Camulod Chronicles Book 8 - Clothar the Frank (73 page)

"You have met Germanus. Are you then familiar with the name of Enos?"

"Aye, Enos of Verulamium. Another bishop."

"But a Britannian bishop, is he not?"

"Britannian?
If by that you mean he is a Briton then aye, he is."

"Well, I bear dispatches in the form of letters from Germanus in Auxerre to Enos in Verulamium, concerning matters which the two of them discussed last year in conjunction with Merlyn Britannicus when last they met—in Verulamium, just before Merlyn had to leave in haste because of the word that Horsa's Danes had sailed for Cornwall."

The man facing me reached up slowly to his chin with one hand and pulled upwards on the end of a short cord that hung there, releasing a metal pin that held the flaps of his helmet together, and as they fell apart he reached higher and pulled the helmet from his head, revealing a strong, evenly featured face, dark haired and dark browed, with a long nose, a wide, square jaw and a mouth that suggested strength of will and good humor. It was the face of a veteran soldier, secure and confident of his own abilities. He flicked a drip of rainwater from the end of his nose with the tip of a forefinger and inclined his head slightly in a grave and courteous acknowledgment that he accepted what I had said.

"Philip," he said. "Philip Rider, they call me, commander of the Fourth Wing of the cavalry forces of Camulod. Welcome to our lands. Where did you land, the river port?"

"Aye, the place called Glevum. Can you tell me where I might find Merlyn Britannicus?"

"No, Master Clothar, I cannot. I can tell you where you will
not
find him, however, and that is in Camulod. He was there for a few months, but he left some time ago and told no one where he was going. He told some of his closest friends that he will be away for some time—'for as long as it may take' was what he actually said, although no one knows what 'it' is—and he could, or he would, give them no idea of when he might return."

He hesitated, then added, "As to where he went, he could have gone anywhere. Merlyn prefers his own company nowadays, would rather be alone, they say, since his misfortunes in Cambria last year."

"What misfortunes are those?"

The man called Philip frowned. "He almost died in Cambria, was thrown into a fire there and badly burned."

"Thrown
into a fire? By whom?"

Philip almost smiled. "A mad whoreson called Carthac, big and ugly and evil and as strong as ten good men. They thought he was unkillable, invincible. He thought so, too, until Merlyn killed him. But before he died he threw Merlyn into a fire. Arthur arrived shortly after that, leading us, and we were able to save Merlyn's life. Took him home on a wagon and nursed him back to health. But as soon as he could move freely, he left again, and as I say, no one knows where he went."

"Are your wars over?"

That earned me a quizzical look that told me Philip found it difficult to accept that anyone would have to ask such a thing. "For this year, you mean? Aye, they seem to be. There's peace in Cambria, to the north of here—Carthac was the festering thorn there, and with his death things soon died down. And in Cornwall to the south, the troublemaker was a man called Ironhair. But he seems to have fallen out with his henchman, Horsa, who hanged him for his troubles." A tiny smile flickered at the edges of his mouth. "So there's peace in these parts, at least. But then there is continuing war against the Saxons to the east, although some won't come out and call it that. The Saxons are a permanent curse and the confrontation out there is more of a chronic condition than a state of war. North and south, though, Camulod is at peace for the moment.

"Our leader, Arthur, is on a grand sweep to the north and east, far beyond our lands, showing the banners and the cavalry of Camulod in other parts of the land in the hope of rallying people to stand up together and confront the Outlanders—Saxons and Jutes and Danes and all the other hordes swarming on the eastern side of Britain." He waved a hand to indicate the men behind him. "We are but the advance party of a full cavalry wing of a thousand mounted troopers, coming less than a mile behind us. A strong force, but our mission is peaceable. We ride merely to show our strength, patrolling our territories."

I nodded, thinking rapidly. "I see. And Arthur Pendragon rides to the north and east, you say. Where is he now, exactly, do you know?"

Philip made a wry mouth. "No one will be able to answer that question until Arthur himself returns with the word of it. He has been gone for two months and more. He could be anywhere by now."

"And Merlyn would not be with him?"

Now the man looked puzzled. "Why would Merlyn be with him? Arthur's no longer a student. He's a commander of cavalry in his own right, commander of the First Wing. He looks after his responsibilities and Merlyn looks after his own. Besides, Merlyn could not have known which way Arthur went, other than north, because Arthur left from Cambria, while Merlyn was still abed in Camulod, recovering from his wounds."

"Hmm," I grunted, thinking deeply about what we should do next. "Thank you, Philip Rider. Can you show me the shortest way to Camulod from here? And this damnable rain, does it ever stop?"

Philip flashed a smile. "Why, man, it seldom starts at all. It will blow by within the next day or two, and the weather will turn fine again before winter sets in, you wait and see. And as for the route to Camulod, that's easy. Simply follow this road south from here until you reach a garrisoned town called Ilchester. They're our people there, and they'll point you in the right direction. You should stay here, however, until our thousand pass you by. I'll leave a decurion with you to explain your presence to Commander Rufio, and after that you can proceed. Now, if you will permit me, I have to make up time and distance."

He slipped his helmet back onto his head and saluted me, bringing his clenched fist to his left breast, then turned his horse around and gave the signal to the men in front of him. In a matter of moments they had regrouped, leaving only one of their number with us, and were cantering away from us.

The decurion greeted us with a courteous nod and then sat silently beside us, and within a short time we heard the approaching cavalry squadrons. Their leaders, riding in the vanguard, drew rein on our side of the road as they neared us, and the decurion rode forward to explain our presence. They listened and nodded, then rode on by us with the decurion, nodding courteously but otherwise paying us no attention. When the last of the thousand had passed us by, their remounts, several hundreds in number, followed after them, herded by a large number of boys below fighting age, and we sat watching until the last of the animals had disappeared from view along the road behind the shrouds of falling rain.

Only then did Perceval turn to me with an admiring grunt. "I can't believe that the only thing in this god-forsaken country that I haven't hated on sight is one and a half thousand of the finest horses I've ever seen. Where do they find beasts like that? I can't believe they breed them here in such an unholy climate."

"Believe it," I told him. "They breed them all here now, according to Germanus, but their origins were Empire-wide. Let's be off. It's not far now to Camulod and I would like a roof over my head as soon as it can be arranged. I'll tell you what Germanus told me about their cavalry as we ride."

We kicked our horses into motion, and Perceval and Tristan ranged themselves on either side of me while young Bors rode close behind us, straining to hear.

I raised my voice until I was almost shouting over the noise of the rain. "The story goes that seventy-one years ago, in the year 376, in a place called Adrianopolis in Asia Minor beyond the eastern edges of the Middle Sea, a Roman consular army of forty thousand men, commanded by the Co-emperor Valens, was overrun and wiped out by a mounted force of Ostrogoths. It was a freakish accident and it should never have happened, but it did. The Goths were migrating from one region to another. They even had their women and children with them. But they were all mounted, on small, shaggy ponies, and they crested a mountain ridge to see an entire Roman army below them, marching in extended order along the edge of a lake. They charged immediately and caught the legions before they could form up in battle order, then rolled them up like a carpet. Forty thousand Romans died that afternoon, including Valens and his entire staff, and the word went out that the Romans were vulnerable to attack by massed formations of horsemen." I glanced from side to side and saw that both my friends were listening closely, so I kept talking.

"Theodosius was still Emperor at that time, and Flavius Stilicho, who was half Roman and half Vandal, was his most brilliant legatus. Stilicho had been appointed commander in chief of the Imperial Household Troops—in other words, commander in chief of all Rome's legions and the most powerful soldier in the world—at the age of twenty-two. They say he was the greatest natural military genius since Alexander the Great of Macedon. Anyway, Stilicho launched an immediate-priority program to re- equip and retrain all the legions of Rome in order to counteract this new threat of mounted attack, and within the space of twenty-five years he had increased each legion's cavalry strength from the traditional five percent of light, skirmishing cavalry— mounted archers whose sole duty was to form a mobile defensive screen while the legion was forming its battle lines—to twenty- five percent heavy, disciplined cavalry that operated in the manner of Alexander's heavy cavalry of six hundred years earlier, riding in tightly packed, disciplined formations and carrying heavy spears." I paused, allowing them to absorb what I had said before continuing. "Now that might not sound like much of a feat when you hear someone say it as quickly and plainly as I have just said it, but don't let that mislead you. Think about what was involved in those changes.

"It was an enormous undertaking, according to everything the bishop told me, and he had made a study of all it involved. That Stilicho was able to achieve such a transformation at all was astonishing, Germanus says, for he had first to confront and defeat the opinions and the plotting of the stubborn old-guard traditionalists who didn't want anything to change and who believed that the old ways would always be the best ways. And the fact that most of them resented him for his youth and his brilliance did not make his task any easier. Stilicho never quit, and eventually he won. But that he was able to achieve what he did within twenty-five short years was nothing short of miraculous."

I looked from one to the other of them and they stared back at me, waiting. "I know the bishop likes to talk of miracles and miraculous occurrences. He is a bishop, after all. But it really is astounding. Imagine, for a start, the sheer
scope
of the program that was required worldwide to breed the number of horses needed to equip every legion in the field with that many horses, including remounts and pack animals. Then think about the size of the animals involved. Light, skirmishing cavalry needed only small, light horses, and Rome had always had plenty of those. But for heavy cavalry you need big, heavy horses. Those they did not have, and they needed thousands of them. So where did they find them?

"I'll tell you where they came from. They created them, bred them out of what they had available. Once again, they launched a new, especially designed program all across the Empire. A cross-breeding program, to mate the largest, strongest animals they could find with the finest they had of lesser size, in order to breed larger offspring. By the end of twenty-five years, the results were astounding.

"But then they discovered, too, that the new 'heavy' cavalry, mounted on huge horses, was poorly equipped. They were armoured heavily on top, as Roman troops had always been, but now their legs were vulnerable, hanging down among the enemy on foot. So new armour had to be designed to protect the riders' legs, and new techniques for making it. And swords had to be lengthened and strengthened, for even the traditional cavalry spatha was too short to be effective from the back of a large, tall horse. And so a new study of metal crafting and smithing was launched to find new ways of working iron and steel to make longer, stronger weapons. It goes on and on, each problem giving rise to new solutions that led in turn to other problems in a never-ending cycle.

"Eventually, however, after only twenty years, in the period from 396 until 398, when Stilicho was Regent to the infant emperor Honorius, he brought the central corps of his new cavalry forces to train them here in Britain, in secrecy, against seaborne invasions of Picts, Saxons and Hibernian Scots. They were extremely successful." I paused, purely to emphasize the effect of my next words.

"Barely three years after that, however, when Stilicho had to summon the legions home in haste from Britain to defend Italia itself against invasion by Alaric and his Visigoths, they had to leave those cavalry mounts behind, simply because they lacked the means to take the animals with them. A man called Caius Britannicus, grandsire to Merlyn and the founder of the place now called Camulod, had become a friend to Flavius Stilicho during the Regent's campaign here. The Regent named this man legatus emeritus and granted him temporary ownership of all the abandoned Roman cavalry mounts, charging him with keeping them safe and secure pending the return of the legions to Britain. But the legions never returned, and those Roman horses became the foundation of the cavalry of Camulod and triggered the ascendancy of Merlyn's colony."

I fell silent then, and it felt as though I had been talking for a very long time, but neither of my companions made any comment on anything I had said. We proceeded for almost a mile before Tristan broke the silence.

"It has not stopped raining in seven days," he said. "Not once. I forget what the sky looks like without clouds. I can barely remember sunshine. I think we may die here in Britain, drowned in rainwater. Most of all, though, I'm longing for the warmth and dryness of that filthy old warehouse in Glevum. I think God must have forgotten we're here."

I was slightly stunned by the obliqueness of what he had said. And then it occurred to me that he had offered an apt comment on the importance of my impromptu history lesson and its relevance here and now. I nodded, accepting that, and glanced up at the sky.