PROLOGUE

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 hill­top 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 on the plain at the bottom of the hill. At any hour of the day, you would find up to a dozen separate groups of horse­men there, wheeling and manoeuvring 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 very small child I was 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 horseshoes and harness and armour. A third made nothing but nails, thou­sands upon thousands of them: nails for horseshoes and nails for building barracks and stables and stalls; small nails and studs for boots; and rivets for leather and 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 supplied the rest of our Colony, producing all of the farming tools and implements and the thousands of utensils required for their daily working needs by a population of upwards of four thousand people.

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 writing is dead in Britain. And yet I write, because I must. Mine is the only voice left, 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 that is my sacred trust. It lies securely hidden in the pit concealed at the rear of my dwelling.

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 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. Even my father, Picus Britannicus contributed a few of his personal evaluations and followed this family’s tradition of struggling to find words to write down to describe the lives we have led.

I have been a scribbler since childhood, aping 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. 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. My sole remaining task is to arrange the remnants in sequence and provide sufficient additional details to bridge the few gaps that yet persist. All I require to achieve that end is time, and time I have—time in abundance. Longevity is my penance; fidelity to my tale, my burden.

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 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. As a boy, 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 the status of Sorcerer and all the allied 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 began, and yet the awful significance of the change itself was slow in penetrating our world.

It was not that the word spread slowly—the speed of calami­tous news is always swift—but this cataclysm was so huge, so overwhelming in its implications, that it defied credence, 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 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.