Again a pause, this time a long one, before the feathery voice resumed, "Use the horses, Cay, and breed more. More and more horses. The Saxons cannot withstand a charge of horsemen. The horses, and the long-swords. Use them hard, and build an army to follow where they lead. You will need legions. Build them. You know how. And Ullic's longbows, Uther's people's weapons. Don't let them go. They stand for power, lad. They can win battles for you from far away. Use them. That's all I have to say. Now call your aunt and go with God."
I rose to leave, but his fingers tightened on mine and pulled me down to him again. "I had forgotten. The Armoury and all its treasures are for you. Uther knows this. There is much in there still to profit from." His eyes closed again and this time I was sure he slept, but he stopped me again as I rose to go and find Aunt Luceiia. I had to lean close to his mouth to hear, so faint was his voice. "Your grandfather Caius wants you to use the name your mother gave you..." The short hairs on the nape of my neck stirred at the tense he used, but his fingers dropped from my hand, and suddenly afraid, I hurried to the door to fetch my aunt. She and Uther were standing outside in the passageway. I beckoned, and as she hurried to his side, Uther and I looked at each other, sharing each other's grief without speaking.
We buried Publius Varrus two days later, beside his friend Caius Britannicus. That night Uther and I got drunk together, each telling the other as much as he could about what Varrus had said to him. Uther was to be King. I was to be his Councillor. From that day on, I became known to everyone except my closest family as Merlyn. Caius, the boy, had died with his uncle Publius Varrus.
BOOK TWO - Fledglings
VIII
I have spent years considering the events that shape the destinies of men and have often come close to accepting the evidence of my own experiences, for all their despair, which indicate that the zenith and the nadir of each man's life, all the grandeur and all the absurdity of life in general, are dictated by sheer chance and blind coincidence. The image that taunts me most when I think such thoughts is of a woman's mouth. It is a remembered image, not an imaginary one.
The integrity of this chronicle now demands that I write of the events that gave rise to that particular image, and to the tortuous and convoluted pathways that radiated outward, from one central set of circumstances, to confuse the footsteps of an entire people. I am not sure, however, that I can do so with detachment, even after five decades, for my emotions are as raw today as they were then. Let me therefore begin slowly and try to reconstruct those circumstances and the foolish, youthful hubris that led to the death of my youth.
Four years had elapsed since the death of Publius Varrus, and in the interim the two hesitant, neophyte captains recalled from that initial, probationary patrol had evolved into brash, confident but effective and competent commanders of the cavalry troops of Camulod, tried and tested in battle. Uther and I had emerged from the crucible of harsh experiences transformed into professional soldiers—warriors in the true sense of the word. We had become men, and in the pursuit of that status we had progressed far along the road to building the legions Publius Varrus had told us we would need in the days ahead.
Uther was a voluptuary, a lecher and a hedonist. So was I. But neither of us thought of ourselves in such terms. Why should we? In the days of our youth the notion of carnal sin' was confined to incestuous relationships with immediate family members. It was only much later that the new, monastic churchmen introduced to our beautiful island the idea of the sinfulness of casual lust, and then, I am convinced, they used it callously, as a tool to prime the minds, of men to accept the idea that women were inferior beings and vessels of sin.
Their efforts were to no avail, thank God, but in the attempt to force their will upon our people they caused great hardship and much grief in every corner of our land, where men of God and men of goodwill struggled with the incompatible desires to serve God by heeding the edicts of His Church—which now demanded no less than the disenfranchisement and subjugation of one-half of our society—and to please Him by continuing to love, honour and respect the proud women of Britain who had been the equals of their men since time immemorial.
None of this, however, affected us as young men. As I have said, we were voluptuaries and, as to carnal sin, completely innocent. Equally innocent were the young women who shared our lives and our carnal pleasures. For the most part, they were attractive and sometimes even beautiful outsiders who had few or no family ties within our Colony. They worked for their keep, as did everyone else, performing by day whatever tasks best suited their individual natures and abilities, and spending their evenings and nights enjoying the pleasures available to them. In effect, they were the camp followers of Camulod, and in the way of camp followers, many of them found permanent mates among the soldiers of the Colony. Invariably, in the way of youth everywhere, they considered themselves Immortals— fit, healthy and full of life and love and admiration for the equally young, healthy soldiers who ensured their safety and prosperity in a time when safety and prosperity were undreamed of luxuries the length and breadth of Britain.
And so we shared each other's pleasures. As we were insatiable without being satyrs, they were concupiscent without being concubines; as we were riotous without brutality, they were acquisitive without venality. None criticized our conduct with one another, or felt or betrayed any censure or surprise. Why should they? Uther and I, living to the full with all our friends, were the Princes of Camulod, the wonders of all our Tribe. We were at the flood tide of our rutting youth, and we were invincible in war. And when we had no wars to fight, we patrolled long and hard, trained long and hard, and worked long and hard at the onerous duties of the administrative Council, set up by our own grandfathers to govern our Colony, on which we both served as members. What could have been more natural than that we spent our evenings and our nights in Camulod and elsewhere filling our bellies and emptying our loins at every opportunity? Food and sex ruled our off-duty existence, with food taking only as much precedence over sexual pleasure as was required to maintain the strength we needed to generate new seed. My own early dreams of inadequacy in the face of Uther's lusts had long ceased to bother me. I was his equal in size, endurance and instant readiness at any time. In those days, impotence was a temporary phenomenon engendered only by over-indulgence and was easily and quickly cured by rest and titillation.
I was in just such a state when I first noticed Cassandra. I had seen her previously, but there is a vast difference between merely seeing a woman and really noticing her. We had returned that same day from a long, tedious patrol, and she had been part of the baggage we had collected in the course of our sweep. Uther, riding apart from our main body, had found her in an open glade, deep in the forest, hidden from the road, and crouching by the corpses of two people we had to assume were her parents. There was no encampment, only a rough shelter of green boughs and dead wood thrown together so that it barely remained upright around the supine corpses. There was no evidence of struggle or violence surrounding the deaths, nor was there any means of telling how the two had died. Uther had had to drag the girl by the wrist to get her to go with him, and had lifted her onto his horse and ridden with his arms around her for the remaining days of the patrol. She was a skinny, lacklustre little thing with great grey eyes and a wide mouth that dominated her small, pointed face. And she was utterly silent. She had not spoken a word from the time he found her. She reminded me of a frightened little rabbit, looking at no one, and walking, when not on horseback, as though she held herself close within her own arms. On our return to Camulod, she had refused to quit Uther. No one could talk to her, none could penetrate her total silence, and she steadfastly refused to leave Uther's side all that day, even when his fancies led him where she should not be.