Uther had made all his farewells to everyone, and he had been more aware than ever before that he might never see any of his beloved friends and family again. Of them all, the leave-taking that had pained him most was the parting from his Cousin Merlyn, who had smiled and hugged him close and wished him well with absolute conviction and sincerity—though the Caius Merlyn Britannicus with whom Uther had grown to manhood would have had to be tied down to his bed and then locked up in a barred cell before he would have permitted Uther Pendragon to ride off to war without him at the head of a Camulodian army.
As the main body of his infantry began wheeling and regrouping into their marching formations, Uther turned his head slightly and glanced again at his cousin. Merlyn was watching the troops closely, the expression in his eyes making it clear that he was enjoying the intricacy of their disciplined manoeuvres, but there was nothing there that reminded Uther of the Caius Merlyn of his younger days. He heaved a great sigh, filled with regret, then turned to his left and bent forward in his saddle, reaching out to where his Grandmother Luceiia sat beside his mother, close by him, in a light, one-horse cart that her husband Publius Varrus had built years earlier. Luceiia saw him lean towards her, reaching, and stretched her hand out to meet his. He kissed it, squeezed it gently, nodded to her one last time, blew a kiss to his mother, and then dug his spurs into his horse's flanks, kicking it down towards the departing army on the great plain.
Chapter THIRTY-SIX
Even before penetrating Cornwall, Uther had decided that he had no wish to waste time and manpower in besieging strongholds, so from the outset of his campaign he took evasive action every time his scouts identified a strongly held, fortified position. He preferred to send his army looping around the obstacle, rather than run the risk of being inveigled into a long, costly and unsatisfying siege that would tie up most of his resources. He took particular care, too, in not merely avoiding but staying far away from several of the largest and best-known strongholds, in particular Golant, Lot's own strongest holding and his most often used base, and Tir Gwyn, Herliss's White Fort. Herliss, he knew, was gone, and it would not have surprised him to learn that his stronghold had been seized by Gulrhys Lot. Until he knew one way or the other, Uther had decided he would be cautious and make no attempt to approach the place.
Passing it by on his first advance southward, however, he had dispatched Nemo alone on foot at the closest point of his approach to find out what she could about the situation in the White Fort. Nemo had gone willingly but slowly, in the guise of a homeless peasant and armed only with a heavy cudgel and a knife with a rusted but serviceable blade, and she had been clearly warned, however needlessly, about the potential dangers in penetrating an enemy stronghold.
Nemo was gone for nigh on three weeks, and then returned bearing mixed tidings. Tir Gwyn had been confiscated, as Uther had guessed it might be, forfeited by Herliss as punishment for his continuing absence from Lot's service, and it was now garrisoned by a strong detachment of mercenary Outlanders. Nemo had entered the fort easily enough, finding it full of rootless people whose only common bond was that none of them was from Cornwall, and had immediately begun blending into the place, attracting no attention, but listening closely and waiting until she felt her face had become familiar to the people around her. That had taken ten days, Nemo estimated, and after that she had begun casually and indirectly asking questions.
It was common knowledge that Lot's fury on learning of the defection of Herliss and Lagan had been spectacular in its insanity: he had slaughtered the entire party that brought him confirmation of the disappearance, despite his full awareness that he himself had sent them out specifically to discover and report the truth of the situation. He had apparently seen no irony in having them killed for succeeding.
No one knew where Herliss and Lagan were hiding, Nemo reported, but rumours abounded that they had been joined by several other powerful Cornish Chiefs and leaders, and that they had raised and were training an army of Cornish clansmen outside the boundaries of Cornwall itself to invade their own homeland and overthrow Gulrhys Lot. As a direct result of these rumours, Lot had withdrawn most of his free-ranging mercenary forces and formed them into armies again, keeping heavy concentrations of them within the protecting walls of the score and more of hill forts, some of them ancient and unused for hundreds of years, that were scattered the length and breadth of Cornwall.
Uther was prepared to accept Nemo's news with relief, since, along with everyone else in his army, he had been finding it hard to accept that they had spent more than four weeks in Cornwall, marching openly from one end of the peninsula to the other and then back again, without ever encountering an enemy force large enough to fight. They had seen many small groups, but those were always small enough and clever enough to disappear into the nearest hills immediately upon catching sight of the Camulodian host.
Uther's Cambrian scouts, predominantly Pendragon bowmen, ranged as far as three miles ahead of the main army at all times, forming a moving, semicircular screen around the advancing troops, and they were the ones who monopolized such fighting as there was, surprising small, unsuspecting groups of enemy warriors, many of them hunting parties, and dispatching them swiftly and effectively from hundreds of paces away.
Despite the lack of a tangible, physical presence, however, it was plain to Uther's people that the enemy had been here recently, for the entire land lay ravaged in the aftermath of the Outlanders' revolt. Burned and ruined buildings lay everywhere they looked: huts, cottages, roundhouses and longhouses, many of them built of wood and recognizable now only by the shape of their charred remnants. They found larger settlements, too, where people had congregated in hamlets and permanent encampments, usually at a crossroads of some description, although the "roads" were frequently little more than well-worn tracks or livestock trails, and close to those settlements, all of them ruined and abandoned, the Camulodians could not fail to note, mainly because of the inescapable stench, the rotting corpses that hung from almost every tree.
Garreth Whistler brought it to Uther's attention that among the burned-out buildings, most of those that had been built of stone had had their walls pushed down after the fires, after the roof trees had fallen in, because the fallen stones of the walls invariably lay on top of the charred timbers and ashes of the thatched roofs. Plainly the damage had been more than a mere incidental by-product of war. These buildings had been demolished deliberately in order to deprive local people of shelter and living space.