Jack Whyte - The Eagles' Brood

In the fight that ensued, Popilius experienced for the first time the destructive power of massed Celtic longbows as used by Uther's people. He had fought several times with contingents of Celts using the bows, but nothing he had ever seen had prepared him for what transpired that day. They had dug themselves four pairs of trenches ascending the hillside, and there were fifty men in each trench. Now, responding to voice signals from a leader in each trench, they began to fire in volleys; fifty long, lethal, deadly accurate arrows aimed and launched at a time from either side of the slope, and each flight followed so quickly by another that each rank had barely time to re-nock and pull before its time came round again. It looked, Popilius whispered, as though it were raining arrows.

Each man, he told me, fired ten arrows into a dense- packed target area that was so close it was impossible to miss. Four thousand arrows aimed at fewer than one thousand close-packed men who had nowhere to run in search of cover. It was over in almost less time than it takes to describe. Not one cavalryman went forward to meet an enemy that morning.

When Popilius had finished speaking, I allowed his silence to hang in the air for long moments before I broke it. "Where did Uther's information come from?"

"You tell me."

"Ygraine."

"That's my guess, too." He sighed deeply. "But it's still only a guess, Commander."

"No, it had to be Ygraine. There's no other explanation."

Popilius nodded. "I agree. That first messenger who came that night I was inspecting the guards, the one who wore Lot's boar...he was her man, sent to fetch Uther. I have seen him since, and he was with her when she joined us four days ago."

"She came willingly?"

He grunted. "Aye, and quickly. She had a child with her, too, new born. Lot thinks it's his, apparently, so she must have lain with him at least once in the past year."

"Is it?"

Again came the shake of his white head and a grunt of discomfort as he sought to ease his position. "Your guess is as good as mine. But Uther walks with an extra spring in his step nowadays, it seems to me."

I scrubbed my face with my hands, as though to wash away the need for sleep, although what I was trying to dislodge was a growing need to scream out my outrage. "You've given me much to think about, old friend," I told Popilius, fighting to keep my voice level. "I feel I've slept away two important years and I've much to do to catch up with all that has happened."

He smiled, a brief, wintry grin. "Well, at least you're back, Commander. 'Thank God,' is all I can say. What will you do now?"

"Find Uther immediately. In the meantime, you have your duty to attend to, and it consists of recovering and returning safe to Camulod. We need you, Popilius Cirro. Try to sleep for an hour or so and then send someone to report your presence to Mucius Quinto over on the far side of the field. No point in doing it now, your wounds are dressed and he's too busy to attend to you. As quickly as you can thereafter, get you home again, and don't let Quinto stop until you get there. I have to leave now, but I'll see you back in Camulod."

He grunted again and nodded, looking at me with fondness. "Watch yourself, Commander. Be careful. There's whole armies of dangerous people out there."

I grinned at him. "Didn't anyone ever tell you how dangerous Caius Merlyn Britannicus can be?" I clapped him on the shoulder. "Sleep a while, old friend. Then make enough noise to draw yourself to the attention of our surgeon. Farewell."

XL

The following day, I found Gulrhys Lot, King of Cornwall, hanging from a tree, his hands and feet severed at the wrists and ankles and stuffed into a bag that was tied around his waist. The bag was made of gold brocade and bore the embroidered crimson emblem of Pendragon. The ring finger of his severed right hand still bore his signet: a massive golden ring set with the black boar of Cornwall and proof that the monster was dead.

Ignoring the mystery of my find, I cut the body down and burned it, but I kept the golden signet. I never discovered the truth of how Lot came to die, hanged ignominiously and left to dangle alone and unmourned in a forest glade, his royal seal intact upon his finger in a bag of meat.

I slept that night within a mile of where his ashes smouldered. The smell of his burning was in my clothes and in my hair, and I dreamed dreadful dreams. Sections of armies, bands of fighting men, mounted and afoot, swept and swirled around me in awful silence, though their mouths were wide with screams and their faces harrowed with agony. I saw Lot of Cornwall, mounted on a silver horse, being hit and borne down into a press of bodies, which scattered suddenly to show me Uther, naked and bloodied, his manhood erect with lust, holding Lot's severed, dripping head above his own and laughing in dementia, weeping blood-red tears while I ran towards him, a dagger in my hand, my eyes fixed on the bloodied flail that dangled from his wrist. And suddenly the severed head above Uther was Deirdre's—my Cassandra's—and it was screaming at me, wide-eyed and wide-mouthed, to stay away, to beware, beware, beware; and then came a clanging, echoing blow to my head, a stabbing, crushing pain in my back beneath my ribs and a hideous tearing wrench that started me awake in terror, my heart thudding in my chest. It was morning and the sun was already high.

I lay awake for a long time, unmoving, my mind reeling with the reality of my terror and the unreality of my dream. My back ached agonizingly, just where the dream-blow had struck me, and I knew I had slept upon a surfaced root. Presently, when my heart had slowed down and my breathing returned to normal, I rolled away from it and sat up, rubbing my aching spine. As I rose painfully to my feet, I "looked ruefully for the cause of my discomfort, ashamed of myself for having made a boy's mistake in lying down in such a spot. But there was nothing there. The turf on which I had lain was thick and springy. I knelt again and dug in the grass with my fingertips, clearly seeing the imprint of my body. There was nothing: no root, no stone, no projection of any kind. The mossy turf was smooth and soft and yielding. I stood up hastily, aware of a stirring of superstitious fear, and set about saddling my spare mount, leaving the big black unburdened.

I ate as I travelled, on horseback, chewing dried nuts and chopped, dried apples mixed with roasted grain, and as I progressed the pain in my body receded palpably, drawing back slowly from a point beneath my ribs in front, until it seemed to exit from its starting point low in my back. Within an hour of leaving my campsite, it had vanished completely.

Sometime later, when I dismounted to drink from a swift-flowing stream, I saw my own reflection in a sheltered eddy beneath the bank. The sun was high behind me as I stooped to the surface of the water, its light diffused through my long, yellow hair, and I thought again, with a chill of horror, of Deirdre's severed head in my dream. Uther had held it by the hair, but the hair had been red-gold, and Deirdre's eyes had not been hers but the bright green eyes of someone else. Not Deirdre of the Violet Eyes, for green was never violet, and as Donuil had told me, her hair in girlhood had been deep red, the red of day-old chestnuts, not the golden hue I had seen in my dream. When I knew her, as Cassandra, she had been fair-haired and grey-eyed. This was the stuff of dreams, but the hairs along my spine stiffened in awe. I scooped up some water quickly and was about to drink when something struck me as wrong. I looked more closely, and saw the discoloration. It looked muddy. Silt in the water, I told myself, but I had seen such mud before, too many times.

Less than twenty paces upstream, I found five of my own men of Camulod starting to bloat in the stream bed. I vomited up the thought of what I had almost drunk, and when I had recovered, I went in and pulled them out, laying them side by side along the bank. I knew all five of them and it was all I could do for them.