Ambrose smiled and nodded. Our new garrison would remain with us, he said, for five months, at the end of which they would be relieved by an incoming complement of troops, and this would go on, twice each year, for as long as we had need of such strength.
From these, Ambrose broadened his discourse to include such tidings as be had from other places. Cornwall was quiet and apparently mending itself, he said, with no news of war or trouble coming out of there. Cambria, too, was at peace, with Dergyll Ap Griffyd's rule continuing in strength and amity. But word had come out of the north, brought by Connor's ships, of an army being assembled in the far north-east, beyond the ancient Wall, in die lands of a king called Crandal, of whom I had never heard. He intended to raid southward into Northumbria, which would bring his forces into conflict with Vortigern and his Danish mercenaries. None of us hearing Ambrose doubted that the invaders would be stopped in Northumbria. Hengist's Danes would keep them occupied and make them wish they had remained in their northern lands. No news had come to Camulod of Vortigern or Hengist, so Ambrose presumed they both were flourishing. Otherwise, he believed young Horsa's warriors, free of his father Hengist's iron rule, would have come spilling south and west.
With such a willing audience hanging on his every utterance, Ambrose could easily have talked for far longer than he did, I suspect, but he had other matters to concern him and so had to take his leave of his listeners as the afternoon was wearing on towards twilight. His troops were new here, he pointed out, unused to the fort and their new quarters, and he owed it to them to make sure that they were disposed as well as they could be, and that the arrangements were well in hand to feed them all their first meal here in Mediobogdum. As he strode off, leaving the rest of us to wonder at the tidings he had brought to us, Arthur and the other three lads trotted at his heels like well- trained dogs.
Shortly after that, I found my own reasons for leaving and made my way to my quarters,- where I sat in the gathering darkness for some time, mulling over everything I had heard that day.
The foremost thing on my mind as I sat there was the matter of the new practice swords. The how and why of using them had plagued me for some time, although I had then considered only having one, plus Excalibur itself. Ostensibly, Arthur would use the new weapon to learn the skills he would require to -use Excalibur to best effect. However, the matter was more thorny than that, and the difficulty lay in the danger of employing any such weapon without accidental harm to the user, be he novice or expert. A weapon that could cut through iron, as these could, would make short work of any flesh and bone that came against its edge, so I must make sure, from the outset of our planning, that I became familiar with the tricks and techniques and tendencies inherent in these blades long before young Arthur ever handled one of them.
As though they were fresh written in my mind, I recalled the words with which Publius Varrus had described the damage to his forearm from the very first of the long- bladed swords Equus had made. Equus and he had discovered immediately that the new, long blades, when used against each other, behaved as no blades ever had behaved before, their tempered-metal tongues rebounding and leaping from each other with a hungry power fed to new extremes by the length of the arc of their swing. And those swords, I knew, had been mere tempered iron, lacking the magical essence—the mysterious skystone metal—that gave Excalibur its fearsome strength and edges. Excalibur's cross-guard would, I knew, discount some of that danger, stopping a glancing, sliding blow to the forearm, but I could not rely on that alone to safeguard the boy.
Now that we were to have two replicas, however, the way became simpler, and I decided to include Dedalus, Rufio and Donuil in the exploratory training program with the new weapons. Among the four of us, we would be able to determine the properties of the new blades and the expectations their users should and should not have of them. The boys, in the meantime, could be set to work learning the heft and mastery of the new wooden training staves, strengthening their young limbs to hard usage as they did so. Then, as we four adults devised the ways and means of best using the new, keen blades in combat, we would pass on those knacks to the boys, teaching them variations in the ways they swung their staves, so they would learn to use the new, long swords before they ever knew the swords existed. I relaxed then, having formulated that design, feeling in my heart that it was right.
Later that night, long after everyone was well abed, Ambrose, who had spread his bedroll on the floor of my quarters for the night, woke me up to go with him to inspect the guard, since this was the first night of the new order in Mediobogdum and I ought to make myself familiar with the routine right from the outset. It was a beautiful summer night with a cloudless, starry sky, and I sucked the night air deep into my chest with great enjoyment as we walked the full length of the parapets of Mediobogdum, talking to each guard we met and finding all of them alert and watchful. Then, from the fort itself, we made our way out onto the parade ground, which had been transformed in the space of one afternoon into another heavily guarded armed camp.
The young officer of the guard there was a man unknown to me and barely out of his boyhood. I found out that his name was Decius Falvo and that his father had been one of my companions on my expedition to Eire. Ambrose regarded young Decius as one of his most promising infantry commanders and I was unsurprised, because his father, whom I had always known simply as Falvo, was one of the finest and most thoroughly dedicated soldiers I had ever had the privilege of knowing. Decius told us that he had mounted an outlying guard high above us, on the peak above the pass, and that there was a wide and well-worn path up to the place, attesting to the fact that the Romans had used it as a lookout point long centuries before.
Ambrose turned and looked at me. "Feel like a climb? We can't inspect the inner guard and leave the outlying ones neglected."
We were challenged and identified ourselves long before we reached the top of the steep path up to the peak. There a cluster of four men stood on duty, peering out and down from the heights into the blackness of utter night, unrelieved by a single spark of light. Above our heads, in brilliant contrast, the sky was a mass of twinkling stars and a crescent, newborn moon hung just above the topmost peak of the high fells to the north-east.
Ambrose and I stood side by side, gazing outward, neither of us feeling the need to speak. The experience of simply being there made me feel powerful and privileged. I turned to look down to where the fort lay hidden in the darkness of the plateau beneath us, and it seemed strange to me that, apart from the dull glow of several sunken fires, I saw no sign of life or movement where I knew large numbers of people slept. The corollary—that there might be an army on the other side of us, similarly shrouded—seemed too commonplace to mention. A short time later, having had a few words to pass the time of night with each of the sentinels, we were on our way back down to the camp beneath.
When we arrived back at the front of the fort itself, in plain sight of the guard stationed at the main gates, Ambrose stopped by the smouldering remains of a fire and began to stir it back to life, feeding it with kindling until the first flames sprang up, then piling heavier fuel on top. Avoiding the heaviest drift of the smoke, I seated myself on a nearby log, and presently he pulled another log close to mine. We had had little opportunity to speak on our inspection tour, since all our attention had been given to negotiating narrow, rock-strewn pathways in the darkness.