Jack Whyte - Uther

The bishop's visit was followed rapidly by the arrival of two strange-looking, foreign-born envoys called Caspar and Memnon, who claimed to have been sent as ambassadors from Lot, King of Cornwall, to Picus Britannicus, the Legate Commander of Camulod. Uther arranged to accompany them safely to Camulod, but beyond that he paid them little notice, and his failure to question their motives or to examine them more closely would cost him and Camulod dearly.

Within a day of Uther's bringing the strangers home to Camulod, the men were recognized, and Merlyn was able to identify them as spies and sorcerers, the men responsible for Lot's poisoned arrows. He threw them into jail in full expectation that their master, Lot, would be following hard on their heels, knowing that he had his two loyal creatures on the inside and expecting to find Camulod lulled into a false sense of security. Merlyn was correct, and Lot's treachery almost captured Camulod, but forewarned, Merlyn's and Uther's combined armies were able to defeat Lot's forces and rout them.

While the defeat of the forces from Cornwall was taking place down on the plain below the hill of Camulod, however, Lot's sorcerers managed inexplicably to escape from their cells, and thus they were able to open the rear gate of the fortress to a party of their own people sent to burn the place down.

That attack was discovered and fought off before it could develop fully, but still the fighting inside the fort was fierce and bloody. The back alleys of Camulod, close to the rear wall, were choked with corpses before the rear gate could be securely shut again. Many of the buildings within the walls had been set alight and were already uncontrollably ablaze.

When Uther and his cavalry abandoned their pursuit of Lot's fleeing forces and came riding back to Camulod a few days later, a thick column of black smoke brought them spurring from its first sighting, and only as they approached the fort did they notice that there were no signs of ongoing battle. Great open pits had been dug on the plain below the hill of Camulod, and the corpses of the slain were being interred there beneath layers of quicklime. The smoke that they had seen was from a funeral pyre. Only then did they learn that Picus Britannicus, their leader and Legate, had been murdered in his bed during the sorcerers' escape and before the night attack. Uther found his cousin Merlyn standing by the pyre, one of the chief mourners. Battle weary and still in their armour, Uther and his men stood silently at the back of the crowd to observe the rites and honour the dead.

Within a matter of mere weeks, more tragic tidings arrived in Camulod, brought personally to Uther's attention this time by Garreth Whistler. Another army raised by Gulrhys Lot, this one a compact, deadly effective striking force built mainly of foreign mercenaries, had invaded Cambria near the time when Lot's main army was attacking Camulod. This small, hard-hitting force, barely large enough to deserve the name army, had created havoc, having caught the Pendragon Federation totally unprepared for invasion from the south and ill-equipped to adapt with any kind of speed to counter a sustained attack from that direction. Uric's people and the concentration of his forces had always been primarily attuned to threats emerging from the northern boundaries of their lands, both coastal and landward.

Despite their unpreparedness, the Federation had nonetheless managed to respond with admirable speed to this new threat, Garreth reported, and the Pendragon forces had rallied well under great pressure. Meradoc, the dominant Chief of the Llewellyn clans, had distinguished himself in the campaign, as had young Huw Strongarm, Chief of the northern Pendragon, who at sixteen was the youngest Chief of a Pendragon clan in living memory. At the peak of the short, bloody campaign that followed the invasion, however, the insurgents were brought to battle, and in the course of the fighting, Uther's father, King Uric Pendragon, had been killed, felled by what had turned out to be a poisoned arrow.

Uther met the news with blank incomprehension. He heard the words and accepted them, but his mind failed utterly to accept or to even consider their import. Nemo was standing by, awaiting his instructions on some matter that would now never be mentioned again, and she watched him closely, prepared to jump forward and catch him if he fell. His eyes had gone strangely dead as though he had lost all ability to focus on anything, and he began to nod his head as though agreeing with some voice inside him that spoke to him alone. He reached behind him with one groping hand and found the chair on which he had been sitting. Pulling it towards him automatically, he lowered himself very slowly to its seat and then asked Garreth for word of his mother. Where was she now? Did he need to go to her immediately, or would she come to Camulod to her own mother, Luceiia Varrus? And when would his father be buried and where?

Garreth Whistler looked uncomfortable, and his gaze went from Uther to Merlyn Britannicus and then to the other senior officers of Camulod's garrison. The report he would now deliver, he told them, had come directly from Meradoc, the ruling Chief of the strongest of the three Llewellyn clans in the Federation. King Uric was already buried, he reported. He had been dead for ten days now and was buried within hours of his death in the place where he had fallen. The enemy had been all around the Llewellyn position, and Chief Meradoc's overriding priority was to rescue his own people from the trap in which they found themselves. The formalized, royal burial of what was by then essentially no more than one more corpse among hundreds had had to be set aside. There would be opportunity later, Meradoc had decided, to mourn and honour the dead King once the living were secure and safe again and the enemy was put to flight.

Uther showed no reaction to any of this, and so it was Merlyn who asked Garreth what King Uric had been doing among the western Llewellyns when he should have been with his own forces in south Cambria. Garreth turned his head towards Merlyn and sniffed before glancing towards Uther, who sat staring vacantly back at him. After a moment, evidently having decided that Uther's attention was engaged elsewhere, Garreth turned back to Merlyn and the others.

From the moment word of the invasion of Cambria first arrived in Tir Manha, he explained, King Uric had delegated command of his own Pendragon clansmen to him, Garreth Whistler, as the King's Champion. From then on Uric had spent most of his time touring the territories of the Pendragon Federation, accompanied by a small escort of hand-picked warriors, rallying and encouraging the fighting men of the other federated clans and demonstrating his support for each of his Chiefs in turn.

At the time of his death, Uric was visiting Chief Meradoc's host of Llewellyn warriors, the largest and strongest armed force in his overall command, and prior to that he had spent time among the warriors of the Griffyd clans with their Chiefs Cativelaunus of Carmarthen and Brynn of Y Gaer. When his visit to Llewellyn was complete, Uric intended to move on to visit the army of Huw Strongarm, Chief of the northern Pendragon.

Enemy activity had been thick and heavy around the Llewellyn territories just prior to Uric's arrival, Garreth told them, and the fighting was heavy enough that Meradoc sent word to the King warning him of the extreme danger and suggesting that Uric postpone his visit. Uric, however, would have none of that and insisted on holding to his original schedule, and so he and his escort had ridden into Llewellyn's lands and died there.

At that point Uther spoke again in a flat, emotionless voice, demanding news of his mother, and Garreth turned back towards the younger man.

The Lady Veronica, Uther's mother, he reported, had been devastated by her husband's death but had recovered quickly, showing great strength and resilience. It had been her original intent, he said, immediately after her recovery from the shock of the news of her husband's death and burial, to return to Camulod in order to be with her mother. But she had changed her mind, for reasons known only to herself, and decided to remain in Tir Manha. at least for the time being. She wrote a letter to her mother, Luceiia Varrus, explaining her thoughts and her decision to remain in Cambria. Garreth had delivered that earlier.