Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

"It's the greatness that counts, Arthur. Pompey the Great, Caesar the Great, Alexander the Great, Xerxes the Great. There are hundreds of such names, and some of them will be remembered forever. Bad leaders may win battles, from time to time, through sheer numerical superiority, the way Lot did in his encounter with your father. They may even win wars, from time to time. But they never achieve true greatness, Arthur. Your father might have, had he lived. Greatness is an attribute bestowed upon a leader by those he leads, and those, being men, are loath to ascribe greatness to a man who has not earned it. But your father's men believed in Uther's greatness, and so must you. Believe me, a man may have the gift of leadership inborn in him, but greatness is something that he has to learn, and to earn, beneath the eyes of those who trust him and believe in what he represents. He must earn that faith through a lifetime of being trustworthy—no easy task, for there can be no lapses in his record—and if he ever should betray that trust, for one moment, and be discovered, as he must—then it is lost forever. Uther Pendragon was never false to any man. He was a terrible enemy, once angered, but he was never false and his integrity was never questioned, even by his enemies—with the sole exception of Lot of Cornwall, who was more of a mad dog than a man. I promise you, no man who deals in slyness or in treachery or duplicity can ever gain that pinnacle of greatness. He may succeed in some things, for a time, but he will fail and fall eventually.

"Integrity, on the other hand, was an attribute your father possessed in abundance, and integrity, entailing honesty and forthrightness, courage, bravery, honour and strict justice in dealing with all men—and women, too— contains the beginnings of greatness. You do know the difference between bravery and courage, don't you?"

As I had spoken my encomium to his father, the boy's face had changed, the tension and the harried look receding visibly as he evaluated and accepted what he heard me say. I had never lied to him and now I could see he believed my words completely, true as they were, and his resilient good nature was reasserting itself visibly. Now my last question, the tone of it, and my ironic look, had the effect I hoped to achieve. He smiled and stood up, closing the large, leather bound book he had been reading.

"Bravery is something you can experience on the spur of the moment, faced with danger. To have courage, you must think about the dangers in advance, then weigh the risks, and then do what you have to do, despite your fears." His face grew serious again. "Uncle Connor is that kind of leader, too, isn't he? With integrity, I mean. His men would follow him anywhere, and they don't care that he has a wooden leg."

"No, they don't, because it's not important. They follow what they love in him. The integrity. The fierceness and the courage, loyalty and honesty that make him who and what he is. That's what I mean when I talk to you of leadership—your Uncle Connor is another great leader. Observe him closely, and see if you can discern what it is about him that endears him most to his men. Then, when you have followers of your own, remember what you saw."

"I wonder when he'll come?"

"He'll come when he arrives, and not before. Now away with you before it grows too dark for me to see what I'm writing."

I didn't see him leave, and he closed the door silently behind him, but I could not return to my writing after that. I had too much on my mind, and none of it had to do with my diurnal notes. The lad had managed to surprise me yet again with the depth and scope of his thinking, and I allowed myself now to think about the progress he had made in everything we sought to teach him.

More than a year had passed since the day Connor delivered the four matched ponies, and he was now overdue to return again from Eire. In the intervening months, Arthur and his young friends had grown to be a familiar sight throughout the length and breadth of our estates, riding their startlingly coloured ponies everywhere in perfect freedom, thanks to the absence of any kind of threat to our well-being, and all four boys including Ghilleadh, the youngest, at barely six years old now rode like young centaurs.

Arthur, their uncontested leader in all things, was growing like a sapling starved for light, shooting upwards with a speed and vigour that, at times, made him appear to be too thin. Lucanus, however, dismissed my fears on that each time I mentioned it, which was quite frequently. The boy, he said, was healthy as a horse. His bones were good, his shoulders broad and likely to be massive, and his chest, though seeming to be frail, was deep and well- formed, with solid ribs. First, the boy must grow to his ordained height, Luke said, pointing out that we Britannici had never been a stunted family. Once his upward growth had been achieved, a matter of another count of years to match the eight he had attained so far, the rest would grow to match. In the meantime, he maintained, filling the lad's quick mind held more importance than the simple and self-sustaining development of his body.

That much I knew was true, and we were working hard in concert, and much to Arthur's dismay at times, on educating him for the task he would assume in time to come. Like all boys, Arthur himself would have preferred his schooling to be different. Given the choice, which I was careful to prevent, he would have opted for the parts he loved instinctively and consigned the other, less enthralling aspects of his training to some unspecified period called "later." But then, he had no notion he was being trained for anything more demanding than the life he knew today. He was aware that, as the ward of Ambrose and me, he would assume our tasks some day and work for the welfare and safety of the Colony that was his home, but he was eight years old and time meant nothing to him. We were immortal in his eyes, and boyhood was eternal, and so he lived a boy's life of constant challenge and adventure, taking it hard sometimes when there were days of brilliant sunshine that were lost to him because his lessons kept him within walls. All in all, however, he seemed well content to learn, no matter what the topic, and his mind was like a sponge, absorbing and retaining all we poured into it.

To make the process seem less personal and more palatable to the lad, we had decided, years before, that his close friends and cousins should be educated with Arthur, so that on days when he was made to fret indoors, he had at least the companionship of misery shared; Bedwyr and Gwin, and latterly Ghilleadh, suffered along with him, as did Ambrose and Ludmilla's daughters Luceiia and Octavia.

Their teaching was divided among six of us, with additional input from many others. Primarily, however, Ambrose, Lucanus, Donuil, Shelagh, Ludmilla and I myself had thought long and with gravity to devise a program that would meet the needs we had been able to define, all of us aware of the importance of the task we were delineating. The training must embrace two major elements, military and civil. Of that there was no doubt. Beyond that division, however, lay a country of bewildering diversities made the more difficult to traverse by the simple fact that none of us save Luke had any experience as teachers. Each of us had skills and knowledge to pass on, nevertheless, and some of those we shared with others of the group, so we had devised a program of instruction, hesitant and tentative at first, when Arthur was but four years old. That program had matured steadily since then, as we gained confidence and came to realize the nature, and the hunger, of the bright young minds with which we dealt.

In the range of what we termed "the civil studies" I was in charge of languages, although the task was shared by everyone. We taught the children patiently to read and then to write in Latin, eschewing Greek because it was not spoken in our land by then and we had few Greek texts. In spoken languages, the children worked in Latin but naturally spoke the local tongue, a liquid mixture born of Celtic and of Latin roots that had no name but flourished as a common, daily language known to all the people in our region. To keep the children's interest lively and alert, I also spoke with them much of the time in the Pendragon tongue, unsullied by Latin contaminations, and Donuil soon accustomed himself to speaking to them at all times in Erse, in which all six children could soon converse. Ambrose even attempted, at one point, to teach them the language used by Hengist's Danes, but that was a fruitless task, since his own knowledge of the tongue was rudimentary and there was no one near our lands who could assist him, and in any case young Bedwyr was the only one who showed the slightest interest in the alien sounds of that harsh language.