Uther, ever the dashing, dazzling heroic figure, had never warred on women and was at pains to point this out to his gentle prisoners. He had commiserated with them about the deaths of their escort and companions—the fortunes of war, over which he could have no control other than by ensuring victory for his own men. That done, and all courteously explained, he had entertained them lavishly as honoured guests for three days, during which his army had consolidated their own security and spirited the stolen spoils of the supply train into their own safe custody. Then, when he was sure that their reports could do nothing to hinder either his progress or his safety, he had released the women, sending them southward to their original destination under heavy guard.
No time had been lost on that occasion, Popilius assured me. Little had been risked, and a valuable prize had been gained. It was only months later that Popilius had begun to suspect that Uther himself had gained a valuable prize that day, quite apart from the captured supplies. Prior to that, Popilius had neither known nor cared about the identities of the women. He had found out only by accident one night, around the campfire with some of Uther's young staff officers who had drunk a little too much wine, that one of the women—the loveliest, of course—had been Lot's queen, Ygraine.
His soldier's mind had been outraged by this information, for here had been a legitimate spoil of war, a hostage and a bargaining tool of great power. Why, then, had Uther, who must have been well aware of who she was and what she would have been worth in the war against her husband, allowed the woman to go free? As I listened to his recounting of his misgivings, I was wondering the same thing myself. She was Lot's queen. She should never have been released!
Had she been anyone else, however, no matter who, Popilius's report would neither have bothered nor surprised me. I would have expected nothing less from my charming and mercurial cousin. But why in God's name would he have released Ygraine the queen? It made no sense at all, even had he been besotted by her, for merely by holding her prisoner he could have pursued his own designs and seduced her at his leisure, and with pleasure, knowing whose wife she was. And then it did make sense, in a bizarre, illogical way over which I had no control. The answer sprang into my mind completely formed and I accepted it immediately and instinctively as being true.
All that I knew of Lot, although I had not set eyes on him since that one time in boyhood, indicated that he was in many ways abnormal, almost inhuman, in his tastes and desires. Not that I had any cause to suspect him of being deviate or homosexual; far from it, his heterosexual lusts were notorious, as was his cruelty. It simply came to me that the man must be incapable of love—ordinary, human love—and it followed inevitably that his wife, as a bargaining piece in enemy hands, would have been less than useless to that enemy.
As a spy, however, angry in her Celtic pride and her sense of betrayal and abandonment by the man to whom she had been given like a sacrificial cow, she could be recruited to the cause of his enemies, would become an invaluable asset to them, even if her regal husband never shared a thought with her. From the way my heart swelled with excitement, I knew I was right. Ygraine was Uther's spy, the one of whom I had already heard! She and Uther had met, had quickly become enamoured of each other, and had conspired somehow, in the brief space of three short days, to undo Lot.
In the moments it took for all of this to explode in my mind, Popilius had continued speaking. Nothing had come of the events surrounding the supply train incident, he said, and apart from his outrage and puzzlement over the release of the woman, the whole thing had faded from his mind until about a year after the original encounter. Popilius had been personally inspecting the guards around a night camp when an exhausted rider had come in—a stranger wearing the blazon of the boar of Cornwall, Lot's own emblem— bearing urgent word for Uther.
Within the hour, Uther had ridden out, accompanied by only two of his closest circle, leaving his army under the control of Popilius. Nothing untoward had occurred and Popilius had not been unduly concerned at first. Only when the second consecutive day of Uther's absence dawned had Popilius begun to grow concerned. His concern mushroomed when he made specific inquiries and discovered that no one, including the remaining members of Uther's inner circle, knew where the king had gone. Even his Celts had no idea of Uther's whereabouts, but they at least were unconcerned. To them, their king was inviolable and invincible. He would come back safely.
As it transpired, Popilius had been forced to sit in agonized inactivity for two more days before Uther returned late in the afternoon, just before nightfall, galloping into camp as though he had not a care in the world. He had called a meeting of his senior officers immediately, and told them they would be moving out at dawn. Few slept for more than an hour that night, because long before dawn began to lighten the sky the camp had been broken down and stowed, and the troops were in formation, ready to ride out. They had marched for a day and a half, and then prepared an elaborate ambush above a narrow, mile-long gorge, where the only road ran narrow and serpentine alongside a fast-flowing stream. Every trooper had been turned to work lining the lip of the gorge with massive boulders, assembling an avalanche of rocks that would decimate the forces caught below. Uther's bowmen, in the meantime, were busy digging themselves in on the peat-covered hillsides on the exit side of the gorge, where the emerging road turned left to pass along the bottom of a gentle slope.
In the fight that ensued, Popilius experienced for the first time the destructive power of massed Celtic longbows as used by Uther's people. He had fought several times with contingents of Celts using the bows, but nothing he had ever seen had prepared him for what transpired that day. They had dug themselves four pairs of trenches ascending the hillside, and there were fifty men in each trench. Now, responding to voice signals from a leader in each trench, they began to fire in volleys; fifty long, lethal, deadly accurate arrows aimed and launched at a time from either side of the slope, and each flight followed so quickly by another that each rank had barely time to re-nock and pull before its time came round again. It looked, Popilius whispered, as though it were raining arrows.
Each man, he told me, fired ten arrows into a dense- packed target area that was so close it was impossible to miss. Four thousand arrows aimed at fewer than one thousand close-packed men who had nowhere to run in search of cover. It was over in almost less time than it takes to describe. Not one cavalryman went forward to meet an enemy that morning.
When Popilius had finished speaking, I allowed his silence to hang in the air for long moments before I broke it. "Where did Uther's information come from?"
"You tell me."
"Ygraine."
"That's my guess, too." He sighed deeply. "But it's still only a guess, Commander."
"No, it had to be Ygraine. There's no other explanation."
Popilius nodded. "I agree. That first messenger who came that night I was inspecting the guards, the one who wore Lot's boar...he was her man, sent to fetch Uther. I have seen him since, and he was with her when she joined us four days ago."
"She came willingly?"
He grunted. "Aye, and quickly. She had a child with her, too, new born. Lot thinks it's his, apparently, so she must have lain with him at least once in the past year."
"Is it?"
Again came the shake of his white head and a grunt of discomfort as he sought to ease his position. "Your guess is as good as mine. But Uther walks with an extra spring in his step nowadays, it seems to me."