Shadow of the King by Helen Hollick Read Free Book Online Page B

drooping, ears flopped,
    hind legs resting. One or two, recognising him, whickered softly as he approached,
    ran his hand along a neck, gently pulling at an ear, touching a muzzle. You knew
    where you were with horses. They did not lie or cheat. They served, proud but
    without arrogance, with strength bound within gentleness. A horse gave you all
    it could without question. As did the Artoriani, his men.
    Arthur groaned, laid his face against the mane of the next horse in line, a broad-
    headed grey. Rome had no need of his fine, brave men. Bringing them over, all
    this expense and time and effort had been a knee-jerk panic reaction, a show of
    bravado, a threat. Live in peace with us, Euric, as did the brother you murdered,
    or face the consequences…only the consequences had turned out to be as threat-
    ening as a broken spear. He had not seen that possibility back in Britain—or had
    S h a d o w o f t h e k i n g 3 5
    he not wanted to see it? Had he, like his men, been so enthusiastic for a fight he
    had turned his eye and sense to the reality? He patted the horse. Too late to realise
    the suspected truth now. One nagging question persisted: had he only listened to
    what he had wanted to hear or to what he had been meant to?
    He moved to another horse, Bedwyr’s chestnut. His own favourite stallion,
    Onager, he had left in Britain. A damn good horse in battle, but a bad tempered
    brute with a will of his own. He would have been unsafe in the confines of
    those flat-bottomed transport ships.
    By seeking a treaty of peace, Rome was only doing what he had done as
    king, except on a larger, grander scale. Why fight if the need to spill blood
    could be averted by other means? He had settled peace in such a way back
    home—but by the Bull, he had not wasted all this time and energy in moving
    men and horses about unnecessarily! Ah, he countered his own thoughts, but
    then, he supposed it had been necessary. To bring his trained men and horses
    all this way had taken a great deal of effort and organisation. The loading and
    unloading of ships, the sea crossing, the march up from the estuary along the
    course of the river here to Juliomagus, their base camp for now. Manoeuvres
    that had taken weeks, not days to complete. If Euric had decided on taking an
    immediate defensive position, all this land would be blackened ruins by now.
    The town of Juliomagus, one mile or so distant, had been engulfed by the
    night, only a few scattered watch-tower lights glimmered in the darkness. The
    stars were different here, too. Bolder, sharper, a few down on the horizon he
    remembered seeing as a boy at his father’s estate downriver near Condivicnum.
    Only he had not known the great Uthr Pendragon to be his father then, for his
    identity had been hidden until it was safe to announce him for the son he was.
    Juliomagus had survived one bloody attack already, a few years past. The
    Saxons had been raiding along the river, building their homesteadings on the
    numerous islands, and, growing bolder, had tried for something more than
    holding a few scattered villages. The fighting had been bitter, but in the end
    Odovacer, their leader, had been driven out, running.
    The whole of Gaul was a simmering cauldron. If watched it would bubble
    away without harm, but if left to its own there was every possibility the heat
    would grow too high and the thing would boil and spurt over like a volcano
    blowing its top.
    Arthur wandered back to his tent. It was that which niggled him. He did not
    much like being a pot-watcher
    Ten
    October 468
    The remnants of an autumn dawn lay over the levels of the Summer
    Land. The Tor, eleven miles distant as the raven would fly, sat like a faery
    island rising solid amid the white, shape-shifting mist, and as the sun rose, deep,
    black shadows lengthened away from the ramparts and ditches of the king’s
    stronghold of Caer Cadan. The heart-place of Arthur, the Pendragon. Finger
    shadows stretched out across the moving