Jack Whyte - The Eagles' Brood

"Caius Britannicus?"

The speaker was evidently their leader, and as I nodded, I drank in every detail of the man. He was older than me, considerably older, somewhere in his mid-fifties, I guessed, but he had the unmistakable bearing and authority of a professional soldier and a born leader. His uniform was magnificent: helmet, breastplate, armoured kilt and leggings of rich bronze inlaid with gold, all worn over a tunic so white that it dazzled the eyes. A rolled cloak of magnificent deep blue lay tethered over his horse's withers.

"That is my name."

"Well met, then! We are all greatly in your debt. I know not where you and your men came from, but I thank God you did, when you did." He pointed upwards, towards the point at the top of the cliff behind me. "Had it not been for your arrival and the assistance we received from someone up yonder, I doubt that any of us would have lived to see the sun set today. The heathen had us neatly trapped and would have picked us off one at a time." He glanced back at me and smiled then, his whole face transformed into a glow of warmth, and seemed to shake himself mentally. "But please," he said, pointing towards the ruined farm in the distance. "Allow me to be hospitable. We spent last night among the ruins down there, little thinking we would have unwelcome guests by morning, and we were comfortable for a while. Will you and your men be my guests for today?"

"Happily," I said, already feeling a profound liking for the man. I turned to where my troop leader Cyrus Appius sat listening on my right and told him to collect the men and bring them on down to the farm. The few wounded would be tended by Lucanus and the squad seconded to him for that purpose.

"Forgive my asking, but why did you allow them to hold you trapped you like that?" I was riding beside the leader, conscious of the fact that he had not told me his name. "I mean, you're cavalry. You could have broken out easily."

"Aye, but there are not enough of us. Less than twenty fighters. We could have broken out, but we have priests with us, a large party of them. They would have been easy pickings for the Saxons. Couldn't just leave them there, could I? By the time I broke out, fought through them, regrouped and swung around again to attack, the Saxons would have been inside, behind the walls, and they would have been able to keep us out. I did not think I could make it work, so I had decided to stay where I was and fight it out. They had us by at least three to one. But where in Hades did you come from? You're not Regular Army, that's obvious, since there is no Regular Army in Britain any more. So who are you? And what are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere with two hundred cavalry? And how did you come upon us?"

My horse had fallen back slightly as the stranger was talking, and now I kneed him forward, coming up alongside the man again. "We're on our way north and, as I said, we were hunting. Some of the towns we've passed seem plague-ridden, so we've avoided them. But because of that, we've been unable to buy food, so I sent out hunting parties this morning. My own party was up on the escarpment there when we heard the noise of your fight. The rest you know."

He swung his head around, looking at me wide-eyed. 'That was you, up there? The bowmen, up on the cliff?"

I shrugged and grinned. "Yes, myself and two others. We saw you from the top of the escarpment yonder, up by the falls, and we came down to help. Donuil, here, ran back and roused the others and brought them down by the road over there to the north."

He blinked again, his eyes filled with something like awe. "Well, Commander," he said eventually. "You leave me with nothing to say, but you will forgive me if I regard you for a while as some kind of deus ex machina, for your arrival and intercession seem truly supernatural." I shrugged again, suddenly uncomfortable and unsure of how to respond. He changed the subject abruptly. "You're headed north, you say. So are we. To Verulamium."

Now I grinned at him. "I had guessed as much. It's the only reason I could come up with for your being here. I reasoned that you must be escorting priests to hear Germanus the Bishop debate with our bishops." He drew his horse to a halt and turned to look more closely at me, hitching himself sideways to see me better, an expression I took to be one of rueful surprise on his face. I grinned again. "Am I correct?"

His mouth twisted into a small grin, too, and he twitched his head in a gesture that fell only slightly short of acknowledgement.

"Almost," he said. "I am Germanus the Bishop."

XXXIII

My first impressions of Bishop Germanus and his associates were chaotic—a series of disconnected images rendered the more haphazard by the giddiness and excitement of victory, with the milling, undisciplined euphoria it generated, and then further befuddled by my profound shock over Germanus's revelation of his own identity. A warrior bishop was alien to my experience, a complete contradiction in terms to one who had grown to manhood knowing bishops only as gentle, frequently reclusive men of peace and pacifism. I had known, of course, that Germanus had been a soldier, with a long and successful career as an Army Staff Officer, and that he had retired as a full Legate—a General commanding an entire Army Group. But I had given no thought at all to the means by which the transition from general to bishop, from man of war to man of God, had been achieved. Somehow, through sheer indifference, I had allowed myself to accept, without consideration or question, the notion of a nebulous, mystical metamorphosis of the nature of the man involved—from militant to penitent; from chalk to cheese; from one archetype to another. Now that I was shocked into confronting my own malformed expectations, I immediately acknowledged the impossibility involved. It was inconceivable that Germanus the Bishop would react to aggression and physical threat in a way that was fundamentally different from the reaction one would expect of Germanus the Legate. The man before me now was an anomaly unlike any other in my experience: a devout man of God, thoroughly trained and experienced in warfare. It was a radical and unexpected combination.

Germanus must have read my consternation in my eyes, for he laughed suddenly and pulled his mount into a high, prancing turn that left him close to me on my left side, and leant forward to speak for my ears alone.

"Our gentle Master bade us turn the other cheek to those who would defame us, Caius Merlyn, but he seized a whip Himself when He was outraged in the Temple." He nodded towards the Saxon corpses that littered the hillside. "Turn the other cheek to such as these, my friend, and they'll rip off your Christian ears, before they remove your head." He smiled at me then, a warm and friendly smile. "See to your troops. We'll talk back at our camp yonder."

We exchanged nods and I watched him ride off with his followers before I turned to my own men, who were even now assembling their formations. Lucanus, I saw, had already sent the wounded, on a series of litters, down to the camp below and was now riding slowly towards me. I waited until he reached me and then gave the signal to my men to move off, pulling aside with him to watch them ride past. In the distance, behind them, our heavy wagons were trundling slowly down the road from the ridge above.

"Well, Lucanus? How badly did we fare?"

"Six wounded, none seriously now. The seventh died— the one with the axe wound. We were fortunate to escape so lightly. Who was that you were talking to? Their leader?"

"Yes, in more ways than one. That's the man we came to hear. Bishop Germanus."

I watched his eyes widen in amazement, much as my own must have done.

"A bishop? Leading cavalry?"

"No," I told him, grinning. "A soldier, doing God's work as best he can."