Daris turned away from the temple and looked outward and down to his left towards the distant encampments—one large and the other much smaller and set apart—that had sprung into being within the week that had passed. The wide, pleasant meadow in which they had been built had already been obliterated and turned into an arid wasteland by the comings and goings of thousands of people and livestock, and Daris knew from past experience that it would take a year and more for the pasturage to return to its normal lushness. But then, he reflected, these Gatherings—happening once in five, ten or a score of years—were the reason the meadow had been carved from the surrounding forest in the first place.
For as long as Daris could remember—and that remembrance included all the memories also held and passed down to him by those elders who had died during his lifetime—the ordinary people of the clans in this part of south Cambria had called themselves the Pendragon Federation. This term was not strictly accurate, however, and there were ambitious people in the crowd down there for this Gathering who would do anything in their power to substitute their own name for that of Pendragon. An attempt to do precisely that would be made at this coming Choosing.
Three clans made up the Federation: Llewellyn, Pendragon and Griffyd. The Romans, when they first arrived, had issued their own names to the clans, misunderstanding everything about them, from their makeup to their ancient holdings. Durotriges, they had called the southernmost, and Belgae the people directly to the north of those, not realizing, in their foreign ignorance, that these were people of the same ancestral blood, and that they were Pendragon, possessors of the land flanking the great estuary to the north of the peninsula that the Romans had called Cornua, the Horn, now known as Cornwall. The other two great clans, the Llewellyns and the Griffyds, from the southern half of Cambria on the western side of the estuary, the Romans had named the Silures and the Demetae, foolish names thrust by an invader on an unconquered people. In the aftermath of their adjustment to the Roman "conquest," the three clans mingled peacefully, melding their holdings so that they could coexist in peace and relative strength without attracting the ire of the conquerors, and over the hundreds of years that then elapsed, that mingling evolved into a federation, dedicated to preserving their joint holdings.
Three clans, Daris reflected now, but seven distinct groups among them: three Llewellyn, two Griffyd and two Pendragon, each ruled by a Chief. The attraction that had bonded them one to the other in the beginning had been self-serving—each of the three clans had hoped to preserve and enhance its own status through alliance with the others— but all three had prospered equally, sharing the benefits of their closeness. And so it had come about that for more than twenty generations now, the seven Chiefs had chosen from among their own ranks a King whose voice would speak for all the people and whose primary duty was to safeguard all of them from Rome's displeasure. From those earliest days, no clan-directed rule had governed the Choosing of the King; no sequence of clan names had been applied; no precedence or preference had been permitted. Each new King had been selected by his peers, acknowledged as the most suitable among them for the task and chosen according to the ancient law.
As Rome's presence and rule settled into peaceful occupation and civil administration, and its soldiers and citizens learned to live in the comfort and security of their wall-girt towns, the people in the remote mountain regions, among them the clans of the Federation, were largely left to live their lives as they wished, so that the Kings ruled in their own right and organized their own local defences against raiders in those far-flung rural areas where Rome had no desire to penetrate. The responsibilities of the King of the Federation were many and varied, but in essence they boiled down to being present and available at all times to act as paramount Chief, final judge and arbitrator in legal disputes among members of the three clans. While it was the responsibility of each individual Chief to settle disputes and other matters pertaining to the law amicably within his own clan, there were invariably situations in which an outside, clearly unbiased judgment was required in order to reach final settlement. Those judgments fell to the ruling King, or, when a King had died and no replacement had yet been selected, to the seven men who served on the Council of Chiefs.
Over the centuries, the Pendragon clan, thanks to the prowess of its warriors and the wealth accumulated by its thrifty traders, grew to be more powerful than the others, despite the fact that there were but two Pendragon clans as opposed to three Llewellyn, and for five generations past Pendragon had provided all the men selected in the Choosing as best qualified for Kingship, the greatest of those being Ullic Pendragon, father of the dead King Uric. The five successive Pendragon Kings had all been good men and good kings—good enough to have their name adopted as the Federation's own.
The home of the Pendragon was located on the southern side of the great estuary of the river that flowed by Glevum, nigh on a hundred miles to the north. There had once been a Roman garrison posted nearby, but it had never been a major or important posting, and the stone buildings erected there had soon fallen into neglect once the Province of Britain had been welcomed into the Pax Romana, the vaunted "Roman Peace" that had subjugated the entire civilized world for a thousand years and ensured the Imperial welfare. Much more important than the small Roman fort, however, was the ancient hill fort that overlooked it, which had survived there, according to local legend, for nigh on six hundred years. Its name was Tir Manha, meaning the Place of Strength, and it was as serviceable as it had ever been. When the Romans left their tiny buildings, the Pendragons moved back into Tir Manha, and over the ensuing decades and centuries it proved to be a perfect place from which to govern the diverse peoples and territories of the Federation. The mainland of Cambria, with its former Roman administrative centre of Caerdyff, lay less than an hour's journey by boat across the estuary, and the rest of the Pendragon lands lay to the south and east, with the great Tor of Glastonbury rising up out of the extensive sea marshes directly to the southeast, and the other ancient hill fort—the one that became Camulod—some five leagues, or fifteen Roman miles, to the south and east of that again.
Now, Daris knew, at least one man would like to see the end of the Pendragons' predominance. Meradoc, the strongest of the Llewellyn Chiefs, lusted for the King's seat and had been pleading his cause with the other Chiefs for months strongly enough, Daris feared, that he might win. The Chief Druid's eyes widened as this thought occurred to him, for until then, Daris had been unaware that he actually feared it. He sucked in a great breath and blew it out noisily, thrusting that thought away, too, as his eyes scanned the scene laid out before him.
King Uric had been dead now for almost two months. But the Federation was at war, and Daris had been forced to withhold the summons until a lull developed in the fighting. Now they had begun to assemble. Meradoc had been the first of them to arrive, six days ago, and four of the seven were now present, with their retinues, in the smaller of the encampments below. Three of those were the Llewellyn Chiefs, Meradoc, Cunbelyn and Hod the Strong, and the fourth was young Huw Strongarm, Chief of the northern Pendragon yet no more than a boy. Three yet remained to come, and two of those were the eldest of elders, Cativelaunus of Carmarthen and Brynn of Y Gaer, Chiefs of the Griffyd clan. Those two would arrive within the hour, for they were travelling together and their party had been seen that morning crossing the river ten miles to the north.