It was midafternoon and the celebrations at the school were already well under way when Bishop Germanus arrived, without fanfare, at the exercise grounds attached to the school’s extensive stables. All activities ceased, and a respectful silence hung over the assembled students. I watched my mentor as he dismounted from the pony he rode that day and walked, alone as always, slowly toward the raised reviewing stand at the far end of the open-air arena where most of the afternoon’s contests and events were talking place, then mounted the dais to join the assembled tutors, staff, and visitors.
As I watched the bishop on this occasion, however, something in the way he moved brought the realization home to me, for the first time ever, that Germanus of Auxerre was an old man. I saw something different and bothersome in him that day, something intangible and yet unnervingly suggestive of a lack of healthiness, although it appeared and disappeared so fleetingly that I was able to convince myself that I had imagined it. It may have been the way he walked the few steps from dismounting from the pony to the start of the stairs rising to the stand. The day had been fine, on the whole, but a heavy shower of rain had fallen half an hour earlier and muddied the ground underfoot, making it treacherous, and just before the bishop reached the first of the steps to the dais he paused, a very brief hesitation, and reached, unsteadily it seemed to me, for the support of the handrail. It happened, I saw it, and the unwelcome burden of a new anx-iety descended upon my head and shoulders.
I was completely unprepared for the revelation and I rejected it even as it occurred to me. I can distinctly remember the anger I felt at myself at that moment for even thinking such a thought—entertaining the very notion of his mortality. But unsought and unexpected as it was, it disconcerted me to the point of causing a strong spasm of anxiety in my breast.
No one else noticed, I am quite sure of that, because Germanus reached the top of the stairs to the dais and strode directly along the front row of seats, his bearing utterly regal and resolute, to where Duke Lorco had risen to greet him. The two men embraced as old friends do and exchanged a few pleasantries before Germanus excused himself and turned to bless the gathering before sending Tiberias Cato the signal to continue with the proceedings his arrival had interrupted. That done, he sat down in the vacant seat by Duke Lorco’s side and both men talked animatedly for a while before settling back to watch the competition, which was now approaching the final stages.
I had been doing well in the competition until then and was quietly confident that I was ahead of the field on points. I had been in excellent form in the preliminary events, all of which involved athletic activities on foot: running, jumping, and wrestling, and the fighting drills, which included mock combat with clubs, swords, and heavy spears, as well as archery and lance throwing.
I had won the running events easily, to no one’s surprise. I had grown a handsbreadth during the summer of my third year at the school, which had inspired much jesting and also my nickname, Legs. But Lorco had challenged me seriously on the broad jump, and I had been on the point of giving up, convinced that I could not possibly match his final, inspired leap, when I saw Tiberias Cato watching me, a troubled, meditative look on his face. I knew Cato had no time for anyone who ever quit ahead of being beaten in anything, and I did not want him ever to think such a thing of me, so I rallied and gritted my teeth for one last, all-out attempt. Somehow I managed to fly out and land precisely where Lorco had landed, destroying his mark in the process and making it impossible to discern whether one of us had outdistanced the other. The judges shook their heads and consulted the notations they had made earlier and muttered among themselves for a long time before they called the event a draw.
I had then fought my way more than adequately through the range of fighting drills, too, emerging unbeaten from all but the last category, the lance-throwing event, where my closest rivals were Milo and Gaius Balbus, the boy I liked least of all the Spartans. Balbus was taller than I was, and slightly heavier, the largest student in our class, and although I could beat him easily in most events, including swords and heavy spears, he was the only student who could throw a javelin consistently farther than I could. Fortunately for me, however, he could not throw with anything approaching my accuracy, and that displeased him greatly, since accuracy gained more points than distance. I seldom had difficulty in upsetting him sufficiently to make him lose his temper, and with it his judgment, whenever we competed. He was quick to anger and viciously savage with his tongue when he was angry, which was the reason I found it easy to dislike him, for he had stung me and all of my friends too often with his waspish, sarcastic ill-humor.
On this particular morning, however, Balbus had aligned himself alongside Milo, who was throwing very well, consistently, and with impressive accuracy. Balbus had paced himself deliberately and precisely, concentrating fiercely and modeling his performance and his rhythm and tempo on Milo’s and ignoring me and my performance completely. It worked well for him, and by the start of the last round of throws—five casts each at the torso of a man-size target thirty paces distant—he and I had both scored sixteen hits out of a possible twenty-five.
The rules of the competition were simple, but the degree of difficulty escalated hugely with each round of five casts. The initial targets, wooden cut-out figures of men, were set up twenty paces from the throwing line, and the whitewashed scoring area extended from the line of the hips up to the head and included the arms—a relatively easy mark. After each round of five casts, however, new targets were placed two paces farther away from the throwing line and the scoring area was reduced in size, the arms and head being among the first to go, until by the last round the casts were thirty paces long and the scoring area was a wrist-to-elbow-length square on the target’s chest.
Going into that last round, Milo was one point ahead of both of us. He had scored eighteen hits, his best score ever and a school record for twenty-five casts. It may have been the lengthy duration of the event—thirty casts of an infantryman’s lancea, the ancient, thonged javelin used so effectively by the Roman armies for hundreds of years, exacts a terrible toll on the throwing muscles—but Milo missed the scoring area of the target with all five of his final casts, although all five hit the wooden target somewhere, and he ended up with eighteen points out of a possible thirty. I hit three out of five to beat Milo’s score by one, but Balbus, in a display of unsuspected virtuosity that shook and humbled me, hit solidly with all five casts and emerged with yet another record: twenty-one hits out of thirty casts.
It was purely coincidental that the bishop arrived just shortly before we were to progress to the riding events, most of which were designed to test advanced riding skills and the formal, correct, and precise handling of animals in restrictive and difficult situations. Several of the equestrian contests, however—and the most difficult, according to some people—involved grueling tests of both horse and rider in events that measured stamina and endurance, as opposed to precision and obedience. The most brutally demanding of those were point-to-point races over planned routes, and fiendishly difficult obstacle courses that had to be negotiated within stringent, close-to-impossible time constraints.