Some gross misfortune had befallen him since I had last seen him, however, for his entire body was twisted upon itself, gnarled and malformed. Whatever injuries he had sustained, they had left him incapable of walking as other men walked. Both legs were misshapen, cruelly skewed, his right hand was clawed, useless, at his breast, and he propelled himself in a lurching, ungainly stagger, dragging his left leg. His mouth was as loud and profane as it had ever been, however, for as he drew near he berated everyone in sight, and his status evidently remained secure enough that they paid heed to him and drew back slightly to allow him to approach us.
He peered up at Ursus, selecting him over me as the elder, bearded man. “Down, whoreson,” he snarled. “Off that horse now or you die. Who in—?”
“Shame, Clodio,” I said, interrupting his tirade. “Is that the way guests are welcomed to Benwick nowadays?”
He stopped dead, keeping his eyes on Ursus and refusing to turn and look at me, but then he answered me in a snarling voice I had never heard him use before. “Aye, these days, it is.” He turned slowly then to glower up at me. “Who are you, that you know my name and speak to me direct? I don’t know you.”
“Yes you do, Clodio. You’ve told me many tales and shared your rations with me more than once, when I was small. It’s me, Clothar.”
“Clothar?” He stiffened and blinked his eyes several times, as though attempting to adjust to some profound revelation. “Clothar? But … How come you here? You should be in the north somewhere, with Germanus.”
“I was, but my time there is done now and they sent me home, bearing letters from Germanus to King Ban.” I swung down from my horse and walked to where he stood, and no one moved to hinder me. When I reached him he stretched out his left hand and touched my face, peering at me in that strange way common to people who see things poorly at a distance.
“Clothar. It is you. You’ve become a man. I never thought to see that, you’ve been gone so long.”
I smiled at him. “I’ve been trying to become one, Clodio, learning to be a soldier, among other things. But more important, old friend, what happened to you?”
He glanced down at himself, and I noticed that he looked first at the clawed right hand that was drawn up beside his right breast. “Ah,” he said, as if noticing it for the first time. “This.” He looked back at me then, gazing straight into my eyes. “Runaway wagon. Five years ago. I jumped off, but one foot was tangled in the reins, so I got dragged. Thrown around, run over by the wheel a few times. It was downhill. Steep grade. Killed two horses.”
The expression “Well, at least you’re alive” was on the tip of my tongue, but I managed to bite it back because it was very obvious that Clodio was not altogether pleased with that situation. I nodded my head instead. “Forgive me, Clodio, I did not know.”
“Forgive? Hah! How could you know? You weren’t here, were you?” He suddenly became aware that we were at the center of a ring of curious onlookers and he rounded on them, cursing them for a lazy batch of layabouts and then telling them my name, pretending as always that I was the King’s own youngest son and making sure they knew exactly who they had been poised to attack and kill when he arrived. He conveniently forgot, in doing so, that he himself had been prepared to flay the skin from us before I spoke to him, but that was typical of the Clodio I remembered so fondly. The men he was haranguing stared at me in something approaching awe, and I acknowledged them with a courteous nod before Clodio sent them scuttling back to their duties.
We watched them until the last of them had rounded the edge of the curtain wall, and as soon as we were alone, I introduced Clodio to Ursus. The two men nodded to each other cautiously, neither one quite prepared yet to accept the other without suspicion.
“Where is everyone, Clodio, and why is the guard so lax?”
He glowered. “What do you mean?”
I thrust up my hand to cut his protestations short before they could be uttered. “Come, man, look at where we are. We’re across the bridge, Clodio, on this side—the wrong side. We came across at the gallop, two of us, unopposed. We might as easily have been half a score. Had we been enemies, we could have cut the ropes and destroyed or damaged the windlasses, making the bridge unraisable before anyone reached us. There were guards up there, above the gate, but they were not even looking out over the battlements. I don’t know what they were doing, but they were not keeping watch. We sat on the brow of the hill over there, less than two hundred paces away, for nigh on a quarter hour in broad daylight and no one even glanced in our direction.”
“But—”
“No, no buts, my friend. There’s no excuse for dereliction of duty. Who is in command here?”
Clodio sniffed, a loud, long, disdainful snort. “I am, I suppose, so I’m the one you’ll have to hang or flog, if you think that’s called for. Lord Gunthar rode out yesterday to bring home your mother, the Lady Vivienne, from Vervenna. She has a young friend there … well, the young wife of an old friend, in truth, Lord Ingomer. He was newly wed a year ago to a young wife, Lady Anne. She was brought to childbed there a sevennight ago. Lady Vivienne went there before that to assist with the birthing, so she has been gone for ten days now, since the day after the King rode out to the west against the Alamanni. Lord Brach accompanied his mother with a score of men.”
Lord Ingomer, our closest neighbor, had always been one of Ban’s staunchest allies and supporters, and Vervenna was the name he had given to his lands, which bordered on Ban’s own. Ingomer’s house, a small, heavily fortified castle, was no more than five miles from where we stood. Nevertheless I found myself frowning.
“Why would Gunthar ride out to bring my mother home when she already has an escort? Brach is with her, isn’t that what you said?”
“Aye, but yesterday, when the word came that King Ban had been wounded—” Clodio cut himself short, appalled that he might have committed a gaffe. “Did you know that? The King was shot down by an assassin’s arrow … .”
“Aye, we know that, but you say the word arrived only yesterday?”
“Aye, about the middle of the afternoon. I was up on the walls and saw the messenger come over the hill there.”
“Sweet Jesu, he took his time in getting here! Four days, to cover a distance we consumed in one?” I was speaking to Ursus, but he frowned and jerked his head in a clear negative, and so I turned back to Clodio, wondering what I had said that Ursus did not like. “Go on, Clodio, what happened when the word arrived?”
“Lord Gunthar grew massy concerned about his mother’s health when once she heard the news, and so he rode to pass the tidings on to her himself, for fear she heard them unexpectedly from some other source.”
“What other source? There is no other source. Are you saying Gunthar rode off alone?”
“No, he took a strong party with him—his own mounted guards. Three score of them in two thirty-man squadrons.”
“And he simply left you alone in charge of the fortress?”
“Nay, not he. Gunthar accords nothing to lesser men than he … men below his station, I should say, since he believes all men are lesser than he is. He left the fortress in the charge of your brother Theuderic.”
“So where is Theuderic?”
“With the others now, wherever they are—Vervenna or elsewhere by now. I know not. He was away when word of the King arrived, patrolling the eastern boundaries against Alamanni raiding parties, so he knew nothing of it until he returned, about midway through the afternoon. Mind you, he was expected. Gunthar knew he was coming in person to pick up supplies, hoping the King might have returned from his patrol of the west side and would be able to spare him some more men for the eastern patrol.”