“The game grows more interesting, Orion, but it can end in only one way. Arthur and his Celts must be defeated by the invaders. That is what must be.”
“Because you want it that way.”
“Yes! That is my desire. I will not allow you or anyone else to stand
against me.”
“Others of the Creators do not agree with you,” I pointed out.
“That is none of your affair,” he snapped.
“Anya is against you.”
He bristled. “Anya is far from here, Orion, devoting her misguided energies to another aspect of the continuum, another nexus that must be resolved properly.”
“Another part of your game.”
“It is hardly a game,” Aten said sharply. “Because of you and
your oafish stubbornness, this nexus here in Britain is in danger of unraveling. If it does, the entire continuum will be shaken to its foundations, whole worldlines will crumble—”
“And you will lose your power,” I interrupted. One glance at his face, though, told me what he dared not say. “You will lose your
existence
!” I realized.
“So will Anya,” he answered. “So will all we Creators be banished
from existence. The Earth, the human race, everything will disappear totally and forever, wiped clean from the continuum as if we had never existed in the first place.”
I stared at him. Then I heard myself say, “I don’t believe you.”
“Believe, Orion,” Aten replied, totally serious. “You claim to love Anya. If you continue to protect Arthur you will be killing her, just as if you drove your dagger
through her heart.”
“But—”
He laughed bitterly. “No arguments, Orion. No matter what you do, it hardly matters. I have another assassin ready to kill Arthur, and the jest is that he hasn’t the faintest inkling that he is an assassin.”
“What do you mean?”
But Aten was no longer there. He winked out, like a light suddenly turned off. Like a hologram projection, I thought. Yet his sardonic laughter
echoed in my mind.
Could it be true? By protecting Arthur, was I destroying Anya, the goddess I love, the only member of the Creators who showed the slightest concern for the human race?
And someone else was going to murder Arthur? Someone who doesn’t even know that he will kill the Dux Bellorum?
I paced slowly along the crest of the hill as the moon edged lower in the night sky, trying to
sort it all out, trying to decide what was true, what my course of action should be. At one point, Aten had seemed almost to be pleading with me. Was he lying? Was he trying to manipulate me, using my love for Anya as a way of controlling me?
The Creators had godlike powers, but they were actually humans from the distant future, humans who had learned to wield the forces of spacetime to travel
at will across the continuum. They had interfered in human affairs all through history and even earlier, always trying to bend the worldlines to suit their whims. Aten had created me and others, he claimed, to do his bidding at placetimes where the continuum comes to a focal point, a nexus that would determine the worldlines for eons to come.
Like spoiled children, the Creators often bickered
among themselves. Their disagreements brought wars and disasters to humankind, their disputes were settled by our blood.
It was a cosmic irony. These so-called Creators were the descendants of ordinary humans such as Arthur and the men and women of this age. We had created them, in truth. They are our distant progeny. Yet they reached back through time to try to control us.
For hours I walked
along that grassy hilltop as the wind from the sea tossed the leafy boughs of the trees and set them to groaning plaintively. The moon went down and I could see the spangled glory of the heavens, stars glittering like jewels, the Great Bear and its smaller brother, the Chained Princess and Perseus the Hero and the majestic stream of the Milky Way. The constellation of Orion was not in sight, though.
And Anya was far away, beyond my reach, perhaps forever.
Then different lights caught my eye. Down on the seashore below the hill, fires were burning. Campfires. This was one of the places where the barbarians had built a settlement for themselves. I could see their boats pulled up on the beach, black against the starlit sand. Huts and larger buildings thatched with straw dotted the shore. The
barbarians had built a village for themselves, a town for their families and flocks. There were even fields of food crops within easy walking distance of the huts.
The barbarians were not piling into the boats, as Lancelot had predicted. They were nowhere near the boats. They had built this village to live in permanently, and they had no intention of leaving. As I peered down at the starlit scene
below me, I saw that they were digging a huge ditch across the old Roman road that led to their settlement.
They were preparing to fight.
3
I woke with a start, back at Arthur’s camp. The first hazy gray hint of dawn was beginning to lighten the eastern sky. Venus hung in the west like a gleaming diamond.
What I had seen during the night had been no dream, I knew. Aten had translated me to
the coastal base of the Angles. Why, I did not understand. But it was clear to me that the barbarians had no intention of fleeing Britain. They were digging in, preparing to fight against Arthur’s advancing army.
After I had eaten with the other squires I sought out Arthur. He was sitting under a massive oak tree, alone, looking lost in thought.
“May I speak to you, lord?” I asked.
Arthur smiled
boyishly at me and patted the mossy ground. “Sit here, Orion, and don’t be so formal. We are all companions here.”
“It’s about the enemy,” I said, sitting beside him.
“The scouts all report that they are fleeing along the Roman road toward the coast.”
“True enough,” I agreed. “The few survivors from yesterday’s battle are retreating. But their brethren are digging defensive works along that
road.”
“Digging?”
“Trenches and earthworks. To stop you.”
He looked puzzled. “How do you know this?”
“I saw it last night.”
His perplexed frown deepened. “But you were here in camp with us last night.”
I thought quickly. “The Lady of the Lake showed it to me.” It wasn’t much of a lie. Anya had appeared to us both in the past; under the guise of the Lady of the Lake she had given Arthur his
sword Excalibur.
“She was here?” Arthur gasped. “In this camp?” He looked all around at the forest surrounding our clearing. Even though it was full morning, the woods were deep and shadowy, thick with brush, dark and mysterious enough to imagine all kinds of spirits and supernatural beings lurking nearby, enchantments and wizards and magic spells.
“She took me to the Angles’ settlement on the
coast,” I said, trying to skirt my half-truth.
“You saw them digging trenches,” Arthur said, sounding dismayed.
“Yes,” I answered. “They were not loading their boats and preparing to leave.”
He smiled grimly. “Lancelot will be disappointed.”
“I imagine so.”
“On the other hand, Lancelot will probably be glad for another chance for glory.” His smile faded completely.
4
Lancelot was delighted
that his prediction had failed to come true. All during our march along the old Roman road he chattered happily about the coming battle.
“We’ll crush them like eggshells,” he said. “The bards will sing of Arthur and his knights for a thousand years.”
He was right about the fame that he and Arthur would win. Poets chronicled the deeds of Arthur and his knights for much more than a mere thousand
years, I knew, although the heart of their romances dealt with Lancelot’s falling in love with Arthur’s queen. As we rode along toward the next battle, though, I began to realize that if Aten had his way Arthur would soon be killed and his story snuffed out. No bard would sing of the deeds of a young Dux Bellorum killed in battle before he was old enough to grow a full beard. Arthur would be forgotten,
his bones and his legend decayed into dust.
Worse yet, Arthur might be assassinated, murdered by one of his own people. Would Lancelot be Aten’s killer? Certainly I would not. What about crafty old Merlin, still back at Cadbury castle with Ambrosius? The High King had agreed to keep the Saxons along Britain’s southern shores in check while Arthur flung his knights against the Angles and Jutes
in the east. Might Ambrosius allow the new Saxon leader to bring his host up behind us, surrounding Arthur’s knights between his Saxons and the Angles and Jutes?
No, I thought, Ambrosius wanted Arthur to succeed. Arthur was now the right arm of the High King; it would be criminally stupid for Ambrosius to work against Arthur.
And yet … the thought nagged at me. Merlin was more than a wizened
old faker, I was sure of that. There was an intelligence and purpose in those shaggy-browed eyes of his. I wondered, again, if he might be one of the Creators in disguise. Not Aten, of course. But one of the others, come to this placetime to manipulate this nexus in the continuum.
My mind swirled with the possibilities as we rode along the paving stones of the old Roman road. Straight as a ramrod
it ran, through forest thick with huge oaks and yews and elms. To these uneducated Britons the straight, paved roads and solid stone buildings of the Romans seemed like the works of gods. They did not know how to accomplish such engineering feats so they assumed the structures were beyond human capabilities. What foolishness, I thought. The Creators played on that credulity, just as I hoaxed
Arthur into believing the Lady of the Lake had transported me to the Angles’ settlement in the night.
The Creators enjoyed being worshipped by their primitive ancestors. If these humans knew what their so-called gods really were, it would make them sick with disgust and shame.
The thick woods on either side of the road made excellent cover for an ambush, I thought. Yet Arthur led his knights
along the road without a worry. They rode two or three abreast, each knight dutifully followed by his squire, the whole procession plodding slowly along the paving stones. Our baggage train and footmen followed in the rear.
We had gained dozens more footmen. Those who had been with us in yesterday’s battle now carried swords stripped from the barbarian dead. Some wore helmets and almost all of
them had boots or some sort of footgear, probably for the first time in their lives. News of our victory had almost doubled their number. Most of them were Christians, although a few still clung to the older Celtic religion. Christian or not, they talked among themselves of slaughtering the enemy, dreamed of looting the barbarians and raping their women just as the barbarians had done to their own.
We trailed along the road all through the long, hot day. The lofty trees shaded us most of the time. I kept peering into the underbrush, worried about ambush. Dimly I remembered another life, in a distant jungle where every bend in the trail was a danger. I tried to laugh my worries away. At least the enemy doesn’t have land mines and explosive booby traps in this age.
5
Midway through the second
day we were halted by an entrenchment. The barbarians had torn up the road and dug a six-foot-deep ditch across it. Beyond the ditch was an earthen mound about six feet high, studded with spearheads. It reminded me of the trench and earthwork rampart that Agamemnon and his Achaeans had thrown up to protect their camp on the shore of Troy. These barbarians had no better military craft than the
Greeks and Trojans of some two millennia earlier.
Arthur brought our column to a halt and summoned me with a beckoning hand.
“You said their trench was near their settlement on the coast,” he muttered.
Nodding, I replied, “They were building one there in great haste, my lord. This must be another.”
His youthful face knotted into a frown. “No telling how many such fortifications they’ve built
along the road.”
Gawain, at Arthur’s other side, suggested, “We could send scouts through the woods to spy out how many of these ditches they’ve dug.”
“That would take days,” Arthur said. “We’d have to camp here and do nothing while they could slip through the forest and surround us.”
“Let them attack us,” Gawain replied. “It will be easier to kill them in the open than to try to charge against
that ditch and wall.”
Bors pushed his horse between Arthur and me. “There’s forage enough here for the mounts. We can wait a day or two. Give the steeds a needed rest.”
Lancelot joined the conference, his face eager. But he was too young to speak his mind in the presence of veterans such as Bors and Gawain. Yet it was clear that he was bursting to have his say.
“I don’t like to wait,” Arthur
said. “Every day we sit idle is a day that the barbarians can use to strengthen their defenses.”
“Then let’s charge them!” Lancelot blurted. “One strong charge and we’ll be over their earthen mound before they know what hit them!”
Bors shook his head. “The horses can’t jump that ditch. And they won’t charge those spear points. They’ve got too much sense for that.”
“Then charge them on foot,”
Lancelot said, without an instant’s hesitation.
Bors gave him a withering stare. “The horses are smarter than you are, lad.”
Lancelot was totally unfazed. Turning to Arthur, he said, “I will lead a foot charge, my lord, if you will permit it.”
“No,” Arthur replied immediately. Then he added, “Not yet.”
He spent the rest of the day studying the earthwork. We saw barbarian warriors poking their
helmeted heads up above the rampart now and then. Once in a while they called to us, taunting us to charge against them. At one point, when Arthur rode slowly along the edge of the trench, a bowman popped up from behind the rampart and fired an arrow at him. I was afoot behind Arthur’s horse, holding a brace of spears for him. My senses instantly went into overdrive. I saw the arrow gliding lazily
toward Arthur, flexing slightly as it flew. Hefting one of the spears, I threw it at the arrow, grazing it just enough to deflect it away from Arthur.
It thudded into the ground at the horse’s feet, making the mount rear and whinny in alarm. Arthur held his seat, barely. I imagine if he didn’t have stirrups he would have been thrown. The bowman was still standing atop the parapet, knocking another
arrow. I threw the other spear at him with all the force I could muster. As he looked up it caught him in the face. He screamed hideously and disappeared behind the earthwork.