Jack Whyte - Uther

Daris said nothing and Uric continued. "Besides, the men he attacked today were vermin, but they were our own vermin and harmless enough, overall. It might not always be so. We no longer have the control that we used to have over our territories. There are invaders everywhere nowadays, and the risks of travel, any kind of travel, are far higher than they were even a few years ago."

The silence that followed this statement was so prolonged that Uric himself was forced to break it.

"Well? You disagree?"

"No, not at all." Daris's response came from a deep well of thought. "No, I'm merely trying to think through and beyond what you said. Are you suggesting that we approach Camulod to give Uther command of a cavalry troop?"

"No, I am saying that Uther should have a guard of his own."

"Of Camulodians?"

"No, Daris. Of Cambrians—Pendragon volunteers, trained and fully equipped with arms and horses—in Camulod. A King's Guard, my Guard, commanded by Uther as my appointee, with Garreth Whistler as his right arm. Camulod will be happy to accede to our wishes, for it will be to their ultimate advantage to have allied cavalry in place here, and besides, in return we'll increase our commitment to them in terms of men and bows."

Daris gazed at the King, and his entire face lit up slowly with admiration and approval as the various benefits of such a move occurred to him one after the other.

"Uric," he murmured eventually, "I have always been a dutiful and admiring Councillor . . . most of the time, anyway . . . and I have always marvelled, since I grew old enough to see and appreciate such subtleties, at the foresight and capacity for long-range planning that you and your father share, but this . . . this is incomparable! This is magnificent! We have no need for heavy horses in our mountains, but their presence—disciplined cavalry here in the lowlands—would be a great asset. It would make a massive difference to everything we do. No invader is insane enough, I think, to attack us in our hills, but anyone thinking of attacking us down here would have to think twice, knowing that we have fast-moving cavalry. Were I not a priest, I would be prepared to split a skin of wine with you in simple admiration and celebration of the brilliance of this sole idea."

Uric the King stood back and looked at him. then nodded. "Excellent. That's as it should be . . . but we'll be drinking mead, for you know damned well we have had no wine to speak of since the Romans left, other than what we've scrounged from Camulod."

Nemo sat silent in her perch, watching the two men as they left the confines of the sacred grove. She had not understood everything they said, but she had understood enough to know that they would soon begin recruiting volunteers for Uther's new Guard of Camulodian-style troopers. And she knew enough, too, to understand that if she moved quickly, presenting her case carefully and clearly to Garreth Whistler, she might win access to this new corps. She was a woman, certainly, but women had always borne weapons in Celtic society, and no woman had ever been denied the right to fight beside her friends and loved ones. No competent woman, indeed, had ever been denied the rank of warrior.

The following morning, shortly after sunrise. Nemo was waiting on Garreth Whistler's doorstep to catch him as he emerged. When he did, she faced him squarely, knowing that he was unlikely to have heard already about Uric's plan. She was blunt and straightforward as always, incapable of making any attempt to be obscure or to appear mysterious. She simply told Garreth Whistler that she wanted to ride with Uther as a mounted trooper. If ever there should be a call to arms for volunteers among the warriors of Cambria, she said, to form a corps of cavalry about the King under the command of the Prince Uther, Garreth Whistler should remember that her name had been presented first and foremost.

Whistler listened to her, his eyebrows raised in good-humoured puzzlement, but then he smiled and promised her that he would bear her request in mind from that day forth. Satisfied, she grunted her thanks and then disappeared into one of the narrow lanes that surrounded Whistler's residence.

By that afternoon, Whistler had received direct instructions from King Uric to call for a muster of volunteers to ride with Uther Pendragon and form a King's Guard of cavalry. Uric had no doubt that Camulod would concur with his wishes in this—he knew how badly they wanted access to his bowmen and their weaponry—and he already considered his new cavalry force to be a reality.

Whistler nodded and accepted his instructions with a slightly bemused look on his face, but Nemo's was the first name he inscribed on his mental list of personnel. It never occurred to him to question the young woman's fitness for the task, for he had long since come to admire her solid strength and her unquestioning loyalty to Uther in all the young man did, and he knew he would find many others among the volunteers, all of them men, who would pose him far greater problems than Nemo ever would. He merely wondered in passing how Nemo had gained her foreknowledge of what was happening.

The new Guard was formed quickly, with more volunteers than there were posts available, and shortly thereafter Nemo and her new companions were plunged into a period of frantic and intensive training that culminated six long weeks later in a series of tests involving both disciplined drills and skills, as well as hard demonstrations of physical achievement and prowess.

Nemo was unsurprised that she won her place among the men, but she held it jealously, competing chin to chin with males of her own age and older, defying all of them and drilling, training, working overtime to deny them the opportunity and the pleasure of besting her in anything she tried. She graduated from training ahead of all of them, winning from Uther's own hand the Roman rank of decurion, or squadron leader, before they ever left to travel to Camulod.

By the end of the first month of harsh competition. Nemo's squadron mates had stopped resenting the fact that she was female. Around the same time, after several bruising fights in which Nemo had inflicted much pain and grief in sudden, violent shows of disinclination, they had also stopped trying to bed her. By the time they left for Camulod to begin their real training, however. Nemo had achieved her greatest triumph over her messmates: they had come to regard her as an absolute equal and had forgotten, by and large, that she was a woman. They called her Hard-Nose, saying it with respect, and Nemo found it infinitely preferable to the Toad. She marched out of camp proudly, her mind filled with the vision of King Uric himself saluting her and her mates. Ahead of her, filling her vision with the splendour of his gold-embroidered military cloak and his great Roman helmet with its high, crimson crest, Uther Pendragon rode proudly on his enormous chestnut horse, accompanied by Garreth Whistler. Behind him marched all his new King's Guard.

When they returned from Camulod, Nemo knew, they would not be marching as they were now. By then the Guard would all be mounted on horses as fine as those their commanders rode, and people would automatically accord them the respect and admiration they had earned and deserved, awed and impressed by their equipment and their magnificence, their training and their discipline. By then, too, she knew with certainty, everyone seeing them would recognize and know the squadron leader, Nemo Hard-Nose, riding at their head. "Everyone," however, was unimportant to her. The only one who mattered in her eyes, the only man in all her world, was her Commander, Uther Pendragon. She knew, beyond any vestige of doubt, that her reason for existence was to protect him against any and all threats to his destiny, whatsoever those threats might be and whomsoever they might involve.