He smiled again and began to fade from my sight, tin light that revealed him to me dimming slowly. "I have told you, Merlyn, you will not find me. Look to yourself, and to your charge, Arthur Pendragon. There is the one you should be grieving for and fretting over... He is accursed... much like you..."
When the room was completely dark and he was gone, I tried to shift myself upright but could not move. I raised my voice, instead, and was answered by another, coming from beyond the door. Then the door swung open and a young woman came in, bearing a lamp with a brazen reflector.
"Master Merlyn? Can I do aught for you?"
"No," I replied, pleased to hear that my voice was as strong as it had ever been. "What is your name?"
I cannot recall her name, but she told me she had heard me talking in my sleep, and I smiled and told her that I had been dreaming. She left me alone again, and I lay staring up at the darkened ceiling in wonder, stroking my fingers up and down the roughened surface of my scaly, dry skinned chest. Her lamp had been bright, amplified by the polished brass reflector. It should have dazzled me, after hours in a darkened room, but it had not. My eyes had grown accustomed to bright light before she entered.
I have never since been able to explain it, but I believe that Ironhair was in my room that night, and I have often wondered if he knew of it.
I was fully recovered and up and about a week later, little the worse for my strange illness, save that my skin was still rough and reddened. I checked myself and found nothing in the least resembling lesions; rough, scaly skin was all I had to show for my exposure on the night of the storm. Rough, scaly skin externally, and an equally rough, scaly texture to what lay inside me.
I reviewed everything that had happened prior to our arrival, and by the time Philip and Rufio and Falvo brought the remainder of my thousand back to Camulod, I had everything in hand, functioning efficiently.
Connor had seen the Danish fleet on its arrival, after it came around the tip of Cornwall's peninsula. He had spied it sailing downwind from afar and fled ahead of it with his two biremes and his fifteen escorting galleys. Vastly outnumbered—his estimate of the enemy's fleet was two hundred sails—he made no attempt to linger and fight but struck northward instantly, intent on gathering his own fleet. In passing, nonetheless, he dispatched two groups of messengers to bring warning to us and to Huw Strongarm, who lay encamped at Caerdyff. He would return, he said, when he could fight effectively against such numbers.
When the word arrived in Camulod, Ambrose was left with little choice but to ride to Huw's assistance. A fleet so large would land four thousand warriors, at the minimum of twenty men to a craft, and he knew the Danes used crew of at least thirty, and would be over crewed with warriors seeking spoil. He reckoned on six thousand warriors, and would not have been surprised to learn that they were eight or even ten thousand.
Huw's armies, Ambrose knew, had been disbanded in the.' aftermath of their victory on the coast by Dolaucothi. No one had expected Ironhair to raid again until the following year, and no one had expected to be confronted by another, vastly different army. Ambrose had not yet learned that these were Ironhair's new allies. It would take an entire month, at least, he reasoned, to rally Huw's Pendragon hostagain, for they were busy with their farms, ploughing the land in preparation for seeding. An army thousands strong; landed as unexpectedly as this one, would spread across the land like wildfire, gaining enormous impetus before it could be challenged or brought to fight. Only a mounted force; from Camulod had any chance of stopping them, for fearsome as they were aboard their swooping ships, once they were on the land they were mere infantry, immensely vulnerable to our massed horsemen.
Within the week, Ambrose had taken two full legions of our total force—two thousand heavy horse, a thousand scouts, and three thousand foot—and entered Cambria, headed directly to the southern coast, to Caerdyff, where he hoped to find Huw Strongarm. Derek of Ravenglass had ridden with him. Behind him, in full charge of Camulod, Ambrose left Tertius Lucca with a holding force of two thousand, fully three fourths of those garrison foot soldiers. He had also left word for me, should I return before he did, that I should remain in place, looking to the defence of Camulod and all the lands about it—from the Appian Colony in the north all the way south to Ilchester and beyond—but that I should send on my thousand horse to him as reinforcements, under Tertius Lucca himself, should we remain unthreatened here at home.
No word had come from Cambria of Arthur, and Ambrose had been gone for nigh on a month when we came home.
On the day following the return of Philip and the others, two troopers came to my quarters in the fort, carrying a large, wooden chest. It was from Plato, majordomo of the Villa Britannicus, and there was a single sheet of paper affixed to the lid. In it, Plato expressed his condolences on the loss of my beloved lady and informed me that Derek had left it at the Villa for me before riding off with Ambrose. I sat staring at it for some time, knowing what it contained, before I took my knife and cut the cords that bound it shut, throwing back the lid to look inside.
Beneath the carefully folded mass of his great red dyed war cloak, my cousin Uther's armour was intact, no single piece of it missing. It bore a few deep scores, but it was in fine condition. The helmet was more splendid than I remembered, crested with a fine display of stiff horsehair, dyed a deep scarlet; the visor band above the brows had been embossed with Uther's fiery dragon, enamelled in red. The same device, much larger, was engraved into the cuirass, the cuts of the engraving similarly packed with fired enamel, so that the device stood out sharp and clear against the dull matte of the bronze breastplate: a broad winged dragon, standing erect upon its strong rear legs and breathing curls of fire. I saw my cousin wearing it, and laughing at me, showing his strong, white, even teeth. He had told me once that I was too judgmental, and his opinion had wounded me deeply, before I realized that it was the simple truth.
Suddenly I missed him, grievously. I picked up his enormous, heavy cloak and spread it carefully out on the floor. Covering all the back of it in heavy layers of colourfully worked, rich needlecraft, that same great dragon reared its head and spread its wings over the wide stretched shoulders, this time done all in threads of pure, finely wrought! gold. Arthur would look magnificent in this, I thought, and turned my head to where Uther stood watching me still. He laughed again and said, "The boy's accursed..." in Ironhair's voice. I turned away again and slammed the lid on the; great box, then sat there looking at it while my mind recalled! the other two great chests I possessed, those that contained! the tools of death of two Egyptian warlocks. !
"Ironhair," I whispered, "I have a gift for you." I attended a meeting of the Council of Camulod the day after that, and left before the business was concluded. I knew few of the Councillors after my absence of so many years, and I found I had no patience now with the minutiae of government. On leaving, I sought out Tertius Lucca and asked him to walk with me, and as we strolled outside the gates of the fort I informed him that I intended to ignore my brother's request to send him personally with the extra thousand horsed His place, I said, was here in Camulod, where he was particularly suited, both by nature and by training, to oversees the conduct of the collective garrisons of the surrounding outposts and to work with the Council. I would send Philip with the cavalry reinforcements, I told him, and would hand over full command again to Lucca, until such time as Ambrose returned.
He listened, keeping his eyes cast down, and when I had completed what I had to say, he nodded, then saluted me, accepting my decree. I left him standing there beneath the walls and made my way to the bathhouse, feeling a grim excitement welling in my breast.