Camulod Chronicles Book 8 - Clothar the Frank (28 page)

It was evident, however, that I was not expected to select a stallion, so that left me facing a choice between a mare or a gelding— all of the colts were too immature to qualify as horses in this instance, I suspected. I examined all of them again, and all of them were beautiful, but my eyes kept returning to the big black animals.

A short time after that, I reached the door of the small smithy, leading the horse I had chosen. Tiberias Cato, hunched over his forge and peering into the blue-white coals, paid me no heed until I stepped across the threshold and called out to him. He started slightly and straightened up, swinging to face me, his eyes taking in the horse I was holding. He tossed the tongs he had been holding onto a heavy workbench and came towards me, wiping his hands on a rag he had pulled from somewhere.

"Why'd you pick him?" he asked when he reached me.

"He's beautiful," I replied. "I've never seen his like before. What kind is he?"

"Forest horse. Wild stock. But why him in particular? He's not two years old yet."

"He's magnificent, and when he's two, and older, he'll be the best here."

"Will he, by God? D'you say so?" Listening to him say that, I actually believed he had not realized that and was surprised, but I had not yet come to an appreciation of sarcasm or irony. His eyes were already moving beyond me to another mount, and he pointed. "That one. Let's see you mount him."

Not catch him or bring him, but mount him. I turned to look at the bay gelding Cato had indicated and then swung back, tightening my grip on the reins in my hand. "Why can't I mount this one?"

"Because he's not broke yet. Trying to ride him now could get you killed, or it could end up with his being ruined as a good horse. Besides, I showed you the one I want you to mount, and I'm waiting."

Disappointed, but no longer feeling rebellious, I quietly took the rope bridle off the black gelding, then loosened and removed the noose around his neck. I coiled my rope again and went after the bay, which stood placidly watching me and allowed me to come close enough to slip both the noose and the bridle over his head. He was not a tall horse, and his head was too big and heavy to be beautiful or even handsome, but he was stocky and deep chested, strongly muscled. When the bridle was secured, I led him to an old tree stump that was obviously much used as a mounting block and heaved myself up onto his broad back. The bay stood there with his head down, his ears twitching back towards me as though he was listening to my breathing. Apart from that, however, he remained motionless as I made myself comfortable.

Then he exploded into motion, leaping high into the air and spinning in a head-snapping half circle to land stiff-legged, head down, hooves together with his back bowed upwards so that he almost jarred me off, which was his intent. By sheer good fortune, this was a trick with which I was thoroughly familiar, having had to deal for more than a year with a cantankerous horse in King Ban's stables that had mastered the same turning leap and must have been one of this animal's relatives, and so I recognized the preliminary movements under me and adjusted to them practically without thought, relaxing my posture and leaning into his spinning jump, allowing the slackness of my body to absorb the shock of his stiff- legged landing.

He must have been greatly surprised to find himself still burdened after this exertion, because he stood stock-still for long enough to permit me to lock my fingers in the hair of his mane and hammer him in the ribs with my heels, and then he went into action again, bucking, rearing and spinning, determined to rid himself of me. I, for my part, was just as determined that he would not do so, because I had caught a glimpse of Tiberias Cato's face just before this second rampage erupted and it was plain to see that he was even more surprised than the horse was by its failure to reject me. And so the gelding cavorted and reared like a mad creature and I clung on, adapting to his every feint and trick until he stopped again, quivering with fury. I did not relax for a moment, however. I knew he was not yet finished and I stayed poised, ready to adjust to whatever he might do next. Even so, what he did caught me unprepared.

With a mighty surge of powerful muscles he launched himself into a run, his stride lengthening rapidly into a full gallop, and I rode him easily, enjoying the sensation of speed until I saw where he was taking me. We were headed directly towards a huge old solitary elm tree in the center of the paddock, and it was clear that he was either going to run straight into it or brush very closely past it, using it as a tool to scrape me off his back. Incredulous, I watched until there was no doubt of what he was doing: the rough bark of the tree would scrape along the horse's right side, and my right leg would not survive the impact.

A bare two leaps before disaster struck, I anchored my fists more solidly in his mane and swung my right leg backwards across his back, bringing my knees together on his left side, my right hip against his surging side. I allowed my body to swing down, straight- legged, until my feet hit the ground and rebounded, and then I used his speed to swing myself back up to straddle him again. I felt his speed start to flag immediately and he had no more tricks after that, so that I found it easy to turn him around and head him back towards Cato, his speed slackening until we drew to a halt in front of the stable master, whose face remained blank even after I had dismounted.

"They teach you to ride like that in Benwick?" was all he said.

"I've never been anywhere else."

"Hmm. King Ban, does he ride like that?"

I merely nodded, not knowing what else to tell him. I knew, from my riding instructor in Benwick, that even although I was a mere boy, a child, I was one of the best riders in Ban's kingdom and would one day be the best of all, but I did not want to say that to Tiberias Cato, lest he think me a braggart.

"I didn't think you'd last through his first jump."

I was on the point of telling him about the horse with the same trick in Benwick, but then decided to hold my tongue and asked him instead, "Does he do that often?"

The small man nodded. "Every time, even with me. Not many people can stay up there when he does that."

"Did you know he would try to scrape me off?"

He shook his head, frowning. "No. I've never seen him do that before. That's something new. He's a clever whoreson, for a gelding."

I shrugged. "It didn't work, though, so he might not try it again. I mean, it's not as if he's human, is it?"

"No, but there's times when he seems to come damn close. Anyway, take the bridle off him and turn him loose, then get out of here. You're not supposed to be here at this time of day. No student is. Come back the day after tomorrow when your lessons start. What's your name?"

I told him, and he nodded and pursed his lips, and such was my self-conceit that I saw nothing strange in being accepted instantly by Tiberias Cato, Master of the Stables, a unique and formidable being respected and feared by every student in the school. I was, after all, Clothar of Benwick, adopted son of King Ban of Benwick, since birth used to being treated with deference and respect.

It may have taken me as long as a week to realize that Tiberias Cato was no respecter of names or rank and that he cared not a whit what people in the world beyond his paddocks thought of anyone else. In Cato's eyes, there was but one natural ranking in the order of men, and it lay visible in the ease and skill—or in the lack of ease and skill—that they demonstrated in their relationship with horses. Cato himself was more centaur than human being and he rode as though the animal beneath him was an extension of his body. I cannot remember ever seeing him use his hands to control a horse while mounted. All his control—and it was prodigious—was exerted from his hips downward, leaving his hands free at all times to do whatever he required them to do. It was very impressive, even awe-inspiring to watch, and yet in order to watch and appreciate his mastery of what he did, you had to be aware of it, and the astonishing truth was that most people looked at Cato, then through him or past him, without ever seeing how gifted he was. They dismissed him idly as some form of stable groom with the seniority of age and were too blinded by their own inadequacies to be able to discern anything of the magic he worked with horses.

I had no such blinkers hampering my view of the stable master. He fascinated me from the day I first saw him ride a horse, and he quickly became my hero. I made it my concern to find out everything I could about him, but of course there was only one man, apart from Tiberias Cato himself, who could tell me everything that was known about the Master of the Bishop's Stables, and that was the bishop, who knew Cato perhaps better than Cato knew himself, and it would be more than a year before I could be sufficiently comfortable in his august company to come right out and ask him openly about his friend and servant Cato. And so until that time I merely watched and admired this favorite of all my teachers, nursing what little knowledge of his history I had been able to acquire from the stories the older boys told about him, and feeling my admiration for him increase with every new example of his knowledge and understanding of the ways and the lore of horses.

4

The six years that followed my departure from Benwick flew by, as time always does when we enjoy what we are doing, until the day when I found myself, slack mouthed and stunned, contemplating my sixteenth birthday, which was looming in the too-near future. I tend to remember the occasion nowadays as having dropped upon me as a complete surprise, as though I had not even been aware of my increasing age until Father Germanus pointed it out to me in the course of one of our regular weekly meetings. It is a comforting thought, that image of being caught off balance, ill prepared and unready, but that is not really the way it occurred.

I may have been mentally and emotionally unprepared to be sixteen years old, indulging in wishful thinking and foolishly believing that if I paid no attention to the passage of time then it would flow on without changing anything, but the truth is that I had been very much aware of time passing, and of the changes I was undergoing, in common with my friends, as a result of its passing. Bodies that had been slim and soft, hairless and childish, had gradually become hardened and muscular, thicker and heavier, and the downy growth that had been barely visible upon our faces no more than a year earlier had coarsened upon some of us, the darker skinned among us, and hardened into stubble on our chins.

The most noteworthy change of all, however, had been in the stuff of our conversations, the things we talked about. Where once we had discussed and debated little else but physical training and our individual performances in drills and contests, most of us now talked of little else but girls,
women
and the dark and mystical secrets surrounding them and their physical nature. And as a result of our waking preoccupation with such things, our nocturnal lives, once a matter of mere oblivion disturbed very occasionally by nightmares, had changed to encompass exciting and erotically disturbing dreams, barely remembered upon awakening yet no less powerful because of that. Manhood was closing in upon us, we all knew, and although the prospect excited and intimidated us, we continued nonetheless to gull ourselves into believing that we could have and enjoy the satisfactions of physical manhood—the fighting and the womanizing—without ever having to abandon the innocence and comradeship of boyhood.

But now all at once, and beyond equivocation, I was to be sixteen, which meant that I would have to leave the Bishop's School and make my way alone in the real world, among real men! The realization of that truth was devastating, because it forced me to accept that this stage in my life, boyhood as I had known it in Auxerre, was close to being over. A boy's sixteenth birthday is his life's greatest watershed, marking the crossing point into manhood and taking him from childhood to adult status, from carefree idyll to the acceptance of a man's responsibilities.

On the day when Germanus reminded me of my age, I had been the acknowledged leader of the senior class, the Spartans, for more than a month, but even that exalted estate had failed to make any significant dent in my lack of awareness. I had been so happy and confident in my own popularity and power among the other students that it seemed natural that things must continue as they were. But my entire world changed in the space of one short, supposedly normal interview, when I found myself having to accept that, with the start of the following year, another boy, a younger boy, would be leader of the Spartans and I would be gone, never to be remembered by the boys that followed in my footsteps from year to year. Where I would be by then, I knew not; but I would be a man—if in name only—and probably a serving soldier, my boyhood locked irretrievably behind me.

On a hot spring day in the first half of my sixteenth year, completely without warning, Tiberias Cato announced that the next day would be a day of festivities and freedom from classes for the entire school, in honour of the return of Bishop Germanus from a particularly long episcopal journey. Furthermore, he announced, the occasion would be highlighted by an all-out competition among the senior students, designed to test their prowess and skills and the progress they had managed to achieve so far in this, their final year. The student who emerged victorious from the final stages of the competition would be rewarded with a special prize, something unique and valuable, although Tiberias Cato refused to say what it was.

That part of the announcement caused more excitement among the students than anything else anyone could remember, for although competition in everything was taken for granted at the school, prizes were seldom awarded, and those few that were usually took the form of time off from classes, for one morning or afternoon, in recognition of some stellar achievement. Such rewards were a welcome respite from the normal grind of daily school life, but no one would ever have described them as exciting.

Here, however, was a competition with a valuable prize to be won, and the entire student body was agog with speculation as to what the prize might be.