Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

"Suspend your judgment until you know me better, King Athol," I heard myself say in a tone suddenly distant and formal. "We are far more closely bound than you suspect."

The king frowned slightly now, puzzled, the small smile still upon his lips. Then, in wary recognition of my sudden formality, he rose slowly to face me, settling himself firmly in an attitude of wariness, his weight distributed evenly on spread feet, his body seeming to lean slightly forward as though to resist the pressure of anything I might throw at him. All of us watched him as he did so, awaiting a further reaction, although for a spell he did not respond beyond rising, merely scanning my face, particularly my eyes, with his own gaze. I sensed then, rather than saw, Connor's body stiffen on my right, but a hand flick from his father, caught from the corner of my eye, albeit tiny and backhanded as though he waved irritably at a buzzing pest, forestalled any reaction or interruption Connor might have been tempted to make. The silence stretched, and the king's eyes left my face and sought Donuil's. Evidently having found nothing there to alarm him, Athol eventually spoke, in slow, even tones.

"More closely bound than I suspect? How so?"

I knew that my next words would be among the most important I should ever utter. A misplaced inflection or mannerism might bar Arthur, and me, from Camulod forever, confining him, or both of us, to this foreign place as prisoners. I stood up slowly and moved towards the hearth, placing myself so that its fire burned brightly at my back.

"I know more of your family, Sir King, than you do. But before I tell you what I know, I must speak of two things. . . things I must say in advance of anything else, since failure to speak of them now might—no, they would— give Connor, if not you yourself, apparent cause to doubt my truthfulness hereafter."

Even though my heart was galloping like a horse with anticipation of the unknown outcome of my course, I admired the old king's self-possession in the face of what he must have perceived as extraordinary and mystifying behaviour on my part. He merely nodded, maintaining his silence and indicating courteous patience. Connor sat leaning forward, his peg leg straight out before him, his left hand gripping his good knee, his right hand holding his ale pot as though to throw it. Donuil was rubbing his long nose with a forefinger, looking downward.

"The first of these two things is this: I came here, into your kingdom and into your presence, fully resolved to speak my mind and tell you all that I will tell you now. Until moments ago, however, I had intended to speak to you of them some time tomorrow. Donuil and I were discussing that when you invited me here after the feast, and I had just finished telling him I have had no suitable opportunity to speak with you in private since we arrived, and these matters demand privacy, I believe. Now that has changed. We are here, in private, and I cannot, in conscience, hold back longer." I paused and tipped my head towards Donuil. "The major part of what I have to tell you will be attested to by Donuil, who has experienced the truth of it at first hand. The remainder, that which Donuil cannot personally verify, you must judge for yourself, based upon your own assessment of the matters I shall disclose."

Athol nodded once again, concealing any signs of impatience with my hedging, and retaining his outward mien of good-humoured courtesy. He glanced briefly at Donuil, who nodded his head wordlessly. "I accept that," Athol murmured. "Though it sounds mysterious, even ominous. What is the second thing?"

"I will deal with that now," I said, hating the stilted quality I could hear in my own words, yet utterly incapable of changing them. "It concerns the propensity that exists in all of us to cleave to that which we wish to believe, rather than to that which our senses indicate to be the unpalatable truth." I turned my gaze now upon Connor. "Connor, when we first met, when you hauled me out of the sea, I told you the truth. I recognized you, do you recall?"

He nodded, plainly not knowing what was coming next.

"We spoke then of Donuil, and the friendship between him and me. You chose to doubt my truthfulness—a reasonable choice under the circumstances—and decided to keep the child, Arthur, as hostage against the safe return of your brother to your father's Hall; a shrewd ploy, since you well knew the child to be worth more to me than my own life, although you knew not why."

"Aye." Connor's voice was low-pitched. "I was wrong to doubt you, I know now. But I had no way of knowing it then."

"I agree, and I harbour no ill feelings. You freed me thereafter to seek Donuil, and you yourself remained behind to await your sister, Ygraine, disbelieving what I said of that, too."

Now his face flushed red and he moved to struggle to his feet. Again, however, he was restrained by a gesture from his father, whose own voice now betrayed a hint of anger. "What of Ygraine? I have heard nothing of this."

Connor was glaring at me now and answered his father without removing his eyes from mine. "There was nothing to hear, Father. Mere rumours and foolishness."

"Not so!" I turned towards the king, facing him squarely. "Connor refused to accept my word of Ygraine's death, but your daughter died in my own arms, King Athol, on the beach that day that Connor found me. She had fled her husband, Lot of Cornwall, days before, and she and all her women and her guards were slain in a fight I witnessed from afar. I was in pursuit of them, or of the man I thought to be pursuing them, but I arrived too late to be of any help. They were all dead or dying by the time I reached them. Very few of their assailants, a mere handful, had survived the fight. I slew them with my bow." I saw no benefit in adding that I had allowed the last of them, their leader, to depart unmolested.

The king's face had whitened to a pallor resembling the beeswax candles that had so delighted him mere moments earlier, and he clasped his hands out of sight behind his back, closing his eyes with such concentrated effort that the skin tightened upon his face, the wrinkles on his brow smoothing out to show clearly against the paleness of his high forehead. I spoke on gently, attempting to lessen the pain for both men, father and brother.

"I told Connor of this later that day, but he argued that the woman who died in my arms that afternoon could not have been his sister. And, by his lights, I will admit, he had strong room for doubt. I had told him myself that I had never previously met his sister, or even seen her in the flesh. Nor did we find her corpse when we returned to seek it. She, and all the others, had been washed out to sea by the returning tide before we could win back. We found one naked female, floating in the waves, a stranger, unknown to Connor or any of his men. So he reasoned that this woman I had cradled in death was another slain by coincidence upon the strand where he had sought to find his sister. It could not possibly have been Ygraine, he chose to believe, because her bodyguard of your own Scots was strong enough to safeguard her against any danger, as was their blood duty. His reasoning was sound enough, but flawed. His knowledge was incomplete. He had—he could have had—no notion of the carnage that had been wrought for weeks in the blighted Cornish lands through which I had been riding, too late at all times to achieve anything worthwhile in any matter."

Silence, then in a quiet, calm voice: "Yet, knowing that, you made no effort to convince him of his error."

It was a statement, not a question, and I lowered my voice in responding. "No, I did not. I accepted his need to believe what he believed, and saw no profit in angering him. Besides, I had concerns of my own, which would have been endangered had I sought to convince him otherwise."