My own trumpeter was sitting on my left, awaiting my signal, but I waved him down. My own group would not be needed. Moments later, I saw Paul Scorvo wave his men back towards me, and almost before they had swung into motion, Rufus Metellus and his sixteen men were cantering in my direction, too. Now I turned to Benedict and bade him send two men to find and comfort the trooper who had gone down behind me. They found him quickly, his throat cut from ear to ear.
Huw Strongarm's men assembled in front of me, their faces strangely blank, showing no pleasure in the slaughter. I was preparing to lead our party back to the bridge when I heard a commotion behind me and turned to see three more of Strongarm's men approaching at the run. The fight there was over, too, with losses of only four of Strongarm's bowmen. None of the interlopers from the ravine had survived. Thereafter, I led our party back into the convergence of the two valleys and settled in to wait for the remainder of our troops.
The cavalry came first, four hundred and sixty troopers, by the route we had followed. Within half an hour of their arrival, the blare of a trumpet to the west announced the arrival of our infantry from the coast, and soon they, too, came into view, marching along the valley bottom in columns often, led by Huw Strongarm's scouts. When all had assembled—five hundred cavalry, a thousand foot soldiers and more than two hundred Pendragon bowmen—I climbed to a prominent rock on the hillside and addressed diem all briefly, outlining what we must do next Then I led them north and east at the forced march pace towards the place where we had been summoned to meet with Uderic Pendragon.
The "king" was not in residence when we reached Moridunum. Word of our surprise must have passed ahead of us. The Roman fort lay still and vacant although the debris littering the ground and the smoke from numerous smouldering fires made it quite obvious that large numbers of men had waited here but a short time previously. Without dismounting, I dispatched Benedict and our five hundred Scouts in pursuit of whoever they might find, and then I ordered the remainder of our people to set up camp here for the night I set out on a short inspection of the old fort itself. It reminded me considerably of our former home in Mediobogdum, save that it was situated in a valley rather than on the heights. Fundamentally, it was exactly the same fort, built to the classical design of a cohortal unit and meant to house as many as six hundred men in comfort. Even the bathhouse, built beyond the walls, was comparable, although it had not been quite as lavishly appointed, and the furnaces were cold and long since dead, their flues blocked by soot and the detritus of decades. Unlike Mediobogdum, however, which had sat high and inaccessible among its mountains, remaining almost inviolate for more than two hundred years, all of the buildings here in Moridunum had been used and abused by careless strangers and were far advanced in ruin, roofless and crumbling after a mere four decades of abandonment.
I finished my tour, accompanied by Rufio, and returned to the fort's ruinous main gate, where Donuil called out to me, inviting me to come and look at something he had discovered. I could see young Bedwyr kneeling on the ground by his feet, his body partly concealed by the stone gatepost. As I stood up in the stirrups to step down from the saddle, I heard an angry, lethal, hissing noise, lightning fast, and saw a flash of movement at the edge of my sight. Then, before I could react, I was hammered by a stunning concussion between my shoulder blades and flung over my horse's head to crash to the ground, unconscious.
I came to my senses in one of the ruined buildings in the fort, beneath the remnants of a sagging roof that extended for about three paces from the gable end before giving way to open sky. As my eyes opened and my vision swam for a few moments, I saw Donuil and Rufio, Derek of Ravenglass, Benedict, Philip, Paul Scorvo, Rufus Metellus and several others, including Huw Strongarm. They were all looking at someone to my left and their faces wavered in my sight during those first few, blinking moments, dissolving and reshaping themselves as my eyes struggled to adjust to the brightness that filled the room. As I lay there, my head ringing, the memory came back to me—the crashing blow against my back, the clang against my helmet and the swooping vision of my horse's ears looming in my face and then passing beneath me. No one had seen my eyes open, and now I heard the sounds of their voices, unintelligible for a time, then sharpening into a babble of discrete words.
It was Donuil who glanced down and saw me watching him, and his shocked reaction, uttering my name, silenced everyone else and brought them closer. Slowly, fuzzily, I raised my arm and waved them all away and they moved back, tentatively, watchful and wary. A new face now bent close to me, that of Mucius Quinto, our senior surgeon since the death of Lucanus and himself almost as old as Luke had been. He laid his hand on my forehead, pressing me back down onto the pallet, and asked me if I knew him. I was astonished to discover that my voice would not respond when I sought to answer him, but I swallowed, then breathed deeply several times and tried again. This time my tongue worked.
"I'm fine, Quinto, " I rasped, in a voice unlike my own. "What happened? Something hit me. Did I fall?"
He nodded, the frown fading from his face as he concluded I was no longer at death's door. "Aye, " he answered. "You fell on your head, from your horse. You were shot, with a Pendragon arrow. "
"A Pendragon arrow?' I digested that for the space of several heartbeats. "Then I should be dead. "
"Aye, you should. " This was Derek's voice, and I could see the concern stamped on his ruddy, bearded face "On two counts, you should be dead, but the arrow hit the blade of the sword across your back, and apparently that's even harder than your head."
Donuil, it transpired, had saved my life by noticing that there was still grease in the pivot wells of the lintel that held the great gateposts. He was amazed that the lubricant had remained in place for more than forty years, and that was what he had wanted me to look at. In standing up to go to him, I had moved my neck out of the bowman's sights, replacing it with the cross slung upper blade of the long sword that hung between my shoulders. Only that sword, made of the skystone's metal, could have deflected the hard shot Pendragon arrow. A mere cuirass would have been pierced and I would have died instantly. Instead, the arrow struck the blade exactly in the centre and shattered upon impact, the force of it slamming the cross hilt of the sword against my helm, concussing me and hurling me forward between my horse's ears, so that I fell to the stony ground head first and remained deeply unconscious for more than an hour. The blade of the sword, when I examined it later, showed not even a tiny scratch, although the thin iron cladding of the scabbard that had housed it was mangled and ruined.
I grunted and grimaced, feeling a stabbing pain now at my right shoulder. I tried to sit up but fell backwards again, my head swimming. Quinto leaned over me immediately, his face crumpled in solicitous concern, his hand reaching for my forehead, but I brushed it away. "Don't do that, Quinto, there's nothing wrong with me but vertigo. Help me sit up. "
He supported me with his right arm, and I leaned on him. Once I had taken several deep breaths, the room settled down again and I could see clearly. I began to feel better, and my deep breathing soon dispelled the nausea that had threatened to overcome me at first. Finally I felt strong enough to sit fully erect, moving away from the support of Quinto's arm. I drew one more deep breath and then looked around at the small group hovering in front of me, watching me with varying degrees of concern on their faces.
"Very well, then, I'm not dead and I do not intend to die, so will someone tell me who it was that shot me?"