Jack Whyte - The Sorcer part 2 - Metamorphosis

As I sat on a hillside outcrop one morning, reviewing the turnout as my army swept by my perch, I noted the division that had grown apparent in my forces and paid more attention to Llewellyn's Celts than to my own troopers. Dour and silent, grim faced and self absorbed, these newcomers woe different from the Pendragon Celts our soldiers had known before. These were hillmen, the true Pendragon people, born and bred among mountain solitudes that seldom knew the presence of Outlanders, and they held themselves apart from the rest of us with a fierce, distrustful and self centred pride. They made it plain, without words, that they marched with us in answer to the call of their people and their land; they owed no allegiance to us, or Camulod, or any other Outlandish power. They marched in utter silence, for the most part, and they bristled with weapons of all shapes and sizes, the most prevalent among them the great weapon known as the Pendragon longbow. Every man, it seemed, now carried a bow stave as tall as himself, and at least one quiver of long arrows made from the wood of ash saplings and flighted with goose feathers.

The sheer quantity of bows perplexed me, for I knew from my own readings of the chronicles of Publius Varrus and my own grandfather, written mere decades earlier, that these weapons had then been few and precious, numbering in the mere hundreds. Ullic Pendragon, Uther's grandfather, had decreed in those days that the new longbows were the property of the people; no man could own one as his personal possession. Each man served as the custodian of a bow for a time, responsible for its upkeep and well being, then passed it on, at the end of a year, into another's keeping. Many of the bows I was seeing now had been among those protected by that very law and were now fifty, sixty and more years old.

For decades now, Druids had walked these lands searching for yew trees in their journeying, and planting and cultivating new groves of yew wherever they found places suited to their growth. And as increasing supplies of yew staves were brought home, the number of bow and arrow makers had grown, too, and mastery of the skills required to make the weapons had become the greatest art of these fierce folk.

I took note then of the bows themselves and found more room for surprise. All of the longbows I had ever seen before were round in section, each carved with loving care from one dried, cured stave of yew. Some of these I was seeing now were different, apparently rectangular in section like the huge, laminated bow I owned myself, now far more than a hundred years in age arid polished with a patina of untold decades of close care and maintenance. The Varrus bow, as I thought of it, was compound in make up, with a double arched shape—two bows, in fact, above and below the carved handhold at the centre—made in flat layers of some dark, exotic wood backed by hand shaven plates of animal bone and braided strips of sinew, glued and dried to iron hardness, the whole crafted and bound and baked by unknown means in Africa by a long dead Scythian master and defying duplication here in Britain.

When Llewellyn himself passed by me I asked him about these new bows, and he confirmed what I had suspected. They were, in fact, made in laminated sections, although they each possessed the single arch of the traditional Pendragon longbow. Most of them were made of ash, he said, though some were still of the rarer yew. The original round bow required a stave of specific dimensions and properties, thickness and straightness being the first two of these. Since not all saplings grow straight, it followed logically that not all were suitable for making bows. But the Pendragon bow makers remembered that the Varrus bow, on which all their new bows were based, had been laminated in sections. In consequence, some had continued working with the lesser woods which, though they lacked the resilient strength of yew, yet had other valuable qualities: dense, narrow grain and pliability. Someone, then, had discovered that a suitable length of sawn ash, well cured, kiln-dried and straight edged, could be split laterally with great care and then rejoined, bonded with impermeable glue, the pieces reversed so that the grain of one piece opposed and reinforced the other. That done, the resultant stave could be hand planed, shaved and tapered to produce a formidable weapon, lesser in strength than the long yew bow, but nonetheless efficient and deadly when it came to piercing enemy armour, even from great distances , Absorbing that, I thanked Llewellyn courteously and then moved on alone, thinking about what had been achieved in the art of warfare, almost within my own lifetime, here in this land of Britain. The huge longbow itself had sprung from nothingness within a hundred years, inspired by the enormous bow that now rode with my own baggage. The cavalry who rode now in extended formation to my right existed only because I myself had stumbled upon the secret of the stirrups that now supported each trooper's feet. The long, cross hilted sword that hung suspended from an iron ring between my shoulders was one of only three similar weapons in the entire world. The iron ball that hung from my saddle bow, secured by a thong around its short, thick wooden handle and swinging on a length of chain, had first been made by my cousin Uther and was now in widespread use, a lethal, deadly flail that, whirled around his head, gave a man five times his own strength in combat. And the long and slender spears, lightweight and almost flexible yet indestructibly strong, carried by the majority of my own troopers, had sprung from our need to have a weapon that our men could use effectively from horseback, on the run. Even our cavalry, I now realized, had doubled upon itself, expanding its effectiveness, with the development of the Scouts.

As I rode, deep in thought, I realized how easy it had been to take all these weapons and developments for granted, and to assume that everyone possessed them. But of course, that was not the case. Few people, beyond Camulod and Cambria, had ever seen their like; no people were equipped to stand against them, and none had the skills, the years of training or the discipline in fabrication to duplicate them. At that precise moment, it came to me with the force of a revelation that if we used our forces and advantages properly we would truly be invincible in war.

That evening, I convened a meeting. I wanted to share my new found revelation with my companions, my subordinates and my allies. My listeners—among them Llewellyn and several of his captains, as well as my own troop commanders—sat in silence for a long time, mulling over all that I had said. Though much of what I had told them they already knew, none of them, for all that, had seen the truth of it in its largest dimensions. The value of the exposition made itself immediately apparent the following day, implicit in the new air of confidence and good humour everywhere as the commanders communicated their own enthusiasm, mostly by attitude alone, to their troops.

Our northward thrust pressed forward effortlessly and with complete success, and the few concentrations of the enemy that we encountered woe exterminated mercilessly by the swarming hillmen who ranged the hills above and ahead of us. Very few of them escaped the lethal hail of arm long arrows, and those who did flee with their lives lost them soon afterwards, when their inevitable descent from the heights brought them into the ken of my massed formations. Within days of setting out from Moridunum, I had joined the fighting on the high ground, leaving my heavy troopers and infantry formations far below and leading my lighter Scouts up into the hill passes. Our presence there restricted the enemy's movements to the hilltops and crests, where Llewellyn's bowmen dealt with them as farmers deal with pests, trapping and destroying them.