Jack Whyte - The Singing Sword

The following day, when the time of Picus's departure came, I could see that he was reluctant to leave his bride, and I sympathized with him. He dallied with her, procrastinating until the time he had set himself for leaving was past and gone, and when he did come to say farewell to Caius, Ullic and myself, he made us promise to look after her for him when her time came.

His father slapped him hard on the shoulder. "Come, Legate! That's seven months away. We'll see you long before then."

Picus was sombre. "I hope so, Father, but I doubt it. I have a bad feeling in my guts about this one. The raids are heavy already, all along the eastern and southern coasts, as if the troubles in the north were not enough. All the signs and auguries are ominous. I'll be writing to Enid often." He smiled a small, embarrassed smile. "She made me promise. I'll keep you up-to-date on what's developing. If anything threatens you here in the west, I'll do my best to make sure that you know as soon as I do." He saluted us and spun on his heel.

As he rode away, Enid stood once more on the walls between Caius and me, her eyes following his every move until the distant forest swallowed him up. She was a beautiful and healthy woman in her early thirties, and all her attributes were enhanced as her belly grew with the child she bore.

But the months passed in unbroken train and Picus did not return to soothe his bride, although he maintained a steady stream of news to her, and so to all of us. From these dispatches we learned of the final fall of the great Wall of Hadrian. The garrisons that had manned it were withdrawn to Arboricum, and all the lands between there and the north were left abandoned. We learned also of a great invading force hammering inland from the Saxon Shore, and of the desperate countermeasures being taken to push them back into the sea again. And then the news stopped coming.

We had become accustomed to receiving dispatches every week, and then came a week when none arrived. It was followed by another, and by the third week, we were all alarmed. Three more weeks passed, and one of Alaric's priests brought us the news that Picus was alive but had been sorely wounded, struck down in battle by an arrow that had pierced his face, entering his open mouth and striking sideways through his head to emerge behind his right ear. No one knew whether he would survive, but according to the priest, he had been lodged in a villa to the north of Lindum, with the family of one Marcus Aurelius Ambrosianus, a Roman magistrate. He was receiving the finest medical attention, and his fate was in the hands of God.

Enid wanted to go to him immediately and was restrained only with difficulty. Logic had little effect on her, but we finally made her see that her journey would be a wasted one, and possibly highly dangerous to the child she carried. The priest who brought us the news had been long on the road, and by now anything could have happened. Picus might be already dead and buried, a terrible thought but one that had to be voiced, since the report was that his wound was grievous. Or he could have been moved. He might even have recovered enough to go back to duty, at least administratively. On top of all of this, the world outside our own small Colony was too chaotic with marauding armies for us to permit a woman, especially a pregnant woman, to go riding off by herself, even with a well-armed escort.

Alone with my thoughts, I tried to visualize the wound he must have taken, and I did not like the thought of it. I even took an arrow in my mouth and prodded the back of my throat with it. Not pleasant! When I tried to imagine the effect of a hard-shot arrow finding the same soft spot, my mind rebelled. I determined to find a way to protect a horseman's face from such a shot, which must have been angled upwards from beneath.

Some time later, we received information that Picus had indeed survived, but the story was such that we could only wonder at it. Again, the news was brought to us by a visiting priest. Marcus Aurelius Ambrosianus, Picus's host, had apparently lost his senses and attacked the Legate one night while he lay sleeping. Picus, whose face was swathed in bandages, had not known his attacker and had strangled the man to death before help arrived. There was no question of premeditated murder, or of anything else except a mindless tragedy. The attacker's sword was bloody where he had stabbed the sleeping Picus in the side, and when the guards arrived they had found Picus, still wrapped in his tangled bedclothes, with his hands locked in a death-grip round the dead man's throat. It was impossible that Picus could have known who his attacker was. The room had been in darkness and Picus himself was blinded by the bandages that swathed his head. Here was a mystery that would remain unsolved, at least until Picus himself came back to explain it to us. We hoped that would be soon, for it was apparent to all of us that the nature of his wounds must be serious enough to preclude, temporarily at least, his further fighting.

In spite of all our hopes and prayers, however, Picus had not yet returned when Enid was brought to childbed and delivered of a healthy, bawling, leather-lunged brat of a boy at the fourth hour of the morning of the second day of January.

Only three nights before, Caius, Enid, Luceiia and I had sat around the fire discussing the impending births of our grandchildren. There was no news of Veronica from Ullic's kingdom, but no news was good news.

"What will you call him, if he is a boy?" Caius had asked Enid.

She smiled into the fire. "Picus and I talked about that. He will be Picus Caius Britannicus."

"Another Caius Britannicus. Why?"

She turned to squint up at him, for he sat above her, perched on the arm of her couch. "Why? To honour you, of course. Does that displease you? Or surprise you?"

He smiled and caressed her high-piled hair. "No, my dear, of course not. But you could please me more by changing it."

Enid hitched around in her seat to face him completely. "Changing it? The child's name? To what?"

He shook his head slightly. "I have no idea, child, but think of this place and what we have done here. This place is British. Its people are, too. We are a new breed here. It seems to me that the full name you would give your child is too Roman — too old-fashioned — for this time and place." He stroked her cheek with the back of his fingers. "Your son will have the blood of Celtic kings in his veins, Enid. Kings of Britain. So give him a British name, one of your own." He grinned broadly. "But none of your Celtic jaw-breakers. Make it a simple name, one that men will hear and know and remember. A name for this land. That would please me greatly."

She stared at him for long moments and then reached out and took his hand. "Thank you, Father Cay," she said. "I like that. I will think carefully about it and try to find something that will please all of us."

She named the baby Merlyn, after the blackbird whose magical songs filled the long spring and summer days throughout the length and breadth of Britain. Caius Merlyn Britannicus.

XXX

The news of my own grandson's birth arrived from Ullic's people a short time later. No Roman nonsense there; the child, a boy, had been named Uther, Uther Pendragon. Mother and child were both well and would come to visit us in the spring, as soon as the snow, heavy in the hills this year, had melted.

I was content with the news of the children, but I was far from happy with the results of my attempts to pour a hilt for the new sword. Nine times I had tried it by the beginning of spring thaw, and nine times the result had been failure. Andros and I were convinced the technique must work eventually, once we had mastered the knack of pouring the metal in the correct volume, at the right speed and at the proper temperature, but our early efforts had been ludicrous, and I had often thanked God and my stars that the metal of the sword was as hard as it was, because I had been constrained to melt nine messes of bronze and gold from the adamantine tangs, cleaning them completely after each failed attempt. It was starting to prove expensive, too, for we were never able to reclaim all of the gold from the abortive attempts, and each time we tried again I had to melt a few more coins of Grandfather's hoard.