Jack Whyte - The Sorcer part 2 - Metamorphosis

I shook my head and looked about me again, this time taking better note of all that I was seeing. The fighting had died down and now only a few fierce, widely separated struggles were still being waged. Murder was being committed before my eyes, for men were throwing down their weapons, attempting to surrender, and were being killed out of hand, mainly by arrows from the ridge above. I drew a deep breath and ordered Donuil to find our trumpeter and sound the recall, and as I spoke I heard the tremor in my voice. He looked at me, wordlessly, then turned and disappeared over the edge of the knoll again.

I walked stiff legged to the other side of the small eminence. I do not remember going down to my horse, but I found myself kneeling by his head, staring through tears at his noble face and at the milky glaze that was already forming in the one large eye that I could see. The spear had pierced him cleanly, plunging deep into his chest even before its butt lodged against the ground and the full weight of his plunging corpse fell upon it, hammering the point home to burst his great heart. For almost a score of years, this magnificent beast had borne me bravely, offering nothing but total obedience and love in return for the meagre attentions I bestowed upon him. Now the spectacle of his egregious death unmanned me completely and I sat down and wept, leaning my back against his shoulder and laying my left arm flat along his solid, silky neck. All around me, strewn among the rocks and gullies of this inhospitable place, the bodies of dead and dying men lay like discarded garments and lacked any power to move me to grieve for diem. Their deaths had been a natural consequence of their lives as warriors and mercenaries. The death of my noble and unselfish friend Germanicus, on the other hand, was intensely personal, and it overwhelmed me with a sense of loss and destitution.

Some time later, I felt Donuil's hand upon my shoulder and I stood up, dry eyed by that time, and followed him to where he had tethered another horse for me. We rode in silence to meet Huw Strongarm.

The victory, Huw told me later, had been much greater than I had realized. The invaders had been summoned to Dolaucothi in numbers far surpassing our expectations, gravitating towards the gold mines in large bands. Surprised from the north and the south simultaneously, however, they had been broken and routed, their ranks decimated and devastated by the Pendragon bowmen on the hillsides above them. The survivors, thousands of them despite their enormous losses, were now in full flight westward, back towards the sea, harried and pursued relentlessly by the terrifying hillmen who could strike men dead with their long arrows from nigh on half a mile away.

Huw was in high spirits, full of excitement and enthusiasm, and he seemed larger than I remembered him, far more regal. It took me only moments to identify the change in his appearance, and he saw me notice it and broke off what he had been saying, looking at me strangely.

"What?" he asked. "What is it? You look... Is something wrong, Merlyn?"

"Your helmet," I replied, shaking my head. "I recognize it, though I've never seen it. It belonged to Ullic Pendragon. I've read descriptions of it in my uncle's books. But it must be a hundred years old, and yet it looks new. How can that be?"

His eyes flared in surprise, and with both hands he removed the war helmet and held it out to me. The head of the great golden eagle that fronted it looked alive, so fierce were its eyes. The huge wings were folded on either side of the helmet's dome and the spread tail feathers fanned out and down to cover his shoulders. 'Take it," he said. "Look closely. This bird was in the air, last year. Ullic's was similar, but this is mine, new made for me." I examined the eyes, made of glass or polished stone, and the precise way the neck feathers had been arranged over the helmet's brow. "The eagle helmet is the ceremonial helmet of the War Chief of Pendragon, Merlyn, and each new War Chief receives his own. Uric and Uther were both King, as was Dergyll ap Griffyd, but only Ullic was both King and War Chief, so he had the helmet. I am the first War Chief of all Pendragon since Ullic. "

I handed the helmet back to him with the reverence it deserved, and he led us then to where his huge new tent was being erected and his senior sub chiefs and captains were already assembling to await his next dispositions. As I listened thereafter to the details of his planning and the way he absorbed and adjusted to every new report being brought to him, I found my excitement rekindled, and I felt myself more able to accept the aching loss of Germanicus with a resigned pragmatism.

For the following three weeks, we stormed through the mountain passes of western Cambria, leaving a trail of slaughter in our wake. We reached the western shore at the end of that time to find the remnants of Ironhair's embattled levies drawn up along the strand, facing us defiantly behind crude and hastily made fortifications. Their evacuation plans had fallen into ruin. The fleet that should have been there to carry them away to safety had failed to meet them, and there was no sign of its coming. They were vulnerable to siege, starvation and thirst, crammed into a narrow space backed with saltwater and bare of any kind of vegetation other than the wrack of seaweed cast up by each high tide. Yet still they refused to surrender, fearing, I had no doubt, the total lack of mercy shown by the Pendragon to any of their ilk.

By the end of the third morning of the "siege, " the defenders were completely encircled and at the mercy of the Overwhelming superiority of the Pendragon besiegers.

I sought out Huw Strongarm and asked his blessing to return with my people to Camulod. Ironhair's invasion, to my eyes and his, was over. The principals, Ironhair himself and Carthac Pendragon, had escaped unscathed, as far as we knew, their bid for mastery in Cambria having failed abjectly. As surely as Ironhair's army had expected to be rescued by a waiting fleet, I, too, had expected to see signs of Connor Mac Athol's presence in the waters off the coast. As neither fleet had been seen, my conjecture was that they had met at sea and, dependent upon the outcome of the battle, either fleet could materialize at any time. Whatever developed, however, Huw now had sufficient strength surrounding the enemy bastion on the beach to handle it. He did not need our continuing presence, or the aggravation of continuing to feed us when we might be better employed at home in Camulod.

Huw believed that Ironhair and Carthac would be likely to return, but not for another year, at least. By that time, Cambria would, under his leadership, be unassailable. A spirit of unity among the Pendragon had been unknown for long enough now—since the death of Uther—that its nearly miraculous re-emergence gave it an exceptional fire and vigour. Should Ironhair invade again in days to come, Huw would request our assistance again, in return for his wholehearted support of young Arthur's claim to Cambria as Uther Pendragon's son. I told him then about my agreement with Llewellyn, which would bring the lad to Cambria the following year, and Huw immediately relieved Llewellyn of his current duties and released him to return to Camulod with us. We two then embraced as friends and equals, and shortly afterwards I turned my two half legions around and led them home to Camulod. We had been away from our Colony for nearly half a year.

ELEVEN

Autumn had already touched the trees with its mordant breath by the time we came down from the highlands and began to approach Camulod from the northwest, having made our way without incident from Dolaucothi in the central hills. We travelled down to the southern coast of Cambria and thence eastward along the littoral, collecting our holding forces from Caerwent and Caerdyff in passing. Then we forded the river mouth to the west of Glevum at low tide—a relatively simple task at summer's end—and struck inland, south and east, to skirt Aquae Sulis and find the great road running south from there to Camulod. Pleased though we were to be going home, we were nevertheless strangely subdued; an air of dissatisfaction hung over us, born of the barely mentioned but inescapable conclusion that it had primarily been the Pendragon Celts, not the forces of Camulod, that had beaten the invaders. We knew we were the anvil against which the Celtic hammer had crashed down to smite and flatten the enemy; it was our solid, unyielding weight against which they had found themselves trapped and crushed. Llewellyn himself had constructed the analogy. But our Camulodian pride was not accustomed to accepting a secondary role, and so many of our number felt discontented and unfulfilled, believing themselves to have achieved nothing of moment.