Camulod Chronicles Book 8 - Clothar the Frank (77 page)

I could find no grounds for disagreeing with the old man's logic, but since he was talking of months of waiting, I began to feel uncomfortable with the prospect of keeping Cyrus and his thirty troopers here with me, and consequently absent from their duties in time of war, for such an extended period. I spoke with Perceval and Tristan about what I was thinking and they agreed with me, so I sent for Cyrus and thanked him for his company on our outward journey, then released him to return to Camulod with his men. I was sure the young tribune was relieved to be able to return to duty, but he was still conscientious enough to demur, out of professional concern, wondering how my companions and I would make our way back to Camulod when the time came.

I set his mind at ease on that by pointing out that we would take the same route that we had followed to come here, the straight route to the west, by road from Verulamium to Alchester and south from there to Aquae Sulis and to Camulod. The territories through which the road passed were probably the last remaining ones in Britain that were completely free of threats from the Saxon invaders, since all of their conquests still lay to the east of Verulamium.

Cyrus agreed, and within two days he had reprovisioned his squadron and set off homeward at their head, hoping to reach Camulod in safety before the winter really set in, although it was already December.

7

We settled down to pass the winter peacefully in Verulamium.

It snowed heavily towards the middle of the month, and that snowfall turned out to be merely the first of many as the temperature plummeted to depths that everyone swore were unprecedented. The snowstorms were accompanied by strong winds that whipped the snow into strange and wondrous drifts that served to isolate the countryside, so that travel became impossible and supplies of food and fuel were used up in those places where people were stranded. We were bored beyond belief, although our boredom was alleviated by the need to seek out new supplies of fuel and food.

Neither I nor my three companions had experienced a winter to compare to this before. It snowed only infrequently in central Gaul, even in the deepest winter, and when snow did occasionally fall, it seldom remained on the ground for longer than a day or two. It never fell and froze and remained for weeks and months as it had this year in Britain. Consequently none of us had ever hunted in the snow before, and we discovered it to be an entirely different kind of science, calling for skills that we had never learned. Fortunately, however, we found excellent teachers among the group surrounding Symmachus, the tall, distinguished-looking man we had noticed when we first rode into Verulamium.

Symmachus was a Roman name, but the man who bore it, although he carried it proudly enough, was a Briton through and through. He claimed direct descent from the ancient Cornovii, the warrior people of northern Cambria whose indomitable strength and refusal to succumb to the Roman invaders in the time of the Emperor Claudius had necessitated the building of the giant legionary fortress of Deva that had housed the ten-thousand- strong complement of the Twentieth Legion, the Valeria Victrix, for upwards of three hundred years. Sometime in the course of that three hundred years, Symmachus maintained, a Roman officer had managed to bypass the disapproving frowns and scowling menace of the Cornovii elders and wed himself to one of their daughters, adding his bloodlines and his Roman name to the annals of the clan. The Valeria Victrix was gone now, with all the other legions, Symmachus told us on the first night we spent in his company, but their enormous fortress was still there in Deva—it
was
Deva, he declared—and so were the Cornovii, although they had fallen out of the habit of calling themselves by any special name and simply called themselves the People of the Hills in their own dialect and Cambrians in the common Coastal Tongue. Symmachus was their king, and he and his people, numbering in the region of five thousand men, women and children, now made their home in the ancient fortress, which they called Chester.

He was a strange man, Symmachus, and for reasons of his own he never liked me and never acknowledged me as the leader of my small group. Instead, he addressed himself to Perceval, as the eldest of our group, at all times, thereby steadfastly refusing me the legitimacy of place that would have been accorded by his addressing me in person. Tristan in particular was highly offended by Symmachus's attitude towards me, but I went out of my way to make light of the situation because I knew what it was about me that the king resented most of all.

Symmachus was accompanied by his wife and two daughters. The wife, a lady called Demea, was still young and exceptionally beautiful, a radiant, laughing creature with bright yellow hair and wondrous green eyes. All the men in the town were at least half in love with her, and the recognition of that truth afforded the king much amusement and enjoyment. After all, he was a strong and well set up man in the prime of life, and his young wife was most obviously besotted with him. And indeed, as we had quickly discovered, his wife's love for Symmachus was the reason he was here in Verulamium, so many miles from home. They had been married now for eight years and were without children of their own, the two daughters being the progeny of Symmachus's first marriage.

The Lady Demea, a devout Christian, had heard about the miracles attributed to Saint Alban, all of them centered around his shrine in Verulamium, and had prevailed upon her doting husband to bring her here, where she could beg the saint in person to intercede for her in Heaven and bless her with a pregnancy. That Demea was fully confident her prayers would be answered was evident to anyone with eyes to see, and the manner in which she and her husband conducted themselves made it plain that they were giving Heaven every opportunity to bless their endeavors. Thus, it was evidently not his beautiful young wife who was the cause of Symmachus's distemper.

It was his daughters, I believed—or one of them, the elder of the two—who cost him sleepless nights and justified, in his mind at least, his continuing disapproval of me. The daughter's name was Cynthia—again a Roman name, or perhaps even Hellenic—but she was obviously not, by her very coloring, the daughter of Demea. Cynthia's real mother, a black-haired, blue-eyed woman from the far northern lands beyond Hadrian's great wall, had died years earlier, giving birth to her second daughter when Cynthia was only four years old. Cynthia was now almost sixteen, breathtakingly lovely and desirable and making no slightest attempt to conceal her attraction to me.

It made no difference to Symmachus that I went to great pains to distance myself from his daughter and avoid her company. He saw nothing of that. In truth, while I acknowledged Cynthia's great physical and facial beauty, I experienced no attraction to her beyond the first few days of knowing her, and she herself had given me the reason to feel the way I did.

Young Bors had fallen in love with her from the moment he set eyes on her, and he was utterly incapable of hiding his infatuation. I know how true that is because I was there when he saw her for the first time and I almost laughed aloud at the spectacular transformation that came over him: his eyes went wide and then almost glazed over and his mouth fell agape and it seemed to me that he forgot how to move. He simply stood there, gazing at her slack jawed and open mouthed, incapable of speech or movement.

Of course, Cynthia saw it immediately. Unfortunately, however, her recognition of his stunned submission to her beauty brought out her worst attributes. Where I took pains immediately to dissemble and conceal my delight in my young servant's reaction to her beauty, Cynthia proceeded from the first to exploit it ruthlessly, treating Bors shamefully and using him imperiously and cruelly, keeping him dancing attendance on her and accepting his every adoring look as no more than her due while she deliberately spurned him, belittling him and insulting him.

Her behaviour, uncalled for and excessive as it was, upset me deeply because it impressed me as being quite natural and unfeigned. I found it repellent that she should be so quick to cause my young associate pain, for no reason other than his natural attraction to her beauty. Bors was my servant, and although I strove to keep our relationship as one of master to apprentice, I had found him to be a willing worker and a conscientious student, as well as a naturally friendly and enthusiastic soul—his truculence and sullen behaviour had vanished within hours of our setting foot upon the road to Britain. He had done absolutely nothing to earn Cynthia's displeasure, but she poured wrath and disdain about his head in equal and unstinting measure, treating him far less kindly than most people treat animals, and I soon found myself harboring a deep feeling of dislike for her that I was never able to disguise completely.

Cynthia, of course, believing entirely in her own allure and fascination, was never able to bring herself to believe that I could be genuinely immune to her attractions, so that the more I attempted to avoid her and discourage her, the more determined she became to enslave me with her charms and to bend me to her will. Unfortunately, thanks to my education and my many talks with Bishop Germanus concerning women and the rules governing a decent man's behaviour towards them, I was never quite able to bring myself to tell her how deeply she had taught me to dislike her, or how her treatment of Bors repulsed me. That would have been too cruel, by my own assessment at that time, although it occurred to me not long afterwards that had she been male and my own age I would have thrashed her soundly for her hectoring cruelty and ordered her to stay well clear of me until she had learned how to control the baseness of her nature.

This, then, was the reason for the tension between the two of us all the time, and that was what her father reacted to with such hostility. His reading of the situation was wrong, of course, but I could hardly come right out and add insult to his imagined injuries by telling him that I found his firstborn daughter ill natured, morally unattractive and generally unpleasant and that I would far rather spend time with her quieter, far less aggressive and offensive twelve-year-old sister, whom she called the Brat.

And so Symmachus distrusted me because he felt I lusted for his daughter, and I resigned myself to being spoken to through Perceval at every turn.

Symmachus was a warrior, however, and he had heard tales of Camulod, and he wanted to know if it was feasible that Merlyn Britannicus and Camulod might consider an alliance with himself and his people in Deva. His question caused a long, uncomfortable silence because none of us was qualified to answer it with anything resembling authority, although I felt that the distance between the two locations alone—almost two hundred miles—would render impossible the kind of arrangement that the king was thinking of. I said as much, and although he seemed to accept the logic of my explanation after examining it for a short time, I could tell that Symmachus was not too happy with me for having stated the obvious and created difficulties for whatever it was he had been considering. Once again, however, I kept silent, venturing no more opinions and showing no more signs of curiosity.

Symmachus and his party had been on the point of leaving for home when the weather broke in mid-December, effectively stranding them in Verulamium for several more months, and so it was that we came to know him to the extent that we did. Although I found him less than comfortable to be around, I had no such difficulties with his companions, who were in fact his family's bodyguard. I came to know several of them very well, and my friends and I spent many pleasant hours with them among the woods, learning to hunt as they did in deep snow. They, in their turn, were fascinated with the spears given to me by Tiberias Cato. The Cambrians had never seen their like, but were unimpressed by the information that no one else had, either. They were quite convinced that somewhere along the edges of one of their northern mountain lakes they would soon find reeds long enough and strong enough to dry and shape into light, strong, durable spear shafts like mine. I made no effort to convince them otherwise, for they simply would
not
have believed that people had already scoured the reaches of the Empire looking for such things.

They were particularly fascinated by the technique I used to throw the weapons, and by the accuracy I managed to achieve, although they pretended to be overly concerned about the amount of time I spent practicing. They were correct in that. I did spend inordinately large amounts of time practicing that winter, but there was little else to do most of the time. When the weather was too cold and the snow too deep to do much outside, I converted the largest hall in the basilica into a practice arena, piling all the cots and tables and benches up against one long wall and throwing my spears from one end of the vast hall to the other. The distance was slightly less than forty paces, which was ample room for practicing throwing with accuracy, and I had ranged a series of tables and benches of differing heights across one end of the room so that I could make my way from one side to the other, jumping or stepping from one level to another and throwing from any of them as I went. At the far end, I had mounted a series of five boards to serve as targets, each of them painted with pitch in approximately the size and shape of a man. My watchers were amazed that I could announce my targets from
any
throwing height, specifying the area I would hit—head, chest, thigh and the like—and then hit accurately from thirty to forty paces distant eight times out of any ten. That, to them, was magical. To me, it was the result of incessant hours of brutal, unrelenting work.

As time passed the weather eventually grew more pleasant, and as the worst of the snow began to melt and disappear, I was able to move outside to practice on horseback. Everyone else did the same, of course, happy to be able to ride out again after having spent such a long time immured by the heavy snow. The others rode abroad, however. I was more than content to ride by myself most of the time, exercising constantly in the courtyard that Enos had originally allocated to the cavalry mounts from Camulod. It was not a large space, but it was suitable for my needs, offering me sufficient room to wheel and weave and to accustom myself again to the rhythm and disciplines of casting a spear with accuracy from the back of a moving horse. Again, watching me at work, my new companions from Cambria, who rode small, sturdy mountain ponies and were not at all familiar with large horses, merely shook their heads and looked at each other in rueful recognition of my interminable folly. All of them, at some time over the winter, had taken their turn at trying to throw my spears, and some had tried much harder than others. None of them, however, had had the slightest success in mastering even the basic elements of the throw.