I cannot think of Camulod without thinking of horses. They were
everywhere and they dominated my boyhood. The life of the place
revolved completely around them ... them and the men who rode them ...
and the earliest sights and smells I can remember are those of the
stables. Almost half of the entire hill top on which the fort was built
was given over to stables and exercise yards, and a huge, barren
campus, or drilling ground, had been created at the bottom of the hill.
At any hour of the day, you would find anywhere up to a dozen separate
groups of horsemen there, wheeling and manoeuvreing at the walk, the
canter or the gallop, and sometimes charging in great, massed
formations, so that in the summer months a pall of dust hung over the
plain and never settled. Horses, and the noises and the smells of
horses, were a constant and unchanging fact of life in Camulod, and
every generation of them bred there was bigger than the one that had
produced it.
I did not know that at the time, of course, because I was a boy,
and to my eyes they grew ever smaller. As a child I had been dwarfed by
the horses of the mounted troopers I admired as gods. As a boy of
eight, they still made me feel small until I mounted one of them. But
as a youth, approaching man's stature, I found that they had become
reasonably sized.
Throughout my boyhood, Publius Varrus, who was my great uncle and
my Guardian in the absence of my father, kept entire crews of smiths
working in revolving shifts in six separate smithies; four within the
fort itself, and two more in our villa on the plain beneath the hill.
The fort smithies were completely dedicated to the needs of the
cavalry. Two of them made nothing but horse shoes and harness and
armour. A third made nothing but nails; thousands upon thousands of
nails; nails for horseshoes and nails for building barracks and stables
and stalls; small nails and studs for boots; and rivets for leather and
for armour. In later years, this manufactory also produced the bronze
and iron wire for the tiny loops that we joined to make the chain link
armour our horsemen used. The fourth smithy in the fort produced
weapons for the riders: spears, swords and daggers, fitting products
for the largest and the noisiest forge of all.
On the plain below, the villa smithies suppied our the rest of
our Colony, producing all of the farming tools and implements and the
thousands of utensils required by a population of upwards of four
thousand people for their daily working needs.
In Camulod today, the fort, the smithies and the great, barren
drill field below the hill lie empty and unpeopled. The villas that it
guarded are no more. They are burned, torn down, despoiled, defaced,
their glorious mosaics ruptured and destroyed. The Colonists who lived
there are dead for the most part, the few, forlorn survivors scattered
on the winds. I alone remain, ancient in years but filled with youthful
memories, living hidden in the hills close by the Colony, in solitary
sanctuary, railing at the heavens by night, and thanking them by day
for leaving me with my hands, and my mind, sufficiently intact to allow
me to set down my tale.
I have no sense of faith that men will read the words I write.
None live whom I would wish to read this tale, and only few who could.
The men who roam this land at will today are brutal, fierce in their
savagery and awful in their pagan ignorance. They know no gods but Lust
and Gluttony; no love but Satiety; and their women match their
baseness. The art of reading, and of writing words, is dead in Britain.
And yet I write, because I must. Mine is the only voice left still
alive, though muted to scratchings on parchment, to tell this tale of
what once was and what might _ could _ have been.
All of the treasures that filled Camulod are shrunk to four, and
they are lodged with me here in this small stone hut. One is a window
of glass, so clear and fine as to be almost transparent. One is a
mirror of lustrous, polished silver, owned by my Aunt Luceiia long ago
_ I retain it in memory of her beauty, keeping it clear and
untarnished, but have not dared to look into it these thirty years.
Another is the wondrous, shining sword which is my sacred trust. It
lies securely hidden in the pit concealed at the rear of my hut.
The fourth of these treasures has value to my eyes and mind
alone. It is a tiny mountain of papyrus and fine parchment, covered in
the writing of four clear, separate hands, one of them my own.
Now that I am old and toothless, I am driven to write this story
down, to continue and complete the chronicle begun by my grandfather
Caius Britannicus almost a century ago, and carried on by his friend,
my great-uncle Publius Varrus.
I have been a scribbler since childhood, aping my uncle Varrus,
who would spend hours each day writing in his parchment books, but I
could frighten myself, I think, were I to give way to the awe I feel
when I open my chests of parchments and papyrus and look at the sheer
bulk of what still remains of all I have collected down the years. All
I require to collate it is time, however, and time I have; time in
abundance.
I will not die too soon, I think, although all who gave my life
its meaning and its richness are now gone. Longevity is my penance;
fidelity to my tale, my burden.
For years now, I have been winnowing these writings, burning the
major part, the trivia, and setting aside those elements essential to
the telling of my tale. The first part is done, and ashes lie mounded
in a shrunken, rain-sodden hillock in front of my house, here in my
hidden valley in the hills. All that remains now is to arrange the
remnants in sequence, and fill in the few remaining gaps.
This tale is mine, to a great extent, since mine was the living
of it. Much of what I have written, however _ the parts I did not
experience directly _ I discovered simply because I am Merlyn and men
feared to lie to me, believing me magical. I did not care to
disillusion them, since it suited my purpose later in my life to be
both magical and feared. Those attributes ensured my solitude, and
therefore my freedom to do what I must do, and I taught myself well to
be uncaring of what men thought of me.
I taught myself well, I say, but it was far from easy. I was not
always lonely, nor feared and shunned by men. I was not even dreaded as
Merlyn, for forty years and more. My name was Cay, short for Caius
Merlyn Britannicus, and I had a sunny childhood, unmarred by pain or
sorrow. As a young man, I enjoyed my status as a leader in our Colony
and my life was filled with laughter, with adventures, and with
friends. Later still, I learned the joys and the grief of love _ and
lived beyond them, filling my days with duty as men did at that time,
until my forty second year. Only then did I learn the awful secret that
divorced me forever from the lives of other, ordinary men and brought
to me all the pains of solitude.
I was born in the year that brought catastrophe to Britain: the
first year of the new, fifth century from the birth of The Christ; the
year the Christians call 401 Anno Domini. The world our fathers had
known disappeared forever in the course of that fateful year, when the
great change occurred, and yet the awful significance of the change
itself was slow in penetrating our world.
It was not that the word spread slowly; news of calamity always
travels fast, but this cataclysm was so huge, so overwhelming in its
implications, that it defied credence ... so much so that people,
hearing the news and passing it along to others, remained themselves
unwilling to countenance the truth of it. It was so appalling, so
terrifying in its ramifications, that people would not talk of it. They
could not discuss it. They could not digest it. They could not believe
it. Yet neither could they long avoid it, for the emptiness of the
roads, stretching unmarched for mile after silent mile bore witness to
the truth of it. The brashness of thoughtless children playing noisily
in the streets of the deserted camps bore witness to the truth of it.
The keening of abandoned women, deserted in thousands throughout the
land, bore witness to the truth of it. And the terror of the people of
the eastern and south eastern coasts and of the northern reaches below
the great Wall Hadrian had built bore witness to the truth of it.
The Eagles had departed ... flown away. The Legions had been
called home. The Armies were gone, leaving only a skeleton presence to
maintain a show of strength while the Empire struggled for its life
elsewhere. Within six years, even the few legions left behind had
followed that first exodus, and after four hundred years of Pax Romana
_ Roman peace, protection and prosperity in Britain _ the country lay
soft and undefended, at the mercy of her enemies.
