It was some time before his father spoke again.
"Not that we are unhappy, you know . . . It's simply that . . . well, we sleep together and behave as man and wife, but I know—" Uric Pendragon broke off and then continued in a rush. "She won't have any more children. None, Publius. And I don't mean she is incapable of having any more. I mean she will not have them. Doesn't want them, won't hear talk of them. She takes . . . she takes medicaments and nostrums to guard against becoming pregnant. Gets them from some of the old women who live in the countryside beyond our settlement, the ones who are supposed to be the priestesses of the Old Goddess."
"The Old Goddess? You mean the Moon Goddess?"
"Aye, the greatest of all our gods and goddesses, Rhiannon. She is very real and very present out there among the people of the mountains and the forests."
"Why on earth would she go to such lengths to avoid having children? That does not sound like the Veronica I know. All she ever dreamed of as a girl was having a brood of children of her own. You must have—" Varrus broke off and cleared his throat. "Damnation, it's difficult to say some things without sounding wrong. I'm not blaming you for anything, yet . . . Have you any idea what happened?"
Uther heard his father sigh, a great, gusting breath.
"It has to be connected with that first night we arrived in Cambria, newly wed, and the debacle that took place there, the deaths. By the time I discovered what was going on, it was already too late to prevent it. I tried to hide it from her, to take her away and protect her from it, but I couldn't, and I know it frightened her badly . . .
"But then, over time, once all the excitement had died away, she seemed to settle down and gradually grew more calm. I tried to explain it to her—all the whys and wherefores of how it happened. But she merely listened, and finally I stopped talking about it altogether. We never spoke of it again. I thought she had forgotten it at last."
They were interrupted at that point by the return of Gallo, evidently accompanied by another man bearing a tray of drinks. Uther felt his bladder stirring faintly and resolutely ignored it, concentrating instead upon the muttered, indecipherable mumbles of small talk and the clinking of dishes. Moments later, he heard the sound of liquid pouring from one container into others. He translated an inarticulate grunt from his father as a wordless acknowledgment of gratitude, and then someone—he assumed it was his grandfather because it was he who spoke next—replaced his cup audibly on a surface of some kind.
"So, you were saying she recovered from her horror, eventually . . ."
"Aye, I thought she had. She was terrified at first. I think she believed that the things she had seen were common—probably thought we burned all our enemies alive. There was a time afterwards when she was so . . . I don't know . . . so gone from me that I was afraid I had lost her and her love forever. Then Uther was born, and we were lost in the wonder of watching him grow stronger and more beautiful each day.
"Months went by, then years, and I began to fret over her failure to have another child. It was not for the lack of trying, and so I began to worry and to question myself. She'd had no trouble conceiving when we were first wed . . . in fact, I believe she caught with child on our wedding night. But then when I began to harp on that to her, wondering why it should be so, Veronica reacted strangely. She grew hostile and refused to speak of it, turning away from me each time I raised the subject. And that was when I began to be aware that something was badly wrong between us . . . That would have been . . . what? Four years ago? No, closer to five. I knew I had done nothing to cause any such wrongness . . . nothing harmful . . .
"I've never doubted that she loves me, but there is a deep, deep sadness in her all the time, Publius, a well of grief. And I feel powerless to help her. As I said, she won't even consider having any more children. Not at all."
"And you don't know why?"
"No, I do, it goes back to that first night, the night of the fires. The last time we fought, she said she would never bring another child into this world to be betrayed and blackened by the Druids."
It took his grandfather some time to respond to that.
"I think, Uric, I would like to hear what really happened on that occasion. By the time we learned anything about it in Camulod, it had all been over for months, and everyone was trying to forget it, stepping over and around it and saying as little as possible. I know there was an uprising of some kind among the Druids and that many of them were killed, and I know that several other people died in a fire. But what did Veronica actually see that night?"
Another long silence ensued, and Uther stood motionless, trying not to breathe too loudly lest the sound of it be noticeable to the men on the other side of the curtain. Every time they paused, as each man thought deeply before saying what he had to say next, it left a silence into which he was afraid the sound of his breathing or his heartbeat might easily intrude.
Finally his father spoke.
"She witnessed a burning."
"A burning . . . What does that mean? Are you telling me it was deliberate, that she saw someone being deliberately burned to death?"
"Aye . . . more than one."
"How many more, in God's name?"
"Thirty-two."
"By the Christian Christus! Thirty-two men? She was barely sixteen years old! You allowed her to watch thirty-two men being j burned alive?"
"No, of course not! I allowed nothing. But there was nothing I could have done. Even my father was powerless to stop it. We arrived in the middle of things, with no warning."
Another long silence and then the sound of footsteps pacing up and down When his grandfather's voice came again, Uther could imagine him looking out and away, with his back to Uric. "And what was going on, Uric? Tell me about it now."
"There's not much to tell. It all came to a head while we were here in Camulod for the wedding feast, but it had begun a long time beforethat—a plot born and nurtured in secrecy, protected by blood oaths and the fear of visitation by demons. What forced it into prominence, however, was sheer circumstance and coincidence. While the King and his strongest supporters were away in Camulod making merry, a force of Ersemen raided our southern coast. Four boatloads of them. By the merest chance, we had a force of our own down there at the time, under the command of Powys, one of my father's best captains. By the time Powys learned of the enemy presence and caught up to them, however, the raiders had burned four settlements along the coastline. Powys fought them as soon as he found them. Caught them away from their boats and cut them off, then slaughtered them—or most of them. Not enough of them, as it turned out. We found out later that Powys had been spending time in the company of certain of our Druids, and because of that, instead of simply killing the raiders out of hand as he ought to have, he brought them back as prisoners."
"Why would he do that? Your people don't take slaves, do they? And you've no place and no time for prisoners. In any case I thought your Chief Druid was with us in Camulod at that time. Was he not the one in the red robes, officiating at the nuptials along with Bishop Alaric?"
"Aye, he was. Llew was his name. He's dead now and was replaced by a man called Daris five years ago. The trouble had begun elsewhere among the Druids, long before my marriage to Veronica, with a group of disaffected malcontents known as the Black Brethren. These people thought they could break away from what they saw as weaknesses in the faith and re-establish the ancient ways—or their ideas of the ancient ways. They revived the traditions whispered of in the tales of the great human burnings, when captured enemies were offered to the gods in sacrifice and Cambria was strong and proud. Such tales as those you have probably never heard, for nothing of the kind has happened in more than half a thousand years. But the stories persist among our people, and the tradition has never been forgotten.