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

I had noted the smile on my brother's face from the outset, and so had contributed nothing to the general storm of disapproval, preferring to wait and hear what he would say when it had blown itself out. Dedalus, too, I noticed, sat in silence, and it amazed me that none of the others seemed aware of that. His was the voice that should have roared above all the rest, and yet its silence went unheeded. Eventually, however, the noise subsided and the few individual voices that still muttered tailed self-consciously away into a lengthy silence that no one seemed inclined to break. I caught my brother's eye and leaned forward.

"Aren't you sorry you mentioned that?"

"No," he replied, his smile growing wider. "I expected it and I enjoyed it."

"Then you have a response?"

Ambrose looked about him. "Of course, and I'll give it gladly, although I may not be able to address every point that was raised here." He paused. "First, let me say that Lindinis, or Ilchester, whichever you prefer, is a vastly altered place from the desolate slum you knew. The ruins are all gone, leaving a wide, cleared space all around the fort. The walls stand high and strong, far higher than they were before, three earth-filled tiers of them, faced with new palisades of logs. Inside the walls, the houses are all rebuilt and full of people—the garrison and their families. We have new earthen walls reaching to new heights, new parapets and towers housing artillery, and a broad, deep, triple ditch surrounding all, crossed by three separate bridges that are raised and lowered from gate-towers by the garrison. The town is virtually impregnable today, even from the open road, and morale there is very high. In the space of a year, incredible as it might seem to you who knew it years ago, Ilchester has become a sought-after post." He stopped, and looked around from face to face.

"Now, why did we do it? Why did we go to such great lengths to redeem a lost town, thirty and more miles from our home base?"

Hector spoke up. "Overcrowding. It was bound to come to that."

"Precisely, Hector—overcrowding." Ambrose turned his gaze back on the others. "You were all there at home the year following the Great Winter. You know how hard we worked to build new quarters for the intake of soldiers we enlisted that year to fill the ranks left empty by the wars in Cornwall, and if you think upon it, you'll recall how much talk there was of reallocation of our arable lands for crops to feed them all. Years have passed since then, and each of them has seen a new intake of soldiers, because soldiers are our lifeblood.

"None of us can ever afford to forget the reason for Camulod's founding. It was survival! Survival in the face of catastrophe and invasion by aliens. That survival involves military readiness—not simply the will to fight but the strength to fight and win, and that strength is our garrison. The moment we allow our garrison to weaken in any way, we might as well lie down and die, because our survival will be at an end." Again he paused, letting his listeners agree to that before he hammered home his next point.

"But soldiers have to eat, my friends, and even though Camulod is blessed in being wondrously fertile, there are limits to what the land can produce. We were aware more than a year ago that we had begun to approach those limits, but that is when one of our councillors, Lucius Varo, put forward the suggestion in Council that we should reclaim the fields that lay fallow around the town of Ilchester.

'The idea seemed sound, if logistically difficult, and so a scouting expedition was dispatched to look into the matter. I commanded that expedition, and my report was enthusiastic, because I saw a double opportunity present itself: a new source of food, combined with an end to overcrowding. Besides that, I recognized that the reclamation and refurbishment of the old fort would give our soldiers something new to occupy them when they were not training for war—something useful, and something permanent in which they could take pride. I had obtained some documents, a year or two before that, detailing the construction of a highly sophisticated fort in Gaul, and I decided we should have a similar construction here in Britain. It took a year to build, with more than a thousand men labouring on it every day, but it was completed months ago, before the winter set in, and it is magnificent. Thomas Atribatus, the fourth generation of his name, commands the garrison, and Lucius Varo himself is installed as civil governor, representing the Council and responsible for the farming operations in the surrounding area. Our new castella is not made of stone, so it won't stand forever, but it will serve our needs for the next hundred years."

There was more discussion after that, but the fire had gone out of our objections in the light of Ambrose's clear and dispassionate comments.

I find it curious that I can recall instants like this, across the gulf of decades, with great clarity, and yet there are others that are lost forever in my mind. Letters arrived from Germanus in Gaul, and swords and weaponry arrived from Camulod; soldiers arrived and stayed, and were relieved and left; and life went tilting onward.

I revelled in the novelty of becoming a working member of a small, close-knit and happy community. I was a warrior first and foremost, nonetheless, and I never lost sight of that. I trained and drilled for several hours every day, with the boys and away from them, pitting myself against Dedalus, Rufio, Donuil and others daily as I had done throughout my life, keeping my muscles hard and supple and my military skills well honed.

I know now that I was completely at peace in those days, for only the second time in my life, savouring and loving die challenge of hard, daily work in the forest and the daily bliss of coming home at last to the warmth of Tressa's company. And as I luxuriated in the happiness of my new life, years slipped by inexorably and invisibly.

Thinking back on that time earlier today, I found myself smiling to remember that, Of all the people who might have recalled me to the realities of life and the passing years, it was Derek who shook me from my daze. It had been a blazing hot summer, and on that particular day, distracted by the heat, I had been unable to concentrate on any of the tasks I had assigned myself. Instead, I saddled up Germanicus and made my" way out of the fort and down into the valley towards Ravenglass itself. I had no particular purpose in mind at the time; I was simply being lazy and indulging myself.

Truth to tell, I was feeling rather neglected and sorry for myself, because Tress had no time for me, and my other close companions were all involved elsewhere. Tress was cloistered with Shelagh and three other women, hard at work indoors, adding the finishing touches to an ornate and quite magnificent robe on which they had been working, under Tressa's guidance, for many months. The garment was to be a gift for Salindra, the second, very young and hugely pregnant wife of Derek's eldest son. She was expected to give birth at any moment, and Tressa was concerned that after all the weeks and months of work that had gone into her endeavour, the birth might yet occur before the robe was finished. I had visited the stone tower room in which they were all slaving over the thing, apparently sewing by feel, rather than by sight, in the cool semi-darkness.

Lucanus had been absent for more than a week, on affairs of his own in Ravenglass, and I did not expect him back for at least several more days. He had recently become concerned over the scarcity of certain medicaments he prized highly, and had determined to spend time with the captains and crews of the various vessels that called into Ravenglass, in the hope that he might be able to enlist their support and find ways and means of replenishing his stores. Rufio, Donuil and Dedalus were down there, too, involved in other matters concerning stores and supplies, all of those far more mundane than Luke's. In the interests of education, they had taken the boys with them as supernumerary quartermasters. Consequently, alone and at loose ends, I made my way down from our plateau and through the forest towards the town and, I hoped, some convivial company.