I have no idea how long it took me to recover from the sickness that swept over me, but when it was over and I picked myself up off the ground I found that Ursus had confiscated our assailants’ provisions and kindled a fire to cook some bannock to go with the cooked meat he had found in one of their packs. The smells were delicious, and I approached the fire slowly, feeling somewhat shamefaced about my latest pusillanimous behavior. Ursus, however, said nothing at all and contented himself with serving me some heated meat on a slab of thin, salty, freshly baked bannock. I accepted it gratefully and devoured it without saying a word. Ursus ate his more slowly, and when he was done he licked the blade of his knife carefully and pointed it at me.
“You did well, lad. First kill’s never easy to handle. But it’ll never be as difficult or as worrisome again, I promise.”
“He wasn’t the first.” I raised my head and looked Ursus directly in the eye. “The one I shot with your bow was the first.”
Ursus twisted his face into the semblance of a half grin and shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “That one didn’t count. That was no more than helping a friend in need. If you hadn’t taken that one down he would have been on top of me before I could handle his friend, and that might easily have been the end of me. Truth is, lad, your first real kill’s always the one whose blood gets on your hands and your clothes—the up-close, frantic one who’s trying just as hard to kill you as you are to kill him. He’s the one you’ll dream about for a while. But you’ll get over it, in time. We all do.”
He skewered the last piece of meat that lay simmering on the flat iron griddle he had laid on the coals of the fire—he must have found that, too, I realized, in his searching—and dropped it onto the last remaining piece of bannock in his hand, then closed his fist, squeezing the whole thing into a solid cylinder of bread and meat. He held it out to me. “Here, finish this, and then we’ll salvage those arrows and drag the bodies out of sight. Can’t bury them, but we can’t just leave them lying there, either.”
A long time later, after it grew dark, he spoke to me again across the dying fire. “Where exactly are you headed? Where are your people from?”
It was the first thing either of us had said for hours and it roused me from my semistupor of meditation. I realized that I couldn’t answer his question properly, simple though it was. I knew where I was going, but I had no notion of how to get there from where we were.
“Genava,” I told him. “It’s a lake, far to the southeast, I think, close to the Alps—part of the Frankish kingdom called Benwick. King Ban rules there. He is a Ripuarian Frank and my stepfather, wed to my mother’s sister—”
Ursus interrupted me with a scoffing laugh. “A Frank’s a Frank, lad, be he from north or south. Leave it at that.”
“No, that’s not true. The two are very different, no matter that they sound alike. King Ban is a Ripuarian Frank, but I’m not. I’m a Salian Frank, from the north, near the Rhine river. My father’s people lived and ruled along the Rhine. Ban rules along the Rhodanus, which is called the Rhone nowadays. Rhine, Rhone, almost the same, one in the north, one in the south. Are they the same river because of that? I think not.”
Ursus raised both eyebrows and pursed his lips, then nodded deeply, maintaining his wide-eyed look. “Prettily put,” he said. “A point well made, so I will say no more.”
I shrugged. “The fact remains, I know where I’m headed, but I don’t know how to set about going there from here. I don’t know where we are now.”
Ursus laughed, a sharp, deep bark. “Is that all? Well, lad, that’s easily taken care of since I know exactly where we are, and I also know the route from here to Benwick and Lake Genava.”
I blinked at him, astonished. “You do?”
“Of course I do, and you’d better learn to do the same, and the quicker the better.” He paused, gazing at me. “Knowing where you are is a matter of simple self-preservation. Look at me, a professional soldier, a mercenary. If I don’t know where I am at any time I could be killed, simply for wandering among the wrong people. And so I pay attention to where I go, always. I’m so used to doing it that I never think about it any more, but I always remember where I’ve been and I know where I am headed next—even if it’s only as far as I can see in a strange country.”
“So where are we now?”
“Seven days south of the gorge on the Liger River, headed southeast, this being the seventh day, and I’d say we’ve been covering less than a score of miles a day because we’ve been cautious, moving slow, keeping our heads down, covering our tracks, and taking care to stay out of people’s way. Seven more days at the same speed should bring us to Lugdunum. The locals call it Leeyon, but whichever way you say it, it’s the military administration’s headquarters for south-central Gaul.” He paused, waiting for my admiration, and when I admitted it he grinned. “What’s important about that, though, from your viewpoint, is that if we swing back to the northeast from there and follow the High Road, we can be bathing in Lake Genava in five more days, providing the water’s warm enough.”
This was momentous news, and I was pleasantly surprised at how close we were to my family home, for had he told me it would take us three times as long I would have accepted that without demur. I felt my face split into a wide grin.
“Well, whether the lake is cold or not, King Ban’s bathhouses are fine, I promise you. They were built for a Roman governor long ago and they lack nothing that his wealth could provide. Will you come with me, then, to Benwick?”
“Of course, how could I not? I have to see you safely home. We should find word of Duke Lorco in Lugdunum, but even if we are ahead of him and he hasn’t arrived yet, we’ll leave word there that I’ve escorted you home and I’ll follow him later to Carcasso. Does that sound like good sense? ’Course it does, so let’s get some sleep and be on the road again early tomorrow morning.”
The twelve days Ursus had estimated for our journey were more than sufficient. We found ourselves approaching Lugdunum at the end of the fifth of the seven days he had allowed us for that portion, and this was mainly because, within three days of setting out on that last lap, we had found ourselves in a heavily traveled area serviced by one of Rome’s great spear-straight roads and hence were able to discard all our former caution and proceed openly at more than twice our previous pace.
Lugdunum was a surprise to me. I knew I must have passed through it years earlier on my way north to Auxerre, but I had absolutely no memory of the place, and I found it to be very different, in almost every way that I could think of, from its counterpart city of Treves in the north. Each had a military fortress, and the imperial legions quartered there were the same in both places. Apart from that similarity, however, everything else was different from one town to the other, beginning most notably with the food but extending to the local people, the farmers and artisans who lived in the surrounding areas. The climate was warmer here, for one thing, since we were now in southern Gaul, but the very appearance of the local folk was completely dissimilar to that of the people who lived in the Treves region. These people here were darker skinned than their northern brethren, and they seemed plumper, somehow, sleeker, more content, and more self-satisfied. “Better fed” was the way Ursus expressed it, and in the utterance he made it sound like some kind of cause for shame.
The wine they drank was better, too, I learned, and even though I could not have told from tasting it I could see for myself that the white wine of this region was closer to yellow in appearance, so I was prepared to believe that it might be thicker and more fruity with the kinds of sugar that northern wines lacked notably. It was the local red wine that made this region famous, however, according to what Ursus told me, and I saw no reason to doubt him, although I had no desire to taste any of it. I had tasted my first cup of watered wine at twelve years old. Now, almost four years later, the blend of the two liquids I infrequently drank was barely stronger than that first anemic mixture of one part wine to three parts water. I still found the taste of it unpleasant and preferred the honest tastelessness of chilled, clear water.