The Saxon Shore

Born of the chaos of the Dark Ages, the Dream of Eagles produced a king, a country and an everlasting legend-Camelot
The orphaned baby Arthur-heir to the Colony of Camulod and born with both Roman heritage and the royal blood of the Hibernian Scots and the Celtic Welsh-has been adopted by his cousin Caius Merlyn Britannicus. Merlyn is now the sole custodian of the great dream of his ancestors: that of independent survival in Britain amid the ruins of the imperial Roman world. He is also the keeper of Excalibur, the wondrous sword crafted by his great-uncle Publius Varrus. It is up to Merlyn to teach the young Arthur all that he needs to know to unify the diverse clans of Britain under his kingship. And it is Merlyn's laborious responsibility to see that the young Arthur survives the deadly threats to this destiny-threats that arise from the bloody Saxon shore.

PROLOGUE

There is a traditional belief, seldom spoken of but widely held, that age brings wisdom, and that wisdom, once achieved through some arcane epiphany, continues to grow inexorably with increasing age. Like most people, I accepted that throughout my life, until the day I found that I had somehow grown old enough to be considered wise by others. The discovery frightened me badly and shook my faith in most of my other beliefs.

Now that I have survived everyone I once knew, I grow more aware each day of how unwise I have been throughout my life. Unwise might even be too mild a word for this folly of persistence I betray in clinging to a life of solitude and pain. The pain is unimportant, and in a total absence of sympathy it has become a form of penance I gladly accept and endure in expiation of my sins of omission and unpreparedness. The solitude, however, grows unbearable at times and I am now accustomed to talking to myself merely to hear the sound of a human voice. Sometimes I argue with myself. Sometimes I read aloud what I have written. Sometimes I speak my unformed thoughts, shaping them audibly to light a beacon in the darkness in my efforts to write down a clean, coherent chronicle of what once flourished proudly in this land but has now ceased to be.

I find it strange nowadays to think that I may be the only one alive in all this land who knows how to write words down, and because of that may be the only one who knows that words, unwritten, have no value. Set down in writing, words are real; legible, memorable, exact and permitting recollection, imaginings and wonder. Otherwise, sung or spoken, whispered to oneself or shouted to the winds, words are ephemeral, perishing as they are uttered. That, at least, I have learned in my extreme age.

And so I write my chronicle, and in the writing of it I maintain the life in my old bones, unable to consider death while yet the task remains unfinished. For I believe this story must survive. Empires have risen in this world and fallen, and history takes note of few of them. Those that survive in the memories of men do so by virtue of the faults that flawed their greatness. But here in Britain, in my own lifetime, a spark ignited in the breast of one strong man and became a clean, pure flame to light the world, a beacon that might have outshone the great lighthouse of Pharos, had a sudden gust of willful wind not extinguished it prematurely.