"Oh!" Glynda swiped at his shoulder with an open hand. "You are a beast, Huw Pendragon, and when it comes my turn to wed I shall make life miserable for you, mark my words."
Huw threw up his hands in surrender. "Very well, as you will it! He is a man, and thus he has two eyes and ears—two of almost everything in fact, except one nose and one head. And he speaks normally, shouting seldom. He smiles from time to time, and he might even laugh, though not too often, I should think, after slaying someone a short time earlier—" He broke off, raising his eyebrows dramatically. "Or do you mean how does he appear, in physical terms, in terms of what young women wish to see? Well, let's see . . . I suppose he is fair to look upon. He stands tall, as tall as me—and that's unusual—perhaps even slightly more, for I fancy I had to look up into his eyes, and I am not accustomed to doing that. Oh, and his eyes are bright blue. I mean they are really bright. . . the colour of them jumps right out at you."
"Like periwinkles," his sister supplied. "I've heard tell of his blue eyes. They are the blue of periwinkles."
"Good, then, if you say so. His hair is black, almost blue in the sunlight in fact, so dark is it, and he wears it long, down to his shoulders, which marks him, even among his short-cropped horse troopers, as one of us, despite all his Roman trappings. And it is clean. His hair. I mean. It is so clean that you can see each single hair shining—no matting, no tangles. He must wash it regularly."
"Aye, some of us do things like that. The people in Camulod certainly do. It makes you smell better. You should try it. Brother." Glynda saw that Huw was preoccupied with some thought that had occurred to him and had not even noticed her jibe, and so she continued. "And'? What more can you tell me? Surely you can do better than that!"
The young Chief shot his sister a sidewise glance and looked impatient for a moment, as though he might take issue with her over such silly questions.
"Very well, he is strong and well-made, his arms and legs as sound and solid as my own. He is huge across the shoulders and deep through the chest. He has a cleft chin, and a long, straight nose, and he keeps his face clean-shaven, in the Roman style, save for a moustache framing his mouth."
"His teeth?"
Huw grinned. "As white, clean and regular as yours, and he has all of them. Now, tell me, because the question just occurred to me a moment ago. Who was it told you about his periwinkle eyes?"
His sister flushed immediately, a tide of rosy colour sweeping upwards from her neck to stain her face. "That is none of your affair, Brother," she snapped, clearly disconcerted by what had been an obviously unexpected question. Then, suddenly, she was turning to leave. "I have work to attend to now. Fare thee well."
Huw stood gaping in astonishment as his mercurial sister turned her back on him abruptly and flounced away to disappear quickly in the direction of the encampment. Then he remembered where he was and what he was about, and he made his own way towards his preparations for the day's ceremonies.
The Choosing flowed smoothly and without incident, despite the fears of those who had expected the untimely death of the Llewellyn Chief to provoke his followers to violence. No such thing occurred, and it quickly became apparent that Cativelaunus's opinion had been right: Meradoc had been less loved than he himself believed, and his death had plunged no one into inconsolable grief.
The ceremony itself was solemn and impressive. The ruling Chiefs, now six in number, were led in procession into the sacred precincts of the temple by an escort of Druids to the accompaniment of a throbbing rhythm of massed drums that resembled the pulse- beat of a human heart and quickly took on a numbing, hypnotic resonance. No other sound marred the silence of the occasion, and the watching crowd stood motionless. No one stirred or spoke or sang, and there was no sound of movement, for all the participants in the procession walked barefoot in ancient tradition and none carried weapons on this sacred occasion.
Daris, dressed in his finest ceremonial robes and surrounded by his most senior priests, stood high above everything at the outset, gazing down on the procession from the top of the ramped earthen wall that protected the inner temple. From where he stood, a pathway six paces wide lay open, stepped with temporary stairs for the occasion down to the temple floor, and on either side of this aisle, packing the ramped sides of the high wall on either side so that they circled the temple completely, the common people of the Federation served as witnesses to the day's events.
Daris watched the procession circle the temple, weaving in and out among the pillars and pausing each lime the vanguard reached one of the Chiefs' chairs set between alternating pairs of the standing stones. There, on each occasion, the Chief whose chair this was would step out of the procession to be flanked by a pair of red-robed priests who led him to his seat and then stood behind him, one by each shoulder, once he was seated. When all six surviving Chiefs were finally seated, the two remaining chairs sat conspicuously vacant. One of them would be filled within the week by Meradoc's chosen successor, since the dead man had had no son of his own old enough to inherit his position. The other, largest of all, would soon hold the new King.
Daris raised his staff in a signal, then slowly turned his back on the temple below as a series of horns began to sound, their differing, brazen tones blending into a fiery, somehow majestic crescendo that announced to all the world that something signal was about to take place within these precincts. Daris luxuriated in the sound of the horns, allowing its reverberating potency to wash over him and raise the skin of his arms up in gooseflesh. He stood motionless, facing directly east, his head thrown back to welcome the sun and his eyes closed against its blinding brightness. Three times the swelling crescendo of the horns was repeated, and then, as the sequence began again for the fourth and penultimate time, the High Priest turned towards the temple again and began to make his way down the narrow stairs. It was a sequence he had practised many times, and his timing was sure enough that as the crescendo gave way once more to the fifth and last repetition, he reached the ground and walked slowly and with conscious dignity towards the centre of the sacred circle, followed by his twelve senior priests, pacing himself to arrive just as the soaring notes reached their final climax. As the trumpets fell silent, the last echoes fading away into stillness, Daris came to a hall in the exact centre of the temple.
There, in his strongest oratorical voice, he asked the assembled Chiefs why they had come to this place on this day, and with that question and its shouted response, "To choose the King," the Choosing ceremony began. It was brief and solemn, and by the time it was over, less than half an hour from the outset, Uther Pendragon had been selected by the unanimous choice of the Chiefs as High King of the Pendragon Federation.
It was Daris's last duty to make the formal announcement of the result to the assembled witnesses, and he did so four times, from the exact centre of the temple floor, turning to all compass points, confident that the acoustical excellence of the temple would carry his voice easily to every listening ear. The crowd, knowing the protocols involved, waited for him to finish the fourth repetition before reacting, but when they did, there could be no doubting the overwhelming approval in their cheers, which seemed to grow even louder as Daris and the five remaining Chiefs led the new King to the King's seat before bowing deeply to show their commitment to his kingship.
Remaining seated, Uther received the oath of support and loyalty from the five individual Chiefs, taking each man's hand and clasping it between both of his own as the other undertook to assist the King in the legal governance of the land and its people. That done, he then rose and bowed deeply towards Daris, paying his own homage to the gods in the person of the High Priest, after which he continued to stand bareheaded in front of the King's seat, listening to the roars of approval. Finally he turned again to Daris, pitching his voice to carry to the Druid's ears over the noise of the sustained cheering.