"Well, yes, they live there, and so do I, but I would hardly call it 'Uther Pendragon's place.' Uther lives there, part of the time, and commands our forces for the time being, in the war against Lot of Cornwall, but his kingdom—his 'place' as you call it—is in the mountains of Cambria, several days' ride to the north-west. Believe me, Camulod is far from being Uther Pendragon's place, or anyone else's. It's a thriving community, held and maintained by its colonists. You've obviously never been there."
He made a derisive sound in his throat and shook his head in a brief, abrupt negative. I frowned, unable to believe what I was hearing.
"Why not?" I continued. "It's not that far from here, no more than fifty miles." I was even more disconcerted now to see hostility and fear in his face and I glanced at the others, to see it mirrored in theirs. I rushed on, eager to find the source of it. "Good God, Lars, you all look as though you're afraid of the place and all it contains! Why? Your two brothers are there, and I live there, and it was founded and built by people like your own father and his friends. Why should anyone—and you of all people—be afraid of the very name of it?" It was evident that he was not going to answer me, and I had a sudden revelation. "Or is it Uther Pendragon you fear?"
His face darkened, rigid with hostility at the very mention of Uther's name, and I knew I was correct. "Why, Lars?" I was insistent. "Why should you fear Uther Pendragon? Tell me."
He cleared his throat. "Ask Eric. And Brunna."
I turned to them, to include them in what had suddenly become a very personal matter.
An hour later, I had heard more than I ever sought to hear. Lars and his wife Brunna, and their extensive family in and around Isca and the surrounding villages and hamlets, were the ordinary people of this region. In their minds "there was no difference between Uther of Camulod—how that name galled me!—and Lot of Cornwall. They thought of both men as demons incarnate. The armies of both had ravaged this entire countryside over the past three years, looting and killing and raping as they pleased. The local people had far less fear of Saxons than they had of their own kind.
Lars told me he had returned from his service with the legions almost twenty years earlier and had met and wed Brunna shortly after that. He had fought with Magnus Maximus, and then with Stilicho's legions after Magnus was killed. When the Emperor Honorius killed Stilicho, his own deputy and former Regent, Lars deserted and made for home, and the journey as a fugitive, ending finally in the quiet backwater of Isca, had taken him three years. Brunna's family had been merchants of some stature in Isca, and her father had set them up fifteen years ago in this hostelry. They had prospered for twelve years, until Lot of Cornwall decided to extend his territories by conquest.
The previous year, while I had been relearning how to live, both of their sons, aged fourteen and twelve, had been taken in a sweep by Uther's soldiers and hanged out of hand along with twenty other men suspected of giving aid and sustenance to the enemy. Two months after that, at harvest time, Brunna's youngest sister, a fifteen-year-old girl, had been ravished and killed, with three of her friends, by a party of Lot's people. The father and brother of the girl whose home they had been visiting were butchered while attempting to protect the girls.
The picture these simple people drew for me was clear. The "enemy," in their eyes, was anyone who was armed and rode a horse or marched carrying weapons. Uther Pendragon and Gulrhys Lot were monsters, and any trees beneath which they rode were likely to bear dangling, human fruit. Their very names carried with them the stench of rotting flesh and burning homesteads, and evoked chaos, screams of despair, and long, starving winters.
Their story drove the wine-fed euphoria from my head and I slept heavily that night. The following morning, I was on the road again, driving my horses hard along the road to and beyond Isca to the south-west. Lars and all his family would make their way as quickly as they could now to Camulod, bearing a letter from me to my aunt that would place them under my official protection. In the meantime, I rode hard, with my gaze focused on the road ahead of me, and on the confrontation with my cousin that lay at the end of it. I rode seething with a fury so great that it had almost displaced my personal grudge against Uther. To hear the name of Camulod spoken in fear and loathing had outraged all within me and made me rage at my own former, self- inflicted blindness. We had heard tales in Camulod of atrocities and vicious acts of terror being committed by our own, but had discounted them, choosing, in what I could now identify with ease as smug complacency, to attribute such tales to the lies and rumour-mongering of Lot and his creatures—fictitious calumnies concocted for the purpose of turning the people of our own lands against us. Now, shaken by the revelations of the previous night, I saw the Dream of Caius Britannicus and Publius Varrus reduced to smoking cinders in the terror of the people of this land around me. Where had the vision of my people gone? What had happened to their ideals of freedom and justice and dignity and worth; of free men, living and working in freedom, having the right to bear arms to protect that freedom against all usurpation, even by their own kind? I cursed the fate that had left me senseless of what was happening around me for two crucial years, and spurred my mount harder.
And as I rode further and further west after leaving the great road, I began to see signs of depredation all around me: burned farmsteads; charred and shattered houses; dangling, withered corpses in the trees; meadows strewn with the skeletal remains of soldiers and horses. And no people. None at all. The land lay empty and devastated, and my anger grew, feeding upon itself.
And then, on a morning bright with sun and the song of larks, I breasted a hill and found fresh corpses sprawled in the autumn grass in my path. I reined in immediately, scanning ahead for possible danger, but whatever peril there might have been earlier had moved on.
Satisfied that the dead and I were alone, I dismounted and went to examine them more closely. They were strangers all, but very newly dead, their flesh still warm, their blood yet liquid, and I left them where they lay.
A short time later, seen only by a pair of eagles circling high above, I stopped by the side of a small, swift-running freshet, stripped and bathed, shivering with the cold, and then allowed the sun's warmth to dry me. I pulled on a fresh, light, clean tunic, then unpacked and shrugged into the ring armour I had adapted from the Saxon devices of the same kind. Mine was designed for a horseman—a heavy coat with a wide-skirted tail ample enough to spread when I was mounted to cover my own and my horse's haunches, and long, loose-legged trousers. The suit was made from well-worked, supple, black-dyed leather and covered with many thousands of tiny, overlapping rings of iron, brass and copper wire that would stop a hard-swung sword, a thrown spear, or an arrow fired from any but a long, Celtic bow. It covered me from neck to ankle and, while it was cumbersome to wear afoot, it served its purpose magnificently when I was mounted.
When I was fully armoured, my long surcoat securely buckled down the side, I repacked and restowed all my gear, then donned my great black cloak with its emblazoned silver bear. I still wore my silvered Roman helmet with its black plume and full cheek-plates—I had not yet been able to improve on that design—and now I strung the great, horned African bow of Publius Varrus and slung it across my shoulders with a full quiver of long arrows. The black war cloak was heavy on such a hot day—it drew the heat of the sun into itself immediately—but I wanted Uther to know who was coming long before I reached him; and the discomfort involved in wearing it was unimportant. By my right knee, slung through three rings attached to a long, flat piece of toughened leather hide, hung my cross-hilted cavalry sword. On the other side, the hook attached to hold my iron flail glittered, unused. I dug in my spurs and my big black surged forward, leading its consorts.