Jack Whyte - The Eagles' Brood

It seemed to take me an age to emerge from the dunes by the water's edge, and long before I arrived there I had heard the sound of baying voices announcing the beginnings of a fight. The deepest point of the bay now lay to my right and I was still more than a mile from the brawl ahead of me. I saw a scattering of riderless horses that told me immediately how the struggle would go. The heavy boat lay abandoned at the end of a deep score in the sand, its bows awash, but the men who had been struggling to launch it had been caught before they could either free the boat or remount to meet their attackers. Now Uther's men swirled around them, some of their horses actually in the water so that light flashed from the splashes they made and from their sweeping blades as they hacked and slashed at their quarry.

And yet the fight was far from over. The men afoot were fighting well although barely holding their own. Armed with the bravery of desperation they had formed a line of defence in front of the brightly clothed members of the group who, as I had suspected, were women, and were now huddled in and around the boat. A new core of resistance formed even as I watched, however, and it was an amazing sight to my distant eyes. Half a score of men, seeing the inevitable failure of their efforts to launch the boat, had scattered and apparently fled from the main action, but only to reform in a tight group, ranked in a close formation on the side of a low dune. Now, armed with what looked to me to be Pendragon bows, this group began pouring a concerted, lethal stream of well-aimed volleys into Uther's mounted troops, smashing them from their horses like straw mannikins.

What nonsense was this? And where were Uther's own bowmen? As these questions sprang into my mind I felt my great horse falter and check beneath me and I knew he could not continue much longer at this speed, fetlock-deep in yielding, clogging sand. And even as I leaned forward to. encourage him, everything changed in the fight in front of me.

In response to a summons from Uther, many of his men broke away from their individual struggles and reformed into a solid wall of horses that they used to smash their way through the defenders, trampling them underfoot, to reach the women in and around the boat. In moments after that each mounted man had hauled a struggling, fighting woman up in front of him, holding her close around the waist or the neck and using her as a living shield against the bowmen. As soon as the last woman—there were eight of them—had been subdued, Uther himself led the group in a concerted charge against the bowmen on the dune. I watched in disbelief, seeing all of this unfolding the way a sleeping man watches a scene of horror engulf him in a nightmare, powerless to change a detail of his dream and knowing that it will only grow worse as it progresses. My horse was barely moving now, and I was still four hundred paces from the boat, five hundred from the dune. I screamed Uther's name, feeling my voice break at the peak, but no one heard me.

The bowmen on the dune had stopped shooting now. It takes a certain kind of inhumanity to commit callous murder on a living, helpless woman, even when she embodies your own death. Frozen, the bowmen stood and watched, arrows nocked, as Uther's men swept towards them. And then finally, when less than fifty paces separated the two groups, one aimed and fired and drew and fired again and one rider went down, his shield and he both dead. Three more aimed and fired and Uther's group was cut to half its size, but Uther was almost at the foot of the dune by then and the bowmen broke and scattered, casting aside their useless weapons and drawing their swords. Uther threw his helpless shield to the ground and charged after one of the disarmed bowmen. I watched the slaughter in agony, still approaching. I could feel the strength draining away from my body like water pouring from a broken vase, and despair , threatened to overwhelm me. I did not know what was happening here, or who these victims were, but I had seen more callous slaughter from my cousin here than I would ever have believed him capable of.

I reined in my mount and sat there, staring. Apart from Uther and his three remaining riders by the dune, there was barely a movement on the beach. One of the women thrown from the backs of the horses got up slowly and stood swaying for a time, then began moving among the others, checking each of them for signs of life. She stooped quickly and helped another to her feet, this one swathed in an enveloping yellow garment that covered her completely except for her arms and one long, slender leg that shone from a large tear in the fabric. The two women clung to each other. Three more of Uther's men were still alive, and now mounted their horses again and began to converge, with Uther and the others, upon the two women. No one had seen me yet, sitting my horse some two hundred paces distant. Now I urged my mount forward again, but even as it began to walk, I reined in and waited.

Uther had dismounted and was approaching the women, who stood side by side, facing him. I waited for him to remove his helmet, but he did not. He merely stopped a few paces from them and stooped quickly to grasp a handful of cloth adorning one of the dead women lying by his feet. He wiped the blood from his sword blade on the cloth and straightened up, slipping the sword back into its sheath. He then flipped the edges of his cloak back across his shoulders. Puzzled, I watched him fumbling at the front of his clothing. I realized his purpose at the same time the women did, for they both turned to run. He closed the distance between them in one leap and grasped the yellow-clad woman by the shoulder, spinning and pushing her so that she fell heavily. The other woman attacked him immediately, and he thrust her aside, throwing her as casually and as easily as if she had no substance. Then he grasped the woman on the ground and, with a great heave, ripped the yellow covering from her body, tumbling her through the air so that I saw naked flesh and long, red hair as the other woman attacked him yet again, leaping this time on to his back. Now I kicked my horse into movement, and as I did so I saw Uther bend and heave and dislodge his assailant, throwing her over his shoulder so that she fell in front of him. He held her with one hand around her wrist and then pulled her erect before jerking her close to him. I knew from the way she stiffened, rigid, that he had stabbed her, pulling her onto a dagger, and I watched her sink to her knees and then fall away to the side. And now Uther was tugging at his clothes again, loosening his belt and tearing at his trousers to expose his loins. I watched him fall to his knees and drag the red-haired woman towards him, grasping her and pulling at her so that he held one of her knees in the crook of each elbow, I was very close, little more than a hundred paces away, still moving like a man in a dream. All eyes were on Uther and his sport. My mind was reciting a litany...

Deirdre of the Violet Eyes. Cassandra of the Valley. Deirdre of the Weeping Sighs. Cassandra in the Valley. Deep the grave where Deirdre lies. Cassandra, Merlyn's Folly...

I had been unaware of unslinging Publius Varrus's great bow from where it lay across my back; unaware of fitting an arrow; unaware of anything except my own criminally irresponsible naivety, All the pathetic human weakness and frailty of my doubts and agonizing over Uther's capacity to sink to the level of brutality involved in the savage beating and the murder of my beloved now writhed in my scornful awareness. How could I ever have doubted it? I had always known that Uther had a blackness in him I could never plumb. And today, here, I had seen more of it than I had suspected in thirty years of knowing him intimately. And now I found my voice again.

His head jerked up at the sound of my shout, and the six men behind him immediately broke from their admiring huddle and began to spread out, moving towards me. I ignored them.