"Loyalty, obedience and success. Those are Meradoc's demands. He sent me out to perform a task, and I have failed to do it. I am a walking corpse until my former allies find me."
"That is insanity. Where will you go? I mean, I know you've said you don't know, but surely your friends—"
"Friends are for ordinary folk who live and behave in ordinary ways. I kill men to please those who employ me. Men such as I never have friends."
"You are a warrior. All warriors are killers, Owain. That's what the word means."
Owain of the Caves turned and looked directly at Uther. and the younger man was astonished to see what he took to be pity in the other's gaze.
"I know that, Uther Pendragon. But you are wrong in this . . . I am no warrior. You are a warrior. Warriors make war. They stand and fight or run away, according to the rules of war—if such things truly exist. The way I see it, those rules are made by those who win, or want to win, and have the strength to try. Warriors fight, and they take pride in being seen to fight. People like me, on the other hand . . . we never fight unless we must. Fighting involves the risk of being killed, so I avoid it. I am a killer, bought and sometimes, though seldom, sold. I often kill in stealth, and sometimes I kill openly, but I never, ever kill in the heat of the moment. My killing is deliberate; it is planned. Few of my victims ever see me coming or recognize the moment of their death."
Uther kept his face straight, despite his profound shock. He had known many men throughout his life who were little more than brutes—vicious and violent and lawless—but he had never before met a man who could speak calmly as this man did of casual, dispassionate killings carried out on behalf of others in cold blood and for personal gain.
Uther cleared his throat. "What do you mean by 'bought and sometimes sold'?"
Owain flicked the twig back into the fire. "Meradoc has sometimes sold my services to others."
"He sold them? Not you?"
The barest shrug of his wide shoulders was the only indication that Owain had heard the question, and for a long time Uther thought he was not going to answer. Then the words emerged in a flat monotone. "My services were his, for him to . . . bestow. I did what he instructed me to do."
"How long have you been doing this, this—killing?" Uther resisted using the word that was in his mind, murdering.
"I have never not done it. It's what I do."
"What, you were born a killer, even as a babe?" Uther, irritated by the man's disinterested monotone, recognized the pettiness of the question even as it left his lips, but he was incapable of biting it back.
"I must have been. I have no other memories. There was a woman once who cared for me, I think, but she was killed one night when I was very young. I tried to rescue her, to help her, I suppose, but I was a helpless brat of seven, mayhap less. They beat me and broke my legs and threw me in the fire. That's why I limp."
Uther glanced down at the long, trousered legs stretching towards the fire. "I saw no limp."
"I limp."
"Who were 'they'?"
He watched the profiled face break into a wolfish, bitter grin. "My father? Brothers? Let's say my family. They were a small clan, and I have seen enough since then to know they were not. . . not as others are. At the time, though, I knew no other people, no other way of being. I thought they were all there was."
Uther felt a rush of gooseflesh, and the short hairs on his neck stirred in sheer horror at the vision of the seven-year-old boy squirming in the middle of a roaring fire.
"Who pulled you out, from the fire? You said your legs were broken."
"Aye, they were. It was another woman, Jess, I think her name was. Couldn't stand the noise or the stink, she said, so she dragged me away and threw me into a corner in another cave, and I lay there till I healed."
"What caves? Would I know them?"
"No, you would not know them, nor would you wish to. It has been more than twenty years since I last saw them, and I have no wish to go back. Anyone who passed that way became our means of living from the one day to the next. We killed whoever came along . . . robbed them, then killed them. Kept the women alive, for a while at least, until we found others, but we always ended up killing them. Sometimes we ate them, parts of them, if the winter had been long. Eventually, after too many travellers had been lost, people stopped coming that way, so we went out to hunt them.
"One day, some of our people were pursued and followed home. When the fighting was over, I was the only one left alive, and that was because I had been thrashed and thrown into a hole again the day before. The men who had come found me there, half dead, and took me out and made a slave of me until I grew too big to beat. Then one night I killed my keeper and left."
Uther had never heard anything to equal this, although he knew there were terrifying tales told of such things in the distant regions of the land, far from the holdings and customs of the major clans.
"Who were these people, the ones you grew up among?"
"The Cave People. They had no other name that I, or they, knew of. They lived barely, and to live, they killed."
"And that is how you grew up. No wonder you do what you do. but—if that's the way you live, why would you scruple to kill me? Especially when you knew it would cost you your own life?"
Owain drew a long, single-edged dirk from his belt and lingered the edge of the blade, and watching him, Uther experienced no more than a momentary, fleeting surge of alarm. After inspecting the weapon closely for several moments, Owain turned it in his fist, bent forward at the waist and drove its point into the ground, right at the fire's edge.
"I am sitting here wondering why I am telling you all this," he said mildly. "I kill because I have always killed, and life—my own included—has never seemed to be an important thing to me. We were all born to die. The killing provides enough wealth for me to live in comfort. But I do not steal, Uther Pendragon, nor do I lie. I do not harm women casually. I do not eat the dead. I pay my debts, I keep myself away from simple folk who would be frightened by my shadow, I live according to a way of life, by rules I made myself, and I respect the gods.
"Not long after I killed my keeper and ran off—I must have been fourteen years old, or something close to that—I fell sick and almost died. I lay unconscious in a wood somewhere, close by a spring, and I was found there by an old man and his wife who lived nearby. They took me home and into their lives, and by the time I had grown healthy again and tit to walk, a process that took months, they had . . ." Owain's voice faded away for a moment as he sought a word. "They had tamed me . . . I suppose that would be the proper word. I was a wild creature when they found me, feral and unnatural and utterly devoid of any trace of civilization or humanity, trusting no one and nothing. They tamed me. They taught me, by their example, by treating me with decency, tolerance and great patience, that there is kindness in the world. And then, with them, for a time, the only time I can remember, I was . . . free of care.
"Their names were Gerrix and Martha, and they wove baskets and sold them. Gerrix had lost a leg as a young man. He had been a cleric then, in the home of some high-ranking Roman magistrate. He taught me to read and to write during the first winter I spent in their home. He had a store of books that was his greatest and only treasure, and I read all of them several times. Gerrix and I would discuss them, because he had no one else with whom to speak of such things. He taught me much, including how to speak, because the truth is that before he and Martha came into my life, I had never really spoken to anyone. The thought of speaking to another person for pleasure—of discussing something logically and without passion—could never have occurred to me."