Jack Whyte - The Sorcer part 2 - Metamorphosis

"Aye, but it's pointless. Owain's dead. I was merely going to say I wish I could have looked him in the eye one last time before he died. "

Huw nodded again, then he grinned a crooked grin. "Aye, well, you might still look him in the eye, but you won't get much out of him in response. I'll send Llewellyn to you later. "

I watched him go, wondering what he could have meant, but I soon dismissed it and turned back to the others.

"Donuil, is there any word of Connor?"

"He's patrolling the coastal waters with his fleet, hoping to intercept Ironhair in the other big bireme.

"Philip?"

Philip interrupted his conversation with Benedict to face me, and as he did so I held out my hand to him. He grasped my wrist and I pulled myself to my feet, gripping him strongly and using his solid bulk to anchor myself against the unsteadiness that threatened to dump me unceremoniously back onto the cot. Once I had steadied myself, I loosened my grip on his arm. I stood spread legged, still unsteady but feeling the strength sweeping back into my legs with every heartbeat. I looked at Benedict now, over Philip's shoulder, remembering that I had sent him away earlier to look for any signs of Uderic's contingent.

"Ben. Did you find anyone out there?"

He grunted a negative, emphasizing it with a shake of his close cropped head. "We searched for about an hour, but the ground's too hard up here to hold a trail of any kind. Once beyond the end of this valley, there were three separate ways they might have gone without climbing the hills. I suspected they might have split up and gone in all three directions, but I didn't want to split my forces on the strength of suspicion alone, so I brought our people back. "

I nodded, accepting his judgment, and spoke to Philip. "Well, what have you to tell me about Connor?"

Philip shook his head slightly. "Nothing, really. I know nothing more concrete than Donuil has already told you. But Connor said to tell you that he'll sweep steadily north, doubling back as necessary from time to time to make sure the waters at his back are, as he put it, kept clear of offal. He'll stay dose to the coast, though, and maintain a land watch from every galley. Should you want or need him to touch shore, his people will be watching for three equal fires set burning side by side. That will summon Connor. Four fires will summon all the fleet When they see either signal, they'll land with the next high tide. His assumption was that you'll keep penetrating northward, hugging the western shore. "

"Good, so be it" I took my first hesitant step then, and made my way completely around the cot unaided, watched by all of them. When I had done so, I reversed myself and did it again. "I'm fine, " I told them then. "Nothing wrong with me that a short sleep won't cure. Will you leave me now? Wake me if anything happens. If any messengers arrive, I want to hear what they have to say immediately. Thank you, gentlemen. "

They left me alone then, all save Quinto, who hovered nearby, watching me anxiously as I lowered myself back to the cot and closed my eyes. I could tell he was loath to leave.

"What is it, Quinto? What do you want?"

He cleared his throat. "I want you to sleep, Caius. Will you drink a potion if I prepare it for you?"

I opened my eyes again and squinted up at him, wondering whether I could trust the soldier in him to prevail over the physician. "Aye, " I grunted, "providing you can guarantee your potion will not keep me laid out here for days, unconscious. I need to keep my wits about me, much as I need to sleep. If they have cause to wake me, I want to come awake alert and able to do anything I need to do. Can you ensure that?"

"Yes, I believe I can. A simple sedative, to help you sleep, that's all I'll give you. Three or four hours should see its force dissipate. After that, you ought to be yourself again. "

"Ought to be? Not will be?"

He dipped his head sideways. "Ought to be. My calling is physician, not magician. "

"Hmm. So be it. Go and fetch your foul brew, then. "

He left immediately, but by the time he returned I was already deeply asleep, and the potion sat unused on the folding table beside my cot.

TEN

Quinto's sleeping draught was the first thing I saw when I awoke by myself several hours later, just before sunset, feeling completely normal again.

Someone had set a leather basin in a frame beside my. cot, and I rose easily and rinsed my face in the cold water from a leather bucket that hung beside it from a tripod. After that, I went outside to see what was happening.

The fort was bustling, jammed to capacity, bodies moving everywhere. A sprawling community of leather campaign tents had been established in the surrounding meadows. Perhaps because of the brief spell of injury I had endured, my sense of smell seemed unusually acute, and I stood for a while with my head tilted back, singling out the various aromas that filled the late afternoon air: the smell of horses and dung from the huge area at the rear where the horse lines had been set up; heavy wood smoke from hundreds of fires; and then the more elusive scents of cooking meats and bread baking among coals. Someone not far from me was frying smoked, salted ham, and from another direction, fleetingly, came the smell of wild onions and garlic. As the mixture of unmistakable savours entered my nostrils , it brought the saliva spurting from beneath my tongue, reminding me that I was ravenously hungry.

I began to look about me, searching for the familiar outline of the large field cooks' tent that served us as a commissary on campaign. As I did so, I noticed something I had missed before, and my jaw dropped in astonishment as I realized that I must have passed within a few paces of it without seeing it.

The corpse of Owain of the Caves had been decapitated; his head had been stuck on a sharpened stake and set up outside the building in which I had lain unconscious. That was what Huw had been trying to tell me in his cryptic way. Now, as I saw it, with its pallid, waxen, moustached face framed by lank, dull brown hair, all thoughts of hunger fled.

I stepped closer to the atrocious thing, at war within myself. This, I knew, was Pendragon justice, an example set up for others to note and take warning from, and yet a terrible outrage stirred within me, evoked by its mere presence. I wanted to snatch the disgusting thing off its spike and hurl it from me as hard as I could, but I also knew that the last thing on earth I wished to do was touch it. I imagined myself clutching it by the hair and whirling it around my head before I threw it, scattering gouts of congealed blood in a circle, feeling the greasy hair slipping through my fingers. Instead, I merely shuddered in revulsion and forced myself to stand there, close to it, and look at it, remembering the man whose head this once had been.

He had been a ferocious mid successful warrior who had served my cousin Uther well and honourably in his time, fighting throughout Lot's War as one of Uther's most trusted captains. Only after Uther's death, for reasons that would now forever be unknown, had Owain turned away from his service, from his own Pendragon loyalties and from Camulod, selling himself to Ironhair and working thereafter to set that upstart in place as ruler of the Cambrian Pendragon. To that end he had conspired to bring death to Uther's own son, and he had finally, willingly, given up his own life in the attempt to achieve that goal. Why? What land of powers did Ironhair possess that could subvert a man as strong as Owain of the Caves and induce him to turn against his lifelong loyalties? I had asked myself the same question a hundred times before, and I had never come any closer to answering it than I was now. Strangely, as I stood gazing at the lifeless head, wondering vainly what thoughts, desires and drives had filled it during life, I found my horror at its presence leaving me, draining away. I finally nodded to it, gazing into the open, opaque eyes. "Rest then, and settle your own debts with God, " I murmured.