Jack Whyte - The Sorcer part 2 - Metamorphosis

As I turned to walk away, one of the men squatting at a nearby cooking fire stood up, watching me. Though my view of him was obscured by thick smoke, I saw enough of him at first glance to be struck by his physical appearance. Whoever he was, I thought, he dressed to be noticed. He was of medium height, and well made, with a narrow waist that tapered from wide, straight shoulders. He wore a short, startlingly beautiful cape of winter ermine furs, one end thrown back over his left shoulder so that the black tips of its outer fringe of tails hung in a brilliant bar across his chest. White and black were his colours, enhanced by silver metalwork and jewellery. I wondered fleetingly who he was, but as soon as the smoke cleared and I saw his narrow, ravaged, hatchet face, I knew he was Llewellyn One Eye. I stopped short, gazing right back at him and struggling to disguise my reaction to his hideous disfigurement.

Then I turned my head slightly to indicate the staring trophy on the stake, pitching my voice so he would hear me clearly.

"This is your work, Llewellyn?"

He came towards me, walking slowly, clutching a cooked leg of some kind of bird in one hand. When he reached my side, he looked at the head on its stake and bit off a mouthful of meat before he made any attempt to answer me. I felt my hunger come back, stronger than ever, as I watched him chewing. He inspected the impaled head as though he had never seen its like before.

"Aye," he said eventually, speaking around the mouthful of meat he had wadded into one cheek. "It's mine. Does it displease you?"

I felt myself start to smile. "No, he's well dead, and your arrow saved my life. I wanted to thank you."

He looked at me sideways, tilting his head strangely to see me with his single eye, the right one. "Horseshit," he said, disparagingly. "Your sword saved your life, and his next arrow would have been for the boy. I thought you were dead before I loosed my shot. Besides, I was shooting for myself. He was a treacherous whoreson, that one, a disgrace to his name and his people."

"How, and why? Because he fought for Ironhair?"

Now Llewellyn turned to look me full in the face. "No, because he sold himself to Outlanders. He was a Pendragon born and bred, a son of these mountains, and he betrayed his birthright and his people. For that he died. It matters not what the Outlander's name was, except that it was other than Pendragon."

"What happened to your eye?" I had been staring at Llewellyn as he spoke, analysing the startling horror of his face, and the question had left my mouth before I was even aware I was going to ask it. He went very still, and then he cocked his head to one side again, peering up at me with his good right eye, thrusting the disfigured side of his face into grim prominence.

"An accident," he said, mildly. "When I was a boy, apprenticed to an iron maker. I was puddling iron and the metal splashed." I winced at the thought, but he went on as though be had not noticed. "It caught me in the eye and splashed down onto my cheek and nose. The smith pushed my head into a tub of water and expected me to die. I didn't So when the iron drops had cooled, he plucked them out of me... Well, some he had to cut out, I've been told, because the flesh was roasted into them. But I was out of my senses at the time, so I don't remember that You can see the shapes of them, if you look close."

He suddenly leaned nearer to me, cocking his head in an invitation to examine his disfigurement and even though I knew he expected me to cringe and pull away, I looked. Sure enough, I saw the evidence clearly. One large, tear shaped drop had settled on the plane of his left cheekbone, its tail stretching upwards and in towards his eye, where its ferocious heat had blinded him on that side, burning away the eye and carving a channel deep into his lower lid. As it healed, the tension of the scar tissue had twisted and pulled the skin and flesh downward, exposing his eye socket horribly and creating a deep fissure down the distorted flesh beneath the eye to join the large teardrop. Three other drops had landed on his face, as well. The smallest of them was in the hollow of his nose, just above the pad of his left nostril, another fell on the outer end of his upper lip, and the third, almost as large as the main splash, had caught him on the outside of his face, beneath the crest of his cheekbone close to the ear, searing a deep hole there before trickling down the line of his jawbone and melting the flesh as it rolled.

Afterwards, as the flesh healed, the shape and depth of the injuries had resulted in the grotesque facial mutilations that now set this man apart. The entire left side of his face was a sight to frighten children, with a leering, empty eye socket set above a ropy network of scars leaving no discernible trace of normal humanity. Above the edge of his mouth, emphasizing the terrifying differentness of this face from all others, a circular hole the size of a fingernail showed his eye tooth and the gum that held it.

He was staring at me intently, waiting for me to say something that would betray my revulsion. But I felt none.

"Yes, you're right. The marks are plain. Four drops—two small, two larger, one of them huge. At least you still have your teeth."

He glared at me for a moment, and then his face creased into a huge grin. He finished chewing the food in his mouth and swallowed, before sucking at a tooth on the right side of his mouth and rubbing his lips with the back of his hand.

"Huw told me you wanted to talk to me. What was it about?"

"I told you, I want to offer you my thanks, but Huw warned me you would accept no gratitude. Do you still work with iron, or—"

"Did the experience frighten me away?" He laughed, a single bark. "No, I kept at it and I'm an ironsmith now, save when we're at war. Then I'm a Pendragon, first and foremost, and so I fight."

"An ironsmith."

"Aye, you might say iron's a part of me." He laughed again. "It certainly consumed a part of me, but I'm more careful now, by far. Do you know anything of smithing?"

"But little. When I was a boy, I had a favourite uncle who was a master of the craft. A man called Publius Varrus. He taught me something of forging and shaping iron."

Llewellyn stood slightly straighter. "I know the name. You own his great bow now, do you not?"

"I do. How did you know that?"

"Huw told me about you, and I've seen the badge he wears, the one with the arrow nicks in it."

I nodded, remembering with pleasure the time I had matched shots with Huw. Both of us had landed arrows side by side within the tiny circle of the brooch his wife had give® him, filling the space so closely that our arrowheads had left parallel nicks in the upper and lower edges of the silver bauble's inner rim. Huw wore the brooch as proudly as a Roman centurion, might have worn the corona on his breastplate. Another thought occurred to me.

"Tell me, how did you know the Cave Man's next arrow would have been for the boy?"

"I didn't, until Huw told me what you said."

I looked straight at Llewellyn now, assessing the man, gauging his mettle. "And have you any idea why he tried to kill the lad, even before me?"

"Aye, he thought him someone else. Young Arthur Pendragon."

"Hmm. And what do you know of Arthur Pendragon?"

Llewellyn twisted his mouth up in what might have been a lopsided smile, except that it exposed the tooth beneath the hole in his cheek. "He's Uther's son, they say. Sired upon Lot of Cornwall's willing wife."

He took another bite from the leg he held in his hand, and I distinctly heard the juicy sound of the meat ripping away from the bone. "Is there any left where that came from?"

"Aye, or there was when I left the fire. Come." He led me back, and as we approached, the two men who sat there yet stood up.