Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

"Aye, and they'll be fretting even now, and will have sent out searchers."

I heaved a great sigh. "You're right, they'll do all of those things, and it would be unfair to prolong their ignorance. But can we take this fire with us? This seems like the first time I've been warm since last summer."

Shelagh shook her head with a fleeting smile. "Not unless you would care to carry it in your helmet. You'll warm up again once we are on the road. Better for you to walk for a while, rather than ride. The exercise will loosen your bones and sinews. Later, when you reach Cambria and find your raiders, you can light a fire to burn the earth."

XXV

Those words of Shelagh's came back to me days later as I sat slouched in my saddle, staring at the prospect ahead of me. To light a fire that would burn the earth here in the high hills of Cambria would require the powers of Vulcan himself. Nothing would burn in this place, for the simple reason that there was nothing to burn. Winter maintained its icy grip and permitted nothing to be seen but rocky cliffs and snow-shrouded, shadowed, treacherous wastes of whiteness. Yet, beside this incontrovertible fact, there was a growing certainty in my mind that I had not the slightest wish to burn anything in Cambria, in spite of all I had said to the contrary in former days.

Dedalus had been sitting quietly beside me as I pondered the sight before me, and now his voice broke into my thoughts, confirming my own opinion of our location but scattering the other, nebulous thoughts I had been mulling over in my head.

"We are too high, here, Cay. They must be below us in another valley, and somehow we have missed them." I nodded, accepting the truth of that in silence as he continued. "Horses could not survive up here in winter. Even had these people been foolish enough to bring the beasts so high into the hills, and even had they done it before the snow fell, they would never be able to keep them alive in such deep drifts."

I turned my head to face him. "I know that, Ded. I came to the same conclusion some time ago. But I have had other, more troubling thoughts upon my mind."

He hawked and spat into the snow. "Aye?" he said eventually. "And you think the higher air up here will clear your head?"

I had to smile at his tone. "Something akin to that," I murmured.

"What's on your mind, then?"

I snatched a deep, slow breath and held it for a time before expelling it through pursed lips, blowing like a horse. "I really can't tell you that here and now, my friend. I've not yet thought the matter through. But I am working on it, and when I have decided what my problem is, and how to phrase it, I'll come to you for your advice." He said nothing, but pouted his own lips and dipped his head eloquently. "In the meantime," I continued, "there's no arguing with you. We are too high. We'll make our way back down into the valley where we left the commissary wagons and camp there tonight. Then we'll head south and west, keeping below the snow line if we can, and see if we can pick up any sign of our quarry in that direction."

"Good. I'll get the men turned around and moving."

I watched him ride away to where the others waited, and thought again how fortunate I was in my friends. Then, as the waiting ranks broke up in the apparent confusion of reversing their tracks without endangering their mounts either in the deep snow or on the precipitous slope that flanked the narrow ridge we had ascended, I returned to contemplating the unease that lay within me, finding it matched by the desolate yet magnificent panorama of snow-filled gorges and soaring peaks around us.

I had found, quite suddenly, that I had no wish to declare or prosecute any form of war on the Pendragon people, and the belated realisation, within the past few days, had caught me unprepared.

In the dying days of the previous autumn, faced with incontrovertible evidence of invasion and treachery on the part of at least one deviant faction of the Pendragon, my sense of outrage over the wanton slaughter of my men had made my resolution to avenge the attack upon Calibri seem straightforward and necessary. That conviction had remained ever present in me throughout the dreadful winter that followed and had governed my plans for the spring. It had burned bright and clear within my breast throughout the approach to Glevum and the engagement with the aliens quartered there. The change had occurred after that, after my night-long imprisonment with the dying Mordechai in the rain-soaked rock fissure and after my farewell to Shelagh.

I had experienced no epiphany; no sudden revulsion over my course. No new idea had sprung, full-bred, into my mind, nor had any chain of tangible events given rise to my change of heart, although several factors had contributed thereto. The transformation of my thoughts had simply occurred, slowly and unheralded, within my deepest feelings. And radical as it was, the thought had merely emerged within me, and grown with utter conviction over a period of days, that I had no wish to carry warfare into the Pendragon lands. Yet I was gravely troubled by this change of heart, because my reason, arguing in the persona of Commander of Camulod, told me that I must, imperatively, issue warning—clarion, stark and deadly, backed with dire example—of the draconian consequences that would attend any future sallies into Camulod from Cambria. I had spoken to no one of my thoughts, and had ridden silent and brooding ever since Glevum, aware that I provided but ill company to my friends.

"Commander Merlyn! Will you remain behind?"

I turned in the saddle and waved in acknowledgment of Ded's shout, kicking Germanicus into motion to follow my men, and as he ambled forward, picking his way with care, I attempted to focus my thoughts upon the amorphous reasons underlying my new frame of mind.

One common element was real enough and would, I somehow knew, eventually come to overpower all others: the child Arthur, my ward, was heir to Cambria, heir to Pendragon. While he was yet too young to be aware of anything, he would not always be so, and he would, I felt, have but scant cause to thank me later if I stirred enmity between his people and ourselves during his childhood. The fact that Pendragon had spilled first blood would bear little weight were the boy to emerge into manhood inheriting a legacy of hatred and fear where once there had been alliance and amity, generations in the making. That element I could accept without difficulty. There remained only the very real need for some form of retribution and example in this present case—a requirement that I feared might prove troublesome if I adhered to the logic plaguing me at present. I had, when all was said and done, led a force of a thousand men all the way from Camulod in the name of retribution.

Yet there were other influences to my thinking, some of them stark in their simplicity, others more obscure. Mordechai's death had affected me greatly, but not until long after I had been pulled up out of the cleft that was his grave. To be sure, I had felt sadness and pain and deep regret on awakening to find him stiff and cold beneath my blanket, but my physical discomfort and the arrival of Shelagh and Rufio and the need thereafter to win free of that stony sepulchre had kept my mind focused upon other things and dulled complete comprehension of the implications of his death.

Shelagh's commonsense advice to me had been wisely given. I had walked up the slope from the fire she had kindled to the path, hobbling in agony from my stiff and aching muscles. Once on the flatness of the path, however, my anguish had begun to abate. Hobbling along behind Rufio and ahead of Shelagh, who led my horse, I had begun to feel my muscles loosening again, but the ascent of the slippery slope beneath the spot where I had found the hanging man, which called for greater effort from a different set of muscles, had been a purgatory, unmitigated by the fact that my companions had to dismount, too, and lead their horses upward with care.