Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

We joined the others, then made shift to haul the cart back out onto the road. We were eight miles and more from our destination and the sun had begun to sink already, lengthening our shadows on the road. Rufio rode out ahead of us again and I sent Philip rearward to make sure the strangers had not reversed their course for any reason. We made good progress after that, but it was deep twilight when we finally approached the small valley that provided refuge to the lepers.

Lucanus was astonished and delighted to see us returned so soon. He had thought us gone for at least six months. That our absence would last less than six weeks had not occurred to any of us as a realistic probability. While our men set up our tents at some distance from the leper longhouse in the barely adequate light of two large fires, Luke and I sat by the larger fire, and I began to tell him of our journey. He had examined Quint's leg as soon as we arrived and the greetings were over, and pronounced it healing splendidly. Quintus would have some deep-trenched scars, he pronounced, but should have full use of the limb once the bone was fully set. More men than Quintus had sighed with relief on hearing that, and one of them was Benedict, who had set the bone and splinted it.

Now, as we sat and talked, his eyes sought Shelagh, who was preparing food with Paulus, the best cook among us, and Turga. The baby slept safely, wrapped in a bundle of blankets close by Turga's side.

"The woman, Shelagh. Who is she?"

"Liam's daughter, I told you when you met her."

"I know that, Cay, but who is she? Why is she here?" His eyes had not left the young woman, whose long, tousled hair disclosed and obscured her face and eyes alluringly in the leaping of the flames. I had to take my own eyes from her deliberately.

"She is to be Donuil's wife."

His head swivelled slowly towards me. "Then where is Donuil?"

"At home in Eire." Before he could question me any further, I launched into the tale of what had happened in the past week, omitting nothing, and as I talked the tent-raising around us was completed and the men began to gather close around the fires, although they took care to leave us room to continue speaking in private. I ended my tale with my agreement with Athol to acquire a concession from Pendragon that would permit Liam to raise his animals on their lands for at least a year.

"You think you can obtain such a concession?" he asked, when I had finished. I could only shrug and observe that it seemed reasonable. There was no ill-will between Uther's people and my own of which I was aware. To my concealed dismay, however, Lucanus named the single concern that had been gnawing unacknowledged at the edges of my mind since I had spoken of this to Athol. I myself had not visited the Pendragon lands since the accession of Uther to his father's throne, and Uther's support of Camulod in the recent wars had cost Pendragon dearly, not in men alone, but in losses of the precious longbows that were so hard to replace, since each one took so long to make. Those losses, allied with the apparent lack of gratitude and concern expressed by me, or any in Camulod, either privately or publicly, might well have eroded the goodwill that had existed between our peoples since the days of King Ullic, Uther's grandfather. In the eyes of the Pendragon, he said, I might well have earned the reputation of an ingrate. Untrue as that might be, it was not an unlikely perception.

Chastened considerably, I admitted that I had given insufficient thought to this possibility, and we agreed that this was a matter that demanded an immediate journey by me into the Cambrian mountains, to express that gratitude, belatedly, and to explain to whoever now held power among the Pendragon the many reasons for the lapse of time since I had burned Uther's corpse and returned home to Camulod. From there, we moved on to talk of other things, and he told me how they had lost five of their number, several days before, struck down by arrows from an unseen enemy. I stared at him, but he had nothing more to say.

"What do you mean, an unseen enemy? You were attacked, yet saw no one?"

"That's what I said. Whoever it was shot at us from the woods, there. From the summit of the hill behind us."

"And killed five people, without attacking further after you had run and hidden? Did you show them you were prepared to fight?"

"To fight? Fight with what, Cay? These people are lepers, not soldiers. . . And no one ran to hide. The five who died were all outside, walking, most of them with the aid of staves and crutches. They were too weak to run. Whoever killed them knew well what they were, and did their slaughter from afar, running no risk of contagion. It was butchery, callous and inhuman."

"The Berbers," I said, and told him of the armed band we had seen returning from this region. As he listened, his face grew troubled.

"Then they will return, is that what you are telling me? They'll pass this way again and come looking for further sport, and Mordechai has no way of deterring them."

"Mordechai may not, but Camulod does," I told him, feeling a monstrous anger boiling in my gut. I looked to where Dedalus sat talking with Benedict and Cyrus and called them to us, bidding them summon the others. Briefly then, once all of them were listening, I repeated what Luke had told me of the arm's-length slaughter of helpless invalids, and I spoke of the inherent threat of further outrages by the alien Berbers, and I saw the same anger stirring in their eyes.

"Now," I said. "We return to Camulod tomorrow and should arrive within the next three days. As soon as we have won back and I have settled several matters within the Colony, I must leave again for Cambria, to visit the Pendragon lands and find out who rules there today. You, Ded, will accompany me and so will you, Rufio. The rest of you, however, all five of you, will return here under the command of Cyrus and Benedict, bringing with you a full cohort of our troopers, and you will cleanse Glevum of this barbarian filth that has polluted it. Do you hear me?"

"Aye!" All five spoke as one.

"Good. So be it! Now eat and then get some rest, all of you. We will be up and away, come dawn. I'll need Lucanus's wagon harnessed ere the sun comes up, and the women and the baby safely installed in it. Eat well, and then sleep well, and deeply."

As soon as they had gone, clustered around the cooking pots and the delicious aromas they emitted, Lucanus and I sought out Mordechai, so that I could bid him farewell and inform him of what would happen upon our return to Camulod. Mordechai listened and then thanked me, although his eyes told me he had a question. I prompted him, curious, and he shook his head, the hint of a smile on his lips.

"I was merely thinking how strange the ways of people are," he murmured. "These Berbers you speak of stand far back and kill us from concealment, because they are afraid to come too close to us, risking contagion. Now you tell me your own men, who are equally afraid of us, will return in strength for our protection. It is a non sequitur, my friend."

"Not really, Mordechai. There is ample logic there. Granted, my men fear your people and avoid their presence, as I do myself. But it is leprosy they fear, rather than lepers, and the avoidance of contagion is mere prudence. These are simple soldiers, ordinary men with ordinary terrors. They dread the sickness far more than the sick . . . But they are decent men, and casual slaughter of the kind that happened here outrages them. As for these Berbers, if that is what they are, they represent a threat to us, and to our Colony, so we will wipe them out and guard against their return. The service we will provide for you is incidental, an entailment to your benefit. However, my men will not come anywhere near your encampment on their return. I see no need to feed the idle curiosity of our troopers by telling them of your presence here. The aliens must be cleaned out of Glevum; that is sufficient reason for our punitive expedition, and all that will be given."