The raid that Uther led out that morning with Ygraine's scent still clinging to his skin was spectacularly successful, for they had struck directly southwestward, avoiding detection almost until they had penetrated to the very end of the long finger of Cornwall that thrust out into the sea. There, on both sides of the spur of land, lay a profusion of bays and inlets, many of them with narrow beaches and high, protective cliffs that Lot's people used to great advantage, landing their mercenary troops in sheltered coves and beaching their seagoing vessels.
Like his father before him, Gulrhys Lot offered safe harbour and anchorage to anyone wishing to use the deep coves of Cornwall for shelter. He made no moral judgments, betrayed no interest in the activities of his visitors and made no demands on them other than one. In return for their safety, security and the right to come and go at will, the raiders must pay him a bounty of half their booty in the form of specie—coins and vessels and ornaments of gold, silver, copper and bronze, and any jewels that they might acquire. Coinage was seldom used anywhere nowadays. Now everything was barter, and once- precious metals were largely worthless. What point in having silver and gold coins if you couldn't use them to buy anything? And so Lot's coffers were always full of coinage, and the pirates were well pleased with the bargain.
What few of them knew, however, was that Lot melted the coins and pieces down into bullion. Thick, heavy bars of solid gold, silver and copper were always sure to stir the hearts and minds of greedy men wealthy enough to hunger for more. Few such men lived in Britain nowadays, but there were still enough of them in Gaul and throughout the other provinces on the mainland to provide a lucrative market for his endeavours. Thus Lot could transform his bullion into ships and men and weapons, and ensure an unending supply of mercenaries for his wars.
On the cliffs above the largest and most important of these inlets, those dedicated to the protection of the pirate fleets that earned him his bullion. Lot had constructed fortifications on the landward side. Many of these were little more than barricades: heaps of logs piled high upon each other and reinforced with sand, with perhaps a stepped ditch behind the crest where bowmen could stand in defence of the entrance to the narrow pathway to and from the beach below. Several, however, more than a score in all, were sophisticated enough to qualify as crude but real forts, lit to be manned most of the time, and a few of them were garrisoned full time.
Uther's raiding force fell upon these outposts like thunderbolts, striking terror into the defenders, since none of them had ever really expected to be attacked by hostile forces from within their own lands. It was beyond the power of their imaginations to envision an invading force strong enough to strike downward clean through the heart of Cornwall and reach the southwestern coast unbloodied. Their incredulity worked well on Uther's behalf, and he took full advantage of it, striking savagely and ruthlessly and driving the demoralized enemy out of their holes and back down onto the beaches, where they scattered and made their individual escapes as best they could. It frequently took his troopers longer to destroy the fortifications than it had to capture them.
Only one fort did Uther avoid on that expedition, and that was Tir Gwyn, Herliss's own White Fort, a massive construction that looked not only impregnable but inviolable since it was built entirely of a local, snow-white quartz. Uther halted his raiders on a nearby hill and allowed them to admire the castle from afar, blazing in the sunshine like a beacon of purity, but then he swung them around and put many miles between them and Tir Gwyn before night fell.
That raid marked the beginning of a season of warfare in which Uther's Dragons went from success to success and earned themselves a reputation among Lot's forces that often resulted in the Cornishmen throwing down their weapons and running away without attempting to strike a blow. Only the hardest of Lot's mercenaries stopped the year from becoming a complete rout for the Dragons. Several groups and divisions of those, mainly Germanic tribesmen who had trained and fought as imperial mercenaries, combined forces under a pair of talented generals called Cerdic and Tewdric and for a time came close to halting Uther's free-ranging progress.
The two armies met late one afternoon across a narrow valley with steep sides, and Uther knew that his were not the only guts squirming with fear and apprehension that day. But as the opposing forces eyed each other, waiting for the dispositions that their commanders would decree, a storm broke over them, battering both armies with terrifying power. Both hosts sat still, absorbing the blasts, waiting for them to blow over, but time passed and the tempest showed no sign of abating. The rain was icy, mixed with hail, and the temperature plummeted. The men were soaked, and then grew chilled, then frozen, and still the storm flared about them, with lightning bolts that shattered trees and scattered men. Night fell, and the world was a quagmire. Day came and the hillside opposite Uther's position was bare of men.
There were no crushing reversals for Uther's Dragons, no battles lost or defeats sustained by his forces, and most of the talk about the campaign, among the allies from Cambria and Camulod, continued to focus on the undeniable success of Uther's ideas about combining infantry with bowmen and cavalry in carefully planned manoeuvres against enemy forces that ought to have been overwhelmingly victorious simply by virtue of their numbers. Apart from that, however, things were going annoyingly wrong for Uther in other areas—piddling, insignificant little areas—and he became increasingly unable to understand why. It seemed to amount to no more than trivial annoyances at first, gadfly occurrences that demanded to be scratched: spies and scouts being caught and killed when they ought to have been safe and free from threat; messages and messengers going astray and never arriving at their destinations; shipments of supplies arriving from Camulod partially spoiled and in one instance totally unusable.
Hand in hand with that kind of thing, indications of incompetence and mismanagement among his own forces began to come to his notice. In the space of a single month, he received four separate reports of inaccurate information being provided to troop commanders and then acted upon without any attempt to obtain verification, resulting in time and effort wasted and men endangered without valid cause. On the worst of those occasions, a ten-man troop had been dispatched to scout a pathway through a dense growth of forest in the northernmost part of Cornwall, assured by their chief scout that the terrain between their departure point and the edge of the forest was wide open and free of hostile forces. It was not, on either count. Reconstructing the scene afterward, the troop commander had found clear indications that the troop had been ambushed by a party of not less than a hundred men who had left ample evidence to establish beyond doubt that they had been living openly and for some time in caverns among a jumble of large rocks close by the road the troopers used. All ten troopers had been killed and their horses stolen.
Incompetence and mismanagement, deplorable though they may be, are remediable, and Uther made it his prime urgency to put a stop to it. The remedy involved close scrutiny of several of his individual commanders, the execution of his chief scout, who was proved to have lied in order to cover his own laziness, and two swift demotions of intermediate commanders to the ranks, where they fared badly at the hands of their former subordinates. That not only clipped the pinions of the officers involved, it also served notice to everyone that high rank, forfeited, entailed a long, hard fall.
Against what most people called sheer misfortune and plain bad luck, however, Uther, like everyone else, was impotent: a scouting troop of twelve mounted men, caught unexpectedly in a narrow valley by a large band of Lot's mercenaries who ought not to have been there, broke and ran down the valley to the eastward in the reasonable hope that their horses' speed would carry them to safety. Instead, it led them into a dry, brush-choked ravine in which they all died when the enemy fired the brush with burning arrows. In another incident, an entire squadron of cavalry, thirty-six strong and operating independently of other support, found itself wiped out when one of the horses came down with some unknown kind of fever and infected all the others. The pestilence spread through the horse lines in the space of two days, and twenty-eight of a total of fifty horses died. The remaining twenty-two animals had all shown symptoms of the illness but had recovered by the end of the fifth day. The squadron commander, a young man called Rollo who had been born and raised around the stables of Camulod, had not dared assume the risk of taking potentially lethal animals back into the healthy herds remaining in Uther's base camp. Upon his own initiative, he ordered that every one of the surviving animals be slaughtered, and he and his men walked back twenty-three miles to rejoin the army, carrying their saddles and equipment.