Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

As soon as we left Vortigern, turning our faces homeward, that changed. The days grew cold and the nights glacial, and the rain came down in torrents, driven by evil and malevolent winds that made a mockery of our woven travelling cloaks of thick, waxed wool. Our armour grew cold and heavy and began to chafe, and even our horses grew dispirited, walking head down and hunched against the bitter fury of what appeared to be a single, endless storm.

There were entire days when we found it impossible to light a fire, no matter how secure the shelter we had found. Everything that might conceivably have been induced to burn was soggy and waterlogged, and the feral wind howled about us incessantly, changing direction from gust to gust, whipping away the tinder that we tried to use and extinguishing each tiny flame we coaxed into life.

For eight consecutive days that storm held sway without abating, and we spent four of those days huddled in a cave, trying to keep ourselves warm. For the last two we had no food at all, although we had no lack of water. We sat or lay, huddled together for warmth, wrapped about with the blankets we had taken from our horses, who shared the cave with us at night. Ambrose made light of the conditions for the first few days, and I sought at first to match him, but I fell sick on the fourth day, overcome with chills and fever, and Ambrose became my nursemaid.

I have no recollections of that time beyond the point at which the end of my nose grew red and sore from sniffling and my ineffectual attempts to wipe away the constant streams of mucus that ran down from my nostrils to coat my lower face. I can recall feeling my teeth chattering painfully, and an ache in my bones from the jolting of my saddle, and then nothing. All knowledge of what passed thereafter came to me from Ambrose, upon whom I was as dependent as a babe in arms.

He it was who found the cave that sheltered us, coming upon it by sheer chance because, in his efforts to support me in my saddle, he allowed his horse to wander from the path and into a tiny clearing for some thirty paces beyond where he should have been. By the time he became aware of what had happened, the cave was directly in front of him—a cavern hollowed out by the stream of water that had poured through it for ages unimaginable. Above his head, the cliff from which the cavern had been carved reared high enough to block the screaming wind, and the floor of the sheltered clearing before the entrance to the cave was bare, thick-coated with the needles of the great evergreens that grew there.

Ambrose had lowered me to the sodden pine needles and gone into the cave. It was large, he found, and almost dry, though open to the sky in places. Its vaulted roof was formed by two great slabs of slanted stone that he suspected might once have been a single piece, sundered by some cataclysmic force in ages past. Rainwater trickled down each side of the cleft, and from time to time great gusts of wind would whistle down the narrow flue they formed, creating wondrous and frightening noises that set the horses stirring at night in fear. All in all, nevertheless, almost dry and almost warm and almost sheltered from the howling gales, the cavern was our salvation. There Ambrose had finally been able to make a fire from pine needles that he first spread out to dry for several hours, then slowly kindled and fed lovingly with tiny twigs and moss and small pine cones. He had fed his fire cautiously and with great skill, huddled over it to guard it from errant gusts of wind and adding strips of his own undertunic to augment its heat whenever it began to fail against the wetness of the other fuel. Eventually, after a long, long time, throughout which I lay shivering beneath a damp horse blanket, he had nurtured his tiny blaze to the point at which its own embers could generate sufficient heat to dry and then ignite each new piece of fuel. For the next four days, he kept a blazing pyre alight, feeding it constantly to keep up its heat, hoping to drive the fever from my bones in running sweat.

I found out, once I had regained consciousness and begun to rally, that he had spent the entire afternoon and evening of that first day gathering fuel, which he piled inside the entrance to the cave, taking no time to rest between trips and entering the cavern after each excursion only to check on me and throw more fuel on the fire.

He abandoned his search for firewood only when darkness fell, and by that time he had amassed enough to the keep the fire ablaze throughout the night, providing he awoke often enough to replenish it. I was of absolutely no assistance to him in any of that. I was, in fact, a grievous source of concern, for my breathing became heavy, laborious and irregular so that there were times, he told me later, when he lay straining to listen, holding his own breath while he waited for me to breathe again, all the time fearing I might not.

In the end, in the deepest part of the night, he abandoned his attempts to sleep and set to work to make me as dry, warm and comfortable as he could. Our heavy woollen cloaks, which he had hung stretched behind the fire, had dried by that time, as had our extra tunics and the other articles of clothing from our packs. Somehow, handling the solid deadweight of me, he had undressed me completely and then washed me with water heated on the fire, drying me afterward with a rough, dry cloth, chafing both heat and energy into my chilled limbs. That done, he had dressed me again in a dry tunic and wrapped me in my warm cloak before dragging me closer to the fire.

When he was sure there was no more he could do to increase my immediate, external comfort, he used the last of our provisions—dry, salted venison, dried fruit and roasted grain—to concoct a hot soup, which he fed to me with a bone spoon, until he could coax no more flavour or substance from what remained. The soup lasted for two days and he ate none of it. On the third day, by which time my poor brother was growing frantic, I recovered my senses, my fever dropped away and the wind subsided, although the rain continued to pour down.

All that day, too, driven by his relief that I had not yet died under his care, he hovered about me like a solicitous hen with a single, ailing chick, and even though neither of us ate that day, I had improved sufficiently by nightfall to convince him that I could survive now on my own and tend the fire for the length of time it might take him to go out into the woods and find us something more to eat. That night, he slept at last while I remained awake and fed the fire.

The following morning, satisfied that I was on the mend, Ambrose departed shortly after dawn and was back by mid-morning with the fruits of his hunt: a large hare, a small rabbit, wild garlic, onions, tender young nettles and a scrip full of fresh mushrooms. Within an hour of his return, the aroma from the leather boiling bag above the fire had set our saliva flowing and we were hard pressed to keep our hunger in abeyance until the meat was cooked sufficiently to eat. My contribution to the feast my brother set before us was a single twist of salt, the last I had, which had lain hidden in my saddlebag for weeks, but it was the crowning touch for an Epicurean stew.

My sickness, the debilitating fever and the ague in its train, had passed, but with its passing I inherited another malady, a maddening itch that consumed my entire body from my waist to the top of my crown. I quickly learned that I could not, or should not, scratch to relieve the discomfort it caused, for the mere act of scratching, while producing some slight relief, at the same time increased the burning itch surrounding the scratch marks. My skin bled in places, yet still I could not desist from clawing at myself.

I sought relief, eventually, by plunging my body into the cold stream in front of the cave—the rain had stopped some time that day—but then, chilled to the bone, I had to rub myself briskly to bring the warmth back to my skin, and with the friction and the returning warmth, the agony came back. I tried to dress myself, thinking that fully dressed I might feel better and we might be able to resume our interrupted journey, but the merest sensation of the clothes upon my skin was unbearable.