Sadly, Ambrose says we will not fight, but that we will appear prepared to fight. King Vortigern has never ridden in a saddle with stirrups, and he says that he is now too old to learn, so he will ride bareback as he always has.
Ambrose says that when we have completed that long sweep, we will leave for home immediately, but I hope that he will bring us directly to Cambria and that the war will still be in progress.
I look forward to seeing you again. Greet Bedwyr for me. I wonder if he has blooded his sword yet.
Arthur.
I read the epistle three times, smiling more broadly each time as I imagined the effort the boy had put into its composition. I sympathized utterly with him, recalling clearly my own laborious attempts at writing down my thoughts when I was even older than he now was. The stricken out words and the few blots that marred the sheet delighted me particularly, since they showed that Arthur had not yet progressed sufficiently along the path to have realized that a letter could be drafted first, painfully and messily, then rewritten completely. Well, I thought, he would soon learn all of that, just as surely as he would learn not to yearn for the death and violence of war. That thought, with all its implications, robbed me of any further desire to smile, and I turned to Ambrose's letter.
Lindum.
Ambrose Britannicus to Caius Merlyn Britannicus;
Hail, Brother!
I wonder which of these two missives you will open first? My intuition tells me that, despite your need to learn the status quo here in the northeast from me, your natural decision will be to read what Arthur has to say first. I must remember to ask you, when next we meet.
Vortigern is well and, to my delight, living in Lindum, which has permitted me to spend some time with my adoptive parents, Jacob and Gwilla. You have never met Gwilla, my mother's sister, but she has asked me to convey her best wishes to you, and so has Jacob, who remembers you well.
The King is as healthy and as ambitious as he ever was, and the knowledge came as a pleasant surprise. I truly had expected that he would be dead, and that his territories would be torn by civil war, but that is not the case. He has great problems, nevertheless, all of them emanating from Hengist's brat Horsa, but it has not come to open war between them, to this point. I have little faith it will remain that way, however. Horsa, from all I hear, has been preparing for war in earnest now for several years and has amassed a mighty army—five to ten thousand warriors, depending upon the source one listens to—which, to this time, he has kept firmly based far south and east of here, among the great marshes of the coastal fens. From there, they have historically raided south, against the Saxon newcomers established there, and that honours the bargain made initially with Vortigern—to help him keep his kingdom free of Saxon invaders—and has led to the precarious, hostile peace that has prevailed up here for years now.
As I say, I expect that to change very soon. My own analysis leads me to suspect that, in terms of his rumoured strength, the ten thousand estimate might be more accurate, and even short of the mark. I base that upon my own evaluation of his immediate fighting requirements, taking into account the vastness of the territory he has to contain: the area we call the Saxon Shore, directly southward of his base. Recent, reliable reports gathered by Vortigern indicate that the Saxons in the south grow stronger and more numerous every year. The fleets arriving annually are growing larger, bringing hordes of land hungry Outlanders to swell the numbers already here, and new fleets are coming, too, from new directions, as the word of land for the taking spreads among the tribes of the Germanic territories that the Romans held underfoot for so long. There is nothing to hold them now, with the Roman restraint abolished, and they are sweeping into Britain in multiplying thousands each year, claiming and clearing land and spreading outwards all the time from the boundaries they held the previous year.
Much of that outward spread nowadays is focused northward, in order to keep the sea within their reach, for these are all seafaring tribes; that means Horsa has his hands full, at present, in beating back these incursions, and he has neither the time nor the resources to cast his eyes backward at Vortigern's kingdom. But the enemy is being constantly renewed and resupplied, and I believe that Horsa must soon fall back into Vortigern's domain, in order to establish a new line that he can hold against the incursions from the south At that point, the northward surge may flag and stop, but the expansion will then seek other outlets, and in the meantime, Horsa's army will be cheek by jowl with Vortigern's.
I greatly fear we may have grown complacent in our western Colony, assuming a safety that is spurious, simply because we are removed from sight and sound of these upheavals. Numbers of such vastness as those reportedly pouring into the eastern lands will not be long contained, because, extensive as the Saxon Shore may seem to us in Camulod, it cannot long sustain the kind of crowding that is occurring now, and the time must soon come when the exploding growth must spill out into other regions of Britain. It follows logically that any such spillage must be to the west, towards us.
How goes the Cambrian campaign, I wonder. It is much in my thoughts, because I now fear that the war against Ironhair and Carthac is by far the lesser of the problems facing us; a local squabble when compared to the threat stirring here on the other side of Britain. Because of the seriousness of my concern over matters here, I have decided to look into things myself, and that will mean extending my stay here by not less than a month, in order to undertake a wide ranging and fast moving sweep of the southern territories. I do not intend to linger anywhere during that manoeuvre, nor will I seek conflict. I simply intend to demonstrate our presence and potential force, as allies of Vortigern, and to gain a clearer understanding at first hand of the forces that may be ranged against us in the future. In the meantime, lam sending this dispatch in the hands of Paul Sulla, to forewarn you.
Vortigern, as we surmised he might, wants me to remain here in the north for an extended time, but I have already convinced him that I must return to Camulod as soon as possible. I have, however, promised to return next year, in even greater strength. I am convinced that this is the proper and appropriate course to adopt, and I am equally convinced you will agree, once you come to understand the gravity of what I have discovered.
Two alternative courses lie open to us next year, as I see it: if the Cambrian war is concluded, you and I will ride up here together; if it still drags on, however, then I will conduct it while you come north to form your own opinion of matters here. I consider that need—for you to come here personally—to be imperative. I see enormous danger here, the potential for great and dire conflict, and that has forced me to reconsider most of the beliefs I once questioned in you, when I thought you guilty of unwarranted xenophobia. Ironhair and Carthac and their like may be contentious and intractable, but I now see that they are Celts like us, our own people in the final analysis. The threats we face from the seething hordes now investing this northeastern land, on the other hand, might well culminate in the annihilation of our people and our very way of life in Britain, should we not take timely steps to counteract them.
I shall return to Camulod as soon as I am able. If you are then still in Cambria, I shall join you there. In either eventuality, I will have far more information by that time than I possess now.
Farewell, and may the gods of war smile upon your army.
Ambrose