Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

He looked surprised. "The very spot?"

"No, not exactly. I had left him ground-tethered. He is trained to stay where I leave him, but I had been gone for many hours. He's an intelligent beast and had wandered away from the shore to the nearest forage. He stayed there."

"Hmm. And the bow?"

"Where I left it, too, with my arrows. The very spot. It wasn't hungry."

He thrust the tip of his tongue behind his lower lip, digesting that without smiling.

"I have never seen such a large bow. Those others we found on the strand are as long, but differently made."

"Aye," I concurred. "It's different, unique, I think. It came from Africa, many years ago, long before I was born. It belonged to my great-uncle Varrus." I saw no point in adding that the others, the Pendragon longbows as they were becoming known, had been modelled upon my own, for length, at least, since the Pendragon had no means of fashioning the layered, double- arched complexity of the great bow's compound structure of wood, horn and sinew.

"Varrus?" Connor's eyebrow had ridden up on his forehead. "What kind of a name is that?"

"It's Roman. His full name was Gaius Publius Varrus."

"So your uncle was a Roman? And who else had a hand in the making of you? Romans were small, I'm told, and dark of skin. Your yellow hair and the height of you makes me doubt you're purely Roman . . ."

I said nothing in response to this and he considered my silence for long moments before turning away abruptly and jerking his hand in a gesture that meant I should accompany him. I rose and followed him, our path skirting the larger bonfire and plunging into the darkness again to where a glow, shrouded by the massed figures of many men, announced another, smaller fire that could not possibly afford warmth for the hushed throng that surrounded it.

The crowd parted at our approach, allowing us access to the small fire and the sight that had held them all so rapt. The woman we had brought with us knelt there, head down, her milk-swollen udders bare to the night and the eyes of all as she suckled the tiny, gluttonous starveling she held tenderly in her arms, and as I watched them, my throat swollen suddenly with a feeling close to grief, I saw the tears that fell from beneath her hair to land upon the child. Someone among the fierce Eirish warriors surrounding her moved forward and quietly placed a blanket over the woman's shoulders, smoothing it into place and draping it across her to cover the nursing baby, whose eyes were closed now in sleepy, well-fed bliss.

How long I stood there, I cannot recall, but presently I felt Connor's fingers on my arm, and I went back with him to his own fire where we seated ourselves again and he poured another cup of mead for each of us. No one came near us after that, and we sat without talking, he staring into the flames and I staring at him as we sipped at our cups.

We had not found his sister Ygraine on the shore. She and her slaughtered women, with the bodies of the birney's entire crew, had been swept out to sea by the incoming tide that had borne me away in the birney. The sole corpse we had found floating naked in the sea had been one of them, but a stranger to Connor. Where her clothes had gone I could not tell, but deprived of them her body had possessed nothing to signify rank or station. What we had found was merely a dead woman, drifting alone and bereft, as all corpses are, of any human dignity. Ashore, only the corpses of some of Uther's bowmen remained, lying where they had died in their last stand on the dunes above the high tide mark with several of those commanded by Derek of Ravenglass, the man who had killed my cousin Uther Pendragon and stripped him of his armour, donning it himself and thereby causing me to pursue him, mistaking him for Uther.

Connor had refused to believe his sister dead, in spite of my story and of the evidence scattered along the shoreline. That there had been a fight of some sort, he could see; that some women had been involved, and had been killed there, he was prepared to accept, having seen one of them. The death of his own sister, however, the Queen of this wild region of Cornwall, whom he had come to rescue and return to her father's hearth, he simply refused to accept without the evidence of his own senses. He had my own admission that I had never seen Ygraine before that encounter, and that, allied with the fact that the woman found floating in the sea was a stranger to him, cast doubt over the identity of the dead woman I had named Ygraine of Cornwall.

I could have convinced him otherwise, I knew beyond question, simply by telling him of my own wife, Deirdre, his is other sister, whom he had thought dead for more than a decade. For Deirdre of the Violet Eyes, as she had been known in childhood, had lived beyond the time of her supposed death, vanishing from Eire and travelling to Britain by unknown means, where, years later, we two had met and loved each other for the space of one short, wonderful year. I had known Ygraine the instant I set eyes upon her, for she could have been twin to my Deirdre, whom I had known as Cassandra. For some inchoate reason, however, one which I remained unable to define even to myself, I had said nothing of any of this. Something, some foreknowledge, some formless but potent caution, barred me from speaking these thoughts aloud. Three times I had been on the point of telling him, but on each occasion I had found myself robbed of speech. Bewildered, even slightly panicked by the premonition that seemed to force me to remain silent, each time I had swallowed hard and covered my confusion in silence, refusing to think about it thereafter. Now it had returned, unsought. Perhaps, I thought then, watching him, it had to do with the manner of the dreadful death that had come upon my wife. Deirdre had been murdered, pregnant with our child, while I was far from home on the affairs of Camulod, the colony established by my grandfather Caius Britannicus and his comrade and brother-in-law Publius Varrus.

Connor broke into my thoughts.

"I think I have decided what to do with you, Yellow Head."

I glanced at him, forcing myself to react casually, as though his comment were of minor import. "That's interesting," I heard myself say, and some interior part of me was surprised by the calmness of my own voice. "Do you intend to tell me about it?"

My restraint was rewarded with a bright, amused, slightly surprised grin. "Of course," he answered, the whiteness of his even teeth startling in the reflected light of the leaping flames. "And you can be assured you are the first to know of it."

"Well, my thanks for that, at least. It's pleasant for a man to know that his fate has not been common gossip before he learns of it." He returned his stare to the fire at that, disdaining, I thought, to respond to my ironic tone, and a brief silence fell, quickly dispelled by me. "How long must I wait?"

Connor pursed his lips and ejected a stream of spit into the fire. "My mouth tastes like the floor of a bear's cage," he grunted. "Have you ever seen a caged bear, Yellow Head?"

"Aye, several." My thoughts had leapt back in time to my boyhood and the books of Publius Varrus; to the description of the caged bear he had pitied and then forgotten immediately on the day he met the girl dressed in blue who was to haunt his dreams for years.

"And?"

I blinked at him. "And what?"

"What think you of bears?"

"What should I think of bears? If anything, I should wonder, I suppose, why you would compare a foul taste in your mouth to anything bearish."

"Don't you think there's something unnatural about a caged bear?"

"Aye, there is, but there's nothing unnatural about a bad taste in one's mouth. If you insist on the analogy, however, then I must say that of all the animals I know, the bear least deserves to be caged. It is the most intelligent of beasts I've ever come across."