"Yes, I believe I can. A simple sedative, to help you sleep, that's all I'll give you. Three or four hours should see its force dissipate. After that, you ought to be yourself again. "
"Ought to be? Not will be?"
He dipped his head sideways. "Ought to be. My calling is physician, not magician. "
"Hmm. So be it. Go and fetch your foul brew, then. "
He left immediately, but by the time he returned I was already deeply asleep, and the potion sat unused on the folding table beside my cot.
TEN
Quinto's sleeping draught was the first thing I saw when I awoke by myself several hours later, just before sunset, feeling completely normal again.
Someone had set a leather basin in a frame beside my. cot, and I rose easily and rinsed my face in the cold water from a leather bucket that hung beside it from a tripod. After that, I went outside to see what was happening.
The fort was bustling, jammed to capacity, bodies moving everywhere. A sprawling community of leather campaign tents had been established in the surrounding meadows. Perhaps because of the brief spell of injury I had endured, my sense of smell seemed unusually acute, and I stood for a while with my head tilted back, singling out the various aromas that filled the late afternoon air: the smell of horses and dung from the huge area at the rear where the horse lines had been set up; heavy wood smoke from hundreds of fires; and then the more elusive scents of cooking meats and bread baking among coals. Someone not far from me was frying smoked, salted ham, and from another direction, fleetingly, came the smell of wild onions and garlic. As the mixture of unmistakable savours entered my nostrils , it brought the saliva spurting from beneath my tongue, reminding me that I was ravenously hungry.
I began to look about me, searching for the familiar outline of the large field cooks' tent that served us as a commissary on campaign. As I did so, I noticed something I had missed before, and my jaw dropped in astonishment as I realized that I must have passed within a few paces of it without seeing it.
The corpse of Owain of the Caves had been decapitated; his head had been stuck on a sharpened stake and set up outside the building in which I had lain unconscious. That was what Huw had been trying to tell me in his cryptic way. Now, as I saw it, with its pallid, waxen, moustached face framed by lank, dull brown hair, all thoughts of hunger fled.
I stepped closer to the atrocious thing, at war within myself. This, I knew, was Pendragon justice, an example set up for others to note and take warning from, and yet a terrible outrage stirred within me, evoked by its mere presence. I wanted to snatch the disgusting thing off its spike and hurl it from me as hard as I could, but I also knew that the last thing on earth I wished to do was touch it. I imagined myself clutching it by the hair and whirling it around my head before I threw it, scattering gouts of congealed blood in a circle, feeling the greasy hair slipping through my fingers. Instead, I merely shuddered in revulsion and forced myself to stand there, close to it, and look at it, remembering the man whose head this once had been.
He had been a ferocious mid successful warrior who had served my cousin Uther well and honourably in his time, fighting throughout Lot's War as one of Uther's most trusted captains. Only after Uther's death, for reasons that would now forever be unknown, had Owain turned away from his service, from his own Pendragon loyalties and from Camulod, selling himself to Ironhair and working thereafter to set that upstart in place as ruler of the Cambrian Pendragon. To that end he had conspired to bring death to Uther's own son, and he had finally, willingly, given up his own life in the attempt to achieve that goal. Why? What land of powers did Ironhair possess that could subvert a man as strong as Owain of the Caves and induce him to turn against his lifelong loyalties? I had asked myself the same question a hundred times before, and I had never come any closer to answering it than I was now. Strangely, as I stood gazing at the lifeless head, wondering vainly what thoughts, desires and drives had filled it during life, I found my horror at its presence leaving me, draining away. I finally nodded to it, gazing into the open, opaque eyes. "Rest then, and settle your own debts with God, " I murmured.
As I turned to walk away, one of the men squatting at a nearby cooking fire stood up, watching me. Though my view of him was obscured by thick smoke, I saw enough of him at first glance to be struck by his physical appearance. Whoever he was, I thought, he dressed to be noticed. He was of medium height, and well made, with a narrow waist that tapered from wide, straight shoulders. He wore a short, startlingly beautiful cape of winter ermine furs, one end thrown back over his left shoulder so that the black tips of its outer fringe of tails hung in a brilliant bar across his chest. White and black were his colours, enhanced by silver metalwork and jewellery. I wondered fleetingly who he was, but as soon as the smoke cleared and I saw his narrow, ravaged, hatchet face, I knew he was Llewellyn One Eye. I stopped short, gazing right back at him and struggling to disguise my reaction to his hideous disfigurement.
Then I turned my head slightly to indicate the staring trophy on the stake, pitching my voice so he would hear me clearly.
"This is your work, Llewellyn?"
He came towards me, walking slowly, clutching a cooked leg of some kind of bird in one hand. When he reached my side, he looked at the head on its stake and bit off a mouthful of meat before he made any attempt to answer me. I felt my hunger come back, stronger than ever, as I watched him chewing. He inspected the impaled head as though he had never seen its like before.
"Aye," he said eventually, speaking around the mouthful of meat he had wadded into one cheek. "It's mine. Does it displease you?"
I felt myself start to smile. "No, he's well dead, and your arrow saved my life. I wanted to thank you."
He looked at me sideways, tilting his head strangely to see me with his single eye, the right one. "Horseshit," he said, disparagingly. "Your sword saved your life, and his next arrow would have been for the boy. I thought you were dead before I loosed my shot. Besides, I was shooting for myself. He was a treacherous whoreson, that one, a disgrace to his name and his people."
"How, and why? Because he fought for Ironhair?"
Now Llewellyn turned to look me full in the face. "No, because he sold himself to Outlanders. He was a Pendragon born and bred, a son of these mountains, and he betrayed his birthright and his people. For that he died. It matters not what the Outlander's name was, except that it was other than Pendragon."
"What happened to your eye?" I had been staring at Llewellyn as he spoke, analysing the startling horror of his face, and the question had left my mouth before I was even aware I was going to ask it. He went very still, and then he cocked his head to one side again, peering up at me with his good right eye, thrusting the disfigured side of his face into grim prominence.
"An accident," he said, mildly. "When I was a boy, apprenticed to an iron maker. I was puddling iron and the metal splashed." I winced at the thought, but he went on as though be had not noticed. "It caught me in the eye and splashed down onto my cheek and nose. The smith pushed my head into a tub of water and expected me to die. I didn't So when the iron drops had cooled, he plucked them out of me... Well, some he had to cut out, I've been told, because the flesh was roasted into them. But I was out of my senses at the time, so I don't remember that You can see the shapes of them, if you look close."
He suddenly leaned nearer to me, cocking his head in an invitation to examine his disfigurement and even though I knew he expected me to cringe and pull away, I looked. Sure enough, I saw the evidence clearly. One large, tear shaped drop had settled on the plane of his left cheekbone, its tail stretching upwards and in towards his eye, where its ferocious heat had blinded him on that side, burning away the eye and carving a channel deep into his lower lid. As it healed, the tension of the scar tissue had twisted and pulled the skin and flesh downward, exposing his eye socket horribly and creating a deep fissure down the distorted flesh beneath the eye to join the large teardrop. Three other drops had landed on his face, as well. The smallest of them was in the hollow of his nose, just above the pad of his left nostril, another fell on the outer end of his upper lip, and the third, almost as large as the main splash, had caught him on the outside of his face, beneath the crest of his cheekbone close to the ear, searing a deep hole there before trickling down the line of his jawbone and melting the flesh as it rolled.