“I know the place, the caves, I mean,” I said. “But how will I find the secret entrance?”
“You won’t. Even knowing it’s there you’ll never find it, not if you search for it for a hundred years. You won’t find it until I show it to you. King Ban knew nothing of it until his father showed it to him, and Ban the Bald told the same tale of being shown by his father. The secret goes from generation to generation.”
An appalling thought hit me then. “So Gunthar knows of it.”
“No.” Clodio’s response was whiplash-quick and sharp. “Never. Empty your mind of that thought. Gunthar has no idea the caverns exist. When he turned twelve and should have learned of it, the King, by sheer good fortune, was involved in quelling a revolt by the Alamanni on our northern borders. When he returned from his campaign, he found his son absent, vanished no one knew where, hunting with his cronies. Even as a twelve-year-old, Gunthar was a law unto himself. Anyway, for whatever reason, Ban never did find a convenient time to show Gunthar the secret. The boy’s fourteenth and fifteenth birthdays came and went, and still he had been told nothing, and by the time he had turned sixteen and attained manhood, his father had decided, for reasons of his own, to tell him nothing. It has turned out to be a wise decision. I am glad to have been able to play a small part in it.”
“You played a part in it? How so?”
He almost smiled at me, but at the last moment all that transpired was a quirking of one corner of his mouth. “Through friendship, and through shared responsibility. You forget that I, too, knew the secret.”
“But—forgive me for being blunt, my friend—why would the King entrust you with the secret and yet deny it to his son?”
“You just said it yourself: trust. Ban trusted me. He could not bring himself to trust Gunthar. And I urged him, quietly, to trust that judgment that bade him remain silent despite the unease he felt over what he saw as a duty to his firstborn. I reminded him that he had sired four sons and that the secret of the castle’s strength or weakness need only be passed to one of them to endure.”
“I see. So have you told any of the other three?”
“No. You are the only one who knows, and even you know nothing yet.”
“But I am not the King’s son.”
“No more am I. But you will be worthy of the trust, Clothar, and when you—should you—choose to pass the knowledge on, you will divulge it wisely, I have no doubt.”
“Does Queen Vivienne know about it?”
“No.”
“Hmm.” I glanced sidelong at Ursus, wondering how he was perceiving all of this, but he was staring down at the ground between his feet and I had no means of knowing if he was even listening. I looked back to Clodio. “Tell me about the entrance. I find it difficult to imagine any well-used entrance being as completely concealed as you describe.”
“I did not ever say it is often used. Ban’s tomfoolery aside, it is opened only once every ten years or so. The doorway was built by a master stonemason a hundred years ago and more, but it is a doorway the like of which you have never seen.”
“So how will I find it, alone?”
“You won’t. You will find me. If you leave now, and should there be treachery so that the castle falls into Gunthar’s hands, I will make my way out and through the caverns each day at noon. I will wait in the caves there for an hour, then return here if you have not come to find me. I will do this every day for ten days, and after that I will assume you have been found and killed, and so will stop going. But if you do come that way, bring no more than a score of your best men, and make sure you bring sufficient cloth to bind their eyes, for none of them must see the entrance or the exit on this end. Now you had best leave, before Beddoc and his people reach us. Where will you go, once you are out of here?”
I looked at Ursus and shrugged my shoulders. “Vervenna first, I think. That seems to be the most obvious place to start. But we’ll approach it carefully, for only the gods can know what we’ll find there. And if there’s no one there, that too will tell us something.” I stepped quickly toward Clodio and laid one hand upon his shoulder. “Thank you, old friend. I will not forget. Let’s hope our expectations are ill founded and we’ll have no cause to call for your assistance. But if we’re proven right and the madness we fear does break out, we’ll be there by the caves one day, waiting for you. Go with God, Clodio.”
“I will, young Clothar, but I would far rather have gone with my King. Be careful.”
We rode into it. Rode unsuspecting into the chaos and destruction that marked the beginning of Gunthar’s War and were engulfed by its madness within the space of two heartbeats. One moment we were forging ahead determinedly through the still unceasing downpour, our horses plodding side by side along a broad and muddy woodland path, and the next we had rounded a bend in the path and found ourselves at the top of a steep defile leading down into a tiny vale that was choked with corpses. It was still not yet noon and the noise of the lashing rain was loud enough to drown any noise from the flies that were beginning to swarm here in uncountable numbers.
At first glance, I could not tell what I was looking at, but beyond that first uncomprehending look there was nothing that could disguise the atrocity of what we had found. My first conscious impression was of a score of bodies. The number sprang into my mind as though it had been spoken aloud, and I recall it clearly. A score of bodies. No sooner had I acknowledged it, however, than I saw that it was woefully inadequate, for another score and more lay sprawled and half concealed by bushes. And at that moment, as though it had been preordained, the rain stopped falling, for the first time in days, to leave us sitting stunned in a silence that seemed enormous, gazing in stupefaction at the carnage before us.
Ursus, as usual, was first to collect himself. “Well,” he said, his voice sounding louder than ever now that he had no need to shout over the noise of the rain, “at least we know now that they have not all joined forces. Whose men were these, do you know?”
“Ban’s,” I said, still too stupefied by the unexpectedness of what we had found to have thought beyond the fact of it to the implications it entailed. “They’re garrison troops, wearing Ban’s emblem, see? The blue boar’s head.” And then, as the import of what we were seeing began to sink home to me, my voice shrank to a mere whisper and I felt my bowels twist themselves into spasms of knotting cramps. “These must be the men Theuderic took with him when he left yesterday.”
Ursus nudged his horse forward until he was sitting knee to knee with me. I glanced at him, wondering if he felt as I did, but he was scanning the entire scene ahead of us, his eyes moving ceaselessly over the ranks of slaughtered men.
“Took them on the march,” he said. “Must have lain in wait for them, knowing they’d be coming.” He tilted his head back slightly, pointing with his chin. “Look at them. Poor whoresons didn’t even have time to draw their weapons. Not a strung bow or an unsheathed sword among them. Probably ambushed from over there.” He pointed to the hillside facing us on the other side of the narrow valley. “See, on the top of the hill there, those bushes? See how dense they are? You could hide horses in there, and that’s exactly what they did. Perfect spot to lie in wait for anyone coming along this path, because once they’re on the slope down, there’s nowhere else for them to run to … .” His voice faded away for a moment, then resumed. “Can you see Theuderic here?”
“Theuderic?” The question snapped me out of the trance I had been sinking into, making me look around in expectant horror. It was one thing to see my cousin’s men shot down and slaughtered, but quite another to think that Theuderic himself might lie among the dead.