Jack Whyte - The Singing Sword

A dog began to howl quite close by and my mind cringed at the sound. I swore if the cur came any closer I would find it and choke it to profound, permanent silence. And then I heard footsteps approaching me, and someone began to sing in a loud, drunken voice, to be joined immediately by his equally drunken companions. I scrambled to my feet and fled into the night, clutching the fur I had been sitting on.

I must have walked a good half-mile along the hillside, paralleling the walls that loomed above me, tilting my body upward against the steep slope that fell away downhill on my right. I could still hear an occasional shout of laughter from late revellers within the walls, but I was soon far enough away from the level tent area to leave all noise there completely behind and my head was thankful.

Eventually I found myself another tree to lean on and sat down, bracing myself slightly against the fall of the slope with my heels, resting my elbows on my upraised knees and pressing the heels of my palms against my pounding temples. I felt as sick and miserable as I had when, as a green recruit, I had first drunk too much of our thin, sour legionaries' wine.

I have no idea how long I sat there. It might have been an hour — perhaps more, perhaps less — but I eventually dozed off and scared myself back to wakefulness when my head slipped from the crutch of my hands. I blinked and growled and muttered and peered around me at the darkness on all sides. In front of me, low on the horizon, the moon was almost gone from sight. I was chilled to the bone, but I felt decidedly better than I had earlier. I cursed, knowing that my bad knee was going to cause me agonies when I tried to stand up, and hugged my cloak closer, seeking warmth that wasn't there. I had been sitting too long. Grimly, I pulled myself to my feet, gritting my teeth against the fierce pain now in my knee. It felt as though all the bones in the joint were brazed together, but I forced myself to walk, limping outrageously, staggering and at one point almost crawling, supporting my weight on one hand against the hillside where the slope was particularly steep.

After a few minutes of movement, as the exercise restored the flow of circulation, the pain began to lessen and I began to make better progress, although the going was still much harder than it had been on the way there because the slope of the hill was now against my bad leg. It was no use berating myself for not having thought of that earlier, for then I had been too sick to think or even care. I simply bit down on my teeth the harder and took advantage of every tree I came to, stopping to lean against each one and rest my aching leg.

I was perhaps half-way back to my tent when I paused to rest against a large tree and my bladder let me know that it was under pressure. Fumbling at the binding of my breech-clout, I was noticing the silence now from the walls above me when an unearthly moan seemed to issue from the ground at my feet and the hairs on my neck and arms stirred in horror. I am not a superstitious man, but that sound, on a bare, empty, dark hillside, turned my guts to water. I froze, my bladder forgotten, my ears straining in the absolute stillness that followed the shocking sound. Nothing stirred, anywhere, and then it came again, a long-drawn, sighing moan, less loud this time and much, much less unearthly. This time I recognized it as coming from a human throat, and I also placed the direction of its source. There was a dip in the ground in front of me, down to my left. Whoever had made that noise was down there in the hollow. I was highly aware of feeling much better now that I had found relief and identified both sound and location. I moved out from my tree slowly, approaching the lip of the hollow with great caution, and there I stopped, feeling my flesh crawl again.

There was no one there. No one at all. It was an empty, grassy bowl, inky dark and empty. And then I saw a pale flash and realized what I was looking at: two people lying hidden, covered and totally concealed by a dark blanket. The darkness of the night had blended it into invisibility until one leg had come briefly into view before being withdrawn again. And then I heard whispering and the man laughed, and my stomach turned over.

The dark blanket was a black cloak, the cloak of Picus Britannicus, for it was he who had laughed, and I had no need to guess who the other person under that cloak with him might be. I backed away from there with a feeling akin to panic in my breast. What would they think if they found me there, spying on them like this? And then my heel caught on a tussock and I overbalanced, unable to catch myself on my bad leg, and I fell heavily on my backside. It seemed to me that I came down with the noise of a landslide, loud enough to wake the dead, but the two people below me were too caught up in being alive to hear me.

I got to my feet again slowly and with caution and hobbled away, hearing the noises of their coupling growing louder and more passionate behind me until the distance I gained was great enough to permit them their privacy. Sweet Christ on His Cross! This could be a pretty mess, I thought, if Picus handled it wrongly. I had no idea what I should do, or how I might proceed in order to make the seriousness of his conduct clear to Picus. Enid was Ullic's sister, and one of his favourite people. An insult to her might be unforgivable; that would not surprise me at all. Though it was as little Ullic's affair as it was mine, that meant little. I suspected that he might be more than simply angry.

And yet there was nothing wrong or unnatural about the attraction or the natural lust that Enid and Picus had sparked in each other, nor was there anything unusual in their gratification of their feelings. So why was I feeling so apprehensive? I did not know, but my mind kept feeding me images of their two bodies grappling with each other, uncovered by the cloak. I visualized Enid's face twisting with the pleasure of what she was feeling and then suddenly it was I, not Picus, who was above her. The realization of what I was thinking brought me up short, and only then did I perceive the reason for my state of mind. It was caused by envy! I was jealous!

I stopped again, this time by an outcrop of rock, and tried to take stock of this new discovery. It was a novel one, for I could not remember ever having dedicated a thought to any other woman, apart from Cylla Titens, since I had wedded Luceiia. Not a serious thought, at any rate. I had remarked the occasional voluptuous breast or swelling hip from time to time, but only in passing. And now, all of a sudden, I was jealous? From somewhere, I found the strength to laugh at myself and recognize both the humour and the truth of the situation. This beautiful, ripe woman had simply reminded me of my lost young-manhood. That is why no one else had noticed their mutual attraction; it was so normal, so natural, that it had gone unremarked. Only I had seen it because, without my knowing it, I had been looking for it and resenting it.

All at once, I felt much better. My aching head had been forgotten, and now my aching leg stopped hurting as if by magic and my swollen bladder reasserted itself. I relieved it and made my way back to my tent, where I found my wife asleep and a lamp burning to light my way to bed. I put out the lamp and climbed in beside Luceiia, snuggling close to her welcoming warmth and hardly even sparing another thought for Picus and Enid and their coupling before I fell asleep.

XXVIII

Picus looked fresh as a daisy the next day.

We were all astir at dawn, and the smells of cooking and wood-smoke were everywhere. Bishop Alaric unveiled the altar-stone to open admiration and celebrated his mass, calling the benediction of God and His heavenly saints upon this place new-built upon an ancient site.