Jack Whyte - The Singing Sword

I walked across to where he lay, and it seemed to take hours for me to reach him. He scrabbled for me with clawed fingers, shrieking and spitting. I grasped the sword's hilt and pulled it free from where it was trapped in the fold of his legs, feeling it cut through more meat as I dragged it away. My face felt frozen. Caius lay behind Seneca, his screaming grandson clutched protectively in his left arm. The blood had ceased to pump from the wound in his neck. He was very still. I looked at his face, so pale, and time slowed down once more as I flexed my fingers around the hilt of the great sword. Then, ignoring the screams and sounds he was hurling at me, I raised Excalibur high above my head and swung it down with all my strength, striking Caesarius Claudius Seneca's head from his body. Plautus said, "Good man!" in a blood-choked voice, and I heard one last crash from behind me. I did not need to look to know that he had fallen on his face, onto the hilt of the sword that protruded from his chest.

Moving slowly, I crossed the room to the pile of garments that had been stripped from Enid earlier and draped them across her ravaged, nude body. Then I picked up my great-nephew and carried him out of that slaughterhouse.

The baby quieted as we walked through the warm, sunlit afternoon. I carried him in the crook of my left arm, the way his Grandfather Caius had carried him, and in my right I clutched Excalibur. Somewhere in the distance I could hear the sounds of battle, but I did not care. There was a lark singing in the sky high above me and a blackbird trilling close by. I heard my name being called and heard hoofbeats coming towards me at the gallop, but I didn't care. The forge would be quiet and safe for the baby, and it would be dark and warm. That was all I cared about.

I, too, had to find a dark, safe place, dark enough to hide me from the horrors tearing at my mind.

EPILOGUE: SUMMER, 401 A.D.

Ullic clapped me on the shoulder, got up from his stool and went out into the bright, hot day, leaving his heavy, ceremonial helmet on the bench beside me. It crossed my mind to call him back for it, but then I thought that, eagle helmet though it might be, it was not going to fly away and he would come back for it later. I smiled at the thought and reached for the pot of polishing oil I had been using, but my outstretched fingers caught the rim of it and the pot overturned, spilling the thin oil over my work-bench. I cursed and scrambled to pick up the odds and ends threatened by the spill, and felt a lance of remembered pain pierce me as my hand closed over a rolled scroll that had lain forgotten there at the back of my bench for months. I stood as though petrified for a few moments clutching the thing, and then I sat back on my stool, leaving the spilt oil to do what it would and unrolling the parchment for the second time since I had received it.

Greetings, Father,

You have been proven prophetic. Stilicho has recalled me to Rome. The barbarian King Alaric — how unlike our own dear friend — and his Visigoths stand poised to attack the Motherland itself. My preparations are being made in haste, for I must move with all possible speed. Stilicho's word is peremptory. "Come at once," he bids me. "Bring your men and leave all else behind." That, in this case, means horses, since I have no way of shipping out all my stock at such short notice. Your commission from Stilicho entitles you to have what I cannot take with me.

I have dispatched word to my depots in Glevum, Durovernum and Londinium itself to expect your men, who will take the horses I have left for you. In all, there will be six hundred and eighty head. Collect them quickly. I proceed in haste, but there may be others who must follow later. I know you will use the horses well. I shall return for them some day.

I must rely on you to use your powers of explanation and persuasion with Enid. I have tried to write to her, but find I am unable to write the words I ought to. My wounds have healed, but they have left me speechless and unlovely, so she is encumbered with a husband who is both ugly and absent. Explain to her, if you will, that these cancel each other out. I will return, some day. My love to Publius Varrus and his family. Look after my wife and my son while I am gone.

Farewell, Picus.

Addendum: I hear nothing of Seneca since I received my wound. He may have died in the fighting in the north. I hope so. If he still lives, however, he will sail with me to Stilicho's command.

Even now, months later, the words still had power to hurt.

The soldier who brought the missive had disturbed me at my work. Luceiia had sent him to me with his message and I had read it and sent him to the kitchens at the fort, thinking he would have to return quickly. But he had asked my pardon and informed me that he was Gwynn, and had been Master of the Stables for Picus here in Britain. Picus had left him behind to work with Victorex, who was now a very old man. Surprised, and still in a state of shock from receipt of the letter, I had welcomed him to our Colony and failed to understand the blankness of his look when I called it by name. I had thought then to explain, but had not had the patience at the time. Instead, I told him that he would learn the whole story later.

He had smiled at me and saluted crisply, saying he was sure he would, and I stood there and watched him march briskly away, thinking how incredibly young he looked to have already retired from being Master of the Stables of the Imperial Armies of Britain, and thinking also that the story I could have told him was not really long at all.

Caius Britannicus, who had built this Colony, had been born in the oldest Roman town in Britain, a town built on the site of a settlement already honoured for centuries as the home of Lod, war god of the Trinovantes of the east. Over the four hundred years since then, men had gradually changed its name to Colchester, meaning "the fort on the hill," but Caius had always called it by its real name, its ancient name, Camulodunum, deploring as usual the way men changed things for the sake of change, with no thought of tradition or the ancient value of the thing thus changed.

Here in his beloved west, on another hill, he had built another fort, this one without a name. It was his mausoleum, standing above his grave. His sister, my wife Luceiia, had named it in his honour, recalling his own words. "None of your Celtic jaw-breakers," she had said. "Give it a new name, this fort on a hill — a British name, not Roman or Celtic. Not Camulodunum, but a name of this land. And make it a simple name, a name that men will hear and know and remember."

We called it Camulod, in honour of Caius Britannicus, the last of the great Roman Eagles of Britain. When we are dead and gone, men may make of it what they wish.

I released the scroll; it rewound itself with a parchment rustle, and I wondered if I would ever see Picus Britannicus again. Then I became aware once more of the smoothness of polished wood under the ball of my thumb and looked down at the surface of the case I had spent so much time making. I was not a worker in wood by choice, but I had had no other option than to make this case myself, using as a model the much smaller one left me by my grandfather to hold the skystone dagger, many years before. This case was of planed and polished oak, and set into the lustrous surface of the top was a silver star, trailing a comet-tail of gold. I picked it up and carried it to the back of the forge, where I opened it up and ran my hand once more over the fitted doeskin that lined the interior. It would suffice.