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

"I see ... " I faced him squarely, attempting to mask my unease. "Have you really dreamed of this enormous fleet, Ambrose?"

He grinned at me and reached to slap my shoulder. "No, not as you mean it. Not in die way you dream, Brother—no magical occurrences or spectral loomings. No, I'm simply attempting to see what might, could, lie ahead ... And speaking of that, hard labour lies immediately ahead. Where are these carpenters and charcoal-burners?"

"Behind us, about a mile from here" I pulled Germanicus up into a rearing, two-legged turn. It was a move we had practised down through the years and one we both enjoyed, I purely for the skill it demanded and displayed and for die awe it inspired in observers. I noticed Ambrose now sniffing the fresh smell of green wood- smoke borne on a stray eddy of wind. "If we follow our noses, we'll ride them down," I said, and I kicked my horse forward.

It took us the better part of half an hour to cross the distance from the fort's gate to the steep hillside clearing where our men were labouring, and as we went we talked of many things, not least of which was the evident and . startling intellect of the boy who was our charge. I mentioned again to Ambrose my recently born fear that the very place I had chosen for his tutoring—this lonely, isolated fort with its tiny and embryonic society—would prove to be inadequate for the task I had set myself. This sanctuary we had found—safe, it appeared, from the eyes and weapons of potential assassins of all stripes—was yet no place in which to train a future king. This conviction I had come to accept only with the greatest reluctance. That had not been my first opinion, when I was flushed with the challenge of escaping danger and establishing ourselves in safety in the ancient fort. Only as the weeks stretched into months had I come to see how small our outpost was,

here on the edge of nothingness, and how minuscule a template it provided for any parallel study of building and running a kingdom. The boy would have to come to know the larger world of men.

Ambrose listened closely to all I had to say, and when I had finished he reined in his horse and kicked one foot free of the stirrup, hooking his knee over the front of his saddle as he turned to peer at me.

"You think this place is too isolated for the task you've set yourself? And yet you brought him here precisely because of that, and you have effectively achieved a complete disappearance, from Camulod, from your previous life and from all danger to the boy."

"Damnation, I know that, Ambrose, and for months I believed that I had done the right thing. But as I watch the boy shoot upward, growing like a young tree, I grow increasingly afraid that too much of the time he spends here will be time wasted when he could be learning other things, necessary things, elsewhere, in similar safety."

"How so? What could he learn about better elsewhere that he cannot learn here?"

"Life, and the living of it among men of all kinds, venal and noble!" I realized how that sounded and hurried on to negate the insult implied to my friends. "Our people here are good and fine, noble and gracious enough, God knows, and among Derek's Celts the lad will come to no harm. But he is not a normal boy, and that is the crux of all my concerns. We are not raising Arthur Pendragon to be a normal man, Ambrose. Our purpose is to breed a warrior and an enlightened leader. It sounds grandiose and overstated, phrased thus baldly, but it is, nonetheless, the truth.

If the lad is to rule, in Camulod or Cambria or Cornwall, he must learn to be a king—a warrior and a leader, greater than a Vortigern and free of such errors as Vortigern has made—and I believe he will not learn such things stuck here in isolation. To learn, he needs examples—of the weaknesses of men as much as of their strengths—and to find those he must look abroad, in the world of men, where ambition and greed and ruthlessness and petty, thieving treachery are daily things, exposed and shown for what they are by nobility and honour and integrity. Only by seeing such things will he learn how to deal with them and rise above them. I learned them by riding on patrols with Uther, keeping the peace in Camulod and dealing with the people beyond our domain. You learned them by riding to war with your guardian uncle, in Lindum, and with Vortigern, keeping the peace and guarding your king's affairs. Arthur may learn the theories behind such things up here, but he will lack the practical aspect of training. We have no venal traitors in our little group—no monsters like Lot of Cornwall or the demented, deformed Carthac. We lack even a Peter Ironhair."

"I think you are overwrought, Cay." The level tone of Ambrose's voice brought home to me the stridency that had been present in my own. "I can see clearly why you are so concerned. This is a lonely life you lead, up here, and I have no doubt its shortcomings loom more starkly in the winter months, but I think you are worrying unnecessarily. Arthur will come home eventually to Camulod, as planned, when he and his friends are old enough to ride with our troopers. That has already been discussed and agreed upon, and should take place within the next three or four years—perhaps even sooner if the lad continues to shoot up the way he's going. In the meantime, our concern must be to keep him safe, to provide him with a stable, wholesome home, and to teach him all he is capable of learning. Although after what he taught us both a few nights ago, it might be more accurate to say we should teach him all that we are capable of teaching, for I suspect he'll learn much more than that, eventually.

"Here in these mountains you can teach him to fight like a warrior, on horseback and on foot, and to live like a man, in self-sufficiency. You can teach him the lessons learned and taught to you by those who learned them years before young Arthur's father saw the light of day. You can give him enlightenment: the power to read and write, both of them sadly lacking in this land today. The people with whom you have surrounded him are the best teachers he could have, and the boy is highly gifted. He will waste nothing, learning from such as these. So let him learn from them, but expose him to other sources, too.

"Think about taking him away, to Gaul, to spend some time with your friend Bishop Germanus, and let him see how others live in other climes. Maybe take him to Eire, where there are no roads, and to the northern islands his grandfather holds, and let him see how primitive life is in such remote and hostile places. You could take him abroad in Britain, too ... not to Cambria or to Cornwall, or even to Camulod, yet. But across the brow of the country, following the Roman roads you spoke of, to Vortigern for a certainty, I should think, providing the king's peace lasts there, in the north-east. Why not? The boy has no enemies there, nor do you, and Vortigern is kindly disposed to you, as is Hengist. Remember, you are no longer Merlyn of Camulod; you'll travel as a common traveller, in company with others and a boy or two, perhaps even four. You'll both be better for it. His Uncle Connor would be happy to escort you anywhere by sea, even to Gaul, I would imagine."

Listening, I heard the truth and wisdom of my brother's counsel, and sat straighter in my saddle, the cares caused by my thoughts on this over the past months falling away like leaves in autumn. I nodded my thanks wordlessly, and he returned my nod and kicked his horse forward again, towards the woods that loomed a short distance ahead. From then on, we rode in silence, appreciating the beauty of the day and little considering how the Fates themselves would dictate the tempo of Arthur's progress and education.

Not everyone in the hillside forest clearing to which we eventually came was sawing wood. Long before we reached the spot, we could hear the rapid and unmistakable sound of practice swords hammering at each other with the solid, ringing, concussive authority that bespoke a number of mature men belabouring each other mightily. It soon became clear, however, that others were working. Now we could hear the hollow-sounding thock of hard- swung axes and, farther off, the asthmatic rasping of saw blades chewing at green wood.