Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

I have no memory of saddling my horse, but as I drew myself into the saddle, the training of years somehow took precedence even over my consuming panic, preventing me from setting out defenceless. I rode directly to my day quarters in the Praetorium, our headquarters, and collected my bow and quiver. Then, as I mounted my horse again, I heard Lucanus call my name and felt his hand grasping at my ankle. Blinking my eyes clear and swallowing hard, I made myself turn and look down at him. He was distraught, his face taut with anxiety, and I knew, even in my despair, that I must say something to him.

"Forgive me, old friend." One small, quite lucid part of me was amazed to hear how calm my voice sounded. "I am not myself. A sudden nausea. I thought a ride might clear my head. A long, hard ride. Don't be concerned for me. I'll come back soon, when I feel better, and you can try your magic arts on me."

I wheeled my mount away and left him standing there in front of the headquarters building as I made my way out of the fort and down the hill and thence across the great campus that lay beneath, riding without awareness or volition, yet guiding my horse surely on the shortest route to the hidden valley that had been mine alone since childhood. It had been months since I had last been there, but Germanicus knew the way and brought me safely down the narrow, winding, bush-lined track among the enfolding hills to where my dead wife waited by the tiny lake, and there, by her graveside, I fell face down and wept, allowing all the horror I felt to engulf me.

I had suspected my true condition for months, even while denying every sign of it and concealing it inside me from my very self. As soon as I had heard the name of Mordechai upon Lucanus's lips, however, all of my pretences and self-delusion had fallen away in the appalling recognition of what I had become. I was a leper! The certain knowledge filled me, making me want to scream my terror and revulsion and disgust to all the world. Leper! Unclean, condemned to banishment from all the world of men. Merlyn Britannicus, Leper!

My sickness of the previous June, the weakness and the dreadful, scourging itch, had come again that winter, and even then I had denied the fear in me, fleeing into isolation in order to avoid the analytical, physician's eyes of Lucanus. He had tended me throughout the first phase of the sickness, to be sure, the fever and the draining weakness it entailed, but as soon as the fever had passed I had removed myself to here, in secrecy made possible only by the fact that Ambrose and Donuil, the only two who knew this place, were both away from Camulod at that time. Here, alone in my Avalon, I had borne the itchy, scaling ugliness of red and angry skin for eight whole days. This time, however, when the itch abated, the scaliness it caused remained, in patches, clear upon the skin above my waist, and lasted for weeks. Even after it had faded, however, I found flakes and patches of discomfort, not painful, and with no itch, but persistent.

Now, as my tears dried, I sat erect and, talking distractedly all the time of slight, inconsequential things to my dead wife Cassandra, who lay beneath the ground close by my side, I unfastened and removed my armour and shrugged out of my tunic, stripping until I wore only my boots, and gazing down at myself almost abstractedly, searching my body for deliverance from the horror in my soul, hearing some tiny voice of sanity within my mind urging me to be calm and search with care, and to draw strength from what my eyes told me: my skin was clean and sound, my body whole, and the contagion that so threatened me lay in my mind alone, huddled among my other, twisted and obscene night fantasies. But my eyes went directly to the site of all my fears.

The hair on my chest was blond and soft, approaching whiteness in its downy goldenness, but there was one patch, slightly larger than the first joint of my thumb and roughly circular in shape, that was pure white. Beneath it, faint yet noticeable, the skin around the edges of the area was pink, approaching redness, and the central area of skin was as white as the hair it bore. It seemed hardly significant, a small anomaly, but I had seen such marks before, on Mordechai's own chest. They were the early lesions of the foulest sickness known to man, the awful, lingering death-in-life called leprosy.

I noticed some time later that my blood was still bright red and clean- looking as it oozed from the skin around my knife point, and only then did I realise what I had done. The wound in my breast was a fingersbreadth deep, the knife blade sharply angled to cut beneath the lesion and slip on between my ribs into my heart. And then I was on my feet again, throwing the dagger from me so that it splashed into the shallows of the lake, and I was drenched in chilling, icy sweat. So close had I come to ultimate despair! Terrified now with a different kind of fear, I sprang to my feet and shrugged into my tunic again, pulling it quickly over my head to cover my nakedness and ignoring the blood streaming from my chest. I then seized my bow and quiver without thought, and leapt up onto Germanicus. My feet found the stirrups by habit, and I sank my spurs cruelly into the horse, sending him surging forward in a bounding leap so that he took the pathway at the gallop, branches whipping wildly at my face and arms as we crashed up the hill. Once on the top, I rowelled him again, spurring him viciously as he thundered across the hillside, avoiding trees, bushes and scattered rocks at breakneck speed and keeping his feet beneath him only by the grace of God. For miles we rode that way, our pace unflagging, until I felt the great horse falter as he gained a crest and I knew that he would soon fall dead.

Ashamed, and panting with exhaustion myself, I reined him to a halt and stripped the saddle from him, making a penance of the strength I used to groom him and to wipe him down, and hugging his great neck against my face until his laboured breathing and the trembling in his limbs had subsided. Then, after an age, when he was calm and breathing normally again, I led him down to water at a brook, after which I turned him free to graze, seating myself upon a fallen log and watching him with an ache inside my breast.

Within the space of one short hour, I had come close to killing both myself and my horse. Self-loathing roiled inside me and I found myself despising my own weakness, for what was sickness, if not weakness?

The blood on my chest had dried. I pulled my tunic off again and examined the wound. It had scabbed over, but when I probed it with a fingertip I felt nothing, and I recalled what Lucanus had said about the lesions. They were numb, incapable of registering sensations. I sighed and replaced my tunic, feeling dead inside, then led Germanicus back to where his saddle lay and harnessed him again.

As I swung myself up to his back again, I heard the sound of distant hoofbeats, clear in the still air of the afternoon, drumming hard against the hillside far below, on the other side of the crest of the small hill on which I sat. I realised then that I had no idea where I was. I had paid no attention to the path we followed when we left the valley, riding blindly over hill and dale in my despair. Now, although I had no real interest other than dulled curiosity, and simply because it seemed the natural thing to do, I kicked Germanicus forward to the crest to see who had intruded upon my solitude.

I recognised Shelagh immediately, though she was far distant and riding towards me through a screen of low bushes and small saplings. All riders have a personal style that makes them instantly recognisable to those who know them, and there was no mistaking Shelagh's. She was flat out, bent forward almost over her mount's ears, her long hair flying free behind her. My first reaction was pleasant surprise, but that was quickly followed by alarm. She was alone, and she should not have been. She had set out much earlier that day with Julia and Ludmilla and the children to go swimming in the wide and shallow river hole that was a favourite spot with all the youth of Camulod.