Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

I was awake soon after dawn broke the following morning, and then, having thrown myself naked and bed-warm into the waters of the lake and towelled myself dry by the edge of Cassandra's grave with the lining of my cloak, I decided that I was not yet ready to ride back to Camulod. I was hungry, and I felt wonderful, at peace with myself and my life for the first time since regaining my memory, so I spent an hour fishing and broke my fast on two succulent trout. I spent the remainder of the morning simply lazing around after hauling a fresh supply of firewood from the depths of the woods that occupied most of the valley. Eventually, however, I could procrastinate no longer and I took the road homeward around the middle of the afternoon. Even then, I took a longer route home than was necessary, aware of the needlessness of secrecy now that Cassandra was gone. Yet I had always been jealous of the privacy afforded me by the enchanted and enchanting little place I called Avalon, and aware of a genuine need to keep all signs of my coming and going disguised from others' eyes. My father had known the place many years before I did, and so had Publius Varrus, and although neither of them had been fanciful enough to name the valley, neither had betrayed its location to anyone else other than Aunt Luceiia. Both men had told me long before, when I was a mere boy, that I should keep the knowledge of this spot close to myself, because it would afford me sanctuary at times when I required to be alone, free of the problems of others. Now, besides myself, only five other living souls that I knew of were aware of its existence: Luceiia Britannicus, Daffyd, my Druid friend and his two apprentices Tumac and Mod, and Donuil Mac Athol, my former hostage, now my friend, whose continuing absence had now begun to worry me in spite of the fact that I knew my concern was foolish. He had been gone six weeks, but I had mentally accorded his task three months. Six more weeks, then, might well elapse before I had any real cause for concern about his welfare. On the other hand, the child Arthur could come to harm in the foreign place where he was held, in spite of the fact that it was Donuil's home, long before Donuil returned to Camulod and then travelled with me across the sea to his home in Hibernia, which he called Eire.

I rode in a dream, so lulled by my own unaccustomed peace of mind that I committed errors of carelessness for which I would have had my own troopers harshly disciplined. Almost without noticing, I reached the Cut and swung my horse into it, lost in the beauty of afternoon and the peaceful trilling of the myriad birds in the forest on either side of the path I travelled. It was only the flight of a hare that made me take note of where I was, as it leaped almost from beneath my horse's feet, startling him so that he reared and would have thrown me had I not already been leaning forward, slouched over my saddle horn. The hare went bounding ahead of me, straight as the crow flies, up the narrow incline of the Cut for a good two hundred paces before swerving suddenly to disappear among the heavy growth on my right. Startled by my own heedlessness, I began to pay more attention to my surroundings, but the day was still peaceful and I remained at ease. Soon I began to wonder, as so often before, about the origins of this anomalous stretch of unfinished road that had been called the Cut since time immemorial. It was, or had been, the beginnings of a road; there was not the slightest doubt of that. As a boy, I had dug, with Uther, and found the base layers of the Roman construction. The anomaly lay in the fact that the road had been begun but never completed. The Romans had been meticulous and painstaking in their road-building. Once they began, they always completed their constructions; except, apparently, in this one particular case.

Local legend had it that, in the earliest days of the Roman conquest of Britain launched by the Emperor Claudius but conducted by Aulus Plautius, Legio II Augusta, the Second Legion, known as the Augusta, under the command of Vespasian, who would later become Emperor, had begun to build a march route north-westward into the lands of the Durotriges, the original Celts of our region, intending to establish a fortress on the north coast of the Cornish Peninsula. The Durotriges, however, had proved to be as warlike as the Iceni in the northeast and had contested the Roman right of way hotly, harassing the expedition to such effect that the roadworks had been abandoned before they could be completed, the troops involved being required much more urgently further to the southwest. In the aftermath of a hard-won Roman victory, in which the Durotriges, in alliance with the Dumnonii of the far southwest, went down to defeat, the Augusta had settled in Isca, and no purpose had ever emerged for the abandoned road, which had thus been left unfinished. Now, four hundred years later, its path was still clearly discernible, particularly here where it ran arrow-straight for eleven miles before ending abruptly in deep forest. All it had lacked was the finishing layer of paving stones, and the solidity of its construction—it had been incised right down to bedrock along this stretch—had successfully withstood the ravages of the forest for four centuries. An occasional large tree grew out of its foundations, belying its subsurface density, but by and large the Cut retained its essential nature, a long, straight, treeless, man-made incursion into the heart of the thick forests of Britain.

The gradient I had been following was so gentle as to be almost imperceptible, but I knew that anyone approaching me from the opposite direction would be looking down on me and would be aware of me for miles before I became aware of them. I travelled less than two miles along the Cut, however, before veering off to my right and making my way downhill again into more open grassland beyond the heavy forest, about ten miles from Camulod. I could see open land ahead of me, screened by only a fringe of trees, when I found the entrails of a deer which, from the condition of the remains, I knew had been killed the previous day, and probably late in the afternoon or early evening. It took no great degree of woodcraft to tell that there had been four or five in the hunting party; no care had been taken by anyone to conceal the signs of their presence. Cautiously, I followed the signs and found an abandoned encampment less than a mile away, which I estimated had housed upwards of twenty men, several of them with horses. The ashes of the four fires I found were still warm, one of them almost hot enough to contain live embers, so whoever these people were, they had moved on only recently and were still close by. Returning to my horse, I took my helmet from where it hung on my saddle horn and fitted it snugly on my head, fastening the chin strap.

I travelled more quickly now and far more circumspectly, taking the shortest, most direct route to the Colony while seeking the most concealment I could find, intent on raising the alarm. What kind of traveller, I asked myself, leaves an encampment late in the course of a day? I had immediately dismissed any possibility that they might be my own people. This party was made up of horsemen and foot-soldiers. Their signs were clear. Our patrols were never mixed, they were either one or the other, and our foot-soldiers wore hobnailed boots. The footprints I had seen around the fires were smooth-soled, lacking the hard edges common to our footwear. I rode around and down the side of a hill to find myself trapped in an open amphitheatre surrounded by dense trees. I saw movement on my right first, a flash of yellow among the greenery, and then the unmistakable glint of light upon iron. I swung hard left, kicking my horse uphill, but before I could begin to ride that way I saw five men above me, watching me. In my first glance I saw their horned helmets and large, round Saxon shields. Wrenching my mount around I saw, too, that I had been cut off from behind, where another four Saxons, armed with axes and shields, had strung out across my escape route. Germanicus continued to turn, dancing on his hind legs, and I saw the yellow that had first appeared to me, a bright yellow tunic, worn by a huge, bearded man who now stood in the open, surrounded by a group of eight or nine others. All of them had either spears or axes, the Saxons' favourite weapon, and I cursed myself uselessly for having left Camulod without my great bow. I accepted that I was a dead man; it was only the manner of my death that had to be resolved now. And then I saw my escape route: a narrow cleft in a massive stone outcrop on the hillside some fifty paces ahead and to my left, a natural split in the rock, offering me at least the hope of a defence. I dug my spurs into my horse's flanks and charged ahead as my assailants began to run towards me from all sides.