Lagan was deep in thought as he strode from the King's residence, ignoring the guards completely. He was not totally lacking in cynical awareness of the King's ways and moods, and the final little piece of manipulation had not escaped his recognition. He had known even as he spoke the words that he was making a mistake in announcing his desire to take his son with him, but the impulse had been overwhelming, and once begun, he had no way of unsaying it. In consequence, he had known before he finished speaking that he would not be allowed to take the boy. Better to have held his tongue and simply taken the lad, than to have mentioned the possibility of doing so to Lot, because Lot's demands on one's loyalty, as everyone knew, were absolute. He would brook no weakness, no distraction, under any circumstances. He insisted ruthlessly that he be the centre and the only focus of attention, and many a warrior had learned to his cost that he could not marry while the King had need of him. Lagan kicked at a pebble in his path, cursing himself for his enthusiasm and wishing he had kept his mouth tightly closed.
Despite the urgency of Lot's demands and the willingness of everyone involved to fulfill them, it was no small matter for Herliss to amass everything he had been asked to supply and then prepare it for safe delivery. The siege engines, in particular, presented a problem in transportation that almost proved insuperable until one bright fellow had the idea of stripping the wheels and axles from the heavy wagons and attaching them directly to the massive timbers of the devices themselves.
The huge Roman siege engines had never been designed to travel great distances. They were massive, cumbersome affairs constructed for strength, stability and endurance, built with solid wheels to provide them with a degree of mobility but intended in that respect purely for positioning each apparatus and, in the case of the artillery pieces, for altering the field of fire they commanded during battle. They were meant to be manhandled but had never been intended for overland travel.
Duke Emrys had acquired them somehow at the time of the Roman withdrawals from Britain, and knowing their worth, he had taken them into his custody and guarded them against a future need. They had been dismantled carefully, the component pieces clearly marked and numbered for reassembly, but they had been in storage for decades since then, split up for safety among Herliss's four coastal forts. In the intervening years the enormous wagons originally used to transport them had been used for other purposes, scattered and eventually lost. In consequence, Herliss faced an enormous task, and he dared not take the risk of mixing or misplacing the component parts of each device, be it ballista, catapult or storming tower, for the men who would transport and reassemble them had had no training in such things.
The time flew by, so that Lagan quickly found himself on the wrong side of Lot's ten-day division, with yet another two weeks' work to go, according to his father, before all the individual pieces would be ready for moving. He had spent all of his time on the south coast moving among the four forts, and by the time he realized that he would have to return with the unwelcome word of delay to Lot, he had not yet found time to visit Queen Ygraine in his father's home fort of Tir Gwyn some twenty to thirty miles inland.
Reluctantly, without having seen or spoken to the Queen, he bade his father farewell and set out again for Lot's stronghold of Golant, bearing the news that Herliss would be ready to move northwards with his treasures in no less than two weeks. Lot, Lagan knew, would not be happy with the tidings. But then, he reflected, Ygraine the Queen was likely to be even less happy at the prospect of being reunited with her husband. According to Herliss, Queen Ygraine did not hold Gully in high regard.
So busy was Herliss that he barely noticed his son's departure. His mind was too full of logistical concerns to leave time for family matters. He was content, knowing that he would follow Lagan within weeks and would finally be rid of the wearying responsibility for all Lot's stored goods.
As for the Queen, Ygraine, she remained unaware for days that her husband had taken note of her again and summoned her to Golant, or even that Lagan had been in the south. The word of her imminent journey came to her eventually from Herliss, whom she had grown to regard almost as a father. Ygraine listened to what he had to say but made no complaint. She understood all too well that Herliss had no choice but to deliver her upon Lot's instructions, and so she accepted the inevitable. But she could find little in his tidings to look forward to, and so filled was her mind with the unwelcome prospect of being reunited with her estranged spouse that it would never have occurred to her to wonder about her own safety on the journey from Herliss's stronghold to Lot's.
Chapter TWENTY-THREE
The ambush, swift, terrible and thorough, was rendered all the more terrifying by the small amount of blood actually shed. And in the duration of it, within the space of moments, Ygraine's status changed from Queen to hostage. Caught completely unprepared, her escort, strong though it was, had no chance of counterattacking. One moment they were marching in good order through a wide, shallow valley under bright, early-spring sunlight, and the next they were caught squarely between two parallel masses of alien warriors, grim- faced and silent, terrifyingly different from any she had known before. They had literally sprung from the ground on either side of the narrow road, already grouped in attack formations and aiming hundreds of great longbows in massed ranks.
She was amazed, however, at how clearly she was able to see what happened in the momentary chaos that followed. Her escort had already begun to surge into a disciplined but already useless attempt to rally some kind of defensive formation, and in the middle of the protective swirling of her own personal bodyguard, at the time when the first hail of arrows should have been wreaking ruin and havoc amongst her protectors, Ygraine, Queen of Cornwall, daughter of Athol Mac lain of Eire, perceived clearly and unmistakably that someone, for some unknown reason, was withholding death and mass destruction.
Only one group of warriors, under the personal command of Gylmer, her husband's most faithful and hotheaded captain, succeeded in forming a shield phalanx and moving forward to engage the enemy on the sloping hillside above. They had barely left the road, Gylmer on his mountain pony riding in their centre, rallying them, when they were slaughtered, all twenty of them obliterated instantly by a lethal rain of long, deadly arrows, fired with appalling accuracy from the other hillside, behind them. Ygraine heard the missiles hissing overhead, moving from right to left, and spun to look, thus avoiding the actual sight of the death that fell upon her quickest men so suddenly, and she was stunned to see that none but the farthest ranks on the right of the hill behind her had fired, in response to some hidden, but deadly signal. They were already stringing new arrows when she swung back to see what they had done. Not a man of the twenty remained standing. And no single bowman in the ranks facing the slaughtered men seemed to have loosed a shot.
The warning was not lost on anyone, including Herliss, the grizzled veteran commander entrusted by her husband with the task of shepherding his Queen and a valuable train of goods and provisions between two of the royal strongholds that dotted his territory. As Ygraine caught sight of Herliss now, his yet-unhelmed head flung back in outrage and his right hand raised above his head, fist clenched, to rally his forces, she recognized the fury and hopelessness that swept across his face as he slowly lowered his hand.