Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

My stomach churning with the need to vomit, I forced myself to look around me carefully, knowing immediately I had no hope of finding Uther's body. These ravaged corpses had been thoroughly despoiled. No weapons lay abandoned on the ground, no clothes, no armour, no signs of the camp I knew had been here. No order governed the disposition of the bodies, either; friend lay entwined with foe, united, inseparable and indistinguishable. The flies held dominion here; they and the scavenging birds the only living creatures in sight.

Disgusted, and shaking with nausea, I turned my horse around and left that awful place, following the outline of a clearly trampled path, and there, mere paces from my passage, I found Uther Pendragon.

There was no mistaking him, even after three days of death His size, his hair, and the hideous, gaping, ragged-edged wound in his lower back, just where I had seen, known and felt it in an awful dream, left no room for doubt. He lay where Derek of Ravenglass had left him after stripping him, alone by the base of a great, dead, hollow pine, spread-eagled among a welter of tumbled, rotting boughs so that his right foot stuck grotesquely skyward, his knee caught in a fork of one of them. The green and blue carpet of flies that coated him finally overwhelmed me, and I fell from my saddle to the ground, retching helplessly.

Later, when I was strong enough, I staggered to my feet and covered my mouth and nostrils with a cloth, tying it in place to leave my hands free for the task. It was the work of mere moments to drag some of the dried-out tree limbs to where he lay and pile them over him. Moments more, and I had struck flint to steel and breathed a small flame to life. I tended it carefully and watched it grow to become ravenous, and then I fed its hunger with Uther's pyre. Remounting my horse, I sat and waited until the leaping tongues of flame soared high enough to lick at, then ignite the long-dead wood of the great hollow pine above him. Only when I was sure that the conflagration could not be stopped did I move my horse away. Then a neighbouring tree, another pine, its inner growth dark and dry, flashed into violent, blazing fury, throwing a sudden cloud of flames and whirling sparks into the air, startling me. Grass fires were breaking out already from the flying sparks. The entire glade would burn, and all that it contained. The air had grown thick and black with whirling smoke and departing birds, and the fury of the fire that consumed Uther Pendragon, nurtured by burning pine sap, already hid him from my view.

"Farewell, Cousin," I whispered, feeling a desolation the like of which I had never known. "Your son will think well of you, I swear."

I departed then, quickly, leaving everything behind me to the cleansing flames.

III

I had ridden through a war-torn landscape on my journey to Cornwall and the southwest, but the return journey demonstrated to me just how little of it I had really noticed. Then, I had ridden fuelled largely by an outrage kindled by my own, personal anger at Uther and what I believed him to have done, and partly by my shock at the stories of the atrocities committed by my own men, the soldiers of Camulod, under his leadership in the war against Lot. The sights I had seen had been those I wished to see on that stage of my journey, those that would feed my rage against the cousin who had wronged me. I had looked for them diligently and had found them in profusion, but in the seeking of them, I had ridden oblivious of other, more terrible spectacles.

Now, much less than a month later, I returned by the same route, sickened by the carnage I had seen in Cornwall, appalled by the senseless squandering of so many young, healthy men. I rode in full awareness now of the path of war and warriors and the havoc they had wreaked between them. The burned and ruined cottages now gave off a sullen, all-pervading stench of bitter smoke and charred embers that spoke wordlessly of desolation and despair. The sight of hanging corpses that had angered me earlier seemed insignificant now on my homeward ride, the smell of them hardly noteworthy now, the swarms of flies and scavenging birds attracted to the mouldering bodies negligible by comparison with the sheer enormity of the numbers of dead and maimed and crippled soldiers littering the landscape I had newly quit. I rode through all of it in a state of almost total despair.

Only once on the journey did I come across any sign of danger, and it might have been no more than my frame of mind that made it seem thus. Early one bright morning, new-risen from a bed of thick-piled grass that had done little to ease my uneasy wakefulness, I emerged from a dense copse on the banks of a shallow river to find myself confronting four armed and mounted men on the other bank. A single glance told me I knew none of them, nor recognized their style of dress. They were all armoured, after a fashion, in mismatched, bossed leather garments, breastplates and leggings, and they all carried leather-covered shields. On seeing them, a deep and sullen anger overtook me and I stood upright in my stirrups, drawing my long sword and passing it to my left hand and then unhooking Uther's heavy flail from the saddle bow and swinging it around my head, daring them wordlessly to challenge me. They exchanged sullen glances among themselves and then swung about in unison and rode away, kicking their shaggy horses to a gallop that soon bore them from my sight.

I drank from the stream and went on my way, acutely aware for the remainder of the day that they might be waiting somewhere ahead of me, hoping to take me by surprise. I saw no sign of them, however, and by the following clay had forgotten them.

Three days later I came again to the hostelry where I had heard the chastening tale of the visitations of the armies of Lot of Cornwall and Uther Pendragon—Uther of Camulod had been the name they gave him, to my angry dismay. The place had been owned by a man called Lars, who had turned out to be the long-lost eldest son of Uncle Varrus's old friend Equus. In the course of a pleasant evening with him and his wife and her brother Eric, a merchant, I discovered not only that Eric made his living largely by trading amicably with the Saxons who had settled the lands to the southeast of Isca, but that the people of the entire region around that city thought more kindly of their recently arrived Saxon neighbours than they did of Uther's armies and the forces of Lot of Cornwall. Those sentiments, outrageous as they had seemed to me upon hearing them, had begun to seem almost acceptable a short time later, when viewed in the context of what these people had suffered at the hands of their fellow countrymen. Now the hostelry lay empty and abandoned, all the doors and windows boarded over. I hoped that they had made their way safely northward to Camulod, as I had urged them to.

It began to rain, as it had rained when last I passed this way, and for the next two days I rode through heavy, intermittent squalls that soaked me to the skin and turned the world into a place of dripping, miserable, lightless shades of grey.

The sun came out again on the third day to reveal to my unprepared eyes a scene untouched by war. From that moment on, I rode through green and pleasant landscapes where men worked peacefully and fearlessly, it seemed, in their own fields, as if the struggles of ambitious warriors had no existence in this land.

I avoided Isca and Ilchester, the desolate town closest to Camulod, keeping my distance from the great Roman road and riding across country now, through heavily wooded land, towards the borders of our Colony, feeling a shapeless joy stirring in me as I began to recognize landmarks. By the time I realized I would not, despite my wishful thinking, arrive home before darkness fell that day, I had reached the beginnings of that area closest to our lands, where the dense forest began to yield to the openness of our fertile valley. I knew exactly where I was now, and remembered a favoured campsite from my youth, a grassy, moss-soft bed beside a rippling stream, concealed from casual view by a screen of thick bushes and a waist-high embankment that once had marked the edge of a much greater stream than flowed there now. Only as I approached within bowshot of the spot, riding almost carelessly in the gathering dusk, did I realize that the site was already occupied.