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

"I'm stretching the muscles of my arms—these ones." He squeezed the massive muscles at the back of his right upper arm with his left hand. 'They're stiff and very sore. So are my shoulders and my back muscles—my belly, too, and even my thighs. It's all this felling of trees that does it, swinging an axe from dawn till dusk every day for the past three weeks. Chopping down a healthy oak is like to chopping through a boulder, according to Longinus. He says both will destroy the sharpest axe's edge and bruise any man's muscles, and I believe him." He stopped, turned slightly to brace his left hand against the wall at his back, then raised his right foot, patching it in his right hand and swinging it up behind him so that the long, divided muscles in his thigh sprang into tension. "Crassus, a Roman- trained masseur in the baths at Ravenglass, taught me this technique of stretching aching muscles once they are warm. It's unpleasant at first, but it eases them, relieves the painfulness and stops them from cramping. I've been doing it for months, ever since we arrived here, and it is effective. And it grows easier, too, with repetition."

I was looking at him as he spoke, noticing for the first time the perfect shapeliness of the clean-lined, sharp- etched muscles rippling beneath his skin. He was magnificently made and in the very prime of his young, glowing manhood, smaller than me by almost one third my weight, I guessed, but perfectly proportioned for his size. I glanced down at my own heavily muscled body, seeing the solid thickness of my thighs and calves and my flat belly, innocent of fat, yet lacking the clean, clear muscular delineation that was so striking in young Mark.

"I don't remember you as being quite so—muscular," I said.

He had finished stretching his thighs and was now bent forward, stiff-kneed, his palms flat on the floor.. He straightened up easily and grinned at me. "I wasn't—never have been, until I came here and started swinging an axe for hours every day. There, that's all. I'm finished now. A cold plunge and a brisk towelling, and I'll be a new man. You should try it, Cay—felling trees, I mean, I think you would enjoy what it will do for you"

He picked up a towel from the bench and wrapped it around his waist before he left, and I stretched out again, settling my own folded towel beneath my head and frowning thoughtfully as the first stinging trickles of sweat broke out at my hairline and across my belly. I had grown lax with myself lately, I knew, neglecting my soldier's regimen over the course of the past winter. I would begin the following day, I decided, and spend at least a part of each morning henceforth swinging an axe against solid oak.

No one else came in to mar my solitude. I bathed at leisure, then shrugged naked into my tunic, pulled my sandals over my bare feet, and made my way to my quarters, carrying the remainder of my clothing beneath my arm, bundled into the cuirass I carried like a basket. I was anticipating a pleasurable change into fresh, clean-smelling clothes, but all thought of such things disappeared when I found the woman Tressa in my quarters. She had evidently thrown wide the shutters to air my rooms, and seeing that immediately, I also saw beyond them to where she was working in the shadowed interior with her back to me, wielding a broom.

As soon as I set eyes on ho-, without pause for thought or any kind of consideration, I spun on my heel and walked hurriedly away, afraid that she might turn and see me there. Even as I did so I was cursing myself for my cowardice, instantly angered at myself for thus cravenly fleeing the sight of a harmless young woman. It would not be accurate simply to say I was surprised and dismayed to find her there in my quarters, although I was—I was actually appalled, and I found the strength of my reaction startling enough to make me question it. When I did, I found conflicting things, strangely hidden deep inside myself, that did not please me greatly. There was no denying that some part of me had hoped to find her there; another part of me, however, a disconcertingly reproving part, had disdained the idea; and yet another large and unsuspecting part of me* the outward-facing part, appeared to me, upon examination, to have been completely unaware of any thought of her.

That latter "truth" was an outright lie, of course, and the fact that it was a lie to myself made it the more annoying. Tressa and her alluring charms, her dimpled smile, her high, proud breasts, lithe waist and swelling thighs, had seldom been out of my thoughts since the night of the storm, when I had watched her so studiously during dinner. Confronting and accepting that, at least, enabled me now to look more closely at the second part of how I felt: the disapproving censure of some other, more carefully concealed part of me. Whence had that sprung, and why so virulently?

Thinking these thoughts, I realized that I was striding along the main street of the fort like a man with a mission, and I forced myself to slow my pace until I was ambling, almost dawdling. Several people passed me, nodding silently in greeting, before I came to the rear gate and walked through to pause on the brink of the chasm where I had hovered a short time before, my arms spread like an eagle on the wind. I found a flat-topped stone outcrop, cushioned with moss, and seated myself where I could look down into the valley beneath and let my thoughts take me where they would.

This ability of mine to take myself to task and thus identify the motives that had prompted me towards a certain course of action was one that I had cultivated over long years of assiduous self-examination. I had begun questioning myself and all my motives in response to a withering criticism from my cousin Uther, who had accused me of being far too smug and all too often self-righteous, judgmental and priggish. Determined, with the arrogance of youth, to change my behaviour from that time forward, I had taught myself to question and examine myself mercilessly, coming eventually to know myself too well ever to gull myself for any length of time.

Now I brought this ability to bear upon the matter of this woman, Tressa, and upon my own very real reaction to her. I stripped myself ruthlessly of false denials and pretenses, and the last scales fell from my eyes so that I accepted what I saw, incontrovertibly, to be true: I found the woman unequivocally attractive, and was resolved to yield to the inevitable and act upon the attraction. I was left, however, with an inner conflict on the matter of celibacy, over which I had spent so many agonizing hours in die past few years. Something deep within me, some niggling voice of conscience, was displeased over that abandonment of what had seemed a glowing ideal. Now, treating the discomfort like some inedible remnant from an otherwise delicious stew, I sat there atop the cliff, beneath the high, stone walls of Mediobogdum, and chewed on it, biting and grinding at the gristly elements of my concern until nothing remained but indigestible fragments that I spat out, one by one.

My desire for celibacy—utterly genuine and heartfelt—had sprung from several sources, each of them entirely comprehensible, if not exactly laudable or logical. My lust for Shelagh was a burden I had carried for years, never satisfied and never justifiable, since it involved perfidy and betrayal to my closest friend. My commitment to chastity on that account had been flawless; celibacy, I hoped, would eventually extend that physical chastity to my unconscious thoughts. My guilt and conflict over my memories—and my two-year loss of memory—of my dead wife, while inexplicable, were nonetheless very real, and some deep- hidden part of me had sought a resolution there in celibacy, too, although I found myself incapable of defining or even delineating why I should be feeling any guilt. And then, apart from Shelagh, the only other woman to whom I had felt an attraction, the lovely Ludmilla, had loved and wed my brother Ambrose. I had no guilt there, and no lustful longings, for which I was intensely grateful. Ludmilla was my sister now, and I thought of her as such, with a fraternal love. And yet, I knew, she, too, had played a role in my attraction to the celibate state: I had dared to begin loving her and had lost her before my feelings had a chance to grow. Celibacy would have removed such a threat forever from my future;