Jack Whyte - Uther

His stroll, however, soon became little more than a shuffle. It seemed that every single person from the countryside for miles around had come into town for the market day. The place was jammed with people of all sizes and ages, completely overwhelming the presence of his own off-duty men, one hundred strong.

Even away from the marketplace, the streets were so crowded that he found it impossible to walk for more than two or three paces without having to step aside for someone carrying a load of merchandise or to avoid tripping over some slower person in front of him or simply to get around a knot of people who had met and stopped to talk where they stood, exchanging greetings and information, not having seen one another since their last journey to the market.

Impatient at first with his lack of progress through the dense crowd, Uther soon gave up and laughed to himself. The people who hemmed him in and blocked his way on every side were all there for the pleasures to be gained from simply being here. There was an air of festivity everywhere, and it was obvious that nothing else in their lives could give the ordinary citizens of Glevum so much delight as enjoying their own marketplace on a pleasant summer day, meeting their neighbours, trading goods and talk, and eating and drinking the appetizing wares of the stall holders—pie-makers, bakers, spit-roasters and brewers—who appeared to be selling food everywhere and were being paid in the small Roman-minted copper coins called ases, which were obviously still considered valuable currency in Glevum.

Uther stopped and looked around at their faces, searching for ill humour, and none of them, not a single face, was frowning. Laughter and smiles were widespread that day, and he shook his head and went on his way, grinning gently to himself and feeling oddly, formlessly content.

At one point he found himself gazing in admiration at one of three young women behind a stall that sold pottery and a selection of splendid pieces of barbaric, colourful jewellery. She was an exotic- looking creature of an age with him, he suspected, and he was captivated by the way her eyes flashed and sparkled as she talked and laughed with the people around her. She was wearing a tunic of bright blue material and over that a vibrant yellow shawl of some soft, delicate-looking fabric, and the brilliant colours set off her dark hair and skin to perfection. He could not see much of her body from the shoulders down, because of the pottery piled high on the table in front of her, but what he could see was alluring enough to make him work his way to the front of the stall to catch her attention.

She came and leaned towards him, head cocked to hear what he might say to her, so he asked her to show him some of the silver jewellery she had on display and to tell him where she had obtained it. Her name was Anna, he quickly discovered, and she had made the pieces herself. He admired them all quite honestly, for they were beautiful, and then, claiming to be unable to decide among them, he asked her which was her favourite. She picked out one of the two pieces he had already decided he liked best: a wide, circular brooch engraved with the thorn and leaf pattern of the north Cambrian clans. He had already visualized it gleaming on his mother's shoulder, and he knew Veronica would be delighted with it. Saying he had no goods to trade, he asked her what she would take for the piece were he to pay in coin. She gazed at him with enormous dark eyes for several moments, assessing him for a potential purchasing limit, then smiled widely, showing off perfect teeth, and named a price. It was not low, but Uther reached into one of the compartments of the scrip that hung by his side and produced a shiny, polished silver denarius, holding it up to her gaze between the tips of two lingers. The young woman's eyes went round with surprise, for the coin was certainly the brightest of its kind, and possibly the only one of its kind that she had ever seen.

Now it was Uther's turn to lean towards her, holding the gleaming coin up for her inspection, and she bent forward to allow him to speak into her ear. Her long hair tickled his nose as he spoke, and the clean smell of her set the short hairs on the nape of his neck bristling. A moment later, the young woman straightened up, a peculiar expression on her face. Then she smiled again, less widely this time, and shook her head in the negative, turning slightly as she did so to indicate an enormous and attractive-looking young man standing off to the right side of the stall. Her message was unmistakable. She was not available.

Uther looked straight at the young giant opposite, who stared back at him, straight-faced, and then he dipped his head slightly in acknowledgment, annoyed to discover that his face had flushed with discomfiture. He turned back then to the girl, smiling again, and pointed to the second piece of jewellery, which he had chosen as being almost the peer of the circular brooch, and indicated to Anna that he would exchange his denarius for both pieces. She accepted immediately, aware that she would never find a bargain of the like again, and wrapped both pieces of jewellery quickly in a square of soft blue cloth. Uther carefully placed the package in his scrip, thanked the young woman politely, smiled at her again, nodded in farewell, cast one more glance and a nod of tacit acknowledgment to her suitor—or perhaps it was her husband—and moved away into the crowd.

Far from being upset by his failure, Uther felt exhilarated by the challenge and the response he had generated from the girl Anna. She had refused him, but the reason for her refusal had been standing right there, glaring at him, and Uther had felt with absolute certainty the reluctance underlying her refusal. At another time, under different circumstances, his request might have been smiled upon. He moved on, casting his eyes around now in search of someone new to test himself against, and he thrust one hand idly into his scrip, stirring the coins there with his fingertips, aware of the smooth, almost oily texture of the shiny metal discs. All of Uther's silver coins were highly polished, ever since he had noticed one of his Grandmother Varrus's household staff using a strange- smelling mixture to clean the tarnish from silver tableware. Intrigued, Uther had asked the man to show him what he was doing and how it was done, and had then acquired a small amount of the polishing material for his own use, so that now when he went on patrol, the silver coins he carried in his scrip all gleamed, catching the eye and stirring the cupidity of all to whom he showed them.

It had taken Uther some time to grasp the concept of coins as specie when he first became conscious of it. In Cambria, no one used money, although uniformly sized bars and ingots of gold and silver, copper, tin and lead were commonly used in trade, and each had a relative value ascribed to it, depending upon availability and ease of procurement. One copper ingot, for example, was equal to five of tin, and one silver bar to five of copper, whereas one bar of tin might sometimes be valued at six bars of lead, and sometimes at fifteen or even twenty bars. The most valuable of all, of course, was gold, and one bar of gold was the equivalent of twenty-five bars of silver.

The Romans, however, had taken that concept much further than anyone in Cambria had ever thought or sought to take it. They had issued coins of differing kinds and sizes, in gold, silver and copper, and had ascribed fixed values to each one. Uther would never forget his astonishment on learning that those values had persisted for hundreds of years until a shortage of gold had developed. From that point onward, the value of gold had escalated and had been followed some time thereafter by the value of silver, so that the ten or twenty copper coins that had once been deemed equal to one silver coin had lost their value, and now it might take as many as a hundred copper coins or more to purchase one silver one. That made no sense to Uther when he learned of it, and he still had not come to terms with the theories behind such things.