Jack Whyte - The Sorcer part 2 - Metamorphosis

One of the tables not far from the fire held a jug of water, which was all that Enos drank, and another that I knew was full of mead, for I had filled it earlier that day. Beside the jugs lay a sharp knife, a thick, hard wedge of cheese covered with coarse cloth, and a loaf of rough, wheaten bread that had come fresh from the oven that morning and lay concealed under a covering of white, clerical cloth. I moved one of the chairs and the smallest table close to the tire and sat down, throwing back my hood and shaking out my hair, then combing it between my spread fingers—one of the few activities for which my clawed left fingers were quite adequate. I was tired and it felt good to sit and stretch out my legs. This had been a long, tense day, its proceedings and the manner of their presentation crucial to the plan that we had crafted with such painstaking care over the past few years.

Mere moments later, feeling the stirrings of an unfed appetite, I rose again and cut myself a portion of bread and cheese, poured a cup of mead and carried them back to my chair. Thereafter, enjoying the almost silent flickering of flames in the stillness and peace of the room, I sat staring into the fire, but looking into the past.

I had not swung a sword nor mounted upon a horse since the day my brother died. My burned flesh and twisted sinews would permit neither activity. Arthur had sent me home to Camulod attended by a physician and borne in a commissary wagon specially adapted to my needs, and I had swung for long days in a cradle suspended from a frame his carpenters had bolted to the wagon's bed for that purpose, inspired by the similar device built by Connor Mac Athol's craftsmen to support their one legged captain while he was at sea. Then, for months thereafter, at home in Camulod, I recuperated under the loving care of Ludmilla, whose loss of her husband Ambrose resulted, once her initial bereavement, pain and grief had passed, in the transferral of some portion of her love for him to me. She grew determined that I would survive my wounds and overcome them, as had both Connor and Publius Varrus in their time. She hectored me constantly to exercise my damaged limbs to exhaustion and beyond, driving me to more and greater exertions, stretching my maimed and fire scarred muscles until they would perform for me again and finally enable me to walk erect. I limped, at some times more than others, and my left arm and hand were practically useless, but the rest of me was whole and strong.

It was Ludmilla, too, who eventually recognized my leprosy. But she had been trained in the medical arts by Lucanus, who had had no fear of the disease and had been filled with admiration and great sympathy for his friend Mordechai Emancipatus, who had worked for decades among those afflicted, eventually contracting it himself. Luke had taught Ludmilla that the disease was not readily contagious, and that it was not fatal, but brought death solely from lack and want and the tragic inability of lepers to find food, shunned and proscribed and dreaded as they were by everyone. She had seen my lesions and known them for what they were, and she and I had talked for hours about the consequences that must lie in store for me, if ever my affliction became known.

And it was Ludmilla, finally, who showed me my salvation in the fact that people now lived in fear of me and shunned me for my sorcery. She brought out my night clothes, the long, black, hooded cloak and the ankle length, pocket hung underrobe that had concealed me in my nocturnal campaign against my enemies in Cambria and which Derek of Ravenglass had carried back to Camulod for me. Ludmilla pointed out that they were equally suited, if not more so, for concealing me and my disfigurement from prying eyes in the light of day. The large, capacious hood would completely mask my face within its shadows, and the long sleeved arms would hang below my finger ends when I required them to. I could benefit from men's fear of me and my sorcery by using it to elude their far, far greater fear of leprosy. Seeing me dressed, as they thought, for sorcery, people would flee from me in terror, and that same terror would completely protect me against their curiosity.

While I had been recuperating from my wounds, Arthur had been at war in Cambria. Thrust into leadership by the death of Ambrose and my own removal, he overcame what some might have been tempted to regard as a premature elevation with the unstinting and committed support of Huw Strongarm. War Chief of the Pendragon, Huw immediately proclaimed the untried young leader to be the son of Uther Pendragon and the natural, incontestable king of all his people. That championship, coupled with the instantaneous commitment and loyalty of his own senior Camulodian commanders, whose trust in Ambrose and myself transferred itself with ease to our young ward and cousin, quickly enabled Arthur to display the true genius that belied his youth.

My killing of Carthac had indeed destroyed the ties that held his rabble together, but it had also destroyed the illusion of legitimacy that supported Peter Ironhair in his campaigns in Cambria. With Carthac dead, Ironhair's Cambrian cause was lost, leaving him only naked aggression to explain his continuing presence. His mercenary levies soon disintegrated, fleeing in all directions from the wrath of Arthur's infantry. Some of them sought to join with Horsa's Danes, who were a separate force, but the Danes would have none of them and turned them away to take their chances against our forces.

Arthur, acting alone in the planning stage but immediately thereafter delegating responsibility to Ambrose's former infantry commanders, designed and laid out a brilliant campaign plan for mopping up the remnants of Carthac's old host. Dividing his forces into maniples and cohorts in the Roman fashion, and employing the tactics used by Gaius Marius four hundred years earlier—tactics that I myself had explained to him when he was but a boy—he had sent his fighting units out to work in close coordination, quartering the territories assigned to them and working with mounted Scouts who served as liaisons between the units. As soon as the elements of his campaign were in place, he prosecuted it ruthlessly, offering no quarter to an enemy who had forfeited all right to clemency by their own atrocities against the common people of the land they had pillaged.

Then, when that effort had been launched, Arthur had turned his mind, and his cavalry, to deal with the Danes, who were the major threat.

Horsa's fierce warriors were of a different order from the rabble that the infantry pursued, and Horsa's own military abilities came into sudden prominence when Arthur brought the might of Camulod to bear on him. The inconclusive battle I had witnessed on the day when I slipped into Ambrose's camp had taught Horsa much: he had learned that when he held the high ground and used his shield walls, he was as safe from our cavalry as he would have been behind the walls of a fortified town. From that day forth, therefore, he fought with an eye to the high ground and the integrity of his defences. My own one man campaign of nightly poisonings and murder aided him in this, for I had succeeded all too well. After three months of nocturnal terrors, the Danes had suspended their practice of roving the land and fighting in small, independent bands. Through fear of Merlyn's Vengeance, they had coalesced into a tight, cohesive group, a real army, three thousand to five thousand strong, moving as one potent force, and they were formidable.

Arthur's cavalry was lethal to the Danes whenever they were caught in the open and unsuspecting of attack, but such occasions were few and happened only at the outset of that new stage of the war. Horsa soon learned that attack was always imminent, and he held his men in tight restraint, ready at any time to throw up their shield walls and hold Arthur's cavalry at bay. That strength, however, quickly became his biggest weakness, since his powerful axemen could not deploy their weapons while the shields were in place, interlocked. Furthermore, to frustrate the cavalry, these shield walls had to be raised on sloping ground, above the horses, since on flat ground the weight of surging horseflesh could simply batter them down. This upward slanting of the enemy's forces made them excellent targets for the long Pendragon arrows.