Sword at Sunset

But the bell was ringing louder, and the sound of singing stole down through the apple trees, and if we were to pay the Brothers the small courtesy of joining them at prayer, we must move. I got up, stirring the unwilling Cabal with my foot. “Up, lazy one!” and with the hound’s cold muzzle thrusting into my hand, walked with Ambrosius up through the orchard. I thought no more about the loosened amethyst, until a later day reminded me. . . .

Well before spring had given place to summer, I and my small band were in Dumnonia, and lodged with Cador the Prince, while we waited for a ship. I had thought to find him in the old frontier town of Isca Dumnoniorum, or at his summer capital on the Tamara River; but it seemed that Cador had as little liking for cities as have the Saxons, and so those few waiting days were spent up on the skirts of the high moors where he had his Dun with his warriors and his women and his wealth of cattle gathered about him, like any wild Hibernian chieftain.

On the last evening, we came back from hunting with a couple of the proud red deer that roam those hills slung across the backs of the ponies. It had been a good day’s hunting, and for a while, just for a while, I seemed to have outdistanced certain pursuing hounds of my own. We came up to the Dun, with our shadows running far ahead of us through the brown of last year’s heather and the fragile green of the spring-sown barley; and the pleasant tiredness that comes of a day’s hunting was in all our limbs. Cabal ran at my horse’s forefoot apart from the rest of the pack. He was the greatest of them all though Cador had fine hounds, too. We clattered through the broad gateway of the Dun, and among the byres and stables of the forecourt, where the tall weapon stone stood for the warriors to sharpen their blades in time of battle, we handed over the ponies and the kill to the men who came for them, and went on together, toward the inner court.

A knot of women sat before the doorway of the long timber hall, in the thin shade of the ancient half-sacred whitethorn tree that grew there. “Sa sa! The fine weather has brought the women out like midges in the sunlight,” Cador said, as we came in sight of them. The sight was a good one to see. The dappling sunspots quivered on the blue and russet and saffron of their tunics, as the small lazy breeze stirred the whitethorn branches and brought down the first thin drifts of fading petals; and they were talking softly, like a huddle of colored birds, some of them spinning, one girl combing out wet hair to dry in the sun; while Esylt, Cador’s wife, sat in their midst, restringing a broken necklace of amber beads, with something small and mewing like a kitten in the soft folds of a fallow doeskin at her feet.

I knew that Cador had a son, born since Ambrosius’s crowning, and named Constantine for my grandsire, but I had not seen him before, though I had heard him yelling like a hungry lamb in the women’s quarters. Cador had been ashamed to show any interest in the thing before other men, but now that he could do so without seeming eager, I think he was pleased to show it off to the stranger within his gates. At all events, his step quickened as we came into the inner court.

Esylt looked up with a melon-shaped bead of amber between her fingers, her eyes narrowed against the watering sunlight. “You are come home early, my lord. Was the hunting not good?”

“Good enough to show the Bear that there are other hunting runs than those of his own mountains,” Cador said. “We killed twice.” He bent down, his hands on his knees, to peer at the small squirming thing in the doeskin, then glanced aside at his woman with a snapping flash of white teeth. “Why then, should I not come home early from my hunting? Is it that I might find something or someone that I am not meant to find?”

“There are three men hidden in the folds of my skirt, and the fourth lies there,” said Esylt, pointing to the child with the hand in which she held the thread. “If you would know his father, you have but to look at him.”

It sounded like a quarrel, but it was a game, the kind of half-fierce, half-laughing game that boys and hounds play together in mimic war. Also it was born of the fact that Cador knew that there was no one that he was not meant to find, and so could afford the jest. I had never seen a man and a woman make that kind of play together, and it seemed to me good.

“So, but I cannot see it all; it might be a small pink pig. What is it bundled up like that for?”

“Because the sun is westering and the wind grows cold,” Esylt said, suddenly laughing. “He is much the same as he was this morning. But see, if you would have it so,” and she turned back the folds of deerskin, so that the man-child lay naked in its nest, save for the bead of coral that every babe wears around its neck to keep off the Evil Eye. “There is your pink pig.”

Cador grinned at it. “Small and useless,” he said, studying to keep the pride from his voice. “When he comes of an age to bear his shield, that is the time when it may be worth while to have a son.”

And for me, at his words, there was suddenly a shadow over the sky, and the hounds were on my track again.

Cabal, who should have been a bitch for his interest in all young things, thrust forward his muzzle to snuff at the babe, and I stooped quickly to catch his collar and pull him back. He would not have dreamed of harming the thing, but it was in my mind that the mother might be frightened. And as I stooped, Maximus’s seal in my sword hilt sprang from its faulty setting, and fell into the nest of deerskin beside the babe and rolled against his far neck, to lie there an instant holding the fires of the sunset in a small fierce flame of imperial purple.

Esylt stooped and caught it up next instant and gave it back to me, and everybody spoke at once, the women exclaiming over the lucky chance that it had not fallen somewhere among the heather, Cador peering into the empty socket of my pommel; while my men and his crowded around to see. And I laughed, and made a jest of the thing, and tossed the gem in the hollow of my hand. It was all over in the time that it takes a gust of wind to sweep up over the shoulder of Yr Widdfa and die into the grass. But an old woman under the May tree whispered something to her neighbor, and they looked from the child to me and back again, as I turned to follow Cador into the hall. And I caught the gist that was not meant for my ear. “It is a sign! A sign! Constantine is an emperor’s name. . . .”

That was the first time I ever saw Constantine Map Cador face to face. The last was only a few days ago — I am not sure how many, it is hard to keep count of tune — when I named him as my successor before the whole war host. That was on the eve of the battle. The Lord God knows how he will bear the leadership, but he is the last of the line of Maximus, and at least he is a warrior. The choice had to fall on him. . . .

“You had best take that down to Urian my swordsmith,” Cador said. “Blades are the business of his heart, but he can make shift to bed a jewel as surely as any goldsmith of Venta Belgarum.”

And so I went down to the lower Dun, following the directions that he gave me, and found Urian the Smith to reset the great seal for me.

I was still standing propped in the forge doorway, watching the little bullock-shouldered smith — for I would not let the seal out of my sight until it was once more securely in its place — when a step sounded behind me, and I turned to find Fulvius, who had gone down to the coast with a couple of Cador’s men to see about our passages, coming from the direction of the stables.

“Well?” I said. “What fortune?”

He grinned, the grin that even when we were boys had always made me think of the little jaunty rough-haired dogs that one puts down rat holes, and wiped the dust and sweat of his ride into streaks across his forehead with the back of one hand. “Well enough. I found a ship sailing for Burdigala in two days’ time, and contrived to strike a bargain with the master. She’ll be coming back with a cargo of wine, but she’s going out in ballast with only a few raw bullhides for cargo, and he was glad enough to hear of some passengers to make the trip more profitable.”

“How much?” I demanded.

“An arm ring to every four heads — that’s if we don’t mind the likelihood of drowning.”

“All things must have a first time,” I said. “Does she leak like a sieve?”

“She looks sound enough, but nigh as wide as she’s long. Na, I’d say on second thoughts we are more like to die of seasickness than drowning.“

That night we sat late after the evening meal, discussing the problem of horse transport. Cador had promised to find me two suitable vessels and have them ready on the far side of the Narrow Sea by the middle of August, which, with luck, would leave us six weeks or so before the autumn gales, for the five or six trips that would be needed to get all the horses across. But the problem was how they should be adapted in such a way that they could be returned to their normal use again afterward. The Roman horse transports had been built with entry parts below the waterline, through which the horses were loaded while the vessels were high and dry, and which were closed and caulked afterward. But what shipmaster would allow his ship to have great wounds cut in her underwater body? And we could not afford to buy ships, nor build them, even if there had been the time to do so. In the end it was decided that part of the decking must be torn up, and the horses drugged and slung into the holds by means of slings and pulleys, the deck planks being replaced after them. It was a desperate measure, and I think we all prayed to God that it would not result in the deaths of either men or horses; horses almost more than men, for they would be harder to replace. But there was no alternative that any of us could see.

The next day, leaving Cabal chained in an empty byre and howling his furious despair behind us, we rode down to the coast. (It was the only time in his life that he was parted from me, and I felt much like a murderer.) And on the morning tide of the day after that, we sailed for Burdigala, packed close into the space left by the stinking bullhides, in a vessel that, as Fulvius had said, was almost round, and wallowed like a sow in litter, into the troughs of the seas, so that one wondered at each weltering plunge whether she could ever shake clear again in time for the next crest. We were very wretched, and presently we lost count of time, so that we had little idea of how many days we had been at sea when at last, having neither foundered nor fallen in with Sea Wolves, we ran into the mouth of a broad Gaulish river. When we came ashore I was surprised to find, never having been to sea before, that the wooden jetty heaved up and down beneath my feet with the long slow swing of the Atlantic swell.

At Burdigala we found a party of merchants gathering for the next stage of the journey, for it seemed that to the horse fairs of Narbo Martius, the merchant kind gathered from all over Gaul and even from the nearer fringes of Hispana beyond the mountains that men call the Pyrenaei; not only horse traders, but those who came to trade among the horse traders, in anything from sweetmeats to swords and painted pottery to ivory Astartes and cheap horoscopes. We joined ourselves to this party, and while we waited for the latecomers, set about buying the nags that we should need for the next stage. We picked small sturdy brutes, with no looks or graces to add to their price, yet such as we might be able to sell again at Narbo Martius without too much trouble. I had thought that the strange tongue might make bargaining difficult, but everyone spoke Latin of a barbarous kind — at least it sounded barbarous in our ears, but maybe ours sounded as barbarous in theirs — and with the aid of a certain amount of counting on our fingers and shouting, we managed well enough. They are a goodly people to look upon, the Goths; tall men, some as tall as I am, and I have met few men of my own height in Britain; fiercely proud, fair-haired but with more of yellow and less of red than our own mountain people have. Strange to think that these loyal vassals of the Eastern Empire were the great-grandsons of the men who, seventy years ago, had sacked Rome and left it a smoking ruin. If they had not done so, perhaps the last Legions would not have been withdrawn from Britain. . . . But there is no profit in such speculating.

The last comers joined the band, and we set out for Tolosa.

All the wide valley of the Garumna seemed, as we made our way eastward along what remained of the old road, to be wine country. I had seen a few vineyards, mostly falling into neglect, clinging to a terraced hillside here and there throughout southern Britain, but never great stretches of vine country such as this. A smaller, darker people than the Goths were at work tying the vines along the roadside, and from time to time we could see the great river that cast its gray sinuous curves across and across the countryside — but myself I have always loved best a mountain stream.

On the fifth evening, our numbers swollen by other, smaller bands that had joined us on the road, we came in sight of Tolosa where the distant mountains began to thrust up into the sky. We spent a day there to rest the horses and mules before the roughest part of the journey and get in supplies for ourselves. Everything for four camps among the mountains, said the fortune-teller, who had taken that road many times before, and liked to bestow advice. And next morning, our numbers increased still further by the men who had joined us in the town, we rode out again with our faces to the hills.

As the road lifted, and the vast vale of the Garumna fell behind us, the tall crests of the Pyrenaei, deeply blue as thunderclouds, marched in a vast rampart across the southern sky. But by the second day I saw that we should not touch the mountains; they rose on either hand, maybe twenty miles away, and between them lay a lesser hill country through which the broad paved road ran, terraced sometimes, or causewayed across a ravine, toward Narbo Martius and the coast. We jogged on at the same slow pace, pausing in what shade we could find during the heat of the day, passing the nights huddled about our fires, for even in summer it could be chill at night, while the beasts stamped in their picket lines at the distant smell of wolf, and the guard sat huddled in their cloaks and longed for morning. We — the Companions and I — slept sword in hand, with the precious riding pads for pillows. We did not distrust our fellow travelers; in such bands it is a law that no man robs his brother, for the sufficient reason that in robber country where there are broken men among the hills, any breach in the traveling band may let in the enemy, and therefore any man caught in such an act is driven from the band to make his own way, which, lacking the protection of their numbers, is likely to be a short one. Nonetheless, there was always the risk of a night attack by the hill robbers themselves, and we were running no risks.

But on the fifth day, without having met any worse trouble than somebody’s mule being overbalanced by its load and slithering into a ravine, we reined aside from the road into the shade of a long skein of pine trees where a brown hill stream ran quietly over a paved ford, to make our last noontide halt. And sitting in the shade after we had sparingly watered the horses, and washed the worst of the white dust out of our own eyes and mouths, I looked down over the gently dropping countryside to Narbo Martius and the sea.

This was a different world from the vine country around Tolosa; the hillside covered with a dense mat of aromatic things — thyme and broom and stone bramble were the only ones I knew — and the quivering air was full of the hot rising scent of them and the darker scent of the pines. The land turned pale and sunburned below us, growing more and more bleached and barren as it went seaward, and the sea was a darker blue than any that I have looked down on from the headlands of Dumnonia, though I have known that the color of a kingfisher’s mantle. A little wind shivered up through the woods that followed the valleys, so that the thin scatter of gray-green trees turned to silver — wild olives, somebody said they were, later — and here and there the pale discs of the threshing floors caught the heat-drained sunlight and shone like silver coins. Strange to be in a land where one could be so sure of the weather that one threshed in the open.

But of all the scene before me, the thing that claimed and held my gaze was the pale checkered smudge of a town on the far-distant coast. Narbo Martius; and somewhere among its horse guards and in fields, the stallions and brood mares that I had come to buy; the horses of my dream.

AT sunset, with the dust haze that rose from the hooves of the pack beasts turned to red-gold clouds in the westering rays, we clattered under the gate arch into Narbo Martius, and found the place thrumming like a bee swarm with the crowds pouring in to the horse fair. It must have been a fine place once, one could see that even now; the walls of the forum and basilica still stood up proudly above the huddle of reed thatch and timber, with the sunset warm on peeling plaster and old honey-colored stone; and above the heads of the crowds the air was full of the darting of swallows who had their mud nests under the eaves of every hut and along every ledge and acanthus-carved cranny of the half-ruined colonnades. The smell of the evening cooking fires was the arid reek of burning horse dung, such as the herdsmen burn in the valleys of Arfon.

The two or three inns which the place still possessed were already full and spilling over with merchants and their beasts, but the open spaces within the city walls had been roughly fenced off with hurdles and rope and dead thornbushes, to serve as camps for the lesser folk and latecomers, and when the trading band broke up, we found a place in one of these, where a couple of score of mules and their drivers were already encamped among their newly unloaded bales, and an ancient merchant sat under a striped canopy, scratching himself contentedly beneath his earth-colored blanket robes, while his servants made camp about him. There was of course no service of any kind, no one in charge of anything, save for an immensely fat man with green glass earrings in his harry ears, who lolled under the awning of a wine booth — it was good wine, though; we tried it later — nor was there any food for the men, though we found that fodder for the beasts could be got close by. So while Fulvius and Owain, who were our best foragers, went off to buy cooked food, the rest of us watered and tended the horses and made camp as best we could in the corner of the corral not already occupied with kicking and snarling mules.

When the other two returned, we supped off loaves with little aromatic seeds sprinkled over the crust and cold boiled meat with garlic and green olives whose strange taste I was by this time getting used to; and washed it down with a couple of jars of drink from the wine booth. Then we lay down to sleep save for Bericus and Alun Dryfed, who took the first watch.

For a long while I lay awake also, listening to the nighttime stirrings and tramplings of the camp and the city, and looking up at the familiar stars that had guided and companioned me so often on the hunting trail, every fiber of me quivering with a strange expectancy that concerned something more than the horses that I should buy tomorrow. It had been growing in me all evening, that mood of intense waiting, the certainty that something, someone, was waiting for me in Narbo Marthas — or that I was waiting for them. So might a man feel, waiting for the woman he loved. I even wondered if it might be death. But I fell asleep at last, and slept quietly and lightly, as a man sleeps on the hunting trail.

The midsummer horse fair, held on the level ground above the shore, lasted for seven days, and so I should be able to make my choice with care and maybe time for second thoughts, but by evening on the second day I had bought well over half the horses I wanted, by dint of much vehement bargaining — duns for the most part, and dark brown, so dark as to be almost black, with a white flame Or star on the forehead — and it was beginning to be harder to find what I sought, or maybe I was becoming harder to please as I grew more used to the big powerful animals that filled the selling grounds.

Yet it was on the third day that, as I pushed my way through the crowd at the far end of the sale ground, with Flavian beside me, I found the best horse that I had seen yet. I suppose he had been brought in late, when the best of the others were gone. He was a full black, black as a rook’s wing. There are more bad horses among the black than any other color, but a good black is own brother to Bucephalus. This was a good black, standing a clear sixteen hands at the shoulder, with a good broad head and high crest, power in every line of him, and fire in his heart and loins to beget some of his own kind. But as I stopped to examine him more closely, I saw his eyes. I would have turned away, but the man in charge of him, a bowlegged individual with small twinkling eyes and a lipless gash for a mouth, stayed me with a touch on my arm. “You’ll not see a better horse than this in Narbo Martius this year, my lord.”

“No,” I said. “I should think most likely not.”

“My lord would like to look him over?”

I shook my head. “That would be a waste of your time and mine.”

“Waste?” He sounded as though I had used a forbidden word, almost awed at my iniquity; and then, his voice turning soft as fur, “Did ever my lord see such shoulders? And he just five years old. . . . One was telling me that my lord sought the best stallion in Septimania — I suppose he was mistaken.”

“No,” I said, beginning again to turn away. “He was not mistaken. A good sale to you, friend — but not with me for the purchaser.”

“Na then, what does my lord find amiss with him?”

“His temper.”

“Temper? The temper of a sucking dove, Most Noble.”

“Not with those eyes,” I said.

“At least let you see his paces.” We were on the edge of the open ground where the horses were shown off, and the crowd was packed dense behind me, but I could have pushed my way through easily enough. I do not know why I hesitated; not, I think, for the stallion’s sake, magnificent as he was, certainly not for the man’s persuading tone. The finger of Fate was on me, I suppose; for the enrichment and the bitter loss that came of that moment’s hesitating have been with me all my afterdays.

The horse dealer had summoned someone from the crowd with a jerk of the head; and a man stepped forward in answer. I had seen him before, distantly, among the men who showed off the horses for prospective buyers. I recognized him by the lock of fair hair that sprang from his temple, mingling oddly with the darkness of the rest of his head; but until now I had noticed nothing else about him. Yet there was enough to notice, when one came to look. He was a very young man, maybe midway between myself and Flavian for age, but lean and sinuous already as a wolfhound at the end of a hard season’s hunting; naked save for a kilt of lambskin strapped about his narrow waist, the wool showing at the edges, and something that looked surprisingly like a harp bag was slung from a strap across his bare shoulder. But in the brief moment while he stood looking to the horse dealer for his word, the thing that I chiefly noticed was his face, for it seemed to have been put together somewhat casually from the opposite halves of two completely different faces, so that one side of his mouth was higher than the other, and his dark eyes looked out from under one gravely level brow and one that flared with the reckless jauntiness of a mongrel’s flying ear. It was an ugly-beautiful face and it warmed the heart to look at it.

“Hai! Bedwyr, the chieftain would see the Black One’s paces, that he may judge of his mettle,” said the dealer, and I did not contradict him because, of all foolish reasons, I wanted to see how this young man with the surprising Celtic name handled such a horse.

The horse was of course already bitted and bridled, but not saddled. The boy swept me a swift low bow, and turning, set his hands on the great brute’s shoulders, and next instant was astride the glossy back, and catching the reins out of the dealer’s hands as the great brute began to dance and snort and sidle, swung him out onto the open trampled turf. Watching him as he put the Black One through his paces, I found myself judging the rider’s mettle as well as the horse’s, noting how lightly he handled the savage “wolf” bit, while never for one instant losing the control; and the way the Black One himself, who I was very sure would have been a plunging fury with almost any other man on his back, not only answered to his authority but seemed to enter into the thing with him as they wheeled and circled and changed paces, and came sweeping in a cloud of dust around the full circle of the open space; so that when at last they came to a trampling halt before me, I could have sworn that the horse, as well as the man, was laughing. . . .

“See, my lord, and he is not even sweating,” said the dealer’s voice in my ear; but I had to think of the long road home; above all, of the sea crossing. I longed to take this superb black thunderstorm, but if I did, he would almost certainly cost us a man’s life, or another horse’s, maybe more, to get him home.

“He is a good horse — with the right rider,” I said, aware of the man Bedwyr looking down at me under that flaring eyebrow, with a curious intensity widening his eyes, “but he is not good for my purpose.” And I turned on my heel and pushed my way into the crowd again, followed by Flavian in a cloud of mute protest, for he was still young enough to be sure that if one only wanted it badly enough, one could hook Orion out of the sky on the end of a cockle pin.

He looked back once, and sighed. “It’s a pity,” he said.

I glanced down at him, and because he looked so young and forlorn, found myself calling him by the name that had been his when he stood nose high to an otter hound. “It’s a pity, Minnow.” And felt that the pity of it included the man as well as the stallion.

But it was to be only a few hours later that I saw the man with the pale forelock again.

Every evening after the first, we had had our own small fire in the corner of the corral, for dried dung cakes cost little, and a sack of them went a surprisingly long way. And that evening we were gathered around it as usual, eating the evening meal, when a step came past the horse lines and a shadow loomed out of the crowded shifting dark, and took substance in the smoky light of the fire. The small licking flames seemed to leap up at his coming, and the pale lock of hair gave him the look of having a white swan’s feather caught at his temple; and I saw that he held in his hands a small thickset harp of black bog oak, on the strings of which the firelight played as on running water.

He came in the usual way of wandering harpers, who sit themselves uninvited at any man’s fire, sure of a welcome and a hearing and a meal for the song they sing; and making me the same swift bow that he had made in the horse ring, he folded onto his narrow haunches between Flavian and Bericus, settling his harp onto his knee and into the hollow of his shoulder before most of us were aware of him at all. We had been talking of the horses, cavalry talk, sweet and nutty on the tongue, but at his coming a gradual silence fell, and face after face was turned expectantly to the newcomer; horse talk one could have at any time, not so a harper. But having gained our whole attention, Bedwyr seemed in no hurry to begin his song, and remained for a few moments fondling the well-worn instrument, so that watching him I was reminded suddenly of a man making his falcon ready for flight. Then with no beginning, no awakening chord, it was as though he flung the bird free. But it was no falcon, and though it leapt upward in bursts and upward rushes as a lark leaps toward the sun, it was no lark either, but a bird of fire. . . .

Old Traherne was no mean harper, but I knew, even while my own heart leapt out on the winged and rushing notes, that this was harping such as I had not heard in Ambrosius’s hall.

Presently it sank and grew little, infinitely little, and sad. I watched a stalk of dry shepherd’s purse among the dung cakes catch light and glow for an instant into beauty stranger than ever it had had in life, before it crumbled into a pinch of blackened fibers. And the harp music seemed one with it, lamenting the loss of all beauty, that might fall in a single grass seed. . . . Now it was swelling again, rising to the heights of Oran Môr, the Great Music, and the lament was for lost causes and lost worlds and the death of men and gods; and as it grew, it began to change. Until now it had been sound without the limit of form, but now it was taking on a fugitive pattern, or rather the pattern was growing through the storm-rush of the music, and it was a pattern that I knew. The harper flung up his head and began to sing, his voice strong and true, with an odd brooding quality in it that matched the song. I had expected a song of the Goths and the South, forgetting his unlikely name. Instead, I found that I was listening to a song of my own people, and in the British tongue; an old nameless lament that our women sing at seed time to help the wheat to spring; for a dead hero, a dead savior, a dead god, for brightness laid in the dark and the dust and the long years rolling over. Why it should help the corn in its springing, we have forgotten with our minds, though our bones still remember; but in its way it is a song of death and rebirth. I had known it all my life, as well as I had known Ygerna’s small song of the birds on the apple spray; and as I had waited when I was a child for the wheat to spring again, for the rekindled hope of the ending, so I waited now for the promise of the hero’s return. “Out of the mists, back from the land of youth,” sang the harper, as though to himself. “Strong with the sound of trumpets under the apple boughs . . .“ I had heard that song so often ended on a crash of triumph as though the lost hero were already returned to his people; this time it ended on one clear note of distant hope that was like one star in a wild sky.

The harp song was silent, and the harper’s hand fell from the leaping strings to lie at rest on his knee. For a long moment we were all silent about the fire, and the sounds of the camp washed in upon us without breaking the stillness of our own circle. Then Owain leaned forward to remake the sinking fire, building the brown dung cakes upon each other with the grave and thoughtful deliberation that was very much a part of him, and the spell was broken, so that I was aware of the dark faces of the mule drivers gathered on the fringe of the firelight, and the angry squealing of a mule somewhere beyond; and close beside me the old merchant, . standing with his hands in his beard, and the faint aromatic smell that came from his robes as he rocked gently to and fro, his head cocked as though still to listen; and the murmur that came from him too, “Sa sa — so the women used to sing when I was a boy — singing the lament for Adonis, when the crimson anemones are springing from the rocks . . .” which was strange, for he understood no word of the British tongue.

I saw the harper looking at me through the blue smoke drift of the dung fire. But it was Fulvius who spoke first. “I should scarce have thought to hear that song in Septimania, unless it was one of our own pack that gave tongue to it.”

Bedwyr the Harper smiled, his crooked mouth touched with mockery. “I am from the settlement that the Emperor Maximus made with his Sixth Legion veterans in Armorica and my father’s mother was from Powys. Does that answer your question?” His speaking voice was deep, a singer’s voice, and touched with mockery also.

Fulvius nodded, and passed him the wine jar. Flavian set the basket of cold meat and olives before him, and he accepted both without comment, returning the harp gently to the embroidered doeskin bag like a man rehooding his falcon. The mule drivers, seeing that there would be no more singing, at least for a while, had drifted away.

I said, “It explains how you came to have the songs of Britain in your harp bag, but scarcely why you should choose one of them for us. Do we wear Britannicus branded on our foreheads?“

“All Narbo Martius knows that the chieftains are from Britain to buy stallions and brood mares,” he said, eating bread and olives in alternate bites. And then he said the thing that I knew he had come to say. “Why did you refuse the Black One? He would sire fine sons.”

“Does all Narbo Martius know that the stallions are for siring?”

“Is it not clear to see? Every horse that my lord has chosen, the points that he has looked for are those that make for strong breeding, in the stallions as well as the mares. My lord has been buying, not these horses but their sons. . . . Why turn from the Black One?”

“We are from Britain, as you have said yourself. That means a long road north and a sea crossing. If I mistake not, the horse is a killer.”

“Your true killer slays for pleasure like a wildcat,” Bedwyr said. “This one’s heart is angry, that is a different thing. He is what he is because he was mishandled in his colt days.”

“You know him, then?”

“I never saw him until today. But brother may know brother . . .”

That was the only time, I think, in twenty years, that I ever heard him speak, however indirectly, of his own colt days, and I would sooner, I think, have asked Aquila how it felt to wear a Saxon thrall ring, than have probed into what he did not choose to tell me.

“I think maybe you are right. Certainly he handled well enough for you,” I said, and scarcely noticed at the time, though I remembered it after, how he looked up at that as though a new thought had opened in him, and then returned to the meat in his hand. “But nevertheless, he must find another master than me.”

But I wished that it need not be so. The Black One had taken my fancy more than almost any other of the horses that I had seen in Narbo Martius.

The wine jar came my way, and I drank and passed it on to Bericus beside me, and returned to an earlier thing. “And now — since you know so clearly what it is that we do in Narbo Martius, do you make fair return, and tell us what brings you here, so far from your own hunting runs.”

On the face of it, it was a foolish question to ask of a strolling harper, but there was something about this man that set him apart from the ordinary wandering minstrel drifting from lord’s hall to fairground; a purpose about him that was at odds with any kind of drifting; and I thought it unlikely that a professional harper would have turned his hand to the kind of work that he had been doing that morning.

And suddenly his eyes, meeting mine through the acid smoke, flashed into a mocking awareness of what I was thinking. “I am on my way to Constantinople, in hope of joining the Emperor’s bodyguard,” he said, and watched me to see what I would make of it.

“I think you hope that I will not believe you,” I said, “but oddly enough, I do.” I was leaning forward as he was, arms across knees, and we spoke to each other through the dung smoke as though the others around the fire did not exist.

“I wonder why.”

“Because for one thing, if for some reason you were lying, you would choose a less wild tale to tell.”

“Sa! I will remember that for a future need; if I wish to lie and be believed, always to make the lie great enough. Does the tale seem so very wild, then? They say that nowadays, with the Ostrogoths pressing against the frontiers, the Emperor will give his sword to any good fighting man of any nation that comes his way. And it will be good to see Constantinople, and a splendor that does not lie in ruins; good to have a sword, and a cause to use it in.” For one moment his manhood and his mocking reserves fell away from him, and I saw through the smoke a boy looking at me with hopeful eyes.

“It is only the length of the road that makes it seem strange. I have heard that now the old posting services are dead, for a traveler without great store of gold it takes the best part of two years.”

“So — but I am well on my way already, and as to the gold, my harp and the odd task such as I had today will see that I do not starve.” Bedwyr reached for another olive and sat tossing it idly from hand to hand, and the boy was a man again, and the subject closed. “Doubtless I should travel swifter with a Lucitanian colt between my knees. But I should see less of the road on the way, and since I shall travel it but once, I’d as lief see more of it than a cloud of my own dust.”

“Are they so swift then, this Lucitanian breed?”

He looked at me, still tossing the olive from hand to hand. “The mares are served by the west wind, so I have heard, and the foals are as swift as their sire, but live only three years. You should strike a bargain with the west wind, my lord — it might come cheaper in the long run than buying Septimanian stallions.”

“I can well believe in this Powys-born grandmother of yours, for you have a true Cymric tongue in your head. . . . But as for me, I need size and strength in my war-horses — the striking power of Camulus’s thunderbolts, not the speed of the west wind.”

“War-horses?” he said.

“Did you think I wished to breed them for the Hippodrome? Our need is for war-horses, in Britain. Here it has been the Goths, but with us it is still the Saxons, and compared to the Saxon, the Goth is the very flower of gentleness. Gaul has not known the tearing of the Sea Wolf’s fangs, and for the most part Gaul has had the sense to lie quietly in the dust while the conquerors ride over. But in Britain we choose another way, and our need is for war-horses.”

He sat back on his heels, and looked at me with level eyes. “Who are you, my lord, that speak of Britain as a chieftain speaks of his war band?”

“I was named Artorius on my ninth day, but most men call me Artos the Bear,” I said, thinking that the name would mean nothing to him.

“So. We have heard that name — a little — even in Armorica where the Sea Wolves do not run,” he said; and then, “Truly my lord should take the Dark One, for they are worthy of each other.”

And suddenly we were all laughing, whirled up into choking mirth by his persistence; and Bedwyr laughed with us, over the rim of the wine jar that he had caught up; but it seemed to me that the laughter only brushed his surface as a puff of wind brushes the surface of a dark pool.

That night when we lay down to sleep with our feet to the fire, I could have laughed at my idiot fancy of the night before, for the day was passed and nothing, apart from the newly purchased; horses in the picket lines, had come of it, after all. Yet I thought about Bedwyr in the time that followed, almost as much as I did about the black horse, and next day constantly found myself looking out for them in the sweating and trampling and the dust clouds of the horse yards. The horse I glimpsed twice, though I did not go near him again, and guessed that other men besides myself must have seen the killer in his eyes, that he hung so long in the market. Bedwyr I did not see at all in the horse yards; but at evening I passed him among the crowd about one of the cheap wine booths. He was drunk, to judge by the flush along his cheekbones and the hectic brightness of his eyes; he had a little dark red rose stuck behind one ear, and flourished a wine jug at me as I passed, shouting something about damping the dust on the road to Constantinople.

On the evening of the fourth day, suddenly weary of Narbo Martius and its uproar that was so much more blurred and raucous than the uproar of a war camp, I did not at once return to the city when the selling grounds began to empty, but let the rest of the band go on without me, and myself strolled down through the ill-kept olive gardens that rimmed the open ground, and sat on the stone curb of a well, looking out over the pale levels toward the sea which was turning to pearl-shell colors as the sun westered. It was good to be alone for a while, and have quiet enough for my bruised ears to hear the faint hushing of the little wind that rose each evening, in the olive trees behind me, and the dark drip of water from the well, and the soft clonk of goat bells, and to watch, far off, the fishermen drawing in their nets. This would be our last night in Narbo Martius, and I knew that when I got back to the evening fire, every man of the Company would be there. On other nights, many of them had hurried through their supper and gone about their own pleasures; the laughter and rough horseplay in the wineshops, and the women of the city kind and not expensive. But I could not risk thick heads and maybe a hunt through Narbo Martius for some fool still dead drunk in a harlot’s bed, when the time came to break camp in the morning. So I had given the order and made sure that it was understood; but I knew that I must not bide long in my quiet place below the olive gardens, taking for myself the freedom for my own pleasure that I had denied to Fulvius and the Minnow and the rest. I think that few of them would have grudged it to me if I had, but it was not in the bargain.

Just until the shadow of the low-hanging olive branches reached that crack in the stones of the well curb, I told myself. It had the breadth of a hand to travel yet. . . .

That time I heard no step coming through the long grass under the olive trees, but a shadow, fantastically long in the westering light, fell across the wellhead, and when I looked up, Bedwyr was standing within a spear’s length of me, his figure blotted darkly against the sunset. “How does the horse buying go?” he asked, without any other greeting.

“Well enough,” I said. “I have chosen all my stallions, all but one of my brood mares. Now we have all things ready for striking camp, and tomorrow I shall take the first reasonable beast that I can strike a bargain for, and with good fortune we should be on the road north by noon.”

He came and sat himself on the ground at my feet, leaning his head back against the warm stones of the well curb. “There are yet three days of the fair to run. Why then so great a hurry, my Lord Artos?”

“It is a long road north, and at the end of it a sea crossing. Even with good weather we must needs rest the horses at least one day in four. And at the best, we shall reach the coast with a month to spare before the autumn storms.”

He nodded. “You will have transports of some kind?”

“If Cador of Dumnonia has been successful — two trading vessels with the decks torn out for getting the horses into the holds.”

“And how many horses do you reckon to get across at each trip?”

“Two to each tub. To try for more would be to strike hands with disaster.”

“So. I see wisdom of not lingering among the wine booths of Narbo Martius.”

“That relieves my mind,” I said gravely, and he laughed, then shifted abruptly to look up at me.

“The Black One is still for sale.”

“I have all my stallions.”

“Sell one again. Or another stallion instead of the last mare?”

“Certainly you do not lack for cool affrontery.”

“You want him, don’t you?”

I hesitated, then admitted it fully to myself for the first time. “Yes, I want him, but not enough to pay for him as I am very sure I should have to do, with the life of a man or another horse.”

He was silent a moment, and then he said in a curiously level tone, “Then I ask another thing. Take me, my Lord the Bear.”

“What as?” I asked, without surprise, for it was as though I had known what was coming.

“As a harper or a horse holder or a fighting man — I have my dagger, and you can give me a sword. Or” — his strange lopsided face flashed into a grin, his one reckless eyebrow flying like a banner — “or as a laughingstock when you feel the need for laughter.”

But though I had known, in a way, what was coming, I was not sure of my reply. Usually I can judge a man well enough at first meeting, but this one I knew that I could not judge. He was dark water that I could not look into. His reserves were as deep in their way as Aquila’s but whereas Aquila, whose past was bitter, had grown them through the years as the hard protective skin grows over an old wound, this man’s were a part of himself, born into the world with him as a man’s shadow.

“What of Constantinople and the Emperor’s bodyguard?” I said, a little, I think, to gain time.

“What of them?”

“And the splendor that does not lie in ruins, and the bright adventure and the service to take?”

“Could you not give me a service to take? Oh, make no mistake, my Lord Artos, it was the other I wanted. That was why I got drunk yesterday; it was no use though. I am your man if you will take me.”

“We have need of every sword hand,” I said at last, “and it is a good thing to laugh sometimes — and to have the heart sung out of the breast. But . . .”

“But?” he said.

“But I do not take a hawk without having made trial of him. Nor do I take an untried man into the circle of the Companions.”

He was silent for a good while, after that. The sun was behind the mountains now, and the evening sounds of the olive grove were waking, the creatures that they call cicadas creaking in the branches, and the voices of the fisherfolk coming up faintly on the wind. Once he made a small swift movement, and I thought he was going to get up and walk away, but he stilled again. “You choose more delicately than they say the Eastern Emperor does,” he said at last.

“Maybe I have more need.” I leaned down and touched his shoulder, scarcely meaning to. “When you are captain of the Emperor’s bodyguard, you’ll look back on this evening and thank whatever god you pray to, that the thing turned out as it did.”

“Of course,” he said. “When that day comes, I shall thank — whatever god I pray to, that it was not given to me to throw all that away, and go crawling back over those five hundred miles or so that I was already on my way, to die at last in a northern mist with the Sea Wolf’s fangs in my throat.”

I said nothing, for it seemed to me that there was no other word to say. And then he turned to me again, his eyes full of a cool dancing light that was nearer to battle than to laughter. “If I get the Black One back to Britain for you, without its causing the death of himself or any other horse or any man, will that seem trial enough? Will you take me then, and give me my sword in recompense?”

I was more surprised at that than I had been at his first asking to join us, and for a moment the surprise struck me silent. Then I said, “And what if you fail?”

“If I have not died in the failing, I will give you my life to add to that of the man or the other horse. Is not that a fair bargain, my Lord the Bear?”

Before I knew that my mind was made up, I heard my own voice saying, “We will go now and look into the Black One’s mouth and feel him over, for I have not even touched him as yet. And if the horse be all that he seems, then it is a fair bargain, Bedwyr.”

And I remember that we spat in our hands and struck palms like men sealing a bargain in the marketplace.

On a wild night of late September, with the first of the autumn gales beating about the thatch, we supped again in Cador’s mead hall, I with the great gaunt joyful head of Cabal on my knee; behind us the long road and the choking summer dust cloud rolling up through Gaul, behind us the urgent struggle to get the last of the horses across before the weather broke. And the torchlight and the heather beer seemed the more golden for the triumphant knowledge of fine big-boned Septimania stallions and the brood mares picketed within the ring fence of the Dun.

Bedwyr, with dark smudges beneath his eyes — for the last crossing, with the Black One on board, had been no easy one, and he had not slept, even in his accustomed place at the great brute’s side, for two nights before it — had come from his fairly won place among the Companions and sat on the harper’s stool beside the hearth and sang for us, or maybe for himself, the triumph song of Arwas the Winged after he slew the Red Boar.

THEY broke at noon, and all the rest of that day and most of the next we had driven them, among the willow-fringed islands and the reedbeds and the wildfowl meres; we had fired their winter camp (they should be well used to the stench of homesteads going up in flames). We had cut off the stragglers and burned their narrow dark war boats in the mouth of the Glein. Now, at evening on the second day, we came up from the river marshes toward the monastery on its island of higher ground, where we had left the baggage beasts.

We were a full band, three hundred cavalry, four hundred counting grooms, drivers, armorers, et cetera — or we had been, two days ago. We were somewhat less this evening, but in a few weeks we should be up to strength again; we always were. There were no captives with us. I have never taken captives, save once or twice when I had need of a hostage.

Cabal trotted as usual at my horse’s off forefoot. Bedwyr rode on my sword side, and on the other, Cei who had blown in like a blustering west wind to join us when first we made our headquarters at Lindum, just two years ago. A big, red-gold man with hot-tempered blue eyes, and a liking for cheap glass jewelry that would have become either a Saxon or a whore. Those two had proved themselves in the past summers when, sometimes alone, sometimes with the half-trained warriors of Guidarius, the local ruler, we had attacked the settlements of Octa Hengestson, and driven back his inland thrusts again and again. And the time was to come when I counted Bedwyr the first and Cei the second of my lieutenants.

Bedwyr had unslung his harp from its accustomed place behind his shoulder, and was plucking the strings in triumphant ripples of notes that broke in waves of brightness, managing his horse with his knees the while. He often played and sang us home from battle. “After the sword, the harp,” as the saying runs — and always it seemed to help our weariness and our wounds. When the tune was recognizable, Cei lifted up his voice in a deep grumbling buzz that was his nearest approach to singing, and here and there behind us a man took up a snatch of the familiar tune; but for the most part we were too spent to join in.

The sun was sinking as we pulled up out of the rustling reedbeds, and the vast arch of the sky was alight with a sunset that seemed to catch its mood from Bedwyr’s harping and break in waves and ripples of flame. Never, even among my own mountains, have I known such sunsets as those of the eastern marshes, winged and shining skies busy as market crowds or streaming like the banners of an army. The standing water among the reedbeds caught fire from the sky, and overhead the wavering lines of wild duck were flighting.

On the lower levels only just clear of the marsh, the monastery’s horses were grazing. It was horse country, though most of the beasts, sturdy though they were, were too small for our needs; too small, that is, if we had had any choice in the matter. But it would be seven or eight years yet before we could hope to draw much from the Deva training runs. We had lost upward of a score of horses in the past two days, and they would be harder to replace than the men.

The countryman in charge of the herd (the horse herding and breaking was the only work of the community not done by the Brothers themselves) took one look at us from the hummock of land that was his lookout post, and tossing up his spear ran back toward the monastery building. We heard him shouting, “They are coming! They are back! Holy Brothers, it is the Count of Britain!” And a few moments later the bell of the little church began to throb out its round bronze notes in greeting and rejoicing. “Truly, we are to have a hero’s welcome!” said Bedwyr; and he let his hand fall from the harp strings, so that the weary smother of hoof-beats behind us grew suddenly louder.

The fire was fading from the sky as we reached the gateway in the thorn hedge; the huddle of reed-thatched sleeping cabins and farm buildings about the church and wattle dining hall were dark against the fading brightness of the west, and the few wind-stunted apple trees of the monks’ orchard were pale and insubstantial clouds of blossom; and suddenly I thought of that other community over toward the sunset in the Island of Apples. The Brothers and the poor folk who had taken refuge with them had come crowding down to their gateway, save for whichever Brother it was who was still ringing the bell. Their hands reached out to us, their anxious faces were full of questioning; they called down blessings on us as we clattered through. They had brought a lantern with them, and by its light I saw the haggard face of a woman with a babe asleep at her shoulder, and that Brother Vericus the ancient Prior was crying.

In the clear space between the ring hedge and the huddled buildings, I dropped from the saddle and pulled off my war cap. The others were dismounting all about me, clattering to a weary standstill, more than one of them swaying with the weakness of a wound. The sharp yellow gleam of the lantern was in my eyes, and people pressing about me, catching at my hands, or my knees, and I was aware of the tall spare figure of the Abbot moving toward me; aware that I was expected to kneel down for his blessing as I had done when we rode out. I wanted to get the wounded under cover, but I knelt down. Cabal lay beside me with a grunt.

“How went the day, my son?” He had a beautiful voice, like the bronze notes of the bell still floating out above us.

“We burned their winter camp,” I said. “There is one Saxon settlement the fewer to foul the grass, and this place may rest secure from the Barbarians, at least until the next thrust.”

His hands were light as skeleton leaves on my head. “May the Grace of God be upon you. And may your shield, under His, be over all Britain, as it has been over us this day; and may you find His peace when the fighting is over.”

But it was not the Grace of God that I wanted at that moment, it was salves and bandage linen and food for my men. I got to my feet again, slowly, for I was so tired that I could scarcely bear my own weight up from the ground. “Holy Father, I thank you for your blessing. I have wounded men with me — where may I send them for tending?”

“Wounded men, alas, we had expected,” he said. “All is ready for you in the hall; Brother Lucius, our Infirmarer, will go with you.”

The drivers whom we had left behind with the baggage train were already busy with the horses, and some of the village men among them. I saw Arian lead off with my bronze and bullhide buckler clanking softly at the saddletree, then turned to the business of getting the wounded together. Gault, one of my best youngsters, had a long spear wound in the thigh, and slid half fainting into the arms of his friend Levin, who had ridden close beside him all the way; but the rest of us were able to walk, and we went up to the hall together. I had a gash in my sword arm — most of our scathes, as usual with horse soldiers, were in the sword arm, or in the thigh below the guard of the thick leather kilt — and it was still oozing red.

In the hall they had hung extra lanterns from the rafters to see by, and pushed back the trestle table to make a clear space. There were small bundles of gear and possessions stacked within the doorway, easily to be caught up for a hurried flight. With the Sea Wolves so near, the Brothers and their refuging village folk had been prepared for flight when we came, and they had left all things ready in case the worst should happen after all.

Those of us whose hurts were slight stood back against the wall while the more sorely scathed were tended. After the chill of the spring evening it was very warm in the hall, for they had lit a fire, to boil water and heat the searing iron. The smoke hung among the rafters and made drifting yellow wreaths around the lanterns; it grew hot, and there began to be a thick smell of salves and the sweating bodies of men in pain, and once or twice, when the searing iron came into use, the sickening reek of scorched flesh. The first time the iron was used, it was on Gàult, and the boy cried out, short and sharp as the scream of a hawk. Afterward he wept, but I think he wept because he had cried out, not for the pain.

Brother Lucian, working with the sleeves of his habit rolled to the shoulder, and the shaven forepart of his head shining sweat-beaded in the lantern light, had two or three helpers, amongst them a young novice, whom I had noticed before. A yellow-haired overplump lad with a good straight pair of eyes, and a way of slightly dragging his left foot. Watching him now, somewhat anxiously at first, for he was so young that I doubted his skill, I saw that he knew what he was doing, and that he cared deeply for the doing of it. Once he glanced up and saw me watching him, but his eyes returned instantly to the work of his hands, without, I think, even being fully aware of mine. I liked the singleness of purpose in him.

When it came to my turn, it so happened that the Infirmarer was still busy upon someone else, and the novice turned to me as I came forward to the table under the lanterns. I was just going to pull off the clotted rag, but he stayed me, with the authority of a man who is about his own trade.

“No, let me. You will set it bleeding again.” He took up a knife and cut through the rag, eased away the stiffened folds and looked at the gash.

“It is not much,” I said.

“Clench your fist,” he ordered, and when I had done so, he nodded. “It is not much. You are fortunate. A nail’s breadth farther that way, and it might have severed the thing that bids the thumb answer to your will.” He bathed the gash and salved it, drawing the edges together, and lashed it. His hands were less plump than the rest of him, very sure of their work, strong and gentle at the same time, with a gentleness that had nothing soft in it but could be swiftly ruthless if the need arose. Also they were the hands of a fighter. And I thought for the first time that it was a pity that the healing art should lie altogether with the Church; better the old way when the healer had been part of the world, when army surgeons had marched with the Legions. Somehow I could not see these hands as belonging to one shut away into sanctuary, their healing shackled always to the dictates of one religion.

He fastened off the bandage and I thanked him and turned away, and in a little we went out, those of us who were still on our feet, to join the rest of the Companions, who had unhelmed and loosened off their war gear, and were kneeling about the candlelit doorway of the wattle church — there would have been room for less than half of us within — for it was the hour of evening prayer. The Abbot spoke the Thanksgiving prayers. His stately words meant little to me, but I remember that there was a late blackbird singing in the orchard, and the wind came siffling up from the marshes, and I had my own Thanksgiving prayer within me, because there was one less settlement of the Sea Wolves in Britain. Afterward they brought out and held up before us their chief treasure; some bones from Saint Alban’s foot, I think it was. The light from the open doorway woke colored fires in the goldwork and enamel of the reliquary, as the Abbot raised it between his hands; and I heard the soft awed gasp of the village folk, who lived, as it were, in the shadow of its sanctity.

Then mercifully there was food at last. We made camp in the orchard, and ate there, for, like the church, the hall would not have held half of us, let alone the huddled refugees of the countryside. The brown-clad Brothers served and ate with us; and the Abbot served me with his own hands.

We had a fire, well clear of the apple trees, and by the flicker of it I saw the young novice watching me, more than once. And late that evening, as I crossed the monastery garth toward the bothy where our sorest wounded had been housed, I met him coming from there, swinging a lantern in his hand and walking with that faint drag of the left foot that I had noticed before. “How is it with Gault and the others?” I asked as we came together, and jerked my chin in the direction of the bothy.

“I think that if they do not take the wound fever, they will do well enough. How is it with that arm, my Lord Artos?”

“Well enough, also. You’re a good surgeon.”

“It is my hope that I shall be, one day.”

I would have gone on, but he lingered as though there was something he wanted urgently to say; and I found myself lingering also. Besides, he had been catching at my interest all evening. “Is that why you entered the religious life?” I asked after a moment.

“There is nowhere that one can learn or follow the healer’s craft outside the Church, in these days,” he said; and then, speaking as though the words stuck a little in his throat, “That is a good enough reason for my choice of life, but lest it should fail me, I’ve another.” He thrust forward his bare left foot from the thick folds of his habit, and glancing down at the sudden movement, I saw that it was turned inward, wasted and drawn up like the cramped claw of a bird, and the reason for his slight lameness became clear. “I am a younger son. I possess nothing of my own save a certain skill with wound salves and black draughts; I had the normal weapon training that all boys have, but as my father was at pains to make clear to me, I’d not be likely to find a lord overeager to take a fighting man as slow-footed as I am into his hall.”

“I wonder if he was right,” I said.

“My Lord Artos is kind. I have wondered the same thing — now and then. But I expect he was.”

“I am willing to believe, at all events, that you will make a better surgeon than you would have made a soldier,” I said. “Why do you make this defense, as though I had accused you of something?”

His eyes were bright and wretched in the lantern light, and he laughed a little drearily. “I don’t know . . . I suppose because it is a time for taking the sword, and I would not have you think —” He caught at the words as though to have them unspoken again. “No, that is presumption; it sounds as though I were fool enough to think that you — that you —”

“Might waste my time thinking of you at all,” I said, rescuing him from the stammer. “My way is the sword and yours is prayer, and both are good. It should not matter to you what I think of you.”

“It will always matter to men, what you think of them,” he said; and then on a lighter note, “Nevertheless, it is good to follow the healer’s craft.”

“It is a craft not without its uses when men take to the sword, Brother . . . What name do they call you by?”

“Gwalchmai.”

Gwalchmai, the Hawk of May; it was a piteously ill-fitting name, for he was built more like a partridge than a hawk.

He hitched up the lantern and began to swing it. “It’s comic really, isn’t it? My Lord Artos, they have made the guest place ready for you — but they will have told you that.”

“They told me. But I had liefer sleep with my men in the orchard. God’s night to you, Brother Gwalchmai.” And we went our separate ways, I to see for myself how Gault and the other three were doing, and he, swinging his lantern in blurred gouts of light before him, on across the garth to the place where the novices slept.

Presently I went back to my Companions, and slept a good sleep under the apple trees, wrapped in my cloak and with my head on Cabal’s flank for a pillow. There is no pillow in the world so good as a hound’s flank.

Next morning “the bloom began to wear off the bilberries,” as they say; and it was Brother Lucian the Infirmarer, in all innocence of heart, who first showed me that it was so. I had been down to the low pastures to look at the monastery’s horses — particularly those who were part broken ready for the autumn markets. There were four or five of them big-boned enough to be of some use to us, which might serve to fill up our losses; and I was considering in my mind the price to offer for them. I might be able to get the price out of Guidarius — after all, we were fighting his battles — or failing that, there was something in the war kist, for a few of us had lands of our own; we had sold off the poorer yearlings from the breeding runs, and the Saxon weapons and goldsmiths’ work that we took from time to time fetched a good price. It mostly went on horses, but not when I could get them in any other way, for I had always to keep something in reserve against the days when gold might be the only way there was.

My mind was so full of horses that I all but walked through the old man, who had turned aside very kindly on seeing me, to tell me that I need have no fear for the wounded, for they would be well cared for, after we were gone.

I stared at him, scarcely understanding, for the moment, what he meant. “I am very sure of it; but, Brother Lucian, we are not yet saddling up.”

“Na na,” he said, smiling. “The day is yet very young.”

“The day on which we ride out from here has not yet dawned, Brother Lucian,” I said bluntly, and saw the startled look in his milky old eyes.

“But surely — surely, my Lord Artos, you will wish to be away back to Lindum now that the work of your swords in this part of the Fens is done?”

They were not trying to drive us out, I realized that; it was simply that it had never occurred to these fools in their enclosed world that men and horses who have been at hard stress for many days together must be rested when the chance offers. “My men need full three days’ rest, and so do my horses; today and tomorrow and the day after, we remain within your gates; and on the day after that, we ride for Lindum.”

“But — but —” He began to bleat like an elderly she-goat.

“But what, Brother Lucian?”

“The stores — the grain — always there is shortage in the springtime. We had our own poor folk to feed, these past few days —”

“But no longer,” I said; for the country folk had for the most part scattered back to their own lives, with their dogs and their cattle, their ducks and their pigs, now that the danger was passed over.

“They ate while they were here,” he rallied and pointed out, reasonably enough. I could see the thoughts scurrying among mouths and grain baskets inside his head. “There are close on four hundred of you, with the grooms and drivers; even should you eat sparingly as we do ourselves, which — forgive me, my Lord Artos — is not to be expected of fighting men — even should you eat as sparingly as we do ourselves, you will swallow up more than a month’s supplies, and your horses will graze bare the pasture that was for ours and our milch cows.”

I broke in on him. “Brother Lucian, will you go now to the Abbot and ask him to receive me.”

“The Holy Father is at prayer.”

“I can wait while the prayer is done, but no longer. Go now and tell him that the Count of Britain would speak with him.”

The Abbot received me within an hour, seated in his cross-legged chair in the hall where last night our wounds had been dressed, the more senior of the Brothers ranged about him. His head might have been that of a king on a golden coin. He rose to greet me, courteously enough, and then seated himself again, his blue-veined hands on the carved arms of the great chair. “Brother Lucian brings me word that you wish to speak with me.”

“Yes,” I said. “It seems that all is not clear between us as to when I and my Companions leave this place.”

He bent his head. “So Brother Lucian tells me.”

“And so that the matter may be settled, and trouble neither you nor us with uncertainties hereafter, I come to ask your hospitality for today, tomorrow and the morrow after. The third morning from now, when my men and horses are rested, we leave for Lindum.”

“That also, Brother Lucian has told me; and that he made clear to you our position, our shortage of stores after the winter. We are not used to feeding four hundred men and as many beasts over and above our own poor folk that it is our duty to care for.”

“There is good pasture hereabouts on the Fen fringes. My horses will not graze it out in three days. Most of us are hunters and we can find our own meat. And as to the grain and stores —” I leaned over him; I had not begun to be angry yet, because I could not believe that he grasped the true situation, and I was trying to make him understand. “Does it not seem to you, Holy Father, that the men who kept the roofs on the barns have earned the right to some of the grain in them? Many of us are wounded, all of us are spent. We must have three days’ rest.”

“But if the grain is not there?” he said, still kindly. “It is not there, my son. If we feed you for the three days that you demand, we shall not have enough left to keep us even in perpetual fast, until the harvest comes again.”

“There is still grain to be bought in the Lindum corn market.”

“And with what shall we buy this corn? We grow our own food; we are not a rich community.”

I was angry now, and I said, “Not so poor, either, that you have nothing to trade. Saint Alban’s foot lies in a goodly casket, even the bones themselves would fetch a good price.”

He jerked upright as though at the prick of a dagger point, and his face purpled under his eyes, while the watching monks gasped and crossed themselves and cried “Sacrilege!” and swayed like a barley field in a flurry of wind.

“Sacrilege indeed!” the Abbot said in a grating voice. “Sacrilege worthy of the Saxon king, my Lord Artos, Count of Britain!”

“Maybe. But to me, my men are a greater matter than a few gray bones in a golden casket!”

He made no answer; indeed I think he was beyond speech for the moment; and I went on relentlessly. I had meant to ask for the horses at a fair price, ill though we could afford it. But now I had decided otherwise. “Holy Father, do you remember a certain saying of the Christos, that the laborer is worthy of his hire? Two days ago, I and my Companions saved this place from the fire and the Saxon sword, and for that, our hire is three full days’ keep, and the four best horses in your pastures.”

He found his voice then, and cried out on me for a despoiler of the Church, and that I should leave such ways to the Sea Wolves.

“Listen, Old Father,” I said. “It might well have served me better to wait until the Sea Wolves had overrun this place, and taken them in the Fens farther westward, farther from their ships. I might have lost fewer men and fewer horses had I done that. And why should I do as I have done, and then ride away, asking for nothing in return?”

He said, “For the love of God.”

It was my turn to be silent. And a sudden quiet came over the hall, so that I heard the drone of the wild bees that nested in the thatch. I had thought him grasping, without either justice or charity in his heart, willing to take the lives of a score of my men and the sweat and blood of the rest of us, and give nothing in return; but I saw now that it was simply that for him the love of God had a different meaning to the meaning that it held for me. And my anger died away. I said, “I also have loved God in my way, but there are more ways than one. I have never seen the flame on the altar nor heard the voice in the sanctuary; I love my men who follow me, and the thing that we are prepared to die for. For me, that is the way.”

His face gentled a little, as though at the passing of his own anger, and suddenly he looked old and tired. But I did not relent; neither of us relented. After a few moments, he said coldly and wearily, “We are not strong enough to persuade you to leave us until you choose to go; and if we were as many and as strong as you, God forbid that, remembering your blood shed for us, we should deny you hospitality when you demand it. Stay then, and take the four horses for your guerdon. We shall pray for you, and it may be that our prayers and our hunger before next harvest will soften your will toward another community at another time such as this.”

He sat back in his chair, signifying with one old thick-veined hand that the thing was over.

We stayed out our three days, encamped in the monks’ orchard while the horses grazed under escort in the marsh pastures, and Caradawg, our armorer, set up his field forge and was busy with his mate, dealing with sprung rivets, beating out the dints in shield boss and war cap, and replacing the damaged links in mail shirts. We had a fair number of mail shirts by now, though they were slow-gathering, since only the great men of the Saxons possessed such war gear and so it was only when a chief was killed or taken that we were able to add to our store. (And the winning of a war shirt had become a matter for eager rivalry among the Companions, in consequence, who wore them as a hunter cuts a notch in his spear.) The rest of us took our turns of horse guard, and sprawled about the fires mending here a broken sandal strap and there the gash in a leather tunic, and ceaselessly trapped and hunted for the pot. But there was no longer friendship between us and the Brothers.

My lads did not take it kindly when I told them what had passed; Cei, I remember, proposed that we should fire the place as a sign of our displeasure, and some of the wilder ones were with him. And when I cursed him and them into a kind of sense, he consoled himself by eating himself almost to bursting point at every meal, in order to make as big a hole in the grain store as might be. The Brothers went about their own life, whether at prayer or at work on the farm, so far as possible as though we were not there, save for Brother Lucian and the boy Gwalchmai, who came and went in their care of the wounded as before. I knew that, even as the old Infirmarer had assured me before the trouble started, I need have no fear for the wounded after we were gone. They were good men, these brown-robed Brothers, though I longed to shake them until their back teeth rattled in their shaven heads. When, on the third morning, I ordered Prosper my trumpeter to sound for breaking camp, and at last the pack beasts were loaded and all things ready, they came out with the Abbot to the place before the gateway, to see the last of us, without anger. The Abbot even gave me the blessing for a departing guest. But it was done for duty’s sake, and had no warmth in it.

The horses, fresh after their days of rest, were trampling and tossing their heads. One of the pack mules tried to bite his neighbor’s crest and started a squealing fight. I turned to mount Arian, and as I did so, met the gaze of Gwalchmai the novice fixed upon me, where he stood on the outer fringe of the Brothers. I have never seen any face so wide open, so completely without defenses, as Gwalchmai’s that moment. The wind from the marsh was ruffling the fair hair on his forehead; he licked his lower lip, and half smiled, and then looked away.

“Gwalchmai,” I said, with the purpose scarce formed in my mind.

His gaze whipped back to mine. “My Lord Artos?”

“Can you ride?”

“Yes.”

“Come then, we can do with a surgeon.”

I would have left him to follow with our wounded when they came back to us, but Gault and the rest would want for nothing in Brother Lucian’s care, and I knew that if I did not take the boy now, I should not get him.

“Stop! Are you not content with our four best horses, that you must take from among our Brothers also?” the Abbot cried; and he made a strange gesture, spreading his arms like wings in their wide-falling sleeves, as though to protect the huddled Brotherhood behind him.

“The boy is but a novice, and still free to choose for himself! Choose, Gwalchmai.”

He took his gaze slowly from mine, and turned it to the Abbot. “Holy Father, I should make but a poor monk, with my heart elsewhere,” he said, and came out from among the Brothers to stand at my stirrup. “I am your man, my Lord Artos, for all that there is in me.” And he touched the hilt of my sword as one taking an oath.

The Abbot protested once again, more vehemently than before, then fell silent, while his monks and my own Companions, silent also, stood looking on. But I do not think that either of us heard what the old man cried out.

I said, “So, that is good, for I think there is in you that which we need among the Companions,” and turned in the saddle to bid a couple of the drivers to bit and bridle one of the monastery horses and fling a rug across his back.

While they did so, Gwalchmai, as composedly as though his leaving with me had been arranged for many weeks beforehand, set to tightening his rawhide belt and girding up the hampering skirts of his habit.

“Have you nothing that you wish to fetch? No bundle?” I asked.

“Nothing but what I stand up in. It makes for light traveling.” He never looked at the Abbot, nor at any of the Brothers again. Someone gave him a leg up, and he settled himself on the riding rug, and gathering up the reins, wheeled his horse among the rest of us. Man after man swung into the saddle, and we clattered and jingled out and down toward the fenland fringes and the old legionary road that runs due north from the Glein crossing toward Lindum.

NOT unnaturally, the Abbot complained of me to the Bishop of Lindum; but the Bishop, though zealous, was a small man, shrill but ineffectual, like a shrewmouse, and not hard to quell. Nevertheless, that was the start of the ill blood between myself and the Church, which has lasted almost ever since . . .

Six years went by, and all their summers were spent in arms against Octa Hengestson and his son Oisc who was now of an age to lead men. Lindum, with its ill-kept roads radiating from it like the spokes of a wheel, was the perfect base for the campaigning of those years, and there, in the old fortress of the Ninth Legion, made over to us by Prince Guidarius, we set up our winter quarters, from which to strike out southward toward the Glein and the shores of the Metaris Estuary westward along the open sea coast, northward to drive the Sea Wolves back into the Abus River.

Meanwhile, I knew that Ambrosius had made his stronghold against the Dark and was taking his stand there against old and mighty Hengest and against a new enemy, one Aelle, who had landed with his war fleet south of Regnum and made himself a sore menace to the British eastern flank. All that had nothing to do with me now; but nevertheless, I think that I would have abandoned Guidarius for the time being, and left the work half done and doubtless all to do again, and ridden south to Ambrosius if he had sent for me. But he did not send, and so I went on with the work at hand.

They were hard years, and we did not always carry home the victor’s laurels but sometimes only our wounds to lick. But by the seventh autumn, Lindum Territory and the northern part of the Icenian coast was almost clear, and so unhealthy for the Saxon kind that for a while their crazy war boats no longer descended on the coast with every east wind that blew. (We used to call the east wind “the Saxon Wind” in those days.) And we knew that when spring opened the country, and the time for the war trail came again, it would be time to strike north across the Abus against Eburacum, where Octa and his hordes had made their new war camp in the old Brigantian country.

That autumn, Cabal died. I had never gone into battle without him running at my stirrup since he was three parts grown, and all that last summer he went with me as he had always done. But he was old, very old, gray-muzzled and scarred by wounds, and in the end his valiant heart wore out. One evening he lay as usual at my feet beside the fire in the hall, and suddenly he raised his head to look up at me, as though he were puzzled by something that he did not understand. I stooped and began to fondle the soft hollow under his chin, and he gave a small sigh and laid his head in my hand. I did not realize what was happening, even then; only his head grew heavier and heavier in my hand, until I knew that the time had come to lay it down.

I went out then, and stood leaning on the colonnade wall for a long time in the darkness.

But there was little time, after all, to spare for grieving over a dead hound that autumn.

“Not many evenings later, we were once again in the hall, the mess hall of the old legionary fortress, where the badges and titles of the ill-fated Ninth Legion were painted on the peeling plaster over the door. There were hounds sprawled about the central fire, hounds belonging to one or other of the Companions. I watched Fulvius’s red bitch suckling her puppies, and thought how perfectly easily I could come by another hound to fill with his padding and the rattle of his long nails, the silence that walked at my heels. But he would not be Cabal. Only fate could send me another Cabal. . . . Supper was over, and the lads were about their evening’s amusements. Beyond the fire, two of them, stripped to their breeks, were wrestling, while a knot of others gathered about them to watch and cheer them on. I could hear their panting breaths and the laughter and advice of the onlookers. In a corner somewhat withdrawn from the rest, Gwalchmai leaned over a draughtboard, confronting Flavian, my onetime armor-bearer. They had long since formed a liking for playing draughts together, those two, maybe because they played almost equally badly. We had sweated the fat of Gwalchmai in the past six years, and he no longer bore the least resemblance to a partridge; a lean wiry young man with a quiet face. I had done well, I thought, when I whistled Gwalchmai from his fenland monastery; his father had been wrong, for he had proved himself a formidable fighter on horseback, though on foot his lameness made him slow; but above all he had proved himself the surgeon that I had taken him for. More than one of us owed our lives to him by now. Whatever mistakes I might make in the men I took for my Companions, I had certainly made none there, nor in Bedwyr’s case, nor in Cei’s. Those three, above all others, had become, as it were, an inner core of the Brotherhood, in the years since we first rode together.

Cei slept with his back against one of the benches, his legs in their black and crimson trews stretched wide to the fire. Presently he would get up, shake himself like a dog, so that his bright glass arm ring and necklaces jingled, and stroll off to the Street of Women at the lower end of the town. When Cei slept in the evening it generally meant that he had plans for a night with more amusing things in it than sleep. Some of us mended harness or cast the dice, talked idly by fits and starts, or simply stared into the fire, waiting for Bedwyr sitting on a white bullskin at my feet to sing again. It was never any use to clamor for song or saga from Bedwyr; when he chose, he would give it of his own free will, harping the bird off the tree, and when he did not choose, nothing on the earth would force him.

A movement in the shadows caught at the tail of my eye, and glancing that way, I saw where on one of the side benches, withdrawn as though into a world of their own, Gault and Levin leaned on each other’s shoulders and shared the same ale cup, talking together in low voices and with quiet laughter. It is a thing that happens on campaign, where women are scarce, every commander knows that; but sometimes, as with those two, it becomes a part of life.

Bedwyr saw where I was looking, and said with a breath of laughter, “It is as well, perhaps, that our good Bishop Felicus is not here to see that. The Church would hold up its hands in horror and talk of mortal sin.”

“Mortal sin . . . But then the Church and I have seldom seen eye to eye, these six years or so. If it keeps the lads happy and in fighting trim . . .” For it did keep them in fighting trim, each of them striving to be worthy of his friend, each to make the other proud of him; and I have known the love of a yellow-haired girl to make life too sweet and unnerve a man’s sword hand, before now.

“Give me a whole squadron of such sinners — so that they be young — and I’ll not complain.”

“What when they grow old?”

“They will not grow old,” I said. “The flame is too bright.” And I knew the grief that I suppose all commanders know from time to time, when they look about them at the men who answer to their trumpets; grief for the young men who will never grow old. . . .

A hurried step came along the colonnade, and Owain who was on guard duty appeared in the doorway (we always mounted a light guard whether in camp or winter quarters, especially since Ambrosius had sent me word that Hengest was gathering a war fleet in the Tamesis mouth). “Artos, one of the scouts has come in, and another man with him. They say they must have word with you at once.”

“I’ll come,” I said. “Keep the next song until I get back, Bedwyr,” and got up and went out with Owain into the autumn darkness of the colonnade.

The two men were waiting for me in the Sacculum where the Legion had kept its Eagle, its altars and its pay chest. We kept our own pay chest there now, and the muster roll, and the Red Dragon on its painted spear shaft propped in one corner; and it was the place where I usually saw any scouts or messengers that came hi. This man I knew of old; he was one of Guidarius’s hunters, who knew the northern marshes as a man knows his own bean patch; a little ferret of a man, but completely reliable. The other was a stranger to me, a tall youngster carrying the woad-stained war buckle that proclaimed him for one of the Brigantes, and wearing the gold tore of a chieftain about his throat — like my own mountain people, the folk of the Northern Moors had gone back to their old ways in dress as in most other things, since the Legions left. I listened to what they had to tell me, and when they were finished, dispatched them to get a meal and a night’s rest, for clearly they were too spent for our company that night. Then I went back to the mess hall, and called Cei and Bedwyr out to me.

We went back to the Sacculum, and Cei, still yawning his way out of his interrupted sleep, kicked the door shut behind us. “Well?” he grumbled. “What’s the word? I was just going down into the town.” Cei generally woke from sleep in a grumbling mood.

“I’ll not keep you long,” I said. “There’ll still be plenty of the night left. And while you’re with her you can bid good-bye to Cordaella or Lalage or whoever it is this time.”

His eyes opened fully, and his temper sweetened in the moment while I looked at him. “Sa sa! It is like that, is it?”

And Bedwyr, who had come out still carrying his harp, and was leaning against the wall watching us, struck a little spurt of notes that was like an exclamation.

“It is like that. It seems that we have wrought too well, hereabouts, for Earl Hengest’s peace of mind. He has come up to the aid of his son — landed on the coast north of the Abus and heading for Eburacum.”

“So that was what he was gathering his war boats for,” Bedwyr said. And I nodded.

Cei hitched at his sword belt. “And so now we march north to meet them.”

“Yes.”

Bedwyr said, “It is something late in the year to be riding out on a new campaign.”

“I know. It is in my mind that Hengest knows it also, and is banking on the knowledge.” I began to walk up and down the small room; four paces from the window to the door, four paces back again — I have always found it easier to think walking. “If we leave him to himself now, with the whole winter to strengthen his position, he will be all the tougher nut to crack open in the spring; and there is always the risk that he may make the first move, and come down on us. We have a month of possible campaigning weather left — if we’re lucky. We must risk the weather breaking early.”

“Aye well, there’ll be girls in Eburacum, I dare say,” Cei remarked philosophically.

Bedwyr quirked up that flaring eyebrow, and the laughter flickered in his voice. “Is it any girl for you, Brother Cei? Any girl in any city?”

“Any girl that is warm and willing.” The golden man turned to me. “What is the word, Artos?”

“How soon can we march?”

“In three days,” they both said together; and Cei added, “That is for the Companions; for Guidarius’s men — who can say?”

I was looking at Bedwyr. His fingers were still on the harp strings, but he made no sound. He lifted his eyes to meet mine, gravely considering, under their odd brows. “Who can say? — Guidarius, I suppose. But it is in my heart to wonder if we can count on the Lindum men at all.”

I had been wondering that also. We had fought through all those last coast summers together, Guidarius’s ragged war host acting as spearmen and mounted archers — their sturdy dependable little horses were well suited to that work, and for scouting, though they had not the weight for a charge; and we knew each other as well as men can who have fought together for more than seven years. It was not them that I doubted, but Guidarius himself. “That’s as may be,” I said. “Let the others know, and get things moving, Bedwyr. I must go and speak with Guidarius now, but I’ll be back in an hour.”

“And myself?” said Cei, his thumbs, as they most often were, in his sword belt.

“Go and bid good-bye to Lalage. You can take over double your share of work in the morning, to even the count.”

I west out through the main gate of the camp, hearing it already beginning to stir and thrum behind me, and across the street to the old Governor’s Palace, close to the Forum. The bitter-smelling mist of early autumn was creeping up from the river marshes, over the lower town, and the lantern that hung in the entrance to Guidarius’s forecourt shed a yellow pool of light on to a drift of yellow poplar leaves across the threshold. It was indeed perilously late in the year to be riding out on a new campaign.

I roused the doorkeeper who was sleeping peacefully with his empty beer jar beside him, and told him that I must speak with the Prince Guidarius.

Guidarius was in his private apartments, spending a domestic evening with his wife and daughters. The room seemed, when I was shown into it after a maddening delay, to be very bright with candlelight, very hot from the brazier which glowed clear red in the midst of it, and very full of girls.

Guidarius, reclining on a wolf-headed couch with his wife sitting dutifully at his feet, was very Roman as to outward seeming, his pouchy face carefully shaved, the few remaining hairs of his head trimmed short, his paunchy little body clad in a Roman tunic of fine white wool, and his wife’s gown cross-girdled in the classic manner, as few women still wore it, even when I was young. I never saw him without a feeling of surprise that he should have turned back, after the generations that his fathers had been magistrates and even provincial governors, to the title of Prince, that had been theirs before the Eagles came. Other men, yes, it had happened up and down Britain, as our old native states woke out of the Roman years, but not men who still wore Roman tunics and swore by Roma Dea and supped, as Guidarius had clearly done (for the remains were still hanging around his ears), with wreaths of rosemary and autumn violets on their bald heads.

He looked up when I entered, and nodded affably. “Ah, my Lord Artorius. I grieve that you were kept waiting, but you know how it is, we must all ease our shoulders from the cares of state sometimes; I am never easy to gain access to when I am spending a quiet hour with my family.”

“I know how it is,” I agreed. “But my business is urgent. I would not have broken in on you else.”

He stared at me a moment, then made shooing gestures to his women folk who had already risen uncertainly to their feet; and they fluttered out, leaving behind them a half-played game of draughts, a wisp of some soft embroidered stuff with the needle shining in it; all the pretty clutter that collects where women have been.

When they had gone, and the heavy curtain had fallen across the doorway behind them, he swung his feet to the floor and sat up. “Well? Well well? What is it?”

I walked over to him. “Prince Guidarius, I received word not an hour since, that Earl Hengest is come north to the aid of his kinsmen; he has landed beyond the Abus and is heading for Eburacum.”

He looked at me, startled, and then the blood rose into his mottled cheeks. “You received? Why was the word not brought in the first place to me?”

“The thing is beyond your frontiers,” I told him. “But I am the Count of Britain, and therefore my frontiers are wider than yours.”

It was foolish, when I should have been trying to conciliate him, but something about the man had always raised my hackles, since the first day that I entered Lindum, and the years that I had tried to work with him had not altered that. But truly, I think it would have made no difference if I had crawled on my belly at his feet.

He made sounds in his throat, then evidently decided to let it pass; only he said testily, “Well, well, young dogs bark loudest, so they say. Though you be Alexander himself, pull out that stool and sit down. It gives me a crick in the neck to be trying to talk to you while you stand over me like a pine tree.”

I did as he bade me, and then went on with what I had it in me to say. “I am come to bring you the word now, and to tell you that I am marching north in three days.”

He stared at me in good earnest then, with a frown puckering his forehead. “It is too late in the year to start a new campaign,” he said at last, much as Bedwyr had done.

“Almost, but not quite.”

He shrugged. “You should know best; you are, as you have pointed out, the Count of Britain. Well, I suppose if you can finish the thing in one good sharp encounter, you may be back here and snug in winter quarters before the bad weather sets in.”

“Prince Guidarius, we shall not be coming back, neither before the winter sets in, nor after,” I said.

He looked at me with his chin dropped. “Not — coming back?”

“Not coming back.”

He seemed suddenly older, and as though there was less bulk inside his skin. I leaned toward him, making myself sound reasonable. “We should have gone in the spring, in any case, that you know; and you will have no more trouble with the Sea Wolves through the winter. How then is it a worse thing that we go now?”

“Next spring is half a year away.” He made a small helpless gesture. “I suppose I hoped that you would change your mind before the time ran out.”

I shook my head. “You have two good leaders in Cradock and Geranicus, and I have broken in your men for you. They were brave men when I came, but a brave rabble; now they are trained troops — even disciplined after a fashion — and will rally to you swiftly at need. You should be able to hold off the Barbarians for yourselves now; and the most crying need for me is elsewhere.”

Silence hung between us for a long tight-drawn moment, and then he gave his plump shoulders a little jerk, as though to straighten them, and I thought I saw beneath the pouchy lines of his face something of the fighting man he had been in his youth. I should not have to fear for the land between the Abus River and the Metaris after I was gone. “Then it seems that there is no more to be said.”

“Something more — I want four hundred of your men to march north with me.”

I thought his eyes would start clean from his head. “Roma Dea! Man, man, you have upward of a hundred of my best warriors sucked into the circle of those Companions of yours at this moment! And you must have had as many more through the years! What further would you have?”

“Four hundred, of their own choosing and mine, to go with me as auxiliaries, as spearmen and archers on this campaign. There will be — I have told you before — no more trouble with the Sea Wolves for this year at least; and when the autumn’s fighting is over, and Earl Hengest safely out of Eburacum, I will send them back to you.”

“Those that are left of them.”

“Those that are left of them.”

“And meanwhile, no man, not even you, my most war-wise Count of Britain, can say for sure what the Sea Wolves will do, for they are as unpredictable as the winds that bring them to our shores; and my fighting strength will not stand the loss of four hundred men.”

I cut in on him. “No man, not even you, my most wise Prince of the Coritani, knows more surely than I do what is your fighting strength and what loss it will stand.”

The new strength in his face was gathering itself against me now. “It is enough for us to hold the Sea Wolves from our own pastures; why should I send my young men to fight in the Brigantes’ country?”

Suddenly it was I who felt old and tired and helpless. “Because if we stand alone, state and princedom and tribal hunting run each within our own frontiers — state and princedom and hunting run, we shall fall one by one, each within our own frontiers. It is only if we can stand together that we shall drive the Saxons back into the sea.”

I do not know how long we argued the thing; but it seemed a very long time. I think once he came near to offering me the whole four hundred, if I would return for another year when the autumn’s fighting was over, but by that time we knew each other well — and he thought better of that particular offer before it was spoken.

In the end I did none so badly, for I came away with the grudging promise of two hundred, on my oath on Maximus’s great seal that they should indeed come back when the fighting for Eburacum was ended.

The mist had crept up from the lower town, scented with wood-smoke and sodden leaves, and was making a wet yellow smoke about the courtyard lantern as I passed out again into the street. The chill of it was on my own heart. How shall we stand against the Barbarian flood? What hope is there for us even for Ambrosius’s hundred years, if we cannot learn to stand together, shield to shield, across our own frontiers?

The two days that followed were filled with the usual turmoil of a war host making ready for the march; rations and gear being issued and packed in the great leather-topped pack panniers, sheaves of arrows and spare weapons issued and checked, horses brought in from autumn pasture and fitted with new leather foot shackles, armor and war gear given a final overhaul to make sure that all was in perfect order; and all day and all night Lindum rang with the deep bell-clink of hammer on armorer’s anvil and the neighing of excited horses from the makeshift picket lines. During those two days also, there must have been many partings in and around the old fortress city. By this time upward of a hundred of the Companions were, as Guidarius had said, men from the Coritani, and many of the others had girls in the town. A few (God knows I had always tried to hold them back from that when I could) had married since we first made our headquarters there. Partings heavy with promises to come back one day, or send for the girl . . . Partings taken lightly with a kiss and a bright new necklace and no promises at all . . . Yet it was not all partings, for when we marched out at last, the strength of our baggage train was increased by twoscore or more of hardy girls, riding in the light carts that carried the mill and the field forge, or walking with a fine free swing, their skirts kilted to their knees, among the drivers and the laden pack ponies.

It is not an ill thing for a war host to carry a few women with it, so that they be hardy and fierce enough to fend for themselves and not drag on the men; for their cooking has its uses, and their care can mean the difference between life and death to the wounded. The trouble, of course, with a few women among many men starts when several men desire the same girl at the same time, or when one man wants one especial girl for himself against all comers. That is when the Brotherhood starts to break. Dear God! That is when the Brotherhood starts to break. I let it be known through the war host that at the first whispering of trouble over the women to reach my ears, I should abandon the whole gaggle of them wherever we might happen to be. Then I let the matter rest.

The young chieftain and the hunter who had brought me word of Hengest’s coming acted as our guides. For the first three days the hunter led us northwestward, by the road and then by looping marsh ways that followed the firm ground among the reedbeds and winding waters and thickets of thorn and sallows, where left to ourselves we should have been hopelessly lost within an hour, and where, even as it was, the horses were often fetlock deep in the dark sour-smelling ooze. One twilight we passed the burned-out remains of a Saxon settlement that had been our work in the previous year, and something — a wildcat, maybe — screamed at us from the ruins. After three days we began to pull up out of the marshes, into softly undulating country and low hills, where the wind over the dead heather made a sound that was harsh in our ears after the softer wind-song over the marshes that we had known so long. And on the fourth evening we struck the road from Lagentus to Eburacum and turned north along it. The hunter was out of his territory now, and turned back to his own hunting runs, and the young chieftain entering his own countryside took his place as guide.

Two marches northward the road crossed a river by a broad paved ford, covered by one of the gray derelict guard posts that still stud the countryside. And there we met the Saxon war host under its white horsetail standards.

Whether they had wind of our coming and were advancing to meet us, or whether they had thought to come down behind us in the old Lindum position and take us unawares, I do not know; nor does it matter now. We joined battle at first light of a squally October morning, the rain sweeping across the sodden wrack of last year’s bracken. They had the advantage of ground, their left flank on the soft ground by the river, their right guarded by dense thorn scrub. They outnumbered us badly, thanks to Guidarius, and the rain slackened our bowstrings, while of course it had no effect on the hideous little throwing axes with which many of them were armed. On our side we had the advantage of cavalry, which on that narrow front did no more than even the odds. By midday it was over; a small, wicked, bloody business. Neither of us gained the victory, and both were too badly mauled to fight again that year.

Hengest and his war host fell back on Eburacum and we on Deva that men still call the City of Legions. It was an obvious choice for our winter quarters, with wide grazing behind us and the cornlands of Môn none so far away. But it cost us something to get there, and more than one of our wounded died on the road. We got through at last, none too soon, and rode into Deva in a full gale from the west and driving rain that was already turning the dried-out summer moors into oozing mosses; men and horses alike blind weary and on nodding terms with starvation. We were used to living on the country but among the mountains in October the living is not rich for man or beast.

The young chieftain came with us, carrying a wounded shoulder, to see us well into the mountains, but would come no farther. His own village was scarce a day’s march eastward, he said, but when we came back in the spring, he would rejoin us. We gave him one of the pack beasts to ride, for he was weak with the wound; and he rode off on his different way from ours, turning once to wave from the skyline before his own hills hid him from view. I have wondered sometimes whether he reached his village. We never saw him again.

I DID not know Deva well, but there had always been friendly dealings between Arfon and the City of Legions; and I had been there once or twice when I was a boy, and again when we brought up the Septimania horses, and the last time only a few years since when I had seized the chance in an open winter for a flying visit to Arfon and Deva to see for myself how things went in the breeding and training runs, instead of sending Bedwyr or Fulvius in the spring, as I had done in other years. So now, as I heard Arian’s heavy hoofbeats crash hollow under the gate arch, I had a sudden sense of refuge and return to familiar things. And certainly it seemed that Deva remembered me. The people came running as we rode wearily up through the weed-grown streets toward the gray frown of the fortress; only a handful at first, then more and more as the word spread, until when we clattered in through the unguarded Praetorian Gate, half the city was running at our horses’ heels, calling greetings and shouting for news.

In the gale-swept parade ground I dropped from Arian’s back, staggering as my cramped legs all but gave under me, and stood with a hand on the horse’s drooping rain-darkened neck, to look about me while the rest clattered in and dismounted likewise. I had thought that the old fortress might be already full of squatters from the city, but save for a few ragged ghosts that came spilling out from odd corners even as I watched, the place was as empty as the Legions had left it. The drift away to the country which was thinning most big cities nowadays had perhaps come about more swiftly at Deva, because Kinmarcus, who had no more liking for towns than had Cador, had gone back to make the capital of his little border princedom at the Dun of the Alderwoods where his forebears had ruled before the Eagles came. The town was dying in its sleep, as a worn-out old man dies; and meanwhile there was room to spare for everybody, and no need to spill uphill into the deserted fortress.

Bedwyr and Cei were beside me, still holding their weary horses. Gwalchmai was busy among the mule carts as they rolled in with the wounded. “Get some of the barrack rows cleared out and the men under cover,” I said. “We shall have to use some of the spare barrack rows and the main granary for the horses — there’ll not be stabling for above sixty; this place hasn’t been used since before the Legions took to cavalry.” I turned on a soldierly-looking old man leaning on a finely carved staff, whom the townsfolk had made way for as for one in authority. “Old Father, do you command here?”

His straight mouth twitched with sudden humor. “In these days I am never sure whether to claim the title of Chieftain or Chief Magistrate; but it is true that I command here, yes.”

“Good. Then we need wood for the fires, food for ourselves and fodder for the horses. As you see, they are in no state to be turned out to graze at the present. Can your people manage that?”

“We will manage that.”

“Also fresh salves and linen for the wounded — the little man over there with the crooked foot will tell you what he wants, and whatever it is, for God’s sake give it to him.”

“To the half of my kingdom,” said the old man. He glanced about the throng of staring townsfolk, and changing his tone so that it might have been another man who spoke above the booming of the wind, quickly and without fuss called out this one and that and gave them their orders. Then as men and women scattered to do his bidding, he came, leaning on his staff, to stand beside me in the little shelter that the end of a barrack row gave from the driving rain. “It will be some time before the fodder can come, there is not so much fodder in Deva as will feed this number of horses, and we must send out to one or two of the big farms for it; but it will come.”

“You are good hosts,” I said, tugging at the thongs of my iron war cap and pulling it off.

“Maybe we should be worse hosts to strangers, but are you not of the breed of the Lords of Arfon?” (I smiled inwardly at the careful way that it was framed.) “And do not your brood mares graze as it were under our very walls? We count you as a friend — as Artos the Bear, before ever we remember you for Artorius, Count of Britain.”

“It is a useful title. It gives me some kind of authority among the princes. But Artos the Bear has a more friendly sound.”

Around me the Companions with the grooms and drivers were already hard at work. A starved-looking young priest had appeared from somewhere to help Gwalchmai with the wounded, and the weary horses were being led away. Amlodd, the cheerful freckle-faced lad who had taken Flavian’s place as my armor-bearer, came to take Arian from me, and I would have turned away about my own work, but the old man stayed me with a brief touch on my arm, his gaze following two of the Companions who stumbled past at that moment, supporting a third into the shelter of the nearest doorway. “You have been fighting and have come sorely out of the battle, and you will have other things to do tonight than tell the story; but remember, when you have the leisure, that we should be glad to know what has befallen — that is a matter which concerns us with the rest of Britain.”

I said, “There is not much to tell — a drawn battle, south of Eburacum. But you can sleep tonight without fear of Saxon fire in the thatch. There’s no wolf pack on our heels. . . . Meanwhile there’s one thing more I need; one of your young men to saddle up and ride to the Dun of the Alderwoods with word for the Prince Kinmarcus that we are in his city and I would come to speak with him as soon as may be.”

But I did not ride to the Dun after all, for three days later Kinmarcus himself rode in with a small band of hearth companions.

We had been getting the best-recovered of the horses out to pasture, to ease the strain on the fodder situation, and I returned to the fortress to see him dismounting from a dancing wild-eyed pony mare on the parade ground before what had once been the officers’ block, while his men stood by with the carcasses of two red deer slung across the backs of a couple of ponies in their midst.

He roared like a gale of wind when he saw me (a great voice he had for so small a man), and came to fling his arm around my shoulders as far up as he could reach. “Sa sa sa, my Bear Cub! It is sun and moon to my eyes to see you after this long while!”

“And trumpets in my heart to hear you again, Kinmarcus my Lord!”

He boomed with laughter. “The youngster brought me your word, that you were here in Deva and would come to speak with me; but I was for hunting in this direction, and so I but carried the trail a little farther, and here I am — with the fruits of my hunting for a guest-gift.”

“A fine gift! We shall feast like heroes tonight!”

He stood with his little legs straddled, and stared about him at my men and his own as they hauled away the carcasses for jointing, his bright masterful gaze disposing of them all in one sweep. “And meantime, while the feast is cooking, is there somewhere in this buzzing hornets’ nest where a man can talk with a chance of hearing his own voice without everyone else hearing it too?”

“Come up onto the ramparts. We keep a lookout over each of the gates, but no pacing sentries between. We can talk in peace up there.”

But when we had climbed the steps to the southwest corner of the rampart walk, he did not at once begin to talk of whatever it was that had brought him (for I was sure that, friends as we were, this was no mere friendly visit), but leaned beside me on the coping, looking away toward the mountains. The storms of the last few days had rained and blown themselves out; it was a day of broken light and drifting cloud shadow; and Yr Widdfa and his bodyguard of lesser heights stood clear, dark-bloomed with drifting shadows against the tumbled sky. It seemed to me, looking in the same direction, that the light wind that siffled across the ramparts brought with it the smell of the high snows, and the chill heart-catching scent of leaf mold the mossy north sides of trees that was the breath of the woods below Dynas Pharaon where I was bred. And then, as so often happened when I turned toward my own mountains, it seemed that the whisper of peat smoke was on the same wind, and the aromatic sweetness of a woman’s hair. I wondered whether I had a son among those blue-shadowed glens and hidden valleys; a son seven years old, and trained in hate since first he sucked in the venom with his mother’s milk. . . . No, I did not wonder; I knew. One can feel hate at a distance, as one can feel love. . . . I caught back the scent of the woods below Dynas Pharaon, and clung to it in spirit as a man clings to a talisman in a dark place.

I suppose I shivered, for Kinmarcus beside me laughed and said, “What is it? A gray goose flying over your grave?”

“Only a cloud over the sun.”

He glanced at me aside; it was a stupid thing to have said, for there was no cloud over the sun just then; but he did not press the thing further. “And now, let you tell me what has passed this autumn.”

So it was to be my turn first. I told him. There was little enough to tell and the story was soon done.

“And so you are come back here to Deva, to lick your wounds, and make your winter quarters.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And what as to supplies?”

“That was among my chief reasons for choosing Deva; the grazing ground for the horses, the Môn barley for us. I sent Bedwyr my lieutenant with the baggage carts and a small escort off to Arfon this morning, to get what he can. I’d have given them a few days’ longer rest, but with winter upon us, I daren’t. We can only pray to God, as it is, that they will get the gram through in time — and that the harvest has been good in Môn.”

“And meanwhile?”

“Meanwhile, we ‘live on the country.’ I’ve paid your folk what I can. I can’t pay the fair price for our keep, there’s not enough in the war kist, there never is; and what there is goes mostly to the horse dealers and the armorers.”

“And to Arfon for corn?”

I shook my head. “That counts as tribute from my people. Some will come actually from my own estates. I am of the breed of the Lords of Arfon, as your chieftain here put it. They will let me have the corn. . . . For the rest, there’s always the hunting — the stored grain in the granary and the boar in the woods; that is the way the outposts used to live in the old days, isn’t it?”

Silence fell between us for a while, and then at last Kinmarcus said, “What thing was it that you would have come to the Dun to speak with me about?”

I turned a little, leaning one-elbowed on the coping, to look at him. “I want men.”

He smiled, that swift fierce smile that leapt into his face and out again, leaving it grave. “It is in my heart that you can gather men to you with little help from any princeling, my friend.”

“Given a free hand, yes.”

“In Lindum, the hand was not free?”

“Free enough, while the men were needed only to clear the Sea Wolves from within their own frontiers. I must have men to follow me out of the Deva hunting runs without let or hindrance from their Prince, and across the mountains to Eburacum in the spring.”

“Your hand is free,” he said. “Set up your standard, and the young men will come like June bugs to a lantern. Only leave a few to defend our own women and our own hearth places.”

“The Scots raiders?”

“The Scots raiders, and others. Maybe the Saxon wind blows across the mountains.” He shifted abruptly, before I could ask his meaning, head up into the wind that lifted back his fallow-streaked mane of hair. “What after Eburacum?”

“It is not only Eburacum, though Eburacum is the heart of it. It is the whole eastern end of the Brigantes country. After that we go wherever the sorest need calls us; southeast into the Iceni territory in all likelihood. The Saxons call all that part for their own North-folk and Southfolk, already.”

Kinmarcus said abruptly, “And yet I believe that if you are wise, you will take the way north, beyond the Wall, and that without overmuch delay.”

I looked at him quietly, aware that this at last was what he had come to say. “What is the reading of that riddle, my Lord Kinmarcus?”

And he returned my look, eye into eye. “I also have a thing to speak of and a tale to tell,” he said. “It is so that I did not wait your coming, but hunted toward Deva. If the signs and portents do not lie, by next midsummer the heather will be ablaze through half the lowlands of Caledonia; by harvest, the fire will have leapt the Wall.”

“Another riddle to answer the first. What does it mean?”

“There has been unrest in southern Caledonia for a year and more. We have felt it stirring, we who hold the princedoms of the North. Even so far down from the Wall as this, we have felt it, but the thing was formless, like a little wind on a summer’s day that blows all ways at once through the long grass. Now the thing has taken form and we know from whence the wind blows. The Saxons have called in the Painted People to their aid, promising them a share of the fat pickings when Britain goes down; and the Painted People have sent out the Cran Tara, even overseas into Hibernia, summoning the Scots, and made common cause with certain of the British chieftains who think they see the chance to break free of all bonds and stand proud and alone — the fools, hastening to set their necks under the Saxon’s heel.“

“Earl Hengest’s heel?” There was a small shock of cold in me.

“I think not. Possibly Octa has a hand in it, but it is more likely in my mind that the thing lies with the true Saxons of the north coast. Oh aye, with us the one name serves for all, but Hengest is a Jute, remember, and the Sea Wolves have not yet learned to combine.” His voice dropped to a brooding note. “If they learn before we do, then that is the end of Britain.”

“How do you know all this?” I said, after a pause.

“By a mere trick of chance, or as some might say, by the Grace of God. Not many days since, a currach bound for the Caledonian coast was driven off course by a northwesterly wind and came ashore on ours. The men on board were an embassy of some kind, for they carried no weapons save their dirks, though they were of the warrior kind, and among the wreckage there were green branches such as men carry on an embassy for a sign of peace, and nowhere any sign of the whitened war shields. Only one man came alive out of the wreckage, and he had been broken senseless across the rocks. The men who drew him to land would have finished him then and there, as one finishes a wounded viper, but he cried out something about the Painted People and the Saxon kind. That was enough to make the man with the dagger hold his hand. They carried him up to the fisher huts in the hope that there might be more to be got from him — and sent word to me.”

“Torture?” I said. I am not squeamish where the Scots or the Saxons are concerned, but I have never liked the business, needful though it be at times, of roasting a man over a slow fire or slipping a dagger point under his fingernails to come at the thing he has to tell. It is not pity, but merely that I feel too sharply the skin parch and blister, the dagger point shrieking under my own nails.

“In the state he was in, if we had tried torture then, he would have found his escape by dying under our hands; so we let him bide for a few days, in hope that he might regain strength a little, and in the end there was no need. The fever took him. It was a talking fever, and he talked for a day and a night before he died.”

“You are sure that his story was not the mere raving of delirium?”

“I have seen many men die in my time; I know the difference between the raving of delirium and a man crying out in fever the secrets on his heart. . . . Besides, when one comes to think of it, the story is a likely one, isn’t it?”

“Horribly likely. If it be true, pray God they cannot get the fire blazing before we have had time to deal with Hengest in Eburacum. That must come first — it is in my mind that next year is likely to be something of a race against time.”

That night we did indeed feast like heroes, and afterward made merry, though we missed Bedwyr and his harp. And next morning after we had made certain plans and exchanged certain promises between us, Kinmarcus rode off with his companions, the little wild-eyed mare dancing under him like a bean on a bake stone.

The day that followed was a good day; one of those days that do not greatly matter in the pattern of things, but linger, comely-shaped and clear-colored in the memory when the days of splendor and disaster have become confused. I had had no time until then to spare for anything farther afield than the in-pastures where some of our mounts were already out at grass. But that morning, after Kinmarcus was away, I sent for Arian, who was rested by that time, and with Cei and Flavian and young Amlodd, rode out to look at the horse runs.

Winter, which had seemed almost upon us, had drawn back a little, and the day had the softness of early autumn; a light west wind soughing across the gently undulating levels, the sun veiled by a silver haze, and the shriveled brown leaves drifting from the long belts of oak coppice shaped askew by the Atlantic gales, that crested many of the faint lifts of land. Here and there, little dark cattle turned to stare at us with slowly moving jaws as we rode by — fewer than there would have been last month, before the autumn slaughtering — or a knot of ponies would scatter and canter a bowshot away, then turn to stare also, tossing their rough heads and snorting. Near the villages men were at the late autumn plowing followed by a wheeling and crying cloud of gulls, and the smell of moist freshly turned earth was a thing to shake the heart. A few miles from Deva we came to the huddle of turf bothies among hay and bracken and bean stacks, where the herdsmen lived; and were told by a small man with a squint to make one cross one’s fingers and the bowlegs of one born on horseback, that Hunno was out with the herd. So we headed for the long shallow valley of our own training runs.

In Arfon our breeding runs were enclosed for the most part with dry-stone walling, for loose stone is plentiful among the hills; here, too, there was some stone, but it was less easily come by, and in some places, taking advantage of scrub and coppice there already, the dry-stone gave place to hedges of roughly steeped thorn, while at the lower end, which was marshy, the valley was closed by a dike and turf wall.

We met old Hunno on a small rough-coated pony, with a stripling whom I did not know riding another behind him, jogging up from the marsh end of the valley. Clearly he had been making his daily round of the boundaries. He looked exactly as he had done when I saw him last, exactly as he had done since I first remembered him; the wide lipless mouth, the little bright eyes peering out from the shadow of the enormous sheepskin hat he always wore — 1 could swear it was the same hat, too. “Heard you was back in Deva.” He greeted me as though we had last met maybe a week ago. And then, faintly accusing, “I been expecting you any time these last three days.”

“I could not come before,” I said. “Too much else to see to. How does it go, Hunno old wolf?”

He gestured with a hand like a knotted furze root. “How does it look?”

But I had no need to follow his pointing finger. I had been looking, all the way down from the head of the valley, joying in the sight of young horses grazing by the stream, war-horses in the making, as a miser joys in the gleam of gold trickling through his fingers. “It looks well enough from here,” I said. We had never dealt in superlatives together, but we smiled, eye into eye.

“Come and take a look at closer quarters.” He jerked his chin toward the water, and we rode on together. Amlodd my young armor-bearer, who was a friendly soul, had dropped behind to join the unknown stripling, and Hunno and Flavian, Cei and I rode ahead in a bunch. Many stallions had sprung from those five Septimanian sires, three-, four-, and even a few five-year-olds; and one look at the big-boned youngsters who scattered at our coming and then turned back in curiosity was enough to tell me that the plan was working out. Not all of them were as tall or as heavy in build as their sires, but all stood at least two hands higher than our native breed.

“All broken?” I asked.

“All rough-broken. A few of the three-year-olds are not finished yet. It’s none too easy to get enough men for the task, not what I’d call skilled men, not in these fat Lowlands.” Hunno spat with great accuracy into the silky head of a seeding marsh thistle, in token of his opinion of the Lowland horsemen.

“You’ll have enough breakers this year, at all events.”

By the time that we had seen all we wished to see in the training runs, and Hunno had signaled finish to the lads whom he had called up to put the best of the young stallions through their paces, the autumn day was drawing on. And as we went up over the brow of the ridge heading for the one breeding run that we had in the Lowlands, Hunno said, “Best come up to the corral, and we’ll drive the rest for you. If you try riding the whole valley, ’twill be dusk before we’re half done, and you’ll likely miss the best of the colts.”

I nodded; we were in Hunno’s hands, and this was his kingdom, and on the crest of the ridge, among the wind-shaped thorns that grew there, reined in and sat looking down the gentle slope seaward, toward the breeding run maybe half a bowshot away. The valley before us was better sheltered than the one we had left, with thick low oak woods on the seaward side, a good place for its purpose; and at the upper end of it, among his quietly grazing mares and their foals, I could see the dark masterful shape of the stallion. The long sweep of the valley was only lightly enclosed, for there were few wolves in those parts, and if any of the little native stallions who ran free on the marshes should attempt to break into the mares, the lord of the herd would deal with him; while, with a stallion contented among his own thirty or forty mares, there was far less risk of a breakout than among the unmated youngsters in the training runs.

I wheeled Arian and we set off again for the stone-walled corral at the head of the valley, passing as we went the furze-roofed shelters for the mares at foaling time, and coming to the corral gate we tethered the mounts to a thornbush and Cei and Flavian and I settled down to wait, while Amlodd went off with the other two to help drive the horses.

The black stallion had been watching us ever since we came down to the edge of his domain, not uneasy, but wary on behalf of his mares; he snorted and tossed his head, his mane flying up in a dark cloud, and came up at the trot, in a wide unhurried circle to come between us and them.

“The Black One takes good care of his own,” Flavian said.

Old Hunno called out to him softly and unintelligibly as he trotted by on his shaggy pony, and the great horse ruckled down his nose in greeting. Bedwyr had been right about that one.

Hunno and his little troop trotted on, dwindling small into the distance, casting about the lower end of the valley, half out of sight among the furze and thorn scrub that dipped toward the marshes. And presently we saw the whole valley moving toward us. We heard the shouting of the drivers, and a few moments later the soft smother of unshod horses on the grass. They came up at a trot, long-drawn-out like a great skein of flighting duck, the herdsmen on their little rough ponies shepherding them on the flanks; and for a moment I was snatched back to a spring day in Nant Ffrancon, eight years ago. They were being herded in through the opening with shouts and cries, the wild-eyed mares with their colts still running at heel, the yearlings and the rough-coated two-year-olds who would be for that winter’s breaking; awkward, scary, curious as to the meaning of this thing. And among them still, a little gray in the muzzle now but still mighty, on guard over his own, the Black One. I saw Amlodd riding with the herdsmen, flushed under his freckles and bright-eyed as a girl in love; and after the hurdles had been set up at the wide entrance, he dropped from his horse’s back and came to me with the bridle looped over his arm, laughing and breathless. “Oh my Lord Artos — sir — I should have made a good herdsman if I were not your armor-bearer!”

“By the time that you are captain of the third squadron,” said Flavian, naming his own rank and speaking from experience, “you’ll have served often enough as both, I promise you.” And he tossed the knot of bright hawthorn berries that he had been playing with, into the hand that the boy flung out to catch it, and turned to the trampling mass of horses.

I went first to the Black One, who in the way of his kind had drawn out from the rest to stand a little to one side, where he could have all things under his eye. He stood with his head alertly up to watch our coming, swishing his tail behind him, but no more uneasy than he had been at first, because of the familiar figure in the old sheepskin hat who walked with me.

“If you had been Bedwyr the Harper,” Old Hunno said, “he would have come to you.”

“I wonder — does a horse remember so well from year’s end to year’s end?”

“He doesn’t forget the man that won and mastered him,” Hunno grunted. “No more than a woman forgets the man that had her virginity — it’s the same thing in a way.”

I gave him a lick of salt, which he took with aloof deliberation, accepting with it the fact that I was not an enemy; and having made that clear to him, I turned in with Flavian and Cei to see my fill of the mares and their young. We moved in and out among them, pausing to look at this one and that, examining, judging, feeling latent strength and responsiveness in slim haunches and supple neck, while Hunno forced up a head with back-laid ears or slapped aside a woolly rump to make way for us in the press. And afterward, those that seemed to me the finest were brought out to us separately, mare and foal, yearling and two-year-old, colt and filly. In all of them the same thing was apparent, the increase of height, the added weight of bone.

“God is good,” said Cei, who was a religious man after his own fashion.

Finally I beckoned Hunno over again. “The chestnut mare over there, with the white foal — bring them out to me.”

I had been noticing that mare and foal ever since they were driven up to the corral, or rather, I had been noticing the foal, but had kept him until the last, childishly enough, lest the rest of the day, coming after, should seem a lesser thing.

Hunno cut them out from the herd and brought them to me, and I had a feeling, seeing his grin, that he also had been saving this foal for the last, hoping that I would not call for him before. I set about gaining the dam’s confidence first, fondling her neck and making small love talk into her twitching ear (for with the mother’s confidence the foal’s would come the more easily), before I turned my attention to the young one. He was a rawboned stallion foal, much younger than most of his kind; indeed, I judged him to have been born at summer’s end or early autumn, as sometimes happens when a mare comes late into season or remains horsey after her proper time. He was not white as yet, but gray as a signet, yet any who had encountered such a foal before could see that by the third year he would be white as a swan. An uncommon color nowadays; but they used to say that there was Libyan blood in most of the Roman cavalry mounts, and there were many white horses of that breed, and he must have been a throwback in color through his mother to some cavalry horse of the Eagles. One could sense the promise in him already, as he stood beside his mother, uncertain of himself, torn between his desire for the reassurance of the milk that he had almost outgrown, and his curiosity as to these men he had never seen before. The fire of his mother’s race was in him, and the power and steadiness of his sire’s. He was only a very little afraid of me, especially when he saw that his mother was content to let my hand rest on her neck. Among my own hills, the foals that run wild on the mountain grasslands and are rounded up only twice a year come wild as hawks to the breaker’s hand; but those that are born of tamed mothers in the home runs, we are accustomed to handle from the day of their birth, and these “gentled” foals are always the more easily broken when the time comes. So the smoky foal was used to men’s hands on him. He was a little shy of me, because my hand was a stranger’s, but my palm to lick — there must have been the taste of salt on it still — soon won him over, and he allowed me to gentle the harsh furry tuft where his crest would be, and draw a finger down his nose to the soft muzzle, caressing him, feeling the promise of him, the small half-shy response under my hand. I knew all at once and with complete certainty that here was my war-horse of a future day when staunch old Arian should come to honorable retirement. I always rode a white horse in battle; it is not that I find them better than horses of another color, but that a white horse marks out the leader clearly for his men to follow; it also marks him clearly for the enemy, but that is a thing that there is no help for. Besides, it is not to the Saxons alone that the White Horse is sacred, else why should men, before even the Legions came, have cut a white Dragon Horse half a hillside high in the chalk above the vale that runs to the very heart of the land? It is fitting that a white horse and no other color should lead the war hosts of Britain into battle. . . .

Autumn-foaled and autumn-found — I knew the name that was his as by right; I should call him Signus, for the four stars of Signus the Swan, that comes winging up into the southern sky just at the time of the autumn gales.

I gave it to him now, as a kind of covenant between us. “Signus — Signus, I call you. Remember that, small one, against the day that we go into battle together.”

And the foal ducked his head and then tossed it up again. It was no more than my hand on his muzzle, but it looked like agreement. We all laughed, I remember; and the foal, suddenly turning shy, backed a little, and wheeling about on long splayed legs, turned himself to the comfort and reassurance of his mother’s milk.

Later, sitting on our hams about the crackling furze fire in the herdsmen’s bothy, Old Hunno brought out a jar of fermented mare’s milk (it is wonderful what unlikely things can be used to make fire-drink) and the peeled willow wands on which he kept the tallies, both of his own and those which Amgerit his son sent down to him every year from the Arfon breeding runs, that the whole record might be kept as one. There, marked by variously shaped notches on the white wands, was the record of every foal born in the last seven years. Round about ninety to a hundred foals a year, save for the third year, when there had been less than half that number. “That was a bad black year,” Hunno said, “a wet spring, a drowned spring, both here and in the hills. And there was more than a score of foals dropped dead, besides them that sickened later; and we lost heavily among the mares too. But this year — Ah now, this year has been a good one; see —” The old brown finger with its ridged and back-curved nail moved up the newest and whitest of the willow wands, touching mark after mark. “A hundred and thirty-two-three-four-five — a hundred and thirty-six, seventy-three of them colts; and we have lost no more than nine. The number of births goes up, look you, because we have added certain of the young mares to the breeding herd.“

Besides the occasional losses, there had of course been some horses that did not come up to the needful standard, besides mares who were stallion-shy or consistently bad breeders, and Hunno had sold off these poorer beasts as I had bidden him, to pay for fodder or occasionally for other horses; but save for these sales, we had kept faithfully to the original plan, however sore our need, of not drawing on the herd until it had had time to become well established. But now the time had come when we might safely begin to do so and we looked at each other about the furze fire with brightening eyes. “We have done well to wait so long,” I said, “and now, thanks to your good stewardship, Hunno old wolf, we can begin to draw on the herd.”

He nodded. “What have you in mind?”

“All the half-bred stallions of four and five years old — the Septimanians are enough to serve as many mares as we possess — possibly some of the three-year-olds, too, come the spring, when they are fully broken. That should give us something over two hundred and fifty.”

“What of the surplus mares?”

“Not for us,” I said. “Too precious to be risked in war save in the last ditch. Let them go back to free range in the hills; they may do something to improve the stock, and we can call them in again in another year should we need them.”

There was a great content in me. We should be able to replace half our present mounts, who were mostly fen horses by that time, good willing brutes but without much fire; and they could go to form a reserve with the rest of the newcomers. (Never wise to put too many raw mounts into the battle line in any one year, however well trained they be.) We had never been able to count on a reserve of spare mounts until now; and God knew how sorely we had sometimes needed them. God, as Cei had said, was good.

When the jar was empty and many things had been talked over, we took our leave, and set out once more for Deva. The mare’s milk was the most potent liquor that has ever come my way. I have always had a hard head, but that night the stars were the color of honeysuckle and soft as the stars of midsummer. I think we sang a little, on the road back to the City of Legions. But it was not all the mare’s milk.

It was well into the second watch of the night when we got back, but a handful of men who were none of mine were standing under the lantern at the entrance to the old officers’ courtyard. They were well-set-up lads, all young and hard, and they had their weapons with them. What they wanted I thought I could guess, even before one of them — it was the youngster who had carried my message to Kinmarcus — stepped forward to my stirrup. “Sir, my Lord Artos, may we have a word with you?”

“I expect so.” I dismounted and handed Arian over to my armor-bearer, with an extra pat because I felt all at once the guilt of disloyalty to him. “Take over,” I said to Cei, and gesturing the newcomers to follow me, led the way to my quarters. The lantern was lit and there was a small fire burning in an earthenware brazier, and I sat down beside it, holding out my hands chilled from the bridle rein, for the softness of the past day was turning raw, and looked at the young men crowding before me. “Well? What is the thing that you wish to say to me?”

The one who had been my messenger answered for the rest. “Sir, we have brought you our swords, we would join the Company that rides with you.”

I looked into their eager and earnest faces. “You are very young, all of you.”

“Fion is the youngest of us, and he will be eighteen next month. We are all made men and carry our own weapons, my Lord Artos.”

I leaned forward studying them, face after face. What I saw there pleased me, but certainly they were all very young. “Listen,” I said. “There are two degrees of following me. I want men for the Company, yes; I always want men for the Company. But I want also —” I hesitated, seeking for the word: “Auxiliaries and irregulars; men to serve with me as light horsemen, as archers and scouts and spearmen, as faithfully as my Companions serve with me as heavy cavalry; men who will follow me out over their own frontiers when the need arises, and hold to me for as long as I need them — knowing always that as soon as I can spare them, in a year, or two, or three, they will be free to return again to their own homes. For the men who ride with me as my Companions, the thing is very different. From them I demand loyalty to myself and to each other, alone and for all time — or at least until the last Saxon looses his hold from the last headland of the British coast. We are a brotherhood, and for us there can be no bond outside, and no release after a few years. By your faces you would seem to be such men as my heart calls to, and gladly I will accept your swords in one degree or the other; but before you decide, in God’s name think. You have all your lives to live, and afterward there can be no way back with honor.”

They glanced at each other; one, a red-haired youth, licked his lower lip, another fidgeted with the handle of his dirk. “Go home,” I said. “Talk it over, put it under your pillow and sleep on it; and come to me again in the morning.”

Another man shook his head. “We came this evening to lay our weapons at your feet, and we would not go back to our own hearths again with the thing still unsettled. ”Give us leave to speak together in your doorway for a few moments, my Lord Artos.“

“Surely, for as many moments as you wish.” I drew my dagger and fell to burnishing it with the tail of my cloak, abandoning them and their councils. They drew aside into the doorway, and I heard the low mutter of their voices for a while. Then the pad of their feet came across the floor, and I looked up to see them standing before me again. The boy who had been my messenger stood a little out from the rest, and two more with him. As before, he acted as spokesman for the rest.

“My Lord Artos, we have taken council together and we have decided. These behind me will serve you truly in the second of the ways you offer. They have bonds of their own that cannot be broken; two of them have wives and bairns — but we three, Finnen and Corfil here, and myself, Brys Son of Bradman, we have no bond to hold us, therefore we bind yours upon us gladly. If you will have us for your Companions, then we are yours under the Red Dragon, without thought of sitting at our old hearths again.”

And another asked, “Is there an oath to swear? Whatever it is, we will swear it.”