“My sword was a spatha, a long, slender cavalry sword, as you know, intended for stabbing. But I kept it razor sharp and a woman has a very thin neck compared to a man’s. She died as her husband had died, her head severed with one blow.”
I had been expecting something of the kind, but nevertheless I was left feeling breathless when he spoke the words, perhaps because of the matter-of-fact way in which he delivered them. As I stared at him, I could feel my eyes growing round with incredulity and what I can only think of now as consternation.
“You killed her, with your own hands? But you said you loved her! How could you do that, if you loved her?”
“I said I fell in love with her. That is a very different thing from loving her, boy. A boy will love his mother and his grandmother, his aunts and all his sisters, but the feelings that he feels for all of them will be nothing to the feelings he endures when he falls in love with a woman. Falling in love and loving someone are not at all the same. That, too, you will learn someday. But even as you are now, at ten years old, think you I should have spared her?”
That question left me open-mouthed, silenced between the need to scream out yes! and the realization that we were discussing the woman responsible for my mother’s death. I was unaware of speaking but I must have whispered something of what was going through my mind, because Chulderic answered me.
“No, not responsible, not completely. It was Clodas who was responsible from the outset—his malevolent envy gave birth to the idea—but he could not have achieved what he did without Sabina. She didn’t handle any sharpened weapons that day, but the lethal honey of her coaxing words to both your parents had been more venomous than any poisoned blade could ever have been, and her deliberate seduction of me, undermining my sense of duty and propriety and enabling me to be false to my own code, was malicious and premeditated. And so I killed her without compunction.”
I sat silent, absorbing that, then nodded. “That was just. But what about my grandfather, King Garth?”
Chulderic shook his head, as though dismissing my question. “The woman was right. Garth was already dead, that same morning. The previous night, while Merofled was moving into striking range of where we were camped, Clodas himself had arrived at King Garth’s door, accompanied by an escort of his mercenaries, telling Garth that he was on his way to visit a cousin who lived in a neighboring territory to the north of Garth’s own lands. Garth took him in and made him and his escort welcome without demur or question, secure in the knowledge that Clodas’s father, Dagobert, had been one of his oldest and dearest friends. During the night Clodas’s people rose up in the darkness and one group killed the old king while he slept, overwhelming his guards easily, since none of them expected any danger. And while they were attending to King Garth, others of their number were busy slaughtering the King’s strongest leaders, all of this planned and practiced, with nothing left to chance, so that come morning there was no one left alive who might have rallied the forces of Ganis to withstand the usurper. It was done and over with. Clodas was King of Ganis before the outrage was visited upon your parents later that same day.
“I refused to believe what the woman had told me, hoping against hope that something might have served to warn and therefore save Garth and his people, and so I set out with Fallo, Quentin, and some others we had found to ride to warn the King of what had happened, and I had you with me, carefully wrapped and tied into a saddlebag that was strapped across my shoulders. But before we had traveled halfway, the word met us coming from Ganis. The King was dead; Clodas had claimed the throne; his army, far larger than the mercenary force your father had provided the previous spring, had moved into Ganis early that morning in overwhelming numbers; everything was chaos and the King’s leaderless army had been disarmed and rendered useless.
“I immediately pulled our little party off the road. We had nowhere to go that might be safe for us, and none of us was of the type that would consider surrendering to Clodas. Besides, we had a nursing infant with us and no way to feed him. Much as I hated having to take the time to do so, I rode apart from the others and sat down alone to concentrate on what we should do next. Your life and safety was my first priority, above and beyond all other considerations. My negligence had made you an orphan, I believed, for I did not know yet that your mother had survived. Now you were the only living remnant of your family’s blood, and I knew my immortal salvation depended upon my keeping you alive, to grow to manhood and claim vengeance for your parents’ deaths. I had never been more than a nominal Christian until that point, but I became devout thereafter, for a while, believing that I had to expiate my sin of negligence.”
“So what did you do, Magister?”
“D’you remember my mentioning Antonia, the other Roman woman who had lost her baby?”
I nodded, wondering what she could have to do with any of this, and he grunted. “Aye, well, I remembered her, too, and I went searching for her, hoping that she might still be in milk, for months had elapsed since I last saw her. She was not difficult to find, for she yet lived in the same house, and she was still producing milk like a brood cow, for she had taken in another baby, younger than you, whose mother had died at the birthing. She remembered me, and when I told her what had transpired with you she volunteered immediately to take you into care. I left you with her and rode off to see what might be done about Clodas and his treachery.”
“Did you fight him?”
“Fight him? I could not draw within a mile of him. He was surrounded by his own people, all of them heavily armed and far more vigilant than I had ever seen before in such a large body of men. Their lord and master had just committed a series of heinous sins, including regicide and the mass slaughter of people who had shown him nothing but kindness. It was reasonable to assume that someone would come seeking vengeance and redress sooner or later, and that the avengers might come from any direction, and so the new ‘King’ had let it be known that he would be openhanded in rewarding any who identified such trouble in advance of its occurrence. Naturally, every man in his army and not a few of Garth’s former people were anxious to qualify for such rewards.
“I had to split my group asunder, to take their chances each man for himself, for had anyone seen us together and failed to recognize us as allies, or, God forbid, had seen and recognized us as Childebertus’s men, we would all have died instantly.
“I remained in Clodas’s camp for more than a week, asking questions, learning little and watching what was going on, and as the days passed I grew more and more discouraged. I discovered that your mother was, in fact, alive but was being kept under constant guard. Clodas, I was told, took pains to visit her twice each day, morning and afternoon, between sessions of governing. That information surprised me, for it had not occurred to me that Clodas might actually seek to govern Garth’s kingdom, but as I watched the comings and goings of the various identifiable officials thereafter, I found myself admitting, however reluctantly, that Clodas was far more of an organizer and administrator than I would ever have believed before that time. By the end of ten days I was forced to accept that I was powerless, as things stood, to do anything to revenge myself on Clodas—I had been entertaining fantasies of sneaking into his quarters and waking him up, making sure he knew who I was and why he was about to die, and then slitting his throat. I was equally incapable of doing anything to help your mother in her captivity, for my face was too well known for me to risk discovery trying to approach the quarters where she was being held.