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

"Market day," Derek grunted, needlessly. "Come on." .

I stayed close to him as he picked his way among the crowds, nodding from time to time and sometimes returning a spoken greeting to those who called him by name. Ahead of us on our left and towering above the intervening stalls, I saw the sandstone walls and arched roof of yet another Roman building. I caught his arm.

"What's that place over there?"

"The bathhouse. That's where we're going."

Moments later, I heard my own name shouted. Sean the navigator grinned at me from behind a baker's stall, where he stood clutching a steaming pasty. I waved to him then had to hasten to catch up with Derek, whose height alone had prevented me from losing sight of him among the press of bodies.

I now began to notice others of our crew among the crowd, but few of them saw me, and those who did ignored me, apart from an occasional cool nod. The Sons of Condran were there, too, I saw, but neither group paid the slightest attention to the other, and when I jostled one of Liam's men by accident, he passed me by with no more than a grunt and a surly look. From then on, I concentrated only on keeping Derek in sight.

TWO

The crowd thinned out as we approached the bathhouse, the densely packed stalls giving way to pens and larger, open spaces containing livestock: cattle, swine, goats, horses of the local mountain breed known as garrons and unkempt, brown-wooled sheep, as well as flocks of hens and geese and ducks and one gathering of regal swans, their wings evidently clipped to prevent them from flying.

"Over here." Derek made his way directly to a dreary- looking collection of flimsy buildings. The bathhouse's western and southern wings defined a bare, open, L-shaped space that sheltered a herd of shaggy garrons. A humpbacked little man with violently crossed eyes, working among the horses, saw me and came scuttling to meet me, scowling as he weaved between the bodies of the animals that prevented him from seeing my companion. As soon as he recognized Derek, however, he stopped, then turned about and disappeared again among the horses.

I glanced at the king. "Do many people react to you that way?"

He almost smiled. "That's Ulf. He never speaks."

"Never? Is he mute?"

Now he did smile. "Only when he's sober. He has a tongue like a pike's jaws when he decides to use it. Most of the time, thank the gods, he chooses to be silent." He said no more, turning away to look about him, and I began idly counting the horses, but I lost track of the milling bodies before I reached twenty.

"Are these all his? For sale?"

Derek grunted. "They're mine. He tends them for me." As he spoke, the little man re-emerged from the depths of the herd, leading two bridled garrons. He handed one set of reins to each of us—flat-braided ropes attached to simple head stalls with metal bits—and vanished silently again.

Derek led his horse to a nearby block of wood and used it to mount, swinging his leg easily over the horse's back from the top of the block. I followed his example. It had been too many years since I had vaulted to the bare back of a horse, and I had no wish to make the attempt here and fail. I dug my heels in gently and the animal beneath me twitched his ears, plainly wondering if the stranger on his back could be ignored or should be heeded. I reined him sharply, pulling his head down as I kicked again, letting him feel the strength of my legs, and he moved forward contentedly, leaping ahead to catch up with his companion.

At one point, as we rode past a long, low building almost on the farthest edge of the town, I saw something that caught my attention. A man had suddenly stopped moving, on the point of entering the building. I looked directly at him but saw only a dirty, yellow tunic and a full beard before he pushed the door open and went in. Nevertheless, I knew he had been staring at me, not at Derek.

'That place over there on our left, what is it?"

Derek glanced where I was pointing. "An alehouse."

"You mean a tavern?"

"That's what I mean."

Moments later we had passed beyond the limits of the town and were riding among dense trees that grew right to the edges of the road on either side. Derek kicked his garron to a canter and mine stayed with him without urging. Soon we passed out of the trees into an area of open fields through which the road ran arrow straight. The few buildings I could see on either side were evidently storage sheds and shelters, and the borders between individual fields were difficult to define, consisting mainly of slightly differing patterns of growth. In the continuing silence from my companion I looked about me curiously.

The valley through which we now rode was perhaps a mile in width at this place, and had obviously been reclaimed over a span of ages from the forest that wooded the steep hillsides to left and right. Ahead of us, on either side, the hills rose higher as they marched inland, until the highest I could see, in the far distance, were crowned with crags and rearing cliffs, some of them shrouded in what was either cloud or snow.

"How far does the valley extend, Derek?"

He glanced at me, frowning slightly at my interruption of his thoughts. "About six miles. To the edge of the mere."

"The mere? What mere is that?" I asked from pure contrariness.

"The mere. It has no name. It's just a mere like any other."

"Six miles. And the farmland extends all that way?"

"No, only as far as the soil permits. The land rises and the rock breaks through about four miles from here."

We had reached a division in the fields on our left.

Ripening grain gave way abruptly to a crop of coarse- leafed plants I recognized as being some form of kale. Derek swung his mount off the road, leading us along a narrow, well-beaten path between the two crops, heading directly for the treed hillside about half a mile distant.

"Where are you taking me?"

"To a place where I can think and we can talk."

We rode thereafter in silence broken only by the plodding of hooves and the song of birds, until the narrow track reached the end of the field at the entrance to a vee-shaped notch in what I had assumed, from the moment I first saw it in the distance, to be a chest-high wall of stone running the entire length of the valley. As we approached, however, it became apparent that what we were facing now was not so much a wall as an accretion—I can think of no other word—of stones, some of them barely larger than pebbles, others that looked large enough to defy the powers of a single man to move them. All of them had been piled haphazardly to form a barrier I now realized was no less than twenty paces thick. As I stared, my mind numbed by the enormity of this rock pile, Derek's horse entered the passage that pierced the middle of the heap, and mine ambled contentedly after him.

"Where did all these come from?"

"From the ground, the fields." Derek drew rein and hitched himself around to look back at me. "We have a local jest that we grow more, and bigger, stones than we do crops. They work their way up to the surface every winter. Our people spend months each year clearing them out and dragging them over here, and the next year there's a brand new crop of them. It never ends. It's been going on since before the Romans came."

I looked at the stones piled on my right, some of which reached higher than my head. "I can see that, but that's more than four hundred years!"

"Far more. Our people were farming here a long time before that."

"Is it the same on the other side of the valley?"

"It's the same everywhere."

"I don't understand—you said you had no stone for building."

Derek threw me a scornful look. "I said no good stone. I meant sandstone, stone that can be quarried, cut and dressed. Most of what you see here is useless for building. It's too small, too loose, too brittle and too much trouble. Hurry."