Jack Whyte - The Sorcer part 2 - Metamorphosis

We broke our fast briefly and in silence, eating without awareness from the rations left in one of the remaining saddlebags, and then we began searching for our friends. The abyss that had seemed so deep and dark in the storm; the previous night turned out to be nothing so enormous. At its deepest point, it was less than a score of paces, vertically, from the path above. Its bottom, however, was littered with loose boulders that had long since fallen from the cliff face and were now hidden by scrub and bushes. The sapling from which I had hung—my greave was still in place, lodged in the dirt at its base—had suspended me no more than my own height again above the ground, sufficient to have killed me, had I fallen down head first, but nothing resembling the depth I had imagined to be under me as I swung there. There, too, below and to the left, his lower body twisted in a shallow pit and his torso partially hidden by a tree trunk, we found Bedwyr, unconscious but alive, his left leg broken beneath him, a splintered length of bone protruding from his thigh. We left Rufus and Marco, the medical orderly attached to our troop, to straighten and splint the broken limb while Bedwyr was still unconscious and then to extract him from the pit in which he lay. The rest of us went looking for the others who had fallen.

Tressa had died beneath the weight of a falling horse— not her own, which lay several paces away, but mine, the beautiful big black gelding that she had called Bucephalus. Tress lay seemingly asleep on her back, her face at peace though tinged with the faintest shade of blue. Her helmet was still in place, covering her lustrous hair so that she looked more like a sleeping boy than a woman. Her lower body, however, from the rib cage downward, lay entirely concealed by the enormous bulk of the black horse's massive hindquarters, which were covered in blood and offal from its ruptured abdomen. She had been right, I thought as I stood gazing down at her. The creature had been aptly named. I remembered how she had teased me in bed, on the evening of the day I changed his name. She had preferred Bucephalus to old, mundane Germanicus, she said; Bucephalus had dignitas, the rolling majesty of a magnificent, historic name. My response had been to gather her into my arms and mount her, laughingly telling her that Bucephalus had killed the most wondrous man in all the world of his day, throwing him from a cliff, and I had challenged her to throw me from her saddle with such ease. But she had had no wish to unhorse me that night, and Bucephalus had been forgotten as we rode together, repetitively seeking the temporary little death to which we both knew she could always throw me. And now another Bucephalus had killed the most wondrous woman in my world.

It took us half a day to bring down the horses and haul the big black's hulk away from Tressa, and then to bury her I found a sheltered spot for her, between two spines of rock some way below the place where she had died, and by myself I dug the shallow pit that would hold her, loosening the earth with my sword and scraping it away with my remaining greave. When I could dig no deeper, I laid her gently in the stony grave and packed her body carefully in the earth I had removed, leaving her beautiful face free of dirt. That done, I placed two slanting slabs of stone over her head, angling them so that they would form a roof above her face, and then I placed a multitude of rocks over the mound that marked her resting place, piling them with great! care so that they fit together and would yield to no marauding wolf or bear. For hours I toiled at that, travelling farther each time in my search for stones till all the grass and earth | around was trampled flat and her funeral place was covered] by a chest high pyramid. Only then did I stop, feeling the laboured ache within my chest threaten to overcome me.

While I had been employed in that, the others had been similarly busy, above me, piling rocks over the three troopers who had met their deaths beside my Tress on that treacherous chute. Gunnar, Casso and Secundus, their names had been. I had known them all as casually as any leader knows his men, but I had not loved them.

As I climbed back up the steep slope beside the path, Donuil came forward to greet me, holding out his hand to help me clamber up the last short distance. But as I took his hand, his face changed into Ironhair's, and I leaned back and pulled him, hard, attempting to throw him out and over, above my head. Thank God he had already braced himself to take my weight, but even so, I almost succeeded in dislodging him, so great was his surprise. He grunted, frowned and then heaved, pulling me up onto the path and then pushing me aside. I know I was demented, and he told me afterwards that he had seen it in my eyes. The moment passed and I stood there, shaking my head as he asked me what was wrong.

We came to Camulod days later, bearing Bedwyr on a litter made out of leather tents slung between two long poles cut from tall, straight saplings and carried between two horses, front and rear. I have no recollection of the journey, or of our arrival.

My first awareness of being home again came when I opened my eyes in the sudarium, the steam room of the fort's bathhouse. I was sitting up, and had been talking, apparently, to Benedict, who sat across from me. I was instantly assailed by a kind of vertigo, with images springing to my mind of similar awakenings, years before when I had lost my memories of myself. Benedict leaned towards me quickly, his face creased with concern, asking if I was well. I nodded that I was and decided then and there to say nothing of my loss of awareness. He continued to eye me uneasily, nevertheless, but the moment passed without further comment.

My clothes, when I located them, were clean, and different from the clothing I had worn out on the road, so I knew I had been home long enough, at least, to have changed them. I went in search of Dedalus, hoping to pick his brains without betraying myself, and had gone half the way across the yard before I remembered seeing him fly from his horse and crash to the ground. Dedalus was dead. Again the vertigo swept over me, and I moved slowly to the nearest wall to lean against the stones, feeling the nausea churning in my gut. I vomited, explosively, but felt no better for it, and then all at once I was down on my knees and falling forward I awoke again with Ludmilla and Shelagh hovering over me. When they saw my open eyes, Ludmilla bent and placed a cool, soft hand across my brow.

"You have had a fever, Caius, and have made us all afraid for you, these past few days. Now lie still until I bring Mucius. Shelagh will stay with you."

When Ludmilla had gone, I tried to turn to Shelagh, but I could not move my head, and panic flared in me. My thoughts leaped back to the time of my earlier injury, when Lucanus had had to drill a hole in my skull to relieve the pressure there. He had strapped my head to a retaining device to do so. Shelagh, however, had been watching my eyes and now she bent over me, slipping her arm beneath my neck and raising me slightly, setting my fears to rest. I had simply become too weak to move my head. I tried to speak to her, but my lips were stuck together. She quickly moistened a scrap of cloth and wiped my mouth, and I recalled the pleasure I had felt long years before when Aunt Luceiia had done the same thing for me. I licked my lips and spoke, but what emerged was a mere whisper.

"What's happening, Shelagh? Where's Ambrose?"

She frowned. "What do you mean, where's Ambrose?" The door at the foot of my bed swung open and Mucius Quinto swept into the room, crossing directly to my side and placing his hand on my brow. His eyes seemed to be on Shelagh, however, and he did not glance down to where I lay watching him.

"What's wrong?" he asked, speaking to Shelagh.