Camulod Chronicles Book 8 - Clothar the Frank by Jack Whyte

overwhelmed and confused me, striking me speechless with the similarity between his case and my own when I had been but half as old as he was now.
    I, too, had ached to think I had never known my father, for the father I had known throughout my life had stood revealed, without warning, as but a substitute—loved and admired but nonetheless a stranger. My true father had died shortly after my birth, struck down and slain when I was barely starting out in life. Clovis's case was different from mine, for I was his true sire, but nonetheless I knew what he was feeling, and I knew that, to some extent, he was correct.
    The truth was that I had told my children almost nothing of the details of my early life, the life I had lived before I came to Gaul and fathered them. They knew that I had ridden with the Riothamus, Arthur, High King of Britain, serving as one of his equestrian knights, and that I had been one of his true, close friends. But they had no suspicion of the role that I had played in his undoing. That part of my story, all of it, I had concealed from them, with the collusion of their mother. They had had no need to know such things, she and I had convinced ourselves, and besides, such knowledge would have been dangerous to them, and to my wife. And so I sat there in that boat on a summer afternoon ten years ago and thought about what I must now tell my son, beginning with who I was, and who I had once been.

BOOK ONE

    Fathers

    BAN

    1

    I cannot recall much about my early childhood, but I have always been grateful, nevertheless, that I survived it, and that the memories of it that remain with me are happy ones, steeped in the eternal sunlight of long, bygone summer days and unaffected by the truths I learned later. The Lady Vivienne of Ganis, who occupied the center of my life then, since I grew up regarding her as my mother, was in fact my mother's twin and therefore my aunt. Her husband, whom I also believed for years to be my father, was called Ban of Benwick, King of the Benwick Franks who settled the Ganis lands in south-eastern Gaul before my birth.
    I was seven years old when first I heard the story that my mother had abandoned me, and I remember the occasion well. I scoffed at first, pointing out to Frotto, the loudmouthed lout who was tormenting me, that my mother was Vivienne, whom people called the Lady of the Lake. Everyone knew that, I told him smugly, except him.
    Not so, he yelled at me, in a jeering voice that contained an awful note of conviction. His mother had told him that the Lady Vivienne had taken me in as a homeless baby, after my true mother had abandoned both me and my father to run off with another man. Infuriated, and strangely frightened by his outrageous accusations, I charged at him. He sidestepped my rush easily, being two years older than me and almost twice my size, and kicked me hard on the shin. While I was hopping on one foot and clutching my injured leg, he punched me twice with large, meaty fists, bloodying my nose with one and then knocking me down and blackening both my eyes with the other.
    Of course, I went running home, half blinded by tears and bruises and bleeding from my nose like a gravely wounded man, and Lady Vivienne was horrified when I burst into her rooms, dribbling blood and mucus all over her clean floor. She rushed to me and held me, uncaring about damage to her clothing, then hugged and comforted me and listened to my distraught tale while she tended to my wounds, holding my head back gently but firmly until the bleeding from my nostrils had dried up, then cleansing and dressing my cut leg. As soon as my face was free of blood and snot, she laid me on her own enormous bed and bathed my swollen eyes with a cool cloth, holding me to her bosom and crooning over me until I was pacified, while her women made sure that none of my siblings made their way in to gawk at me in my distress.
    The major part of my comfort that day sprang from Lady Vivienne's immediate