Camulod Chronicles Book 8 - Clothar the Frank (79 page)

I threw myself backwards, my eyes screwed tightly shut against all distractions as I concentrated upon keeping my body at full stretch, pulling at Perceval's leg, which felt heavy and lifeless. Once, twice, I felt as though something shifted and then I felt a lateral movement and heard Tristan grunt.

"Right," he said. "That's it. You can stop pulling now. I can't do any more. That's as close as I can bring it to being where it was before."

I relaxed and immediately felt myself on the verge of total collapse, exhausted by the effort I had been sustaining. Above our heads, Bors was now chopping hard, but even as I grew aware of that the noises stopped, and moments later we heard the sounds of him scrambling down to join us again. He brought four long, narrow boards with him, and a long coil of thin hempen rope.

"I brought some water, too."

"Good lad," Tristan said. "Do you have any clean cloth? I'll need one piece to wash his wound and another to use as a bandage."

"I've got cloth," I said, remembering that I was wearing an extra tunic of plain white cloth beneath my quilted one, for additional warmth. I quickly stripped it off and shrugged back into my outer clothes before the cold could even penetrate. Tristan ripped it into two pieces, one much larger than the other, and used the smaller piece to wash away the blood that was now crusting on his brother's thigh. He used a corner of the larger piece to dry the skin, after which he folded the remainder into a pad that he placed directly over the wound, binding it in place with strips of the wet cloth. I had noticed that the bleeding had lessened perceptibly since Tristan's ministrations ended, and apparently that was a good thing, because Tristan mentioned it, too, in an approving murmur.

He then splinted the leg, cutting the rope into lengths before calling on Bors and me to hold the boards in place along the limb while he tied them into place. He worked swiftly and with great confidence, and I was much impressed with his self-possession and the competence with which he had managed the entire affair, from the first moment of his looking at his brother, assessing the situation and what had to be done.

"Where did you learn to do all that?" I asked when the last ties were in place and he sighed and slouched back against the bole of a tree.

"Hmm. I didn't learn. I saw it done once, though, after an action against the Burgundians, not far south of Lutetia. One of our senior centurions, an old sweat called Lucius, fell into a ravine, from horseback. The situation was quite similar to this one, in fact, except that Lucius had an arrow in him, too. That's what caused him to fall in the first place. Anyway, an old friend of his, who had been a medic decades earlier, before becoming a centurion, knew what to do. I was in the situation you were in today, so I wasn't nearly as sure about what I needed
me
to do. But I remembered the old medic talking about how we needed to stretch the leg and bring the broken bone ends back together."

"You've never done that before, ever?"

Tristan heard the wonder in my voice and frowned slightly. "No, and I'd feel a lot better about it if my beloved brother there would just wake up, or grunt, or puke or something." He stooped forward and placed the flat of his hand against Perceval's brow. "Well, he's still breathing, at any rate, so I suppose there's nothing more for us to do but wait." He glanced up at the cliff above us and shook his head in rueful wonder. "I have absolutely no idea how we're ever going to get him out of here."

"I have, sir."

Both of us turned to look at Bors. He shrugged and held up both hands in a curiously helpless gesture.

"I found a set of pulley blocks in the toolbox with the axe." He looked from one to the other of us, but when neither of us showed any reaction he continued. "There's no poles, but we have an axe and we're surrounded by trees, and we've lots and lots of rope."

"So?" Tristan was clearly not understanding what Bors was telling him, and neither was I. "What are you talking about, Bors?"

He blinked at us both in astonishment, and then he grew suddenly confident. "We can build a hoist, like the ones the sailors used to load the feed for our horses when we left Gaul. It only needs four stout poles, a few ropes and a set of pulleys, and we have all of those. Once it's assembled, we need simply strap Master Perceval to a board and hoist him up directly to the cart, straight up the face of the cliff."

I remembered seeing the device he was describing, swinging heavy sacks from the wharf and delivering them safely to the ship's deck, but I had paid it no great amount of attention and now my memory of its workings was clouded, to say the least.

"Straight up the face of the cliff. Can you build such a device, Bors?"

He looked at me wide eyed. "Aye, sir, I can."

"Where did you learn to do such a thing?"

His face went blank with astonishment. "Nowhere, Master Clothar. I simply watched what the mariners did, and paid attention to the way the device worked. It was very simple. And then I remembered having seen a similar thing, but much larger, on my father's farm when I was a boy. One of the workers there, a foreman, taught me about pulleys and tackle and the way they work. He showed me how a single man can lift many times his own weight simply by using ropes threaded through pulleys."

"And so you now believe you can build such a device and use it to haul Perceval to safety up there on the cliff top?"

"Aye, sir, I do."

"And the first step towards doing it is what? Cutting down four trees?"

"Four, aye, Master."

I looked at him one last time, setting my chin and pursing my lips before I spoke. "You are absolutely sure you can do this?"

I saw the determination in his eyes. "Aye, Master, I'm sure."

"Well, then, let's go and select our trees."

Twenty-four hours after that—having found our trees and felled them, then dragged them close to the top of the cliff, cut them to size and harnessed them together to form a tripod and a hoisting arm—Tristan and I had learned how to thread a rope through a set of pulley blocks and how to set up a simple gin pole hoist.

Perceval had regained consciousness about the time we set off to hunt for suitable trees, and he had been suffering unimaginable pain ever since, so that lines newly stamped into his face appeared to have been etched there years earlier. We fed him rich, blood- thickened venison broth spiced with wild garlic and onions that grew in profusion close by where we were camped at the cliff base, but he had little appetite, too badly in need of rest to care about eating and in too much pain to be capable of resting. By the time we had erected the hoist, however, he had lapsed into unconsciousness, and although that would make our task of raising him easier, it also worried us deeply. We strapped him securely to a stretcher made of wrist-thick sapling stems and raised him quickly, straight up the cliff as Bors had promised. Once we had him safely there, we transferred him to the bed of the cart, which we had loaded with dried bracken from the sheltered bottom of the cliff to cushion him as much as possible.

By that time, however, it was growing dark, and after a hurried discussion, weighing the pros and contras of attempting to travel through unknown woodland in the dark of night, we decided we had no other choice but to remain where we were for another night and set off for Verulamium early in the morning. So we lit a cooking fire and set about cooking more of Tristan's venison, which we ate with the last of the bread we had brought with us.

We retired early that night, looking to be astir and ready to move off before dawn broke, but I for one could find no rest, fretting over the health of our helpless friend. Bishop Enos had some wonderful healers and physicians among his priests, I knew, and I would not be satisfied until Perceval was safely delivered into their hands.

9

We arrived back in Verulamium before noon the next day, having been absent for five days, and we were traveling very slowly, painfully aware of the agonized sounds coming from the rear of the cart at every bump in the surface of the ground. Once within the town, however, it was the work of mere moments to deliver Perceval to the building that Bishop Enos had dedicated to permanent use as a hospital. There, a tall and gaunt old priest called Marcus, who had once served as a military surgeon with the legions in Africa before the invasion of the Vandals in 429, took Perceval off our hands and promised he would have the finest care anyone could have. Father Marcus stripped off the splints Tristan had applied and examined the work that we had done to repair the leg, and was lavish with his praise for Tristan. We were grateful to be able to leave our friend and brother in his care.

I made my way directly to Bishop Enos's quarters to inform him of what had happened to Perceval, only to find that the Lady Demea was there, deep in conversation with the bishop. I slipped away without either of them having seen me and went outside, where I found young Maia sitting on a concrete water conduit, her long shadow stretched out before her, her slender feet bare in the gutter by the side of the road. She was completely unaware of my presence as I walked up behind her.

"Maia," I said, "I'm not angry at you, so there's no need to run away from me."

She jumped to her feet as I spoke and spun around to face me, her face flushing hotly, and after a few moments when she was plainly searching for words, she said, "I'm not afraid and I'm not running anywhere."

"Good, I am glad to hear that, because I need to talk with you. I would like you to come by the basilica tomorrow when I am practicing with my spears and show me how you threw that one. I am not at all upset about that, I promise you. In fact the opposite is true. So will you do that? Mil you come tomorrow?"

"I can't. I won't be here."

"What do you mean? You won't come to the basilica?"

She shrugged, her face regaining its normal color. "No, I mean I won't be here in Verulamium tomorrow. We are leaving for home in the morning, returning to Chester."

"You are? That's very sudden, isn't it? Why?"

She shrugged her shoulders, the movement emphasizing how thin and insubstantial she appeared to be, and yet I knew she was as strong and lithe as a whip, despite the impression she conveyed of being like a young deer or a newborn foal, all eyes and long, unsteady legs. "Because the King and Queen's prayers have been answered," she replied. She spoke without inflection, and nothing in her demeanor indicated that she might hold any opinion of any kind on what she was reporting, but there was something impossibly subtle about her words that made me look at her more closely, wondering if there was really cynicism in her speech. She paid me no attention, however, and was already continuing. "Saint Alban has interceded in Heaven on their behalf and Queen Demea is now with child and so we must go home now. That is why I am here. I'm waiting for the Queen. She is talking with Bishop Enos."

I continued to stare at her for the space of a few more heartbeats, then told myself not to be so silly. The child was only twelve, after all. That was a marriageable age, certainly, but only for rare unions between young girls and very old men whose mortality was questionable. It was no indicator of either womanhood or intellect. "I see," I said, nodding slowly. "Has she been there long, with the bishop?"

"No, not long. Why?"

"Oh, no reason. I'm sorry you are leaving so soon. I shall miss you."

"I'm
not. I can't wait to go home."

"I don't suppose you would care to show me how you threw that spear right now, would you?"

She cocked her head and looked at me strangely, her elfin face with its enormous piercing blue eyes unreadable. "Now? But you have no spears."

'True, but they're nearby. I can have them here in moments. What say you, would you like to try for that target again?"

Her eyes sparkled, and as she straightened her back I noticed again how tall she was, unusually tall for a girl her age, and thin as a sapling tree. She smiled, very slightly, white teeth gleaming briefly behind wide red lips. "I don't know if there's enough time."

"Of course there is. There's always time for what we love to do. Stay here until you see me cross the street over there, then follow me into the basilica. It won't take long for you to show me how you throw."

I had been right the first time I saw her. She threw naturally and without thought, uncoiling into the cast reflexively and following through perfectly simply because she had that kind of grace in her normal range of motion. She threw three spears, and two of them hit their targets. I was full of praise and I could see she was delighted with her own prowess. But she never lost sight of the fact that she ought to be sitting outside the bishop's house, waiting for the Lady Demea, and so I thanked her for her demonstration and allowed her to go on her way. She flashed me a dazzling smile and darted away like a deer towards the door, where she hesitated and looked back at me, lingering.

"What? Say it."

"Where did you learn to throw spears like that?"

I shrugged and grinned at her. "Like what?" I was being facetious, but she took me seriously.

"Like magic, the way you do, with the cord wrapped around the shaft. I've never seen that here."

"No, you wouldn't, not in Britain. I learned to do it in Gaul, across the sea."

"I've never seen anyone who throws better than you. I have never seen spears like those, either."

"That's because there are none. These spears have no equal."

"I shall call you Hastatus," she said then, sounding very grown up and sure of herself. "It means a spearman. Do you mind having a new name?"

"No," I said, smiling again. "Not at all. Not if it is bestowed by someone as skilled and gracious as you are, Lady Maia."

A flicker of something that might have been annoyance crossed her face, and I thought I had offended her with my levity, but then she nodded. "So be it, then. You shall be my Hastatus. And I'm glad you don't like Cynthia. I don't either, but most people simply can't see beyond her face." She flicked a hand in farewell and was gone.