The Lance Thrower - aka Clothar the Frank

492 Pages·2003·2.19 MB·English

by  Whyte Jack

AKA – The Lance Thrower

Also by Jack Whyte
A DREAM OF EAGLES
The Skystone
The Singing Sword
The Eagles' Brood
The Saxon Shore
The Sorcerer Volume I: The Fort at River's Bend
The Sorcerer Volume II: Metamorphosis
Uther
Eagle

AKA
The Lance Thrower
JACK WHYTE
JACK WHYTE
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First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),
a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc., 2003 Published in this edition, 2004
(OPM) 10 987654321
Copyright © Jack Whyte, 2003
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Publisher's note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any
resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Whyte, Jack, 1940-
Clothar the Frank / Jack Whyte.
ISBN 0-14-028648-9
1. Lancelot (Legendary character)—Fiction. I. Title. PS8595.H947C56 2004 C813'.54 C2004-904577-6
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To my wife, Beverley

AUTHOR'S NOTE

In approaching this story, I was forced to come to terms with a few
historical realities that bore heavily upon my vision of how the legend of King
Arthur came into existence. In my mind, the entire story revolves around the
Arthur/Guinivere/Lancelot triangle, and everything that occurs in the legendary
tale is attributable to the humanity—and the human weaknesses—of the King
himself, the dysfunctional nature of his marriage to Guinivere and their joint
attraction to the brilliant foreign warrior known as Lancelot.
But there's the rub: Lancelot of the Lake, Lancelot du lac, is a French name,
and Lancelot himself, the legend tells us, was a French knight who crossed the
and Lancelot himself, the legend tells us, was a French knight who crossed the
sea to England expressly to serve as a Knight of the Round Table at King
Arthur's Court. Well, even making allowances for legendary exaggeration, that
simply could not have happened in the middle of the fifth century, because in
those days England was still called Britannia and what we call France today was
still Roman Gaul.
It would not be until at least a century later, when the Anglo-Saxon
invasions of Britain finally came to an end with the tribes called the Angles
emerging as the dominant force, that the country would begin to become known
as the land of the Angles—Angle land, and eventually England. By the same
token, Roman Gaul would not become known as France until much later, when
the invading Franks finally established their dominance over their arch-rivals,
the Burgundians. Over time, the Frankish territories became the land of the
Franks—France—while the Burgundians remained in their own territories of
Burgundy.
Reputedly wonderful horsemen, the Franks are the people generally
credited with bringing the stirruped saddle to western Europe, and from the time
of their first appearance in the Roman Empire, along the Rhine River in the third
century, they had a reputation for being blunt spoken and utterly tactless,
probably because their original tongue contained few of the subtleties of Latin or
Greek. Be that as it may, we still use the term "speaking frankly" to denote
directness and an unwillingness to mince one's words. There were two main
tribal branches of Franks: the Salian Franks lived in what is now northern
France, Belgium and the Netherlands, and the Ripuarians lived in the southwest
of France and in what is now Switzerland.
Clothar is my interpretation of Lancelot. Academic opinion indicates that
the name Lancelot probably developed from the Latin word lancearius, a Roman
military denomination that was probably similar to the European lancer
regiments of the nineteenth century. In Clothar himself, I have posited a
Frankish horse warrior who comes to Britain, befriends the High King and earns
himself an undying reputation as an archetypal hero, the character who will be
called Lancelot centuries later by French storytellers who have heard of his fame
and his exploits but have lost awareness of his real name.
The Names
It was an anomaly of Roman society that the names given to children
appear to us to be relatively unimportant, but it is true that many children were
named simply according to the order of their birth. The first three or four sons of
named simply according to the order of their birth. The first three or four sons of
a family might be called Gaius, or Caius, Marcus or Paulus, but the fifth son was
likely to be Quintus, which means fifth, and thereafter, in large families, would
come Sextus and Septimus or Septimius (sixth and seventh). Octavius Caesar,
who would name himself Caesar Augustus, was the eighth son of his parents.
Roman place-names give us problems today, too, because they are Latin
names and the modern cities that have replaced the Roman originals all have
different names. For the sake of authenticity in a story like this, however, it
would be jarring and unnatural to use the modern place-names, and so I have
supplied a list below of the most important place-names in this story, along with
their modern equivalents. The most obvious and enlightening example of this
usage is the Roman fort at Lutetia in Gaul. It was built during the Gallic Wars of
Julius Caesar, and its sole purpose, situated as it was on a crucial river ford, was
to keep a lid on the warlike activities of the local tribesmen, a clan called the
Parisii. That fort, Lutetia, has since grown to become the city of Paris.
Roman Name Modern Name
Autessiodurum Auxerre
Carcasso Carcassonne
Cenabum Orleans
Dubris Dover
Genava Geneva
Gesoriacum Le Havre
Glevum Gloucester
Lugdunum Lyons
Lutetia Paris
Massilia Marseille
Treves Troyes
Verulamium St. Alban's

Language
The major difficulty an author faces in writing historical fiction is that of
language, because language is constantly evolving and we have no real
knowledge of how people spoke and sounded, in any language, hundreds of
years ago. I have chosen to write in standard English, but even that is a relatively
new development, since the language was only "standardized" in the nineteenth
new development, since the language was only "standardized" in the nineteenth
century. Until that time, there was no orthographically correct way to spell
anything.
Most of the characters in my stories would have spoken in the ancient
Celtic, Germanic and Gallic tongues, while the better educated, Romanized
characters, like Bishop Germanus and his associates, and even Clothar as a
student at the Bishop's School, would most probably have conversed in Latin.
When people of mixed tongues met and mingled, they would have spoken the
lingua franca of their time, although the real lingua franca—literally the
language of the Franks—had not yet come into common use. But throughout
history, whenever people of diverse tongues and races have come together to
trade, human ingenuity has quickly developed basic, fundamental languages to
fit their needs. In Africa, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that
language was Swahili. In Oriental Asia, it was Pidgin. We do not know the name
of whatever trading language was dominant in fifth-century Europe, but I have
chosen to call it the Coastal Tongue, because the coast was the interface point
for most traders.
Many terms and expressions used in this story, however, have no modern
equivalent, and others sound modem and up-to-date when in fact they are
genuinely ancient. I have addressed a few of these in the notes that follow here.
Modern readers are sometimes surprised, for example, to find the title Duke
being used in the ancient world, but the word originally sprang from the Roman
army, where a man who had distinguished himself by demonstrating spectacular
heroism and leadership could earn himself the title of dux, which is the Latin
word for a leader, a man who is foremost among his companions, and out of that
title came the English title of Duke.
In much the same way, people in North America today tend to feel
proprietorial about nouns like corn and bannock, not realizing that corn has
always been the generic Old World term for any kind of grain and that bannock
—the simplest form of unleavened bread—is common to every primitive
society, no matter what they call it. The Celtic clans of Scotland and Ireland
have always called it bannock, and it was their use of the name that the
aboriginal peoples of America adopted. The plant Americans call com, on the
other hand, is known as maize in Europe, where it is a coarse, mealy grain fed to
cattle. American sweet corn came to be known in Europe only during and after
the Second World War.
Another problematic word for us is mile. A modern mile is 1,760 yards, or
approximately 1,500 meters, whereas the Latin word mille meant a thousand,
and a Roman mile was one thousand paces long. Bearing in mind that the
average Old World Roman was less than five foot six inches tall, their marching
pace would have been short, probably in the range of twenty-six to twenty-nine
inches, making their mile shorter than a modern kilometer.
And then there are the latifundiae. Few people today have any concept of
how highly organized, and even industrialized, the Roman Empire was sixteen
and seventeen hundred years ago. The Romans had a thriving stock market and a
highly refined and regulated real-estate industry, and the food production and
distribution system they constructed to feed their citizenry, founded upon a
system of enormous ranches and collective farms called latifundiae, was
extremely sophisticated even by today's standards. These private enterprises, run
by corporations and funded and owned by investors, produced grain, cattle,
wines, fruits and vegetables and other commodities in vast amounts for shipment
to markets throughout the Empire.
The Latin word magister, which gives us our modern words magistrate and
magisterial, was in common use in the Roman army in the fifth century. It
appears to have had two levels of meaning, and I have used it in both senses
throughout this book. The first of these was the literal use, where a student or
pupil would refer to his teacher or mentor as Magister (Master), with all
appropriate deference. The second usage, however, resembled the way we today
use the term Boss, denoting a superior whose title entails the accordance of a
degree of respect but falls far short of the subservience suggested by the use of
the word Master.
Similarly, the word ecclesia gives us our modern word ecclesiastical, but
the original meaning of the word was a church, particularly a permanent church,
built of stone.
Citrus wood is well documented as being the most precious wood in the
Ancient World, but we have no idea what it was like. No trace of it survives. It is
one of the earliest known instances of a precious commodity being exploited to
extinction.
And finally, a word about horse troopers. Roman cavalry units were
traditionally organized into turmae (squadrons) and alae (battalions). There were
thirty to forty men in a turma (the singular form of turmae), and the strength of
the alae ranged anywhere from sixteen to twenty-four turmae, which meant that
a cavalry battalion could number between 480 and 960 men. The contus, a
substantial, two-handed cavalry spear, was the weapon of many heavy cavalry
turmae, and those troops were known, in turn, as contus cavalry.