Jack Whyte - The Eagles' Brood

And as I rode further and further west after leaving the great road, I began to see signs of depredation all around me: burned farmsteads; charred and shattered houses; dangling, withered corpses in the trees; meadows strewn with the skeletal remains of soldiers and horses. And no people. None at all. The land lay empty and devastated, and my anger grew, feeding upon itself.

And then, on a morning bright with sun and the song of larks, I breasted a hill and found fresh corpses sprawled in the autumn grass in my path. I reined in immediately, scanning ahead for possible danger, but whatever peril there might have been earlier had moved on.

Satisfied that the dead and I were alone, I dismounted and went to examine them more closely. They were strangers all, but very newly dead, their flesh still warm, their blood yet liquid, and I left them where they lay.

A short time later, seen only by a pair of eagles circling high above, I stopped by the side of a small, swift-running freshet, stripped and bathed, shivering with the cold, and then allowed the sun's warmth to dry me. I pulled on a fresh, light, clean tunic, then unpacked and shrugged into the ring armour I had adapted from the Saxon devices of the same kind. Mine was designed for a horseman—a heavy coat with a wide-skirted tail ample enough to spread when I was mounted to cover my own and my horse's haunches, and long, loose-legged trousers. The suit was made from well-worked, supple, black-dyed leather and covered with many thousands of tiny, overlapping rings of iron, brass and copper wire that would stop a hard-swung sword, a thrown spear, or an arrow fired from any but a long, Celtic bow. It covered me from neck to ankle and, while it was cumbersome to wear afoot, it served its purpose magnificently when I was mounted.

When I was fully armoured, my long surcoat securely buckled down the side, I repacked and restowed all my gear, then donned my great black cloak with its emblazoned silver bear. I still wore my silvered Roman helmet with its black plume and full cheek-plates—I had not yet been able to improve on that design—and now I strung the great, horned African bow of Publius Varrus and slung it across my shoulders with a full quiver of long arrows. The black war cloak was heavy on such a hot day—it drew the heat of the sun into itself immediately—but I wanted Uther to know who was coming long before I reached him; and the discomfort involved in wearing it was unimportant. By my right knee, slung through three rings attached to a long, flat piece of toughened leather hide, hung my cross-hilted cavalry sword. On the other side, the hook attached to hold my iron flail glittered, unused. I dug in my spurs and my big black surged forward, leading its consorts.

I had crossed the highest ground in Cornwall, it appeared, for from that point onward the land fell away beneath me, each successive hilltop lower than the one that had preceded it, until eventually I approached the sea coast, seeing from afar the sunlight glittering on the sparkling surface of the waters that stretched beyond the horizon. There, in the valley bottom beneath the last upsurge of coastal hillside, I found the massive track of a passing army, coming from the highlands to my right and proceeding westward, along the coastline. The debris they had left behind lay scattered everywhere and the scene of their passing was a broad riverbed of bruised and flattened grass the width of the valley bottom, winding away from sight to disappear into the south-eastern hills. They had passed by perhaps the day before, no more than that. The grass, I knew, would show little sign of their passing by this time tomorrow.

Without pausing, I put the spurs to the black's flank, heading downhill and cross-slope to find and follow the broad swath. My way was clearly marked and my apprehension grew with every mile. I found the first corpses within four miles of joining the wide track. There had been a skirmish, probably a rearguard action, and Uther's people had not been victorious. All of the dead wore Uther's red dragon blazon, and there was a heap of them, some twenty in number, who lay piled together without weapons. They had been wounded earlier, dragged together, and killed out of hand. All their throats were cut.

From that point onward, I was seldom out of sight of death in one form or another. Several of the bodies I found wore the black boar of Cornwall, but the great majority wore the red Pendragon mark, and too many wore the armour of Camulod. I stopped counting when I had reached several hundred. After that, I simply rode and looked, goading my horses to move more and more quickly through a landscape littered with slain men who had died fighting, and hanged men who had not, and butchered men who had been bound and then casually slaughtered, and among and around all of them were the carrion crows and other loathsome creatures that far outnumbered their silent hosts and feasted on the fruits of men's hatred of one another.

And then I found a living man, who caught my eye by moving. He was above me on a steep hillside, and I pulled my horse up sharply, dropping the reins and whipping my bow into readiness and taking aim before I realized he wore my own uniform: the black and silver Roman-styled armour of Caius Merlyn Britannicus of Camulod. I lowered my weapon and started up the hillside towards him as he began to walk downhill, lurching and staggering. When less than thirty paces separated us, he fell forward onto his face and rolled down almost beneath my horse's feet. Even as he fell I recognized the face beneath the crusted blood that obscured it. It was young Marcus Bassus, one of my most promising junior commanders and the fourth consecutive member of his family to serve loyally in the forces of our Colony.

I was off my horse before Bassus stopped rolling down the hillside, and I cradled him as gently as I could while I looked around for some spot where I could lodge him without further danger. I thought at first he was already dead, but he was only deeply unconscious and I took advantage of that to drag him across the slope to a spot that was grassy and almost flat. There I undid his breastplate, cutting the blood-slick leather straps, and examined his wounds, seeing at once that he was far, far gone. An arrow had pierced deeply beneath his armpit, striking downward from behind and freakishly finding a path between his ribs and deep into his chest. He must have had his arm extended above his head when he was shot. The arrow had broken off at some time—I could not remember having seen it as he approached me—and only a broken stub, less than the length of my thumb, projected from the wound, greasy with partially congealed blood and crusted with dirt. The jagged end of it had torn the inside of his arm, ripping the muscles there and leaving a gristly mess. I had time to bathe his face and pad the inside of his arm against the splintered arrow- stem with a piece of cloth before his eyelids fluttered open.

He knew me, and he was in control of his senses, and in the quarter-hour before I left him there he told me, speaking in a thin, pain-filled voice and breathing in fast, agonizing but shallow gasps, something of what had happened in the previous few days.

Uther, he said, had blundered badly, miscalculating several elements like a man under a curse. He had a spy within Lot's camp, it appeared, who had provided him with a detailed report convincing him that Lot's main force had been committed in the south-east, prior to Uther's arrival in the west, against the incursion of a large Saxon army. Lot had as usual, the story went, sent his army off without him, and had immured himself to await reinforcements in one of his northern strongholds. Once told of this, and believing his source implicitly, Uther had determined to march northward quickly to the coast, there finally to bring Lot to battle before his expected allies could arrive. Thus determined, Uther had refused to listen to the advice of his senior officers, basing everything on the gamble that Lot's main army was safely committed in the south-east against the Saxons and would await Lot's arrival. In the meantime, Uther believed he had the advantage of surprise, with Lot safely bottled up in a minor stronghold that would not be able to withstand a siege. He had ignored the misgivings of his advisers, who had urged him to protect his back against attack from the north-west where, according to other rumours they had heard, a new army of Hibernian Scots mercenaries, the ferocious warriors who were becoming known as galloglas, was on its way to join Lot's summer war.