Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

"Lady. How is he?"

Ludmilla, too, spoke softly, her voice barely more than a whisper. "He is well. Asleep. Lucanus gave him a sleeping draught against the pain."

"Is his wound bad?"

"No, merely superficial. He was fortunate. Lucanus stitched him up and he should mend completely within the week. My name is Ludmilla."

I saw him nod. "Ludmilla . . . what?"

"Sir?"

"Ludmilla what? Have you no other name?"

"Oh, I see." I could tell she was smiling. "No Roman name in the style you would recognize. I am of the house of Pendragon, cousin to Uther. Ludmilla Pendragon, then, would be my Roman appellation."

"Ludmilla Pendragon . . . I am Ambrose Britannicus, half-brother to Caius Merlyn."

"No! Had I not heard you say so I should never have guessed." I heard pure raillery in her whispered tone, and so did Ambrose, but he mistook it for scorn. I opened my eyes fully and saw him flush even deeper.

"Forgive me, Lady," he said, appalled. "Have I offended you?"

Ludmilla was instantly contrite and moved towards him quickly, hand outstretched. "No, that was cruel of me. I did not mean to tease you, but did you honestly think I could be in any doubt of who you are? The resemblance between the two of you has been the major topic of conversation in Camulod since the first moment you were seen. Shall I wake Commander Merlyn? Do you wish to speak to him?"

"No! Not yet." He smiled, now, gaining confidence. "I would much rather speak to you first, before anyone else appears. How is it that I could be here for weeks and not have seen you?"

No raillery now. Ludmilla had evidently been asking herself the same question and her voice betrayed that. "I don't know," she whispered.

"Would you not at least have come, through curiosity, to see this marvel of comparison?"

"There is no comparison, but no, I would not."

"I do not understand. No comparison?"

"Please, Commander Ambrose, be seated." Her voice was gentle and Ambrose sat down obediently, his eyes never leaving her for an instant as she moved to stand closer to him. "I have many duties," she went on, "and in these last weeks they seemed to swarm upon me. I heard all about the marvel of your resemblance to Commander Merlyn, but I know Commander Merlyn well, by sight, and I find him amiable and admirable."

"But?" Ambrose leaned forward, an elbow on one knee. "You did not speak the word, but my ears heard a 'but' in there, somewhere."

Ludmilla giggled gently, something I could not remember having heard her do before.

"Your ears are keen . . . Let me see, then. How shall I put this? I cannot, without sounding improper and immodest, but I will in spite of that . . . Commander Merlyn is a wondrous man and everything a woman looks for in a man is there in him. For me, however, there is a blindness involved. I find him amiable and admirable; as I have said, but he holds no wonder for me. Do you understand that? I feel towards him as I would towards a brother. And therefore, when the talk was all of you and how much you two were alike, I found it no great sacrifice to dedicate what time I had to my duties. They were pressing and necessary, whereas the simple meeting of another amiable brother seemed to have no urgency. Does that make sense? I simply did not know . . ."

A pause of heartbeats, during which I decided it was time I sprang awake, but before I could do anything, Ambrose asked his next question. "Did not know what, Lady?"

"How different two identicals could be."

I coughed and spoke, "Ambrose," and in an instant they were both beside me, Ludmilla taking my right hand to feel my pulse, and Ambrose seizing the other to wring it heartily. Several moments of activity went by before I could ask the question that superseded all others in my mind.

"Did you catch Ironhair?"

"No, Brother. We caught his companions, three of them, but he was not with them."

"What do you mean? Where was he, then?"

He shook his head. "We don't know. The other three swore he left them as soon as they reached the bottom of the road down from the gates. He swung off to the north, they said, leaving them to make their own way south and east to Isca and thence to the coast and Gaul."

"Where are they now, these three? Did you bring them back with you?"

"No, they are on their way to their destination."

"What?" I attempted to sit up and merely managed to drive the breath from myself in a whoosh of pain.

Ambrose waited until I had recaptured my breathing, then resumed. "They told me they did not know him well, that they had met him only days earlier, him and one other, on the way to Camulod. They themselves had come to deliver a cargo of wine, ordered by our quartermasters this time last year. Ironhair rejoined them as they were preparing to leave, during the funeral or shortly after it, and rode with them from the fort. I believed their story, and did not interfere with them any further."

"What do you mean you believed them? Why should you believe them? And why permit them to go on?"

He looked at me wide-eyed, his eyebrows high on his forehead. "I mean I believed them, Caius, nothing more than that. They had made no attempt to flee from us, or hide. When we approached them, they were prepared to fight, as anyone would be on meeting a force of strangers on the road, but once they saw who we were, they offered us no contest and were courteous and open with us. I believed them implicitly. They spoke the truth. I have met liars before, you know."

There was nothing I could say to that without sounding completely boorish. I let go my breath with a sigh. "Aye, you're right. I had no right to snap at you. I am angry Ironhair escaped, that is all."

"He will turn up again, sooner or later, Cay, and if he does, you'll have him. And even if he should never appear again, you will benefit by that; all of us will."

"Aye. What hour of night is it?"

He grinned at me. "Late. We returned some hours ago, but I met Luke and he told me you were a prisoner of Morpheus and would remain that way for hours, so I bathed and had some food."

"Good. I hope your bath was uninterrupted?"

"No one attacked me."

"Excellent." I sighed again, uncomfortable with my injuries. "Ludmilla, did Lucanus leave any more of that foul brew he fed me? I'll never get back to sleep without it."

She had moved away while Ambrose and I were speaking, but now she reappeared, holding a cup. "Yes, Commander, I have it here." She held it for me while I gagged it down, and then she and Ambrose returned to their fascination with each other. Neither of them was any more aware than I was of when I fell asleep again.

IX

We. had received no further news of Peter Ironhair by the time we eventually left Camulod nine days later. He had disappeared completely, swallowed up by the forests that stretched unbroken in every direction beyond our fields, and I was forced to come to terms with the fact that there was nothing I could do to remedy that, other than to keep searchers in the field in the increasingly forlorn hope they might stumble upon his hiding-place. I called them off after a wasted week. In the interim, however, I had mended quickly enough, although I bitterly resented the enforced idleness. Luke had estimated the healing time to the day.

I had put the time, which otherwise would have been lost, to good use, nevertheless, even though it was to be years before I saw the benefits of my days of convalescence. I had begun with impatience, thinking fretfully about the child now held in Eire, and what he would mean to my great-aunt and to all of us in Camulod in the years to come. From that point, I began to think more analytically about what the future might hold for him, and that led me to a train of thought that was completely new to me: the problems any and all children must face, growing to maturity in the bubbling broth of the Britain that was forming now and changing from day to day, sinking towards anarchy and chaos. Those problems would be particularly enhanced when the child in question was blessed, or encumbered, with the blood that flowed in young Arthur's veins. By the time my thoughts had clarified along those lines, I was in a fever of impatience to discuss the matters in my mind with someone, any one of my closest friends. But Ambrose was patrolling again, Donuil had his own duties and Lucanus was Lucanus, constantly immersed in his surgical responsibilities. I spent most of that frustrating week alone.