“But—”
“Perhaps this is Merlin’s way of telling you that
you can stand on your own feet now.”
Arthur shook his head. “I wish I could believe that, Orion.”
“Believe it, my lord,” I said, “because it is true.”
Southward we plodded: knights, squires, footmen, churls, and camp followers, long lines of men mounted and afoot, of horses and oxcarts, slowly winding our way through the bare trees and brown hills of the empty countryside toward the warmer
clime of the south and Ambrosius’ great stone castle at Cadbury.
Twice we were attacked, not by invading barbarians but by our own Celtic people, brigands who fell upon small groups of our men when they were foraging or hunting, isolated from the main column.
Lancelot was leading a small hunting party, scouring the hilly countryside for game to bring back to the cook pots, when bandits tried
to ambush us. Arthur had commanded me to go with Lancelot because I had gained a reputation as a good hunter. My namesake, Orion, was famed as a hunter. We were afoot, looking for signs of deer, when they came screaming fiercely out of the woods, armed with swords and staves.
One of the squires went down while the others ran back toward Lancelot, who already had his sword in hand. The youngest
of Arthur’s knights, barely old enough to have the wisp of a beard starting on his chin, Lancelot must have looked like an inexperienced boy to the bandits. What a mistake!
He stood his ground, without shield or helmet, as the squires ran back toward him. I stood at his side, grasping my own sword, every nerve in my body tingling with the anticipation of battle. I had been created to be a warrior,
and my senses speeded up whenever needed for the fight.
But there was no need for that this day. Lancelot waited until the bandits were almost upon him, then drove forward like a hurricane of death. Almost faster than my eyes could follow he cut down the first two brigands that reached him. His sword was a blur as he hacked the life out of two more. Four of them tried to circle behind him, but
I slashed the arm off one of them and the others turned and ran.
It was all finished in a few heartbeats. Lancelot stood among the corpses, his sword dripping blood, not even breathing hard.
Arthur was not happy with our report.
“Britons attacked you?” he asked Lancelot.
“Aye, my lord. Hungry men, from the looks of them. God knows this countryside has been picked bare. There isn’t a deer or
even a boar anywhere around here.”
Arthur rubbed his bearded chin. “If they’re starving they’ll attack again. We’ll have to be on our guard each step of the way.”
2
Lean, gray-faced Friar Samson rode beside Arthur each morning, praising his victories as God’s will and urging Arthur to cleanse the land of the pagan invaders. Arthur listened respectfully, even though Samson could become pompous
in his pronouncements. On the morning after still another bandit attack, after patiently listening to Samson’s droning lecture, Arthur asked the priest to see to the souls of the footmen trudging along the trail behind us.
The friar’s gaunt face flashed anger for a moment, then he meekly bowed his tonsured head and turn his horse back away from the knights. Samson looked nothing like his namesake:
he was almost painfully thin, and his withered body was as bent and twisted as a man twice his age.
Gawain trotted up beside Arthur. “Had enough of piety for one cold morning, eh?”
Arthur said nothing.
“Why so downcast?” asked Gawain, riding alongside Arthur. “Those bandits were nothing more than a pack of knaves, Britons or no.”
“Hungry knaves,” Arthur replied glumly. “Look at the land around
us.”
I could see what he meant. For many days we had ridden through devastation. Since the Romans had abandoned Britain, barbaric invaders from across the seas had invaded the island, burning, raping, looting, killing. Towns that had once been peaceful and prosperous were now blackened with fire, abandoned, their people flown or dead. Farm fields stood bleak and fallow, abandoned by peasant and
lord alike. The land lay gray and barren, crushed by the endless raiding and looting.
The countryside was so bare that Arthur had to split his army into four separate columns as we worked our way southward, so that we could find some fodder for our mounts. The foragers came back to camp each night with meager pickings; many days they found nothing at all. Even I, mighty hunter that I had been
created to be, could find only an occasional half-starved rabbit. Deer and larger game had long since been devoured.
What was even worse than the invading Saxons and Jutes and Angles was the fact that each petty Celtic king made war against the kings around him. Where once they had given at least a nominal obeisance to Ambrosius Aurelianus as High King, now they fought each other while the invading
barbarians established their own kingdoms along the coasts.
“I had thought to drive out the barbarians,” Arthur said so softly that I—riding behind him as a squire should—could barely hear his somber voice.
“We will,” said Gawain lightly. “Next spring, once the weather clears.”
“And who will till the fields?” Arthur asked bitterly. “Who will build new houses? Who will make the land green and
prosperous again?”
Gawain laughed. “That’s peasants’ work, not fit for a knight to dirty his hands with.”
Gawain spurred his mount and trotted up ahead, to where Lancelot was riding point, alert now for ambushers along the trail, leaving Arthur to plod along in somber silence.
“I wish Merlin were here,” he muttered, more to himself than me.
“You don’t need Merlin anymore, my lord,” I said,
nosing my mount to trot alongside him on his right, the side that would be unprotected by his shield in battle.
“Perhaps not,” he said, with a rueful smile. “But I’d feel better if he were here.”
We would not beat the winter, I realized. Later in the day it began to snow softly, quietly, as the pale sun dipped low behind the silver-gray clouds that had blanketed the sky all afternoon. Silently
the wet flakes drifted down through the calm, cold air, frigid as death. I have never liked snow, not since I had been killed by a cave bear in the bone-cracking cold of the Ice Age, many lifetimes ago.
“We’ll have to camp up there,” Arthur said, standing in his stirrups and pointing to a grove of deeply green yews off to the side of the trail. The woods climbed up the slope of the hills. A good
place for an ambush, I thought.
That evening we were attacked again. Most of the knights and squires were dismounted, huddled around meager fires, shivering in their jerkins and cloaks as they waited for the evening meal.
“Where’s the cook wagons?” Sir Bors growled. “They should be here by now.”
Arthur turned to me. “Find them and hurry them here, Orion.”
With an obedient nod I replied, “Yes,
my lord.”
Yet I did not like to leave Arthur’s side. I knew that Aten and others among the Creators were plotting his death, and I had vowed to protect the young Dux Bellorum.
Ambrosius was dying, if the word from the south could be believed. Many among the knights were already muttering among themselves that Arthur should be the next king. That is why Aten wanted him killed.
I rode my tired
steed through the dark, snowy evening, searching for the kitchen train that should have caught up with the main body of our column an hour ago.
I saw the flicker of flames through the black boles of the leafless trees. Urging my mount forward, I began to hear the shouts and curses of men fighting. And dying.
The kitchen wagons were strung along the trail, two of them ablaze, churls and cooks
desperately trying to defend themselves against men attacking from both sides of the trail. Most of the kitchen workers were huddled beneath the wagons, a few on their roofs, fighting with knives and meat hooks, swinging heavy iron pots like clubs, using whatever they could lay their hands on as weapons.
My senses shifting into overdrive, I drew my sword and spurred my horse into a charge. I
saw that the attackers were hardly better armed than their victims. They looked to be young men, boys even, fighting with staves and hunting knives for the most part. A few of them had bows, and they were standing off to the far side of the trail, trying to pick off the men fighting from atop the wagons.
With the loudest, most ferocious yell I could muster I charged the bowmen. They whirled to
face me. To my hyperalert senses their movements seemed sluggish, listless, like men moving through molasses. In the lurid light of the flaming wagons I saw their eyes widen as I charged at them. Two of them pulled arrows from the quivers at their hips and began to pull their bow strings back.
They both got off their shots before I could reach them. I saw the arrows floating lazily through the
snowy air, spinning as they flew. I had neither shield nor helmet with me, even my coat of chain mail lay bundled in the pack behind my saddle. The first arrow I flicked away with my sword but the second hit my horse in the neck. I felt him stumble as I swung one leg over the saddle and leaped to the ground a scant few feet in front of the bowmen.
They were all nocking arrows, but they were far
too slow to save themselves. I slashed into them, my sword ripping the nearest one into a geysering fountain of blood. The next one fell, his head severed from his shoulders, and the others dropped their bows and ran.
I turned to the footmen battling the kitchen help hand to hand. They were totally unprepared for a swordsman, and I was no ordinary fighter. Within minutes they were running, howling,
into the snow-filled night.
The men who had ducked under the wagons scrambled out now and got to their feet. Friar Samson was among them, his rough homespun robe caked with snow and dirt.
“God has sent us a deliverer!” he cried. Despite his frail body he spoke with a voice powerful enough to fill a cathedral. “On your knees, all of you, and give thanks!”
I said nothing, but I thought of Aten
and the other self-styled gods. If Samson knew that they were deciding his fate, playing with the human race the way mortals play at chess, I wonder what he would think of his God?
Once up from their knees, the kitchen men turned into fierce warriors now that the enemy was beaten, and began to cheerfully slit the throats of the poor fools who lay in the snow wounded and too weak to defend themselves.
Friar Samson ignored the slaughter, but I stopped them, yanking one of the butchers off the back of a screaming, crying boy who could have been no more than twelve or thirteen.
“We’ll march these prisoners back to Arthur,” I commanded. “Let him decide their fate.”
Reluctantly, they allowed me to take the two youths who were still alive and able to walk. I walked with them, after giving my downed
horse a merciful thrust through the heart.
3
The knights and squires roared with approval when the kitchen wagons creaked into camp. Arthur, though, sat grimly on a fallen log as I explained to him what happened. Bors, standing to one side with his burly arms folded across his chest, looked ready to hang both prisoners.
At last Arthur turned to the two wounded youths. One of them had been stabbed
in the arm, the other’s face was swollen on one side, where a kitchen churl had banged him with a skillet.
The youths sank to their knees before Arthur. He wore only a plain rough tunic over his chain mail, but Excalibur gleamed in its jeweled scabbard by his side, and it was clear to them that this young warrior with the soft brown beard and sad amber eyes was a man of authority, even though
Arthur was not that many years older than they.
“Why do you attack us?” Arthur demanded. “We are fighting the invaders to protect you. Is this the thanks you give?”
“Hunger, my lord,” answered the smaller of the two. His voice cracked, whether from puberty or fear I could not tell.
“Our village is in ruins,” the older one said, a smoldering trace of resentment in his deeper voice. “You have
much; we have nothing.”
“You have a dozen dead friends,” Bors growled, “if Orion’s story is to be believed.”
“Two of them were our brothers,” replied the younger one, his face downcast.
Arthur shook his head. “Orion, find Kay. Tell him to send these two back to their village, or what’s left of it. Let each of them take as much food as they can carry.”
Bors’ eyes popped. He started to object,
but Arthur forestalled him with an upraised hand.
“We are not your enemies,” he told the youths. “War has ravaged the land. We are trying to drive out the invaders so that we can all live in peace once again.”
I took the prisoners to Kay and explained Arthur’s decision. Kay looked dubious, reluctant, but he piled both youths’ arms with food from the nearest wagon. The boys scampered away, despite
their wounds, staggering slightly under their loads.
As I watched them disappear into the snowy darkness, I thought that Arthur knew how to be a king. If he lived long enough, he might indeed bring peace to this troubled land.
4
I wrapped myself in a thick, rough blanket and leaned my back against one of the yew trees. I had volunteered to stand watch because I need little sleep. Another of
the superior abilities that Aten had given me. He had built me to be a warrior, with all the strength and bloodlust that a killer requires. Yet I was sick of killing, tired of the endless wheel of death and blood.
The piercing cold of the winter night began to seep through the blanket. Without consciously thinking of it, I clamped down on the blood vessels close to my skin, to keep my body’s
interior warmth from escaping. Still, the bitter cold and the wet flakes of snow chilled me. I unbuckled my sword and leaned it against the trunk of the tree. I could feel the dagger that Odysseos had given me, ages ago at Troy, pressing iron cold against my thigh where I kept it strapped beneath my tunic.
All I really cared for was Anya, the gray-eyed goddess whom the ancient Greeks knew as
Athena. She was the only one among the Creators who truly cared for the human beings that her fellow Creators used as puppets. I loved Anya, a desperate, foolish passion that roused the jealousy of Aten, that egomaniac. She loved me, too. As impossible as it seems, this goddess, this Creator, loved me just as I loved her. Time after time, in the frozen wastes of the Ice Age and the temperate Paradise
of the Neolithic, in the Macedonia of Alexander the Great and the far-flung interstellar empire of the Fourth Millennium, Anya had loved me and tried to protect me from the cruel whims of Aten and the other Creators.