Letting out my breath in a hiss, I turned to the second box and unlocked it, too, with only minor difficulty. Now I drew my sword and, leaning backwards as far as I could, used its point to attempt to raise the lid, knowing that when I did anything might happen. The sword was too short to permit me enough leverage from a safe distance. There was a javelin leaning against the wall, and I used that instead, at arm's length, crouching low as I placed its point against the front flap of the lid and pushed it up and open. Nothing happened, although I flinched at the clatter of the lid as it fell backward. I opened the second box the same way, with the same result. I waited, motionless, while I counted slowly to one hundred and then, finally convinced that no poisonous vapours were to be released, I stepped forward cautiously and looked at what I had uncovered.
The interior of the first box was beautifully made, rimmed by a scored, wooden edge as wide as my hand, with the central portion divided into a grid of twelve square compartments, four long by three deep. Leather thongs lay piled, apparently haphazardly, on top of the contents of the compartments. I leaned forward and probed die thongs cautiously with my fingertip. They seemed to be plain leather, with no sharp points hidden among them. I made to pick them up, and then I realized that they were handles, one attached to each side of each section of the scored wooden frame. The wide, scored border was a series of nested trays, made to fit one into the other, each growing progressively deeper, but each offering complete security and safety to its contents.
As I progressed slowly and with care with my examination of the contents, I put aside some of the more baffling objects for further study. Some of these were, and were to remain forever, mysterious. Others, however, were more easily identified, and still others I was soon able to classify. All of them, I found without great surprise, were dangerous, capable of dealing death in one way or another. I discovered, for example, four oblong clay boxes, glazed inside and out, with fitted, sealed, similarly glazed lids, containing an oily, pungent, greenish paste that turned out to be the venom used on the poisoned arrows. I spread some of it on metal, and as it dried it left a scaly, crystalline residue that I recognized as the same that had coated the arrowhead with which I had executed Caspar.
Other jars and boxes, phials and glass tubes held a wondrous range of substances, all strange to me: crystals and powders; pastes and crushed mixtures of things that had been ground down by mortar and pestle; unguents and oily substances that seemed to have been rendered over fire; bunches and boxes of dried berries, grasses, leaves and even seeds or nuts. The colours of many of these materials were astonishing: bright and dull greens; glowing reds from cinnamon to crimson; rich, startling blues and yellows; one glossy, almost radiant black; and a full range of whites, darkening into pale and dark browns.
All of these I inspected with great care, melting them, if they would melt, to see how they would react; mixing them in water; exposing them to air and fire; testing them in every way I could think of, including feeding them to animals, most of which died, and keeping copious notes on my findings.
One of them astounded me, and although to this day I have no knowledge of what it was, I used it sparingly for long afterwards until I had exhausted it, once I discovered how it worked. I found a box of it, almost full, hidden at the deepest level of the larger chest and tightly bound with twine. It was a blackish, granular powder of no distinction that I proved harmless immediately by feeding small quantities of it to three rabbits with no ill effects. Having determined it was not a poison, I tasted it. It was unremarkable, tasting like charred ashes, save for a saline tang that I could not define. I mixed it in water, stirring it well and watching it to see how it dissolved or altered. It did neither. Discouraged, and on the point of pouring it out, I remembered whence it had come and reasoned again that the Egyptian sorcerers would not have kept it so securely among their clandestine treasures unless it had value of some kind, so rather than pouring it onto the floor to waste, I strained it through a cloth, twisting the fabric tightly until it contained only the original pinch of powder. That done, I spread the moist powder on a piece of tin and held it over a candle flame. It dried out slightly from the heat, but nothing more. Disappointed, and by now losing interest,! shook the residue back into the scrap of cloth through which I had strained it, balled it up carelessly, and threw it into the fire of the forge, where it exploded with a great whoosh of flames and billowing black smoke that caught at my throat and brought me choking to my knees, eyes streaming and heart palpitating in panic.
When I had regained my breath and my composure, I placed another pinch of the powder carefully on the top of the bench and touched it with a burning taper. As soon as the flame touched it, the powder, whatever it was, ignited with a flaring hiss of intense flames, emitting great, rolling clouds of bitter, blinding smoke. Fire powder! Within an hour I had established that it was the most combustible substance I had ever found. No flame was required to ignite it—it reacted with equal violence to the heat of a spark. Amazed and mystified, I packed it away again, safely out of sight, wondering how I would ever find a use for it.
I had been secretive about the boxes and their contents, and Uther had forgotten their existence within days. Donuil did not forget, but he disliked the boxes and avoided them, trusting me to find out what I could about them. No one else knew of their existence. And as I worked with them, fascinated by their contents, it never crossed my mind that the mere possession of them might change men's perception of me, in the years ahead, from soldier to sorcerer.
Towards the end of my third week of study, however, I was forced to lay them aside for other matters. News came from die north-west of another sudden, overland attack, this time on Uric's lands by hostile, unidentified forces from the north-east, reinforced by more of Lot's people from the south who had attempted a seaborne invasion from Lot's north Cornish territories. The invaders, we were told, had been driven back on both fronts after harsh fighting, but Uther's father Uric had fallen, slain by a poisoned arrow.
My cousin Uther was now King of the Pendragon.
He took the news less than well. In fact, he collapsed, hit far harder by grief than I would ever have suspected he could be, and it surprised me deeply to discern that his grief sprang from a deep and obviously genuine love for his father, an affection I had never suspected. This realization astounded me, and forced me to a drastic re-evaluation of my uncle Uric, by whom I had never, frankly, been impressed;
Among all the strong and forceful characters who made up our family—and many of them seemed superhuman— Uric, king though he had been, had seemed one of the least remarkable, overshadowed, to my mind at least, by almost all his relatives. Yet here was Uther, my wild, unmanageable cousin, weeping openly over the death of his father in a way that I, who had loved my own father deeply, had been unable to. Prompted by guilt, I suppose, and an urge to reexamine the life of this uncle whom I had obviously not known at all, I tried on several occasions to entice Uther to talk to me about his father, but I was almost totally unsuccessful until one afternoon, days after the arrival of the news, when we were alone together in Uncle Varrus's Armoury.