Soon even that arrangement became impractical, when he lost the ability to chew or even swallow voluntarily, and it was Shelagh who evolved a system, adapted from the way she had fed orphaned lambs at home in Eire, of feeding him with watered honey and warm milk through an elongated teat made, like a sausage, from the tight-sewn gut of a slain sheep, one end of which she stretched and tied over the neck of a bottle. When it became clear, eventually, that he was incapable of digesting even milk, his diet shrank to watered honey, and we knew that our brave and wonderful Lucanus was doomed.
I was distraught and refused, for the longest time, to accept the evidence that lay before me. I became so obsessive in my blind belief that he must survive that I savaged anyone who seemed, to my eyes, to be too pessimistic concerning his chances. So intractable did I become that my other friends soon chose to stay away from me, rather than risk earning the rough edge of my tongue. Only Tress and Shelagh seemed to have endless patience with my despair, and it was they who earned me to bed the night my old friend died.
I had been awake for three whole days and nights—and they had, too, save that they relieved each other—sleeping only fitfully in a narrow, wooden chair beside Luke's cot. When my body betrayed me and I fell from the chair to the floor without waking up, they carried me between them to another bed close by Luke's and covered me. A short time later, Shelagh went to rest, leaving poor Tress to keep watch, and Tress, too, fell victim to Morpheus.
When she woke me, she was wild-eyed and terrified, and the sight of her terror brought out my own. Lucanus was gone, she cried, out into the snow, barefoot. I can remember thinking, as I threw my cloak over my shoulders, that he had been abducted. He could not possibly have had the strength to walk unaided. Shelagh was awake by this time, grim-faced and filled with resolve, and I sent her to rouse the others. Then, with Tress close behind me, I ran out into the whirling snow and followed the clear imprints of Lucanus's bare feet.
I followed them for more than seventy paces, to the open flight of steps that led up to the high wall's parapet, and there I found him, huddled where he had fallen sideways from the treacherous, snow-covered steps. Donuil and Benedict, the first to emerge after us, found me by the sound of my howls of grief. It was they who carried the still form between them, back into the futile warmth of the Infirmary, where he had spent so many hours and days tending the ills of others.
I have seen and known far, far too many deaths in my long life, and everyone I loved has gone before me, but only one other death in all the years affected me so deeply and so grievously as that, the tragic ending of my closest, oldest friend.
By the time we came to bury Lucanus, I had managed to bring my grief under control and was able to perform the funeral rites with something approaching dignity. On the day of the ceremony, I visited his bier alone to say my last farewell, and I wept as I stood over him, my hand touching the cold hands crossed upon his breast. The widow's peak of his hair was perfect in its symmetry, but the flesh of his face had already fallen in upon itself, settling tightly over the skeletal bones of his cheeks and jaws, and it came to me that this presence I was facing contained nothing of my dear friend and companion, the man whose empathy had healed a score of thousand wounds and bruises. This corpse had nothing in it of the kindly face that laughed so warmly, although rarely enough to make the sight a joy to behold. Where had that warmth and kindness gone, so suddenly?
I can recall speaking to his corpse, but I have no idea what I said to him. I know I was almost overwhelmed several times by the realization that I would never again speak to him or hear his voice. God, how I wanted to honour him in some majestic, all-embracing way! I thought about burning him, as we had my father, in honour of his enormous contributions, not just to us alone in Mediobogdum, but to the generations of Colonists and soldiers he had tended to in Camulod. In the end, however, we interred him on the threshold of his Infirmary and covered him with a simple slab of the local stone, inscribed by our stonemason with a representation of the caduceus of which he had always been so proud and the plain, simple name LUCANUS.
As our masons laid the stone in place and levelled it, I saw the tears streaming down Arthur's cheeks, and I laid my hand on his shoulder, drawing him aside. He walked with me a way, then stopped and looked back at the grave. The snow around it had been tramped into slush by all our feet, but it was still snowing lightly, and the stone stood out stark and black, against the pale ground.
"It's so ugly," the boy said, more to himself than to me.
"Aye, it is, lad," I said softly, knowing he meant the grave and not the stone. "But it's the common fate of all mankind. We all go there, eventually."
He turned on me, angry. "Why, Merlyn? Why should we?"
I had no good answer for him.
"Why must we go into the grave?" he continued. "It's too ... final, too utter!"
I found myself frowning at him. "What d'you mean by that? It's inevitable, Arthur. The grave awaits all men and women."
"And most deserve no more. But there are some ... like Luke ... who deserve more. Now he is there, in a hole, in the ground. Identifiable. Ended. Finished. He's done! There's no more hope that he will ever again ... achieve ... "
"How could he, lad?" I asked softly. "Luke's dead."
"I know that, Merlyn!" He was almost spitting out his words, so great was his frustration. "But that doesn't make it right that he should come to such a public and a final end right here ... " His voice failed him and he shook his head tightly, his fists clenched by his sides.
"It's not his death that angers me, Merlyn. It's this visible statement we are making that everything he ever did—all his achievements—have ended here, in a clearly marked hole in the ground. There's no need for that, other than that created by our need to honour him. But his honour is in our hearts and memories. We should enshrine him in our minds, but leave his final resting place obscured from all men's eyes. In the spring we will be gone, and he'll be here alone, forgotten and neglected. When men pass by this way and see his stone, they won't know who he was. They'll walk on him, or sit on him, and even though they may think they knew him, they'll know nothing of him save that he's dead and he's rotting here! Better to bury him someplace unmarked and secret. Then he would be safe from gawking fools and left alone to live in our memories."
I found that my mouth was hanging open in amazement, not at his eloquence but at the content of his speech. I had never heard any man utter such perfect and incontestable good sense and wisdom, and my own bafflement in the face of such obvious truth left me speechless. But there was nothing I could do at that time. I had a momentary vision of the reaction of the others, were I to walk forward and uproot the stone prepared so lovingly to mark Lucanus's grave.
To cover my confusion, I reached out and placed my arm about young Arthur's shoulders, with no notion that, years later, I would recall those words of his and act upon them on his own behalf. Instead, and perhaps foolishly, in retrospect, I looked for a way to break his train of thought and take his mind off on another track. I turned him to face me directly and grasped him by the shoulders.
"Listen to me, Arthur! Where a man rests after his death is unimportant. His importance lies in his life and what he did with it. Luke's life was exemplary. He was, I think, the finest man I've ever known, apart from my own blood. In all things that he did, he was a giant among men, the very soul of wisdom, of compassion and of strength. He stood for the nobility of ordinary, commonplace people. If you seek to emulate him in that aspect alone—in knowing who you are and what you stand for, and perfecting that—then you will live a fine and honourable life.