let’s go.”

Eleyne waved in farewell as we moved out. “My thanks go with you. Let me be first to salute my royal lord.”

“And I second,” Kay shouted, ranging in at my knee. “You’ve taught them all to stand straight again. Ave, Artorius.”

“God and Arthur!”

I led them on toward the crown.

We picked up the road in an hour, pushing the horses hard. Our men rode in close formation, no straggling now. Bedivere relinquished his lance to Trystan, claiming his right to bear the dragon standard at my side. So it was the two of us in the lead, the red dragon overhead. Then Gareth, Kay, Trystan and Geraint with the piked heads, and behind them the massed hundreds of the heart of west Britain.

My head burned and throbbed as we rode, bleeding afresh now and then. I rode with no helmet or armor, in ragged linen shirt and filthy trousers spotted with blood and blackened with smoke. That was how the people of Britain, for whom all the horrors were done, would accept me. They would see the reality of what they wished for. Their king, their executioner, their

chosen sacrifice.

As we rode, we kept alert for danger. There were only a few farmers on the road with their carts, hurrying aside as we thundered past. Sixteen miles to Kaelcacaestir. Thirteen. Nine.

Now across the open moor we sighted the low regular line of the old Roman fort walls and the dust cloud rising from the plain beyond. Four miles. We began to spy larger groups of people, nobles and peasants, all moving toward the gathering on the plain. The nobles swung away from the road, the oxen lumbered the wagons out of our way. All saw the red dragon flying and knew who had come to be crowned.

Two miles. The dust cloud loomed nearer and larger, the multitudes seething in their color and flash, distorted with distance but growing into individual shapes on the plain. Great masses of men and women and horses and flags and steel. The wagons of the peasants, the pennanted liners of the great, crosses

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of the monks, the bishops with their gold and silver croziers catching the sunlight.

One mile. Now we turned off the road toward the meeting plain, passing by the small thatch-and-wattle village where timid kerns peered out to see who rode so bloody and begrimed with severed heads on their lances to the place of choosing.

“A dragon. A dragon. It is Arthur!”

And Merlin whispered, Ave, Imperator.

“All very well to take the crown,” Trystan worried beside me, gesturing ahead at the throng. “But what makes you think they’ll take you?”

My head ached savagely. I shook it to clear my sight. “Because I’m all they’ve got.”

Trystan grinned. “It’s your humility one loves.”

Geraint cried suddenly, “Arthur, look sharp!”

Out from the milling crowd, directly in our path rode a column of armed horsemen led by a gray-bearded man who wore a gold circlet about his helmet.

“Mark,” Geraint hissed. “God rot his guts, riding straight and proud as if his murdering hands were clean.”

“Don’t slow down,” I said. “We stop for nothing.”

King Marcus gave an order we couldn’t hear. The column opened left and right in a flank line directly across our path, some with drawn swords.

I called to the gray king. “Marcus, you know who I am. Don’t try to stop me.”

He answered smoothly, “It is nothing, Count Arthur. Just that you come straight through the ranks of the people. Turn aside and take your place with the other princes. We have waited for you.”

“And in the strangest places,” Geraint jeered. “Do you not see some friends on our lance heads?”

Marcus was too distant for me to read his expression, but it seemed he froze a moment.

Ave. Somewhere deep in the crowd the cry began. Ave for someone.

The distance narrowed between Marcus and myself. One hundred yards. Fifty. “Marcus, get out of my way or I’ll run you into the ground.”

“Boy,” he threw back at me, “you threaten a king?”

“There’s only one king here today, and it’s me. Move aside, old man.” I twisted in the saddle, feeling the dried blood crack around my mouth as I shouted the order. “Forward—charge!”

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Ave, said Merlin again.

I dropped my lance point and ran straight at Marcus. The king held his ground for a moment, as if he couldn’t believe I’d charge, then felt the force of thai human arrow-shaft of purpose, my men, streaking for him. With a quick hand signal, he swung aside. His men crowded back to let us through. Not a sword was raised against us.

Now we surged through the massed crowd. My men pulled ahead in two long files to sheathe with iron my path to the imperial sword.

Ave!

Princes on all sides, and behind them the armed men that propped up their jealousies, their prides and their fatal indecision. And behind those, the common people, gathered from as far as men could walk or ride. Dumnonii who remembered me at Neth, the armorers from Severn who forged our swords under Kay and remembered why they were made. Men from the Catuvellauni whose homes were their own again and who knew the reason for the smoke over the midlands. Further on, the people of the north, Parisi and Brigantes who were alive today because I could ride eighty miles overnight to beat an enemy from their riverbanks. And over all the people and the dust rose the great, rocking, resounding echo of that cry begun on a hill near the Severn long ago.

Ave/

There was Cador at the head of his Parisi tribunes and ministers. I reined in abreast of him for a moment, searching for Guenevefe. Cador flinched visibly from the stench of us.

“Where is Guenevere, Prince?”

“Behind the walls of Eburacum,” Cador said. “With the gates

locked.”

“She’ll open them for me,” I told him.

“I believe Agrivaine gave orders to the contrary.”

“Oh yes, the busy Agrivaine. If you’re wondering where he is now,” I laughed, “he’s half a day south stoutly refusing to join me. Can you manage a smile for that, Cador?”

We moved on up the path the common people cleared before us. They were cheering, but the faces close by showed their horror at the sight of me.

“Has he painted himself, then?”

“That’s blood. The man’s half dead.”

“Where’s he been?”

“They can’t kill Arthur. They can’t kill the Pendragon!”

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“Pendragon! Pendragon!”

Ave!

At the top of a low rise the mound of stones stood as in my death-dream, the great sword jutting hilt up from the top, I dismounted and gave the order: “Fan out. Cover the hill.”

It seemed the top of my head was about to come off. I reeled with pain and exhaustion and would have fallen but for the arm that gripped me.

“Come, Artos,” said Bedivere in my ear. “Just a bit farther.”

We went up the rise together, Gareth, Kay, Trystan and Geraint coming after with their lances. Old Anscopius stood near the sword, gripping his crazier amid a gaggle of priests and monks.

“I’ve come to take what’s mine, Anscopius.”

The wrinkled, hawk-fierce visage did not draw back from the bloody apparition of me. “This sword is not for taking, Count, but for choosing.”

Ave! Ave! Pendragon!

“Do you hear them?” I choked in the dust and heat. “If ever there was a choosing, they’ve done it already. Did Christ choose?”

Anscopius stood his ground. “What are you doing, blasphemer? You wear no thorns. There is no cross here, no sacrifice.”

“Is there not?” I turned to face the multitudes below as the cry went up again and again like the baying of hounds on a scent. “What do you think they’re cheering for, Anscopius? For the blood. For the heads on my lances. For the man who can wallow in this filth to give them what they want for as long as they want. The Irish killed their kings when they lost their virility. We only betray them and leave them to die alone like Ambrosius.”

I reached out a dirty hand to grab a handful of his vestment. “So you cry Ave for me like the rest of them, old man. Say it! Because you made us, you and the rest of those princes that deserted Vortigern and wouldn’t support Ambrosius. You made us necessary. And now we no longer serve. We take. Because there’s no one else strong enough to do the job or stop us. Say it!”

Anscopius looked at me, then at the sweaty, intractable faces of Kay and my captains, and saw the truth of it. We were made fit for what we must do by what we had done.

“Ave,” he mouthed ironically. In submission, in pity, in compassion, in a wise old man’s understanding of too much.

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“We both know the mob, Arthur. But now they cheer you. Hail, Emperor of Britain.”

And still there was a choosing of a kind. As I moved to the mound of stones, the Ave that had never ceased since I came on the field grew to a roar that was no syllable or word, but only an unending wave of assent from a single throat called Britain. And as 1 grasped the sword hilt, they knelt; first a few in front, then more, then all, going down on their knees in a rippling wave of

acceptance.

You are the god-king now. Merlin whispered. Do you love

them?

Yes, I—no. I don’t know.

It doesn’t matter, hostage that you are. See how they kneel. See where your men ring you round. How can any doubt you are the chosen? And does it impress you, Druith-foot? Does it make

you drunk?

No, Merlin. Look at the bloody mess of me. Look at the faces of my men, at Bedivere who left his youth on the Wall and in the midlands. Look at the heads on the lances, smell the death in my clothes. J know the price. A king is only a sacrifice. Another sacrifice will come after me. Flint before bronze before iron. Waves on a shore, shaping it a grain at a time. You taught me that and I accept it.

Then take the sword from the stone. Ave, Imperator.

I lifted the imperial blade and held it high for the people to see. Ave—Merlin’s voice faded but the roar went on shaking the earth and sky.

“Damn it, ‘torius, wait!”

Kay’s shorter legs labored to match my stride as we hurried toward Gareth waiting with our horses, past the holiday-fair crowd of merchants, jugglers, wine sellers, thieves and religious reformers who mushroomed on the plain in the wake of king-choosing.