XI
TO THIS DAY, I find it hard to believe that the confrontation between Uther and Cassandra never did occur. I have no explanation that a rational judge could accept as perfectly plausible. It simply worked out that, for one reason after another, the two were never brought face to face in my presence.
The first and most important of these reasons was that I was provided with genuine grounds for more than reasonable doubt of Uther’s guilt by no less a person than my Aunt Luceiia, who had no suspicion of any suggestion of Uther’s involvement in the matter.
I was summoned to her quarters on the afternoon of the day my father told me his story, and I went to meet her feeling guilty over my recent neglect of her. Aunt Luceiia was a very old woman by this time and she seldom ventured beyond “the family rooms,” as she called her living quarters. From the age of six or seven, through the descriptions in my uncle’s books, I had known another Luceiia. Therein I had met her when she was twenty-five, before she became wife to Publius Varrus, and thus she had remained in his writings over the years, unmarred and unimpeded by their passage. In reality, however, more than forty-five years had passed since then, and although the Luceiia Britannicus who lived today showed more than a slight resemblance to the raven-haired beauty of those writings, her hair was now snowy white and her face, still beautiful with its high-cheeked, sculpted lines, was deeply etched by the passage of time. I had not seen her since the day we returned from patrol, when I had stopped by to pay her the obligatory call to mark our safe return. I found her this afternoon, sitting in the light from the glazed window that was her greatest pride, a far more splendid aperture than the one in my hut, being made from four large and carefully fitted sheets of glass so fine that it was almost fully transparent.
As soon as she heard my footsteps, she turned to me and waited with upraised arms for her kiss. I embraced her and she squeezed me fondly. “Oh, you feel good when you’re not all wrapped up in armour! I forbid you ever again to wear armour when you visit me, although I suppose that means I’ll never see you at all, now that I’ve given you an excuse.”
I took the rebuke as it was intended, gently. “I’m sorry, Auntie. I know I’ve been neglecting you, but I’ve been really busy. There’s much happening.”
She released me from her embrace but continued to hold my upper arms, leaning back slightly to gaze up into my face. “God, how those words sound familiar! That was Publius Varrus’s favourite song! But at least he did come home to me, from time to time. He was not like you, staying away and breaking an old woman’s heart while he tried to break a young one’s hymen.”
“Aunt Luceiia!”
“Don’t Aunt Luceiia me! I’ve heard all about you, young man. And you needn’t pretend to be shocked, either. One of the few privileges of being an old woman is that you don’t have to worry about what people think of you, and another is that you can still remember what it’s like to be young. Would you rather have me pretend that I don’t recall what life is like? Or that I have never known passion or a man’s love? That would dishonour me, as it would Publius Varrus. Here!" She grasped me by the wrist and pulled me down towards her. “Kneel down, boy, I have things to say to you.”
Smiling, I knelt in front of her and she leaned close to me, directing her words straight into my eyes. “I—am—alive! Do you believe that, Nephew?”
I laughed aloud. “Of course I believe it, Auntie. What’s the matter? Don’t you?”
“Oh yes, Nephew, I believe it, but there are too many people around here who do not seem to. They all tippy-toe around me as if I’m not here, or as if I’m asleep, or dangerously ill, and they are afraid of disturbing me. Even worse, some of them seem to think I am a piece of furniture that remains in the spot where it is placed and is not supposed to communicate anything other than its presence—and that mutely! Hmm!" She nodded her head and stamped her foot emphatically. “But I know what goes on around here,” she continued. “More than most people think I know. For one thing, I know about that poor girl in the stables.”
My heart almost stopped at the unexpectedness of this. I looked at her for several heartbeats, trying to mask my dismay while she grinned at me with a look of pure triumph. How had she found out? And how much? I forced my voice to remain calm, as I asked, “What do you know, Auntie? What about her?”
“I know who did it.”
I swallowed the sudden lump in my throat. “Then you know more than anyone else. Who was it?”
“Remus.”
“Who?" The name meant absolutely nothing to me.
“Remus. The priest.”
“What priest, Auntie?”
“The strange one. You know! Remus, the one with the cold eyes. He is an evil man, that one.”
I took a deep breath. “Aunt Luceiia, I have no idea of who, or what, you’re talking about.”
“Of course you do, Caius, or you’ve simply forgotten him. I am talking about the priest, the Christian priest they call Remus. At least, he calls himself a priest. You met him here, the day you got back from your last patrol.”
I remembered then that there had been a priest in the room when I had last called, but I had paid no more attention to him than I would to any other cleric, which is to say I had ignored him. Aunt Luceiia was always being visited by ecclesiastics on the search for alms and charity, and I had long since stopped paying attention to any of them. They were simply a fact of Aunt Luceiia’s life. She was a very religious woman. I swallowed again, hard.
“You called him evil. Why would you say that about him?”
“Because he hates women.”
I began to relax, feeling a superior smile invade my face. “Come now, Auntie! How does that make him evil? I can think of a dozen men I know who have no liking for women.” Ludo’s face had popped into my mind immediately.
“Caius, listen to me,” she snapped, utterly impatient with my male obtuseness. “Listen to what I am saying. I know men, and what they like and dislike. That one hates women. He cannot conceal his hatred. He tries to dissemble it, but it comes out. I am not suggesting the man is effeminate; I am saying he is depraved.”
I was frowning by this time. “Auntie, I remember seeing him, but I don’t remember anything about him. Who is he? Where will I find him? And why would you think he could do such a thing? I mean, disliking women, even hating them, is one thing, but beating a girl almost to death for no reason other than that is another matter altogether. Particularly if the man is a Christian priest.”
Aunt Luceiia sat erect and began to pleat a fold in her gown, looking down at her hands almost primly. “You know Bishop Patricius?" I nodded, and she continued. “He is a pleasant man, and well-meaning, but he is not half the man his predecessor, Bishop Alaric, was.” Alaric had been a dear and lifelong friend to my great-aunt and all her family and I knew him well from their writings. “I saw that the first time I met him, but I could not condemn him for that, God makes very few Alarics. Patricius will be an able enough bishop, but not an inspiring one. He lacks the human insight Alaric had.
“Anyway, Patricius came here to visit me, and he brought this Remus with him. I did not like him then. He disturbed me, but I said nothing to Patricius. Remus returned that same day you and Uther did, and I sent him away. I am not normally discourteous or inhospitable, but he offended me deeply and so I banished him. I told him to leave my house and this fort immediately and never to return. I threatened to call the guards and have him escorted from the main gates, but he left before I could do so.”
I was impressed. The man must have been a boor indeed to have such an effect on my aunt, who was the most gentle-natured person I had ever known.
“What did he do to offend you so deeply?”
“He was himself, that is all. He refused to accept a drink from the hands of one of my serving girls. He dashed the cup from her hands and told her to stay away from him, that she was unclean! Unclean, Caius! In my house!”
“I see. So what did you do then?”
“I threw him out. Told him to leave immediately, not just my house, but Camulod itself. He was unwelcome here and would remain so.”
“And you threatened to call the guards?”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t?”
“No.” She shook her head. “I told you, there was no need to. He left.”
“And? That was all of it?”
“No, not quite. That was all that happened, but there was something else that I dismissed at the time because it was unimportant: He walked with a slight limp, and instead of a staff, he leaned on a curious stick, strongly made and shaped to fit his hand.”
“Sweet Jesus! Why have you waited so long to tell anyone this?”
She threw up her head in mute protest at my outraged tone, her face betraying a strange mixture of resentment and guilt, and the asperity of her immediate response showed me how deeply conscious she was of having said nothing about this earlier. “Because I did not know until this afternoon that the girl had been beaten with a stick. When I heard that, I sent for you at once. It was late in the afternoon when this man Remus left here. Almost dusk. I think now he might have lingered in the fort and spent the night in the stables.”
"Might have!” I was on my feet. “Auntie, you did well to make the association with the stick and tell me this. How well, you may never know. But I wish you had screamed for your guards at the time this happened. Excuse me now, I have to find this man.” I kissed her on the cheek and almost ran out of there.
A search of the entire fort, backed up with intensive questioning, produced only five people who had seen this priest, and all of them had seen him on the way to Aunt Luceiia’s quarters. No one had seen him leave again, and no one had seen any sign of him after that. I sent out patrols to scour our entire territory in search of him, but it was hopeless. He had had three days and three nights to remove himself and we found no trace of him, nor was anyone resembling him ever seen again in our lands. Proof of his existence had, however, established reasonable doubts of Uther’s guilt in my mind, and I was glad of them. There was another suspect, the only one, as far as Aunt Luceiia was concerned, and I did not undervalue her judgment.
Notwithstanding all of that, a secondary reason for my failure to confront Uther with Cassandra was the fact that life in Camulod quickly returned to normal, which meant that a messenger arrived, begging our help against a raiding party of Saxons to the south-east. My father had just returned from a patrol sweep, and so I was sent out with a flying column to do what I could against the raiders. They were long departed, safely back at sea by the time we arrived, however, so after remaining for a day with the villagers, doing what we could to help put their lives together again, we headed back to the fort.
Uther had returned during my absence, offering no explanation of where he had been, but accompanied by twenty of his father’s bowmen, and had already left again, this time on a routine sweep of our territories in the south-west, I was glad to have missed him by several hours, for even with my reasonable doubts established, I still did not relish the thought of meeting him face to face with my remaining concerns unresolved.
“How was he?" I asked my father.
“The same as ever, just Uther. No guilt in evidence, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s what I mean. Did you tell him the story?”
“I did, yes.”
“How aid he react?”
“Shock, and concern. Both, I felt, quite genuine. But he didn’t believe the story of her magical disappearance. He knew you had something to do with it.”
“How could he know that?”
“He didn’t know anything, Cay. He merely said it smelled like one of your tricks.”
“What tricks?" I remember the injured innocence in my voice before the next thought occurred to me. “You didn’t tell him how we did it, Father? Did you?”
“No, I did not, nor did he ask me.”
“I asked Titus that. He didn’t.”
“So,” I shrugged my shoulders, hitching my armour so it hung more comfortably, “shock, concern and no guilt. Good for Uther.” I shook my head. “I’ll be glad when this affair is over, one way or the other.”
The next day I rode out to the valley to check on Cassandra, hoping to find her much improved. She was. I could see that the moment I opened the door of the hut. She was sitting up against the wall, feeding herself with a spoon from a bowl that Daffyd held for her. I looked around the interior of the tiny room.
“Hello, Daffyd. Where are the boys?”
“Hello, yourself, Princeling. They are gone. I sent them home days ago. They were driving me mad, cooped up in here like a couple of randy weasels.”
“How is she?" She was staring at me over Daffyd’s shoulder and her eyes were enormous, far bigger than I remembered. The bruising had begun to heal, and her whole face was now a mottled, yellow colour, tinged with blue in places. There were a couple of small scabs on her eyebrows, and around her mouth where her lips had been split open.
“She is recovering. Don’t you think she looks better?”
“Aye, she does. How are her teeth?" I did not know what had prompted me to ask that.
“Oh, she’ll bite again. They are all still there. Two were a little loose, but they are stiffening. She’s young and she’s healthy and mending fast.”
“Good. Any broken bones?”
“No, and her eyes are fine, before you ask. But she is deaf, and mute, as we suspected. Here, come over here and hold this bowl for her. I have to make water.”
I took the bowl and he went outside and I heard the gush of his urine against the wall of the hut. Up close, the girl’s face was a sight to marvel at: it was one enormous bruise, from brow to chin. Her eyes were fixed on mine, and she made no move to resume eating from the bowl. I moved it slightly towards her, indicating that she should continue to eat, but she just stared at me and her eyes filled with tears, throwing me into a state of consternation. Women’s tears had always unnerved me and, with this woman in particular, I was totally at a loss as to what I should do. I stared, appalled at the great drops of liquid that seemed to hang forever on her lashes before plummeting down her yellowed cheeks, and then, looking around frantically for something to dry them with, I found a cloth of some kind lying beside me and snatched it up, moving clumsily to pat the wetness from her face. She flinched at the contact and, as I realized how painful her face must be, I flinched, too, in sympathy, and then she smiled at me through her tears and my stomach turned right over.
I had never seen her smile before, nor had I ever seen a smile to equal this. It transformed her whole face, lighting it up from within, bruised and discolored as it was, and changing it into a thing of ethereal beauty. I was undone on the spot. Even today, decades later, I can remember realizing that that tremulous, slow, painful smile had ensured that I would never seek a smile from any other woman. Even the fact that the movement stretched her tender, healing lips and made her wince again in pain did nothing to disenchant me. I was already lost. She dropped her eyes to the bowl I had abandoned, and I picked it up again and held it out to her. She began to eat again, or sip, as delicately as a fawn drinking from a pool. I lost all track of time and sat there, rapt, until the bowl was empty, when she tapped it with her spoon and smiled again, bringing me back to awareness.
“I thought you thought her ugly, boyo?" Daffyd’s voice came from right behind me, but I didn’t take my eyes from her yellow face.
“I did, Daffyd, but I had never seen her smile. I must have been blind.”
“Aye, or preoccupied, perhaps. Anyway, from the way she’s looking at you, she doesn’t find your face too frightening.”
“Hmm.” I was gazing at her face. “Daffyd, how … How are her … other injuries?”
“Her body openings? They’re healing. She will be fine, in her body, at least. In her mind … I just don’t know, Merlyn. I’ve seen women who have been violated in war, some of them brutally. They’ve taken it in their stride, for the most part. But I have only ever seen two women who were treated like this before, outraged for no apparent reason with what had to be a mindless violence. Neither of them was ever the same afterward.”
I felt a chill in the pit of my belly. “What do you mean? In what way? Who did it to them? Was it the same man?”
“No, no, the two were years apart.” He moved away from the table and gave his attention to the fire in the small, open hearth, blowing carefully on the embers and then feeding in sticks one at a time until the fire was blazing heartily again. In the meantime, I sat staring at Cassandra, who stared right back. Finally satisfied, Daffyd straightened up and turned back to me.
“The first man was really insane. Completely possessed. Threw himself over a cliff and killed himself and good riddance. The other one, years later, was never caught. Never knew who he was.”
“How long ago was this, Daffyd?”
“The last one? Oh, must be ten years gone, now.”
“You said the first one was possessed. Do you believe in possession?”
He looked at me severely, quirking one eyebrow. “Anyone who doesn’t is a fool.”
“Then you believe in evil.” Aunt Luceiia had used the word to describe the priest Remus.
“Of course I do. If you believe in good, boyo, you’ve got to believe in evil.”
I was uncomfortable with that, with his loose definition of the idea I was grappling with. I looked again at Cassandra. She was the antithesis of everything with which I was trying to come to grips. I shook my head in a qualified denial of what Daffyd had just said. “No,” I said, “the opposite of good is bad, Daffyd. Evil seems to me to be far beyond mere badness. It’s something else altogether.”
Daffyd was looking at me strangely. “What are you trying to say, Merlyn?”
I could only shake my head. “I don’t know, Daffyd. But this …" I nodded towards the silent girl on the bed. “It seems to me that anyone who is truly evil must be unfit to live.”
“How many such people, truly evil people, do you think there are in this world, boy?”
“Truly evil? I don’t know that, either, but there can’t be that many. I’ve never met one.” Something ticked in my memory. “Wait, though! I’m wrong. I have met one. One person.” My memory was churning now, spinning out a long, connected series of images. “When Uther and I were boys, we met Lot, the son of the Duke of Cornwall. He and Uther fought, and tried to kill each other. I mean, it was no boys’ fight, Daffyd. They went at each other with swords and both were wounded. My father dragged them apart before they could kill each other. Thinking of it now, I remember Lot as evil … profoundly, unbelievably wicked, through and through, for the sheer pleasure of it … almost mindlessly bad, but not endowed with the saving grace of mindlessness, for he knew exactly what he was doing.”
“Hmph! Do you feel the same way about Uther?”
“Uther? Gods, no!" I was genuinely shocked.
Daffyd smiled slightly. “I’m glad to hear that, boyo. Lot of Cornwall, eh? Funny, now, you should pick him. You’re not the first I’ve heard say such things about him. He’s a bad one, all right. Calls himself King Lot now, he does. Rules out of that fort that his old father built himself after he saw your Camulod. Quite a place, they tell me.”
I was intrigued by the tone of his voice at the mention of this fort of Lot’s. “Have you seen it? The fort?”
He hunched in scornful dismissal of the suggestion. “No, never been down that way. Better things to do with my time, haven’t I? But they built it right on the edge of the sea, I’m told, on the top of an island that’s cliffs on all sides. No way to capture it, they say. It’s a stronghold, no doubt about that.”
“Does it have a name, this stronghold?”
He shook his head. “Not that I know of, but then I don’t care, do I, boyo? But by all accounts, it’s an unusual place. Perhaps you’ll see it for yourself one day.”
“Perhaps I will, Daffyd, although I hope not. I should not be welcome there.”
“Aye,” he grunted, “I dare say you’re right. Conquerors are seldom made welcome any place they go.”
“Conquerors? Why would you say that? You’ve just told me the place is impregnable.”
“No, boyo,” he responded. “You’re starting to forget all the lessons I taught you. You’ve forgotten already how to use your ears. What I said was, they say there’s no way to capture it, but who are they? And yet, if people want to pay attention to them, whoever they are, then nobody will even try and the place might never be taken at all, so it would be proved impregnable, wouldn’t it? You see?" He was staring at me.
I nodded “I think so.”
“That’s good, then, for what I said, and what you thought I said, were not the same thing at all. But I’ll tell you one thing, and you should hear me clearly: there’s not much good farming land down that way, and if Lot of Cornwall is as big a swine, or a king, as they say he is, he is going to come your way, sooner or later. He has people to feed, so I would say sooner is closer to reason than later. And when he does—notice I’m not saying if he does—you are going to have to teach him his place, you mark my words.”