Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

I pulled my horse to a stop and so did he, and we sat staring at each other for long moments. "Well," I asked him eventually, "what have you to say to that?"

"Tell me about these dreams."

For the next hour, until we reached the Roman road and stopped to wait for the others to catch up, I told him everything I could recall of every prophetic dream that had ever harrowed me, including the deaths of Equus, Picus our father and Uther, and the apparition of Ygraine before I ever saw her. When I had finished speaking he sat silent for a long time, and then he asked me a surprising question.

"The child, Arthur. Did you dream of him?"

I thought about that for a moment. "Of him? No. But I dreamed something with him, when we lay asleep in the birney, off the Cornish coast. At least, I think I did. Not a dream, perhaps, but a fragment."

"What was it?"

"A sword, standing in a stone. That's all I can remember."

"A sword? Standing in a stone, not on one?"

"No. In it. Point down. I don't remember it well, but I do recall that."

"Was it Excalibur?"

"It may have been, but I don't really know. I think I would have recognised Excalibur. Why do you ask that?"

"Because Excalibur came from a stone. The Skystone."

"Hmm. That had not occurred to me. Now that you mention it, of course, it becomes obvious. That's probably the explanation for what I dreamed. As I said, it was strange, and only a fragmentary thing, but it was not frightening, like all the others."

He sat gazing at me with narrowed eyes, his mind obviously elsewhere, but before I could ask him what he was thinking I heard the jingle of harness back along the path and the first of our companions came into view, riding now ahead of Luke and his wagon. Ambrose flicked a glance back towards them and leaned closer to me.

"We must talk more about these dreams, Brother, but I doubt if you should fear them. I believe they occur, and I believe they are prophetic, but I cannot think of them as being omens of evil, not in you. They come to you for a purpose, and there is power in them. You must learn to use that power."

Our companions were upon us by that time and I could do no more than nod my agreement before they joined us, loud and brash and gay now with their new-won freedom. Ambrose left us there, by the side of the great road, after wishing us well on our journey and we watched him until he had disappeared, waving back over his head as he put his spurs to his big horse.

"Well, my friends, we won't get to Eire by sitting here." We swung north and left Camulod behind us.

Donuil's remark about attracting unwelcome attention became reality far sooner than any of us expected. It occurred some time in the course of our second day of travel, although we remained unaware of the fact until after we had made camp and eaten a hot meal. We had built our encampment in the southwest corner of a long-abandoned Roman route camp, in the shelter of two corner walls that looked as strong as the day they were built, centuries earlier, and we had posted two sentries. Mine was to have been the third watch, and I was on my way to sleep when Rufio, Donuil's centurion mentor, approached me casually and threw an arm around my shoulders. I knew immediately that something was wrong, because none of my men, particularly Rufio, who held me in some awe, would have dared actually to touch me in the normal way of things. There was no rule against their touching me; it was simply the way things were. Forewarned by his direct approach, I betrayed no surprise and as we walked together towards my tent he told me that we were being watched. He had seen movement in the bushes around the walls, but had no idea of how many men were out there.

Careful now to do nothing that would signal our awareness of being observed, I turned back and moved to where Donuil had already stood up from the fire. He, too, had noticed the way Rufio approached me. I briefed him quickly and then quietly, moving unconcernedly, we alerted the others and unobtrusively doubled the guard before retiring as we would have normally. Few of us had any sleep that night, lying awake and waiting for the alarm, but nothing happened.

When daylight came, we broke camp routinely and moved out, having seen no sign of anything unusual. Rufio, however, found the fresh tracks of six men in the area where he had seen the shadowed movements the previous night. We rode on, wary and alert, our weapons close to hand. All day we rode steadily, though not in haste, stopping only to relieve ourselves, and as evening approached we made camp again, this time some distance from the road, on a grassy knoll protected on three sides by a fair-sized, swift-flowing river. We ate a cold supper from our saddlebags that night, since hunting was out of the question. It would have been folly for any man to ride off alone to hunt for meat. Again, we were watched but unmolested and again Rufio found the same signs of six men come morning. This time he called me over to look at how two particular pairs of footprints identified the group, whoever they were. The first belonged either to a giant or to a man whose feet would appear grotesquely large; the second to either a child or a dwarf. Lucanus had been watching me and he called to me as I went to mount my horse after examining the tracks in the soft earth no more than twenty paces from where we had lain.

"Cay, come, ride with me for a spell."

When I had tethered my horse to the back of his wagon, I pulled my bow stave and quiver from their wrappings and clambered up onto the bench beside him. He clucked at his horses and slapped the reins, and we moved forward with a lurch.

"Same people as before?" I grunted an affirmative, my mind still upon the disparity in size between the two pairs of unusual footprints. "Well," he urged me. "What do you think? Will they attack us?"

I grunted a negative this time and busied myself with stringing my bow before answering him properly, bracing the end of the stave against the wagon's wood frame and bending the bow with my foot. Strung, the weapon was formidable. I pulled it, feeling my shoulder muscles flex and harden against the tension of the compound arc. "I doubt it," I answered him then. "We are fourteen, eleven of us armoured soldiers, and they are six. So long as we stay together we'll be safe enough. They're probably hoping we'll split up, so they can take us piecemeal." I propped the bow beside me, leaning it against the bench, within easy reach.

Lucanus was looking at me quizzically. "You don't think they know we know they're there?" His voice held mild disbelief.

"No, I don't." I selected an arrow from the quiver on the seat beside me and held it up to my eye, squinting along it. It was straight and true. "Think about it, Luke. If they suspected we were aware of them, then they would know we'd stay together, safe in our numbers. Knowing that, they wouldn't be here now. They'd have gone looking for easier prey."

"Hmm. So what d'you intend to do about them?"

"Nothing, except hope they'll give up and go away. I certainly don't intend to fight them if I don't have to. But I'm worried about you. How far are we from your friend's settlement?"

"I don't really know, but we'll know when we come to the inn called the Red Dragon. I expect we should be there by tomorrow afternoon."

"Good, but after that you have ten miles or so to ride west alone, while we keep going north. Let's hope our friends out there become impatient before then and disappear. Otherwise we'll have to escort you all the way to where you're going. Can't let you ride off alone with a wagon full of goods and six thieves waiting for you to do exactly that, can I?"

Instead of answering, he surprised me by changing the subject. "How d'you feel about Ludmilla nowadays, Caius?"

I absorbed the non sequitur and merely grinned, knowing what was coming. "Better than I have in a long time," I answered him. "Now that she is completely besotted with Ambrose, and he with her, I seldom think about her, other than as a future sister."