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

"How far down is it?'

"I've no idea." I tried to keep my voice light, since I could see there was no need to warn him of the danger here. "But the beautiful part of it is that it's too far up ever to be a threat to this place. No army could climb that, nor any single man I've ever met."

"No." He moved forward again, bending cautiously from the waist. "All those rocks, did they fall from die cliff?'

"Aye, they did, every one of them. That's why there are no trees on the cliff face. But there's grass on many of the ledges down there, and it's thick in places, so nothing has fallen recently."

"Hmm." He sounded far from convinced. But then, after a few mole moments' contemplation of the abyss itself, he turned his eyes outward to where the oak- and ash- and beech-covered hills shepherded the valley westward to the sea beneath low, cloudy skies of varying greys. There was nothing there to mar the forest's deep-green mantle. The peaks behind us, to the south and east, were hidden by the walls that reared at our backs. Only to the north-east did the high cliffs of the largest Fells shrug themselves free of timber.

"It's beautiful, isn't it, Merlyn? So different from Camulod."

"Aye, lad, it is. You think it more beautiful?"

"No-o, and yet yes. The mountains ... "

"You've never seen Cambria, have you?"

He threw me a glance, much more an eighteen-year- old's than an eight-year-old's, that included Lucanus and told both of us that I knew very well he had not. I grinned.

"You will, some day, I promise you, and you'll find that the mountains there, too, are beautiful, and very, very different."

"Different from these? How can that be?"

I shook my head. "As soon as you see them, you'll know. They're higher, for one thing. On some of them, in the highlands, the snow never melts. Their crests are white all year round."

He looked up at me in open disbelief. 'That's impossible. The summer sun would melt it."

"Not in Cambria, Arthur, nor anywhere else where the mountains are high enough."

"High enough for what? To escape the sun?"

I shrugged. "I suppose you might put it that way. They don't escape the light, but they do evade the heat. It's a known fact that, no matter where you are, the higher you climb above that level where the land meets the waters of the sea, the colder the air becomes. If you climb high enough, you reach a point where even the summer rain falls as snow." I grinned at him. "It's true! Ask Lucanus. He and I have ridden into summer storms, on uphill journeys in high land, where the rain turned to snow as we rode higher. And we've turned around and ridden down again, out of the swirling snowstorm to where there was no sight of snow and the rain still fell. Didn't you notice how cool it became today, when we started climbing the hill out of the valley to come up here?"

He nodded, remembering. "But why, Merlyn? Why is that?"

"I wish I could tell you, lad, but I can't. Luke, do you know?"

Lucanus shrugged his shoulders slowly. "No, I do not. But I know it is true. Heat seems to be heavier than cold, Arthur, if you can imagine such a thing, because it always grows colder, the higher you climb. And yet heat rises upward from a fire, so that the upper part of a room is always much warmer than the temperature at floor level. Contradictory, in the extreme, but true, nonetheless, and defying explanation."

"Hmm." The complexities of the abstraction were too much for the boy, and he dismissed them. "Does this valley have a name? Do you know?"

"I don't really know," I answered him. "I know the river we crossed down there is called the Esk, so this would be the valley of the Esk."

He was staring towards the western horizon, where it flattened visibly beyond the shoulder of the farthest, mist-hazed hill. "Could we see the sea from here, on a bright day?"

I followed his gaze. "I think we could. That flat part is the line of it, I believe. It's out there somewhere."

He turned to face the wall of the fort. "And what's beyond the crest of the pass where the road goes over?"

"Another valley, I imagine, and another, and then eventually another town like Ravenglass, at the end of the road."

"Was there a fort there, too?"

"Aye, and a vicus. As I said, a town just like Ravenglass."

"Cumbria ... " He murmured the ancient name of the region surrounding us, drawing it out so that the "m" became a resonant hum. "What's the difference between Cumbria and Cambria?"

I smiled, raising an inquisitive eyebrow towards Luke, who merely shrugged and made a face indicating ignorance of this, too. "They're both ancient names. There was probably no difference, at one time. They might be the same name, differing only in the way the people say them ... And before you ask me what it means, I'll tell you I don't know. But all of it is Britain, Arthur." And some day it could be yours, I thought. "Come now, we'd better go back into the fort and look at what is there. You'll have questions aplenty then, I'll wager."

My inspection of the fort itself, confined to a cursory examination of the condition of its buildings, was brief, since I knew what I was looking for, although one small construction was a surprise. Lucanus pointed it out to me in passing, and then departed in search of food, leaving me to investigate. It was a stone building, in the north-eastern quadrant of the fort, abutting the outer wall close to the guard tower. I leaned inside and then withdrew again, absurdly pleased.

"What is it, Merlyn?"

"A latrine, and a good one, too. I hadn't expected it."

Arthur approached the door then and leaned in as I had done, sniffing deeply before turning to look at me, his eyebrows raised in puzzlement. "It's tiny. What's good about it?"

I grinned at him, then led him inside, to where the air had been untainted by men for many years, and gestured to the stonework of the floor and the upright, less than knee-high wall that framed it. A handbreadth-deep channel in the concrete of the floor ran along three sides in front of this wall, and it was evident from the slight slope in the floor that the channel had been fashioned to lead water from the mouth of a pipe that protruded from, one corner of the small room towards the drain holes at each end. I recognized the style immediately as being of the kind I had only read about before: the classic, early-Roman garrison latrine. I could see where there had been spaces for nine men to squat; three to a side on three sides. In one corner, close by the end of the front wall, I saw what looked like several dust-covered pebbles and a few short sticks. I crossed and kneeled to pick up one of the "stones," finding it, as I had suspected, completely weightless.

"Here," I grunted. "Look at this. You know what it is?"

The boy examined it, clearly baffled as to its nature, and shook his head. I picked up one of the dry sticks and moved directly to the low wall that ran around the floor, where I inserted the stick into one of the three curious keyhole-like slots that pierced each side of it.

"This is very much like our own latrine in Camulod, Arthur, but very old, and even more functional. This place could service three or four hundred men. The pit behind the wall here was covered by wooden bench seats, three holes each, centred on these slots." I held up the weightless pebble. "This is a sponge, more than two hundred years old and probably much smaller than the ones we use today in Camulod. Our sponges are precious now, because they are hard to come by, but when this place was built, they were plentiful, because the Romans ruled the world and had endless access to such things. You've heard Lucanus talk about the need for cleanliness the Romans have always shown, well, here's a perfect example. The sponge was held on one of these sticks. The channel in front, here, was filled with running water. The soldiers wet the sponges in the water, inserted them through the slot in the wall between their legs, and cleaned themselves, then washed the sponge again in the channel. Simple, effective and hygienic. And if we can get the water to run again, we'll have a working, permanent latrine. Should we, of course, decide to stay here."