Only at one point did his resolute pursuit of his cousin falter. Resuming his journey after pausing by a brook to eat a hurried bite of food in the middle of the day, he emerged suddenly into a clearing where he found a burned and gutted farmstead and the slaughtered bodies of the family that had lived there. Only the mother remained alive, demented by grief, kneeling beside her murdered baby, staring dry-eyed into madness and horror. He had stopped and dismounted, thinking somehow to help her, but she attacked him with the savagery of a trapped animal, clawing and biting, ferociously protective of the tiny, pathetic body in front of her, and he withdrew hurriedly, flinging himself back into the saddle, sickened with anger and a great, helpless shame as he galloped away from the wretched scene.
Less than an hour after that, he reached the top of a cliff overlooking the sea and saw a broad trail of hoofprints stretching away along the shoreline below to his left, moving from west to east. Knowing that he was closing the distance between himself and his quarry, he set off again at a determined gallop down the hill and up onto the top of the next, where he was rewarded by the distant sight of his cousin's unmistakable red cloak, with its gold embroidered dragon.
Despite the legendary reputation for sorcery that would later accrue around his name and memory, Merlyn Britannicus was first and foremost a man, with all a man's limitations, including a tendency to short-sighted hubris and self-delusion. So intent was he upon his hunt and the long-delayed vengeance that lay ahead of him that his recognition of his cousin's presence was instantaneous and categorical. It would never have crossed his mind that what he saw was only Uther's clothing and colours. And so, his anger cold now, and focused, he set spurs to his horse again and thundered downward from his high viewpoint, using the animal cruelly as its hooves devoured the distance between him and the group ahead. He had accepted that his destiny involved confronting and then fighting his blood cousin, and he was prepared to accept the consequences, whether he lived or died in the struggle.
As he flogged his horse westward, parallel to the distant shoreline on his right and keeping to the firm footing of the ridge above the soft beach sand, he overhauled his quarry rapidly but remained far removed from the activities along the waterside. Thus, from a distance far enough to be confusing, he witnessed events that defied his understanding, for Uther, who was supposed to be escorting and protecting the Cornish Queen and her female attendants, now seemed to be chasing them, bent upon their capture, and even more mystifying, the women were being fiercely and successfully protected by a group of men wielding long, Pendragon bows that ought, by rights, to have been aligned with Uther's force.
By the time he realized that the large boat he could see drawn up above the high-water mark on the distant beach was to be the end of the long flight, Merlyn was too late to affect the outcome of the incomprehensible events across from him. His horse, tiring rapidly after its long run, scrambled down the slope towards the beach and then surged through fetlock deep sand that drained the last resources of its strength, and Merlyn watched in impotent horror as Uther's mounted men, still far beyond the reach of even Publius Varrus's great African bow, reached the women clustered around the boat and plunged among them. The women's screams reached his ears as the mounted men, acting in concert, reached down and began hauling the women up to hold in front of them, using the female bodies as living shields against the lethal arrows of the bowmen, who had fallen back in formation and were wreaking destruction on the horsemen.
The tactic was successful, because, for long, fatal moments, the ranked bowmen hesitated, unwilling to shoot at or through the women, and by the time they rallied and began to shoot at the horses, instead of their riders, the enemy were on them and the bowmen broke ranks and scattered, to be hunted down and slaughtered.
By the time the last bowman had been killed, only Uther himself, two of the women and six other riders remained alive upon the bloodied beach, and as he continued to struggle towards the others, incapable of even raising a shout, Merlyn watched Uther pull one of the women down onto the sand to violate her, having stabbed her last surviving companion. Seeing it, he knew with sickening, heartbreaking certainty that all his suspicions about his cousin—about the darkness and the demonic fury that dwelled inside him—had been true, and yet they fell short of the evidence of depravity now unfolding before his eyes.
Some time later—a period that his intellect told him could have been no more than an hour, but which seemed to his exhausted body to have lasted much, much longer—Merlyn Britannicus stood peering outwards from the boat that he had first seen lying high and dry upon the beach while a skirmish seethed around it, mounted men attacking others on foot, male and female both, some of whom struggled uselessly to drag the vessel towards the waterline. Now the boat was afloat, and he was in it, drifting farther and farther away from the distant beach and its scattering of lifeless, bloody bodies.
A gust of cool wind came from nowhere, pressing his sodden tunic against his skin and raising gooseflesh. He shivered, glancing back to where his black ring-and-leather armour lay piled on the deck where he had thrown it. the planks beneath and around it soaked and water-stained. From there, his eyes moved again to the dry, black bundled bearskin that lay against the short mast in the middle of the deck. He shook his head as though in disbelief before crossing his arms over his chest and then turning away again, back to face the rapidly receding land.
He could see his horse standing there, still watching him alertly, its ears pricked high towards him, but now as he watched, it turned away, lowering its head and began to drift off in search of forage. On the sand, he could see the silver-and-black heap of his discarded war cloak, and he remembered throwing it down there across his huge double-arched bow. The bow was still strung, he realized, and he wondered how long it would last before the bowstring stretched or snapped. Then, realizing that he was allowing himself to be distracted, he grunted and pushed himself away from the boat's side to examine yet again the alien mass of gear, ropes and tackle that lay neatly arranged on all sides of him. He vaguely knew that all of it was required for manoeuvring the vessel, but Merlyn Britannicus had never been on a boat in his life and could barely begin to decipher the meaning of any of the meticulously laid out equipment. He recognized the oars, neatly piled in rows the length of the vessel on both sides, but they were all enormous, made for use by two or perhaps three men standing abreast. He knew, too, that the vast bundle of cloth hanging between two cross-shipped spars at the foot of the mast was a sail, and he could see the ropes and pulleys that had to be used to haul it up to where it would catch the wind. But the sail itself was dense and heavy, made from multiple layers of cloth, and the top spar to which it was attached had four thick ropes leading to it, each threaded through its own pulley block at the mast top. He knew that it would require at least one man hauling on each rope, all working simultaneously, to drag the heavy top spar and its burden up the thick stubby mast, so he felt no temptation to attempt anything so futile on his own. Besides, he thought, there was not a breath of wind.