Most of the officers turned to look at Uther as he approached, then turned quickly back to Cirro, as though afraid to look away from him for too long, lest he expire between one breath and the next. Cirro himself was the only one who did not look away again from Uther. He merely stared, solemn-faced, and nodded in greeting as the King approached.
Uther knew that everyone there was aware that he had brought hack women and a baby to join their party, and he knew, too, that their curiosity about who these people were and why they should have come with him must be immense. He himself had offered no explanation to anyone and had warned his own people to keep silent. Now he fully expected that Cirro, despite his obvious pain and exhaustion, would demand to know what was going on, as was his right as commander of the Camulod contingent of the army.
Uther marched directly up to the older man, laid a friendly hand on his shoulder and asked him how he was feeling, knowing that the question was stupid and yet unable to stop himself or to think of anything more appropriate to say.
Cirro waved away Uther's concerns with a gesture of his left hand and then surprised him by making no reference at all to Uther's absence or to the newcomers he had brought back with him. He had more important matters to communicate and discuss before relinquishing his command.
They had defeated the German mercenaries, he reported, speaking sibilantly through clenched teeth, but had lost more than a hundred men in the encounter and almost as many again with serious wounds. More than sixty of their casualties had been infantry soldiers, but twenty of them had been Pendragon bowmen, isolated and cut down by unexpected enemy manoeuvres. Another half score and more had been cavalry brought down by arrows or, in a few instances, by the axes and spears of the enemy. Almost before the echoes of the fighting had died away, however, scouts from the rear had come running to report the advance of another, far larger host from the north, this one apparently composed entirely of Erse Galloglas. The veteran German mercenaries who had caused them so much trouble had numbered in the region of seven to eight hundred men, according to Cirro's best estimate, but the new force streaming towards them appeared to be almost twice as large as that.
Listening to the infantry commander's report and recognizing the effort and the pain involved in making it, Uther sucked in his breath and held it, realizing that he had committed a great error in judgment. He had assumed, when the German mercenaries attacked with so much strength and purpose, that this was the army he had been warned about, and that the earlier identification of it as an Erse force had been wrong. Now, faced with the reality of a second, larger host where he had anticipated only one, he was forced to reassess the odds he might be facing, and he was daunted by his own sudden uncertainty and his ignorance of what was really happening. This second army had to be the Galloglas enemy that Ygraine had named earlier, the Ersemen who called themselves the Sons of Condran, and they must have been landed, exactly as she had described, from a large fleet of Erse galleys somewhere to the northwest above the Shelter. Visualizing that, Uther felt the first, unfamiliar sensations of panic in his breast, stirrings that he grimly fought down, forcing himself to consider his revised options as dispassionately as he could. Turning his back on Cirro and the others, he reviewed the possibilities now swarming in his mind.
It now seemed highly unlikely to him that the mercenary force he had been fighting, which had come from the same northerly direction, could have been an advance unit of the Galloglas army. The temptation to accept it as such was strong, but when he looked squarely at the evidence, the combination of disciplined, battle- hardened imperial mercenaries and undisciplined Erse warriors in the same force was too alien to imagine. Besides, he told himself, he had been engaged with the mercenaries for a day and a half. Had the Ersemen been part of the same force, no matter how dilatory, undisciplined or unwilling, they would have caught up to an advance guard long before the end of that encounter.
Whence, then, had the Germans come, and where had they been going? And if Ygraine's report was accurate and yet another licet had now landed Lot himself on the coast nearby, where had it originated? It hardly seemed possible that it could be part of the same Erse fleet. But then, if it was another fleet entirely, who commanded it, and how large a fighting force had it disgorged on his western flank?
Compressing his lips into a thin line, he swung back to face Cirro and the others, who had all been standing silent, waiting to see how he would react to the word of this new threat. Wasting no words, he told them that the women he had brought back with him were Lot's Queen, Ygraine—the real one this time—and her companions. In clipped tones that permitted neither interruption nor comment, he explained, to the astonishment of most, that his spy in Lot's camp had been the Queen herself, and that she was sister to Merlyn's Erse friend and former hostage Donuil, and also to Merlyn's own dead wife, Deirdre. She had a child with her, Lot's acknowledged heir, Uther said, declining for the time being, on a sudden impulse, to name the child as his own. He told them that Ygraine was to be picked up from the southwest coast by her brother Connor, who commanded the fleet of galleys owned by their father, King Athol Mac Iain of the Erse Scots, and that he, Uther, as commander in chief of the combined Camulodian and Cambrian armies, had undertaken to get the Queen to the meeting place safely, both in reward for her loyal and dangerous aid to this point and in order to keep the Erse King neutral in this war, and in recognition of the strength and the bargaining power Lot's legitimate heir would offer them as a hostage.
He also told them about Ygraine's latest report of the landing in the west, and that Lot himself was now bearing down upon the fort in which the Queen had been held, only a few miles from where the Camulodian army now stood.
He ended by telling them bluntly that, in his opinion, the combined odds stacked against them at this time were too great to defy, but he was surprised by the intensity of the relief he felt when all of them, Popilius Cirro included, agreed with him immediately, making no attempt to debate or deny his conclusions. The best thing they could do, based upon all the knowledge they now had, Cirro said in a greatly weakened voice, would be to withdraw immediately, as quickly and as discreetly as they could, heading directly southward as fast as they could travel until they were clear of any threat from Lot's newly landed fleet and its cargo of warriors on their westward side. After that, once they were safely out of the way of Lot's incursion from the west and ahead of the Galloglas behind them, they could change direction and make their way directly southwest towards the mouth of the River Camel, where they might fortify themselves for a while and await the arrival of the galleys Connor was sending to carry his sister home.
Uther listened now in silence, stifling his own doubts. He had no wish to see Ygraine sail off across the sea to Eire, carrying his son, but on the other hand, he was equally sure that he had no wish for her and the child to remain in Cornwall, in danger of being taken and killed out of hand by Gulrhys Lot. He said nothing of that, however, confining himself to agreeing with the general plan of evasion and hoping that Nemo would find them before they struck southwestward with news of Lagan Longhead, his whereabouts and the number of men in his command.