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

I stepped even closer to the edge, aware of my own foolishness yet seemingly powerless to resist the urge to look down at the cliff face itself. The pressure of the wind increased, becoming a solid, living thing, so that I had to force myself forward into it, leaning out against its power while listening to my mind screaming at me to step back and stop being a fool. It was a strange sensation, hanging there, leaning my weight into that wind for what seemed a long, long time, knowing that if it died without warning I would, too, falling out into the space that taunted me. For long heartbeats I felt convinced that by merely spreading my arms and diving outward I would find the power of flight and might swoop like a bird, in safety, down to the trees beneath. I even raised my arms, holding them out before me and feeling the pressure of the air beneath them filling the folds of my cloak and lifting it to flap like wings about me, before I blinked and stepped back, dropping my hands to my sides and feeling my cloak subside and the hair settle down on my head again as the direct flow of air from beneath was interrupted by the edge of the cliff. As I stepped back, the wind died, without warning, as I had feared it might mere moments earlier. For a count of four heartbeats the air was utterly still and I shuddered with horror, clearly imagining my own body plunging downward into the abyss over which I had so recently been poised. Then the gale returned with a blustering, muffled roar, and I stepped away resolutely, turned my back on the valley and re-entered the fort, making my way straight to the stable where Germanicus was tethered.

Moments later, I left the fort again through the main, southern gate, waving to Lucanus, whom I had noticed walking the interior perimeter road dose against the wall. As I emerged from the gateway and kneed my mount along the approach to the main road, passing the bathhouse and cresting the rise that hid the fort itself from the roadway, I glanced upward to my left, to where the narrow ribbon of the road snaked its way up the final approach to the pass to the next valley, and my eye was arrested by a flash of white. Reining in my horse, I looked more carefully and saw that the whiteness was at least one of the piebald ponies belonging to the four boys, although there was no sign of the boys themselves. Curious, I swung Germanicus eastward when I reached the road and kneed him upward, towards the saddleback of the pass.

I knew the boys came up here often, particularly during the winter months, when they had spent their days sledding down from the heights. I myself had made no attempt to approach the crest of the pass since the first and only time I had been up there, late in the autumn, long before the first snowfall of the winter. I had forgotten how unimaginably steep the incline of the roadway was. As we ascended, Germanicus was forced to lean further and further into each mounting step, battling to force his weight and mine upward, his shod hooves scrabbling and sliding on the hard, slippery, cobbled surface of the roadway as he fought to negotiate each tightly twisting curve on the serpentine slope. I found myself imagining again the agony and grief of the legionaries and wagon drivers who must have sweated and racked themselves struggling to control heavy-laden wagons, drawn by teams of oxen and mules, on such an impossibly pitched surface, only to face even greater difficulties on the downward slope beyond the crest.

As I approached the summit, sheltered now from the buffeting of the wind by the sheer, towering cliffs of the mountainside on my left, I drew rein and dismounted, determined to walk the remainder of the way out of pity for my noble horse. The single pony that had attracted my attention was close by, his reins tethered, I could see, by a heavy stone, and I recognized him as Primus, Arthur's own mount. He looked as though he had been ridden hard, over muddy ground, for all four of his legs, his long tail and the underside of his belly were caked with mud. Of the animal's owner I had yet to see the smallest sign.

Now, however, my eyes were attracted by a suggestion of movement among the short grass on the rocky bank by the side of the road. Only when I took a step closer did I realize that I was looking at the scarcely visible, barely rippling movement of a thin, unbroken sheet of water that was flowing straight down from the last vestiges of snow still melting on the heights far above.

Intrigued, I moved closer still, stepping off the edge of the road into the shallow, pebble-filled ditch and leaning forward to brace my outstretched hand against the rock face, breaking the thin sheet of icy water so that it buckled and surged, shockingly cold against the warm skin of my hand and wrist as I bent forward to peer closely at the vegetation. With a tiny thrill of wonder, I discovered then that what I had thought to be grass was actually an astonishing mixture of delicate, intricately structured mosses of incredible complexity, and tiny, bulbous-leaved plants, many of them bearing minuscule flowers of white, yellow, blue and every colour of red, from pale pink to deep, blood crimson. All of these, in hundreds of thousands,, clung tenaciously to the very surface of the stone, rooted in an endless web of minute fissures in what had seemed a wall of solid rock. Between these fissures, beneath the flowing sheen of water, the stone was coated with lichens in a wondrous range of colours from pale yellows and greens, through ochres and umbers and purples and browns deepening all the way to black—a miniaturized vista of hues and textures the like of which I had never seen or imagined. I remained there, lost in the wonder of my discovery, losing all track of the passage of time, until I became aware, gradually at first and then with increasing urgency, of the loss of sensation in my chilled hand. Smiling foolishly then, I straightened up slowly and, chafing my hand dry with the lining of my cloak, found young Arthur Pendragon staring down at me from the cliff face above me and to my left.

"Merlyn, what are you doing? What are you looking for?"

I nodded a greeting. "Arthur. I came looking for you, first, because I saw your pony from below, but when you found me I was looking at the plants on the stone face, here, and the way the running water covers them. What have you been up to?"

"Nothing." He bent his knees and began making his way down towards me, balancing easily with one outstretched hand touching the stone face behind him.

I turned and climbed the short distance back to where Germanicus stood waiting for me. I gathered his reins and stood again for a spell, staring in wonder at the greenery that had assumed again, from this distance, the appearance of short, bright grasses. Germanicus whickered gently and butted my shoulder with his muzzle, and I turned lazily around to gaze back downward to where our fort lay beneath us, to all outward appearances devoid of life, its walls presenting an aspect of impregnability I knew they could not maintain in reality. There was a fire, as always, in the bathhouse, the smoke from the furnace chimney spilling lazily to pool in a freakishly sheltered pocket and billow there for a while like an errant cloud before being sucked upward at one end of the hollow, into the teeth of the wind, where it curled over the wall and scattered rapidly into nothing.

Arthur jumped down onto the edge of the road with a thump and came towards me, but only when he was almost within arm's reach did I see the swollen bruise on his right temple and the encrusted rims of blood that framed his nostrils. I had not noticed it before because I had been looking up at him from beneath, on the wrong side. Now it was evident that his right eye was blackening impressively, its upper lid swollen and sore looking. He saw me notice, and his face flushed with what I took for discomfort. I stepped closer to him and took his chin in my hand, tilting his head back and up.