Jack Whyte - Uther

During the years that followed, Uther and Merlyn became men in fact as well as in name, passing from eighteen years old to twenty- two, and their professional abilities as soldiers matured and became finely honed and unimpeachable. They became known behind their backs by their admiring and sometimes resentful men as the Princes of Camulod, and the life they led was a full and rewarding cycle of duty, achievement and enjoyment. Nemo Hard-Nose soon became inured to the sight of the processions of beautiful young women that came and went with unfailing regularity through the private quarters that Uther and Merlyn called their "games rooms." The numbers of women and the degrees of hilarity and high living fluctuated only in response to the presence or absence of Merlyn's father, the Legate Picus Britannicus, who was still the Legate Commander of the Forces of Camulod, and whose disapproval was the only thing that could really keep the two young men in line. Uther's grandmother, the widowed Luceiia Britannicus Varrus, also exercised great power over the behaviour of her grandson and great- nephew, but she was seldom seen around the fort; she preferred to spend her time alone in her home with the women of her household.

Towards the end of the fourth year, however, in the autumn, Uther and Merlyn found a young woman in the forest at the far end of one of their regular perimeter patrol sweeps when they had been riding apart from each other. Nemo's squad was there with Uther at the time, and it was Nemo who first saw the young woman kneeling on the ground among the saplings in a clearing away from the road as she rode by. Investigation would show that the young woman, who seemed to be unable to speak, was mourning the deaths of two elderly people who were lying beside her and who everyone supposed were her parents. There were no signs of violence on either of the bodies and no obvious signs of sickness. Nemo sent one of her men riding to fetch Uther, and after a cursory examination of the scene, Uther ordered two of his men to dig a grave and bury the dead. Then he swung the young woman up to ride behind him, where she remained until they arrived back in Camulod. By the time they got there, it had been established that the young woman was mute, and in the need to call her something, one of the young commanders gave her the name Cassandra, after the tragic prophetess of Troy.

On the night they returned from the patrol, in the privacy of Merlyn's games room, something happened between the two cousins that would permanently damage their relationship.

Uther disappeared in the middle of the night, taking only a few of his Dragons and riding away without informing anyone where he was going or why he was leaving so suddenly. That same night, the young woman called Cassandra was savaged and beaten to the point of death. She survived, however, and was confined under heavy guard in the surgeon Lucanus's infirmary. Then the following night, she disappeared from a guarded room in a building ringed with guards, and people started whispering that Merlyn had used sorcery to spirit her away. The woman Cassandra vanished completely from Camulod.

Shortly after that. Nemo began to pick up disturbing snippets and fragments and mutterings—nothing that made complete sense and nothing more definite than vague rumour, but the cumulative effect was that whatever might be wrong between the two commanders, Uther and Merlyn, the woman Cassandra was at the root of it all.

Merlyn, it appeared, suspected Uther of something nameless but reprehensible. It could not have been the attack on Cassandra, Nemo reasoned, because she knew that Uther had left the fort during the midnight watch, shortly after storming out of the games room. One of the Dragons from her own squad had been on guard duty outside the tower that night and saw him stride away, and still others had been posted at the main gate of the fort and checked Uther and a half score of their fellows through there shortly thereafter. They had told her, too, that Uther was in no sweet frame of mind.

Uther returned directly to Tir Manha upon leaving Camulod on the night of his quarrel with Merlyn, and many months would pass before he returned. He sent word of his whereabouts to Picus Britannicus immediately upon his arrival home in Cambria and requested that his Dragons be dispatched to join him there. He had need of them, he said, for the next stage of their training, which would be in the lowland valleys of the southeastern part of the country. Picus sent the Dragons home immediately, under the command of their own Cambrian officers, of whom Nemo was one. But it was not to be her fate to remain in Tir Manha, for Uther immediately sent her back to Picus in Camulod bearing important messages, and after that time she lived neither in one place nor the other, the majority of her time being spent on the road between them.

Uther could not stay away from Camulod permanently, however, no matter how disagreeable the circumstances of his departure had been. He had duties and responsibilities to attend to, and his conscience would not permit him to ignore them for long. On his eventual return, he and his cousin Merlyn, despite the unresolved tension between them, were jointly honoured by Picus Britannicus, who presented his two youngest commanders with sumptuous new armour and identifying standards. Uther received a magnificent new cloak, banner and shield, all bearing the device of a great golden dragon woven in thin gold wire on a deep red background. The blazon was similar to the ages-old red dragon emblem of his Cambrian Pendragon people, but it was subtly different so that it would be personal to Uther. To top off the gift and render it perfect, Picus included a new high-plumed bronze helmet in the Roman officers' style, complete with ornate, hinged cheek-flaps to guard and conceal his face in battle. Merlyn, at the same time, received a black war cloak lined with soft white wool and bearing the blazon, woven in fine silver wire, of Merlyn's own insignia: a mighty, rearing bear with spread arms and enormous claws, commemorating his killing the largest bear anyone in Camulod had ever seen while armed with nothing more than a large spear. Like Uther, Merlyn also received a new war helmet, this one made, like his personal armour, of black enamelled iron and crested in alternating tufts of black and white horsehair. With it also came a new standard and shield, each bearing his device, the silver bear on black.

The following day, however, word arrived that Camulod was under attack from two directions. One of the outlying farms, a stock- breeding operation in the south of the Colony, had been robbed, its entire two-hundred-man garrison wiped out. And simultaneously, an invading fleet of Erse galleys had landed in the north, their presence reported by King Uric's people, who had seen the galleys passing upriver. Lot of Cornwall had engineered his first double assault on Camulod, and from that day onward, Camulod would be almost constantly at war with Britain's southwestern most region.

After the initial outbreak, with that successful raid against the Colony's southernmost farm, the war progressed swiftly. Under the overall command of Picus Britannicus, Uther and Merlyn split their forces, Uther riding south and west against Lot and Cornwall with seven hundred highly mobile cavalry, while Merlyn headed north with four hundred cavalry and three thousand foot soldiers to stop the invading Ersemen. Merlyn's campaign was completely successful, ending in the capture of a high-born Eirish hostage, but Uther's cavalry was ambushed and decimated along the northern coast of Cornwall by an enemy force using poisoned arrows, which killed every one of Uther's men who sustained even a scratch from their envenomed tips.

Uther was not completely convinced, however, that his attackers were Lot's people, for there was sufficient evidence to the contrary to raise genuine doubts. A short time before the attack, his scouts had found the remnants of a massacre in which some sixty people had been stripped, then bound and slaughtered. Lot himself, speaking through a Christian bishop sent out to Uther as an intermediary, claimed that those were his own people, captured unawares and slaughtered by a strong force of seaborne raiders of unknown origin. That unexpected claim was sufficient to give Uther pause and make him doubt himself. The murderous group who attacked his force had overshot themselves foolishly, expending all their poisoned arrows far too quickly, so that the survivors of Uther's army, still more than six hundred strong, were able to rally and pursue their erstwhile attackers. But the attackers had galleys waiting for them right below the cliffs where the attack had occurred, and they were afloat and at sea before Uther's men could close with them. Uther had to wonder if Lot might be telling him the truth. His gut feelings told him otherwise, that the sixty dead might well have been the sweepings of Lot's jails expediently disposed of simply to hide Lot's guilt in the ambush; but his training in logic, acquired in Camulod under his Uncle Picus, suggested the contrary. And so he gave Lot the benefit of the doubt and released the bishop to return to Cornwall, despite his strong conviction that the man of God would rather have remained a captive in the custody of Camulod.