The Road to Avalon Read Online Free PDF

had talked of this before. “My mother told me too many times that I looked just like my father. I don’t look at all like Merlin.” There were two sharp lines between his brows. “My mother didn’t lie.”
    Morgan nodded solemnly and took a last bite out of her pear. “We’ll find out who you are one day.” She tossed the core out of the tree and gave him a humorous look. “I liked it better when we were reading Virgil.”
    The frown lifted from Arthur’s face. “Pius Aeneas,” he said. “So noble. And so tedious.”
    “Don’t let Merlin catch you saying that,” she warned, and he laughed.
    “Never!” he said in Latin. Then, rising to his feet, “It’s getting late. We’ll miss dinner if we don’t hurry.”
    The two children climbed out of the tree, Morgan as nimbly as Arthur, and began to walk hand in hand back to the house.
    As time went on, Morgan continued to attend Merlin’s lectures, but left the boys to themselves when they went into the field to learn the physical arts of war. Ector was their chief instructor at first; then, as the boys improved, Merlin began to import a series of “experts” for the various disciplines of war and leadership. Over the years, Avalon became accustomed to a procession of strange men who would spend a few months instructing Arthur and Cai before they departed as mysteriously as they had come.
    The boys learned the correct use of the lance, pike halberd-ax, long-sweep sword from horseback, short sword for afoot, and the long sword. They learned about siege engines and circumvallation and entrenchment. They learned how to use their voices so they could reach every corner of a battlefield and still be understood. And every day Ector had them out on the grass wrestling. The sport that Arthur and Cai had once played merely as a release for excess boyish energy now became a daily occupation of forced excellence.
    “Excellence” was Merlin’s favorite word. “Your Christian religion teaches you why you are in this world: to serve God,” he told them. “But the thing you must teach yourselves is that the highest service is to excel. It was to excel in everything that you were born into this world. If you do not excel, then you were born in vain.”
    Merlin’s lectures were always addressed impartially to both boys, but Arthur knew the old man was talking to him. Why this should be so, he did not know. But that it was so, he was certain.
    And it was in his nature to excel. He could feel it in himself as he answered the challenges constantly posed by his teachers. Even the wrestling with Cai became a challenge, and it was not long before Arthur had learned to use leverage to compensate for his slighter weight.
    He could ride better than Cai, too. He could ride better than the cavalryman Merlin brought to Avalon to teach them. It was the use of horse in battle that most interested Arthur. He read all of Xenophon’s comments on cavalry, and he questioned Merlin relentlessly on Constantine’s use of horse.
    “The Battle of Adrianople established definitively the value of heavy cavalry,” Merlin told his pupil. “It was one of the most nearly total defeats ever suffered by a Roman army. The cavalry of the Goths cut the legions to pieces. From Adrianople on, cavalry formed an important part of the Roman army. Stilicho used it at Aquileia when he defeated Arbogast.”
    Arthur, however, drew his own conclusions from Merlin’s talk. “It seems to me that the Romans never learned the proper use of heavy cavalry,” he said to Cai one chill winter day when the boys were in the baths after some strenuous work with lances. “Constantine had light cavalry, but he never used it in direct attack.”
    “Don’t say that to Merlin,” Cai replied humorously. “You know how he feels about everything Roman.”
    “I know.” Arthur ducked under the water and came up, his dark head sleek as a seal’s. He gave Cai an ironic look. “The empire is more his religion than