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

She was staring at me, great tears trembling on her lashes. "What?" she asked, her voice faltering.

"Will you come with me, to Camulod?"

"You'd want me there, among all those grand people?"

I laughed then. "Want you? Are you mad? And what's this nonsense about grand people? The place they live in is grand, I'll swear to that, but they are all very ordinary- Well, quite extraordinary, some of them ... But there's no reason for you to have any fears on that account. You're more than equal to any of them. Of course I want you there, beside me as my wife, mistress or concubine. As any one of those, yes, I want you, although I hope you'll be there as my wife and remain my mistress and my wanton concubine."

She frowned again, her eyes filling up with some thought I could not decipher.

"What's this about being your wife? Why would you say such a thing? Years you've known me now, and ne'er a word about being wife or husband has passed between us. No need for such a thing with us, I believed, as you did, too."

"Aye," I agreed, shrugging my shoulders. "But that's changed now—" In truth, it had changed but that moment, with the sudden, flaring fear that she might not come with me. My former vow never to wed had been reviewed in that flash of time and rejected as foolish.

"How, changed? And why so quickly?" Her eyes were flashing sparks. "Is what we have not good enough for Camulod? Will all your mighty friends be shocked to find you living with a common woman who is not your wife?"

"Gods, will you listen to the woman? Tressa! That's not what I meant at all! I meant only that I have grown to love you too dearly to wish to continue without being your husband. If I cannot have you with me, then, God protect me, I have no wish for Camulod. I want you there as my true friend and companion, guide, confidante and counsellor. Yes, again, to all of those. But as a female intimate who lies with me and then goes home to sleep alone, no, that I will abjure from this time forth." I reached out and gathered her into my arms, feeling the uncertainty with which she let herself be pulled. "There's a place already prepared for you in Camulod, my love," I whispered into her hair. "A place filled with light and love and airiness in which you will spread your wings and glow like the most precious-coloured butterfly. A place of honour, in the house of my Great-uncle Varrus and my Great-aunt Luceiia, and it entails being my openly professed lover and my spouse and my true friend. Will you take it?"

She leaned back in the crook of my elbow for long moments, looking up at me with tears trembling on her lashes, and then her arm swept up and her hand cupped the back of my neck and she drew me down to her mouth, and then, for a long spell, there was nothing that I need to write about or that any other needs to know.

I met with all our folk the following day and told them of my thoughts and my decision, taking great pains to let them know that I considered none of them to be bound by my wishes. They had accompanied me from the south long years before and since then had created a new home here on this harsh mountain plateau, forging friendships and alliances with Derek's folk in the town beneath and with those of Derek's folk who had come up to live with us in Mediobogdum. Any who wished to remain behind when we left for Camulod, come spring, would do so with my fullest blessing and support, and any of the people there from Ravenglass who wished to come to Camulod would be equally welcome.

When I had finished speaking there was a long silence, broken finally by a loud and prolonged belch from Dedalus. As the laughter died away, he said, "Well, having rid ourselves of that foul air, we had best apply ourselves to bethinking what we have to take with us when we leave. Winter will soon be down about our ears, and when it's gone we'll be too close to leaving to have time to spend rooting around for things we've missed. My proposal is, we draw an inventory from the stores, tally up everything we own and have, and decide then what we must leave behind. Derek's folk will be glad to have anything we choose not to take, and that could amount to many wagon-loads of goods. Who are our scribes and clerks? Let them go first to work, and then the rest of us will improve on what they have to say.

"But first, Cay, if you're sure you want to leave in the new year, you ought to send word in advance to Camulod, now, before the first snowfall. Otherwise Ambrose will know nothing and will send out the relief column to come up here. We might miss them on the way, if they're patrolling."

And so the work began. Within the week a mounted party of ten men went spurring south to Camulod, bearing a letter from me to my brother, explaining what was in my mind and telling him that we would be beneath the walls of Camulod within a month of the last snow's disappearance from our northern hills. Systematically, we set about dismantling the home we had created for ourselves in Mediobogdum. Two hundred years it had sat empty ere we came, and after we had gone it might be yet two hundred more before another came to live in it.

Tress began to pack up all the objects that surrounded our life together, secure in knowing that we would be travelling side by side and that she need have no fear of being abandoned. Nothing was actually moved away from where it would normally be found, but I began to note that every article, every utensil, every stick and piece of furniture was marked with a twist of coloured yarn. I said nothing, content to leave the marshalling to her, but I found it interesting to compare the various items that were marked with the same colours. I felt sure there must be logic and reason behind the patterning, but it escaped me utterly.

Arthur found me, one dull and cloudy afternoon not long after that, engrossed, for the first time in years, in a meticulous inspection of the contents of the larger of the two wooden, iron-bound chests that had belonged to Caspar and Memnon, the long-dead warlocks who had brought about my father's death and plunged us into the first battles of our war with Gulrhys Lot of Cornwall. I had kept the heavy, solidly constructed boxes close to me, always locked, ever since they had first come into my possession, years before the boy was born.

Always I had told myself that I would learn the secrets of their tightly wrapped and carefully preserved contents, and in the early days of owning them I had, in fact, tested many of them and formed some hazy notions of the uses for which several might have been intended. As far as I had been able to discern, however, every single item contained in those chests had but one purpose: the infliction of death by means unknown and unconscionable to the soldier warrior. The forms of death within these two receptacles, meticulously ordered in nested trays and laid out in some bewildering symmetry of malevolence, represented an abundance, an entire spectrum of chaos that lay far beyond the intent or understanding of ordinary, sometimes violent men.

Each of the two chests contained several layers of trays, varying in depth, but each carefully fitted as a cover for the one directly beneath it, and all of them equipped with long, looping thong handles to permit their removal. As far as I could see, all of the evil deaths of political assassination, of sorcery, of necromancy and of ruin sown among mankind for the sheer pleasure of creating terror and chaos were represented in this unique collection. There was nothing in either chest, that I could find, that embodied anything other than grief and pain and agony and despair. And so I had soon abandoned any study of them.

Not daring to accept the risk of having them fall into other hands, I was nonetheless unable to destroy them. I had not yet explored them fully; indeed, I had not even looked at all the contents of the second, smaller, chest. My better judgment told me there was no such thing as good in either of them, but until I knew that to be absolutely true, I would remain incapable of simply destroying them.