Jack Whyte - The Sorcer part 1 - The Fort at River's Bend

I locked my door and amused myself for several hours in front of Aunt Luceiia's silver mirror, marvelling at the completeness and complexity of the changes I effected in myself. Then, irked by the painful tenderness caused by the adhesive, I packed everything carefully away, and made my way to the bathhouse.

SIXTEEN

Once again, the secrets of the warlocks' chests were driven from my mind by more pressing events that demanded my attention. I would think of that late autumn, forever after, as the Autumn of the Beasts.

First came the wolves, driven to descend on us, Lucanus believed, as the result of some sickness that had decimated their normal prey. It seemed to me he must be right, for there were very few deer around that year, and one could ride for an entire day through the forest without encountering any of the hares, rabbits or squirrels that normally abounded in the woodlands.

Wolves, like bears and other large animals in the wild, generally take pains to avoid contact with humans. That particular year, however, the wolves came closer to our fort at Mediobogdum, and in greater numbers, than they ever had before without the spur of winter starvation to impel them. The sound of their howling, just beyond our walls, became a nightly commonplace from the late summer onward, and after the loss of several of our animals, we were forced to move all our livestock into the safety of the fort each evening before the sun went down. We were completely unprepared, however, to be attacked and plundered in full daylight.

Shelagh had begun raising swine the first year after our arrival, and her herd had prospered. She had quickly acquired buyers for as many prime yearling pigs as she wished to sell, but from her father she had inherited a keen eye for healthy traits in beasts and she always managed to retain the best of each litter as future breeding stock. Because she now owned a dozen prime sows, she had constructed a large and spacious pen to hold them, close to the bathhouse and its plenteous water, but far enough removed so that the stink of the proliferating farrows would be bearable to people coming and going from the baths. At night the animals were brought inside the fort and penned again in another enclosure built against the north wall, as far away from our habitation as they could be.

On one late and lovely afternoon, when the trees had almost lost their golden cloaks completely, a pack of wolves, desperate with hunger, braved the nearness of men and attacked the swine pens.

The alarm was raised immediately, of course, although the squealing of terrified pigs would have brought us running even had no one seen what was happening. Within moments of the first outbreak of noise, more than a score of men, all armed, converged upon the vicinity of the swine pens. I was one of the first to arrive, having been on my way to the bathhouse, but because of that, I was one of the few who arrived unarmed. Dedalus came running next, from another direction, carrying a spear, his longbow and a quiver of arrows slung across his back. Seeing me without a weapon, he threw me the spear and unslung his bow, nocking an arrow even before we had seen any targets.

The: noise was appalling, and among the demented squealing of the pigs we could hear what we took to be the snarling of dogs. The dogs were wolves, and they were swarming everywhere, attacking with awe-inspiring ferocity. I counted fourteen of them before I gave up and began to concentrate on reaching them and beating them off, only to discover that the latter was easier to think about than to achieve. These wolves betrayed not the slightest inclination to slink off as they normally would when challenged by men. Instead, they turned on us and attacked us without hesitation. One huge animal leaped directly at me, fangs flashing, and it was by die merest chance that I was able to drop to one knee and fling up my spear point in time to pierce his hurtling body; even then the dead weight of him threw me over backwards.

I scrambled to my feet again, wrenching out the spear point, and saw another gaunt form writhing on the turf ahead of me, skewered by an arrow. Dedalus had positioned himself to my left, on a little knoll, and was drawing and shooting methodically, bringing down wolf after wolf, not bothering to kill each one since he knew that there were enough of us to finish off the ones he wounded. And then Hector, on my right, went down beneath two animals, one of which had sunk its fangs in the wrist of his sword arm.

I was in easy throwing distance but dared not throw, for I might have killed Hector as easily as either of the wolves. Rufio saved Hector's life by leaping to his side and swinging a massive axe I had never seen before. With two enormous blows he destroyed both animals and then leaped forward, over Hector, to confront another that was slinking forward, belly down, towards the fallen man. When he landed in front of it, the beast warned him away with flashing fangs, growling and slavering, but Rufio was already swinging and the edge of his axe caught the wolf on the shoulder, cleaving it and hurling it to Rufio's left, where I pinned it to the ground with my spear.

The battle seemed to last for ages, but it must really have been only a very short time before the first wolf fled, yipping and yowling, and the others followed it to safety. Even then, however, they withdrew only a short way before stopping to turn and snarl at us again from what they took to be a safe distance. The Celtic longbow that Dedalus held, however, was lethal at far greater distances than that, and he killed four more of the animals before the surviving beasts realized how vulnerable they yet were and fled, pursued by two more of Ded's deadly arrows.

We found twelve dead wolves in and around the pens, and opinions varied as to whether seven or nine had escaped the slaughter. We also found five dead yearling pigs and two so severely savaged that we had to kill them. None of the fearsome sow matrons had been injured. We dined communally on pork for the ensuing week.

And then, a mere ten days after the wolf attack, Rufio's horse came home alone in the middle of the day, lathered with sweat, its eyes rolling in terror partly caused, I had no doubt, by the unaccustomed flapping of its sad- - die's empty stirrups. My mind immediately filled with visions of the surviving wolves from the previous week's escapade, and I was the first one to horse, although Arthur and his three friends and every other man then in the fort were close behind me. Once we had left the fort and reached the road, however, there was no way to tell which direction to take; the ground was too hard and stony to show any sign of passage. I reined my horse in hard and waved the others down, and we returned immediately to the fort, where we summoned the garrison from the camp and organized search parties.

No one had any knowledge of what Rufio's intentions had been when he rode out that day. He would not have ridden down into Ravenglass, we knew. We had a rule, informal but observed, that no one was to ride to Ravenglass without reporting his or her intentions—primarily to avoid causing concern should the journey require an overnight stay, but also because there was always someone who required something from the town and was unable to go there personally to collect it. We also knew he would not have crossed the saddleback pass into the next valley, since there was no conceivable reason for anyone to go there. But that was all we knew. He might have gone up the flank of the hill to the south-west, towards the places where we were working in the stone quarry and the forest; or he might have gone down into the forested valley beneath, in the hopes of finding deer or other game.

We had eighty bodies available for the search, half of them infantry. I sent forty men on foot down into the valley and took the remainder with me up onto the south-west flank of the mountain above us. Less than six hours of daylight were left to us, and we searched until the gathering dusk became too thick to deal with, so that we arrived back at the fort long after dark, making our way slowly and with great difficulty down the rock-strewn hillsides towards the beacon fires that our friends had lit around the walls of the fort. In all our minds and hearts, we hoped that the other party had found Rufio, but they had not returned, so our hopes were quickly dashed. Sure enough, when they eventually straggled home exhausted, they had seen no sign of our friend.