Uther could see worry stamping itself more visibly into Uric's face. His grief and his concern for the King gradually became so evident, and his impatience and frustration with the slowness of their progress so pronounced, that Uther eventually found himself anticipating the worst and beginning to come to terms with the formerly inconceivable notion that King Ullic Pendragon might actually be in danger of dying as a result of unimaginable injuries.
In Uther's short lifetime he had known three invincible, unmovable, impermeable personalities: Ullic Pendragon, Uric Pendragon and Garreth Whistler. All three of these men were his heroes, and their indestructible permanence anchored his own identity. He had never ever considered any of them to be capable of dying.
When they reached home, they found their worst fear confirmed: the King was dead.
As was the custom in such cases, and hard on the heels of Uric's formal confirmation that the dead man was his father, Uric was taken to attend a gathering of his clansmen and was formally named the new Chief, assuming his father's duties and the Chief's chair left empty on Ullic's death. He was distraught, his mind overwhelmed by his loss, and he showed little appetite for the tasks to which he was being appointed and no interest at all in the ceremony surrounding the event. The Druids were prepared for that, however, and moved around and about him as though he were functioning as normally as they were so that the rites and legalities of succession were quickly observed and ratified by Druidic custom. King Ullic Pendragon had been dead for three days, and Uric was now Chief of Pendragon, the rightful occupant of the Chief's chair.
All of these thoughts passed through Uther's mind now as he sat staring at the bier and the armoured corpse displayed upon it, laid out for the burial rites. Ullic Pendragon—if this were really he—lay flat on his back, his eyes held shut by two small, flat pebbles and his hands crossed on his abdomen, loosely clasping the hilt of his sword, a Roman short-sword made for him personally by his close friend Publius Varrus of Camulod, Uther's other grandfather. Publius Varrus himself was there too, sealed across the bier from Uther with his wife Luceiia Britannicus Varrus by his side, both of them gazing at the corpse on the bier and thinking their own thoughts, paying their respects in silence.
Finding himself in the intimate presence of death for the first time and looking at the corpse of his beloved grandfather, Uther discovered that he seemed to be incapable of the kind of grief he could see overwhelming everyone around him. He had no time for grief, it seemed to him, and no capacity for grieving. The body, laid out in all its finery upon the bier in the Great Hall, surrounded by heaps of fresh-cut blossoms and aromatic herbs and pine boughs, looked quite like someone else's notion of King Ullic. Uther could hardly believe that it was really his Tata. The nose was too sharp-edged and bony, for one thing, and the cheeks too grey and sunken, creating hollows in the face of this fellow that were never visible in the laughing face of Ullic Pendragon. And this man, whoever he might have been, was visibly smaller, over all, than Ullic Pendragon. His arms, despite their familiar, silver-chased leather armbands, were far slighter, much slenderer than Ullic's massive forearms, and his hands looked skeletal, bony and thin-skinned, with brownish blotches on the backs of them. Ullic's hands were enormous and filled with life, strong and deft in everything they did. Even the dead man's beard looked different from Ullic's. Ullic's beard was iron- grey and rich, a dense and bristling bush concealing his mouth, chin and neck from the wind and other people's eyes. The beard on the dead man was a wispy, sad thing, unkempt and unimposing.
Uther was far from convinced that the dead man was King Ullic Pendragon.
He could see, nonetheless, that everyone else believed it. His mother's eyes were swollen and red from constant weeping. She had been weeping when he and his father arrived home from their journey, and she had not ceased since. His father had been weeping too, and although Uther found that hard to credit, there was no doubting the evidence of his own eyes. Uric's eyes were as red and as swollen as his wife's, and his cheeks were grimy with smeared soot from the fire, where he had sat huddled for hours, shrouded in whirling smoke and staring into the coals, occasionally wiping tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand.
Uther's grandparents had also brought Cay with them from Camulod to honour the dead King, who had been Cay's uncle- eldest brother to Enid, the mother Cay had never known. Cay now sat behind Uther, slightly to his left. A quick backwards glance over his shoulder revealed that his cousin was sitting with his eyes closed, and the thought occurred instantly to Uther that he might be asleep, tired out by the swift and unexpected journey from Camulod That thought then led to a ludicrous vision of Cay snoring aloud and startling himself awake, outraging everyone, family and Druids, and for a long time after that Uther had a hard time fighting an insane compulsion to laugh out loud. He had no wish to laugh, but the urge to bray out guffaws of mirth was almost insuperable, and he was terrified that he might give in to it and disgrace himself.
Desperately then, in a frantic effort to divert his thoughts, Uther stared at the bier and tried to think of all the ways he had heard of to dispose of a dead body. Everyone died, he knew, but it had somehow failed to register in his mind prior to this episode that "everyone" included all the members of his own family. Ullic Pendragon had been but the first to go in Uther's lifetime, but now, looking at his grandfather's bier, Uther realized for the first time that within Ullic Pendragon's lifetime he, too, had had to stand and bid this kind of farewell to beloved family members . . . his own grandparents, born more than a hundred years before King Ullic's death, and his own parents after that. He accepted, too, for the first time, that just as surely as Uric Pendragon was now mourning the passing of his father, Ullic, he, Uther, would one day have to mourn Uric and his mother, Veronica, and the kindly couple from Camulod who were his mother's parents. All of them were bound to die.
His mind reeling with the anticipation of so much loss and sorrow, Uther scrabbled frantically inside his mind for something to distract him from such thoughts and remembered that he hail been counting ways to dispose of bodies that had ceased to live and breathe. He forced himself to focus upon that again, willing himself to empty his head of everything but the logistical problems caused by death.
The fact that everyone died entailed the logical conclusion that everyone's body had therefore to be disposed of. This was a novel and astounding thought for Uther. He looked around the gathering assembled to say goodbye to King Ullic and made a cursory attempt to estimate the number of people there. It was well over a hundred, all of whom must die eventually. From there, he visualized the population of Tir Manha, as he had seen it at official festivals and functions. So many people, he thought. So much death. How could I have reached the age I have without falling over corpses everywhere?
Everybody died, and astounding as it might seem, those left alive were able to absorb the deaths and deal with the remains of those who died. And everyone, all of the peoples in the places he had known in his short lifetime, appeared to do so differently. He knew, because he and Cay had discussed it once a few years earlier, that in Camulod most people were buried according to the Roman military system. Individuals were usually buried standing upright, in the case of men, or sitting upright if the corpse was female. None of the adults he had asked, including his Grandfather Varrus, had been able to tell Uther why this should be so, but some of them, after discussing it among themselves for a time, had suggested that the custom of upright burial had come into being in the early days of the Roman Republic's foreign expansion and conquests, when the need to dig postholes for temporary fortifications, and sometimes in search of fresh water, had still been commonplace. For those purposes, army units had carried wide iron augers the breadth of a man's shoulders in their supply trains. These devices could drill a vertical hole into soft ground as quickly as two-man teams could twist the handles in a circle. And once the cylindrical hole was dug, a corpse could be dropped into it feet first, then quickly and completely covered, leaving a narrow, vertical grave that was less likely to be seen by enemy searchers than a horizontal one. That had apparently been important in early, pre-Christian times, when vengeful enemies would seek out and disinter dead soldiers, knowing that a desecrated grave would deny its soldier occupant access to the Underworld.