Camulod Chronicles Book 8 - Clothar the Frank (80 page)

10

In the morning we turned out to bid farewell to Symmachus and his party, and I was surprisingly reluctant to see them go. Cynthia, I noticed, had apparently changed her mind about me, for she did not address a single word to me, and she left for home without deigning to glance in my direction. Maia the Brat sat beside her, and although she did not smile upon me either, she at least rewarded me with a tiny, private flip of the hand as her carriage pulled away.

Tristan nudged me as the wagons left and nodded towards Bors, who stood forlorn, gazing hopelessly after his disappearing love.

"Look at him, poor fellow. I remember how that feels, to watch your first love ride away forever. But he'll get over it quickly. We all do." He looked back at the retreating wagons. "That's quite the young lady. I don't think I have ever seen anything quite like her."

I managed to find a smile to mask my disagreement. "Cynthia? She's unique, I'll grant you, but I think I may not die of grief if I never see her again."

He grunted, a single, muffled bark of amusement and agreement. "I believe you there, but I wasn't talking about the beautiful Cynthia. It was her sister I meant."

"Who, Maia the Brat?" I laughed aloud. "She is a delight, I'll not begrudge her that. And she's quick, and clever, and has a mind of her own. But she's just a child, for all that, a little girl."

"A little girl. . . Aye, right. You come back and tell me that in three or four years, if we ever run into her again. I guarantee she'll be the loveliest creature you'll ever have seen. She'll bewitch you, just as her sister bewitched Bors."

I laughed again. "Not me, Tristan. I'm unbewitchable."

"She doesn't think so now, not that one, believe me. She likes you very much, and not in the way you obviously expect of a twelve-year-old."

"Maia? Come on, man, I've barely spoken to the child, and when I did we talked of throwing spears."

He shrugged elaborately and held up his hands. "Fine, forget I mentioned it, but I know more about that young woman than you do."

I looked at him in surprise. "You do? How can you?"

He grinned at me and danced away, his arms raised defensively as though he expected me to pummel him with my fists. "I ask questions, and I listen to the answers, and so I learn much more than those who never ask and far, far more than those who ask but never listen." Knowing he was baiting me, I refused to rise to his goad, but he kept going anyway. 'The young woman has a mind of her own . . . but she has secrets, too. And she would rather be a boy, at this stage in her life, so she trains with weapons when she is at home in Chester, where all her people love her. And her name is not Maia, although she wouldn't tell you that."

Suddenly I found that I had lost patience with his bantering. "Don't play the fool, Tristan, of course it is. I had the name directly from her mother."

He sobered instantly, looking at me eye to eye, the smile on his face fading as swiftly as the humor left his tone. "Stepmother, Clothar. Demea is her stepmother. The child was born on the first day of May—hence the name, Maia. And Demea and Symmachus met and fell in love in the month of May when the child was three, and they were wed the following May. But only after that did Symmachus start calling the child Maia, to please his new wife and to ingratiate her to the child. Little Maia's name had been the same as her real mother's prior to that, and the Lady Demea preferred not to be reminded of that name or to have her husband reminded of it. The child's real name is Gwinnifer. Mind you, she seldom uses it, save among friends."

Gwinnifer.
I had never heard the name before but it resonated, somehow, in my breast. I swung around on my heel to look after the cavalcade, but they had long since passed out of view, and the road lay empty.

MERLYN

1

'Tell me about the dream you had . . . when Germanus spoke to you."

I sat gaping at my questioner, wondering how he could have known of such a thing, and he smiled and waved a hand towards a table to his right, where papers and parchments were strewn in apparent chaos.

"Enos sent me a letter telling me about it and alerting me that you were on your way here. He had no way of knowing which of you would find me first—you, personally, or one of his priests—but he sent the letter anyway, anticipating that one of his people might reach me and warn me of your coming. So, when was this dream?"

I shrugged and leaned back into my chair. "I cannot say, with any certainty, Master Merlyn. It was at the end of the winter. Most of the snow had vanished, and Bishop Enos had finally been able to go out into the countryside, about his work. The earliest bloom of flowers had come and gone again . . . it was the end of March, perhaps early in April."

I was sitting comfortably, in a folding, curule-style armchair that had a leather seat and back, and the man across from me, in an identical chair, almost smiled, the right side of his mouth twitching upwards. "Do you mean to say that you had lost track of time?"

"Completely. It sounds ludicrous, I know, but it is true, nonetheless. We were very bored in Verulamium and it was a long, harsh winter. We would have left much sooner than we did, purely for the sake of moving, had it not been for Perceval's injury. We were held down by that, waiting for his leg to heal."

"It did heal, though, and remarkably well."

"Aye, considering the damage he did to it. He walks now with only the slightest limp, and that will soon be gone. He grows stronger every day. But it was fortunate that his brother Tristan was there with us and knew what needed to be done."

"Aye, it was indeed. Now tell me about this dream of yours, if you will."

I shrugged again. "It was a dream, what more can I say? I dreamt it."

"But it had a salutary effect upon you, did it not? Greater than any dream you had ever known. You told Enos that it was the most realistic dream you had ever had, and that it had forced you to change your plans. It sent you off to look for me, did it not?"

"Aye, all of that is true."

"And why was that? What made it so different? You will forgive my insistence, I hope, but the matter is important to me."

I sucked in a deep breath and sat straighter, stifling my impatience with this man whom I had met less than an hour earlier, after pursuing him three times across the width of Britain.

We had arrived back at the gates of Camulod without giving anyone warning of our arrival, but our presence had been noticed even before we reached the outer perimeter of the territories ruled by the colony, and as we approached the
castellum,
it was to discover that we were expected. Merlyn Britannicus, I was told then, had convened a gathering of Camulod's senior strategists earlier that day and would be unable to join us until the meeting was completed with its agenda satisfied. Fortunately, the guard commander told me the assembly had been in session since shortly after dawn, and no one expected them to take more than another hour to conclude their business. In the meantime, we were taken to the bath house, where we cleansed ourselves of the accumulated dirt of ten days on the road, and then to the refectory, where we stuffed ourselves on freshly prepared food far richer than any rations we could ever carry in our packs.

Sure enough, soon after we left the cookhouse with our bellies full, a soldier came looking for me. Merlyn had emerged from his conference and invited me to join him in his private quarters. I went with the messenger immediately, my mind swarming with thoughts of finally meeting with the man I had come so far to see.

I had heard many things about Merlyn Britannicus in my travels across Britain and some of them were simply incredible, defying both logic and belief but titillating and terrifying the very folk who whispered of them. Merlyn Britannicus was a sorcerer, these people said, perhaps the blackest sorcerer ever to live in Britain. Even his clothing proclaimed the fact that he was a practitioner of the black arts, a familiar of the gods of darkness. He dressed in loose, long- flowing robes of deepest black, and no man or woman was permitted to lode upon his face. But then, the person speaking always added, who would want to? This was Merlyn Britannicus, of Camulod, a man whose death at the hands of his archenemy hundreds had witnessed. And then, after his death, they had continued to watch in horror as the head was struck from his corpse with his own sword.

Carthac, the monster who had killed him, carried Merlyn's head back to his camp, swinging it by its long, golden hair as he went. The camp was enclosed and virtually unassailable, high in the mountains and miles from the scene of the fight where the rest of Merlyn's corpse had been left lying. Carthac had shown Merlyn's severed head to his whole army, swinging it high around his own head before casting it into a bonfire, where it exploded in a fireball the likes of which no one had ever seen, filling the air with billowing, choking smoke and whirling sparks. And from that cloud of smoke, to the consternation and awestricken terror of everyone who saw it, Merlyn Britannicus had leaped into view, miraculously reborn, to kill and strike the head off Carthac in his turn and send all his followers screaming out into the open air, where they found Pendragon bowmen waiting to shoot them down from the mountain slopes above their camp.

From that day forth, these storytellers said, Merlyn had walked in silence, shrouded in robes of deepest black, and all men shunned him.

That was the people's version, the tale told in hushed voices throughout the land on dark nights when the wind howled in the distant emptiness beyond the firelight.

The version I had learned from Merlyn's friends was very different. The man Carthac had beheaded was actually Ambrose Ambrosianus, Merlyn's half brother, close enough to Merlyn in appearance to be virtually identical. The two brothers had worked hard to turn that close resemblance into a tactical weapon, cultivating it in such a way that they wore identical clothes and armour and were never seen together. Because they were frequently seen fighting on the same days, but at great distances from each other, the story spread that Merlyn the Sorcerer could win simultaneous victories and be seen triumphant on the same morning or afternoon on two battlefields twenty or thirty miles apart.

On the day when Merlyn was "reborn," he had penetrated Carthac's camp disguised as a sick messenger, and he was sitting by the fire pit, nursing a pouch full of some mysterious fire powder. It had been his intention to use the fire powder to create a diversion that would allow him an opportunity to kill Carthac, taking him by surprise in his own camp, by his own fireside, where he least expected any threat. Unaware that Carthac had even met Ambrose, let alone captured him, Merlyn was therefore taken completely by surprise himself by what transpired, and he had barely begun to assimilate what he was seeing when Cardiac threw Ambrose's head into the fire. Then, intent upon recovering his brother's head before it could take further harm, Merlyn had dashed into the flames, forgetting that he was carrying the bag of his magical fire powder. The powder spilled into the open fire with a terrifying explosion of flames and smoke, and from that cloud Merlyn had emerged in front of Carthac, stunning everyone and stabbing the enemy leader to the heart before he could react.

Carthac, however, was not to be easily killed. Panicked perhaps by the miraculous reincarnation of a man he had just beheaded, and ignoring the wound in his chest, he scooped Merlyn up and threw him bodily back into the heart of the bonfire from which he had sprung. Merlyn landed flat among the coals and sustained grave injuries, but fortunately—although he himself would come to question that good fortune in the long, exhausting months of rehabilitation that stretched ahead of him—the explosion of fire powder had blown the blaze apart and scattered the fierce-burning branches and bright embers that would otherwise have consumed him completely. As it was, he emerged only slightly disfigured and incapacitated, although his burnt legs ensured that he would never ride a horse again with any ease and would forever afterwards walk with a pronounced limp. His left arm and hand, too, were badly damaged, his fingers reduced to little more than claws, and his face, particularly the left side of his mouth, bore scars of what could have been a far more hideous burn. Whenever Merlyn smiled, his mouth was pulled awry on that one side, twisted downward artificially to expose his lower teeth. But then, whenever Merlyn Britannicus smiled, everyone who noticed—and there were very few of those— was invariably glad, because his natural self shone through. The eyes of the people who made up the rest of the world never penetrated the darkness beyond the long, black outer robes he wore, or the hood that overshadowed his face and kept even his eyes concealed from unwanted scrutiny.

This was the man who sat across from me now, the hood of his outer robe pushed back to expose the yellow hair—now showing broad streaks of silver gray—that swept back from a wide, high forehead and keen, deep-set and piercing eyes beneath straight, golden brows.

It was hard not to stare at him, because this man had become a legend and much of the legend had to do with his unseen face, so I was signally aware of the honour he was doing me by allowing me to look upon his face. It was a strong face, but strangely coarse looking, almost as though the skin had undergone some kind of abrasion that had almost broken it. I was dissatisfied with that explanation even as it occurred to me, but I could find no better way to describe it.