“What will I do without them? Much the same as I have done with them these past twenty years, which is nothing at all. But I’ll have less difficulty in resisting the temptation to use them to rid myself of some of the weaker sisters among our students. I frequently used to imagine myself standing in the middle of the practice ring, picking the slackers right off the backs of their circling mounts. So by taking these out of my reach, you’ll be assuring the future safety of the students. They are yours, Clothar, as is the spatha and the legate’s armor. Use them as we know you can and will, and we’ll make no complaints.
“Now, let’s go and find something to eat. Young Bors can pick these up for you later.”
Five days after that conversation, we rode into Lutetia to inquire after Perceval’s brother Tristan, making our way directly to the garrison headquarters, where we were told we would have to speak to the adjutant.
Perceval, I had decided on the day we left Auxerre, while I was still decidedly drunk with power on the assumption of my new role as mission commander, would no longer be known as Ursus. Now that his father had been dead for more than a decade, I argued, he had no longer any convincing need to conceal his given name and could stand tall as who he was by birth, Perceval of Montenegra. We were embarking upon a new life, I pointed out to him—bound for a new land where no one would ever have heard of Montenegra and where he could, if he so wished, begin a new existence, free of whatever taint he believed had clung to him thus far.
Ursus had been hugely unimpressed with my idea and my enthusiasm for making it real. Stubborn would not have been too strong a word to describe the strength with which he initially tried to resist it. He had refused even to consider the change at first, let alone accede to it, having been plain Ursus for so long, but he gradually relented under my incessant urging and my indisputable logic, and agreed to a trial—a purely temporary assay of the change—for a period of three months, stipulating only that he would never claim or acknowledge any association with the name of Montenegra, tied irremediably as it was to the memory of his detested father. That, he asserted, would be too much for him to stomach and so I accepted his refusal on that point.
In due time the adjutant returned, a pleasant fellow with the Roman name of Quintus Leppo, and assured us that no Tristan of Montenegra was recorded in their annals. Before Perceval could voice his disappointment, however, the adjutant volunteered the information that there was, or there had been, a Tristan of Volterra in their ranks until very recently.
Perceval’s head snapped up on hearing that. Volterra, he had once told me, had been a region in his father’s holdings of Montenegra. Where might we find this Tristan, he wanted to know immediately, and the adjutant asked him why he wished to know. When Perceval said he was his brother and produced the letter he had received, Leppo broke out in smiles and suddenly became a mine of information. Tristan, it transpired, was a close friend of his and still shared lodgings with him on the principal street of the old settlement of Lutetia. He had served out his mercenary contract and was spending some time in retirement now, debating whether to remain in the north or to seek employment for his skills elsewhere.
Barely an hour after that, we knocked on the door of Tristan’s lodgings and found him at home alone. By the end of that night, after he and his brother between them had drunk more beer and mead than I had ever seen in my life, it was decided that he would ride with us to Britain, sharing his brother’s fortunes and leaving future wealth or penury to the falling of the dice.
That decision did not displease me. I had formed an immediate liking for my friend’s younger brother, who was, I decided upon seeing him for the first time, close enough to me in age to be an equal—three or four years, I thought, flattering myself hugely, was a negligible difference. He was also one of the fairest, fine-looking young men it had ever been my pleasure to encounter. Indeed, the way the young women in the bar in which we drank that evening—the brothers drank, for the most part, while I merely marveled at their capacity for consuming the potions I could not stomach—fawned upon and draped themselves around the blond young man astounded me and made me vaguely envious.
Tristan, in truth, was something to behold. He was fair in the way that few other than the northern people of the snowy lands are fair. His hair was so pale that in certain lights it looked pure white, and his eyes were big and bright, piercingly blue with that hue that only certain flowers can possess. No trace of beard or mustache marred the smooth, gold-bronzed perfection of his face.
He liked me, too, from the outset, which is always a sure sign of future friendship, but what moved me most of all was the pure, undiluted, and unquestionable love and affection that he evinced for his long-lost brother from the moment of first seeing him and recognizing him there on the threshold of his lodgings. This was a man, I felt, who could ride with me anywhere.
He owned two horses and a full supply of armor and weaponry. He was, he assured me, a mercenary and a professional, prepared to sell his skills and his expertise to anyone who measured up to the criteria he demanded in an employer.
When we arrived in Gesoriacum, four riders and eight horses, we found Joachim, the first of Germanus’s three preferred sea captains, in residence, preparing to return to sea in search of one last cargo to trade and money to be earned before the end of the trading year. I gave him Germanus’s token of the lapis lazuli ring, and we discussed the price of hiring his boat and crew for our voyage.
We sailed for Britain at high tide on the following day.
I learned about the sickness of the sea on that brief voyage, for the Narrow Seas were rough and unfriendly to mariners, and their harsh lesson was to stay with me throughout my life.
Although I hated Joachim when, after two days of unimaginable agony, he suggested that we avoid the south coast known as the Saxon Shores and veer to the west, around the horn of Cornwall and then north to Glastonbury on the western coast, there came a day when the dawn was bright and golden and I looked out from the prow of the ship to see the high hill he named as Glastonbury Tor looming above the flat shores to the east of where we crept forward through a calm, still sea.
VIII
BISHOP ENOS
I HAD NEVER SEEN such an inhospitable place. Britain, the vaunted land of riches famed by Julius Caesar and the Emperors Claudius, Hadrian, and Trajan, was a hole without any redeeming features that I could discern. For the first seven days after our arrival on its coastline, heavy, driving rain fell incessantly and left us chilled to the bone, shivering in our armor and unable to escape the damp, appalling misery of the place. The moist, cold air contaminated every place we found during that time that might conceivably have offered us anything resembling accommodation or comfort and left us sniffling with discomfort and close to despair over the sheer foulness of the climate.
Perceval expressed best what we were all feeling late one soggy afternoon, after we had been vainly trying for the better part of an hour to light a fire using sodden wood. “I hate this damnable place,” he said, “and I resent having to live in constant motion, afraid to stand still for more than a few moments lest my armor rust up and lock solid and I be stuck here forever.” It was an inept attempt at humor, but we were in sore need of humor by that time.