Jack Whyte - The Eagles' Brood

"You mean Uther?" I looked him straight in the eye. "I've already done that by getting rid of the four women. I've also done it by keeping my suspicions to myself, except in the case of Titus. He had to know if I was to have his help. My problem with the benefit of the doubt, Father, my only problem, is defining the doubt. I'm not sure I have any."

"Of course you have. If you had none, you would not be so upset."

I nodded, accepting the truth. "You're right. Of course I have. But my doubts are all emotional. The evidence I have to consider is not. The hard facts destroy all room for doubt."

"What hard facts? You have none." He left me gaping at that while he sat down again at his table. "The only facts you have are these." He raised one finger for each of the points as he made them. "The girl was assaulted. You moved thereafter to protect her. Those are the only facts. Explanations of what happened between the girl's quitting the room and being found next morning are guesses...pure conjecture. You have no facts there."

"But the evidence—"

"What evidence? None of that, either, except the girl's injuries. Nothing to indicate who, when or why."

"Yes I have! Uther -"

"Uther..." He cleared his throat again, his frustration with his own voice more apparent than I had seen it in a long time. "Uther left shortly after the girl. That's all you know. Everything else you feel.. .or believe.. .is based upon your own interpretation of the circumstances."

I dropped my eyes to the knife in my hand and flung it hard at die door. It hit flat and rebounded almost to my feet and I sat staring down at it unseeingly.

When my father spoke again, his voice was gentle. "As I said, you have to loft it correctly. A matter of balance, Cay. Everything else is, too. Admit it. All you have to point towards Uther is your own interpretation of the circumstances that surrounded this event. It was an awful event...not condoning it in any way, shape or form. The perpetrator will be punished. If it was Uther, he will find noleniency in me. But you are a long way from proving complicity, let alone guilt, in my eyes. Your interpretation is no more than that...not provable fact. You can only prove that Uther left the room after the girl left, and by your own admission he did not seem to be in pursuit of her."

I picked up the knife and weighed it in my hand, giving -myself time to digest what he had said, fighting against an urge to scream to him that he had not been there, had not seen what I had seen. As frustration welled up in me I threw the knife again at the door, this time hammering the point into the wood a good half-inch. I went then and worked the point free, making myself calm down before I faced my father again.

"Very well, Father. I admit the truth of what you say. I have only my own interpretation of what I saw and heard. So? Help me, then! How would you interpret the evidence as you see it?"

"In a total absence of witnesses, I would not." He saw my retort taking shape and forestalled it with a raised hand. 'Total, I said, Caius, total! We have a witness. We can prove the truth. The girl will know. She may not know, perhaps, who attacked her...if it wasn't Uther...but she will know whether or not it was Uther!" I stood there with my back to the door, feeling the tension roiling in my stomach.

"You did the right thing, Caius, in removing her." A long pause. "As a matter of fact, you seem to have done all the right things. You did well." He nodded towards the chair I had been sitting in. "Sit down. I want to tell you a story. Might prove the point I am trying to make." He got up again and went to tell the guard outside his door that he did not wish to be interrupted, then he came back and seated himself at the table where he pressed the heels of his hands together and examined his open palms minutely. He sat that way for a few moments and then pursed his lips and looked at me quizzically, a crease that was not quite a frown between his brows. I sat unmoving, waiting for him to begin, and when he did, there was something new in his voice. I cannot explain what it was, and at the time I was almost unaware of it, except that I found myself hanging on his every word, having lost all awareness of his speaking difficulties.

"Caius...?" he began. His voice tailed away uncertainly, then he cleared his throat abruptly and grinned at me. 'The story I'm going to tell you may shock you...but only because it happened to me and I am your father. Had it happened to another man, you might be able to accept his version of it without comment or judgment, although I doubt you would. I know that if I were to hear it...my instinct would be to disbelieve. But I am your father, and it did happen to me. I want you to have no doubt of that. It happened."

I wondered what was coming, but he did not keep me waiting. "I took this wound in the throat the year you were born. Did you know that?" I nodded, and he went on, "I almost died from it... I should have. It was a bad one. I can remember that, as a boy, you were afraid of me, frightened by my voice. I used to see it in your eyes... Over the course of the years, however, you have grown accustomed to the sound of it until now you hardly notice its strangeness. Am I correct?" Again I nodded and he smiled a small, thin smile. "Then again, perhaps I am simply speaking better as I grow older, I don't really know and have no way of judging. But for the first three years after I took that arrow in the mouth, Cay, I did not speak a word. I wrote... every thing. And I developed hand signals so that eventually my officers and men could understand and obey any order instantly. But that's beside the point. What I am getting at is this: During my convalescence from that wound, I strangled a man to death with my bare hands. He tried to kill me, was trying to kill me when I finished him." I shifted in my chair. I had read a reference to this in my uncle's books, but I knew nothing of the story.

"I was wounded in a skirmish with the northern Picts who had come down over the Wall when it fell for the last time that year. They had penetrated further south than we had expected and we ran into them sooner than we had thought to. One of them put an arrow into my mouth. It was open at the time. I was shouting orders... Anyway, that was the end of the fight as far as I was concerned, and it should have been the end of me, too. Titus took over from me and broke them and sent them back to the north licking some deep wounds. We were in north Britain, as I've said, close to the town of Lindum...between there and Danum, as a matter of fact. No one expected me to live, but I surprised them all and they finally left me at the villa of one Marcus Aurelius Ambrosianus, a noble Roman of ancient family who had retired from public life in Rome itself to live in his villa here in Britain. He was an old and noble man in the way that few of his compatriots were noble in those days."

He broke his narrative at that point to rise and open a small chest, from which he withdrew a flask of mead and two horn cups. "It's early," he said, "but talking this much makes my throat dry and sore." He poured for both of us and handed one cup to me before sitting down again and sipping at his mead, holding it in his mouth and allowing it to trickle slowly down his throat. "That's good," he murmured, taking another sip. "Well, as you know, our own lineage is not petty. Ambrosianus made me welcome in his house and had his people aid my own in caring for me. I knew nothing of his kindness, for I was at death's door and lay that way for more than a month. They fed me on liquids, through tubes of animal intestine that our sawbones inserted in my throat by way of my nostrils. Everyone looked on me as a living miracle. I should have died immediately. I survived. I should have died later, of starvation, since I could not eat. I survived again, thanks only to that mad physician! And do you know I can't even remember his name today?"