Why do men strain at the curtain that hides tomorrow? Why do seers grow rich pretending to pull it aside for a blurred, distorted view? It is hardly a blessing.
Our villa lay a day’s ride up the Severn valley from where the river widens into the sea channel. This has always been the land
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of our tribe, the Dobunni, and our cousins, the Silures. For a hundred years before I was born, we Pendragon wore the Roman toga fastened over our left arm and the enameled gold armlet of tribal chieftainship on our right. By the year of my birth, father called himself Roman more out of habit than fact. It had been fifty years since Constantine went into Gaul with the last of the combat legions, leaving only the thinly spread auxiliaries from which we tried to build an army again. Suddenly we were defenseless, a prosperous people used to four centuries of unbroken peace and order. When the Romans left, we crowned a new emperor in the imperial name and others in quick succession as the separate tribes dissented from one another and rose up to slay die leader they themselves might have hailed a year before.
And the wolves waited outside our walls and grinned and watched: the Irish across one sea, the Saxons across another, the Picts in the north. Their envoys came and saw the lush lowlands poorly defended and went home to sharpen their swords. Out of the confusion of tribes came a Council of Magistrates, sub-kings with their own people’s interests at heart. They raised one of their own to the purple, a Stlure called Vortigem, and he stopped the warring for a time.
In some ways, it’s marvelous to be old. You have years of hindsight to play with. Grandfathers sit by the fire rumbling sagely of what should have been done at a certain time and place to prevent a certain thing. Trust in this or pray to that god, life has a way of bringing the right man sufficient to the time, though the time may not know it. So with Vortigem—inglorious, ignoble street squabbler, the petty bargainer in the marketplace, the cold, suspicious face of a losing gambler, the peasant shrewdness, the small man’s need for endless self-explanation, the veneer of courtesy and court rhetoric quickly dropped for street vulgarity among cronies or in moments of stress. Not a hero, not a man to remember.
But I say he came to power against the wall and ruled with his back to it, until that day 1 saw him in our house. He inherited the empty shell of Roman form and power, half-trained, ill-equipped legions that would not fight outside their own province. He inherited the threat of invasion from three sides, and when these threats became real, he faced them with timorous chieftains not yet imperiled enough to rise above self-interest, an empty treasury and letters of refused help from a Rome that could no longer repel the barbarians at its own gate.
What would you have done?
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If you were a hero, beset with three vicious dogs, you might fling yourself on one, but the other two would destroy you. You could guard against all three, but how long before one or all charged? The bargainer in Vortigern threw a bone to the worst of the dogs and set it loose on the others. He invited the Saxons as mercenaries, fed them and gave them a kennel.
But the dogs grew too numerous for the kennel, always more of them, always greedier, demanding where they used to ask. Soon the whole east of Britain was theirs and the treasury empty again. Then people said to old Vortigern that he was a compromised, humiliated fool and it was time for new blood on the throne. “A leader!” they cried (they always do), a fighter, a name that rings with the glory of Rome. And they turned to Ambrosius Aurelianus, commander of Vortigern’s armies.
Thus this one day at Uther’s villa, the high men of the west gathered to hail a new emperor while the grubby street peddler slipped away to oblivion. In the glow of hope, few will recall the lesser man who bought the new heroes time, carved out with
pitiful, broken tools.
I say this so that you might understand that battered, bartered old man—Vitalinus, called Vortigern, Emperor of Britain. He had the soul of a tax collector. I would not put such at the head of a mounted charge, but to bargain on wile and an empty purse, I would send Vortigern before Lancelot, Bards, when you shape a song to heroes, drop in a verse for Vortigern and let it begin: “Each man in his time.”
Our villa was built in the old days of the long peace. You couldn’t defend it for an hour, but never since, not even in Camelot, have I so loved a place.
The plan was the usual Roman square with the villa itself built around three sides, the fourth closed with a low, white-washed wall that formed a wide courtyard. The baths and kitchens ranged down one side, with the slave quarters opposite; family chambers joined them to make the base of the square, and the whole stretched out room by room at ground level to catch as much sun as possible. Stables, smithy and auxiliary kitchens and quarters were outside the wall. Floors were mosaicked, well wanned in winter by hot air blown from ample stoke holes. The imperial engineers built it to last forever. I remember nothing earlier than this house, no other mother but Flavia. We raced into the courtyard bare minutes ahead of Vortigern’s
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party. Flavia was standing on the portico, small and plump, dressed to receive royalty and definitely impatient. Bedivere left us to go home; Ray and 1 slowed apprehensively as we approached our mother. Before we could speak, Flavia beckoned the house slaves, Scipio and Auius.
“Both of you to the baths with Scipio, and don’t dawdle. Aulus, lay out clean tunics, teil the women to feed them in their room tonight.”
Scipio whisked us away, and precious little time we had to splash about. He herded us through all three baths for a quick dip, oiled and scraped us efficiently, then toweled and trotted us back across the courtyard. Already the emperor’s guard milled about, rattling down from mounts, grooms leading the animals to the stables. The officers were of high rank, few lower than tribune. We had only a quick, wide-eyed glimpse of them before Aulus had us under his fussy wing for dressing and combing and Flavia’s special orders. We weren’t to go near the triclinium while our parents were dining with Ambrosius and the emperor. We would be brought in later to pay our respects and say good night. This would be a polite signal that dinner was over. The business and protocol of the accession were then to be discussed.
The dinner dragged on. We stretched out our own meal, played some knucklebones on the floor, bored and vaguely excited at the same time. I listened to the faint voices, distinguishing between them. The quiet, cadenced reason: Uther. The fluttering laugh like a startled bird, mother. There was another heard less often, clipped and precise. The fourth spoke often and long, monotonous as the beating of a hammer, rising above the others or boring through them, a voice like a toothache.
“That’s Vortigern,” said Kay. He peered close at me. “You’re squinting again. Does your head still hurt?”
My ears rang faintly and the golden boy Merlin danced through memory to the piping of his flute.
The moment arrived. Flavia came for us, ushered us solemnly down the hall with whispered warnings: “Arthur, don’t slouch. Kay, keep your finger out of your nose. Salute as your father taught you and answer clearly. It will just be a minute.”
We had to stand politely in the doorway for some time, waiting to be acknowledged. Even as we approached, that dogged voice droned on. Father and the gray, compact man who must be Ambrosius still reclined on their couches, but the emperor paced about the room, fat, rumpled, sparse hair uncombed. He
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looked sweaty and disagreeable even though our slaves had pampered him through the baths only three hours before.
Flavia said you could tell a Roman of equestrian rank by the cleanliness of the napkin spread over the end of his dining couch to catch the sauce drippings. Father’s had a dab here and there, the like for Ambrosius who was used to a rough table in camp. Mother’s napkin barely needed washing, but the martyred linen crumpled over Vortigern’s couch might have been used to wipe down a horse.
“Don’t trust the Council!” He was saying that as we came down the hall. “Get the army behind you—if you can call it that—and keep it there, don’t ask me what you’re going to pay mem with. Land or turnips, I guess. Haven’t been any new mintings for a hundred years and most of what there was is buried. One whiff of danger and those—princes buried it deep as they could. Fat lot of good, most of them got their, throats cut anyway. Well, they deserve it.”
The emperor paused to drink noisily, then grinned at father. “Ironic, isn’t it? Anywhere you go, you could be walking on a fortune, and not enough silver above ground to paint a button. ‘Where’s the army? Why aren’t we protected?’ I tell them, cough up, an army costs. Where in Christ’s name do you think it’s coming from? Where are your audit rolls, your tax schedules? You’re the Council of Magistrates, I tell them, the assembled princes of Britain, and you don’t even know where your money is. They’re so used to dodging taxes, they think it’s a right. They squeeze it out of the tenants. I tell you I’ve got no use for monks, but the buggers are right in screaming about the way the bloody landowners lay the taxes on their tenants and then can’t find five anas to support the army they whine for. Oh, one magnanimous feilow told me he’d let go two stableboys and his peacock keeper. Really tightening his belt. I flicked away a
tear.
“And they say betrayed them. let in the Saxons. You’re damned right I did. Because your noble peers, Uther, or their fathers at least, couldn’t agree with each other long enough to pay the troops. Because your father, Ambrosius—bless his memory, he was a good soldier, enemy or no—but he wouldn’t move his troops out of Efauracum when I needed them in the south.”