Sword at Sunset

“It is a girl child,” Old Woman said, and the little bright-filmed eyes went searching in through mine, to read my inmost answer. And I could have laughed aloud in relief. I believe I had never thought of it being anything but a son; but Old Woman’s news was not bad, to me, only surprising. And she saw that, and scorned me for it, with the slantwise scorn of her people; and spat into the fire. “Aiee, aiee, and so you will keep it. Now we, the Dark People, are wiser. When we have a girl child too many we put it out on the hill for the Wolf-People. It is not good to have a daughter before a son, it is a sign that the Great Ones are angry, and it should be put out for the Wolf-People. But she would not have it so.”

“She was right,” I said, “for this is not a girl child too many, but a daughter greatly longed for.”

I would have gone on, then, but her eyes still held me from the last few steps, and suddenly I saw that there was trouble in them. The words came so softly, so mumblingly out of the toothless toad’s mouth, that I could scarcely catch them. “There was a time — the Sun Lord knows it, when I made the patterns in sand and water and learned certain things concerning the Sun Lord, and forbade Druim Dhu the Young Man of my house to bring a certain word up to the Place of Three Hills, accordingly.”

I nodded, bending toward the small bright eyes. “You told him that there are taller crops than mouse grass, I think. Something of more matter than the easing of our minds?”

“So, the Sun Lord remembers and understands. . . . But there was a grayness about the Sun Lord, a mist between me and him, and I could see into it a little way, but not enough. I could not see whether the child would be of the holly or the ivy; only that there would be a child, if Druim Dhu took no message to the Place of Three Hills. But now it is on my heart that the child had best be given to the Wolf-People.”

“That is not our way, among the Sun Folk, Old Mother, and I believe that in this tiling at least, the Great Ones are not angry.” And I felt myself released and I took the last few steps to Guenhumara.

For the moment I thought she was asleep, but when I knelt down beside her she opened her eyes — enormous eyes whose grayness seemed to shadow her whole drained face. The hair on her forehead was darkened with sweat, but the work was now over. Her body lay so flat that it scarcely raised the otter-skin robe that covered her, and something moved and bleated again, infinitely small, in the curve of her arm. She put the soft covering back without a word, and showed me the babe. It was very crumpled, but the crumpling was no more than the damp crumpling of a newly opened poppy bud that will unfurl to silken softness in the sun. It was almost as red as a poppy bud, too, with a little fine dark down on its head, and dark eyes, when it opened them, that wandered as the newly opened eyes of a kitten do. It yawned, the triangular smile of a kitten, and went to sleep again, one small hand outside the otter skins, and when I touched it in the palm the thing curled around my finger seemingly of its own accord, and bonelessly as a sea anemone. A foolish whimpering delight woke in me, because my daughter was clinging to my finger in her sleep.

“How is it with you, Guenhumara?”

“I am tired, but it is well with me now,” she said, and then, “You see that it is a girl child?”

“I see; and Old Woman told me.”

“It is strange, I never thought of it being a daughter — I suppose that is because I wanted so sorely to give you a son to train up to handle a horse and a sword and be a great warrior by your side.”

“I would as lief have a daughter,” I said. I was a little drunk. “A small soft daughter to hold in my heart. She shall have a Saxon bracelet to cut her teeth on — the Saxons weave very pretty jewels out of gold wire for their women — and a white wolfhound puppy to grow up with; and a great warrior one day to sweep her into the Chain Dance at Midsummer. . . .”

Guenhumara laughed the soft shadow of a laugh. “Foolish, you are — my Lord Artos the Bear of Britain is no more than a foolish cub himself, when he is pleased!”

Neither of us said, “Next time it will be a son: next time . . .” But the contentment of the moment was enough for us, without looking forward or back to stress or strain or joy or heartbreak.

Guenhumara reached out and touched my sleeve. “You are as wet as though you had been drawn up out of the sea.”

“I have been in the burn all night with the men of the village, working to turn it back into its own course.”

“And now that is done?”

“Now that is done, and the water is sinking. There has been much damage to the grazing land, but the village is safe, and I think none of the cattle have been lost.”

“You must be weary, too. This has been a hard night’s work for both of us, my dear.”

Presently I heard the voices of the men outside, and Itha’s voice, and a grumbling as they turned away to make themselves a fire and dry off elsewhere, and the living hut began to empty as the women went out to tend their menfolk. I had forgotten that no man save myself who owned other gods than theirs might enter here again until the place had been purified, lest the nearness of a woman who had newly given birth should rob the warriors of their fighting powers. Truly, I had laid a burden on these people. Well, maybe my help and Pharic’s and Conn’s in the matter of the burn might repay a little. Later I would bring them a gift — the fort’s biggest copper pot, perhaps; and meanwhile the least that I could do was to take myself out of the women’s way as quickly as might be.

I took my finger from the small clinging grasp, and said to the enormous figure on the stool beside the hearth, “Old Woman, when may I come for her?”

“In three days,” she said. “In three days she and the child — since you are set on keeping it — will have gamed strength enough for the way, and you may take them safely. Also in three days her purification will be accomplished.”

“In three days, then,” I said.

But in the same instant Guenhumara’s free hand was on my arm, clutching at me as though I were the only thing between her and drowning; and I saw that her peace had broken all asunder and she was afraid. “Artos, you are not — Artos, don’t leave me here! You must not — you must take me with you —”

“In three days,” I said. “In only three days.”

“No, now! I shall do well enough on your saddlebow, and Pharic can carry the babe.”

I looked down at her questioningly. “What is it, Angharad, Heart-of-my-heart?”

“I — we must not be left here, the bairn and I — Artos, I am afraid!”

“Of what?” I bent close over her, and her words came muffled against my shoulder, so that I hoped Old Woman would not hear. I did not clearly hear myself, but I caught something about the babe, about three days in the Hollow Hills. And I tried to soothe and reassure her, putting back the damp hair from her forehead. “Listen, listen to me, love. These people are my friends; there is nothing here for you to be afraid of.”

“For me, maybe no — but for the babe. You heard what She said: you can hear the other one wailing now — over there against the wall. Artos, they hate this one because it is a girl child and strong, and comes of the Sun People, and theirs is a son and sickly —”

I dared not listen to any more. I kissed her and got up, refusing to see the look in her eyes. I had told her not to be afraid, but I knew that she was still afraid, though she made no more pleading; and there was nothing that I could do about it. I could not pass on to her my own certainty of friendship in this place, nor could I carry her off with me now, unless I wished to likely kill both her and the babe. A gray wave of helplessness broke over me, so that all my peace, like hers, was broken, as I turned to the entrance.

AT the appointed time, I took my gifts of gratitude to Druim Dhu’s village, and brought Guenhumara back to Trimontium.

Itha had tended her well, and she was already able to stand on her feet again and even walk a little, with my arm around her. Only she had a strange unchancy look about her eyes. She said nothing as to the three days and nights that I had left her there against her pleading; indeed for the rest of that day she scarcely spoke at all, but often seemed to be listening, and once I saw her bend her head to the babe as she was suckling it, and snuff the little warm body as a bitch snuffs the puppy against her flank to be sure that it is her own.

That night, when the lamp was out and the moon patterning the beaver skins across the bed, I remember asking her how it had gone with the sick child — for she had been waiting for me in the curve of the windbreak before the entrance hole, and I had not gone into the houseplace at all.

“Better,” she said. “It began to gather strength in the night, and Old Woman says that it will live now. Children mend so quickly. At sunrise they are in the doorway of death, and the next they are sitting up and crying for honey cake.” Her voice was hurried and breathless, the words tumbling a little over each other, running on: “So quickly — they mend so quickly — often I have seen it happen among the bairns in the women’s quarters . . .” And I knew that she was telling it to herself rather than to me, and that she was still afraid.

But when I asked her what was amiss, she only laughed and said Nothing — Nothing — Nothing, and shivered, though the night was not cold. I could feel the faint tense quivering under my outstretched hand on her flank, and wanted to draw her close and warm it away against my own body, but the bairn in the curve of her arm was between her and me.

Whatever the thing was, it passed — or Guenhumara locked it away in some inner place and buried the key; and by the ninth day, the bairn’s naming day, she seemed almost as she had been before it was born.

We called the little thing Hylin; there is almost always a Hylin among the women of the Royal House. And old Blanid, who had by then rejoined us, wept a good deal and talked of the day that Guenhumara had been named; and the whole of Trimontium demanded extra beer in which to wet the baby’s head, on promise of not burning down the fortress a second time. And I wondered if any of the women of the baggage train remembered a babe of her own, put out for the wolves. If they did, at least it did not prevent them from taking their full pleasure of the heather beer.

Indeed the last sore heads were scarcely sound again when the supply train came up from Corstopitum, bringing the whiter stores.

Bringing also, letters and news of the outside world. It was strange how, between the supply wagons, one first hungered after the world beyond the southern hills, and then almost forgot that it was there at all, until the next train got through. This one brought me letters from Ambrosius as usual, and one (he generally wrote about once a year) from Aquila; and both told the same story of increasing Saxon pressure, a new tide rising, a new wind setting from the Barbarian quarter, upon the Icenian coasts; a new restlessness among the southern settlements.

I think it had been in my mind all that end-of-summer that my work in the North was done, and now I knew it without doubt. “My plans of campaign had been turned toward the level horselands of the Iceni that the Saxons were already calling for their own Northfolk and Southfolk, before ever the sudden flare of revolt in Valentia had called me across the Wall. Now when the time for winter quarters was past, it would be time for turning south again, taking up the old campaigning plans where they had been laid down. . . . Time, perhaps, to be standing shield to shield with Ambrosius once more. . . .

On our last evening in Trimontium there was a soft growing rain that later turned to mist, and the green plover calling unseen from the skirts of Eildon. There was a certain sadness over most of us, that evening, a sense of leave-taking; and as the mist thickened, it was as though the familiar moors, knowing that we no more belonged here, had withdrawn themselves from us and turned their faces away; even the roughhewn walls and the ragged thatch that dripped mist-beads from the reed ends had lost something of substance and reality, and the fortress was already returning to the ghost camp that it had been before we came.

“It might have waited until we were gone,” Bedwyr said, looking about him as we made our way up from the baggage lines where everything stood in readiness, toward the mess hall at suppertime.

“The mist?” I said. “It will clear by dawn, it’s not the sort that lasts.” Because I did not want to understand what he meant.

We passed the mound where the girl of the Hollow Hills lay, and the horses above her. I had never known her name. The Dark People do not speak the names of the dead. It was grassed over now, and brambles arched about it, and it looked as time-rooted as the rest of old red Trimontium; the small white flower that was nameless also was in bud already, the bud of a white star among gray soft hound’s-ear leaves. And I had the sudden foolish thought that I hoped she would not be lonely when the cooking fires were quenched and there were no more voices in the Place of Three Hills.

When we got back to the mess hall, there beside the fire, having appeared out of nowhere in his usual manner, sat Druim Dhu in his best green-dyed catskin kilt, white clay patterns on his arms and forehead, and about his neck his finest necklace of dried berries and blue glass beads and woodpecker feathers.

He sprang to his feet when I came close, and stood in the firelight holding up the bow that had been resting across his knees, and conscious of his decorated beauty as a flower or a woman might be.

“Is it a festival?” I asked.

“Na, I do honor to my friends that are going away.” But the dark eyes were inscrutable as ever; and even now, though I would have trusted him with my life, I did not know whether the strange forehead patterns and the glowing necklaces had been put on in sorrow, for a kind of parting gift, or in triumph that the Dark People were left masters of their own hills once more.

When the food was ready he ate with us. Silent as usual — but indeed it was a somewhat silent meal for most of us, though from time to time the silence flared up into sudden noisy horseplay and somewhat unreal merriment — and after the meal was over and he had eaten his fill, and most of the men had scattered again to the various tasks and preparations that were still to be accomplished before tomorrow’s march, we walked together toward the postern gate above the river, and I went out with him a short way onto the track.

A little above the spring that had been, as it were, Itha’s gift to the war host on our first coming, we stopped, and stood silent.

“We have had good hunting together, Sun Lord,” Druim Dhu said at last, “in Cit Coit Caledon above all. That was a great hunting, a most great hunting.”

“A most great hunting,” I said, “Dark Man.”

“And now it is over.”

“Maybe I shall come back, one day.”

“Maybe, Sun Lord,” he agreed with courtesy; but we both knew that I should not come back, one day or any day. And I knew suddenly why he had painted his forehead and put on the necklaces — and that I was going to miss the little dark hunter, south of the Wall, more than anything or anyone that I left north of it.

“It will seem strange to hear the foxes barking again in the Place of the Three Hills,” he said. “And whiles and whiles, when we are moving the cattle over, I will be looking to see if there is a garland on the branch of the big alder tree up Horse Burn.”

I said, “And whiles and whiles, I will be looking across the fire between sleeping and waking, and thinking to see the white clay marks and the green glint of woodpecker feathers.”

It was a light enough leave-taking, yet as I watched the small lithe figure dissolve into the hill mist, I knew that I was bidding farewell not only to Druim Dhu, but to a whole part of my life. As in Ambrosius’s study on the night that he gave me my wooden foil of freedom, so now on this steep hill path with the river sounding through the mist below me, I was standing on a threshold. . . .

I turned, and went back up the track to the postern gate, and stepped across the foot-hollowed stone sill, and the guard thrust the dead thornbush into place behind me.

It was the familiar room in which Ambrosius had given me my wooden foil. The familiar frescoes of bulls’ heads and garlands on the walls a little more faded than they had used to be, in the fading daylight; the bronze brazier in the center, casting its dim rose of light up to the rafters, for the spring evening had turned cold with an east wind; the dim black and gold lozenge pattern of scroll ends on the shelves of the far wall; Ambrosius’s sword lying where his sword always lay when he was not wearing it, ready to his hand on the big olivewood chest. Only the man standing with his back to me and his head bent to catch the last light of the west as it fell through a high window, on the scroll in his hands, seemed a stranger. A slight, faintly stooping man, with hair the dim silken gray of seeding willow herb, bound about the temples with the narrow gold fillet that so many of the Cymric nobles wear.

I even wondered for a moment, who was making free with Ambrosius’s private quarters. And then as I checked in the doorway, the man turned — and it was Ambrosius.

I suppose we said something, cried out each other’s name. And the instant after, we had come together with arms about each other’s shoulders. In a little, we held off at arm’s length, and stood looking each at the other. “Well may men call you the Bear!” Ambrosius said, laughing, “especially those who have suffered your love grip! Ah, but it is good to see you again, Bear Cub! The hours since your messenger came have seemed long indeed!”

“And to see you, Ambrosius! It is Sun and Moon on my heart to see you again! I waited for nothing save to leave Guenhumara and the bairn in my old quarters — not even to wash off the dust of the road, before I came seeking you.”

His hands were on my shoulders, and he looked up, searchingly, into my face. His own dark narrow features looked strange under the paleness of gray hair, but his eyes were the same as they had always been. “Ah yes, this Guenhumara,” he said at last. “Do you know, I used to think that you would be all your life as I am, who have never taken a woman from her father’s hearth.”

“I used to think so, too.”

“Is she very fair, this woman of yours?”

“No,” I said. “She is thin and tawny, but she has beautiful hair.”

“And she brought you a hundred horsemen for a dowry, which I think might make any woman beautiful in your eyes.”

“It was the horsemen that were beautiful. Guenhumara does not need to be. She is like —” I hesitated, trying to think what Guenhumara was like, for I had never sought to describe her before, even to myself.

And the laughter twitched for an instant at Ambrosius’s lips. “A flower? Or a falcon? I have heard it all before, Bear Cub. Na na, never trouble, I shall see her for myself before long.”

But I was still trying to think what Guenhumara was like. “Not a flower — maybe one of those dry aromatic herbs that only give out their full scent to the touch.”

Presently he was sitting in the cross-legged camp chair with the wolf heads carved on the arms, that had been his seat as long as I could remember. I had pulled up the same old stool to the brazier, and Cabal, who had stood until now, watching us, with slowly swinging tail, collapsed at my feet with a contented grunt, seemingly as much at home here as that other Cabal had been. And we looked at each other with the strangeness of the long separation making a sudden silence between us. Ambrosius broke it at last. “You will have brought your whole Company south with you?”

“A full muster of three hundred, with spare mounts and the usual baggage train.”

“So, that makes good hearing. What became of the auxiliaries you wrote of?”

“They went back to their own places — they were always a shifting population. They gathered to the Red Dragon to fight for their own hunting runs, and each time I moved on a few would follow me, and the rest drift back to their own hearths, while others gathered in their stead. It meant training raw troops all the time; but they were good lads.” I fell silent, staring into the red heart of the brazier, realizing suddenly a thing that I had never thought of before; that the Companions, also, were a shifting population. I was remembering men who had marched with me from Venta thirteen years ago, men from the Wolds and the wide-skied Lindum marshes; men out of Deva and Eburacum, little bands of hotheads from my own hills, from the Lake Lands and all across the dark North of Britain, all my Companions in their time, lying dead among the heather through the length and breadth of Lowland Caledonia, their places filled by the young warriors of the land that had killed them. Yet I had not thought of the Brotherhood as a thing that shifted and changed. When we rode south once more and the last of the auxiliaries fell away, I had been glad that we were just the Company again, the old tight-knit Brotherhood that we had been at first. And sitting beside the brazier on that chill spring evening in Ambrosius’s chamber, with a thrush singing in the old pear tree under the courtyard wall, I knew that that was because the Company had a living entity of its own, stronger than the individuals who made it up.

“If you have work for us, I think you will find us equal to somewhat more than the same number of spears drawn at random,” I said, thinking that he might be regretting those fallen-off auxiliaries.

He too had been staring into the heart of the brazier, but he looked up, smiling behind his eyes. “I am very sure of it. As to the work that I may have for you — I sent you the word last autumn of a new tide flowing.”

“It came to me.”

“That tide flows more strongly now. The Sea Wolves are on the move again, swarming into the Trinovantes territory, spilling inland over the old Icenian lands from the Abus River to the Metaris. We are holding them, but none the less, you are come in a fortunate hour, you and your three hundred.”

“What of the Cantish settlements?”

“As yet, nothing; but it is in my mind that they also prepare to move. Have you heard in your northern fastness that Oisc, Hengest’s grandson, has proclaimed the Kentish Kingdom and that our kinsman Cerdic grows to be a mighty war leader in his own right?”

“No,” I said, “I have not heard that. Oisc slipped through my fingers at Eburacum, but I had Cerdic in my hand, and I let him go. I was a fool not to have him killed. But it is hard to be wise, with a fifteen-year-old boy standing at bay over his mother’s body.”

He nodded, and then a few moments later, raised those pale bright eyes of his abruptly from the red heart of the brazier. “How soon can you take the war trail?”

“Give me ten days,” I said. “We’ve had a long hard march after a long hard winter, and we’re still out of condition, horses and men alike. Some of us — you remember Flavian, Aquila’s son — have to send for waiting wives, and I have arrangements of my own to make, for getting down part of the Deva horse herd. We’re new out of the wilderness, Ambrosius; give us ten days to see to our own affairs and taste the fleshpots — get drunk for a night or two and play Jupiter among the women of the town, and straighten our sword belts again thereafter, and we are all yours.”

The smile flickered again behind his eyes. “That seems a modest enough request. The last time it was a whole campaigning summer.”

“I promised you the North, in exchange for that summer,” I said, and picked a withered ivy leaf from among the stacked logs by the brazier, and handed it to him, “and here it is.”

He took it and began to play with it between his fingers; but it was so dry that it crumbled away.

We sat talking on in the fading light, discussing possible plans of campaign, discussing the broader issues that I had all but forgotten, fighting my own war away in the North, exchanging the story of the years that lay divided between us. Presently, speaking of the fortifying of the Royal Territory, the Old Kingdom that was one of the chief things he had to show for those years, of his plans for defense in depth, using again the hill forts of our forefathers, Ambrosius pulled a bit of charred stick from the brazier and fell to drawing maps on the tesserae, as I had seen him do so many tunes before; until there was no more light to see by save the dim rose-red glow of the brazier itself, and he shouted for his armor-bearer to bring lights.

The boy brought candles in a tall three-branched bronze pricket, and set them on the chest top beside Ambrosius’s sword, and went away again. Sitting there with Ambrosius in the gathering dusk, I had forgotten the change in him, but now as the light strengthened and steadied, I saw him again clearly as I had done in that first moment of entering the room, the deeply bitten lines of his dark narrow face under the gray hair, the way his eyes had sunk back into his head, and the faint discoloring of the skin about them. I thought that he looked not only old, but ill.

He caught me looking at him and smiled. “Yes, I have changed.”

“I did not say so.”

“Not in words, no. Have I not always told you that you showed too clearly in your eyes everything that is going on behind them?”

“Ambrosius,” I said, “are you sick?”

“Sick? Na, na, I grow old, that is all. An old gray-muzzled sheepdog. . . . Ah well, I shall sleep in the sun now, and scratch for fleas, while a younger dog guards the flock from wolves. . . .” He bent forward and set another log with meticulous care over the red cavern of the brazier. “It is thirteen years, Artos.”

Thirteen years. Wonderful what one could forget in thirteen years. . . . Almost, I had forgotten that my own war with the Saxons was not all the war there was. Almost, seeing the Sea Wolves flung back at this point and that along the coast, I had forgotten that, like the harsh gods of the Saxon kind themselves, we were carrying on a struggle which must end in darkness at the last. It was another kind of coming back from the Hollow Hills . . . Remembering again . . . Finding all things and all people a little changed, a little strange, and myself the strangest of all . . .

“On my way here a while since, I could have thought it was a hundred,” I said. “With the campaigning season started, there was scarcely a face I knew, and two boys that I passed exercising hounds stared and whispered as I went by as though I were something out of another world.”

“I can tell you what they whispered: ‘Look at his scars! He is head and shoulders taller than anyone else hereabouts — and that great hound with him — it must be Artos the Bear!’ And then as soon as you were safely by, they ran to tell their comrades that they had seen you. You are something of a legend, Artos. Didn’t you know that?”

I got up and stretched until the small muscles cracked between my shoulders, laughing. “I am a very weary legend — and I must away and see how all things are with Guenhumara and the babe.”

“Tomorrow,” Ambrosius said, “I will have the stores cleared out of the Queen’s Courtyard chambers, that Guenhumara may have them.”

“Your mother’s chambers? You will give her those?” I knew that he had used them as storerooms ever since his own return to Venta, that he might avoid having to let anyone else live there after her.

“You are all the son I have,” he said, “and she is your wife, this Guenhumara. Therefore it is fitting that she should use them, and bring them back to life again.”

WHEN I got back to my old quarters, Riada my armor-bearer was squatting before the door with his sword across his knees. “I have looked to them as you bade me,” he said, getting up, “and I got them fire and a lantern.”

“Sa, that is good. Off with you now, and see if you can still find something to eat.”

The door behind him stood just ajar, spilling soft yellow light across the colonnade, and I pushed it open and went in. Guenhumara was sitting beside the small brazier, combing her hair, which I saw was damp and clung about her temples in darkened wisps, though the ends were already feathery dry. She looked at me through the strands as she swept them this way and that. “I have washed my hair; it was full of all the wayside dust from here to Trimontium.”

“It was still bonny,” I said, “but it’s bonnier without the dust.” I glanced about me. “Where is Hylin?”

“Asleep in the little room through there, with Blanid.”

I went quietly and looked into the room that had been my sleeping cell since I was a boy. A rushlight burned like a star on its bracket high on the wall, and by its light I saw Hylin curled asleep in a soft dark nest made from the old beaver-skin rug at the head of the cot, just as she had done at Trimontium. Guenhumara always took her up at sleeping time, and lay with her in the curve of her arm. Blanid slept also, against the wall at the foot of the cot, snoring gently; and I stepped over her and bent to look at Hylin. She was as white as she had been red on the day that she was born, and the blue showed through at her tight-shut eyelids; and I thought, as I had thought often before, she was too small for a half yearling and thin like the small one of a hound litter that gets pushed out from the milk. But that was like enough, for Guenhumara had never had enough milk for her and maybe the milk of the little baggage mare had not agreed with her as well as Guenhumara’s milk would have done. Maybe we could do something about that now; there must be a woman in Venta with milk to spare.

“Well?” Guenhumara said without looking up, when I went back to the outer room.

“She was asleep with her thumb in her mouth.”

She flung back all her hair and looked up at me then, with a pinched spent face. “If you say maybe it is because she is hungry, I shall hit you!”

“I was not going to,” I said quickly, for I knew how she hated that she had not enough milk.

But she flared out at me like the veriest spitcat, none the less. “And do not you use that quieting voice to me! I am not a child nor yet a mare to be gentled past a white rag in a thornbush!” And then before I could answer, though indeed there was no answer in my mind, she got up and tossed the comb aside and came and laid her head against my breast. “Artos, I’m sorry. It is that I am tired. We are both so very tired, the bairn and I, that is why she looks so gray.”

I put my arms around her and kissed the top of her damp head — I always loved the smell of Guenhumara’s hair when it was clean and wet. “Go to bed, love. I must find Bedwyr and make sure that all is well with the lads, and wash off a layer or two of dust. But I’ll not be long behind you.”

“I can’t go to bed yet, I’m too restless. Maybe I’m homesick.” She looked up at me. “When do you take the war trail and leave me alone in this great strange place?”

“Not for ten days. Ambrosius will give you his mother’s chambers that he has let no one use since her day, and I shall be able to see you settled in there before I go. Venta will not seem so great and strange to you, then.” I kissed her again. “Try to be happy here in the South; it is not my country either, but it is a good land, none the less.”

“At least we can be homesick together in the winter evenings,” she said with a shaken breath of laughter.

A familiar step came along the colonnade and she moved back quietly out of my arms as Bedwyr’s voice sounded beyond the part-closed door.

I bade him enter, and he pushed the door open and stepped into the lamplight, with my iron cap in his hand and a shapeless load of glimmering mail flung across one shoulder. “I’ve seen your baggage ponies unloaded,” he said, and flung down cap and war shut with a chiming crash onto the end of the big olivewood chest. “Riada will bring up the rest of your gear later.”

“That should all have been Riada’s work, but thanks, Bedwyr.”

He shrugged. “The boy had not eaten, and I had. The rest of the lads are fed and in some kind of shelter for the night. Cei is seeing to the horses, still — some difficulty about finding a good place for them in the picket lines — you know what horse masters are when there is any question of disturbing their own arrangements.”

“I also know what Cei is. I will go down to the horse lines and see what goes forward, before I head for the bathhouse.” I turned again to Guenhumara. “I may be some while seemingly — longer than I had thought. If you will not go to bed, wake Blanid to keep you company.”

“I shall do well enough with the fire for company.”

But I hated to think of her sitting there alone, combing and combing her hair, it might be far into the night. And then I had a happier idea. “Bedwyr — can you bide for a little? Maybe she will give you a cup of wine for a song. Can you weave a harp spell that is good for the horning hunger?”

He put a hand to the strap of his harp bag, and checked, looking at her with that wild left brow of his flying in inquiry. “If my Lady Guenhumara would have it so?”

Guenhumara hesitated also, and then stooped for her comb. “Anything, so that you play softly and do not wake the baby.”

And he lounged down onto the chest beside my war gear, unslinging his harp as he spoke. “As soft as the wild swan’s down. . . . Bide while I tune the darling, and you shall have the very birds of Rhiannon sung from their tree into your hollow hands, if that will help to pass the evening.”

I whistled Cabal to heel, and went out; Guenhumara’s voice in my ear, calling after me, “Come back soon,” as though I were going, not merely to the horse lines, but on a long journey.

I wished that Bedwyr had not said that, about the birds of Rhiannon.

Within half a moon the old struggle with the Sea Wolves had claimed me again, and with the Brotherhood I was far up into the old Icenian hunting runs. We saw fierce fighting all that summer; but what remains of it to me now? No man remembers the battles of his later years with the clearness, the joy and fire and anguish of the warfare of his youth. I had fought out half a score of pitched battles by then; how many skirmishes and forays and lesser fights, the war gods only know; and the details of one encounter become confused with the details of another, so that now, of all those battles of the later years, the only one to stand out clearly in my mind is the one we fought below Badon Hill. And that was the red flowering and the crown of all that had gone before. But in that first summer of our coming south, Badon was still five years away; and better than the whistle of arrows and the smoke of burning camps, I remember the smell of the saltings, and the wide wind-rippled marsh skies that reminded me of those first campaigns about Lindum when all things were younger and we were still a Brotherhood in the making.

I returned to whiter quarters on a day when, after a month of bitter wind and ram, with the evenings already drawing in to early lamplight, the year turns back for a last regretful look at summer. And when I came to the Queen’s Courtyard, I found Guenhumara and another woman sitting on the colonnade step in the late sunshine, while Hylin and two more babies tumbled about the old beaver-skin rug at their feet, and a dark grave boy of eight or nine, with a wooden sword, went gravely through the practice position of sword fighting. One look was enough to tell me whose son he was, and therefore who the other woman must be — and indeed she was little and brown, even as Flavian had described her. Guenhumara had risen and stood waiting. I think that in all our years, she never ran to meet me, but stood waiting for me to come to her, quite still, not from any lack of welcome but as though she were making something last, not wasting it in flurry and soft outcries; and with the same wish to make the moment last, I seldom hurried toward her. I checked for an instant beside the boy, and asked, “Do they call you Minnow?”

He lowered his guard and looked up. “How did you know, sir?”

“I just thought they might. Keep your point two inches lower when you make that lunge, Minnow. You’re laying yourself open to a belly thrust else.”

He made the movement again, stamping his small feet and recovering as neatly as many a grown man. “Sir — is my father come back?”

“He is with the horses now.”

I went on, Cabal stalking behind me, to where Guenhumara waited at the entrance to the colonnade, while Teleri gathered her brood and flurried softly away into the shadows behind her.

The winter that followed has a sheen to it, a silken texture in my memory, like a flower with the light through its petals, and not much longer-lived. Hylin seemed much stronger, the summer sun had burned her soft skin brown and bleached the ends of her soft wispy hair; she had filled out, and though she could not talk yet — I had half thought she might, but Guenhumara said no, that a year was too young — she had learned to laugh, a small crooning bubbling laugh that was the prettiest sound I had ever heard. I bought her a white boarhound that winter, choosing her a bitch since they are more gentle than dogs and less likely to stray — out of a litter of squirming and whimpering whelps in a huge willow basket which one of Ambrosius’s hunters brought to the courtyard with their anxious mother sniffing behind. I got Bhan the leather-worker to make a puppy collar with tiny five-petaled silver flowers on it, where a grown hound would have had studs of bronze. It was the first time in my life that I had bought a pretty thing for my daughter, and I enjoyed it more than I should have enjoyed laying captured treasure at the feet of a queen. It was a mild whiter, so mild that at midwinter there was still one tattered blossom on the little thorny white rose that grew in an old clay wine jar at the angle of the colonnade; and Guenhumara picked it and brought it in to lie on the table at suppertime on the Eve of Lights, and the scent of it in the warmth of the brazier was fit to tear the heart out of the breast.

With spring came the time to ride the old weary war trail again. And by the next autumn Hylin was growing thin once more, and had begun to get strange little sweats that came at night and were gone again in the morning; and Guenhumara, tending her, seemed to have gone away from me to a great distance. I got Gwalchmai to look at the child, and he came with me for kindness’ sake, but when he looked, he said only, “Na na, I have become something of a surgeon in these years; but I know nothing of the sicknesses of bairns. Get Ambrosius’s leech to see her.” So I asked Ambrosius for the loan of Ben Simeon his physician, and the little burly Jew came and looked at her, and shook his head, snapped his ringers and clicked his tongue to make her laugh, and went away using strange words that we did not understand and I think were not meant to understand, and saying that he would send something to help the cough, and soon he would come again.

All that winter the only thing that seemed to soothe Hylin when the fever was on her was the sound of Bedwyr’s harp. And God alone knows how many evenings he came up weary from the colt-breaking yards, the sweat of his day’s work still rank on him, to squat beside the Small One’s cot and make little tunes for her — tunes simple enough to teach to a whistling starling, which must have seemed to him as it would have seemed to the man who carved the marble Demeter in the Forum, had he set himself to fashioning dolls from grass stalks and poppy heads turned inside out.

I was glad that I had already given him a farm from my own estates in Arfon, Coed Gwyn, where the snowdrops whitened the woods in spring, for if I had done it afterward, I should have been afraid that it might seem like payment, and unforgivable.

I carried a heavy heart with me down the war trail that spring, and yet there was relief in the familiar feel of my battle harness. I have always been a fighting man, and for me there was the release, the small sweet death of forgetting, in the clash of weapons and the dust cloud of battle that other men find in women or heather beer.

We were encamped a short way east of Combretovium with the Saxons across the valley within their laager of wagons, and I had gone out to a small isolated knoll to get a good view of the enemy and make some guess at their movements, when a messenger came seeking me out, with word from Guenhumara that Hylin was dying.

It was a very still evening, I remember the shadows lying long from our camp toward the Saxons, and in the stillness I could hear the faint small sound of shouting voices and the ring of the armorer’s hammer across the valley between.

I do not know what I said to the man; something about getting a meal, I think. Then I went on studying the enemy camp. Cabal looked up into my face, whimpering, sensing something amiss. Presently Bedwyr brushed out from the furze bushes and came to a silent halt beside me. I looked around at him, carefully, and saw it in his eyes, that he knew. I suppose the messenger had spread it all over the camp by that time. Neither of us spoke, but he laid his hand briefly on my shoulder, and for an instant I set mine over it. We very seldom made any outward showing of the long-familiar bond. “I have told Riada to saddle Signus,” he said at last.

“Then you must be telling him to unsaddle again. I’ll not be needing Signus until the morning.”

I suppose he thought that I was stunned by what had happened, for he said, “Artos, don’t you understand? The message has been a day and a night on its way to you, already —”

“And if I do not leave now, I may not see the bairn alive. Yes, I understand.”

“Then why —”

“If I go now, I leave my men to face tomorrow’s Saxons without their leader.”

“Don’t be a fool, Artos. Have Cei and I never led troops against the Saxons, yet?”

“Never troops that the Bear had deserted on the eve of battle, to ride off about his own affairs. . . . With three squadrons away, the chances hang unevenly balanced between us and this particular pack of the Sea Wolves. Listen, Bedwyr, I know you and love you, every man, and I know that I can depend on your loyalty to the last ditch; I know there is not one man among the Company will blame me, if I ride away now. But there are the others — I know also what a chancy thing is the mood of a war host. I do not think that I can be well spared until tomorrow’s fighting is over.”

“How if you were killed or laid out in the first charge? We should have to spare you then.”

“That would be another thing. I believe that you would all fight like fiends out of Tartarus to avenge me.” I patted his shoulder clumsily. “Go and tell Riada I shall not be wanting Signus until mounting time at first light tomorrow.”

“And Guenhumara?”

“Guenhumara knows that I will come when I can. She will remember that I was Comes Britanniorum before ever I took her from her father’s hearth; and the old bargain between us.” But in that, I suppose I was expecting Guenhumara to think like a man.

Of the next day’s fighting I remember nothing at all. They told me afterward that at one time we were as near to defeat as ever we had been without being actually driven from the field. And I heard men talking among themselves outside the bothy as I was stripping off my harness while Riada brought around my spare horse, and one said to the other, “Trust the Bear to know the perfect moment to fling in his charge,” and spat appreciatively. So I suppose that I played my part none so ill. A wonderful thing is habit.

I left the clearing up of the day’s end to Cei and Bedwyr, the wounded to Gwalchmai as usual; and when I had snatched a bite of bannock and a hurried draught of beer, and went out to the horse which Riada had brought around, I was surprised to find that the shadows had scarcely begun to lengthen. The smoke of a great burning rose from the Saxon camp, and all across the valley the women were moving among the dead and wounded; and already the ravens were gathering overhead.

I mounted, and rode out of the camp that was silent and full of faces, and set my horse’s head toward the low ridge of hills that carried the old Icenian Way. Riada had provided for me the swiftest and most enduring of my remounts, since Signus, having been in battle, was in no state for a long hard ride that day; but I would have give much to have had him between my knees now, for I never knew his like for speed and endurance. I came near to breaking the willing heart of my mount, for I rode as though the Wild Hunt were on my heels. I rode the sun out of the sky and the moon clear of the hills, drumming mile after long mile down the old ridgeway without let or pause or mercy. Toward midnight I came to the hill fort at Durocobrivae, the first outpost of Ambrosius’s stronghold, and there changed my foundered horse for a fresh one, and rode on again.

Dawn was not far off when, my horse rocking in his stride, I came up the last straight stretch to the north gate of Venta, and the guards opened the great valves, the ironshod newels shrieking in their stone sockets, and passed me through. I was clattering up the still-sleeping streets. The guards at the palace gates passed me through in turn, and I dropped from the saddle ha the outer courtyard, staggering as the solid pavement heaved up to meet me like the deck of a galley in a swell. I tossed the reins to someone who came with a stable lantern as though he had been waiting for me, and headed at a drunken stumbling run for the inner court and the Queen’s Court beyond.

The moonlight broke in a silver wave against the far side of the courtyard, whitening the leaves of the rose in its great jar and casting its tracery of shadow in perfect echo on the wall behind it. The door of the atrium stood open and the lantern light spilled its yellow pool across the colonnade, together with the sound of a woman keening. Guenhumara came into the doorway, and stood outlined against the light waiting for me; but it was not she who was keening.

I had checked my headlong pace, and came across the courtyard at a walk — it seemed very wide, a vast space like an arena — and up the step of the colonnade into the lantern light. I remember trying not to hear the keening, trying not to hear its meaning in my heart and loins and belly.

“The bairn?” I croaked; and put out a hand to steady myself against the doorpost, for I was almost as near to foundering as the horse that I had ridden half to death that night. “How is it with the bairn?”

Guenhumara never moved. She said, “The bairn died an hour ago.”

GUENHUMARA was still standing in the doorway. I said something, or tried to, I do not know what, and she replied in a hoarse flat tone that had nothing of her voice’s usual beauty. “Why did you not come before?”

“I came as soon as I could, Guenhumara.”

“I suppose you had some righting to finish first.” Still the same hoarse level tone.

“Yes,” I said. And then as she never moved from the doorway, “Let me in, Guenhumara.”

She moved back quickly, before I could touch her with the hands I held out, and I lurched through into the atrium. The room seemed strange, the lantern set low so that the shadows leapt gigantic up the walls; making the blue and russet saint in the tapestry stir as though on the edge of life, and I was vaguely aware of the black huddle that was Blanid in the corner, rocking to and fro and keening as the Northern women keen for their dead, and another woman on the edge of the lantern light, who I suppose must have been Teleri.

“Where is she?” I said.

“In her usual sleeping place.”

I turned to the open doorway of the sleeping chamber, and went in, all but stumbling over Margarita, the boarhound bitch, who lay across the threshold. There was a quietness in the room that seemed to shut out the keening from the atrium, as though it had passed beyond such things. There was a scent of burning herbs, and the rushlight on its pricket glimmered like a small high star, its yellow light quenched and washed away by the silver tide of moonlight that flooded in through the window and lay across the bed. Small Hylin lay as she had always done, in her soft nest of beaver skin at the head of the bed, but straight and stiffly neat, not curled like a kitten. Why could they not have left her thumb in her mouth, I wondered dazedly, and buried her as one buries a favorite hound, in the familiar position of his lifetime sleeping? Cabal, who had followed me in, thrust forward his muzzle inquiringly, then looked up into my face and whimpered, crouching away into the shadows. Margarita had crawled to my feet, whimpering also, and pawing at the bed rugs, frightened by what she could not understand. Guenhumara stood at the foot of the bed and never moved.

The stillness seeped with an icy chill into my heart, numbing it, and I could have turned away I think without much show of my grief. . . . Then a nightingale began to sing somewhere in the tangled wilderness of the old palace gardens, and the white throbbing ecstasy of the notes pierced through the merciful numbness with a sharp sword of beauty that was more than I could bear. And I knelt down by the bed and drove my face into the soft darkness of the fur beside the little still face that no longer looked like Hylin’s, and cried.

The moonlight was graying into the cobweb darkness of day-spring when I stumbled up from my knees, and the song of robin and willow wren was waking in the wild garden. Guenhumara still stood at the bed foot, unmoving as the Nine Sisters on the moors above her father’s Dun and as remote. I would have put my arms around her, but she stepped back, saying quickly, “Na, don’t touch me, not yet.”

And I let my arms fall to my sides. “I could not come before, Guenhumara.”

“Oh, I know,” she said drearily. “All that I accepted for part of the bargain on the day that you took me from my father’s hearth. . . . It was of no great matter that you were not here, it was not you she cried for — she cried for Bedwyr and his harp, before she fell asleep.”

The blow was struck quite deliberately, and she was not a woman given to striking with such weapons. Suddenly I had a panic sense of Guenhumara’s going away from me, and I caught hold of her whether she would or no. “Guenhumara, what is it? For God’s sake tell me what you are holding against me!”

For a moment, standing there beside the Small One’s body, she put out all her strength to fling me off; then the resistance went out of her, and she said in a low wail, “Why did you leave us those three days and nights in the Fairy Howe?”

“Because you were both too weak to be carried off within an hour of bearing and being born. If I had carried you off then, I might so easily have lost you both.”

“If you had, then at least I should have died very happy, and the bairn would have escaped all that she has suffered these past months,” she said. “As it is, I think that you have lost us both, now,” and the chill of her words struck me through as the nightingale’s song had done.

“Guenhumara, cannot you understand? I left you safe among friends for three days, because I was afraid for you if I did otherwise. In God’s name tell me, is that so great a sin?”

“Safe among friends,” she flashed. “Because you were afraid? What do you know of being afraid? Oh yes, you know the tightening of the belly that comes before battle. You have never known in all your big trampling sword-smiting life, what it is to be afraid as I was afraid, those three long days and nights! I begged you — I knew how it would be, and I begged you to take us away, but you would not listen, you would not even hear — and now the bairn is dead.”

“Because she spent her first three days of life in a house of the Dark People? Heart-of-my-heart, how can you believe such a thing?”

“Everyone knows what the Dark People do to the children of men — it was in the very air of that place. And on the last night, the third night, I dreamed dark dreams and woke with a start, and they had taken the babe from my arms! That terrible old woman was sitting by the fire, holding her up and crooning over her — a little dark song that made my heart beat cold. And there was a man there, with a badger’s pelt over his head and shoulders and his face painted in badger stripes, and he was making signs on her forehead with his thumb as a potter marks clay; and Itha and all the other women were there, and they threw herbs on the fire so that it leapt up with a strange bitter smell and curled all about the bairn. I cried out, and Itha brought her and gave her back to me and said that I had dreamed ill dreams and must sleep again, and despite all that I could do, I slept as she bade me.”

“Anwylin, Anwylin, there was no waking; it was all the same ill dream.”

“The smell of the bitter smoke was still about her in the morning.”

“Then it was some ceremony of purifying. All faiths have their hidden ceremonies.”

“They were drawing her life out,” Guenhumara said. “I know. They were drawing her life out, to give it to their own sick child — it began to mend next day — and they left her not enough for three years.”

The thing was hopeless. I would have trusted the household of Druim Dhu with my own soul or hers, but I knew that nothing I could do or say would change her own belief in the matter. Nevertheless, I tried once more, desperately. “Guenhumara, there was good faith between me and the people of Druim Dhu, and whatever of evil the Dark People may work from time to time, they do not break faith unless one first breaks faith with them. If I had let slip Cei to forage among their corn pits that whiter —”

But she was not even listening. She was not conscious of my hands on her, and I dropped them to my sides with a feeling of leaden hopelessness. When she spoke again, it was more gently, but the gentleness brought her no nearer to me than she had been before. “I know that you loved her too, and I know that you could not understand what you were doing. But I shall remember always that it was because of you that the bairn died. . . . No, don’t touch me; I don’t want to touch you or be touched by you — not for a long while, maybe never any more.”

I was defeated, and I knew it with a helpless despair.

I took one last look at the Small One’s body, and went past Guenhumara, Cabal faithful at my heels. It was her right to be left alone with the child. I went out through the dun-lit atrium and across the courtyard to the storeroom, where a cot was always kept furnished with rugs and a pillow in case I sent back a messenger or came myself too late at night to rouse the household, and flung myself down there. And the strange thing is that I slept until close on noon.

We buried Hylin the next night, and so I was able to help carry the little bier, before I rode back to join the Brotherhood next day. Aquila, who was at home nursing a breast wound, came with me; and Ambrosius and a few others. I had not many friends in Venta at that time of year. We carried her from the house after dark, with torches, in the Roman manner. The men of the Roman heritage who were old when I was a boy used to say that a woman’s whole life was “lived between the torches,” for she left her home at night and by torchlight only twice, the first time in her bridal litter and the second on her bier. But for small Hylin there was only once, and she would never know a bridal litter.

It was a windy night, and the torches streamed raggedly in the wind that made a soft turmoil in the leaves of the poplar trees; and the shadows leapt and ran all about the small grave.

Afterward there was no funeral feast. It was such a little death, too little for such things. We walked back in a silent knot, the torches quenched, and parted at the gate of the old Governor’s Palace. Aquila would have walked with me all the way and so I think would Ambrosius, but I wanted no man with me, and they knew and loved me well enough to let me go alone.

The moon was several nights past the full, but when I came into the Queen’s Court there was enough light to show me the figure of a man sitting on the broad rim of the old cracked fountain basin.

Cabal growled softly in his throat, until I stilled him with a hand on his collar. And the man got up and turned toward me. I could see little in that light, save that he was of nearly my own height, fair-haired, and very young, but something in his voice, when he spoke in the British tongue, stirred and crept in my memory. “You are Artos the Bear, him that they call the Count of Britain?”

“I am Artos the Bear. You have some business with me? A message?” But I knew he was no man of the war host that I had ever seen.

“No message,” he said. “A matter of my own, but hearing of the sorrow upon your house, it seemed better that I wait for you here, rather than walk in unheralded at such a time.”

“Surely it must be a matter of great urgency, that it will not keep until the morning, even over such a night as this one.”

He said, “Forgive me. I am a stranger here, new come from the mountains and unused to cities of any kind. What place should I turn to on my first night in Venta Belgarum, save to my father’s house?”

Utter silence came upon me; a dark and icy stillness. And in it the words seemed to spread and spread like the ringwise ripples when a pebble is dropped into still water. And when the last ripple died into the dark edge of the stillness, I could only repeat his last words, and set them spreading again.

“Your father’s house?”

So Ygerna had kept her word. I knew the timbre of his voice now. Across the years I heard it again: “May you have much joy in your son, my lord — much joy in your son — much joy . . .”

“I am called Medraut,” he said. “My mother said that she told you I should be called Medraut, after the pet white rat that she had, with ruby eyes.”

“She did; and that she would send you to me when you came to manhood. It will have cost her something to redeem that promise, for she must miss you sorely — or are there others born after you?” I tried to catch the insult back, remembering that she was his mother. “Forgive me, Medraut, I should not have said that.”

He gave a small bitter laugh. “Na na, I make no mistake as to the cause you had to love my mother, or she to love you. But she will not miss me. She is dead. It was when she lay dying that she bade me come to you.”

We were silent again, and then I said, “For your sake, I should be sorry.”

“Sorry?”

“Doubtless you loved her.”

“Loved her?” he said musingly. “I do not know. I have learned more of hate than of love. I only know that I was part of her and she of me, as though there was still some cord between us. . . .” He was fingering the carved acanthus leaves of the old fountain curb, watching his own hand in the moonlight. Then he looked up, and said a horrible thing — horrible in its piteousness and serf-betrayal. “It is cold outside my mother. I know now why the newly born draw their first breath in weeping.”

And in reply I had a thought that was equally horrible. I wondered if he was in truth born into life even now, or whether his mother had devoured him as a wildcat in captivity will devour her young. But I only said, “It is cold in this wind. Come into the house, Medraut.”

“As my father bids me,” he said.

There was no one in the atrium, but a low fire still burned in the brazier, and the candles were lit as usual in their tall prickets, and from Guenhumara’s private chamber came the click of a shuttle to and fro. I left him standing by the brazier and crossed to the farther door and went in, letting the heavy curtains fall again behind me.

Guenhumara stood weaving at her loom — a piece of saffron cloth with a border of some intricate many-colored design. She never turned around when I entered, though she must have heard me, and Margarita, crouched against an upright of the loom, lifted her head from her paws and thumped her feathered tail as Cabal padded into the room. “Guenhumara,” I said.

She tossed the shuttle across and let it fall into its resting place; then turned slowly to face me, and I saw by the dry brilliance of her eyes that she had not shed one tear. “Artos — it is over, then.”

“It is over.” I glanced about me into the shadows. “How long have you been here alone? Where is Teleri and old Blanid?”

“I do not know. I sent them away, sometime. They did not want to go.”

“It is not good that you should have been alone!”

The gray shadow of a smile touched her mouth but never the hot bright eyes. “You mistake. It is good for me to have been alone. Better than to be stifled by the soft sympathy of other women. Who is the man that I heard come in with you? I thought it was agreed there was to be no death feast for the child.”

“A man I found waiting for me outside. Bring wine into the atrium, Guenhumara.”

“Wine?” she said. We had a very small stock of wine, three amphorae at that tune, I think, but we saved it for the greatest of occasions.

“Wine, Guenhumara.”

She turned without another word and went out by the far door into the colonnade, and I heard her footsteps going quickly along it to the storeroom. Then I went back to the atrium.

Medraut stood where I had left him, beside the brazier, and for the first time I was able to see him clearly. His head was up, a half smile on his lips. He waited for me to take stock of him at my leisure, at the same time taking his own stock of me. He was as tall as I had thought, his shoulders not yet broadened into a man’s, under the shapeless garment of sheepskin with the wool inside, which was belted by a wide bronze-studded strap about his waist. His legs were very slightly bowed, as are the legs of most of us who are bred in the saddle; “suckled on mare’s milk,” as we say in the mountains. His hands too, like my own, were horseman’s hands, and when I looked into his face under the mane of mouse-pale hair, it was as though I looked across five and twenty years or so, at my own fetch, in the days when my beard was a golden chicken down along my jaw, as his was now. And I knew the chill stirring at the back of his neck, that a man may well feel, seeing his own fetch in the firelight. Only his eyes were his mother’s, deeply and hotly blue, veined like the petals of the blue cranesbill, and with the same discolored shadows under them, and they gave to his face a startling beauty that I had never possessed. He was so nearly a son to be deeply proud of; and yet something, somewhere, was horribly amiss with him. He had been too long within his mother, and some part of him was marred and twisted — I could feel the deformity as I could feel Ygerna in him. Lame flesh may be carried off like a tattered cloak, without harm to the spirit — I thought of Gwalchmai; but Medraut was crippled somewhere in his inmost self, and that is another matter.

I told myself that I was merely remembering Ygerna and grafting what I remembered onto her son, and almost made myself believe it.

Then he turned a little, quite deliberately, shaking back the heavy fold of sheepskin from his upper arm, and I saw above the elbow the coiled and entwined dragon of red gold that his mother had shown me on the morning after his begetting. “No need to show me that,” I said. “No man, seeing you, could doubt the truth of your claim.”

He smiled a little, and turned back to the fire, but left the fold of dappled sheepskin flung back from his shoulder.

The outer door opened, and Guenhumara came in, bearing the great silver guest cup with the ram’s-head handles. “Drink, and be welcome,” she said, bringing it to Medraut.

He took it from her with bowed head, saying, in place of the usual formula, “God comfort you, my lady, and ease the sorrow of the house.” I came to know in after time, that he might always be counted on to say the right thing when he wished to. Guenhumara looked up at him, a long clear look that turned from him to me and back again. Then she took the guest cup from his hands, and set it down on the table within easy reach, and without another word, went back through the curtained doorway into her own chamber.

After she was gone, I pulled a stool to the brazier, bidding Medraut to do the same, and we both drank from the guest cup, but the thin cool wine of Burdigala brought no fellowship; only after we had drunk it, it seemed easier to speak.

“It is in my mind that your mother will have taught you to hate me well,” I said, scarcely knowing that I was going to, until the words were spoken.

The dark blue eyes met mine, but I could not see into them, as I had not been able to see into Ygerna’s. “Did I not say? I have learned more of hate than of love. Is it my fault?”

“No,” I said. “What is it that you wish of me?”

“A horse and a sword. I am your son. It is my place and my right to ride among your squadron and sleep at your hearth.”

“Do you care a jot for our struggle against the Saxon flood?”

He shrugged very faintly. “It will not submerge the mountains.”

And I leaned forward, studying him through the faint smoke of the brazier. “Then how if I say to you that there is no place among my squadrons for a man who neither knows nor cares what he fights for?”

“I should say to you that surely it matters little if a man cares what he kills for, so that he is skilled enough as a killer. Give me a horse and a sword, and I will prove to you that I can use both.” He smiled, an odd, unexpected, tremulous smile. “One day I may even learn from you to care for the cause behind the fighting.”

I was silent, still studying him across the brazier. I did not believe in this sudden hint of a hunger after better things, and yet I think that at the moment, he believed in it himself. He was one of those who can always believe as they wish to believe. At last I said, “Tomorrow I ride to rejoin the Company. You shall have your sword and your horse.”

“I thank you, my father.”

“But first, you shall take off that arm ring.”

“It is mine,” he said quickly, and made as though to cover it with the protection of his other hand.

“You fool. I have no wish to take it from you. You can carry it in your breast for all I care. Only I say that you shall not wear it above your elbow, in the sight of all men.”

“My mother gave it to me, and she had it from her mother —”

“Who had it from Utha, my father and your grandfather, on the morning after he mated with her. All that I know as well as you do, and it is for that very reason that you shall take it off.”

“Why?” he demanded, still covering it with his hand.

“Because it is mate to the one which Ambrosius the High King wears above his elbow. It is a royal arm ring of the Princes of Britain.”

He took away the shielding hand and looked down at the heavy gleaming thing.

“The royal arm ring of Britain,” he said musingly. “Yes, it might perhaps be — tactless to wear it about Ambrosius’s court.” Very slowly he pulled off the great arm ring, and thrust it into the breast of his rough sheepskin tunic. “See what a dutiful and obedient son you have, my father.”

I got up, and he rose instantly, with exactly the right show of deference. “It is past midnight, and we must make an early outset in the morning. Come, and I will show you where you can sleep.”

I did not rouse out any of the servants; truth to tell, I shrank too much from anyone else seeing him. I had had all that I could take for one night. The thing would be all over Venta soon enough without any help. I took a spare lantern and lit it at the brazier, and led him out across the courtyard to the small turf-floored storeroom where I had slept for the past two nights.

In the doorway, when I would have left him, he stayed me, standing against the lantern light. “Father —”

“Yes?”

“Are you going to acknowledge me? Or do I ride with you tomorrow simply as a new spear out of nowhere, to join your war bands?”

“Since no man who looks at you can doubt for one moment that you are my son,” I said, “it is in my mind that neither of us has much choice in the matter.”

“Father —” he said again, and checked, and then, “Can you not speak one gentle word to me, on this first night of my coming to you?” and his voice shook.

“I am sorry,” I said. “This is not a night when I have many gentle words to spare,” but I touched his shoulder, and realized with a sense of shock that, like his voice, he was shaking.

He drew a long breath and suddenly thrust out his hands to me as a woman might do. “Artos my father, it is an ill night that I have chosen for my coming; yet how was I to know. . . . And in the child’s death, do not quite forget that I am your living son! May not a son’s coming redeem the night a little for the other loss?”

It might have been a child’s appeal for warmth, it might have been only an incredibly clumsy attempt at consolation, but I knew already that Medraut was never clumsy, that when he wounded, he did it of deliberate intent; and I could have struck him across the mouth. But he was my son. My God! My only begotten son! I thought blasphemously. And I could not trust myself to speak again, but turned and went back to the atrium.

I had nowhere to sleep now, but I did not want to sleep; I felt as though I should never sleep again. I sat down on the stool by the brazier with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands, and shut my eyes at the light that seemed to claw at my aching eyeballs. The sense of doom was heavy on me, and the room seemed full of Ygerna’s hate reaching out to me still from beyond death. And Medraut was alive, and the child that I had loved was in her grave; and everything that was in me seemed broken and bleeding, and I was lost in a great wilderness.

Guenhumara came and found me there. I heard her step come across the tesserae and caught the faint indefinable scent of her, and knew that she was standing just behind me. But I did not look up.

“So that was your son,” she said, after a waiting pause.

“There’d be little use denying it, would there?”

“He is very like you. As like as a son can be to his father; only one cannot see into his eyes as one can into yours. And that makes him the more dangerous.”

“Only if he is dangerous already,” I said dully.

“A son of yours, as like to you as that one, coming out of nowhere with the Royal Dragon of Britain on his arm, and if I mistake not, something of your own power to draw men after him.”

“All that is nothing by itself,” I said, defending him, I think, to myself more than to her.

“By itself, no,” she said, and then, “Send him away, Artos.”

“I cannot — I must not.”

“Why? Are you afraid of the mischief he may work against you elsewhere, if you do?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Na. The thing is not so simple as that. If I send him away, I am no more than a horse swerving away from the jump that it must take at last. He is my fate, my doom if you like, Guenhumara. When I first saw him it was as though I looked at my own fetch. No man can escape his doom; better to face it than be taken between the shoulders as one tries to run.”

“Artos, you make me afraid when you talk like that. It is as though you were already half defeated.”

“Not unless I try to run.”

“Then if you will not send him away, I pray to God that he may get his death in battle — and soon.”

I had not been aware that my eyes were shut until I opened them and found myself staring into the red hell-mouth of the brazier. “No! Guenhumara, for Christ’s sake no — I am too near to praying that already.”

“And knowing the things you know, why should you not?”

“Because whatever he is, it is my fault, mine and my father’s who unleashed the evil.”

“Your father’s, maybe, though he did nothing that many another man has not done before him,” she said quickly. “Not yours! No more yours than the bear’s when he falls into the trap that has been dug for him.”

Suddenly her hand was on the back of my neck, hesitantly, moving to brush my cheek. But when I put up my own to touch it, it remained only a moment, as though to avoid seeming to repulse me, and then was gently but finally withdrawn. “Come to bed, Artos. You need sleep sorely, and as you said, you must ride early in the morning.”

And so I lay beside Guenhumara again in the wide bed, and there was a certain peace in being near her. But the child was between us, as surely as she had been on the night that I brought them both home from the Hollow Hills; as surely as the naked sword that Bedwyr had laid between Guenhumara and himself in the bitter winter before the child was born.

NEXT morning I gave Medraut his sword, and a big roan from among the reserve herd, and we rode out of Venta in the soft summer rain that had come up with the dawn. Cabal loped ahead as always, and beside him ran the smaller, lighter form of Margarita, both of them looking back at me from time to time. “Take the bitch with you,” Guenhumara had said. “She will be happier with you.” But I knew that the white boarhound’s constant whimpering and searching the same places over and over again were more than she could bear.

At Durocobrivae we made a halt for the night, and I picked up my own horse again; and toward sunset on the second day, we rode into camp.

I took Medraut to my own bothy, and sent him off with my waiting armor-bearer to draw his war gear from the baggage train and get something to eat — turning away to fling down my cloak and saddlebag even as I gave the orders, so that I need not see the look on young Riada’s face. I had seen too many looks on too many faces already; the startled glance and lengthened stare, the suddenly widened or narrowed eyes, as I rode in with Medraut beside me.

Left to myself when they were gone, I stood staring at nothing, fiddling with my dusty harness but getting no further with stripping it off. I should have gone out at once; God knows there were matters enough for me to see to; but still I lingered, giving the news time to run through the camp.

Presently a step came over the trampled turf, and Bedwyr loomed into the ragged doorway, his figure shutting out the rippled flame of sunset as he ducked through. “Artos — they said that you were back. What news? What news of the Small One?”

“Dead,” I said. “She died an hour before I reached home,” and heard the leaden words as though somebody else had spoken them.

The silence closed over them. I could not see Bedwyr’s face, but I heard him swallow harshly in his throat. Then he said, “There are not any words, are there?”

“No,” I said, “there are not any words.”

“How is it with Guenhumara?”

“Much as it would be with any woman. If she could weep it might be the better for her.”

Not even to Bedwyr could I tell that story to the full. I had taken up my iron cap and was burnishing it with the rag which Riada kept for that purpose. The sunset light through the doorway was reflected red in the smooth curved surface. “She said the child cried for you and your harp, before she fell asleep the last time.”

He gave a smothered exclamation, then nothing more, and after a while I said, “So here’s another lament for you to make.”

He folded up abruptly onto a packsaddle, his hands hanging across his knees. “No more laments. I have made overmany laments in the past fifteen years.”

“So long?” I said. “We are growing old, my friend. One day it will be time for the young ones to take our swords in hand, and make one last lament for us — if they remember — and step into our places. And for us the aching will be over.”

“The young ones — such as the son who rode in with you this evening?”

My hand checked on the war cap of its own accord. “You have heard, then?”

“I have seen him. You never told me you had a son, Artos.”

“Until two nights since, I hoped very greatly that I had not.”

“So? Was he, too, fathered under a whitethorn bush?”

“It amounted to that. . . . Bedwyr, will you take him into your squadron?”

“Mine?” I knew from his voice the upward quirk that would set his left eyebrow flying. “I should have thought that you would wish to keep him in your own.”

“Should you? Na, it is better that he should not ride too much in my saddlebag. He must go to you or Cei, and Cei will not know how to handle him.”

“Will he take so much handling?”

“Listen, Bedwyr; he was begotten in hate. It is a foul story, and save for Guenhumara, it is between myself and God — and in hate he was bred up by his mother, and held by her all these years. It is the only thing he truly understands; he is a stranger in the world, and at odds with it, because his mother never truly gave him birth until her own death tore him from her.” I was struggling for the words I needed. “He wants to get back to the warm darkness of his mother’s womb; and failing to escape from it, he will be revenged on the world if he can. How much of all that will Cei understand? Cei, whose idea of hating is a blow and a flare of sparks?”

“Whereas I . . . ?”

“I think that at least you know how to hate.”

“A strange recommendation.”

“Not so strange, since a man understands better in another the thing that he knows in himself. And may even have a surer mercy for it.”

“That sounds oddly like a counsel of love.”

“Love?” I said. “No, not love. But I remember also that Cei could never have ridden the Black One as you rode him.”

There was a silence full of the small sharp sounds of the camp about us, and then Bedwyr spoke again, with a curious cold stillness in his voice. And I realized that after all the years that we had been closer than most brothers, I still knew scarcely one thing about him that belonged to the time before Narbo Martius. “At least it is true that I know how to hate. I hated my mother. She drowned my bitch’s puppies before my eyes, and the bitch took the milk fever and died. I used to lie awake at night thinking of the different ways to kill my mother, and the only reason, I think, that I did not do it was that once it was done, I should not have it to look forward to. And then I grew to manhood, and I knew that I had left it too long and I should never kill my mother now. So I left home by the road to Constantinople, and you know the rest. . . . Yes, I’ll take the boy into my squadron.”

He never suggested that I should send Medraut away, as Guenhumara had done; but few men, I think, have the ruthless logic of a woman.

For a while Medraut’s coming was a subject for talk and jest around the watch fires, but the war camp had more pressing matters to occupy them than the Bear’s youthful wenching and its resulting bastard, and soon the thing was to all outward seeming as though it had never been otherwise. It seems strange now, that the ripples should have died so soon. . . . But indeed my son had an eye for country and an uncanny knack of blending into it which, on one level, enabled him to find and fortify a place for himself among us almost unnoticed (even Bedwyr, I think, was at times, and at first, scarcely aware of the new rider in his squadron) and on another, combined with a land of cold panache, aided him to swift success in the type of warfare which is carried on by ambush and foray. He began to get a name for being lucky to follow in battle, and that goes far with men who live with their swords in their hands; and so presently some of the young ones began to follow him.

He had plenty of opportunity to enhance his name among them in the next three years.

Three years of ebbing and flowing warfare, while the Barbarians clung onto Cantii Territory and the land strip between the South Chalk and the sea, unable to gain further ground in the face of Ambrosius’s troops; while more and more of the Sea Wolves swarmed into the old Trinovantian and Icenian lands; always, it seemed, a new skein of the tattered black war boats before each easterly wind, a new war camp or settlement springing up overnight in place of the one we had burned out in the morning. For the sea crossing is shorter in the South, and the Sea Wolves, it seemed, better combined and of more steadfast purpose, so that it was like trying to sweep back a river spate with a besom broom. And always, if we turned our backs for an instant in dealing with the flanking thrusts to the north or south, the settlers in the Tamesis Valley would put out another probing tentacle toward the heart of Britain.

For the most part, now that Ambrosius and I had again joined forces, the wolds and marshlands of the East Seax and Northfolk and Southfolk were my hunting grounds even up into Lindum Territory, where the Saxon inroads had begun again; while Ambrosius turned his forces against the Barbarian swarms south of the Tamesis. But as the years went by, Ambrosius himself took the field less and less often. He was High King as well as military commander; for him, not only to lead his troops in war, but to rule the broad central territory that was the heart and the ultimate fortress of Britain; and often affairs of kingship held him in Venta while other men led his war hosts on the outer frontiers. And so little by little the pattern between us changed and codified; and we were no longer sword brothers of a like kind, in our fighting, but he the Monarch and I, who had been the Count of Britain, the Rex Belliorum, the chosen war leader.

But all too often it was not the duties of kingship alone that kept Ambrosius prisoned in Venta. Increasingly, through those years, he was a sick man. One could see it in the gradual wasting of his flesh — he had never much to spare — in the yellowish color of his skin and the growing brilliance of his eyes, and the drawn look of his mouth which bespoke endurance. Those of us nearest to him could see it also, in the way he drove himself — not as one who rides a well-trained horse and rides him hard, but as one with the wolves behind him, lashing a spent beast. But at any suggestion that something was amiss, he simply laughed and went away into his own remoteness where other men could not reach him; and lashed himself the harder, afterward.

It was when we returned to winter quarters in the fourth autumn since we came south, and I saw the change that there was in him since I saw him last, that I asked Ben Simeon, his Hebrew physician, what ailed the High King. He looked at me under his brows, the dark luminous gaze brooding on my face, as he hitched his greasy old kaftan about his shoulders in the way that he had, and inquired, “How many of those nearest to the King have asked me that, do you suppose?”

“More than one, I imagine,” I said. “It so chances that we love him.”

He nodded. “So so, and all of them I have put off with answers that sound well and mean nothing. But you are in a son’s place to Ambrosius, and therefore it is right that you should know the truth. In Alexandria where I learned my trade, and where the priest kind have not yet made it a sin to explore the bodies of the dead for knowledge of the living, they call it the Crab Sickness.”

I did not know what he meant, and I said so.

“It is a thing, a very evil thing, that grows like a crab in the body; and sometimes it spawns into many of its own kind, and sometimes it remains but one; but either way it devours the body.”

I found it hard to speak through something that seemed to close my throat. “And is there no checking this thing?”

“None,” he said. “Neither by herbs nor by the knife. The secret of it is as deep beyond us as is the secret of life itself — or the secret of death.”

“Death,” I said. “Is that the end?”

“Whether the thing runs its course mercifully swift, or crawls through years of time, it is death in the end.”

I remember that I was silent for a while, drawing patterns on the beaten earth with the chape of my sword. Then I asked, “Does Ambrosius know?”

“One does not keep such news from the like of Ambrosius, with the work that he has in his sword hand, still to do, or to be passed on in good order to someone else.”

So I was right; he had been working against time all that year and more, striving to leave Britain strong for another hand to take from his, building toward a victory that, if it ever came, he would not live to see. I could have gone home through the streets of Venta howling like a dog for Ambrosius who had been to me father and friend and captain, not for his death, but for the manner of it, and for its shadow reaching out before.

The early weeks of that winter went by, much as the same weeks in other years. By day we slaved in the training grounds and the colt-breaking yards; or when chance offered, took a day’s hunting in the forests about Venta. Our evenings were passed, for the most part, about the fires in the gymnasium of the old Governor’s Palace, which the Companions had taken for their mess hall; sometimes, the chiefs and captains among us, in Ambrosius’s High Hall which had been the great banqueting chamber, or in my case, and all too seldom, in my own quarters with Guenhumara, like a mere tired soldier or farmer or merchant returning to his woman at the day’s end. And these evenings were at once a deep joy and an abiding sorrow to me.

It was always a joy to me to be with Guenhumara, to look at her, and breathe her quietness, yet beneath the joy, and in some way part of it, as though one were the shadow of the other, lay always the sorrow, the sense of distance between us that I could not cross; the loneliness. She had said that she did not want me to touch her, and I could not come near enough to touch her, nowadays — oh, not physically: physically, when once those first few days after Hylin’s death were past, she never withdrew herself from me, nor did she ever withdraw her kindness, but kindness is not of necessity the same thing as love; and I knew that something within her, her deepest and inmost self, her soul perhaps, had gone away from me and was going further. I think that she did not wish it; I think that at that time she would have come back if she could; but she could not find the way, and I could not find it for her.

Sometimes on those rare evenings, we would be alone together; sometimes a little knot of friends, Cei and Gwalchmai, Pharic and the Minnow . . . very occasionally Bedwyr alone; and those were the best evenings of all.

On those evenings we abandoned the atrium, and sat in Guenhumara’s private chamber, or at least Bedwyr and I sat, while Guenhumara returned to her weaving. I can see her now, as though I were still sitting on the stool beside the brazier with Cabal sprawled on the warm tesserae at my feet, lordlily indifferent to the white boarhound bitch Margarita suckling his squabbling puppies close by. She would be working at her standing loom, and Bedwyr sitting on a pillow beside her, idly fingering his harp, and glancing up at her; she turning perhaps to glance down at his ugly laughing face, and their two shadows flung by the lamp onto the web of her weaving, so that it was almost as though she were weaving them into the pattern of the cloth. And behind the wandering harp notes, the whisper of sleet against the high window shutter.

I liked to watch them so, for it seemed to me good that the two people I loved best in the world should be friends, that we should be a trinity; the clover leaf or the yellow iris, not merely three in row, with myself in the center. On those evenings, too, it was as though Guenhumara came back a little out of her distance, so that I felt that a little more — a little more — and we should find each other again.

Medraut never made one in those quiet evenings. He had begun to gather a following of his own, among the younger of the Companions, and they had their own ways of passing the free hours. And I was only too thankful that it should be so. Perhaps if I had been otherwise, if I had tried harder to fight his mother in him, instead of leaving him in her power, it might have saved much sorrow later. And yet — I don’t know — I do not know. I think he was destroyed, and not merely held captive; and only God can remake what has been destroyed.

The dark of the whiter was past, and the days lengthening, and the hunter in me had begun to sniff the distant unrest of the spring, when Ambrosius sent for me one evening.

I found him in his private chamber, sitting in the great chair beside the brazier. Gaheris his armor-bearer squatted with hunched shoulders on the floor beside him, cleaning a piece of harness, and in the farther shadows I could just make out the dark shape of the Jew physician. We talked for a short while of things that mattered little to either of us; and then in the midst of some quite different subject, he said: “Artos, I am like a beast in a cage, here in Venta. I must get outside the bars for a while.”

“So?” I said.

“So I am going up to the villa for a few days. They tell me that the hunting in Spinae is good after the soft winter.” He smiled at my silence, the old swift smile that kindled his whole face as though a lamp had sprung up inside it — there was little flesh now to shield the light. “Good hunting for the friends who come with me, even though maybe my own hunting days are gone by.” And I saw in his eyes that he knew that Ben Simeon had told me.

“Can you ride so far?”

“Surely. It is but a forenoon’s ride, and my old fat Pollux grows less like a horse and more like a goose-feather bed with every day that passes.”

It would be useless to argue against the plan, I saw that; and indeed I had no wish to. “Who goes with you, Ambrosius?”

“Not many: yourself and Gaheris here and Aquila — my war leader and my armor-bearer, and the captain of my bodyguard. I shall not lack for care and guarding.”

“And Ben Simeon?”

He shook his head. “I have no more need of physicians, Bear Cub.”

And the figure in the. shadows made a movement that was the beginning of urgent protest, and then was still again.

TWO days later we were up at the small villa house — scarcely more than a farmsteading — in the wooded hills north of Venta, which Ambrosius and his father before him had used for a hunting lodge. The old smoke-darkened atrium was full of stored grain baskets and so were the wings, save for a few rooms where the steward and farm servants were housed, as was the case with almost every villa out of the Saxons’ path, for in these days when there was no longer any export trade, the people had given up wool and turned back to corn. But Ambrosius had always kept the two long rooms of the upper story for his own quarters, and the servants sent on ahead had made all ready for us.

On that first day we none of us hunted, but left the dogs in idleness, though Kian the chief hunter told of a twelve-point stag well worth the hunting, and remained together about the farm, lingering over the day as friends linger over a parting meal before each goes his separate way. We supped — the three of us, for young Gaheris had been dispatched to join the hunters in the steward’s quarters — in the long upper chamber, a good country meal of hard-boiled-duck eggs, dark rye bread and ewe’s-milk cheese, and the last of the withered long-biding apples that the steward’s woman brought proudly from the storeroom for our pleasure; and washed it down with thin wine made from the little pinkish grapes that grew on the south wall.

The meal over, and the winter dusk already drawing in from the ends of the room, we gathered about the brazier; gathered close, for the clouds had rolled away and the evening was turning cold under an ice-green sky; and huddled our cloaks about us, scuffling our feet into the rushes where the dogs lay sprawled. The fire was a sweet-scented one, of apple and knotted hawthorn wood laid over the glowing charcoal; the smoke of it fronded upward into the blackened bell-mouth of the smoke louver, touched to gold by the flickering of its own small flames — hawthorn burns neatly, in licking flames like fringed flower petals — and the burning wood gave back the warmth of the sun that it had gathered through a score of summers.

We had not lit the fat-lamp, and the light of the brazier beat up into our faces, throwing curious upward shadows from cheekbone and jaw and brow. Ambrosius sat forward, with his hands hanging relaxed about his knees, as he had always done when he was very tired, and his face in the upward light was the face of a skull wearing the gold circle of kingship about its hollow brows. Aquila’s face with its great hooked nose was that of an old outworn falcon. He had been sick a long time with the breast wound, and though it had healed at last, he would never be fit for hard service again; it was for that reason that Ambrosius had made him captain of his guard. But a worse wound to him had been the loss of his wife the previous summer — a little brown fierce thing with a taste in plumage that was bright as a woodpecker’s; but I think to Aquila she had not seemed like that. . . .

Presently Ambrosius roused from his thoughts, and glanced from one of us to the other with contentment, a great peace and quietness on his face. The wooden bowl of apples stood on a stool close by, and among them a couple of handfuls of sweet chestnuts from the tree in the courtyard. He reached out and took one of them, and sat turning the glossy brownness of it in his fingers with the lingering touch that means memory. “Constantine my father brought me up here on my first hunting trip, in the whiter before he — died,” he said after a while. “Utha he had brought up for three years, but that was the first winter that I was judged old enough. I was nine, and a man among men. . . . Utha and I used to roast chestnuts in the evenings; but in those days we still used the atrium and there was the hot edge of the hearthstone to roast them on.” He smiled ruefully, as though at his own foolishness. “I suppose one couldn’t roast chestnuts on a brazier.”

“I don’t see why not,” I said. “You have been High King so long that you have forgotten how to make one thing do the work of another. You have forgotten cooking ribs of stolen beef over a watch fire in a snowstorm,” and I got up.

He made to stay me, laughing. “Na na, it was but a trick of the mind — a whim of the moment.”

But suddenly, and out of all proportion to the size of the matter, I was determined that Ambrosius should have his chestnut roasting. “The whim is a pleasant one, though. I also have roasted chestnuts here before I was old enough to carry my shield.” And I went down to the steward’s quarters where the cook place was, and called to the steward’s woman, “Mother, give me a shovel or an old fry pan. The High King has a mind to roast chestnuts.”

When I came back to the upper room, bearing a battered shovel, I had the impression that Ambrosius and Aquila had been in earnest speech together, and that they had stopped abruptly when they heard my returning foot on the stair. I was vaguely surprised, but they had been sword brothers when I still ran barefoot among the hunting dogs, and must have many things to speak of in which I had no part. I showed them the shovel in triumph, and set to building the glowing hawthorn logs into the best shape for my purpose, feeling suddenly my own morning time come back upon me as I did so; and setting half a dozen chestnuts on the shovel, slid it into the hot heart of the fire. “See? I have not wasted my years in the wild places.”

So we roasted chestnuts, like three urchins, while Cabal propped himself against my knee and looked on, singing his deep throat-song of contentment in the warmth; and scorched our fingers raking them out, cursing and laughing, but never very loud, for a mood of quiet seemed to hold us all, that evening. . . . After a while Ambrosius looked up from the hot chestnut he was peeling, and I found the gaze of his sunken eyes drawing mine across the firelight. Then he leaned forward, the hot nut forgotten in his fingers.

He said, “Artos, when I determined on this hunting trip, and spoke of feeling caged in Venta, did you think ‘sick men have odd fancies’?”

“I know too well the feeling of the cage bars that comes upon a man toward the end of winter quarters, when the life of the world is stirring but spring and the time to march out again is still far away.”

He nodded. “Yet that was not the whole reason, nor the chief reason that I wished to come up here into the hunting hills.”

“So? And the chief reason?”

“There were two,” he said. “Two, conjoined like the two halves of a damson stone. And one of them was this, that I knew the time had come to speak to you of certain matters concerning the man who takes the Sword of Britain after me.”

Aquila made a harsh sound of protest in his throat; and Ambrosius answered it as though it had been spoken. “Ah, but it has. . . . Na na, my friends, never wear such grim faces for me. I am not an old man — not old in years — but assuredly I am not going out in my flower. I have had a long enough life, and a good one that has brought me faithful friends and a few to love me; and there is little more that any man can ask — save perhaps that there shall be one to carry the tools of his trade after him and work more greatly with them than he has ever done.”

He was silent for a long moment, looking down at the half-peeled chestnut in his hand, and we also were silent, waiting for what came next. I had an odd feeling, though I do not think he had actually moved at all, that Aquila had drawn back from us a little, as from a thing that was chiefly between Ambrosius and myself. “The time has come when I must choose out a man to carry the tools of my trade after me.” Ambrosius raised his head again and looked full at me. “Artos, save for the small accident of birth, you are my son; all the son I ever had. I have told you that before. Furthermore, you are of the Royal House in blood, as surely as I am myself.”

I cut in, thinking to make the matter easier for him. “Utha’s son in blood, but not in name, and so I cannot be the one to carry the tools of your trade after you. Never fret, Ambrosius, I have known that always. I am the war leader. I have no hunger to be the High King.” I reached out, I remember, and set my hand over his. “Long ago, you promised me Arfon, and that is enough for me.”

“Na, you do not understand,” he said. “Listen now: If I set you on one side, the choice must fall upon Cador of Dumnonia, or upon young Constantine, his son. They are the last that have the royal blood of Britain in them, and I am not sure of Cador; he has the inner fires of a leader, but his flame flares and sinks, and his purposes shift like wind-driven sand dunes. I cannot feel in my heart that he is the man to hold together a mixed kingdom and a pack of native princelings straining at the leash. The boy’s mettle I have had no chance to judge at all, but whatever he may be later, he can be little but a half-broken colt yet.”

(I thought of the dark young man I had hunted with, that spring before Gaul, and the babe into whose nest Maximus’s great seal had fallen.)

I said, “Ambrosius, should not all this go before the Council?”

A smile twitched at his lips. “I scarcely think so. Listen again: If I call the Council together and tell them that I have chosen Cador of Dumnonia to follow after me, I am putting Britain — all that was our heritage, all that we of the war host have spent our lives for, all that we still mean when we speak of Rome — into the hands of a man who I am not at all sure is strong enough to hold them; and if, when I am dead, it appears that my doubts were well founded, it will not be I who suffer, but Britain. Britain and the whole western world that will see the last lights go out.”

“Who, then?” I said.

He looked at me very straightly, speaking no word; and after a moment, I said: “Oh no, I am not the stuff that usurpers are made of.”

“But can you be sure that you would be left the choice? If I were to name Cador of Dumnonia as my successor, I think that for the most part the British princes would accept him, with a certain amount of muttering among themselves. ‘He is no greater man than we are,’ but also, ‘He is the last of the blood-royal.’ But the whole of this Kingdom of the South, and besides your own war band, the whole of the war host would rise for you, to a man.”

“Not if I did not lead the rising,” I said.

“Artos, my simple Bear Cub, you overestimate — or perhaps underestimate — the power of your hold. When men rise for a leader it is not always at the leader’s instigation. . . . You are the man with the strength to hold Britain after me, and because you are baseborn, I cannot name you formally as my successor before the Council. But I can at least leave you free to win the High Kingship for yourself.”

“I think that still I do not understand,” I said slowly.

“Do you not? If I die without naming my successor, most men will turn to you as a matter of course, and the rest will be for you to handle. Therefore I shall be at pains to die suddenly, without time to name an heir. It will inconvenience the Council somewhat, I imagine, but —”

I sprang up. “My God! Ambrosius! You are sick in your mind! To leave us with no named heir — that will be to leave Britain rent with inward war, at a time when our only hope is to stand together — you cannot have thought — you —”

He sat in the heavy carved chair and looked up at me, his head tipped back, the eyes clear and resolute in his dying face. “Oh yes, I have thought . . . I am not a gambler by nature, Artos, but I can throw the dice when need be. I know perfectly well that in this I am throwing for the highest stakes of my life, and that if I lose, Britain will fall apart like a rotten apple, and lie open for the Barbarians to swarm in; but if I win, we shall have gained a few years more to carry on the battle. And I believe that I shall win — at least with more likelihood than if I were to name Cador of Dumnonia to come after me.” A shadow of wry laughter crept into his tone. “It is a pity that, in the nature of things, I shall not be here to know whether I win or lose; whether I have thrown Venus or the Dog.”

“I still think that it is madness!”

“Madness, maybe; but there is no other way. Sit down again, Artos, and listen to me for a while longer, for we have not all the time in the world.”

I sat down, feeling as though I had taken a blow between the eyes, and aware all the time of old Aquila’s frowning gaze bent in judgment upon me. “I am listening, Ambrosius.”

“So. Then, you know as surely as I do, that the campaigning of this coming summer is not likely to follow the pattern of the past few years.”

I nodded. “So says every wind as it blows over. Yet it is hard to see why the thing should come now, this year and no other, if it did not come five years ago. We have shown the Barbarians clearly enough that in pitched battle in anything even faintly approaching even numbers, we can cut them to pieces with our cavalry; and they must know, for their scouts are not fools, that we are steadily building up the strength of our cavalry forces.”

“It is maybe for that reason that they determine to throw their whole strength against us before it is too late.” Delicately, he shelled off another strip of brown husk from the creamy kernel of the long-cold chestnut. “It is in my mind that the Saxons are learning to combine at last. Certainly the coming and going that there has been all this winter between the Cantish Kingdom and the East Seax would seem to point that way.”

The captain of the bodyguard smiled down his great hooked nose into the fire, and raked out a smoking chestnut with his dagger. “We also have our scouts. It is a good thing, seemingly, to have friends among the Little Dark Men of the hills and forests.”

“Ambrosius, if there is indeed a great push coming in the spring, then at least wait until, by God’s mercy, it has been flung back, before you make your decision past unmaking it again.”

“I shall not last until the spring,” Ambrosius said, simply, and tossed the half-peeled chestnut that he had been playing with so long, back into the fire with a gesture of “Finish.” And then he said — it was the first and only time that I ever heard him speak of his sickness — “I have stood up in my place as long as I could. God knows it; but I am worn through with carrying a wildcat in my vitals — I am rotted and eaten away. Soon there must be an end.” I saw the sweat on his forehead in the firelight.

After we had sat in silence for a while, he spoke again. “Artos, I have a sense of fate on me. It is not merely that our scouts report certain movements of the Saxons. I believe in my bones, in my very soul, that a Saxon thrust such as we have not seen before is coming this spring — by midsummer at latest: and when it comes, there will be a struggle compared with which the battles we have known will be but candles held to a beacon blaze. And believing that, I must believe that this, above all others, is not the time to be leaving Britain in the hands of an untried king, but rather in the hands of a strong and well-proved war leader. As to what comes after, so far as the question of my successor is concerned, the victory in such a struggle would be a mighty weapon in your hand, Bear Cub, and if you fail, then Britain will not need a High King again.”

His voice had died almost to a whisper, hoarse in his throat, and his brilliant eyes were haggard, clinging to my face. Yet still I was half resisting; and not from humility but from lack of courage. I had always been one who dreaded loneliness, the loneliness of the spirit. I needed the touch of other men’s shoulders against mine, the warmth of comradeship. I was a fine war leader, and I knew it, but I shrank from the very thought of what Ambrosius was asking of me. I did not want the loneliness of the mountaintop.

Aquila had risen some time before, and tramped over to the window at the end of the room; he was something of a lone wolf, old Aquila, and his own deep reserve made him flinch from the least probing into the reserves of other men; and I suppose he did not want to see our faces while the last stages of the thing were fought out. Suddenly he spoke, without turning from the window. “Talk of beacon blazes, there’s something big burning over yonder beyond Ink-Pen, by the look of it!”

I got up quickly and went over to him. “Saxons! Open the window, Aquila.” He lifted the pin and swung wide the glazed leaf, and the cold and the smell of frost flowed in against my face. The window looked north, and as the dazzle of the firelight faded from my eyes, and the stars began to prick out in the clear sky, I could make out a dull red glow in the sky, like red reflection of a great fire.

Even as I watched, the glow was spreading, rising higher into the stars. “It would take a whole city burning to yield that glare,” Aquila said, and I could hear the frown in his voice. And then the formless glow began to gather to itself a shape, a great blurred bow, and out of its brightness suddenly a streamer of light flickered up into the dark sky, and then another, and another; and I wondered why I had been such a fool as not to know the thing at once — I suppose because in my mind it belonged to the North, and so I was blind to it here in the South Country. I laughed, and something in me lifted as though at the touch of a familiar magic. “No Saxons tonight, old wolf. It is the Northern Lights, the Crown of the North. Dear God, how many times I have watched those flying ribbons of fire from the ramparts of Trimontium!” I glanced aside at Aquila, whose exclamation told me that he had recognized the thing he looked at, at the same moment as myself. “Sa sa! You too! You must have seen them often enough in your thrall winters in Juteland.”

“Often enough,” he said. “They used to grow and grow until they were like great banners of light flying all across the sky; and the old men would say that they could hear a rushing of great wings overhead. . . . But one scarcely ever sees them here in the South, and then no more than the red glow that might be a farm burning in the next valley.”

There was a movement behind us, the scrape of a chair being thrust back, and a slow slurred step on the tesserae, and we moved apart to make room for Ambrosius between us. “What is this marvel? This Crown of the North?” He set a hand on my shoulder and the other on Aquila’s, breathing quickly and painfully, as though even the effort to rise and cross the floor had been a day’s labor to him. “So-o,” he said, lingeringly, when he had got his breath back. “A marvel indeed, my brothers.” For in that short while that we had been standing there, the light had strengthened and spread, until one got the impression of a vast arc spanning the whole night, if one could but have seen over the northernmost hills that hid it from our view; and from that unseen arc, as though it were indeed the headband of a crown, a myriad rays sprang out, darting and wheeling to and fro, flickering out half across the sky, like ribbons of colored fire that licked and trembled and died and darted forth again, changing color moment by moment from the red of blood to the green of ice, to the blue of the wildfire that drips along the oar blades of the northern seas in summer nights.

“I too have seen the glow like a burning in the next valley, and a flicker or so in the northern sky, from the high shoulder of Yr Widdfa,” Ambrosius said, in the tone in which a man speaks in the place where he worships his God. “But never the like of this. . . . Never — the like of this.”

Voices, scared and hushed and excited, were sounding in the courtyard, a babble of tongues and a running of feet. Down there they would be pointing and gesticulating, their faces awed and gaping in the strange flickering light. “The others have seen it now,” Aquila said. “They could scarcely make more starling chatter if it were a golden dragon in the sky.”

“There will be many pointing to the north and bidding each other to look, tonight,” Ambrosius said musingly. “And later, all Britain will tell each other that there were strange lights in the sky on the night before Ambrosius Aurelianus died; and later still, it will become Aquila’s dragon, or a sword of light with the seven stars of Orion set for jewels in the hilt.”

I remember feeling as though a cold hand had clenched itself in my belly, making it hard to breathe, and knowing in that instant the second of the reasons that had brought Ambrosius up from his capital to this half-derelict hunting lodge that he had known as a boy; turning back in the end to the place that had been dear at the beginning, just as I, with my own hour upon me, would have turned back if that might be, to some lost glen in the lap of Yr Widdfa of the Snows.

I flung my arm around his shoulders, as though I would have held him to me, and felt the sick skin and bones that he was, and I wanted to cry out to him, “Ambrosius, no! For God’s sake not yet!” But I wanted to cry out for my own sake, not for God’s, not for his. “I have lost too many of the people I love; there is time yet, stay a while longer —” But the pleas and protests died in my heart. Besides, any that could be made, Aquila would have made before me.

So we none of us spoke of the thing in words. And after a while, when the glory of the Northern Lights had begun to fade, and the stars to show again, Ambrosius said conversationally, “I think that the frost will not be hard enough to spoil the scent tomorrow.”

“The scent?” I said. “Oh no, Ambrosius, no hunting; we bide together, we three.”

“Of course. We shall bide together, and together we shall hunt old Kian’s twelve-point stag. The hounds will grow stale else, and the huntsmen also. A day on the game trail will do the three of us more good than all Ben Simeon’s black potions.”

I turned on him, and in doing so, caught sight of Aquila’s face in the strange bluish light, and knew that he was as unprepared for this as I was.

“Ambrosius, don’t be playing the madman! You could never last an hour’s hunting!” I blurted out.

And in the same bluish light, I saw him smile. “Not as I am now; but sometimes it is given to a man, by the Lords of Life, to gather all the strength that is yet in him, enough for a few days, maybe, or a month, and spend it all in an hour or a day as a single moment; that is, if the need be great enough. I believe that it will be so given to me.”

The great lights were dying from the sky, and his face was sinking into the shadows as through dark water, as the winter night returned to its usual seeming. “I have roasted chestnuts with the two dearest friends I have, and I have seen the glory of the God beyond gods in a winter sky. That is a good way to spend a parting evening,” he said, and turned from the window and walked steadily back to the fire, as though something of the strength he spoke of had already come to him.

Aquila slammed the window shut, and tramping after him, defiantly took up the fat-lamp and lit it.

I followed last of all.

The few remaining chestnuts, left forgotten, were charred and glowing on the glowing shovel, each sending up curled tendrils of smoke. As the lamp flame sprang up and steadied, and the soft light flowed out to quench the fierce red dragon’s-eye of the brazier, Ambrosius stooped and took up a half-full wine cup from the table where we had supped; and turned to us, smiling, the cup held high. “Brothers, I drink to tomorrow’s hunting. Good hunting and a clean kill.”

But seeing him standing there, the lamp turning his mane of hair to tarnished silver and filling his eyes, always so pale in the darkness of his face, with a rain-gray light, and burnishing the gold fillet about his skeleton temples; seeing the fault half-triumphant smile on his mouth that was unlike any smile that I had ever seen there, and the great cup burning in his hand, and the shine upon him that was not the lamplight alone, it seemed to me that I was not looking at the Ambrosius I knew, but at the King decked for sacrifice, and my heart shook within me.

Then we heard young Gaheris pounding up the stair to demand whether we had seen the marvel, and he was only Ambrosius again, standing in the candlelight with an empty wine cup in his hand.