"Oh, no, not among the three of us!" Dedalus lowered the front legs of his chair to the ground and stood up. "You two are in command here, not me, not this time. I am an observer on this outing, and that is all."
"Centurion Dedalus, sit down, if you please. A few moments ago you were telling me I am expected to rule by decree."
Dedalus sat down again slowly, looking pained, his face twisted up as though his mouth were full of a bad taste.
Uther nodded at him. "Well, then, I am decreeing that you, as the most experienced officer present, will sit on this tribunal for the purposes of advising us in assessing responsibilities and rendering judgment. No more discussion on the topic. Now, who's the captain of the guard today? We'd better speak to him now, and tell him what we intend to do, because we are going to need both his help and his people."
The inquiry lasted for more than three hours, but by the end of it the inquisitors knew what had happened, even if they had not discovered the underlying motivation. The prisoners were paraded one by one before the three-man tribunal, marched in under escort and treated as though they were on defaulters' disciplinary parade, which in fact they were, troopers and civilians alike. The eight townspeople were brought in first, their wrists in iron shackles and their mouths gagged so that they were unable to utter a single word of protest. Before the gag was removed, each of them was informed by Dedalus, as senior magistrate, that the tribunal was being held in order to discover the truth about the events leading up to the brawl in the marketplace, and for that purpose alone. No one among the three judges, they were told, had the slightest interest in listening to any prisoner's complaints about his treatment. The prisoners were here in this predicament and under martial law as the result of their own actions, because they had been committing mayhem in a public marketplace, endangering other law-abiding citizens.
Each prisoner testified that he had become involved in the brawl either in self-defence or to protect a friend, neighbour or spouse. In every instance, the men told of a sudden outbreak of brutal violence unleashed without provocation by Camulodian troopers.
Listening to all they had to say and knowing that none of these men had spoken with any of the others since their arrest, the judges had no reason to doubt what they were hearing. Before the first of the troopers was brought in, therefore, the judges had agreed that the blame lay firmly with the Dragons, and that their priority now was to identify the ringleader. After that, if the questioning of the prisoners went well, they might have some hope of being able to identify the cause. Dedalus was still insistent that the instigator must have been Nemo, the natural leader of this particular group. The hard men in her squad, the Boneheads as they were known, revered her for her insane courage under stress. Despite all that, however, Uther was unwilling to believe that Nemo might be at fault in this instance— not without provocation.
Within the hour, however, it quickly became apparent from the evidence of her squad mates that Nemo had been the one to initiate the fighting, hurling a heavy pot at the head of Mark, the giant sawyer. Her Bonehead mates had all been around her at the time, and always ready for a fight, they had joined gleefully in an indiscriminate assault on the townspeople. It became painfully clear as the inquiry progressed that the Boneheads were aptly named. None of them showed the slightest sign of guilt or remorse or even regret at appearing in front of the tribunal, and all of them seemed to take great delight in incriminating themselves and each other in the activities that were being investigated.
Nemo, brought in last of all, was not even questioned about her role in the events. She was simply accused of having started the debacle, and she made no attempt to deny her guilt. She provided no reason for her attack when invited to speak in her own defence. She had nothing to say, and she said nothing. She simply stood and glowered at a spot somewhere above the heads of the tribunal, as though defying them to do their worst with her. And so they did.
All nine of the accused were summoned together to face judgment, and when they were assembled, Centurion Dedalus informed them of the tribunal's findings and sentence. They had disgraced their own unit and the name of Camulod, he told them, and their behaviour had cost the Colony not only the goodwill of the citizens of Glevum, but also a substantial measure of the dwindling reserves of the coinage the Council of Camulod kept for emergency use. Because of that, and since they themselves had nothing of any value to offer in restitution other than toil and sweat expended in the common good, they would spend four months on chain duty, all privileges suspended for the duration of that time. They would participate in no training exercises or patrols during those four months, but would spend the entire time confined to garrison cells when they were not working punishment duties. Their confinement was to begin immediately. They were placed under open arrest, disarmed and guarded until they could be incarcerated on their return to Camulod.
It was a savage sentence, and four months was an unheard-of commitment to chain duty, lacking the commission of some extraordinary military crime such as attacking an officer or killing a comrade in a fight. But all three judges had concurred in adding an additional month to the sentence they originally considered, as a response to the utter absence of any sign of fear, shame or remorse among the offenders. The nine miscreants stood side by side and accepted the judgment solemnly, and none of them offered so much as a grunt of protest. Dedalus finally waved a hand in disgusted dismissal and they were marched away, leaving the members of the tribunal to look at each other in silence. None of them felt like discussing the matter any longer, and soon they split up and went their separate ways.
On the morning following the tribunal, Uther, in a foul frame of mind, disappeared on a three-day furlough. Later that same day, however, urgent word arrived from Camulod that Uther's grandfather, Publius Varrus, lay dying, and Caius Merlyn went galloping off in search of his cousin, leading two extra horses and claiming that he knew where Uther might have gone. Cay found him under attack in a roadhouse in the company of several skittishly attractive serving maids more than willing to fulfill a soldier's needs. Together the two of them fought off Uther's attackers, thieves who had hoped to catch him off guard while he took his pleasure with the women. Afterwards, Uther, in recompense for the villainous proprietor's participation in the murderous attack on him, burned the roadhouse to the ground. Then the two cousins made their way as quickly as they could towards Camulod.
Publius Varrus was great-uncle to Caius Merlyn, but he was also Uther's maternal grandfather, and both young men loved the old smith deeply. Before he died—and his grief-stricken wife Lucciia would swear that he hung on to life for that sole purpose—Varrus spoke privately, first to his grandson and then to his great-nephew, of his hopes for them and for the union between Cambria and Camulod, and both had listened carefully and taken his dying testament to heart.
From the day of his death, two changes were noticeable in the young men: Cay, who had always been known formally as Caius Britannicus, insisted that everyone call him by his Celtic name, Merlyn, from that time on. Uther, for his part, sobered somehow upon the death of his grandfather, becoming different, more dignified and perhaps in some elusive, indeterminable way even more manly in his bearing. Uther had grown up, matured within the space of the few days that had elapsed from the first word of his grandfather's illness to the completion of the old man's funeral services and his burial in the main courtyard of Camulod beside the grave of his best friend, Caius Britannicus, Proconsul and Senator of Rome.