher standards in one thing or another. And yet it was plain that they all liked her and that they respected her integrity and her natural sense of justice.