Jack Whyte - Uther

The patrol arrived at the northern end of their excursion in the town of Glevum. This was a river port built only a few miles upriver from the throat of the estuary that separated Cambria to the north from Cornwall to the south, spilling out into the western sea between Britain and the island of Eire, which the Romans had called Hibernia, the Winter Place, because of its seemingly permanent cloud cover and its rainy, blustery, damp-cold climate.

Glevum was greatly favoured by coastal traders because of its sheltered inland harbour and its close proximity to the sea. Because of that popularity, the town had grown immensely wealthy over the previous decades and centuries of Roman occupation, so that it boasted numerous public and civic buildings with fine marble pillars, ornate pediments and entire walls clad in sheets of the finest marble imported from across the seas. The town had also been the regional administrative centre with a permanently assigned garrison to reinforce the edicts of the governing bureaucrats, and for many years its population had flourished and expanded, been nurtured and nourished by the wealth of trading activities and been protected by the military strength of the resident garrison and the nearby military base at Corinium.

Since the departure of the Roman garrisons, however, less than two decades earlier, Glevum had degenerated rapidly, and its dissolution was plain to see in the dilapidated condition of the streets, where weeds grew between the cobblestones on the main thoroughfares and entire sections of the sophisticated system of stone-carved water conduits that had once served the residential needs of the citizens had been broken and left unrepaired.

The civic government established by the Romans continued for some time after the military withdrawals. But when the army left Glevum and every other town in Britain, the power to enforce the law went with it, and the entire country began to fall, ipso facto, into a condition of anarchy. It took some time after that, however, for the truth of the situation to be fully understood, because although the force behind the law had departed, the reputation of the law remained. For hundreds of years in Britain, the ordinary people had been conditioned to behave lawfully, respecting the traditions and the proscriptions set in place by the legal, military-backed authorities, and so they continued to do so for months, and in some instances for years, after the fact of law had broken down and ceased to exist. Only very gradually did it become clear that the government had become a toothless guard dog and that people could now behave with abandon and break long-standing laws with impunity because there was no organized force in existence to stop them or to punish them for their actions.

Many of the former Roman towns took steps to safeguard their own welfare by organizing their citizens into quasi-military defensive units, while those that had the wherewithal undertook to hire mercenaries, who then functioned as private armies, policing the towns that paid their way and nominally protecting them against incursions by organized bands of brigands and raiders. Inevitably, however, even in the most successful of those arrangements, the seeds of failure and dissolution had already been sown. Hiring mercenaries to protect wealthy communities was akin to hiring wolves to protect sheep, and so within the space of ten or fifteen years, the towns of Britain, with very few exceptions, began to be abandoned by their citizenry, even though most of those citizens had nowhere better to go. It would be less hazardous, most of them thought, to take their chances of survival in the open countryside or in the forests than to remain, like sacrificial cattle, in once- wealthy towns that were natural targets for thieves and raiders.

Somehow, against great odds, Glevum had contrived to be one of the few towns in the west to retain a few shreds of its original dignity and stability, and Dedalus had told Uther and Cay on their first visit that he suspected its continuing survival had much to do with the ongoing need for its port, docking facilities and warehouses. As long as there were trading ships still plying the sea routes and merchants waiting in places such as Glevum and elsewhere for those ships' cargoes, then an incentive would exist for men of wealth and strength to fortify and defend the ports that served their needs, even if that entailed supporting them from afar and at great cost. That belief was reinforced by the presence of a strong force of mercenaries in Glevum, a force that Dedalus said had been in residence there for more than eight years. These people worked most of the time as stevedores, loading and unloading the ships and barges that came into the harbour. They guarded the docks and warehouses and otherwise kept to themselves, by and large, living a self-contained existence with their own women and everything else they needed in a few of the large dockside warehouses that they had converted into living spaces. They seldom mixed with the citizens of Glevum, but they allowed the town's populace to go on about its business without interference from them.

Whenever a force of any size approached the town, however, the stevedores put down their burdens, took up their weapons and were transformed into mercenaries until they had either discounted the threat or thrown the would-be raiders back to limp away with their tails between their legs. The Camulodians had been challenged thus on their first patrol through Glevum, and although no hostilities took place at any time between the two forces, the Camulodian commander, the Legate Picus himself, negotiated the terms of an ongoing accommodation with the town's defenders. The Camulodian patrols could find safe refuge in Glevum but were to leave the governance of the town and its affairs to the occupying mercenaries. Picus had ascertained that these people were not the common run of mercenaries, little advanced from bandits, but were well-disciplined Germanic troops of exceptionally high quality, all of them veterans of the legions and transported here to Glevum from beyond the sea for the specific purpose of guarding the dock facilities and keeping the harbour open and safe for shipping. Because of the tight-lipped discipline of the individual mercenaries, however, and the infallible discretion of their leaders, Picus had been unable to find out anything about the men's employers. Because of the enormous expense represented by their presence, he suspected that they were being kept in place in Britain by one of the surviving great trading houses of the Empire and that the investment in their presence, whoever was supporting it, was still proving to be worthwhile. To date, Dedalus had told the boys the year before, all potential disruptions of the town's trading routines had been prevented, and the thrice-yearly arrival of the cavalry column from Camulod had become a commonplace occurrence, causing no concern.

The patrol reached the town just before mid-morning to discover a regular market gathering in full swing. They set up their route camp close by the town gates in the same large meadow they had been using for that purpose for several years. By noon everything was in place: the horses had been groomed and set to grazing; the guard of the day had been installed; and those troopers due for off-duty time had been released to enjoy the market, under strict orders to be back in their places by sunset. The weather was warm and pleasant, sunny with only a few clouds to throw an occasional shadow, and Uther, finding himself briefly free of duties, left the camp in the care of Cay while he went off on a leisurely walk through the Glevum marketplace. When he returned, he would attend to his official duties for the day, and then, beginning on the following day, he would have three days of official rest, relieved of all duty and responsibility for a full seventy-two hours. For the time being, however, he was prepared to settle for a short, enjoyable stroll through the centre of the town.