I laughed aloud and slapped him on the back in my delight. "Llewellyn, you are a man of great discernment. It is, indeed, the perfect gift and Huw Strongarm should have one. Not only do I have another, I have a new made one, never used, its leather panels still smelling of smoke and tanning and its poles and guy ropes clean and free of grime or dirt Tertius Lucca brought it with him but yesterday, in one of his wagons—an unexpected gift from the Council of Camulod, for my use. It will be Huw's, instead, because despite the laudable concern of the Council, my own trait there is in perfect condition. Well done, Llewellyn, Well done. Now, is there anything that you would like?"
He answered me promptly. "Aye, there is. I'd like a horse of my own, and a saddle. " He was grinning widely now, the left side of his face twisted. "I find I love to ride. I would not take it with me when I'm with my own, but when I go with you, I'll go in pride and comfort. "
"So be it, my friend. Visit our horse lines and pick out the horse you want then speak with Philip about a saddle. But you know that, once the horse is yours, you'll have to care for it yourself?"
"Aye, Merlyn, I know it. Rufio is a thorough teacher. He's the man you should have teaching young Arthur, not me. "
I grinned and nodded. "I might agree, but Arthur has long since learned everything Rufio had to teach him. Now he teaches Rufe! That's why I need you for him: new tricks, new Cambrian skills and new techniques, to keep the lad on his toes. "
We struck camp the following morning. I had dispatched written messages to Camulod, acknowledging receipt of the supplies and bidding Ambrose to sit there until he heard again from me, since I knew not where we might end up and we had no need of reinforcements at this time. I also sent off messengers to Huw Strongarm, bearing the gift of his new command tent—the messengers who carried it had spent hours the day before learning to erect and diamante it—and apprising him of what we intended once we had penetrated the central highlands.
We would march north and east towards the ancient gold mines of Dolaucothi, where it seemed most likely that Ironhair and Carthac might be found, grubbing for gold in the ancient workings. I invited him to send messengers to us there, since, were we unable to find our quarry in Dolaucothi, we would then face two optional, equidistant choices of route. One, to the north and east again, was a Roman fortification with no Roman name I knew of; to Llewellyn, it was simply the Roman place at Colen, in the middle of Cambria. To the north of that, a full day's march to westward, was Mediomanum, the last of the Roman forts of central Cambria. To the southwest from Dolaucothi, on the other hand, lay the famous fort at Cicutio, a long held stronghold of the Twentieth Legion Valeria Victrix. That would have been my natural choice, had I been free to make it, but the choice of our final destination would be based upon Huw's information regarding the enemy's whereabouts.
Once out of Moridunum that morning, we made our way quickly towards Dolaucothi, heading into the mountain glens that sank deeper and deeper into shadow as the hills surrounding them grew higher. Not a single day passed from then on without groups and bands of silent men joining us from the hills as we moved, swelling our ranks until our numbers rose to top nine thousand. So rapid and so visible was this influx that, despite our newly refurbished stores, the logistics people in our quartermasters' company grew concerned at the number of mouths we had to feed. But food came to us without our seeking it, sent in from villages and hamlets and from solitary farms along our route, few of them ever seen by us, since we kept to the valley bottoms and most of the dwellings we passed nestled in the shelter of the thick treed hillside slopes.
As I sat on a hillside outcrop one morning, reviewing the turnout as my army swept by my perch, I noted the division that had grown apparent in my forces and paid more attention to Llewellyn's Celts than to my own troopers. Dour and silent, grim faced and self absorbed, these newcomers woe different from the Pendragon Celts our soldiers had known before. These were hillmen, the true Pendragon people, born and bred among mountain solitudes that seldom knew the presence of Outlanders, and they held themselves apart from the rest of us with a fierce, distrustful and self centred pride. They made it plain, without words, that they marched with us in answer to the call of their people and their land; they owed no allegiance to us, or Camulod, or any other Outlandish power. They marched in utter silence, for the most part, and they bristled with weapons of all shapes and sizes, the most prevalent among them the great weapon known as the Pendragon longbow. Every man, it seemed, now carried a bow stave as tall as himself, and at least one quiver of long arrows made from the wood of ash saplings and flighted with goose feathers.
The sheer quantity of bows perplexed me, for I knew from my own readings of the chronicles of Publius Varrus and my own grandfather, written mere decades earlier, that these weapons had then been few and precious, numbering in the mere hundreds. Ullic Pendragon, Uther's grandfather, had decreed in those days that the new longbows were the property of the people; no man could own one as his personal possession. Each man served as the custodian of a bow for a time, responsible for its upkeep and well being, then passed it on, at the end of a year, into another's keeping. Many of the bows I was seeing now had been among those protected by that very law and were now fifty, sixty and more years old.
For decades now, Druids had walked these lands searching for yew trees in their journeying, and planting and cultivating new groves of yew wherever they found places suited to their growth. And as increasing supplies of yew staves were brought home, the number of bow and arrow makers had grown, too, and mastery of the skills required to make the weapons had become the greatest art of these fierce folk.
I took note then of the bows themselves and found more room for surprise. All of the longbows I had ever seen before were round in section, each carved with loving care from one dried, cured stave of yew. Some of these I was seeing now were different, apparently rectangular in section like the huge, laminated bow I owned myself, now far more than a hundred years in age arid polished with a patina of untold decades of close care and maintenance. The Varrus bow, as I thought of it, was compound in make up, with a double arched shape—two bows, in fact, above and below the carved handhold at the centre—made in flat layers of some dark, exotic wood backed by hand shaven plates of animal bone and braided strips of sinew, glued and dried to iron hardness, the whole crafted and bound and baked by unknown means in Africa by a long dead Scythian master and defying duplication here in Britain.
When Llewellyn himself passed by me I asked him about these new bows, and he confirmed what I had suspected. They were, in fact, made in laminated sections, although they each possessed the single arch of the traditional Pendragon longbow. Most of them were made of ash, he said, though some were still of the rarer yew. The original round bow required a stave of specific dimensions and properties, thickness and straightness being the first two of these. Since not all saplings grow straight, it followed logically that not all were suitable for making bows. But the Pendragon bow makers remembered that the Varrus bow, on which all their new bows were based, had been laminated in sections. In consequence, some had continued working with the lesser woods which, though they lacked the resilient strength of yew, yet had other valuable qualities: dense, narrow grain and pliability. Someone, then, had discovered that a suitable length of sawn ash, well cured, kiln-dried and straight edged, could be split laterally with great care and then rejoined, bonded with impermeable glue, the pieces reversed so that the grain of one piece opposed and reinforced the other. That done, the resultant stave could be hand planed, shaved and tapered to produce a formidable weapon, lesser in strength than the long yew bow, but nonetheless efficient and deadly when it came to piercing enemy armour, even from great distances , Absorbing that, I thanked Llewellyn courteously and then moved on alone, thinking about what had been achieved in the art of warfare, almost within my own lifetime, here in this land of Britain. The huge longbow itself had sprung from nothingness within a hundred years, inspired by the enormous bow that now rode with my own baggage. The cavalry who rode now in extended formation to my right existed only because I myself had stumbled upon the secret of the stirrups that now supported each trooper's feet. The long, cross hilted sword that hung suspended from an iron ring between my shoulders was one of only three similar weapons in the entire world. The iron ball that hung from my saddle bow, secured by a thong around its short, thick wooden handle and swinging on a length of chain, had first been made by my cousin Uther and was now in widespread use, a lethal, deadly flail that, whirled around his head, gave a man five times his own strength in combat. And the long and slender spears, lightweight and almost flexible yet indestructibly strong, carried by the majority of my own troopers, had sprung from our need to have a weapon that our men could use effectively from horseback, on the run. Even our cavalry, I now realized, had doubled upon itself, expanding its effectiveness, with the development of the Scouts.