End of the Century Read Online Free PDF Page A

palace was easily grander than the most lavish villas of Glevum.
    Lugh shrugged. “It's drafty and damp, if you ask me. But then, no one does.”
    They reached the entrance, and the guard treated them to a wry smile. Galaad steeled himself to endure another barrage of mocking, but was surprised to find that he was not the object of the guard's derision this time.
    â€œHow goes it with you, Long Hand?” the guard japed. “Not troubled by your injuries, I hope?”
    â€œThey plagued me a little last night as I pleasured your mother,” Lugh returned, “but I managed to do the job, still and all.”
    The guard's grin fell, and he tightened his fist around his sword's hilt.
    â€œDraw your iron if you feel up to it,” Lugh said, a slight smile curling the corners of his mouth as he laid his hand on the handle of his own blade. “But remind yourself that there is a reason you stand sentry outside Artor's door and I sit at his table.”
    The guard set his jaw, eyes narrowed, but relented, relaxing his grip on the hilt and letting his hand fall to his side.
    â€œThis one is with me.” Lugh motioned to Galaad with a nod. “Keep watch out here, why don't you, and raise the alarum if the Saeson horde should swim up the Gallus.” He then glanced over his shoulder at Galaad. “Come along, tadpole.”
    With that, Lugh disappeared through the entrance. Galaad glanced at the guard, who seemed to quiver with frustrated anger, and hastened after his guide.

    As they made their way through the corridors of the palace, Galaad burned to ask Lugh why the sentry had called him “Long Hand,” but the Gael's dark expression and the quickness of his pace suggested the question would not be welcome. Instead, he followed along, taking in the faded grandeur of the building and its fixtures. Sculptures stood atop pedestals in recessed alcoves, likenesses of long-dead emperors and forgotten gods. They passed outside into an enclosed garden, the hedges bare and leafless, the dead grasses underfoot rimed with hoarfrost. Then they reentered the building on the far side and came at last to a large reception hall, semicircular in shape, thronged with people, two dozen or more.
    â€œWait here,” Lugh said, pointing along the wall, where a low bench sat. “Artor will be along presently, and then you can bore him with your strange tale yourself.”
    With that, Lugh turned and moved off into the room's center to join a knot of men talking closely, leaving Galaad on his own.
    Galaad, eyes wide, sat on the stone bench and tried unsuccessfully not to look like a complete rustic. It wasn't as though he could help himself, though. These men gathered here, he knew, represented a larger sampling of humanity than he'd ever witnessed before. From their modes of dress and the varied accents and dialects Galaad could hear, he knew that they were representatives of the various client kingdoms of the island, from as far as beyond Hadrian's Wall in the north and the shores of Demetia in the west, and among them perhaps envoys from the Hibernian dynasts or the nations of Gaul beyond the channel.
    The center of the audience chamber was dominated by stibadium dining couches surrounding a pair of semicircular sigma marble tables, placed with their straight sides facing one another so that the whole formed a large marble circle. At the head of the table was a heavy oaken chair, delicately gilt with hammered gold, which like the couches now stood empty.
    The floor under Galaad's feet felt warm, no doubt with a Roman heating system hidden beneath, and was elaborately mosaiced. The mosaic was a disquieting mix of Christian and pagan imagery—representations of the Messias balanced by depictions of Bellerophon upon winged Pegasus slaying a monster, the Virgin Mother opposite Apollo and the seasons, cherubim vying with chimera, and at their center the Chi-Rho—suggesting that one of the previous