Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

He nodded, accepting my words, and thanked me again with great dignity. When we left him, assuring him he would be quit of us come dawn, Lucanus walked with me back to my tent. I paused there, before entering, and looked him up and down, as friend to friend, the exigencies of the day all dealt with.

"Well," I asked him. "Are you well? Convinced you have contracted no disease?"

"Leprosy?" he responded, smiling. "No, Cay, I am convinced there is nothing of the leprous in me now that was not here ere we arrived."

"I'm glad of that, my friend," I told him then, only half jocular. "As I told Mordechai, I am not at ease in proximity to such potent threat as is concealed beneath the clothes of even such a friend as he." He stared me directly in the eye and I nodded. "So be it. Are you hungry, or have you already eaten?"

He pursed his lips and shook his head. "No, to both your questions. But I am tired. I have not slept properly since the night of the attack, waiting for a return visit."

"Well, you can sleep now. No one will bother us tonight and we leave for Camulod at dawn. Sleep well, Luke. It will be good to reach home again, even for a few days."

We passed by Aquae Sulis late the following day without looking for signs of life, making twelve additional miles before we camped for the night, and as I made the rounds of our small camp before seeking my own bed I was aware of the feeling of anticipation that filled everyone. Even the women seemed to be looking forward to tomorrow, although neither of them had ever seen our Colony. We would be up and on the road before first light, travelling at campaign speed, and we hoped to sight the towers of Camulod before noon. I wrapped myself in my cloak and an additional blanket beside the fire and then discovered, to my great surprise, that I could not sleep. I lay awake for a long time, tossing and turning, feeling the earth grow harder beneath me, before I accepted my insomnia and crawled out from my blankets to throw more wood on the sinking fire. As I did so, I heard the sound of the baby whimpering somewhere close by, and then the sound of Turga's voice crooning and whispering to him, soothing him to silence again.

Returning to my blankets, I lay still for a while with my back to the fire, watching the shadows form beyond me as the new fuel ignited, and listening for more sounds from the baby, but he was silent again. Something had struck me as different in the sound of his crying, however, and I found myself wondering if his voice was deepening, then smiling in the darkness at the silliness of the thought. And yet, he was growing like a weed—even my unsophisticated masculine eye could see the change in him since we had first landed in Eire. The child had grown visibly, not so much in height—length, I amended—but in overall bulk. He had thickened, that's what it was.

That notion, the thickening and strengthening of his small body, reminded me of Benedict's comments that morning, concerning the weeds growing in the roads of Britain. In a hundred years, he had opined, the roads would be destroyed, fractured and torn apart and ultimately replaced by the inexorable growth of millions of plants, beginning with green, healthy weeds that would root between the cobblestones, as had the one he noticed, and, over time, would widen and then split the surface cracks before giving way to shrubs, bushes, saplings and eventually mighty trees whose roots would sunder and obliterate all that the legionaries had achieved. The idea grew in fascination as I considered it; the notion that a simple, everyday broad-leafed plant—a weed—could have the capacity to precipitate such mass destruction of man's greatest achievements.

From that point, somehow, and by some logic that escaped me then, the weed in my analogy transfigured itself into the child, Arthur. He, too, I realized, possessed the potential of that thickening, ever-thriving weed. Seeded almost by chance between the enduring, close-knit edges of Britain's contiguous clan territories, with their differing, but equally rigid and unyielding systems of survival and their lack of anything resembling a centralized core of laws, young Arthur Pendragon could become a wedge that would break apart the cobblestones of Britain and reshape them into a bonded surface that would cover all the land. Nurtured by the Roman-bred, republican ideals of his immediate ancestors, the boy might bring about a revolutionary change in the ancient ways, if he were properly instructed and guided. The raw potential was there in his makeup. But then I saw his laughing, innocent face clearly in my mind, for a moment, and tried to imagine it in manhood, frowning and solemn with righteousness. The attempt was ludicrous, and I turned onto my other side, emptying my mind of such nonsense and staring wide-eyed into the leaping flames.

The darkness beyond the firelight was absolute, and the stillness of the night was disturbed only by the crackling of the new wood on the fire, and I soon found myself thinking about my brother Ambrose for the first time in days and wondering how he had progressed with Ludmilla. Those thoughts led me to Donuil and his love for Shelagh, a love that seemed almost to have sprung into being magically, although in truth I knew the seeds of it had been planted years ago and had merely lain dormant until the two set eyes upon each other once again. From there, my thoughts passed on to Luke and the matter of his celibacy, and my own. He had promised to think about how he might counsel me in that matter during my absence, but I had been gone far less long than either of us had thought possible, and I knew he had had much to occupy him during that brief time. I resolved to ask him about it on the journey to Camulod, but the idea lacked urgency somehow, and I realized, after some time and with great reluctance, that I was being distracted from my task by Shelagh's face, mainly her eyes, which interposed themselves between my own and Luke's image in my mind.

Surprised at myself, and feeling more than slightly guilty, I took myself to task, questioning the source of such thoughts. And of course, as is normal in such matters, the answer I found was even more disconcerting than the question I had asked: I had not willed myself to think of Shelagh. She was simply there, in my mind, but now I realized that she was seldom absent from my thoughts, even when I was unaware of them. With that awareness came an increase in the guilt I felt. Shelagh was to be Donuil's wife, and Donuil was my friend above all else, entitled to my unswerving loyalty. And damnably, with that conviction came the insidious thought that the two must now wait months to lie together, to consummate their bond . . . and I visualized that consummation, save that it was I, not Donuil, who reared above Shelagh's exultant body, supported on my outstretched arms and watching the ripples of pleasure distort her lovely face. Frightened now in my soul by the intensity of what had sprung unbidden to my mind, I rose up from the fire and blundered off out of the firelight, blind from the flames, seeking I knew not what. I was fleeing from myself, I knew, terror-stricken by my own sudden arousal; fiercely, demandingly engorged and seething with surging lust and guilt. The mere existence of such unsought, urgent wanting in my body seemed to me a betrayal of Donuil's friendship and a violation of his trust.

I crashed headlong into a tree trunk and knocked myself off my feet, seeing flashing lights all around me in the darkness and knowing they were only in my head. Stunned and confused, I raised myself to a sitting posture and remained there for a while, asprawl on the damp ground, until the coldness penetrated to my buttocks, after which I pulled myself to my feet. My eyes had now adjusted to the dark and the riot in my blood had abated considerably. As I turned to return to the tents, however, I heard a sound that froze me in mid-step. I strained to recognize it, then smiled at myself. It was only the splashing of water from the brook that curled around our campsite. Somewhere upstream, beyond where we had camped, there must be a small waterfall, and the sound of it had caught at my ears. I walked in the direction of the noise and found a pool, some fifty paces removed from where we slept, where the water swirled over some large boulders and fell into a small basin. Above my head, the moon shone through a gap in the clouds, lighting the place with silver, and I remembered the advice of the Legate Titus to young men on long patrols: "When your lusts bother you, and if you have the opportunity, seek out a pool of cold water and steep yourself. It will clear your head and your veins." I stepped forward and knelt by the little pool, then leaned forward, supporting myself on my hands, and plunged my head slowly beneath the water. Sure enough, my fires were doused, for the present, at least. I towelled myself dry with the lining of my cloak as I returned to the fire and took my seat again, thinking once more of Shelagh, but this time with awareness and circumspection.