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

"Yes, Merlyn. I do." He nodded his head with conviction, his great, golden eyes wide and solemn. "But I would at least like my friends to learn the fighting sticks."

I laughed, a short bark. "Then you'll have to teach them, because none of us who are already teaching you have the time. Are you prepared to do that? D'you think you are capable of doing it?"

He looked at me calmly, his eyes level and filled with confidence. "Yes, I do, if you'll permit it."

I shrugged, smiling. "I wouldn't think of stopping you. I'll have Mark issue the staves you'll need. How many of your friends would like to learn now, today?"

"Seven." He did not even have to count.

"Fine. You'll have seven staves, tomorrow or the day after, depending on when Mark has time to turn them on his lathe. Now run away and let me back to work."

It took little longer than a week for me to become used to the sight of him and his three satellites drilling their less- privileged friends in the uses of the wooden staves the others had envied for so long. I thought at first it might be a passing thing—that all of them, including Arthur and his three trainers, would soon grow tired of the discipline required and the daily grind of practice in addition to their normal round of chores and tasks. But such was not the case, and I watched with ever-increasing admiration as the seven novices grew more and more proficient. Their numbers swelled to thirteen and then to seventeen, and all the time Arthur was indefatigable in his attention to them.

It occurs to me again now, as it has so many times in the years that have elapsed, that the stature young Arthur achieved was due as much to what lay inside him as it was to the external, dictatorial forces that shaped his behaviour. He was to meet many powerful men—kings and princes, chiefs and warlords—in the time that lay ahead of him, and he was to see and evaluate for himself an entire spectrum of examples of how and how not to mould men, train armies, conduct campaigns, make laws and govern peoples and territories. He carried within him, however, from his earliest boyhood, a natural sense of lightness and the fitness of certain things, allied with an innate regard for justice, as opposed to power and privilege, that set him above all others of his time and made ordinary men love him.

Time and again I witnessed it during his boyhood, as in the instinctive and immediate sharing of his four ponies with his three bosom friends—an offer made in ignorance of the fact that this had been precisely the intent of the gift- giver, Connor—and again in this matter of sharing his knowledge and his fighting skills with his less-privileged friends. The task involved great inconvenience and sacrifice of personal time and freedom for him, yet it would never have occurred to him not to do it. He saw it as a natural obligation, to be taken in stride and accomplished to the best of his abilities, and he would spend long, additional hours on balmy summer afternoons when he might have been fishing or riding, instructing any of the boys who were having difficulty in mastering the tricks they were learning. I watched quietly, as did Ded and the others, and took pride in his dedication and his apparent selflessness, but yet, for all my pride, I must admit it never occurred to me that I was watching the evolution of anything amazing.

I saw and admired the conscientious young man; I overlooked the future warrior, champion and king completely.

FIFTEEN

Very soon after the installation of the wooden horses, the slow-passing, idyllic days of the previous years-long interlude began to seem like an impossible dream. Time, once again, dictated a steady, marching beat. The harvest, which began less than a month after Arthur's first session with the new swords, introduced the new order with a slow and stately roll of drums. Everyone—our own people and the folk of Ravenglass—worked together to a clearly defined plan.

Within the week, however, the steady rhythm of the drum beat gave way to a stuttering, irregular staccato as the weather broke without warning and a succession of heavy storms crashed down about us, each more savage than the last. The early storms of the first few days were greeted philosophically, but as their frequency and intensity grew greater, every other task in Ravenglass was abandoned so that every able-bodied person could work in the fields to salvage the crop before it was utterly ruined. Nursing mothers carried their babies swaddled on their backs as they wrestled with stooks or flailed the grain on the thrashing floors, and old people of both sexes, many of whom had done no hard labour for years, worked as crews on the wagons and grain sleds or spent their time tending the horses and oxen, without whose strength the grain could not have been transported. The weather worsened steadily, bringing torrential rains and high winds every day for almost three weeks, so that eventually we had to abandon almost a full quarter of what should have been a prime harvest to rot where it lay, utterly waterlogged and ruined.

Harvest time also brought a brief visit from Connor, who, accompanied by little Feargus, had sought shelter from the terrible storms at sea. He brought tidings to accompany the bleak outlook that this ugly month had spawned. War had broken out again in Eire, and the pagan, north-western tribes called the Children of Gar were now in possession of the major part of Athol's former kingdom on the east coast. They had not yet taken all of it, Connor reported, but that was due only to the fact that one tiny portion on the coast itself was defended by a rear guard garrison of warriors, the last of Athol's clan to remain in Eire.

The women, children and old people had now all been successfully transported to the clan's new territories in the islands off the coast of Caledonia. The ferocious, last-ditch campaign was being fought only because the remaining defenders literally had their backs to the sea and nowhere to go. They were to have been evacuated as quickly as vessels could be brought in to transport them, but the logistics involved were intricate. Surrounded and heavily outnumbered as they were, the Scots had to stand fast. Even with galleys available to them, none could simply sail away, abandoning their less-fortunate comrades, so no withdrawal was possible until sufficient galleys had been assembled to take the entire army off in one night.

That assembly had been close to complete when Connor and Feargus had sailed, a few weeks previously, carrying the last cargo of young cattle and livestock across to Liam Twistback in the south, and by this time, Connor was confident, the operation should have been completed and the race of Scots should have been completely removed from Eire, which they had already ceased to think of as home. In consequence, he and his men were now travelling directly to the north, where Connor would henceforth base his fleet with his brother Brander's, in his clan's new territories.

The storms abated, eventually, and fine weather returned. Connor set sail for the northern isles, and within days of his departure the autumn column arrived by road from Camulod, under the command of three of our old friends, Benedict, Philip and Falvo, all of whom had travelled with us to Eire a decade earlier. They, too, had taken the brunt of the weather gods' displeasure, and their troops presented a spectacle very different from all those that had come before. No glorious panoply here; these soldiers had been on the open road for almost a month, sleeping in one- man legionaries' tents of leather the entire time. Many of them were practically unfit for duty, suffering from chronic exposure to malignant conditions and rife with chills, aches, pains, congestion, fevers and ulcerated abrasions caused by the chafing of cold, wet armour.