Jack Whyte - The Eagles' Brood

Nothing I have to say will begin to do justice to the love, the joy or the private splendour of the short years that followed. In the earliest days, Cassandra became my life and all I wanted out of life, and I was hers "and all she seemed to need. Responsibility, however, is an inescapable burden of manhood and I had mine, which my conscience would not let me ignore. Although she and Avalon comprised my secret life and all my private world, there was also the world of Camulod, which I could not neglect. Cassandra knew each time when I must return and she never tried to detain me, but each time I had to leave her in our valley of Avalon, the parting grew more difficult for me.

I tried to take her with me only once. I mounted my horse and lifted her up in front of me and as I placed my arm around her waist to keep her safe, a vision of Uther holding her just so made me cringe. This was the day I had sworn to myself I would find out the truth, for Uther was at home in Camulod and I had come to Avalon to see this confrontation effected. She leaned back into my arms as my mount climbed the narrow, tree-lined path from the valley floor, and there she remained content until we were clear of the bushes and mounting the rim of the hollow that concealed her home. But when she saw the distant towers of Camulod on its hilltop, miles away across the valley, and realized that I was bound that way, she stiffened and grasped the reins, bringing my horse to a stop. Gently, she prised my arm from around her waist, and then slipped smoothly to the ground, where she stood gazing up at me. Surprised, and slightly put out, I gestured to her to climb up again, trying to indicate that this was important to me, but it took only one look into the calm, slightly stubborn resolve of her gaze to convince me of what I should have known. Cassandra had no wish to go to Camulod, or even to see it on a distant hill. My heart was filled with love for her, and shame for what our Camulod had come to mean to her.

I decided then and there that Uther's guilt or innocence was not important. It had happened in another lifetime. If I were to face her with him now, and he were guilty, I might be ripping the scab from a barely healing wound. If, on the other hand, he were not the one, I would only have put her in needless mind of what she had endured, and possibly even have placed her in danger once again from the true culprit. She had no need of any of this. I dismounted and left my horse to graze by the side of the path and I held her close as we walked back down the winding, hidden path to Avalon, where she was content to be alone.

And yet, as we walked back down that sheltered path, another thought squirmed, guilty and fully formed, in my mind. If, as I had now come almost fully to believe, Uther was in fact innocent of any violence upon her, I had no wish to expose her to him, or him to her. When I had thought her ugly, she had been fascinated by my gallant cousin and I had been uncaring. Now that I was lost in her beauty, I could not bear the thought of seeing her look at Uther as she had before.

As was my invariable habit on leaving the valley, I turned my horse to leave by the back of the hill, keeping its bulk between me and die fort, making my way around to the south-east. This added another hour to a one-hour journey, but I was more determined now than ever that no eye should ever follow me to Avalon or mark me coming from it. On that particular day I had completed my detour and was approaching the last copse of trees between me and the open valley when I heard a noise that shocked me and made me kick my horse to a gallop within paces.

My father always knew where I was, whenever I was not in Camulod, and we had devised a signal by which he could summon me immediately, if the need arose. There were three high hills around the plain of Camulod. Both he and I knew that there was only one of them that interested me, but we had no wish to betray the fact that I could always be found close to the same spot, so the plan was that in emergency he would send riders to the tops of all three hills each one carrying one of the shrill screaming stones on a string that Vegetius Sulla had used to silence a noisy Council long before I was born, the singing or screaming stones the barbarians beyond the Rhine used as missiles.

The signal had never been used before, and it was never used again, but when it sounded this time I was already more than two-thirds of the way back to the fort. I put my heels to my horse and was soon galloping up the hillside road, and as I rode up, soldiers came pouring down past me to join the ranks of the army already assembling on the great campus, or training ground, at the foot of the hill. They came in squads and troops, already in formation from the courtyard of the fort, and so I knew that whatever had caused this tumult was momentous. I turned my horse and put it to the hillside, leaving the road to the descending squads, and as I climbed I looked off to my right and saw cavalry approaching from the villa and from the direction of the outlying farms.

My father was already in council with Uther, Titus, Flavius, Popilius the senior infantry centurion, and several others, among whom I recognized Gwynn, the captain of Uric's bowmen from the hills. They all looked up as I strode into the Armoury and I saw that every one of diem was in full battle armour. Even in the tension of the moment, I saw that Uther, who stood with his back to me and turned as I approached, wore a new red cloak with a great dragon in embroidered gold on the back of it, and I knew at once who owned the big new standard I had seen out in the courtyard.

"What's going on?" I asked as I crossed the room.

"Merlyn!" Uther's smile was the one I knew and had always loved. "You return by magic! Where have you been?"

"Riding," I snapped. "Father?"

My father nodded an abrupt greeting. "We're being attacked.. .in double force, it seems. Our breeding stock has been raided. Horses stolen. One attack out of the north, from the river estuary—Gwynn brought news of a fleet coming upstream—and one from the south and west."

"The south and west?" I looked at Uther. "But that's..."

"Aye, Cousin." He finished it off for me. "Our boyhood friend, Lot of Cornwall. It seems Cornwall is no longer big enough for him."

I remembered Daffyd's words of only months earlier. "What's he after?"

"What he is after and what he will find are two very different things."

My father cut both of us short by slapping the flat of his sword blade on the table. "Gentlemen! We have work to do here and no time for idle chatter. Caius, we know from Gwynn here that a fleet of more than a hundred galleys is landed to the north."

"A hundred!" I was stunned. "That's more than three thousand men!"

"Thank you, that had occurred to us." I subsided, and he went on, "Gwynn thinks they are Hibernian. whoever they are, they could not have chosen a worse time to hit us. We have already sustained heavy losses in the south-west. The hostile force there is at least four hundred strong—cavalry strong enough to have overrun our outlying farms and to have stolen the herd of horses that was gathered there."

"How do we know this?" I was hoping not to hear what I heard next.

"Because two of our men got away and brought us the news."

"Two? That's all?"

"That is all. The others are all dead."

I could not believe what I had heard. "Father, we had more than two hundred men stationed there!"

"That was yesterday, Caius. Today we have none. However he did it, Lot managed a complete surprise attack in the darkness before dawn. From what the survivors tell me, our men were slaughtered before they could react."

"How did the two survivors escape?"

"They didn't escape. One of them was on his way to the main camp there with dispatches from me. The other was returning from a visit to his dying mother. They met going west and travelled together. They arrived in sight of the camp just after daybreak and saw what had happened."