“Well, my friend, I hope you’ll judge, when all’s been said and done, that this was worth all the sweat and tears thrown into it. Because no matter how big a success it is with our own lads, and with the women and the common folk, you’re going to have a lot of angry contestants moaning and complaining about the rules being biased.”
“Let them complain, Sag. I don’t care.” Sagramore had been made master of the Games months earlier, one of the first appointments Pelles and I had made after our decision to proceed with the Games, and since then I had almost grown immune to his fretting, telling myself patiently that, right from the outset, he had failed to see the reality of what I was trying to do here. Sagramore was a fine soldier, an exemplary knight and a true and loyal friend, but he had not been gifted at birth with great intellect or with the ability to theorize at length. Tactics came naturally to him in the face of action, but strategy and long-term planning were forever beyond him.
As Magister Ludorum, master of the Games, he had focused all his energies single-mindedly upon fulfilling his magisterial duties and making sure that the Games would be as close to perfectly organized and run as he could make them, and it troubled him deeply that I seemed to be going out of my way to make the task of winning easier for our own men than it would be for the visiting contestants. The idea that these Games had been designed as a political tool dedicated to only one purpose was beyond Sag’s comprehension. He believed, on one high level, that my honor would never permit me to do anything shameful, but none the less, he remained uncomfortable with some of the decisions I had made and with some of the directives I had issued, and he believed that the visiting Franks were not going to like what I had done to undermine their chances of winning. Even more worrying to him was the possibility that if the rumors we had heard were true and Burgundians were coming to take part in our Games, they would be likely to be even less pleased and more hostile than the local Franks.
“Let them cry, Sag, let them cry. And I hope the Burgundians do come, although I’ll be surprised to see them. They’re no more popular in these parts now than they were when I was a boy. Franks or Burgundians, though, or whoever else might join us for the entertainment, they will all be in the same small boat … by the time they realize what’s happening it will be too late and the lessons will have been taught. I would rather have them angry at me after the Games, and aware of what will happen if they provoke me, than I would have them go away victorious and feeling superior, so that we have to ride out and teach them bloody lessons on a battlefield.”
Sagramore was standing beside me on the castle wall, arms folded on his armored chest and scratching at his chin with one thumbnail as he squinted down at the enormous enclosure that had been created in front of the main gates. It was square in area, two hundred paces to a side and enclosed by railed fences. Beyond it, two hundred paces farther north and easily visible from where we stood high above the castle gates, the edge of the cliffs that formed the precipitous coastline angled gently from southwest to northeast, a hundred feet and more above the breakers at their feet.
I was proud of the arena we had built to house King Pelles’s Games. The steeply ramped banks of seats on the northern and eastern sides of the enormous campus—the ground on which the contests would be played out—had taken our carpenters more than a month to build, and were designed to provide ample vantage points for the crowds we expected to attend. Behind the eastern block, concealed from view, was the encampment for the visiting contestants, built with full stabling facilities and exercise yards for both men and horses. Access to the contestants’ encampment was provided by the roadway that lined the south side of the great square, running along the base of the castle wall at our feet. As well, the entire western side of the square was fenced in removable sections, permitting variable access to the immense sprawl of buildings and paddocks—far larger than the main enclosure—that comprised Tiberias Cato’s stables. No one knew who would be coming from the ranks of the new nobility in northern Gaul, or even from the old nobility, but grounds and facilities had been set aside for their use, too.
I had grown tired of waiting for Sag to respond to my last comment, and so I was surprised when he finally grunted and nodded. “That’s as may be, Lance, but none the less, were I a champion of any rank who had traveled a hundred miles or more to take part in these Games, only to discover that the whole affair had been set up to make it impossible for me to win, I would not be pleased. Were I such a man, I think I might be tempted to go looking for the fellow responsible.” He turned and grinned at me. “The master of the Games.”
I laughed at his sally, but refused to accept his point. “That’s horse apples, Sag, and you know it,” I told him. “We’ve been through this before. There’s nothing impossibly difficult about winning any of the contests. All we’ve done is to make sure that it’s as near to impossibly difficult as we can make it, in order to ensure that everyone who wins is worthy of the victory and has earned it. And so certainly our men, our very best men, have been training hard for the event. Where is the fault in that? It has been six months since the word went out that Pelles of Corbenic is to host a Festival of Games for the Vernal Equinox, a contest of the best against the best, with valuable prizes to be won. Are you suggesting that there might be champions out there who intend to take part but are not training for whatever events they intend to enter? Are you?”
“Well, no, but—”
“No buts, Sag. I will grant you that we have certain advantages that others do not possess. But try not to lose sight of the primary purpose of these Games. It is to set an example of how good we truly are, Sag, to demonstrate exactly how much better and stronger and more versatile we are than anyone else is. And we’re ready.” I waved my hand to indicate the massive square below. “Everything is looking excellent. I don’t even think we need to go down there at all today. We can see it all from here. Can you think of anything we need to check at close quarters?”
“No, Magister. Nor could Bors and Perceval, when I asked them earlier. It’s all done, they think.”
I was happy to hear him say that. There were three weeks left before the Games were scheduled to take place, and I was astounded that we had been able to finish everything ahead of our planned completion date. I was unstinting in my praise of the prodigious work that had been done by everyone involved.
At our backs, out of sight beyond the rear walls and between the castle itself and the mile-distant edge of the inland forest, an entire town had been laid out in a grid of large, carefully measured blocks, in preparation for the arrival of the multitude of visitors we expected. The lines of the grid were clearly marked as thoroughfares and streets, and the blocks between them were divided into spacious sites to accommodate tents, wagons and livestock. Each block had a water station with ample fresh water for everyone’s needs, and in what I believed to be our most spectacular achievement, we had even built an elaborate network of communal, partitioned latrines. The latrine sheds were sited over a series of enclosed pipes that were sluiced by the waters diverted from a nearby stream to carry the waste away from the inhabited area and down to the cliffs above the beach. The system had been designed by a team of engineers Pelles had brought at his own cost from the nearby city of Brugis, where they were responsible for the city’s water system. It was the very first project we tackled in preparation for the Games and it had taken weeks to design and months to build. It would accommodate, its builders estimated, upwards of a thousand people, each using it three times a day. The most surprising thing about the sluices system, from my viewpoint at least, was that when the festivities were over and everyone had departed, it would be left in place for a month to dry out, and then it would be dismantled and its constituent parts put to other uses, leaving no sign that it had ever been there.
We had sent out messengers months earlier, with instructions to leave no town, castle, outpost or hamlet in northwestern Gaul, between us and Paris, uninvited, and we had been receiving reports ever since then that people would be coming in large numbers.
Pelles and his family—even his mother, Queen Catalina—were all highly excited about the forthcoming events, for nothing of this magnitude had occurred in Corbenic before, and they all knew how important the outcome could be to their entire future. All in all there was an atmosphere of anticipation throughout Corbenic, a sensation of being perched upon the threshold of great events.
I ran my fingers through my hair and Sagramore turned to look at me, his face wrinkling in a smile. “What are you thinking?” he asked me. “I can’t tell if you are scratching your head or pulling your hair out.”
I smoothed my hair down with both hands and laughed in spite of myself. “I think it’s a little of both, Sag. We’ve finished all the hard work of getting ready, and any day now people will start to roll in—visitors and travelers, soldiers and knights, kings and dukes and all their entourages, merchants and traders, peddlers and scavengers and whores and musicians and tumblers and jugglers and cutpurses, thieves and mummers and vendors of food and drink and everything else imaginable. And once they start to come, the tide will swell and grow until our very land is transformed beyond recognition. And somewhere around that point, we will all be wishing we could recapture the peace and quiet of the past few, frantic weeks. But by then you will be master of the Games in fact, and I will be relegated to being garrison commander again. And so I think you and I should stroll over and talk to the cooks, right now, this moment, while we are still ourselves, and prevail upon somebody to feed us and give us something to drink. What say you? Come, then, and walk with me.”
The visitors began to arrive within the week, the first contingent of them being a troupe of traveling entertainers who had set out northward from the town of Luguvallium, southeast of Auxerre, as soon as they heard of our forthcoming festival. Originally from Massilia, the oldest trading port on the warm southeastern coast of Gaul, they had been traveling incessantly for five years, presenting their offerings for the entertainment and amusement of audiences throughout the southeastern areas of Gaul, but they told us how the incursions of the Huns had shut them off from their traditional routes and forced them westward, in search of new audiences.
They told us they had heard mention of us first in Luguvallium, almost four hundred miles away, and that information shocked us profoundly, an object lesson in just how quickly matters can get out of hand. Until that moment, we had not even dreamed that the word of our activities would travel so widely or so quickly and effectively, and the realization that it had soon set us to scratching our heads over the arrangements we had put in place to handle visitors. These people had traveled more than twice as far as any we had expected to attend. If their arrival was any indication of what we might expect in the coming month, then our accommodations and logistics were already overtaxed.
Late in the afternoon of the day the first visitors arrived—they had come into view from our battlements around mid-morning—Pelles sent word that he needed to meet with me immediately, and I was on the road within a quarter hour of receiving his summons, aware from what his messenger had told me that he knew about the newcomers and was already fretting. I knew my cousin well by that time, and had learned that he was one of those people who, while normally placid and unexcitable, disliked intensely being taken unawares by events he could not control. Sure enough, I arrived to find him already surrounded by his Council of Clan Chiefs and senior advisers.
In the council that followed, Pelles and I talked long into the night, discussing the opinions of his advisers, and a number of them rode back with us to the castle the following morning, where our entire officer cadre was waiting to meet with us, summoned by a messenger sent ahead of us. That afternoon we conducted a thorough review of all the arrangements we had in place to deal with the expected influx of strangers, and three officers on our quartermaster’s staff, who had already shown a facility for such things, were set to work developing additional ways to cope with unexpected demands, should such a need arise. There was really nothing more that anyone could do by that stage, but the mere exercise of addressing the matter had a soothing effect on everyone, creating at least an illusion that everything was well and in hand, and Pelles was able to return to his villa content that his chiefs would carry the appropriate word to their people.
The fact that we had dispatched several bodies of troops in strength to guard the approaches to our lands against intrusion by unwelcome troop formations was recognized but went unacknowledged among our senior personnel.
Three days after the arrival of the traveling troupe, the next arrivals came in, a small train of wagons carrying four families of merchants and accompanied by a twelve-man retinue of guards. They had barely begun settling in to the new camp site when another group arrived, this one a band of more than half a score of warriors, all of them come to compete and already well launched into a mood of gaiety. The trickle grew to a flood, and the population of the makeshift town behind us grew bigger every day, so that by the time the opening of the Games arrived, we had lost sight of who had come from where but were aware that upwards of three thousand visitors were living around the castle—approximately the number we had planned for. Only long afterwards would we be sure that the traveling players had been the only group to come from more than two hundred miles away. In addition to our three thousand visitors, we had our full complement of cavalry troopers and our normal garrison force, as well as several thousands of Pelles’s own Corbenicans—the resident clans themselves. All in all, our quartermasters were housing and feeding in excess of ten thousand people a day, and would continue to do so for nigh on a month.
Once under way, the Games developed swiftly into something even greater and more satisfying than we had imagined. The spirit of competition among the contestants was ferocious from the outset, and the spectators soon began rooting for their chosen champions, and with growing enthusiasm came wagering, with people betting on everything and anything that could be bet upon, and factions emerging from nowhere in support of whatever champion or group of champions came into prominence on any day. The competition was fierce and uncompromising in every event and in every category of skills, and there was no lack of numbers in any of those, since the best minds in Corbenic and much of Camulod had bent themselves towards building a program of tests and contests that would plumb the very depths of capability for everyone involved in them.
Foot soldiers wrestled in singles, pairs and groups, using bare hands and even leather cestes, the gladiatorial fighting gloves so beloved of the Romans for centuries; others used wooden practice swords and shields, while still others fought with short, heavy wooden clubs simulating daggers and axes, and with headless spears and long, heavy practice staves. As the Games progressed, these large, well-equipped groups dwindled steadily in numbers as umpires and judges culled the ranks of “vanquished” men, until one clear victor emerged in each category. In other parts of the great, square campus, men competed with spears and javelins, slings and other missiles, including bows and arrows. And always, in one way or another, at all times, horsemen were visible everywhere one looked.
The horsemen were, of course, the sole reason for the gathering, and more planning had gone into the equestrian elements of the Games than into any other aspect of the event. The Franks had always been proud of their horses and their horsemanship. According to their own legends, they were the first people ever to acknowledge a man and his horse as a working partnership of anything approaching equals. The Romans, on the other hand, had never been known as horsemen, and they had begun conquering the world before the Franks ever became known. Their legions had been infantry, and the only cavalry they had used were light skirmishers: bowmen or javelin throwers who used their speed and agility to create a mobile, protective screen in front of the Roman armies while the legions were massing into their invincible battle formations. Hundreds of years after the days of Julius Caesar, the Romans had relied heavily on their famed Germanic cavalry—ferocious warriors who rode into battle with both hands free to fight, controlling their mounts with their legs alone, and among those troops, the Frankish elements had considered themselves primi inter pares—first among equals.
Here and now, however, in Pelles’s territory and in the brief course of Pelles’s Games, we had to show our Frankish neighbors—and show them convincingly—that their day had passed, and that the new cavalry of Corbenic had come into its own. It was not a task to be lightly approached or easily completed, and thus everything that happened in the main arena was designed to draw attention to cavalry performance. All escort duties to and from the field were performed by groups of cavalry, every horse and every man perfectly groomed, flawlessly turned out and accoutered, and moving in perfect synchronization, as though bound together by physical welds. All presentations of prizes and awards within the arena were made within or in front of a formation of cavalry, even although most of the formations were spread far enough and the individual riders positioned with sufficiently painstaking care to ensure that they blocked no one’s view of what was happening on the field. The awards ceremonies in the middle of the field were always simple and dignified, satisfying in their own right and perfectly attuned to recognizing the achievements of the victors, but they were always highlighted in a setting of military readiness, with the entire arena seemingly carpeted in disciplined ranks of vigilant and brilliantly caparisoned cavalry.
The show of strength was not subtle, but neither was it offensive. It merely reflected the realities of life in Corbenic nowadays, where everything revolved around and was dependent upon the new cavalry imperative. Everyone in the crowded stands knew about Baldwin’s treachery against Pelles a mere two years before, and about the subsequent changes that had taken place in Corbenic since our arrival from Britain, and they understood that Pelles had taken the steps he had in order to protect himself and his kingdom in future.
The equestrian events in the arena had been designed to emphasize the differences between Corbenican cavalry and all others. We had to ensure that from now on, whenever men spoke of cavalry, they would envision large, tightly disciplined bodies of mounted men moving and fighting as a single entity, so huge and overwhelming in its irresistible weight and force that it could and would obliterate any less disciplined force drawn up against it.
We had to show that, and we had to prove it, and so we designed trials involving teams of horsemen working together to win points for timing, coordination and cooperation. The difference between our troopers and all the other contestants became obvious immediately. Throughout their history the Franks had been intensely proud of their prowess as equestrians, but they idolized individual excellence and individual performance, and they had no slightest understanding of the idea of working together as an integrated group. They fought as single warriors, and on the very few occasions when circumstances dictated that they had no other choice than to combine to fight together, they most frequently dismounted and fought together side by side as a static block.
From the first events of the opening day of the Games, the opposing values of the two sides became painfully obvious as Corbenican cavalry teams obliterated their Frankish opponents in every category, from relay races to team jousts. The Franks were incredulous and even scornful at first, scoffing at the elaborate-seeming maneuvers and methods of the Corbenicans, but after their tenth successive defeat they stopped scoffing and began to concentrate on winning at any cost, and the harder they tried, the less success they had. They also paid attention to the unavoidable truth that as the size of the groups involved in any contest grew larger, so did the margin by which they were defeated. Singly, in individual events, they fared quite well, and we sent our best horsemen and competitors into those encounters, determined to win against all odds. But in larger groupings, five against five or ten against ten, the coordination and density of our cavalry blocks made them impervious to the Franks’ attacks, no matter how high-spiritedly they assailed us or how doggedly they strove to outmaneuver us.
It was in one such encounter, at the end of the second week of the festivities, that the most troubling event of the Games took place, during a bout that had pitted a score of our men against an equal number of the visitors, who had banded together and had spent several days practicing the skills that would be required in the competition. They had done better than any of us had expected, losing, admittedly, but losing less severely than had become normal, when they suddenly drew together, grounded their weapons and changed the rules of the encounter. They had lost eight men to that point, as opposed to five men lost on our part, and tempers were growing short as frustrations mounted. We were using wooden practice swords and long, headless spears, but the blows being dealt and traded were far from harmless, and several of the men on both sides who had been “retired” were real casualties. The umpires, most of whom were local Frankish warriors, had been doing a splendid job, risking their lives and limbs among our swirling, swinging weapons as they sought to keep track of every blow that landed, and to gauge whether or not it would have been lethal or crippling to the man receiving it. And then, without warning, the Frankish contestants had stopped fighting, lowered their weapons and grouped together in the middle of the field, leaving our men to ride helplessly around them, unsure of what was happening.
Before any one of us had time to regain the initiative, one of the Franks stood up in his stirrups, raised his wooden sword above his head and shouted a challenge in a voice loud enough to be heard all over the arena and the stands surrounding it.
“Hear ye, all and everyone! I propose an end to this nonsense. A challenge, issued to all Corbenic from all of us who have come here to fight. Let Corbenic put forth a champion … a single man … to meet with one of ours. And let the outcome of that fight decide the victor here.”
There was a palpable silence after he had finished, as people thought for a brief time about what he had proposed, and then a swelling chorus of agreement broke out among the visiting crowds. Single combat between two champions was an ancient and honorable tradition, not only among the Franks but among all the ancient peoples that the Romans had named Barbarians, and it was a practical and admirable one, at that. Many a battle had been decided thus, in the open space between opposing armies, when their leaders had conceded that there was little point in decimating their entire armies when a single display of strength and superiority could demonstrate the ascendancy of one side over the other. This spokesman of the Frankish group was saying the same thing, and now he began shouting again, his voice silencing the last vestiges of discussion.
“One against five, they say. One of them—any one of them—can better five of us. Well, we have heard enough of that. Time now to show the truth. We have grown sick of Corbenic’s boasts, and now we challenge them to prove their claims—if they can. Let one of them—any one of them—come forth now against me … one to one, man to man, using the weapons of his choice.”
Some said afterwards that we should have anticipated such a thing, but in truth I do not believe we could have done so, simply because the contestants facing us were not an army. They were not even related geographically and most of them could make themselves understood to others only with great difficulty, using limping, hesitant forms of the Coastal Tongue, the cobbled-together language used among traders. That they would combine to defy a group they had commonly perceived to be an enemy was something that no one could have anticipated.
My mind was racing, weighing the dangers and deciding on a course of action long before the enemy leader had finished, and the gist of what I was thinking lay in the fact that he was their leader and his challenge had to be met, which meant that this fight was mine alone. There was no possibility whatsoever of my stepping aside and leaving it to a subordinate. At that instant, an image popped unbidden into my mind—the face of my young squire, Rufus—and I thrust it aside, annoyed at its irrelevance, because I was already thinking about the terms of the fight and the weapons at my command. I had only my long wooden practice sword and a light shield with me and I could see that my opponent had a long thrusting spear in his hand and what looked like a pair of light throwing javelins slung in a quiver at his back, plus a long wooden sword much like my own. Again I saw young Rufus in my mind, his eyes wide, staring at me as he waited for me to answer a question, and again I thrust the image aside, but even as I did, understanding came to me of what I had been seeing: I could use whatever weapons I chose, my opponent had stipulated that very clearly and bore a sufficiency of weapons to illustrate it. I would have preferred to use my lances, but they were lethal.
Young Rufus, however, in his enthusiasm to copy me in everything I did, had made amazing and almost perfect replicas of my bamboo throwing spears. He had no bamboo—no one had—but his weapons, and he had six of them now, were all made from flawless aged and turned ash wood, fashioned with the willing assistance of an old Frankish craftsman whom Rufus had befriended soon after our arrival from Britain. They were longer and slightly thicker and heavier at one end than my missiles were, blunt ended but cleverly balanced to compensate for the missing weight of the metal heads that crowned the real weapons, and the gentle taper of the shafts at the butt end enabled him to affix the same kind of throwing cords that I used on my own lances. Rufus went nowhere without his beloved spears nowadays, and I had seen him less than an hour earlier, while I was in the paddocks preparing to ride out for this competition.
I stood up in my stirrups but I could not pick him out among the throng of boys lining the railed fence that separated the paddocks from the arena. I waved my shield to attract the attention of Quintus Milo, who had turned out to be one of the best of Pelles’s cavalry officers and a doughty fighter.
“Agree, Quintus. Take the challenge. Tell them I’ll do it, but that I need to go and find a weapon. But don’t tell them my name … simply say I’m a squad leader. And talk to the umpires for me while I’m gone. Tell them what’s happening and have them announce the details for the crowd. I’ll be back.”
I set the spurs to my horse, but just before swinging him around to gallop away I reined the animal in hard before he could react to the spurs. I had just been filled with an outrageous idea and now I felt myself grinning. I was angry, but I was also cool and clear headed, my decision firmly made in absolute defiance of good sense and the laws of logic.
“I hope you realize that these people just called us liars, Quintus. You do, don’t you? You heard what he said. They’re laughing at us, daring us to take them one on one. Well, we’re going to feed them back their bile. We may not be better men than they are, but we have better weapons and far better skills, and that’s what this is all about. So accept the challenge … all of it. One against one, five times. Me against their five best, one after the other.”
“But Clothar—”
“Do it, Quintus, and don’t debate with me. And don’t mention my name aloud again, either. The fight is mine and I’ve no intention of losing it to some swaggering braggart from the far side of some river that no one has ever heard of. And now I have to pick up some weapons. I’ll be back by the time they’ve made the announcement.”
I made my way directly to the elaborate pavilion in the southwestern corner of the field that housed the king, and Pelles himself, knowing something strange had happened, came forward to meet me as I approached. I told him quickly what had come up and what I had decided to do. To his credit, he did not blink an eyelid, even although he knew, as did I, what might happen afterwards were I to lose the challenge. He trusted me without question or comment and I was grateful. He summoned a messenger to carry his approval to the heralds, he and I exchanged salutes, and I swung away again in search of my weapons.
I saw young Rufus as I rode along the western edge of the field, right where I had expected him to be, perched on the top rail of the fence closest to the action, in the middle of a group of squires wearing the colors and devices of the knights they served. Rufus was wearing a plain light brown tunic, and his eyes were fixed on mine even before I found him among his friends. As soon as he decided that I was, in fact, looking for him, he jumped down from the fence and came running. I leaned down, my hand outstretched for him to grasp, then swung him up to sit at my back.
“Your practice spears,” I asked over my shoulder. “Are they here, and will you lend them to me?”
“Of course, my lord!” I could hear the wonder in his voice that I would even be aware of his spears, let alone wish to borrow them.
“Good. They have cords attached?”
“Already wound, my lord. They’re in Magister Cato’s hut, over there.”
“My thanks, then. I’ll try not to break any of them. Fetch them for me, if you will.”
He ran and brought me the weapons, and I spent the next few moments checking their readiness, although I knew there was no need. They were the boy’s pride and joy and were in perfect condition. I nodded my approval, slung their long quiver over my shoulders, picked the lad up bodily again and carried him back to where his friends were gawking at us, then kicked my horse back towards the large knot of horsemen in the center of the arena.
The heralds were just starting to make their announcement as I got back: the captain-at-arms of the Blue Group, currently in the arena, would fight in single combat against the captain-at-arms of the Red Group. Should the Blue captain be successful in his challenge, the Red Group would concede defeat and leave the arena. Should the Blues fail to win, however, the captain of the Reds would remain in the arena and fight the next Blue challenger in line, until either he was vanquished or he had beaten five successive champions.
The crowd erupted in a frenzy of cheering and jeering, and I imagined I could hear the levels of wagering escalate as I rode to the far southwest corner of the field to await the signal for the start of the fight. Behind me, I knew, my first opponent would be doing the same thing, moving northeastwards. I reached the corner of the field and turned my horse around, shutting my mind to the spectators and concentrating only on the arena and what lay there for me. Ahead of me and to my left, my own men and all but five of the enemy were leaving the arena and entering the paddock area. In the corner opposite me, almost a quarter of a mile from where I sat, my five opponents were clustered together, watching me, their leader in the center, slightly ahead of the others.
I knew nothing about the man I was about to fight, not even where he came from. I knew that he was tall and lean, his limbs long, clean lined and well muscled. I also knew that his hair was long and pale gold in color, because locks of it had escaped the confines of his helmet. I knew he favored a spear over a sword, and I suspected he might be a skilled javelin thrower, simply from the way he carried the two missiles slung at his back, but I doubted that he would be able to throw as accurately as I could from the back of a galloping horse, and that was the tactic I intended to use to bring him down quickly.
A single horn blast signaled the start of the bout, and I kicked my horse forward immediately, taking him smoothly from a walk to a canter and into an easy lope as I reached behind me and pulled a lance from my quiver, then wrapped the end of the throwing cord comfortably around my fingers. Across from me, bending forward over the neck of a horse far smaller and more wiry than my own, my opponent still grasped his thrusting spear, holding it out and away from his body, the point angled slightly downwards yet still roughly parallel to the ground as he advanced more and more swiftly to meet me. I waited until we had closed half the distance between us, and then I leaned forward, pressing my weight down into my left stirrup and feeling my horse responding beneath me, veering to my left. My opponent veered to intercept me and I kicked my mount to a full gallop and started to circle away from him. He countered instantly, swinging hard left and committing to the chase, so that by the time he realized I had merely feinted and turned in a tight little circle to head back towards him, he was too late to do anything effective. I galloped flat out towards him then veered to pass in front of him, fully ten horse-lengths to his left, and as he swept by me I raised myself in the stirrups and unleashed my lance. It hissed across the distance separating us and struck him hard and high on the left shoulder before being deflected upwards to clang against his heavy, visored helmet. The impact, completely unexpected and far more crushing than he could possibly have expected, lifted him clear of the saddle and sent him flying.
I ignored him after that, knowing that he was effectively dead and could not possibly get to his feet and remount after such a fall. I broke away and charged back at full speed towards his four remaining companions, controlling my horse with my knees as I reached behind me for another lance and prepared it for throwing.
Ahead of me, the second of the Frankish champions belatedly spurred his horse into motion, kicking wildly at it as he fought to bring it to fighting speed. This one carried no spears at all that I could see. He had a light shield and a long wooden sword and he rode crouched in his saddle, presenting me with the smallest possible target as he came sweeping towards me. He did not even last as long as his leader had. My first cast hit him full on his lowered head, right in the middle of his helmet’s dome, as he came charging towards me like a dart from a ballista. He was still unconscious, I learned later, when they came to carry him out of the arena.
The third man approached me more slowly, having learned from the swift fate of his two companions. He, too, carried a wooden sword and a light shield, but he was more cautious and probably more intelligent than his predecessors. I rode circles around him for some time, and he was content to allow me to do so, merely turning his own mount to keep me in sight, and keeping his shield raised protectively in front of him at all times. It was soon plain to see that he was hoping I would tire my horse and make his life a little more simple, and so I stopped circling and instead sat facing him for a time, hefting my lance and gauging the distance between us and the time it would take him to swing his shield and block my throw.
When it became clear that he was prepared to sit there all day, defying me to make the first move against him, I made it. I charged straight towards him, rising high in my stirrups and throwing hard and straight, and sure enough, just as I had expected, he swung his mount sharply to his right and brought his shield arm scything sideways to send my weapon whistling off, over his shoulder. By the time he had seen my cast, however, and begun to pull his horse aside, I had already closed half the distance between us and was pulling my long, heavy wooden sword from my saddle bow. I was within striking distance of him before he could recover from his defensive shield swing and I caught him in the angle of neck and shoulder with a crushing overarm swing that sent him reeling, clutching reflexively at his saddle bow as he toppled sideways and crashed to the ground almost beneath his horse’s hooves.
My friends told me afterwards that the crowd was screaming in delirium by that stage, but I was unaware of anything beyond my own priorities as I slipped the leather loop of my practice sword off my wrist and hung it over the hook on my saddle. I had begun to reach behind me for another lance, my eyes sweeping the far corner of the field for my two remaining opponents, when I realized that neither one of them was there. My heart leapt in alarm and I wrenched hard at my mount’s head, yanking it down hard, sideways and to the left, just as I heard the thunder of hooves at my back. My fourth opponent was in full attack by the time I began to look for him, and now his first heavy blow landed on me before I had a chance to prepare for it.
My sideways lunge, however, tightening as it did into a miraculously narrow turn by my magnificent horse, was neither instinctive nor intuitive, no matter how it might have looked to an observer. It was the result of deliberate and intensive training, developed over months of wearying, repetitive drills and designed to go against the instincts of man and animal and to thwart any attacker by doing the unexpected at a time of great stress. It was the best move I could have made in this instance, because this attacker was left handed, and the angle of my hooking movement to his left took me sufficiently inside the arc of his swing to throw off his aim. The long, heavy cudgel that was his practice sword landed high on the rear edge of my helmet and clanged down from there to skip across my shoulders. The glancing blow did little damage to me, for I was still turning into it even as it fell, but I felt the long blade of the hard-swung weapon catch against the quiver hanging at my back, snapping the shoulder strap and sending the quiver flying, along with the three spears it still contained. Then, knowing that another blow, this one backhanded, was already coming at me, I kicked my right foot free of its stirrup and let my body slouch forward until I fell sideways from the saddle, my left foot securely braced in the stirrup while my right hand found and grasped the peak of my saddle, ready to pull me upright again.
As soon as it felt me drop like that, with my head down below the level of its own, my horse responded as it had been trained to do, wheeling abruptly to its right in a rearing turn, to bring the protection of its body between me and whoever my attacker might be. I felt the concussion of a blow landing on the bare saddle, but I was already scanning the ground ahead of me, searching avidly for the quiver of spears I had lost. It was almost within my grasp, tantalizingly close but beyond my reach until my attacker struck again, his horse striking my own as he leaned forward to hack at my hand on the saddle horn. I can but presume that is what he did, because I could see nothing of him and the blow never hit me, but that is what I would have tried to do had I been him. Whatever his intent, he aided me, because my mount shied in protest and sidled far enough away from his attack to allow me to snatch up the quiver of spears without his being aware of it, and I immediately straightened my left leg, thrusting against the stirrup for leverage as I kicked upwards with my right leg and hauled myself back up into the saddle as my horse responded perfectly, bearing me away and to the left of my opponent in a long, looping circle.
As soon as I was back in my seat, I set about preparing a new lance, controlling my horse with my knees and ignoring the surge of galloping hooves closing quickly again from behind me. I wrapped the end of the throwing cord around my index finger, took the reins again in my left hand and this time swung around to my right, still turning tightly and aiming as I went. The fellow barely saw the missile before it took him under the arm on his right side, passing beneath the edge of the shield he had thrown up too high and too quickly, and slamming into his side between armpit and waist. It would have been a killing strike, even though it failed to unhorse him, and he was finished.
I turned my attention to his last surviving companion, who had been riding close behind him all the time, not participating in any of his attacks on me but ready to move at once should I win again. Now he sat gazing at me, he and his horse both motionless, and although I could not see his face behind the visor, I knew what he must be thinking. He had stood fifth in ranking among his peers and I had beaten all four ahead of him. Now that he was left alone to face me, he should have had the advantage, since I ought to have been exhausted by the fights against his fellows. But that was not the case. All I had done was throw spears, lethally and skillfully, outmaneuvering all of them. And now I sat waiting for him to bring the fight to me. I found nothing surprising in his hesitancy, and in fact felt a pang of sympathy for the fellow, so I threw away my two remaining spears, one after the other, then drew my practice sword and leaned backwards to kick my right leg high over the front of my saddle and slide to the ground, where I slapped my horse on the rump and told him to move away. Only then did I hear the noise of the crowd, as they released a great susurration of pent-up breath and then fell silent.
The man fought well, once he realized that he had a straightforward chance of besting me on foot, man to man, blade to blade and with no strange missiles involved, but he was not accustomed to swinging the immense weight of the practice swords we used every day, and so he tired quickly. When it became visibly agonizing for him to keep his point clear of the ground, I finished him quickly, smashing his blade aside and tripping him easily, then pressing my own point to his unguarded throat.
At that moment, standing over the last of my five opponents that day in one corner of the arena, facing the ranked seats ahead of me and hearing the shouts and cheers of the spectators there, I felt nothing but a fleeting sense of satisfaction that was amplified when one of the umpires approached me carrying the six javelins belonging to my squire. As I thanked him for his considerateness, however, I became aware of a change in the tenor of the sounds surrounding us. A formless feeling of unease sprang up in me, and I turned to look behind me.
The Corbenican cavalry were advancing into the arena from the paddocks beside the field. Their decision to come out, I knew, must have been spontaneous, and yet they moved in their units, following each other wordlessly in the disciplined formations that had become second nature to them. Gauls and Britons together, they came forward in sequence and in silence, forming up wordlessly until the entire armed cavalry strength of Corbenic sat motionless in front of me, their eyes fixed on me, making me feel both proud and humbled. The only sounds that came from their ranks were the occasional snort or whinny of a horse and the thud of hooves as an animal stamped its feet or shied at a fly bite. I saw King Pelles himself riding among them, surrounded by his clan chiefs and heading towards me, and I was aware that the edges of the huge field were lined with ranks of watching Franks who had spilled out from the visitors’ encampment behind the stands. There was no need for words. A message had been delivered for all to see and it had been understood.
Moments later Pelles was stretching out his hand to me, and I walked forward, took it and bent over it. When I looked up again he was smiling at me.
“Well done, Cousin,” he said. “You may dismiss your men now. This day’s events are over, for who could improve on what you have already shown us? Come you now and dine with us.”
My commanders were watching me, aware of King Pelles but waiting for my signal. I gave it, they passed it along, and still in silence, the cavalry troops thronged in the field began to disperse, still in formation and still in disciplined sequence.
That single episode, spontaneous as it was, marked the effective end of the King’s Games, for the spirit seemed to have gone out of the visiting competitors as a result of it. The Games had been successful, nevertheless, for the lessons they presented had been well observed and taken to heart. From that time forward, all over northwestern Gaul, the warrior peoples began to pay close attention to Pelles’s cavalry and its fighting techniques. No great, sweeping equestrian movement was born of the lessons learned, however, for the only sources of capable cavalry teachers were Camulod in Britain and Corbenic itself, and even when interested parties attempted to lure high-ranking officers away from Pelles with rewards of money and position, they were doomed to fail because they lacked the infrastructure that had emerged from Camulod and was necessary to the successful undertaking of such a venture: the hundred-year-old cavalry background and the established blood lines and breeding programs.
The story of my five-champion challenge survived, too, although in a form that was considerably altered as years passed by. When I heard it repeated many years later, I was already an old man and I laughed at it, never thinking that such a silly piece of fabrication could be true in any sense, but some of my younger companions took great delight in telling me that it was my tale, and that I was the hero knight in it. I was astonished, and even quite ashamed, to be remembered in such an exaggerated tale, notwithstanding that my name was mentioned nowhere in it. It was a ludicrous distortion of what had really happened, embellished time and again until not a grain of recognizable truth remained in it.
Rather than living in the castle above the sea, I was a visitor in this tale, a stranger from outside, seeking to overthrow the evil lord of the castle and constrained to deal, time after time, with the implacable champions he sent against me, until I had overthrown his entire complement, at which time I entered the castle, claimed it as my own and slew the king.
I had been in Gaul for more than two years now and our entire complement from Camulod numbered in excess of six hundred souls, with nigh on five hundred of those being officers and troopers. Pelles’s cavalry army was firmly founded by now, with its own bloodstock and horse farms, armed camps and garrisons, and sound, solidly supported recruitment programs, and the advisory and supervisory capacities fulfilled by myself and my officers had become redundant. Pelles’s own army staff, headed jointly by Chief Cortix and Quintus Milo, was now every bit as competent as my own. Cortix and Milo, between them, commanded four complete alae of approximately two hundred and eighty men apiece, including officers—we had originally called them squadrons, but Milo, on assuming command, had chosen to go back to the old Roman name for cavalry regiments—and although they were barely over half strength when their Camulodian members were subtracted, they would be at full strength within half a year, once the next full intake of recruits was trained. As they had been from the outset, the alae were called the Reds, Whites, Blues and Golds. Our original Camulodian troopers—the trainers of the new army—now constituted the Pied Squadron, with black-and-white banners and maxillae, and they had become a self-contained and self-governing entity nowadays, little more than auxiliary troops.
As the days passed by in the aftermath of the Games, I found myself thinking more and more about that, and about the need to return to Camulod, where the war against Connlyn in the north had become a bleeding ulcer in the side of Arthur’s vision of Britain.
My concerns came to a head one night when I was at table with Pelles, in his main dining hall, attending a celebration dinner in honor of his two newest squadron commanders, a brilliant young rider called Serdec, who sprang from Getorix’s Wolf clan, and one Gaius Balbus, a half-Roman warrior from Chilperic’s Bear clan whose mother was Chilperic’s own daughter. The two new officers had been inducted into the Brotherhood of Corbenic, the grand-sounding name that Pelles’s officers had awarded themselves less than a year earlier, upon being judged capable of surviving as cavalrymen without our Camulodian input, and the celebrations were reaching the point at which the king and his personal guests would be permitted, and indeed expected, to quit the festivities and leave the younger subalterns to their own amusement.
Already tired of the loud and drunken antics of my subordinates, I had been idly watching young Mordred approach one of the tables, carrying a large and obviously heavy jug with extreme care, biting his tongue with the effort of concentrating upon not spilling a drop. He reached the table, which was occupied by a group of the most senior soldiers, and craned forward, stretching out his arms to place his burden on the table, but I could see he was not strong enough to lift it as high or as far as was required. Before he could drop it, however, one of the men turned and took it from him, swinging it easily to the table with one hand and ruffling the lad’s hair with the other. I saw the boy’s face flush with pleasure even as another man turned with a grin and a wink and passed him a large wedge of soft bread stuffed with a generous slice of roasted pork. Young Mordred grasped it, his eyes shining, and nodded his thanks before scuttling away, grinning broadly and already tearing hungrily at his prize. As one of the castle “boys”—squires, pot boys, stable lads and apprentices—he would not normally be fed until everyone in the Great Hall had eaten his fill, so this beneficence from the senior soldiers’ table was high privilege indeed.
Now, the mere sight of the lad scuttling happily away between the tables of officers and ignored by all of them reminded me with surprising force that he was the son of Arthur Pendragon, High King of Britain, and that his father still knew nothing of the boy’s existence. That ignorance on Arthur’s part meant that I had not yet performed my duties to the full, and had become culpably delinquent in failing to do so, since I had known the truth now for nigh on a year. That, I now realized, was the basis of all the growing discontent I had been feeling for weeks and even months. It had been plain to me now for some time that Merlyn had said nothing to Arthur about the lad, having decided for reasons of his own that the information I had sent him in my letter was not sufficiently important for the King’s attention, and although I had no knowledge of his reasons for thinking so, I decided that he was wrong and that it was high time for me to take young Mordred home, in defiance of Merlyn if need be, to meet his father. And his stepmother.
It was high time, in fact, for me to take my troopers home, all of them. Their task here in Gaul was done, and Pelles’s kingdom could now survive without them.
My train of thought was interrupted when Pelles stood up, bringing the entire group at his table to their feet, but as I filed out of the hall in the king’s wake, nodding to smiling faces here and there as I went, I made up my mind to broach the subject to him later that same night if opportunity presented itself. Pelles was more of a king nowadays than he had ever been and he seemed constantly to be surrounded by envoys and supplicants of one stamp or another. More than half of his table guests that night had been complete strangers to me, although I had been introduced to all of them at one time or another in the course of that day, and even as we walked from the hall, he was clustered about by four richly dressed men, two of whom I had earlier dismissed in my own mind as prating idiots but all of whom were intent upon capturing his full attention. I watched them ruefully, knowing that I would have little chance of sequestering Pelles that night, and in fact it was three more days before I was able to speak to him with no one else around. I managed it then, too, only with the collusion of his sister Serena, who arranged it by the simple expedient of summoning Pelles to her presence—he dropped everything and came to her immediately, as he always did—and telling him that I needed to talk to him, after which she left the two of us alone.
It was obvious from the moment I began to speak of what was on my mind that the possibility of my leaving with my troopers to return to Camulod had simply not occurred to him until then. He was profoundly shocked to hear what I had to say, and some of the confidence appeared to drain visibly out of him as he began to consider the ramifications of what I was suggesting, because the first and most evident result of our departure would be a gaping hole in the defenses he had built for his kingdom. Even the removal of our horses and breeding stock would cause Corbenic’s paddocks and stables to look far larger and far more empty than they actually were, because when we removed ourselves from his domain, we would be taking upwards of a thousand trained war horses with us. I spent the following hour trying to reassure him that our departure would be very gradual, spread over the same amount of time as our incremental arrival had been, and that by the time the last of our men and horses boarded the departing vessels of our final fleet of transports, his own people would have had ample time to replenish their herds and to train replacement cavalry mounts for their cavalry troopers.
Pelles came around to my way of seeing things, eventually, but he was still a chastened man, a king with much on his mind, when the two of us finally parted.