Legacy (27 page)

He turned his attention to the spymaster. "So, Namatius, what do you suppose was Arvandus' motive in attempting to contact us? Has he been a target of yours?"

"No, sire. This is purely a gift from God. As to the motive, Arvandus was under indictment for graft. Perhaps he was simply seeking an employer who would better appreciate his talents. Or perhaps he was acting out of sheer embitterment."

"Either way, there's no reason we shouldn't make use of the information he wanted to give us, now that the Romans have seen fit to give it to us for him!" Euric bellowed with laughter, while watching Namatius for a reaction and seeing only blandness.
Do you resent being reminded of what contemptible human scum you come from? Or do you already know it so well that you're no longer capable of resentment?
He quieted down, and stroked his full, dark gold beard reflectively.

"This worm Arvandus has a point. If we act quickly, we can smash the Britons while they are still the alliance's only force south of the Loire. After that . . . Syagrius won't interfere without support. And maybe we can detach his Frankish vassals from him—I know you've already been cultivating contacts with Childeric!" Namatius inclined his head in acknowledgment.

"Very well, Namatius," Euric continued. "Send me the captains of the war-host! I know that all the men have gone home for the winter after this last Spanish campaign, but we can recall them early. And we can have the plans ready before they're assembled." He strode to the map that hung on one wall, hitching up his belt over his gut—no doubt about it, he was becoming heavyset in middle age, and grey hairs were appearing in his beard.
But God will grant me the time I need!
"Yes," he muttered, staring at the map. "According to Arvandus' version of the plan, the Britons will advance from Bourges
this
way, and then halt, to await the arrival of Syagrius' forces—probably around
here
." He stabbed his finger at the map, for all the world as though it were an accurate representation, and not a vague approximation of the landscape through which they would wend their way, with the help of local guides. "This is where we will catch them." His finger continued to rest on the map, near the symbol for a little place called Bourg-de-Déols.

"Indeed, sire," Namatius murmured. "We'll have them at every conceivable disadvantage. Only . . . I have contacts in Armorica, and everything I have heard about their High King, this Artorius Riothamus, indicates that . . ."

"Yes, yes," Euric said impatiently. "I know his reputation, and that of his army, especially the cavalry. Naturally—against Saxon yokels and Pictish primitives
any
competent cavalry would seem fearsome! It will work to our advantage. The more impressed people are by him, the more impressed they'll be when we crush him! That's why I want the entire war-host mobilized early. I want to come against these Britons in such numbers that we'll overwhelm them, not just defeat them. That is part of my objective—creating a sense of the futility and hopelessness of opposing us. Now go!"

Namatius hurried out, and Euric went back to the window and gazed out over his lands.

Yes
, he thought,
forget the old sagas
. The great Gothic adventure was only just beginning.

"Ho, Bedwyr!"

Sarnac turned from checking his saddle girth and saluted Artorius—he never thought of him as "Riothamus" any more. The High King acknowledged and leaned down from his saddle.

"Well, Bedwyr, are you as anxious to get moving as everyone else?" His gesture took in the camp outside Bourges, now a beehive of activity as the army prepared to advance into Berry. The scene embodied the excitement of imminent change, without the apprehension of immediate danger. They were simply deploying into an advanced position, to be joined later by the Roman and Frankish forces from Soissons. Only then could fighting be expected, for the Visigothic farmer-warriors were only just beginning to return to arms for their fixed campaigning season.

Or so it was entirely reasonable for Artorius to suppose. . . .

"Aye,
Pan-Tarkan
," Sarnac replied slowly, trying to make himself remember Tylar's admonitions against interference. "Of course you know best about how soon we should advance, or whether we should wait for Syagrius. . . ." He clamped his mouth shut.

Artorius cocked his head. "What ails you, Bedwyr? This isn't like you at all."

"Oh, nothing,
Pan-Tarkan.
It's just . . . well, call it a feeling, from some of the campaigns I remember in the East." He could not allow himself to say more. He had already said too much.

Artorius' eyes narrowed, and for a heartbeat or two they locked with Sarnac's. Then the moment was past; Artorius was straightening up in his saddle with an offhand "Cheer up, Bedwyr!" and riding off to exchange greetings with other men.

They left Bourges in early spring, riding southwestward into a world of sun and blossoms, in which Sarnac was almost able to escape from his foreknowledge.

"Don't let this countryside fool you," Kai was saying earnestly. "Berry is a land noted for witches and sorcerers. I was talking to this amulet seller in Bourges, and he told me about the time when . . ." Sarnac let him rattle on, listening with half an ear and watching the advancing army.

Artorius wasn't taking his entire force into the field, for he had left Bourges strongly held. But what he was taking was his elite: armored heavy infantry, with the sun glinting off their ring-mail
loricae
and the tips of their spears, picked units of archers and javelin men, and the main body of the Artoriani. He and Kai rode with the Artoriani past the advancing columns of infantry, exchanging shouted greetings and ribaldries. Further back were the baggage train and various noncombatants, including Tylar. Sarnac now wore the scarlet cloak of the Artoriani but continued to stubbornly decline the usual scale hauberk, clinging to his accustomed quilted-cloth armor. He claimed to be superstitious about it; it was an explanation these men could accept.

"Tylar," he subvocalized, unnoticed by Kai, "I still don't entirely get it. It seems like this campaign in Gaul should be remembered in the legends."

"But it is," came the pseudo-voice vibrating through his mastoid. "Of course, the facts will be misplaced—as is the way of legends. As always, one of the first things lost sight of will be the identity of the enemy. In the early versions, Arthur will be portrayed fighting the Romans, rather than allied with them. Later, when the romantic aspects become predominant, the campaign will turn into an expedition to capture Lancelot and the faithless Guinevere. In both versions, he'll be called back to fight his last battle against the traitor. . . ."

"Look, Bedwyr!" Kai pointed ahead, where the blood-red dragon floated lazily over the head of the column in the spring warmth.

"Signing off," Sarnac told Tylar. Then, aloud to Kai: "Yes, I see! We're halting. Over there must be where we'll make camp." His pointing finger followed the distant dragon standard as it moved off toward the right, onto a rise. He gave a silent command and studied the map that seemed to appear in front of his eyes. It showed their present position—near a village called Bourg-de-Déols, he noted—and the surrounding country, with the River Indres to the south and the town of Chateâuroux beyond that. It was a gently rolling landscape, and the rise—toward which the line of march was now curving—was unexceptional. Nothing more was needed in the way of a defensive position; it wasn't as though Berry was enemy territory.

The advance guard of unarmored light horsemen trotted off toward the low hills on the horizon, scouting ahead, as the army piled into the campsite with a composite din of shouted commands, neighing horses, clanking armor, and a thousand other sounds. Sarnac, trotting through the organized chaos, recalled Tylar's remark about the shadowy quality of this wretchedly documented era, a sense of ghostly armies and dim battles glimpsed only by occasional flashes of lightning. It was hard to think in such terms amid the sweaty, dusty, profane, and entirely prosaic reality that surrounded him. Even the technological primitivism seemed less exotic than he had expected. He'd had to adjust to the lack of various amenities, and then had simply adapted to what was available. Much of the uniqueness of his world's technology lay in realms of the impalpable and the submicroscopic. As far the human senses were concerned . . . well, a handle was a handle, whether it was on a sword or a tacscanner.

He realized that the gap that separated him and even Tiraena from these people was nothing compared to the gulf that yawned between all of them and Tylar. He still didn't know just how far in the future the time traveller's native era lay, and he wasn't certain that he wanted to know.

Nevertheless, he decided to ask, as he and Tylar stood gazing out over the encamping army. But Tylar had warmed to the subject Sarnac had raised earlier.

"Yes," he was saying, "like most English-speakers, you identify the Arthurian legend with Britain alone. But the continental tradition will be, in some ways, closer to the truth. Medieval poets, like Wolfram von Eschenbach, will have Arthur holding court at Nantes, and send him to Britain only as an afterthought."

Sarnac nodded absently, looking around. The Indres flowed past on their left. It wasn't much of a river, but spring rains had made it unfordable. Ahead was an open plain, long ago cleared of trees, with the low hills beyond it. And . . . what was that? Several of the light horsemen were coming back from those hills at a gallop. He squinted toward the early afternoon sun and saw the riders lashing their horses. What . . . ?

"Tylar. See those scouts coming back?"

"Why, yes, and in some haste!" He brushed an insect away and seemed to consider. "What do you suppose . . . ?"

Then the first of the riders came into voice range of the sentries and began shouting. The sentries shouted in turn, and in a ripple of sound, a cry spread through camp.

By the time Sarnac and Tylar caught the words "the Visigoths" amid the roar, they had already seen the masses of soldiery begin to debouch onto the plain from the hills. For an instant their eyes locked—Sarnac's almost wild with the sudden knowledge of what he was about to watch happen on this drowsy spring afternoon, and Tylar's oddly serene. Then the time traveller nodded.

He knows
, Sarnac thought with a calmness that surprised him.
He's known all along.

"I can't understand it," Kai was saying again, simply to be saying something. "They must have hauled their warriors off their farmsteads much earlier than usual—before the winter was over—to get organized and into Berry so soon. But
why
? It's as if they knew where we were going to be."

"It's the damned Gauls!"

The speaker, a few places away in the ranks, spat feelingly. "We were betrayed. What else can you expect? One of their swells who knew the plan must have sold it to Euric."

"Probably for a promise to keep him supplied with boys," Kai snarled. He was in an uncharacteristically jittery mood as he stood waiting. All of them were, and Sarnac knew why: it was the very fact that they
were
standing, dismounted by Artorius' order. He had placed the Artoriani alongside the heavy infantry, in front of the archers and javelin throwers, in the hedgehog formation he had hastily fashioned. Sarnac had kept expecting the Visigoths to plunge ahead with the headlong ferocity that supposedly characterized barbarians and catch the British off balance as they were forming up. But the huge, unwieldy enemy host was incapable of any such lightning maneuvers. Instead, it had flowed like spreading syrup around the low hill on which the Britons stood, surrounding them on three sides—the Indres secured the fourth. Now they were close enough for Sarnac to get a good look at them.

The infantry were generally helmetless and protected only by shields—wooden and iron-bossed like his own—and a double tunic, the outer one of fur-trimmed leather. In contrast to their drabness, the heavy cavalry massed in the background were spectacular, seemingly armored in gold, although he'd been assured that the mail corslets were really gilded iron. Also gilded, and adorned with flowing horsehair plumes, were their helmets, which otherwise were standard Roman cavalry issue. They were armed like the Artoriani, with long lances and swords which, like the Roman
spatha
, were descended from a Sarmatian original. But they lacked mounted javelin men. All their missile-armed troops were afoot. And they had a lot of them—archers and spear-throwers both, now waiting in formations that seemed to sway impatiently, in time with the growl that rumbled from them.

Suddenly, there came an atonal blare of horns from behind those enemy formations. The rumble rose to a roar as the Visigoths surged forward, into what seemed to Sarnac to be an insanely short range for a duel of missile weapons.

"Well," Kai said, jitters gone as they grounded their lances, "now we just have to take it for a while." They raised their large round shields to shelter the archers, as was their function at this stage.

Sarnac had examined those bows. The late Roman compound bow was actually not that poor a weapon. The problem was the way they used it, drawing it back to the chest like boys playing Robin Hood. They hadn't discovered the advantage of drawing it to the cheek.
Hell
, he thought,
if Tylar would hop ahead to the fourteenth century and bring back some English longbowmen, it would change the whole picture. Better yet, a platoon of twenty-third century Fleet Marines in powered combat armor.
He decided he really must mention it to the time traveller, who now waited with the other noncombatants in the hedgehog's hollow center.

A hail of missiles began to glance off his shield, and Sarnac heard screams all around him as arrows found exposed flesh. Surely, he thought, the Visigoths in their thousands would overwhelm them with sheer volume of fire. But the response from the British bowmen was effective enough to keep the Visigothic archery disorganized. The Visigoths' technique was no better than the Britons', and their wooden self-bows weren't quite as good. The only advantage that bows had over javelins in this era was that an archer could carry more arrows than a javelin man could carry javelins. As these half-assed arrows rattled off his shield, Sarnac decided it was just as well that serious archery wasn't being practiced at this range—it would have been a mutual slaughter, with the good guys on the short end.