Camulod Chronicles Book 8 - Clothar the Frank (69 page)

The fresh juice was warm but nonetheless delicious. As soon as I had drained my cup, however, Germanus rose to his feet again.

"I would like to meet your friend Ursus, if it please you. Will you take me to him?"

"Yes Father, of course, but he might be asleep."

"He
will
be asleep—it is late. But this is a special night." He turned and looked again at the magnificent armour on its tree. "We will leave this here for now, but all my people know it is now yours. You may collect it tomorrow or whenever you wish, but I would suggest you leave it until you have decided about young Bors. If he is to be your assistant, then he should begin with this. And he should learn everything from that point on—the care of your weapons, armour and horses, the care and maintenance of your other clothing, the preparation of your food and the prompt and exact execution of your wishes and commands. This is a learning process for the boy, to lead him into manhood. He has the makings of a splendid soldier, but he lacks this particular type of training, so I charge you to be conscientious in supervising and disciplining him. It will teach him obedience and humility, which is even more important. Now take me to your friend."

We rousted a tousled and sleepy Ursus from his bed, and I introduced him to Germanus. Even under such imperfect and unexpected circumstances Ursus was honored to be meeting a man whose exploits and fame were legendary, and when Germanus invited him to walk with him for a while he accepted with alacrity, merely asking leave to throw some cold water over his head and pull on a warmer tunic. I was not allowed to accompany them, and so I went to my own quarters, where I sat on the bed, leaning back against the wall and going over the astonishing events of this amazing evening.

Perhaps an hour later, Ursus came into my room and shook my shoulder, startling me awake.

"You had better get into bed. You won't sleep comfortably, propped up like that. I enjoyed talking with your friend Germanus . . ." I peered up at him, hoping to hear what had happened between the two men. Ursus nodded. "I've never been to Britain. I'm looking forward to seeing it."

"You're coming with me? I was going to ask you tomorrow."

"Aye, Germanus told me. He questioned me pretty thoroughly. Got me to tell him things about myself I didn't know I knew. Anyway, he ended up by telling me what you're about to do and asked me if I would consider going with you. Of course I had to say I would, because I couldn't live with myself if you went poking about on your own and got yourself killed. The only problem is Tristan. I don't know what to do about him."

'Tristan?"

"My brother. My youngest brother. Believe it or not, I'm fifteen years older than he is." Ursus reached inside his tunic and pulled out a much-folded sheet of very fine parchment. "This was waiting for me when I arrived back in Carcasso. It is a letter from my brother, the first letter I have ever received. Don't ask me how he found me or how the letter reached me, for I have no idea. Someone must have recognized me somewhere, and found out that I was calling myself Ursus, and in some manner the word made its way to Tristan. I have no idea how long ago this was written, or how long it took to reach me, but Tristan was in the legions, stationed in Lutetia, when he wrote it, and he was hoping we might be able to meet again someday. In it he tells me that my father, damn his black heart, died ten years ago, and my brother Simon now rules Montenegra in his place. I liked Simon. He and I were as close as any two in our benighted clan could be. I never knew Tristan at all. He was the smallest tadpole when I left, born to a younger wife after my mother finally died of trying to please and placate the black old boar that I'm named after."

"How old is he now, then?"

Ursus blinked. "I don't know. Yes, I do. I'm thirty-seven now, so Tristan must be twenty-two. He says in his letter he joined the legions on his sixteenth birthday and he's been in for six years, so that would make it right."

"He's five years older than me."

"Aye, that's about what I would have guessed. Anyway, when I left Carcasso, I decided upon a whim to come up this way to ask about the lad, to see if I could find out where he is nowadays. He might be there still, he might have moved on years ago. I don't know. But we have to pass by Lutetia on our way to the coast, so if you wouldn't mind, I would like to stop there and ask about him."

"Absolutely, of course. How long has it been since you saw him?"

"Hmm . . . twelve years, at least, perhaps longer. But he will probably have moved on from Lutetia by now. You know what the army's like."

"Aye, well, we'll see when we get there. Now we'd better sleep. It's late and Germanus leaves at first light. I'm glad you'll be coining with me to Britain."

He left and I lay back to think again about the adventures ahead of me, but I must have fallen asleep instantly, for the next thing I was aware of was the predawn crowing of a rooster.

4

Germanus was in fine fettle as he made his way out of the ancient town that had been the domain of his family for hundreds of years. I was merely one indistinguishable dot in the vast crowd of people who turned out to see him leave and wish him well, and he spent more than an hour moving among the crowd of well-wishers, embracing some and blessing others and thanking all of them for honoring him in this way.

When he spotted me, he came directly to where I stood and grasped me by both shoulders, looking straight into my eyes. "May God be with you, Clothar, my son," he said. "I will be thinking of you and praying for you every day, that your mission to Merlyn Britannicus might bear fruit and bring great blessings to the people and the land of Britain. Go in peace." He kissed me on the forehead and began to turn away, then hesitated and turned back to me, his smile widening. "I wore that armour for many years and during many campaigns, you know, and only ever once did I mar it with a scratch. Try to treat it with the same care, will you? No Saxon axe will cut through it, but a hard-swung axe could make a fearful dent in it, and in you for that matter, so promise me, if you will, that you will stay well away from hard-swung axes."

"I will, Father," I said, trying to smile despite the swelling lump in my throat. "I will. God bless you."

He touched me again, cupping my cheek in his hand. "He already has, Clothar. Walk in His light, my son." And with that he was gone, swallowed up by the crowd.

Later that morning, when the cavalcade was gone and the crowd had dispersed, I went looking for Tiberias Cato and found him, not surprisingly, in the stables among his beloved animals. He waved me to him as soon as I entered the main gates of the horse yards, and when I reached his side he nodded a silent greeting and pointed to a small group of horses in an enclosure close by.

"That one," he said. "The bay. That's the mount I picked out for the boy Bors. As your servant, he'll have no need of a prancing war horse, but that animal will be perfect for him. It's sound and solid, and what it lacks in beauty it makes up for in willingness. The beast has a tractable nature, with enough strength and stamina to do anything he will require of it. It will carry him
and
a full load all day and every day if that's what is required. The other one behind it, the gray gelding, is his packhorse. Same attributes, same stamina, merely less sweet to look upon. Have you decided yet to take him with you?"

"Bors? No, I haven't even met him yet and know nothing about him other than what Bishop Germanus told me last night."

"What more do you need to know, then? If Germanus vouches for him, how can you doubt the lad?"

"I don't. I was merely pointing out that I have not met him yet. I think I may remember his face, but I won't know until I see him."

"Well, that's easily remedied." He shouted to a small boy who was cleaning out a stall behind him, bidding him drop what he was doing and run to the school, where he was to find Brother Michael's class and ask the teacher to send the boy Bors back here to meet with Magister Cato. When the lad had scampered away, he turned back to me.

"I took the liberty of picking mounts for you and your companion Perceval, too. Didn't think you would object to that. Come, I'll show them to you." As he led me back to where he had sequestered four horses for our use, he continued talking about Bors.

"He was always a bright student, right from the outset, and I knew that from the first day I set eyes on him, but everything about him's different now, and none of the changes have improved him. Mind you, there's a part of me that can't really blame the lad, because he's been through more misfortunes than many a grown man goes through in a lifetime. But still, enough is enough.

"It started with the news of his parents' death. That would normally be enough to bring down any man—I mean, it happens to all of us, but none of us are ever ready for it when it occurs and it's always devastating. But then, hard on the heels of the first one, comes a second messenger, this one bearing the tidings that the remainder of his family—his entire clan—had been wiped out by the pestilence, along with three-quarters of the population of the small town they had lived in."

Cato sniffed loudly and braced one of his feet against the bottom rail of the paddock. "That second message is what did the boy in. Until it arrived, he had been grief-stricken but very normal in how he reacted and behaved. After he heard the news about the rest of his family being dead too, however, he changed completely. He grew bitter and resentful, and noisy in his bitterness. He started questioning the very existence of God, demanding to know how anyone could believe in the goodness of any God who could allow such things to happen.

"Of course, that kind of talk was not too well received here, as you can imagine, and several of his teachers began to lean on him, but that only made him worse. He stopped working at his lessons altogether and went from being a bright student and a positive influence among the other boys to being a bitter, cynical recluse who never had a good word to say about anything or anyone."

"So how did the other boys react to that?" I asked, and Cato looked at me with an expression of rueful skepticism that I remembered well.

"Not very well," he said. "Some of them even joined forces to show him the error of his ways. But that was a waste of time, and often painful. Bors is a big lad for his age, and he's always been able to hold his own against lads twice his size. He thrashed a couple of them very badly, and the others soon decided to leave him alone to stew in his misery.

"Germanus is the only one who refused to give up on the boy. I gave him up us unredeemable months ago, but the bishop chewed on my ear for days and weeks until I decided to give the boy another chance. I did, and I kept working with the boy, biting my tongue every day and keeping what I really thought of him to myself. But nothing came of my efforts until a few days ago, and even then there wasn't much to see. But whatever credit there is for that goes to Germanus. I don't know what he did with the boy, or how he penetrated the tortoise shell the lad has built about himself, but in the past couple of days young Bors has become more . . . tractable. Now that's a word I can't remember ever using before to describe a person. It's a word I generally save for horses, obedient, biddable horses, but it fits what's happening with Bors. I wouldn't say the boy's more approachable, because he really isn't, but there's something happening inside that enclosed little world he lives in. Anyway, you'll be able to judge for yourself soon enough. He should be here directly."

By then we had been standing for some time looking at the four magnificent animals in the fenced enclosure he had led me to. All four were bays, of varying degrees of color, and all four were superb. Cato pointed out two in particular, one of them dark enough to be a chestnut, with only a single blaze of white on his forehead, the other with four white fetlocks. "Those two are yours," he said. "There's not much to choose from in the way of differences among the four of them, but those two would be my personal choice were I the one riding off into the unknown on them."

"So be it, then, Magister. They shall be mine."

"Good. They're easy to identify as well, which does no harm. Here comes the boy."

I recognized him immediately, and instantly wondered why I had not been able to recall him by name before. He had been a junior Mend and something of a protégé to my own Mend Stephan Lorco, following Lorco around for his first two years in the school in a condition resembling hero worship. He had already closed the outer gate behind him and was walking across the main yard of the stables, still several hundred paces from where we stood, and something in his gait, in the way he held himself, immediately caught my attention, making me look more closely to identify what it was that had struck me as being unusual, and before he had halved the distance separating us I knew what it was. He had not seen us yet, standing as we were in the shade of a low hut at the rear of the paddocks, with several lines of fencing between him and us, but there was a lack of diffidence in his walk that was unusual to the point of appearing arrogant.

Summoned from the classroom to meet with the formidable Magister Cato, he should have been filled with trepidation, wondering what he had done to engender such a command. Any other boy in the school would have been recognizably afraid. I would have been, in his place. But this boy showed no such concern. He walked confidently and purposefully, head erect, shoulders back, his pace steady and unhurried.

"He's not afraid," I said.

"No, not that one." Cato's voice was quiet. "A year ago he would have been, but now he doesn't care. Grown up before his time, poor little catamite. There's nothing I could say to him or do to him now that would make him feel worse, or even better, which
is
worse. That's why he needs to go
with you, if you'll have him. He's a man now, in his grief, but his body and the rest of him are still in boyhood. Those parts need to grow now, too, but in a man's world, not a boy's school. Bors! Over here."

The boy turned towards the sound of Cato's voice and came straight to where we stood. I saw him recognize me and frown slightly.