“By the balls of Mithras,” Chulderic growled, “the man who made these things knows his craft.” He wrapped his fingers firmly around the center of the shaft he held, then moved it around behind his back as he bent toward the unconscious form of the King, peering closely at the sleeping face.
“How long will he sleep?”
“Two hours, I hope, perhaps longer. But it could be less. It depends upon how well his mind blocks out the pain.”
“That’s what you gave him the potion for?”
“Aye. The substance is strong. It induces sleep and stifles pain.”
“What is it called, this substance?”
“It has no name of its own. It is one of a range of marvelous powders, all of them white, that are miscible in water and produce wondrously beneficent effects. We call them opiates, and although I know not where they come from, they are supposedly distilled from the essence of white poppy flowers in a distant land to the east, beyond the Empire’s bounds.”
“The Kingdom,” I whispered, remembering something Tiberias Cato had told me about his days as a boy there.
Sakander turned his keen gaze on me immediately. “What did you say?”
He did not call me “boy” but I felt the rebuke nonetheless and I felt myself flushing. “I said, the Kingdom. It is what the Smoke People call the ancient land far to the east, beyond this Empire.”
“The Smoke People. And who are they?”
I shrugged, feeling foolish to be talking of such irrelevant and inconsequential things over the unconscious body of the King. “A tribe of nomads, horsemen, thousands of miles from here. A friend of mine, one of my teachers, once lived among them for a while and learned from them about the Kingdom, an ancient place of great wisdom and learning, peopled by men with yellow skin, black eyes, and straight black hair.”
I was conscious of both men staring at me, and then Chulderic, his voice inflectionless and unreadable, said, “Sakander, this is the King’s youngest son, Clothar. He has been away, in the north, attending Bishop Germanus’s school in Auxerre since before you came to us. Apparently they have taught him some novel notions.” He looked back to the King. “When will we be able to move him?”
Sakander began speaking without removing his eyes from mine. “He should not be moved at all, but since it is clearly both dangerous and foolish for us to remain here, separated from the army, then we may as well move him immediately and hope to achieve the worst of it while he is still in the grasp of the opiate.” He turned back to the King then, dismissing me for more important matters. “I have him lying on a board, beneath those covers, for ease of carrying, because I did not know how soon we might want to move him. Four strong men should be able to bear him easily from here to the largest of the commissary wagons. It is well sprung—as well as any wagon can be—and I have it already stripped of all its contents and layered thick with straw to guard him as well as may from bumps and bruises.” The surgeon shook his head. “I don’t know whether it is better to move quickly or slowly in such cases, but whichever way we go, Lord Ban will be badly jarred in transit. Fortunately we are but four miles from the main encampment, so if we leave within the hour we can be there before noon.”
“Aye, four miles from the army’s camp, but we’re fifty miles from home.”
Sakander nodded, his face expressionless. “True. Will you give orders to break camp?”
“Aye.” Chulderic called to Samson, who came in immediately. The old warrior explained what he and Sakander had decided, then instructed the younger man to choose four men to move the King, and then to make the necessary traveling arrangements to rejoin the main body of the army.
Ban of Benwick remained unconscious while he was gently moved, and he slept through the entire four-mile journey to the main camp. Sakander sat beside the King the entire time and his face was somber and unreadable, but I suspected that he was not entirely grateful for the King’s lack of awareness. It seemed to me, watching him as he bent forward time after time to wipe the King’s face with a moist cloth, that the surgeon might have been happier had he discerned even a hint of discomfort in the King’s demeanor. But that was purely a personal conjecture and I had nothing at all on which to base my suspicion, beyond an insistent prompting from somewhere in my own head. It simply seemed to me that the King slept too profoundly.
Ban slept that entire day away, and the night as well, opening his eyes only at midmorning on the following day. I had ridden out of camp by that time, accompanied by Ursus, unable to remain waiting passively for something to happen and even less able to sit quietly by while my father—this title in defiance of the fact that I knew him to be my uncle—fought for his very life. Chulderic told me later that the King was very weak, but free of pain and lucid when he awoke, and that he remained that way for nigh on two hours, during which time Chulderic had been able to pass on to him the gist of the messages I had brought from Germanus. The King had listened and understood, and had made several pronouncements, in addition to which he had had Chulderic summon the cadre of his senior officers, both to witness and thereafter attest to his lucidity, his soundness of mind, and his self-possession, and also to bear witness to his issuance of several specific instructions concerning the immediate future of his lands and his people.
Astonishingly, Ban had then, and thus publicly, rescinded his acknowledgment of his firstborn son, Gunthar, as his legal heir and follower, denying him the right to claim the crown of Benwick. His second son, the twenty-three-year-old Samson, Ban had declared in front of everyone assembled, would be his heir henceforth and would assume the crown on Ban’s death. It was a momentous announcement and apparently a spontaneous one, in the eyes of those who were present for the occasion, notwithstanding the King’s claim that he had been considering it for years, believing he yet had years ahead of him to resolve such matters.
My own belief is that the King’s claim, disregarded and generally discounted as it was, was no less than the truth. I knew from comments made by Samson and Brach that Ban had been having serious misgivings for years about Gunthar’s fitness to succeed him, but I also accepted that Ban truly had believed there was no shortage of time ahead of him and that he was under no urgency to make such a grave decision. As soon as his circumstances changed, however, Ban the King, who had always been a pragmatist adapting constantly to the real world in which he lived and ruled, made a final and irrevocable decision and announced it bluntly, in the presence of witnesses.
So now my cousin Samson would be king of Benwick. And my cousin Gunthar would not. Wrack, ruin, and chaos lay between those two statements.
Even as I listened to Chulderic’s report of the King’s pronouncement, I knew that the old warrior was as perturbed by the development as I was—it was plain to be heard in his tone. He had been counselor to Ban for many years, but he had always held his personal opinions close and was notoriously tight-lipped on matters of the King’s concerns, so I had no real knowledge of how he felt about what he was reporting to me, nor had I any insight into whether he might approve or disapprove of the King’s decision. Such perceptions, however, were irrelevant. The King had made up his mind and had then made his decision public. Neither Chulderic nor anyone else, and least of all I, could do anything to change what had been done. But neither one of us could ever have envisioned the carnage and the depredations that were to follow from the King’s decision. That all lay in the future.
For the time being, once the first impact of the news of Ban’s decision had passed by, my own mind became entirely preoccupied with the awareness that the King’s sudden decision on this matter of the succession must reflect his own belief that he was going to die. It was a notion that my mind could not encompass. Ban of Benwick, my uncle, father, guardian, was and had always been the single, strongest constant in my life, far more so at that time than even Germanus. The perfect embodiment of the term “warrior king,” he had always been indomitable and indefatigable, a champion among champions of any stripe, with an upright, unimpeachable integrity and dignitas that had won him the respect and admiration of everyone who knew him and had dealings with him. And now this paragon was to die? It was simply unacceptable and I would not, could not countenance the possibility. I knew he was sorely wounded and I had seen the proof of that with my own eyes, but he was Ban of Benwick, indestructible. His wounds might be grievous and even life threatening, I told myself, but they would not be fatal. Ban would overcome them. He would. He must.