I felt myself frowning so hard that my face was starting to ache. The vision of my uncle as I had last seen him hovered in front of my eyes.
“What is the King doing here, Chulderic, so far from Genava?”
The old man looked at me in surprise, astonished that I should even have to ask such a foolish question. “He is being the King, fighting for his people and their safety. The entire countryside is crawling with two-legged vermin—Alamanni and the accursed Burgundians—all seeking what they call ‘room to live.’ We’ve been killing them as quickly as we can, and in the biggest numbers we can find, for nigh on three months now. They must breed like rats, the whoresons, because the more of them we kill, it seems, the more of them spill out of sewers and noisome craters in the earth. And they are outraged, crying to Rome for help against our ravages! Can you believe such shit? They want us to hold up our hands and step aside and let them take over our homes without a word of protest. Oh, it’s been going on for a hundred years now, especially with the Alamanni, you know that. But now the whoreson Burgundians are causing us more grief than the damned Alamanni ever have.”
He paused, and for a moment I thought he was finished, but he was merely rallying his forces, gathering his strength, and nurturing his outrage and disgust.
“And they have imperial backing, it appears, whoreson supporters at some rarified level of government who maintain that Empire—and tell me, pray, what Empire that might be? Tell me that!—Empire, they say, could not survive without their wondrous aid. Burgundian aid! They are being given title to lands around Genava—other people’s lands—as a reward for what is described as ‘faithful and unstinting service in Imperial Wars’! Have you ever heard such rabid filth? What about us, who live here and have fought and died for the whoreson Empire forever, without thought of asking for special privilege or dispensation? Would it ever have occurred to us to ask Rome’s blessing upon our actions had we decided we have a right to usurp and dispossess our neighbors? Sweet Jesus crucified!”
I had been waiting for a pause in his tirade and I leaped in before he could begin again. “I need to see King Ban, Chulderic. Will you take us there?”
He nodded, but his eyes still lingered suspiciously on Ursus, who had not moved since being cut free and showed no sign of returning to consciousness. “Aye,” he growled. “I will. But we had best see to your friend here. He should have come to his senses ere now.”
He was right, and I knelt quickly by Ursus, shaking his shoulder and calling him by name. Fortunately, he heard me on my first attempt and came awake slowly, groaning as he reached up to cradle his head, but then he remembered what had been happening before he fell and he snapped awake, pushing himself up until he was sitting, staring up at Chulderic. I offered him my arm and pulled him up to his feet, and then I made the introductions and told him what had happened.
When I had finished, Ursus stood looking at Chulderic, stooping forward slightly and fingering the swelling behind his ear. “Was it you who hit me?”
Chulderic smiled. “No, sir. That would have been one of our younger men. Strong warriors they are.”
“Aye, so it seems, especially when hitting a man from behind his back.” He squinted at me. “So now what do we do?”
“We go and visit the King and hope we find him well.”
Chulderic cleared his throat, a deep, harrumphing sound that contained all his skepticism. “Little chance of that. If you’re the praying kind now, from your bishop’s school, pray you then that we find him alive. He was struck down by a freakish chance, but the blow went deep. He might already be dead. Damnation, but I wanted to haul the man who shot him in to his judgment.
“Come then. Let’s away.”
Even from afar there was an air of dejection hanging over the King’s camp as dawn broke that day. I became aware of it as soon as we emerged from the surrounding forest and began making our way toward the distant tents. The few guards I could see stood slumped, rather than bristling at attention in the usual way of perimeter sentinels, and the normal bustle of a military camp was subdued, with no one moving at speed anywhere and no upraised voices where normally there would be a babble of sounds and shouts. Even the smoke from the cooking fires seemed to hang listless and inert, settling in flattened layers of varying density above the fires rather than dissipating in the early-morning air. I glanced at Ursus and saw immediately that he, too, had sensed the hopelessness here.
Chulderic and I had talked as we rode about the dispatches I bore for the King from Germanus. I had been carrying them belted about my waist, beneath my armor, and I had already passed them over to the old man, as Ban’s senior and most trusted counselor. I knew I could trust him to read and absorb the tidings I bore and, provided the King were fit to hear them, to pass their content on cogently and succinctly enough for the King to understand them and make any decisions that might be necessary. Now Chulderic rode beside me, knee to knee, and his face was wrinkled with concern. I could see his white-knuckled grip on the reins and knew it was only by a great effort of will that he was suppressing his urge to go galloping forward at top speed to be by his King’s side. Of course it was much too late for that now and nothing would be served by his making an undignified spectacle of himself in the last few moments of our approach. And so we rode sedately forward and dismounted decorously in front of the King’s tent.
As we did so the flaps to the tent were pushed apart and a tall figure emerged, stooping to keep his head clear of the peak of the entranceway. It was my cousin Samson, Ban’s second son and my favorite kinsman among his offspring. I was delighted to see him there, because Chulderic had made no mention of his presence with the King’s party, but I realized immediately that his attendance upon the King, along with that of his brothers, would be commonplace enough to merit no particular attention. At twenty-three, as I reckoned his age, Samson’s natural place as a warrior was by his father’s side. Samson ignored me completely in passing, going straight to take Chulderic’s reins from the groom who had been holding them. Chulderic gave him no chance to speak.
“How is he?”
Samson shrugged and dipped his head, twisting his mouth in a wry acknowledgment. “Not good. The surgeons say the arrowhead is lodged against his spine, deep beneath his shoulder blade. They can’t probe for it, and they can’t cut in to it because both the shoulder blade and the collarbone above it are directly in the path of the knife.”
“And so they do nothing?”
“Sakander tells me there is nothing they can do without killing him, and I believe him. If they break the collarbone in front to gain access to the arrowhead, they might have to sever it completely, and Sakander says the chances of its knitting again are slight, given my father’s age … and besides that, he says, even if they could reach the arrowhead, there is still no guarantee that he would be able to remove it—it’s a war arrow, remember, heavily, barbed—without killing my father.”
Chulderic spat an obscenity and then headed toward the tent’s entrance, but he stopped and looked again at Samson. “Is he awake?”
“No. He was, until a short time ago, but Sakander fed him a potion and he fell into a deep sleep just before you arrived. Now he should sleep for several hours.” Samson looked at me then, and from me to Ursus, a small frown ticking between his brows. “Who are these people?”