Legacy: Arthurian Saga (21 page)

"Not a word. You don't think he tells
me his secret thoughts, do you? Now you just do as he says, make
yourself at home, keep your mouth shut, and see you don't get into
trouble. I don't suppose you'll be seeing much of him."

"I didn't suppose I would," I said.
"Where am I to live?"

"Here."

"In this room?"

"Not likely. I meant, in the house." I
pushed my plate aside. "Cadal, does my lord Uther have a house of
his own?" Cadal's eyes twinkled. He was a short stocky man, with a
square, reddish face, a black shag of hair, and small black eyes no
bigger than olives. The gleam in them now showed me that he knew
exactly what I was thinking, and moreover that everyone in the
house must know exactly what had passed between me and the prince
last night.

"No, he hasn't. He lives here, too.
Cheek by jowl, you might say."

"Oh."

"Don't worry; you won't be seeing much
of him, either. He's going north in a week or two.

Should cool him off quickly, this
weather...He's probably forgotten all about you by now, anyway." He
grinned and went out.

He was right; during the next couple
of weeks I saw very little of Uther, then he left with troops for
the north, on some expedition designed half as an exercise for his
company, half as a foray in search of supplies. Cadal had guessed
right about the relief this would bring me; I was not sorry to be
out of Uther's range. I had the idea that he had not welcomed my
presence in his brother's house, and indeed that Ambrosius'
continued kindness had annoyed him quite a lot.

I had expected to see very little of
the Count after that first night when I had told him all I knew,
but thereafter he sent for me on most evenings when he was free,
sometimes to question me and to listen to what I could tell him of
home, sometimes -- when he was tired -- to have me play to him, or,
on several occasions, to take a hand at chess. Here, to my
surprise, we were about even, and I do not think he let me beat
him. He was out of practice, he told me; the usual game was dice,
and he was not risking that against an infant soothsayer. Chess,
being a matter of mathematics rather than magic, was less
susceptible to the black arts.

He kept his promise, and told me what
I had seen that first night by the standing stone. I believe, had
he told me to, I would even have dismissed it as a dream. As time
went on, the memory had grown blurred and fainter, until I had
begun to think it might have been a dream fostered by cold and
hunger and some dim recollection of the faded picture on the Roman
chest in my room at Maridunum, the kneeling bull and the man with a
knife under an arch studded with stars. But when Ambrosius talked
about it, I knew I had seen more than was in the painting. I had
seen the soldiers' god, the Word, the Light, the Good Shepherd, the
mediator between the one God and man. I had seen Mithras, who had
come out of Asia a thousand years ago. He had been born, Ambrosius
told me, in a cave at midwinter, while shepherds watched and a star
shone; he was born of earth and light, and sprang from the rock
with a torch in his left hand and a knife in his right. He killed
the bull to bring life and fertility to the earth with its shed
blood, and then, after his last meal of bread and wine, he was
called up to heaven. He was the god of strength and gentleness, of
courage and self-restraint. "The soldiers' god," said Ambrosius
again, "and that is why we have reestablished his worship here --
to make, as the Roman armies did, some common meeting-ground for
the chiefs and petty kings of all tongues and persuasions who fight
with us. About his worship I can't tell you, because it is
forbidden, but you will have gathered that on that first night I
and my officers had met for a ceremony of worship, and your talk
about bread and wine and bull-slaying sounded very much as if you
had seen more of our ceremony than we are even allowed to speak
about. You will know it all one day, perhaps. Till then, be warned,
and if you are asked about your vision, remember that it was only a
dream. You understand?"

I nodded, but with my mind filled,
suddenly, with only one thing he had said. I thought of my mother
and the Christian priests, of Galapas and the well of Myrddin, of
things seen in the water and heard in the wind. "You want me to be
an initiate of Mithras?"

"A man takes power where it is
offered," he said again. "You have told me you don't know what god
has his hand over you; perhaps Mithras was the god in whose path
you put yourself, and who brought you to me. We shall see.
Meanwhile, he is still the god of armies, and we shall need his
help...Now bring the harp, if you will, and sing to me."

So he dealt with me, treating me more
as a prince than I had ever been treated in my grandfather's house,
where at least I had had some sort of claim to it.

Cadal was assigned to me as my own
servant. I thought at first he might resent this, as a poor
substitute for serving Ambrosius, but he did not seem to mind, in
fact I got the impression that he was pleased. He was soon on easy
terms with me, and, since there were no other boys of my age about
the place, he was my constant companion. I was also given a horse.
At first they gave me one of Ambrosius' own, but after a day on
that I asked shamefacedly if I might have something more my size,
and was given a small stolid grey which -- in my only moment of
nostalgia -- I called Aster.

So the first days passed. I rode out
with Cadal at my side to see the country; this was still in the
grip of frost, and soon the frost turned to rain so that the fields
were churned mud and the ways were slippery and foul, and a cold
wind whistled day and night across the flats, whipping the Small
Sea to white on iron-grey, and blackening the northern sides of the
standing stones with wet. I looked one day for the stone with the
mark of the axe, and failed to find it. But there was another where
in a certain light you could see a dagger carved, and a thick
stone, standing a little apart, where under the lichen and the bird
droppings stared the shape of an open eye. By daylight the stones
did not breathe so cold on one's nape, but there was still
something there, watching, and it was not a way my pony cared to
go.

Of course I explored the town. King
Budec's castle was in the center, on a rocky outcrop which had been
crowned with a high wall. A stone ramp led up to the gate, which
was shut and guarded. I often saw Ambrosius, or his officers,
riding up this ramp, but never went myself any nearer than the
guard post at the foot of it. But I saw King Budec several times,
riding out with his men. His hair and his long beard were almost
white, but he sat his big brown gelding like a man thirty years
younger, and I heard countless stories of his prowess at arms and
how he had sworn to be avenged on Vortigern for the killing of his
cousin Constantius, even though it would take a lifetime. This, in
fact, it threatened to do, for it seemed an almost impossible task
for so poor a country to raise the kind of army that might defeat
Vortigern and the Saxons, and gain a footing in Greater Britain.
But soon now, men said, soon...

Every day, whatever the weather, men
drilled on the flat fields outside the town walls. Ambrosius had
now, I learned, a standing army of about four thousand men. As far
as Budec was concerned they earned their keep a dozen times over,
since not much more than thirty miles away his borders ran with
those of a young king whose eye was weather-lifted for plunder, and
who was held back only by rumors of Ambrosius' growing power and
the formidable reputation of his men. Budec and Ambrosius fostered
the idea that the army was mainly defensive, and saw to it that
Vortigern learned nothing for certain: news of preparations for
invasion reached him as before only in the form of rumors, and
Ambrosius' spies made sure that these sounded like rumors. What
Vortigern actually believed was what Budec was at pains that he
should believe, that Ambrosius and Uther had accepted their fate as
exiles, had settled in Less Britain as Budec's heirs, and were
concerned with keeping the borders that would one day be their
own.

This impression was fostered by the
fact that the army was used as a foraging party for the town.
Nothing was too simple or too rough for Ambrosius' men to
undertake. Work which even my grandfather's rough-trained troops
would have despised, these seasoned soldiers did as a matter of
course. They brought in and stored wood in the town's yards. They
dug and stored peat, and burned charcoal. They built and worked the
smithies, making not only weapons of war, but tools for tilling and
harvesting and building -- spades, ploughshares, axes, scythes.
They could break horses, and herd and drive cattle as well as
butcher them; they built carts; they could pitch and mount guard
over a camp in two hours flat, and strike it in one hour less.
There was a corps of engineers who had half a square mile of
workshops, and could supply anything from a padlock to a
troop-ship. They were fitting themselves, in short, for the task of
landing blindfold in a strange country and maybe living off it and
moving fast across it in all weathers. "For," said Ambrosius once
to his officers in front of me, "it is only to fair-weather
soldiers that war is a fair-weather game. I shall fight to win, and
after I have won, to hold. And Britain is a big country; compared
with her, this corner of Gaul is no more than a meadow. So,
gentlemen, we fight through spring and summer, but we do not retire
at the first October frost to rest and sharpen our swords again for
spring. We fight on -- in snow, if we have to, in storm and frost
and the wet mud of winter. And in all that weather and through all
that time, we must eat, and fifteen thousand men must eat --
well."

Shortly after this, about a month
after my arrival in Less Britain, my days of freedom ended.
Ambrosius found me a tutor.

Belasius was very different from
Galapas and from the gentle drunkard Demetrius, who had been my
official tutor at home. He was a man in his prime who was one of
the Count's "men of business" and seemed to be concerned with the
estimating and accounting side of Ambrosius' affairs; he was by
training a mathematician and astronomer. He was half Gallo-Roman
half Sicilian, a tallish olive-faced man with long-lidded black
eyes, a melancholy expression and a cruel mouth. He had an acid
tongue and a sudden, vicious temper, but he was never capricious. I
soon learned that the way to dodge his sarcasms and his heavy hand
was to do my work quickly and well, and since this came easily to
me and I enjoyed it, we soon understood one another, and got along
tolerably well.

One afternoon towards the end of March
we were working in my room in Ambrosius' house. Belasius had
lodgings in the town, which he had been careful never to speak of,
so I assumed he lived with some drab and was ashamed to risk my
seeing her; he worked mainly in headquarters, but the offices near
the treasury were always crowded with clerks and paymasters, so we
held our daily tutorials in my room. This was not a large chamber,
but to my eyes very well appointed, with a floor of red tiles
locally made, carved fruitwood furniture, a bronze mirror, and a
brazier and lamp that had come from Rome.

Today, the lamp was lit even in the
afternoon, for the day was dark and overcast. Belasius was pleased
with me; we were doing mathematics, and it had been one of the days
when I could forget nothing, but walked through the problems he set
me as if the field of knowledge were an open meadow with a pathway
leading plain across it for all to see.

He drew the flat of his hand across
the wax to erase my drawing, pushed the tablet aside, and stood
up.

"You've done well today, which is just
as well, because I have to leave early."

He reached out and struck the bell.
The door opened so quickly that I knew his servant must have been
waiting just outside. The boy came in with his master's cloak over
his arm, and shook it out quickly to hold it for him. He did not
even glance my way for permission, but watched Belasius, and I
could see he was afraid of him. He was about my age, or younger,
with brown hair cut close to his head in a curled cap, and grey
eyes too big for his face.

Belasius neither spoke nor glanced at
him, but turned his shoulders to the cloak, and the boy reached up
to fasten the clasp. Across his head Belasius said to me: "I shall
tell the Count of your progress. He will be pleased."

The expression on his face was as near
a smile as he ever showed. Made bold by this, I turned on my stool.
"Belasius --"

He stopped halfway to the door.
"Well?"

"You must surely know...Please tell
me. What are his plans for me?"

"That you should work at your
mathematics and your astronomy, and remember your languages." His
tone was smooth and mechanical, but there was amusement in his
eyes, so I persisted.

"To become what?"

"What do you wish to
become?"

I did not answer. He nodded, just as
if I had spoken. "If he wanted you to carry a sword for him, you
would be out in the square now."

"But -- to live here as I do, with you
to teach me, and Cadal as my servant...I don't understand it. I
should be serving him somehow, not just learning...and living like
this, like a prince. I know very well that I am only alive by his
grace."