Far from being upset by his failure, Uther felt exhilarated by the challenge and the response he had generated from the girl Anna. She had refused him, but the reason for her refusal had been standing right there, glaring at him, and Uther had felt with absolute certainty the reluctance underlying her refusal. At another time, under different circumstances, his request might have been smiled upon. He moved on, casting his eyes around now in search of someone new to test himself against, and he thrust one hand idly into his scrip, stirring the coins there with his fingertips, aware of the smooth, almost oily texture of the shiny metal discs. All of Uther's silver coins were highly polished, ever since he had noticed one of his Grandmother Varrus's household staff using a strange- smelling mixture to clean the tarnish from silver tableware. Intrigued, Uther had asked the man to show him what he was doing and how it was done, and had then acquired a small amount of the polishing material for his own use, so that now when he went on patrol, the silver coins he carried in his scrip all gleamed, catching the eye and stirring the cupidity of all to whom he showed them.
It had taken Uther some time to grasp the concept of coins as specie when he first became conscious of it. In Cambria, no one used money, although uniformly sized bars and ingots of gold and silver, copper, tin and lead were commonly used in trade, and each had a relative value ascribed to it, depending upon availability and ease of procurement. One copper ingot, for example, was equal to five of tin, and one silver bar to five of copper, whereas one bar of tin might sometimes be valued at six bars of lead, and sometimes at fifteen or even twenty bars. The most valuable of all, of course, was gold, and one bar of gold was the equivalent of twenty-five bars of silver.
The Romans, however, had taken that concept much further than anyone in Cambria had ever thought or sought to take it. They had issued coins of differing kinds and sizes, in gold, silver and copper, and had ascribed fixed values to each one. Uther would never forget his astonishment on learning that those values had persisted for hundreds of years until a shortage of gold had developed. From that point onward, the value of gold had escalated and had been followed some time thereafter by the value of silver, so that the ten or twenty copper coins that had once been deemed equal to one silver coin had lost their value, and now it might take as many as a hundred copper coins or more to purchase one silver one. That made no sense to Uther when he learned of it, and he still had not come to terms with the theories behind such things.
In Camulod, however, and in the countryside surrounding it, as in his home in Tir Manha, no coins were used at all. All trading was conducted by barter. And yet the Colony was rich in coinage, gold and silver both. In the economy of Camulod, which depended upon the sustained manufacture of iron tools and weapons for its farmers and soldiers, an ingot of iron was worth a hundred ingots of raw gold, for nothing useful could be made with gold. Only when Camulodians went out into the urban Roman world, where some people still revered the idea of money, did they carry coinage, mainly gold and silver, to purchase the things they needed, and those were mostly raw iron ores and ingots of smelted metal.
When Uther first ventured out on territorial patrol, Cay had been the one to take coins with him, but Uther watched carefully and was greatly impressed as Cay used them, exchanging several of them in a marketplace in Aquae Sulis for various commodities he might not otherwise have been able to acquire—a unique clasp knife with a curved blade and a hilt plated with horn was one thing Uther remembered clearly.
It had been on his return to Camulod after that incident that Uther saw the silver being polished, and he worked diligently throughout one entire afternoon polishing a pile of fifty silver coins for his own use. Since then, he had only ever used five of these, but he noticed that his brightly polished silver coins invariably attracted more attention and gained him more bargains, than the dull, ordinary silver denarii used by his cousin.
Uther had not gone very far when he heard a noise beginning to swell behind him, and he knew that some kind of disturbance was underway. Voices were growing louder, and as he turned to look back, he could see that people were starting to shout and mill about, attempting to get out of the way of whatever was going on. He felt a distinct surge of pressure as the dense crowd at his back swayed against him, and he heard the first screams of terror and panic rising from women who found themselves trapped helplessly in the heaving crowd.
Cursing the loss of his good humour and telling himself that the upheaval, whatever it was, had nothing to do with him or his people, Uther nonetheless began to make his way back towards the source of the sounds, elbowing his way through the press and looking around him constantly for any sign of his own troopers among the crowd. He caught sight of three familiar helmet crests to his right. Climbing up onto the low wall of a fountain that he had passed moments earlier, he attracted the attention of the three decurions by whistling loudly and waving. They began making their way towards him as soon as they saw him, and by the time they reached him, they had been joined by three more of his men who had been close by and curious. Now that they were seven, they formed a wedge and began to make more rapid progress as they approached the scene of the disturbance. Uther was issuing orders as they went, preparing his men for anything they might encounter, but when they did emerge from the crowd, without warning, into the marketplace, they were unprepared for what met their eyes.
The crowded marketplace had been transformed into a scene of chaos, with people running in every direction, screaming and shouting to escape the vicious brawl that was seething among the stalls and in the open space that fronted them. Men struggled everywhere, hand to hand in pairs and in groups, hutting heads and flailing at one another with clenched fists. Some of them even used cudgels and other blunt weapons, drawing blood and breaking teeth and bones. Occasionally one or another of the grappling men would knock or pull an opponent off balance, reeling and toppling over to sprawl and roll among the debris on the ground. The scene bore no resemblance to the orderly marketplace Uther had left mere moments earlier, and at least one brawler in every group bore the red dragon of Pendragon on his left shoulder. The heart of the marketplace was already in utter ruin, with stalls and tables overthrown and upended and all their goods scattered and smashed and trodden underfoot. Several still forms lay scattered here and there, and one of them Uther recognized instantly as the young giant who had so silently laid claim to the young woman, Anna. Close by the huge man, almost at his feet, lay one of Uther's own men, face down and utterly motionless.
Stunned and taken completely aback, Uther nonetheless waved his decurions forward with a terse order to stop this and arrest everyone. The noise of the conflict had attracted other Camulodian troopers by this time, and the three decurions began hauling all of them into action, setting them to rounding up the miscreants who had caused the damage. The fighting was abating by that stage anyway, it seemed, the energies of the contestants bleeding away rapidly as exhaustion set in, and they began to realize that they had gone too far and might now have to pay for the excesses they had committed.
Uther remained on the outskirts of the action, breathing deeply and trying to control his anger. He felt betrayed and confounded by the fact that most of the damage seemed to have been done by his Dragons. Someone would have to do penance for this, he knew, but for the time being he was unsure of what his next steps should be. He forced himself to look once more at the group of prisoners being herded together and admitted that it was not as bad as he had feared, nor were they as numerous as they first appeared to be. He counted eight of them, and one more lying in the gutter close to Anna's big suitor. Once again he looked towards the body of the giant Celt, and as he did so he saw the man's head twitch and then his shoulders heave as he stirred and tried to sit up, only to collapse back onto the ground. Then came a hurried explosion of bright blue, and Anna dashed out from among the watchers to the big man's side, carrying a steaming bowl containing a moistened cloth with which she began to wash away the blood clotted over her lover's left eye.