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

Within the hour, we had assembled the remainder of our initial group, including Donuil and Shelagh, and made our way outside the fort to sit informally in a casual grouping at the top of the chasm that guarded our rear, and there Ambrose told us all the details of his journey from the south. Arthur, of course, was there with his three bosom friends, Bedwyr, Gwin and Ghilleadh, the four of them perched, still as stone pillars, fearful that they might be dismissed. Everyone ignored them, and they eventually settled down to listen.

My brother brought surprising but welcome tidings. The towns he had passed through in his journey, having lain abandoned and neglected for years, were now being inhabited again—not in any highly organized fashion, he reported, but there were definite signs of revitalization. Glevum and Aquae Sulis, in particular, he said, each had populations now of several hundred people, although the new citizens, rather than living in the indefensible Roman ruins, preferred to dwell on the outskirts of the towns, finding security in rapid access to the safety of the deep forest in case of attack. The bridge outside Glevum, over the Severn River, had been repaired and reinforced and was once more, as it had always been, a natural gathering point for people from north and south of the river wishing to trade. Elsewhere, too, he told us, along the great Roman road the people were now calling the Foss Way, because of the wide ditches or fossae that lined it on both sides, small centres were springing up where natural routes crossed the high road. People were organizing themselves again in small communities, looking to their own defences, planting crops and even clearing new ground in many places, because that section of the land, at least, was relatively peaceful and unplagued by war. No Saxon hordes had penetrated this far north and west, to date, and raids from Eire were now few and far between. I had little doubt, on hearing that, that thanks were due there to our alliance with Athol's Scots, and to the damage done to the Sons of Condran in the past year.

Ambrose and his troopers had been welcomed everywhere, once the realization had spread ahead of them— magically, it seemed—that they were not intent on pillage and raiding. The sight of strongly armed and disciplined warriors who posed no threat, and their promise to return that way again regularly in the future, had put new heart into people all along the great road, which, he informed us in response to a question from Dedalus, was surprisingly in superb condition, still almost free of weeds and erosion. I smiled at Ded when he asked his question, knowing he was remembering our comrade Benedict and his prediction, on returning from Eire a decade earlier, about trees destroying die roads in Britain, given time. Ambrose went on to talk of the force he had brought with him: three squadrons of cavalry, each forty strong, and a full Roman maniple of infantry consisting of ten twelve-man squads.

Ambrose turned to me directly, saying he had thought to leave four squads of infantry with us, in addition to the squadron of cavalry we had discussed. Could we feed such numbers? I looked to Derek, silently inviting him to speak, since his would ultimately be the task of feeding them. We had no fields of crops, up here on our plateau, and all our food, save wild meat and freshwater fish, was grown by Derek's folk and traded to us in return for our help in their fields and in the forest, plus our commitment to assist them should the need arise to defend their town. Derek thought for several moments and then shrugged, smiling slightly. Forty-eight trained warriors and their officers, he admitted, might be an asset worth making the occasional sacrifice to keep and feed.

Ambrose smiled and nodded. Our new garrison would remain with us, he said, for five months, at the end of which they would be relieved by an incoming complement of troops, and this would go on, twice each year, for as long as we had need of such strength.

From these, Ambrose broadened his discourse to include such tidings as be had from other places. Cornwall was quiet and apparently mending itself, he said, with no news of war or trouble coming out of there. Cambria, too, was at peace, with Dergyll Ap Griffyd's rule continuing in strength and amity. But word had come out of the north, brought by Connor's ships, of an army being assembled in the far north-east, beyond the ancient Wall, in die lands of a king called Crandal, of whom I had never heard. He intended to raid southward into Northumbria, which would bring his forces into conflict with Vortigern and his Danish mercenaries. None of us hearing Ambrose doubted that the invaders would be stopped in Northumbria. Hengist's Danes would keep them occupied and make them wish they had remained in their northern lands. No news had come to Camulod of Vortigern or Hengist, so Ambrose presumed they both were flourishing. Otherwise, he believed young Horsa's warriors, free of his father Hengist's iron rule, would have come spilling south and west.

With such a willing audience hanging on his every utterance, Ambrose could easily have talked for far longer than he did, I suspect, but he had other matters to concern him and so had to take his leave of his listeners as the afternoon was wearing on towards twilight. His troops were new here, he pointed out, unused to the fort and their new quarters, and he owed it to them to make sure that they were disposed as well as they could be, and that the arrangements were well in hand to feed them all their first meal here in Mediobogdum. As he strode off, leaving the rest of us to wonder at the tidings he had brought to us, Arthur and the other three lads trotted at his heels like well- trained dogs.

Shortly after that, I found my own reasons for leaving and made my way to my quarters,- where I sat in the gathering darkness for some time, mulling over everything I had heard that day.

The foremost thing on my mind as I sat there was the matter of the new practice swords. The how and why of using them had plagued me for some time, although I had then considered only having one, plus Excalibur itself. Ostensibly, Arthur would use the new weapon to learn the skills he would require to -use Excalibur to best effect. However, the matter was more thorny than that, and the difficulty lay in the danger of employing any such weapon without accidental harm to the user, be he novice or expert. A weapon that could cut through iron, as these could, would make short work of any flesh and bone that came against its edge, so I must make sure, from the outset of our planning, that I became familiar with the tricks and techniques and tendencies inherent in these blades long before young Arthur ever handled one of them.

As though they were fresh written in my mind, I recalled the words with which Publius Varrus had described the damage to his forearm from the very first of the long- bladed swords Equus had made. Equus and he had discovered immediately that the new, long blades, when used against each other, behaved as no blades ever had behaved before, their tempered-metal tongues rebounding and leaping from each other with a hungry power fed to new extremes by the length of the arc of their swing. And those swords, I knew, had been mere tempered iron, lacking the magical essence—the mysterious skystone metal—that gave Excalibur its fearsome strength and edges. Excalibur's cross-guard would, I knew, discount some of that danger, stopping a glancing, sliding blow to the forearm, but I could not rely on that alone to safeguard the boy.

Now that we were to have two replicas, however, the way became simpler, and I decided to include Dedalus, Rufio and Donuil in the exploratory training program with the new weapons. Among the four of us, we would be able to determine the properties of the new blades and the expectations their users should and should not have of them. The boys, in the meantime, could be set to work learning the heft and mastery of the new wooden training staves, strengthening their young limbs to hard usage as they did so. Then, as we four adults devised the ways and means of best using the new, keen blades in combat, we would pass on those knacks to the boys, teaching them variations in the ways they swung their staves, so they would learn to use the new, long swords before they ever knew the swords existed. I relaxed then, having formulated that design, feeling in my heart that it was right.