I scrubbed my face with my hands, as though to wash away the need for sleep, although what I was trying to dislodge was a growing need to scream out my outrage. "You've given me much to think about, old friend," I told Popilius, fighting to keep my voice level. "I feel I've slept away two important years and I've much to do to catch up with all that has happened."
He smiled, a brief, wintry grin. "Well, at least you're back, Commander. 'Thank God,' is all I can say. What will you do now?"
"Find Uther immediately. In the meantime, you have your duty to attend to, and it consists of recovering and returning safe to Camulod. We need you, Popilius Cirro. Try to sleep for an hour or so and then send someone to report your presence to Mucius Quinto over on the far side of the field. No point in doing it now, your wounds are dressed and he's too busy to attend to you. As quickly as you can thereafter, get you home again, and don't let Quinto stop until you get there. I have to leave now, but I'll see you back in Camulod."
He grunted again and nodded, looking at me with fondness. "Watch yourself, Commander. Be careful. There's whole armies of dangerous people out there."
I grinned at him. "Didn't anyone ever tell you how dangerous Caius Merlyn Britannicus can be?" I clapped him on the shoulder. "Sleep a while, old friend. Then make enough noise to draw yourself to the attention of our surgeon. Farewell."
XL
The following day, I found Gulrhys Lot, King of Cornwall, hanging from a tree, his hands and feet severed at the wrists and ankles and stuffed into a bag that was tied around his waist. The bag was made of gold brocade and bore the embroidered crimson emblem of Pendragon. The ring finger of his severed right hand still bore his signet: a massive golden ring set with the black boar of Cornwall and proof that the monster was dead.
Ignoring the mystery of my find, I cut the body down and burned it, but I kept the golden signet. I never discovered the truth of how Lot came to die, hanged ignominiously and left to dangle alone and unmourned in a forest glade, his royal seal intact upon his finger in a bag of meat.
I slept that night within a mile of where his ashes smouldered. The smell of his burning was in my clothes and in my hair, and I dreamed dreadful dreams. Sections of armies, bands of fighting men, mounted and afoot, swept and swirled around me in awful silence, though their mouths were wide with screams and their faces harrowed with agony. I saw Lot of Cornwall, mounted on a silver horse, being hit and borne down into a press of bodies, which scattered suddenly to show me Uther, naked and bloodied, his manhood erect with lust, holding Lot's severed, dripping head above his own and laughing in dementia, weeping blood-red tears while I ran towards him, a dagger in my hand, my eyes fixed on the bloodied flail that dangled from his wrist. And suddenly the severed head above Uther was Deirdre's—my Cassandra's—and it was screaming at me, wide-eyed and wide-mouthed, to stay away, to beware, beware, beware; and then came a clanging, echoing blow to my head, a stabbing, crushing pain in my back beneath my ribs and a hideous tearing wrench that started me awake in terror, my heart thudding in my chest. It was morning and the sun was already high.
I lay awake for a long time, unmoving, my mind reeling with the reality of my terror and the unreality of my dream. My back ached agonizingly, just where the dream-blow had struck me, and I knew I had slept upon a surfaced root. Presently, when my heart had slowed down and my breathing returned to normal, I rolled away from it and sat up, rubbing my aching spine. As I rose painfully to my feet, I "looked ruefully for the cause of my discomfort, ashamed of myself for having made a boy's mistake in lying down in such a spot. But there was nothing there. The turf on which I had lain was thick and springy. I knelt again and dug in the grass with my fingertips, clearly seeing the imprint of my body. There was nothing: no root, no stone, no projection of any kind. The mossy turf was smooth and soft and yielding. I stood up hastily, aware of a stirring of superstitious fear, and set about saddling my spare mount, leaving the big black unburdened.
I ate as I travelled, on horseback, chewing dried nuts and chopped, dried apples mixed with roasted grain, and as I progressed the pain in my body receded palpably, drawing back slowly from a point beneath my ribs in front, until it seemed to exit from its starting point low in my back. Within an hour of leaving my campsite, it had vanished completely.
Sometime later, when I dismounted to drink from a swift-flowing stream, I saw my own reflection in a sheltered eddy beneath the bank. The sun was high behind me as I stooped to the surface of the water, its light diffused through my long, yellow hair, and I thought again, with a chill of horror, of Deirdre's severed head in my dream. Uther had held it by the hair, but the hair had been red-gold, and Deirdre's eyes had not been hers but the bright green eyes of someone else. Not Deirdre of the Violet Eyes, for green was never violet, and as Donuil had told me, her hair in girlhood had been deep red, the red of day-old chestnuts, not the golden hue I had seen in my dream. When I knew her, as Cassandra, she had been fair-haired and grey-eyed. This was the stuff of dreams, but the hairs along my spine stiffened in awe. I scooped up some water quickly and was about to drink when something struck me as wrong. I looked more closely, and saw the discoloration. It looked muddy. Silt in the water, I told myself, but I had seen such mud before, too many times.
Less than twenty paces upstream, I found five of my own men of Camulod starting to bloat in the stream bed. I vomited up the thought of what I had almost drunk, and when I had recovered, I went in and pulled them out, laying them side by side along the bank. I knew all five of them and it was all I could do for them.
Throughout the remainder of that morning, I became inured to the sight of my own men lying dead. They had taken many of the enemy with them, but I ignored those completely, my eyes attracted only to the colours of Camulod and the red dragon of Pendragon. My route lay directly to the south, to the sea, and I knew I would wade through the debris of a running fight for the entire journey. I met five living men of Uther's force, all wounded badly; none able to tell me anything coherent. I left each of them with food and drink and moved on. I also found eight of Lot's men alive, five of them dying. The other three tried to unhorse me all at once, but I had seen the one crouched in the tree above me and was forewarned. I killed him as he leaped at me, catching him on my sword point and thrusting him away and down so that he almost tore the weapon from my grasp. One of the others seized me by the ankle, but my horse turned on him, striking him with its shoulder, and he fell away as I slashed at him, catching him high on the side of the head. The third man fled and I did not have the heart to follow him.
I stopped to eat and change horses at noon in an open meadow that seemed miraculously free of corpses and signs of conflict, and less than half an hour after that I came across a scene that harrowed me far more than the carnage of battle through which I had been riding all morning.
I emerged from a small valley between two low, swelling hills to find myself in a devastated farmstead. The farmhouse itself had been no more than a hovel, but it had been burned and its walls had collapsed upon themselves. The bodies of the farmer and three children, one of them a newborn child, lay sprawled in a pathetic, huddled group close by the gutted building. Beside them knelt the mother, alive and, as far as I could tell, unharmed. She knelt erect, her dry eyes staring into the surrounding hills with the haunted blankness of dementia. I dismounted and approached her with the idea of offering to help in some way, but she was unaware of me or my existence. Even when I took her hand she offered no response, but when I stooped towards the slaughtered baby at her knees she turned on me like a wild thing and tried to bite me. I withdrew hastily and she subsided immediately, ignoring me thereafter, resuming her empty-eyed watch over her dead family and I stood there uncomfortably, my stomach roiling with unwarranted guilt and sickness, until I convinced myself that I could do nothing for her. I backed away in silence and left her there with her grief. Moments later, I found the sea.