Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

The sound of voices woke me in the darkness before dawn as the camp stirred into life. I rose slowly and sleepily and dressed in my full armour before moving to saddle my horse, tightening the cinches securely before hauling myself up onto his back. It felt good to feel the weight of my swordbelt again and the solid cover of my iron, leather-lined helmet. New fires were springing into life all along the narrow strand that fronted the sea, and I could smell the briny tang and hear the roar of waves washing up as the tide came in, the sound amplified strangely by the ear flaps of my helm. I kicked Germanicus into motion, and rode directly west, recalling clearly the directions of Derek of Ravenglass, and had no difficulty in finding the mouth of the river on whose banks Uther Pendragon lay unburied. The great white stone Derek had described as marking the entrance to the river's channel was visible from far away, and when I reached it I swung inland, moving through the shallows by the riverbank, allowing the big black to pick his own way among the boulders that littered the bed of the stream. The river scarcely merited the status Derek of Ravenglass had accorded it, being no more than a broad, shallow stream, slightly over fifty paces wide at its broadest, where it flowed out to join the sea. Within the channel, cool and tree-covered, it dwindled rapidly in the space of a hundred paces to less than one third that size. It was pleasant there, however, for the day, young as it was, had already grown more than merely warm, and the twelve heavy miles along the sandy beach from the site of Connor's galley had heated both my horse and me uncomfortably. Three miles upstream, the Ravenglass king had told me, I would find the remains of Uther and his men, mixed with a number of Derek's own.

From time to time as my horse carefully picked its way upstream, I came to deep and pleasant-seeming pools trapped behind fallen logs or dug deep- channelled by the fall of water from some minor obstacle higher in the stream bed, which rose steadily as we moved inland. Each of them tempted me to dismount and bathe, for I was itchingly aware of the long passage of time since I had last been truly clean. For all that, however, I had no real desire to yield to the impulse here. Somewhere upstream, I knew, the bodies of a substantial number of slain men lay scattered in and around this stream; mutilated bodies that had been dead for days. I thought of Lucanus and his horror of polluted water, and I recalled my horror—God! had that been mere days ago?—when, just as I stooped to drink from another stream, I had suspected wrongness, and had found other slain men, men whom I had known, floating a short way upstream, swollen obscenely, their leaking fluids fouling the water around them.

I rode on, trying to rid my mind of such thoughts by dwelling on other things. Derek of Ravenglass came back into my mind, and I pondered our bizarre encounter days earlier, and the strange lack of ill will I bore him then and now. He had killed my cousin Uther Pendragon, but in so doing he had, in the oddest way, restored to me my faith in Uther himself, a faith that had died the day before I had set out to find him and kill him. For, as I had told Connor, I had believed that Uther, my cousin and dearest friend, had brutally slain my wife and unborn child. Derek of Ravenglass, by killing Uther and despoiling him of his arms and armour, had given me cause to doubt my belief again, based as it was upon logic that I now suspected might have been flawed from the outset.

Confronted that day with Derek where I had expected Uther, since he wore Uther's distinctive armour, I had seen what I might not have seen had I, in fact, met Uther. I looked to Uther's saddle bow hung an iron-balled flail with a leather-covered handle. Derek had agreed to give it to me, and it hung now from my own saddle bow. The red paint that coated its short chain and the heavy, iron ball on the end of it was chipped and battered from much use. Now, as I rode, I unhooked the weapon and grasped the handle, swinging it up to catch the weighty mass of the ball in my left hand, where I examined it closely. The thing had been the death of many men, but I knew now, almost beyond a doubt, it had not taken the life of my Cassandra. I had believed, before seeing it in Derek's possession, that I had found the selfsame flail sunk in the muddy bottom of a shallow mere, close by the spot where my wife had met her death. I had assumed it Uther's, for at that time I knew of only two such weapons and Uther had made them both, one for me and the other for himself. I had been carrying my own, many miles away, when my wife was killed. Uther had vanished from Camulod again, as he used to do, without a word. His guilt, once I had found the flail and recalled other profound suspicions, had been glaringly self-evident to me.

I sighed now, and reslung the weapon from its hook, remembering my father and his startling example, recounted to me at his own expense, of the requirement for moral men to be willing to accord the benefit of doubt when faced with a lack of solid proof, no matter how great the circumstantial evidence of wrongdoing.

In the few years that had elapsed since Uther's invention of this fearsome tool, years through which I had remained immured, all memory and knowledge driven from my head by a battle wound, others had copied Uther's design and the weapon had become widely used. I knew that now, but my knowledge was very recent. Someone had used one to murder my wife and the child she carried. Someone, but evidently not Uther. Or was that evident? My memory stirred again with suspicion. Perhaps he made another, identical, to replace the one he had lost. I shook my head violently, attempting to dislodge the thought, and as I did so I heard the crows.

My flesh crawled with revulsion at the familiar sound, the anthem, the very death-watch of war. The discordant cacophony was still far off, but I kicked my horse to a faster gait, dreading what I should shortly face but unable to tolerate the thought of allowing the grisly feast ahead of me to pass uninterrupted for a moment longer than I could help.

The stream bed narrowed dramatically at one point, throwing its waters higher and more strongly, as though to impede my passage, and the banks became suddenly rocky and precipitous, looming high above me as though to shut out the light of day. The channel turned sharply right and then left again, rising steeply, and then I reached the end of the broken water and emerged suddenly into a clearing where the high wall on my left fell away abruptly, leaving an open, thickly treed glade along the river's grassy edge where the water flowed smooth and deep. On the right, the cliff loomed still, harsh and unyielding.

I pulled my mount to a clattering halt, scanning the scene before me. White and black. For long moments my eyes refused to acknowledge what confronted them. The white was naked flesh, bleached and blood-drained, for a chaos of once-fierce warriors lay stripped of everything, including any semblance of humanity. The black was dried blood, torn flesh and flap- winged scavengers. Outraged, I screamed my anguish and sent my mount charging through the shallows, splashing mightily and dislodging the gorging birds from their repast so that they rose in an angry, fluttering cloud, their caws of panicked warning deafening me. I reined in my horse when we reached the bank, hauling him back onto his haunches as I gazed in horror at the scene around me. Corpses, hundreds of them, it seemed, lay sprawled and tangled, piled in confusion, with, here and there, the solitary, lonely- looking, swollen-bellied body of a horse among them. From the trees around me, the crows and magpies chattered and scolded, warning me away from what was now theirs, and above their sound, I slowly became aware of another more pervasive, the buzzing of a million swarming flies.