Tactful Cador. 1 learned later it wasn’t Uther he knew, but my real mother, Ygema.

“The manner of your address somewhat disrupted my memory.” Cador dropped his eyes again to the schedule. “But the emperor restores it.” His eyebrows went up as he read. “Indeed. Indeed. Well. Who is Bedivere ap Gryffyn, is he present?”

Bedivere strode forward to my side, saluting so sharply his gear rattled: “Sir!”

None of this was lost on Cador or my fellow commanders who, by Jesu and Mithras, would know themselves in the presence of the regular army.

“You must understand, Lord Arthur. We have not been what you would call a real legion for some years. We commend your zeal.” Cador raised his voice to the entire assembly. “And we read the emperor’s amendment to your commission, as follows: ‘To these two officers, for engagement of Saxon raiders against the heaviest numerical odds, the perpetual right to wear the gold laurel of valor.1 ” Cador handed me my roll. “To you, the fifth squadron and our wannest congratulations.”

Bedivere and I could only stare at each other; in the regular army, life was cheap and bravery common. The gold laurel wreath went more often to grieving widows than living men. The very human Bedivere prayed, “God stop us from earning another,” but I was less impressed by the miraculous honor than by the new respect in Guenevere’s gaze, even let my eye linger when she looked my way. Aye, lady, we do such things in the south. Aye, there were a hundred of them, more or less. The distinction was more for what she thought of it.

Of course, Cador was too subtle a diplomat to let my honors crown the investment ceremony. He rose and signaled to the guards at the entrance. “My lords-commanders, let me now introduce you to your enemy—the Pict.”

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,. Commotion ft the door, the sound of grated chains. The crowd parted as two guards led in a dwarfish, swarthy creature with matted, blue-black hair. The muscles of his broad back were crossed and recrossed with the festered ridges of a whip. Standing erect, he would barely top the shoulder of the smallest man present. He was naked save for a coarse wolf hide around his middle; the manacled arms were tattooed with strange designs. When the guards pulled him to his feet, I saw that his high cheekbones were each grooved with two straight scars into which blue woad had been worked to make them vivid and indelible.

1 felt a wave of disgust and pity. They must have starved him besides the whippings. His black eyes held the agony in check behind stoic watchfulness. We learned later that Cador had only kept him alive to show us. The prince came down from the dais, holding a delicate cloth to his nose as he approached the prisoner.

“We caught this stealing food at Corstopitum. Silent and quick as a monkey, but not quick enough to save it. We see these so rarely, I caged it out of curiosity. You see, this is one of those wretched lumps our peasants call Faerie. We could not glean much even under the whip. They seem to feel less pain than humans. Calls itself Melga. Says its people are the Prydn, something like that. One of the three bucks of a female whose name it grunted out but which, for the soul of me, I can’t pronounce,”

Cador glanced around at us with an indulgent smirk. “Fascinating. The males do not take a single wife as Christian men, or even’a number of wives. The bitches keep several bucks to litter with. It’s said even Brude, King of the Picts, must choose a successor from the female line.”

His nose took brief refuge in the perfumed cloth. “Unusual, is it not? As a doting father, 1 might not flinch to see Guenevere wed one of our deserving young prince-milites. But can you conceive what chaos to the natural order if she were to take all of them at once?”

Even the priests roared at that, Guenevere harder than anyone else. “Aye, father,” she called over the cackling, “and what sleep for Guenevere?”

“A busy little animal,” said Cador when the levity died down. “It raises sheep and cattle when it can’t steal them, and breeds its own in a lair so foul no self-respecting dog would enter it, or else on the bare moor where the sickly-bom are left to die under a rock. It knows no mercy. It builds nothing, owns nothing, but it can move with no more sound than the moon

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slipping behind cloud. Some say they have the power of a boucca to change their shapes. They can look like a goat, a hummock of turf, a rock, a hare—”

Then why didn’t he change into a hare and escape, I thought?

“—One can’t say. It’s only known that their victims rarely see them.”

The filthy little lump didn’t look very magical or smell very human, crouching in his dumb misery at the hind end of his life—more like the wolf whose skin covered his loins. But a wolf who knew it was going to die.

“So be wary, my lords.” Cador dismissed the creature with a cursory gesture. “Dispose of it quickly. No need to let it suffer more.”

When the guards had dragged the man through the door, two servants bustled about the chamber, dipping their hands in bowls of rose water and flicking the perfumed drops into the polluted air. Cador regained his chair of state and motioned us commanders to him.

“You are all commended for your valor.” A glance at me. “Nor do we pretend to school men who may wear the gold laurel. Nevertheless. You have seen your enemy, such as he is. You may have heard he paints himself blue. So he does, if he wishes to be seen. If he does not …”

Cador handed Gawain a short, frail arrow, flint-tipped, fletched with ragged feathers, the shaft not of solid hardwood but the straightened stem of some bush or perhaps bog weed. Agrivaine passed it to me with brief contempt: “This thing couldn’t kill a baby.”

“It doesn’t have to.” Cador made his point with silken efficiency. “Though you’re wrong; it could kill an ox. The head is poisoned with hemlock or worse. The slightest scratch is enough to put a man abed for days if not treated immediately. When you ride north of the Wall, let your eyes be everywhere. Otherwise this arrow may be your last sight of Picts or anything else.”

East from Solway to the mouth of the Tyne, across the neck of northern Britain, Hadrian built the Wall when Rome was still an empire. From sea to sea the stone spine runs over barren hills. Forts and roads have been built beyond it, but have never endured. Legionaries peering north from the lonely mile castles could truly say they stood at the end of their world, and mis-48

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spelled sentiments crudely daubed on its stones left no doubt which end they considered it:

BETTER TEN YEARS VP AN ELEPHANT’S ASS THAN ONE MORE YEAR ON THE WALL. C. FLAV. VI LEGIO

Some of them came from the south and the sun to shiver out their service in the never-ceasing wind:

HEP-SVT, IX LEGIO NILE BORN IN THE RA-SVN, MAY HE NOT DIE HERE IN THE CVRSED LAND OF SET.

Some men scratched the only grave markers of near-nameless friends: HERE THE ARROW CAVGHT SILVIVS; THE SYRIAN NAMES … DIED HERE. And others too faint to read, illegible names, illegible men who faded and blew away with the dust to limbo.

We couldn’t wait on the Wall, but patrolled far beyond it to the ruined heath-villages and through the bare hills. We learned expensive lessons like the mean harmony of an arrow keening above the wind; that there must be armor to cover the arms and legs as well as the chest, more flexible than the old stiffened ox hide. That we must breed horses large enough to carry more weight without losing speed. But we never learned fast enough. The arrows flew, the men died or tossed in fever, but we never saw where the missiles came from, and even those under me with some education came to believe that the Picts were descended from evil /wwcca-spirits. Time has no hour marks in such a place. The wind blows, the rain falls, the snows come and melt, the sun shines or hides in fog, the flies buzz, the wind blows …

We were miles north of the Wall that day, the patrol watering at a ford half a mile back; a long way forward for two men alone, but fatigue can dull judgment. This day’s work should have gone to the fourth squadron, whose area overlapped our own, but Trystan was indisposed this week, black drunk in his tent, and his Cornish riders wouldn’t budge without him. My own men, weary from one long ride, had to make another with only a few hours’ rest.

I slipped out of the saddle and looked around. To the west a

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burned-out village. To the north a long hill crowned with a ring of ancient stones. On a sober day, Trystan had reported pony tracks leading east. Peredur read others going west. This general area seemed where they might meet if meeting was their mind. Sheepherders we let pass, the occasional lone figure glimpsed at a distance, never close, but a larger group could mean a potential raid on the Brigantes, who paid Cador for protection.

The exhaustion felt like grit under my eyelids. I rubbed at them and held out my hand to Bedivere. “Water bag.”

He passed it to me, concerned. “The old sickness?”

“Haven’t felt right since this morning.” Since winter was more like it, but Bedivere was scraped thin too, windburn and worry lines cut into his face and etched with dust that never seemed to wash out, the sharp blue Belgae eyes reddened around the pupils and buried in crow’s-feet from squinting into glare.

“You’re worn to a ghost, Artos, tattered as your clothes. Will you rest when we get back to Cilurnum?”

I sagged down in the grass. “If there’s half a chance.”

“Na, na, no ifs, no half-chances. Promise me.”

“All right, I’ll rest.”

“Cross your heart on it.”

He hadn’t asked that since we were boys, but he was serious now and dead right. Without a long rest, I wouldn’t be fit to ride again. I drew the ritual X across my chest.

“Cris croes tdn poetk, Bedwyr-bach. Who’s got the maps?”