NEXT morning when the horses were brought around, Ambrosius mounted Pollux almost as lightly as the rest of us (he had had to be almost lifted into the saddle when we set out from Venta, two days before) and sat there in his greasy weather-stained old hunting leathers, discussing the day’s prospects with Kian his chief huntsman. An extraordinary return of strength had come to him from somewhere, and even his face seemed less skull-like than it had done for a month past, so that all last night might have been no more than a dream.
Yet his renewed strength seemed not quite to belong to the world of men, and something of last night’s shining was still upon him, after all, and the huntsmen and farm folk looked somewhat askance at their lord, and seemed more shy of going near him than ever they had been before — for he was never one to wear the Purple among his own folk, and I have heard him arguing with an armorer about the placing of a rivet, or with some old falconer as to the handling of an eyas, and getting the worst of it in the way of any man who argues with an expert on his own ground.
The world was gray with hoarfrost, under a skim-milk sky still barred with the last silver and saffron of the dawn, but the frost had not been a hard one and would not spoil scent; and the horses danced after their day’s rest, even old Pollux, and the hounds strained forward in eagerness against their leashes as we rode out from the farm courtyard and skirted the brown of the winter wheat field beyond, scaring up the little crested lapwings as we went, and headed for the dark shoreline of the woods beyond.
The sun came up, and the frost melted around us as we rode, giving place to a thin white mist lying close to the ground in the hollows. The horses waded through it as through shallow seas of gossamer as we dropped into the valley, and small bright drops trembled in the light, hanging from every dried hemlock head and half-silken, half-sodden feather of last year’s willow herb. And I remember that over the open fallow the larks were singing. In a sheltered hollow of the woodshore, the first hazel catkins were hanging out, and as we brushed through, shaking the whippy sprays, the air was suddenly stained with a sun-mist of yellow pollen for yards around. And I wondered how it all seemed to Ambrosius: whether he had yet freed himself utterly from the dearness and strangeness and piercing beauty of the world, from the lark song and the smell of melting frost on the cold moss under the trees, and the thrust of a horse’s flanks beneath him, and the faces of his friends. His own face betrayed nothing, but I thought that he looked about him from time to time, as though he wished to see very clearly the winter woods dappled like a curlew’s breast, the prick of a hound’s ears, the crimson thread tips of a woman-bud on a hazel spray, the flying shadow of a bird across the turf, to draw them in and make them part of himself, part of his own soul, so that he might carry them with him where he was going.
The hounds picked up the scent of the stag beside the pool where he had come down to drink at dawn, and the instant they were slipped from the leash they were off and away, filling the winter morning with their music under the high thin sounding of the hunting horn. So, following the hounds, and with the hunters running hound-swift alongside, we swung westward and up onto high ground. Ambrosius rode that day like a sound man. I have wondered since, if Ben Simeon had given him some such draught as they say the Jutes give to their berserkers, but I do not think so, I think it was something that, at God knows what cost, he himself had summoned up, the last valiant flare of a dying torch before it gutters out. He had drawn a little ahead of Aquila and me, and we glanced at each other and marveled; and young Gaheris had a look of puzzled hope as though he half believed his lord’s sickness was passing.
We hunted long and hard, and it must have been close on noon when, toiling up a slope of bare winter-tawny turf, we sighted our quarry on the skyline. A magnificent twelve-point stag, a royal hart, in the instant before he bounded forward over the ridge. Old Aquila sounded the View, and the hounds who, for some time past, had been running almost in silence, businesslike, muzzles to ground, broke out into fierce music and sprang forward with a burst of eagerness.
When we crested the ridge, the stag was nowhere in sight, but a few moments later he came into view again, flying like the wind above his own shadow along the opposite hillside. The hounds were hunting by sight now, and swung right-handed, streaming out on a line that would carry them straight across the valley to cut him off; but he saw us in time, and doubling in his tracks was away down-valley toward the refuge of the woods that crept up from the low river country, and for a while we lost him among the hazel scrub and thickets of thorn and wayfaring trees that were the outer fringes of the forest; and the music of the hounds turned thin and querulous. “He has taken to the water,” said the chief hunter, and we swung away down the riverside, splashing our way across by a shallow stickle, the hounds swimming for it, and pushed on down again, along the farther bank. Sure enough, a mile or maybe more downstream, at a place where the bank had been pulled away, exposing torn earth and a tangle of willow roots, the hounds picked up the scent again. Hunters and hunted swung back toward open country, for the quarry could not strike into the denseness of the damp-oak forest with its low growth of branches to entangle his antlers, any more than we could force a way through on horseback. And when next we had him in full view the great stag, though running swiftly as ever, was clearly laboring. “I think we have him!” I cried, and the big brindled hounds swept on, baying and belling. Our horses were tiring, but we urged them on to one last burst of speed. Ahead of us, the stag was slowing visibly, struggling on with his proud diadem of antlers lowered now; once he all but stumbled to his knees, then regathered himself and fled on in one last desperate flare of swiftness, with the hounds almost upon him.
Over a last hill shoulder and down into the valley beyond, stumbling and struggling through the sodden wreck of the past year’s bracken, with the brindled hounds running low and baying on his heels, and behind, crouched on our horses’ necks, we four, and Ambrosius’s hunters racing and leaping at our stirrups. In a narrow side combe, scarcely more than a stream channel down the slope of the hill, among flint boulders and the tangled roots and spiny maze of ancient thorn trees, the stag turned at bay; his head up, the great antlers like tree branches themselves; a king again, and no mere hunted fugitive, though his eyes were wild and his flanks sobbed in and out, and his nostrils seemed full of blood. And as we reined in below the great beast, there was a majesty about him that gave us all pause; not a hunted beast but a king brought to his death. Ambrosius flung up his hand, I remember, and it was as though brother greeted brother.
The brindled hounds checked an instant, then sprang in, yelling; the hunters making a wide bow on either side and siccing them on with jibes and encouragement in the dark tongue in which hunters talk to the hound pack. The rest of us dismounted, for it was impossible to take horses up into that steep tangle. But Ambrosius, who yesterday had been a dying man, had flung himself from the saddle, with the familiar hunting shout “I claim kill!” and was away ahead of us, scrambling among the tree roots and under the low thorn branches, and I caught the wintry light flash on the blade of the hunting knife in his hand.
He was among the hounds now, and I saw that he meant to make the kill himself. I had seen him do that before, in the Western hills when I was yet the height of another hound. It is accounted the crowning feat of a hunter, also the most hideously dangerous, work for a young man in the flower of his strength and speed; but to put oneself forward to aid in the kill after another man has cried his claim is one of the unforgivable things, and I knew also, as surely as ever I had known anything in this world, that Ambrosius had cried it for a warning to us to hold back from more than his kill. Only Gaheris, not knowing the truth, ran at lung-bursting speed to reach him against all the law of the hunting trail. But the boy caught his foot in a thorn root and fell headlong, driving the wind from his body, and by the time he had struggled still crowing to his feet again, and Aquila and I, with our own knives drawn, had come pounding more slowly up behind, the thing was finished.
Ambrosius had run in among the hounds that were yelling all about the stag as it confronted them with lowered head. Even as he did so, one of the dogs, impaled on a deadly tine, was flung aside with its belly split open like a rotten fig. I heard the dying howl of the dog, and in the same instant a strange cry of triumph from the High King. I saw him spring to meet the great animal, scarcely attempting to avoid the deadly antlers, seeming rather to court them as naturally as a man goes to his woman’s arms after a long parting. The upward thrust of the strong branched and weaponed head and the flash of the hunting knife came in the same bright splinter of time, and as though in a dream or at a great distance, I saw the crumpled body of a man who did not seem in that moment to be Ambrosius flung up as the dog had been, and slither writhing across the stag’s shoulders, and crash down untidily, all arms and legs, among the thorn roots and the boulders. Then the Red Lord of the Forest swayed and staggered a step forward and plunged down upon him.
The hunters were shouting, running from all directions. And we — we were running too, now that it was too late, bounding upward with bursting hearts. He can have been only two or three spears’ lengths ahead of us, but it seemed a mile before we reached him. Then I was kneeling beside the tangle of beast and man, hauling the still faintly kicking stag off Ambrosius’s body, while Aquila and the boy drew him clear, and the hunters whipped off the hounds. Ambrosius’s knife was still in the great brute’s throat, and when I drew it out the blood burst out after it in a red wave. There was blood everywhere, soaking into the thorn roots, curling in rusty tendrils downstream with the flow of the little hill torrent. I dispatched the deer, and turned back to Ambrosius. And all the while the words of the old saw were chanting themselves maddeningly over and over in my head. “After the boar, the leech; after the hart, the bier.”
Ambrosius was quite dead, horribly dead, the whole lower forepart of his body smashed to red rags, one great gash where the tine had entered at the groin and burst out again below the breastbone, gaping raggedly over blood and torn gut and wet soft things that I could not look at. I was not Ben Simeon who had been to Alexandria. But his face was not touched. It wore a look of faint surprise (so many dead faces that I have seen have looked surprised; it must be that death is not like anything that we have imagined it to be), and under the surprise, a look harder to define, something of triumph, but not personal triumph, the look, perhaps, of a man who has fulfilled his fate, and gone gladly to the fulfillment.
Above the battered and mutilated body, Aquila and I looked at each other, and then bowed our heads. I don’t think any of us spoke — any of the three of us, that is; the hunters were murmuring among themselves, white-faced, as they got the dogs leashed, and turned again and again to stare in our direction. I looked at the ashen face and quivering mouth of Ambrosius’s young armorbearer, and knew that the boy must instantly be got away and given something to do. Besides, he was the obvious choice, for he was the lightest rider of us all. “Take the least tired of the horses, and ride back to the farm. Tell them the High King is dead, and bring back a hurdle — no, stay — three of the hunters had best take the other horses and go with you. You’ll be quicker so than by rounding up three of the farm people.”
When they were gone Aquila and I straightened the King’s body somewhat, that it might not lie tumbled and unseemly when it began to stiffen. Then I stripped off hunting leathers and under-tunic, and tore the tunic into strips and bound them about his loins and waist, that none of the red wet ruin of things might fall out when we came to move him. Aquila held him for me the while; and when it was done, I picked him up and carried him down to the foot of the narrow combe, clear of the thorn scrub where they would be able to get the hurdle, clear of the blood and mess. The remaining hunters with their hounds had gathered at a little distance, and we forgot that they were there. I do not think that in all that time either of us spoke one word. Only I remember Aquila’s harsh painful breathing, for with the running and the struggle he must have all but torn the breast wound asunder.
In a while the party from the farm came back with the hurdle, and stood gazing down at the dead King, almost as silent as ourselves. Then we lifted his wasted body — he was nothing but yellow skin over the light bones — and laid him on the hurdle, and set off back to the farm. Somebody had gralloched the deer, and they flung its carcass across the back of a pony and brought it after us.
It was not so very far, traveling straight across the country, for the stag had looped and doubled many times in his flight, and the dusk had scarcely deepened into the dark when we stumbled into the courtyard, where the flare of torches beat harshly on our eyes and the farm folk came crowding around, and the sound of women’s wailing was in the air.
We carried him upstairs and laid him in the long upper chamber, at just about the time that he had stood last night with the half-empty wine cup in his hand and that strange brightness upon him, crying to us, “I drink to tomorrow’s hunting. A good hunting and a clean kill!” But he himself was the kill, as he had known that he would be.
We left him to the women, and when they had done their work, and he lay stiff and seemly on thinly piled bracken from the fodder stack, his sword beside him, Aquila’s cloak for a royal coverlet, and the household’s best honey-wax candles burning about the long chamber, Aquila and I took up our stand at his head and feet to keep the death vigil. We had brought the hounds into the room — my old Cabal and a leash of his own hunting dogs — that they might draw any evil spirits from his body, according to the rites of Mithras, though presently he would be buried according to the rites of Christ. That was the one thing that we could still do for him.
I had sent Gaheris off on the steward’s horse to carry the word back to Venta, to Bishop Dubricius the father of the Council, to Justus Valens the second-in-command of the guard. “Tell them that we shall start to bring him back at dawn, and bid them come to meet us. Hurry, and you should be there well before first light.” He had not wanted to go, he had begged to share our watch, and I remember that he was crying. And I had promised him that he should share the watch that must be kept in Venta, and that for the moment he was of more service to his lord on the road south.
It was very quiet in the long upper chamber, for the farm folk and the hunters had betaken themselves to their own quarters in their own huddle of shocked stillness; only we heard each other’s breathing, and the soughing of the thin north wind in the bare chestnut tree outside, and the creaking of the old house at night, and once a dog howled and a voice stilled him, and later he began to howl again. 1 could understand why Ambrosius had wished to come back to this place to die. Tomorrow there must come all the solemn panoply of a High King’s death, the slow chanting of the Christian priests, the flaring torches illuminating the bull masks of Mithra, the bier hung with gold and imperial purple, the curling smoke of the death incense making the senses swim. But tonight there was only bracken to lie on and familiar rafters overhead, the smell of the winter night and burning hawthorn logs, the harping of the icy drafts along the floor; and Aquila who was not a brother to stand at his feet, and I who was not a son to stand at his head.
Ambrosius’s face had lost the look of surprise and the other, more strange look that had been upon it earlier. It had no expression now save a sternness infinitely remote. It was no longer a face but a mask, with the brand of Mithras showing between the brows more clearly than it had done between those of the living man; a head nobly carved in gray marble for his own tomb, that had caught the austere strength but missed the gentler things. It was not even very like Ambrosius any more. But looking down at it as I stood leaning on my sword, I saw it for the face of the King Sacrifice; older than either Christos or Mithras, reaching back and forward into all time until the two met and the circle was complete. Always the god, the king, the hero, who must die for the people when the call comes.
I suppose there must have been something in his ending, of the man who goes out to meet a quick death rather than wait for the slow and hideous one that he knows is coming to him. But more than that, he had chosen his way for the deliberate purpose he had spoken of so reasonably last night, peeling chestnuts beside the fire, and for another that had nothing to do with reason. . . . I remembered suddenly across the years, Irach flinging himself forward upon the Saxon spears at Eburacum. And for the second time in my life I glimpsed the oneness of all things. . . .
The hilt of my sword shifted a little in my hands which were crossed upon the grip and shoulders, and the light of the candles caught the royal purple of Maximus’s great seal, and set a star of brilliant violet light blazing in its depths. I had never told Ambrosius that I would take up the task that he laid upon me, but I knew now that if by any means, by the grace of all the gods that ever men prayed to, I could gain the High Kingship of Britain, I would do it.
I think that Ambrosius had known it all along.
ON the third day after Ambrosius’s burial the Council of the Kingdom met, as I had known that they must before many days went by. My place in the government of the land had always been a carefully unformulated one; I had sat at the Council table whenever I was in Venta at the time when a meeting was called, but always, as it were, as a guest. And that morning, as on so many other mornings, I received my formal invitation. And I knew, with a tightening of the stomach, that the time had come for the opening phase of the trial of skill and judgment that lay before me.
An hour after noon, when she brought me my best cloak of violet cloth with the black and crimson border, Guenhumara set her hands on my shoulders and said, “Will they talk of who is to be the new High King?”
“Assuredly,” I said, “but it is in my mind that now, with the Saxons stirring beyond the borders, is not the time to be king-making.”
She gave me a long clear look. “You know that the apple is yours, to stretch out your hand for.”
“I believe that it may be, but I cannot afford to break Britain apart in plucking it.”
“You are always afraid of breaking something, aren’t you?” Guenhumara said, and she drew my head down and kissed me, with nothing but duty and gentleness behind her lips.
The Basilica at Venta must have been a place of beauty and splendor in the days when the world was still firm underfoot. Ever since I could remember, it had been half derelict, the frescoed plaster falling from the walls, the fine Purbeck marble cracked and damp-stained, the gilding blackened. The huge wrought-bronze screens that had shut off the Council Chamber from the main hall had been taken down in my grandsire’s tune, and melted down for harness of war. But the place had a certain dignity and beauty still, though a beauty of decay and fallen leaves compared with the pride of high summer.
I made a good businesslike swinging entrance through the west door, with Cei and Bedwyr and Pharic behind me for a ceremonial guard, tramped across the tesselated floor, and mounted the three steps to the Council Chamber, and stood before the Council of Britain.
There was a stir and a ripple and a thrust of movement as those already there rose for me in all courtesy — save for Dubricius who, being a Father of the Church, rose for no man save the High King himself. A cold diffused light shone down impersonally from the three high windows, and searched out rather than lit the faces of the men about the table. Dubricius himself, with eyes alight and alert and cold as a seagull’s in a plump many-folded subtle face that seemed to be made of the finest quality candle wax, would be my chief opponent, I knew, and the two other churchmen would follow his lead. The rest, I thought, would be more open to reason; some of them had been fighting men in their time, and two were soldiers still: Perdius, who commanded the main cavalry wing of the war host, gave me the brief nod that was the nearest approach to a greeting that he had for anyone, and I caught Aquila’s dark frowning gaze as it came out to me like a handclasp.
The King’s Chair, on the right of which Dubricius sat, was empty in the cold uncaring light, and opposite to it, a chair of state had been set for me. And when the grave courtesies of the occasion had been exchanged, and the Bishop had prayed for the soul of Ambrosius the High King, we turned first to the lesser matters that must be dealt with; the mere camp routine of state, while the recording clerks on their stools scratched away at their tablets in the background. When the camp routine had been disposed of, I remember that there came a pause, as though every man drew breath for the true business of that day’s meeting of the Council.
Dubricius leaned forward, his big pale hands folded on the table before him, the great ruby on his thumb making one point of pride and fire in the clear emotionless light of the February day, and looked about him at each of us in turn. “My dear friends, my brothers of the Council —” He had a pleasant voice, unexpectedly dry to come from so unctuous a body, unexpectedly moderate to come from a man with those eyes. “A short while since, in the opening moments of this sitting, we prayed for the soul of our late most beloved lord, Ambrosius the High King. Now, since it appears that our Lord Ambrosius took his leave of this life without having at any time named his heir —” The lively seagull’s eye turned first to Aquila and then to me: “That is so, my Lord Artos?”
Aquila sat very still and gave no sign, but I felt his gaze on me. “That is so,” I said.
And Dubricius bent his head in acknowledgment until the broad chins flattened on the breast folds of his mantle. “Since it appears that our Brother Ambrosius has at no time named his heir, there falls to us assembled here, the heavy and grievous task of considering the man best fitted in all ways to succeed him, and for that purpose above all, we are met here today.”
“If the High King had but left a son!” murmured a dejected-seeming Councilor renowned for his fruitless “if onlys.”
A carefully controlled impatience twitched at the Bishop’s brows. “The whole necessity for this meeting of the Council, Ulpius Critas, arises from the fact that the High King left no son.”
Aquila, who had been staring at his own hard brown sword hand on the table, looked up quickly. “None in blood.”
“We all know, I think,” Dubricius said with dry courtesy, “where Ambrosius’s choice must have fallen, were it not that —” He seemed for the moment at a loss how to go on, and I helped him out.
“That Artos the Bear, his brother’s son, was chance-begotten on a farm girl under a hawthorn bush.”
The Bishop again bent his head in acknowledgment and acceptance, though I thought with a trace of pain, such as a well-bred man might fail to conceal, were a guest to spit at his supper table. “There remains, then, unless my memory plays me false, but one other on whom the choice may rightly fall: Cador of Dumnonia also is of the Emperor Maximus’s line.”
“Only on the dam’s side,” another man put in, and a third added reflectively into the gray bird’s-nest of his beard, “But no hawthorn bush.”
Perdius, the cavalry commander, said impatiently, “Shall we lay aside this question of hawthorn bushes, which has to my mind very little bearing on the case, and choose whoever seems like to be the man best fitted for the High Kingship? We have no experience of this Cador’s powers, but we know well the Bear’s. May I state now, once and for all, that I believe Artos, the Rex Belliorum these many years, to be that man.”
“Speaking as a soldier?”
“Speaking as a soldier, in a day when we need above all things, a soldier to lead us.”
But Dubricius was a churchman, bound by the laws and the formulas of the Church. “So; but then again, Perdius, there may be others among us who may believe that the High Kingship, which is of God, calls for other qualities, other qualifications, besides a strong sword arm. And in the judgment of these others, Cador of Dumnonia, the true-born son of his father, and a ruler already in his own right, may seem to have the stronger claim.”
The soldier snorted. His broad reddish nose had been badly broken in his youth, and he possessed, as legacy of the damage, a peculiarly offensive one-nostriled snort which had caused many a man larger than himself to curl up like a wood louse, but I do not think that he had ever used it on the Bishop of Venta before.
“A ruler? A petty princeling with no better claim to the High Kingship than a whole fistful of others, save for this one small matter of a few drops of blood, which he shares with Artos the Bear.”
“And with one other,” a lesser churchman said; and the implied warning and reminder that Artos had a son to follow him was clear in the small sharp silence that followed. One or two of those about the table glanced at each other and away again. Medraut’s following was among the younger of the war host; the older men, the Church and the war-scarred veterans did not, I think, even then quite trust him.
I was suddenly weary of sitting in my seat of honor and being argued over as though I were not there at all. I slammed back the heavy chair and stood up. To be the tallest man in any company is a thing that has its uses. “Holy Father Dubricius, my Lords of the Council — here is a great arguing that it seems to me may well drag on until this day year and still be no nearer to its settlement; and I would suggest that this, with the Saxons slinking to and fro like a wolf pack on our borders, waiting only for spring to be at our throats as they have not been for a score of years, is not the time for a king-choosing at all. We have enough on our hands without that.“
Dubricius looked at me with a wakening gleam in his eye and there was a sudden stillness of close attention all around the table. “Surely, my Son, if the Barbarians are indeed moving — though of that, we have little sign that differs from the signs in other years — then this, of all others, is the time to be swift in choosing a king, lest when the time of testing comes, we must face it without a leader.”
“If the thing might be done peacefully, yes,” I said, “but do you not see that whichever way you throw the apple, there will be trouble, bad trouble, afterward? See now, the choice lies between Cador and myself —” I quelled a sudden movement from the Bishop. “Oh yes it does; I am not standing aside from this in humble apology for my left-hand birth; bastardy makes me no less fitted to carry the Sword of Britain — and if the choice falls upon me, I know well enough that I shall have almost the whole body of the Christian Church ranged against me —”
The churchman cut in, querulously. “Have you shown yourself so much a friend to the Church that she should open loving arms to you now?”
“Meaning that I have pastured my horses on monastery land, and demanded a share in the monastery plate when the war kist was empty? Yet I have kept your roofs over your heads for twenty years, your lights burning in your sanctuaries and your monks inside their own whole skins. And I am thinking with a certain saying of your Christos that the laborer is worthy of his hire. If the choice falls on me, the Church will set its face against me, as I say, and with her certain of the Celtic princes who love not the ways of Rome even now, and like enough Cador of Dumnonia will join you. Sa! But let you choose Cador of Dumnonia to carry the Sword of Britain, and you will find that not only my own Company, but the whole war host will rise against him and you. Oh, I will not stir the thing up, I swear you that, but none the less they will rise, without my stirring. Holy Father Dubricius, my Lords of the Council, for God’s sake believe me. It is not the moment to be risking such a split in the kingdoms — a split through which the Saxons may come in on us, as an army through an undefended pass!”
Bishop Dubricius said wearily, “How may we be sure that all this talk of a Saxon thrust is more than an attempt to gain time?”
“For what, in God’s name?”
“For perfecting plans of your own, for making more sure of the war host.”
Aquila spoke, slowly and deliberately. “I cannot speak for the Companions, but for every man of the war host, I can speak. They will not accept a Western princeling thrust upon them without having yet earned their trust. The Rex Belliorum has no need of time to make more sure of them.”
And behind me, the leveled voice of Bedwyr said: “I can speak for the Companions.”
Dubricius’s gaze flicked past me. “I did not know that we had a new Councilor among us.”
“No? Nevertheless, as lieutenant to Artos the Bear, I claim the right to speak for his personal cavalry.” (A thunderous growl from Cei supported his words.) “We are the Bear’s men to the death, and whether he leads us or no, we will not see another man sitting in the place that should be his.”
Someone was trying to silence him, but the Bishop made a quick gesture with the hand on which the great ruby was brilliant as a gout of fresh-spilled blood. “No, let him speak — it appears, then, that you care more for a personal leader than for the good fate of Christian Britain?”
“We care for the good fate of Britain, oh yes, for the last-leavings of Rome, for the last lights that must be shielded as long as we may shield them from flickering out. Quite a few of us have died for these things from time to time. You have maybe heard? But we do not think that an untried princeling on the High Seat, instead of a war leader who has spent half a lifetime in arms against the Sea Wolves, would be for the good fate of any save the Sea Wolves themselves, at this time. You speak of Britain as though it were one, my Lord Dubricius; but we are from many tribes and many peoples. Some of us were bred up in the last lingering ways of Rome, some in the free wilderness where Rome’s shadow scarcely fell. We are from the broad hills of Valentia, from the marshes of the East and the mountains of the Cymri. Myself, I am not of this land at all, save by ancestry, but was born and bred in Armorica beyond the Narrow Seas. We have only one thing to bind us together, we are the Bear’s Companions, and our swords belong first to the Bear and then to Britain. That is a thing for you to remember, my Lords of the Council.“
He of the bird’s-nest beard leaned forward abruptly. “You speak with a loud voice, Bedwyr, Lieutenant of the Bear; yet one remembers that there are but three hundred, or maybe a few more, of you.”
“How many rode with Alexander of Macedon when he set out to conquer the world?” inquired the deep singer’s voice behind me with great sweetness. “He called them his Companions, too.”
There was a long, long pause in the Council Chamber, and the scratching of the clerks’ quills was silent. Very slowly the Bishop bowed his head and sat thinking, the thick blue-white rolls of his jowl resting on the fine embroidered stuff of his mantle, his eyes half closed. In a while they flashed open again, making their usual disconcerting change in his face, and he straightened himself in his chair. “Let me be clear as to this before we carry the matter further. What, precisely, are your demands? Not of necessity the High Kingship for yourself?”
“Not of necessity the High Kingship for myself, but that it shall not be set upon any man, at this present time.”
“And why does it seem to you that the thing will come better at another time?”
“When this spring’s fighting is over, if the victory is ours, we may have leisure to fight among ourselves, with the wolves driven off to a safe distance. If we taste defeat, then we shall be dead, and all need to choose a new High King gone from us with our last breath.” I stared around the Council table into face after face that looked back at me, in support, in rejection, in complete blankness. One of the more ancient Councilors had fallen asleep. “Father Dubricius, you speak of our need to choose a ruler before the Saxons come, but for the civil matters of state, surely this Council, this Senate, is competent, while for all that has to do with the leading of a fighting people, does not the Rex Belliorum suffice, as he did in the old days, when a confederacy of the Tribes, with no High King over all, would choose out one chief from among themselves to lead them on the war trail?”
Dubricius seemed to have withdrawn deep inside himself, his eyes half closed once more. Then again he opened them, not swiftly this time, but with a slow deliberation, and fixed them on my face as a man might look into the pages of a book that interested him.
“Yes,” he said, when he had read enough. “I retract certain words of mine that I spoke just now. I believe, at all events, that you believe in this great Saxon thrust. Now tell me why?”
I remained standing, as though to sit down again would be to lose some advantage. I leaned forward with my hands on the table and told again all that I had learned from our scouts, of the stirring beyond the Sea Wolves’ borders, of the coming and going between the Cantii territory and the East Seax. Most of that, of course, was known to them already, but they had not before had the small pieces fitted together to form the whole picture. I told them of Ambrosius’s views (which were indeed my own also) as to why the thrust should come now, when it had not come last year nor the year before; I told them of the likelihood that the Barbarians were at last learning to combine, and the men about the table listened and nodded wisely and listened again; and when I was done, a small buzzing murmur rose from them until Dubricius silenced it with a movement of the hand.
“So,” he said. “You make out a good case, and clearly it is one that you believe in. . . . That, I have allowed already. You might still be mistaken.”
“I might, though thirty years of the war trail give one something of an instinct in these matters. But Ambrosius had it also, and I never knew him to be mistaken.”
There was another long and dragging silence, and in desperation I was just about to plunge in again, though indeed I did not know what more there was to say, when the Bishop turned his hand over and laid it flat on the table in a gesture of “Finish,” and said most surprisingly, “No, nor did I.”
He swept his gaze around the whole circle of the Council — and yet one knew that he had taken in every face as he came to it. “Brothers, shall we cast our votes on this matter? Will those of you who are in favor of leaving this choice to wait for a while, signify your judgment by putting your right hands on the table before you.”
Aquila’s hand and that of Perdius slammed on the table almost before he had finished speaking, and three other Councilors followed almost as swiftly; the lesser churchmen sat rigid with their hands in their laps; Ulpius Critas half raised his arm, then changed his mind and pretended to rub his nose, then changed again and laid three fingers on the edge of the table after all. Vericus of the bird’s-nest beard took his time to think, then set his hand before him with a small decisive slap. One more Councilor refrained, and the Bishop, smiling a little sleepily, left his own hand lying where it was, big and plump and pale on the polished wood. The ancient was still asleep, and nobody troubled to wake him; the verdict was clear enough without his vote.
I parted from my grimly triumphant escort within the gates of the Governor’s Palace, and went on home, to find that one of the scouts had come in and was sitting on his haunches half asleep in the corner of the courtyard where the evening sun yet lingered with a little warmth. He roused at the sound of my footsteps and was up with the swiftness of an otter, and came to meet me, touching joined palms to forehead in the gesture that the Dark People make before their chiefs.
Noni Heron’s Feather was well known to me, a man half bred between the Dark People and our own, with the skill as a hunter and tracker that only the Dark People possess. I had followed the game trail with him more than once, and there are few better ways of coming to know a man than by hunting with him; and it was so that he had become one of the chief among my scouts.
“What word do you bring, Noni my friend?” I said, stooping to fondle Cabal’s great gray-muzzled head as he came to greet me.
He thrust the long black hair out of his eyes, and stood up straight in his wildcat-skin mantle, as he had seen the Companions do when they spoke with me on parade occasions. “The Sea Wolf who walks by the name of Cerdic has gathered his war bands and moved up from the hunting runs of the Cantii, driving much beef cattle with him on the hoof, and has made his camp two days eastward of the frontier on the old track under the North Chalk. In other places also, the Wolves are driving off the herds. Indeed, that I tell as a thing from my own heart, for they have driven off the red cattle from my father’s village, and if my father’s folk had not contrived to hide the cows in calf among the forest, next winter they would have starved.” He paused for breath, for he had told the thing at a racing speed. “Another thing I tell, but this thing not of my own knowing: Erp the Otter bade me bring you the word and say that he will come in a while and a while when he has seen what follows, and tell it again himself, but that meantime you should know as soon as might be.” He paused again, a little anxiously, for in general I did not like secondhand information. But from those two, I knew it might be relied on.
“So?”
“Erp came from the edge of the Great Water, that way —” He pointed south and eastward. “And met me at a certain spot, and bade me tell you that he had seen three boats come in to the place that you call Dubris.”
“War boats?” I asked quickly.
He shook his head. “Na, not the long war boats, but broad-bellied like a woman in whelp, and out of them, men carried ashore new weapons rust-spotted with salt, and ironbound caps, and barrels, and one of the barrels broke open and out came much sawdust, and packed in the sawdust —” He broke off yet again, searching this time for the right word, his fingers making flickering filigree patterns over his own body. “War skins, like this — like salmon skins.”
“Mail shirts,” I said. “So they still have to bring in their best sarks from the Rhenus armorers, do they?”
“Mail shirts? That is the word? Aiee! I will remember.” He came a light half step nearer. “My Lord the Bear, one thing more I tell. I heard it spoken of around a Sea Wolves’ campfire, while I lay hid in the shadows beyond the firelight — and since, in other places also: they say that they have chosen out Aelle of the South Seax to be Battle Lord of them all, of all the tribes of the Sea Wolves, and lead them on the war trail!”
Like all his kind, Noni betrayed nothing through his eyes, but I think, from the almost prick-eared look on the rest of his face, that he wondered why I laughed.
SUNSET was past, but the web of light still lingered behind the hills northward, and the nights are never very dark in midsummer. And from the hawthorn-crested barrow that was the highest point of the camp, I could look out over the clustered wattle huts of the regular garrison (we always kept a small garrison there, even in times of so-called peace, for Badon Hill was one of the main strong points in Ambrosius’s system of defense in depth) and make out still the shape of the surrounding country. A familiar shape, for I served along the northern frontiers when I was a boy.
I could see how the huge hill shoulder thrust out from the main mass of the Downs, commanding the Ridgeway and the sweep of the White Horse Vale, and the pass where the road dives southward through the bare rounded turf hills. Once through that pass and into the rich lowlands beyond, the land would lie open to the invaders, to swing westward through the lead-mining hills into the reed and withy country south of Aquae Sulis — we might be able to do something there, but it would mean holding a perilously long and slender line, and the marshes would hamper our cavalry — and so on to the coast, and the main strength of Britain neatly sliced in two behind them. It was the old game, the same game as they had tried at Guoloph, twenty years ago. But between the Sea Wolves and all these things, like a giant on guard, stood Badon Hill with its triple crown of dikes and ramparts that had been a stronghold to our British forebears before even our Roman forebears came.
If the White Horse Vale is the gateway into the heart of southern Britain, then Badon Hill is the key to the gate. It remained to be seen whether the Saxons could turn it. . . .
Ambrosius had been right. In the face of our growing cavalry strength, they had dared delay no longer in mounting their great attack. And for the first time in their lives, it seemed that the Saxons were indeed learning to combine. With Aelle of the South Seax for their chosen War King, and Oisc for his lieutenant, they had drawn together, the Jutes of Cantii Territory and the Tamesis Valley settlements, the East Angles and the Northfolk and Southfolk of the old Iceman horse country. Up from the south and swarming down the Ridgeway from north of the Tamesis, they had come, to converge at last on the White Horse Vale; and all the way, we had harried them, by flank attacks from Durocobrivae and Calleva, by night raids and ambushes, and the dog-pack tactics of slingers and mounted archers on their lines of march by day, striving by every means in our power to slow them up and thin their ranks. It had had some effect, but not enough, we could not spare sufficient light troops for the task; and the last messengers to come in had re-ported that the enemy had joined forces and were camped for the night astride the Ridgeway some six miles off, and that despite the valiant efforts of the light troops who were now keeping watch on them, they still numbered some seven or eight thousand men.
Against them we could muster not much over five. But we had the cavalry.
Below me in the camp where the light of the fires was biting more sharply as the last of the daylight died, arrows and fresh bowstrings were being given out, while men with torches moved along the picket lines, checking foot shackles, and from the field forges came the ring of hammer on anvil where the smiths and armorers were at work on last-minute repairs. And from the cooking fires the smell of the evening stew began to mingle on the air with the tang of woodsmoke and horse droppings.
I had called the Council of War to sup with me, for when there is not much time to spare, it serves ill to waste it by eating and conferring separately when both may be done together, and so in a little, Aquila the firstcomer tramped into the light of the council fire that burned almost at the foot of the bush-grown barrow, flinging back the heavy blood-red folds of his cloak, and half turning to speak to Bedwyr, who stepped out of the shadows behind him, into the fire flicker that touched as though with exploring fingers the pale feather of hair at his temple. And I went down to them, with old Cabal stalking at my heels.
Perdius was the next to join us, and little grim Marius who commanded the foot of the main war host. The Lords of Strathclyde and the North, and the princes of the Cymri, for I too had sent out my own Cran Tara that spring; and Cador of Dumnonia, grayer than when we hunted together in the spring before I sailed for Gaul, thicker in the shoulder and inclined to a paunch; and when the stewpot and baskets of barley cakes had already been set beside the fire, Cei arrived, clashing with cheap glass jewelry, from our sister fort across the road valley, where he held command of tomorrow’s left cavalry wing.
So we ate, and while we ate, worked out with bits of stick and ale cups and daggers, the pattern — so far as one can ever make such a pattern in advance — of tomorrow’s fighting.
When the food was eaten and the War Council ended, and the captains and leaders gone their own ways, I went to put on my war shirt. The day had been hot, and in summer no man wears link mail more than need be; and there would be little leisure for arming in the morning. Old Aquila walked with me, for the bodyguard was camped beyond the garrison huts, and so his way was mine. Before the mud bothy where my personal standard drooped on its spear shaft by the doorway, we checked, and lingered looking out over the great curve of the Downs silvered now by the moon, and by very contrast with the quiet of the summer night beyond the ramparts, the awareness of tomorrow’s battle was strong on us.
“We have waited a long time for this,” Aquila said.
“Ever since we drew breath after Guoloph, I suppose. Twenty years. And yet it seemed at the time, just for that one time, that we had fought the greatest fight that ever there would be between us and the Saxon kind. And afterward —”
I hesitated, and he said quietly, “A new Heaven and a new Earth?”
Cabal nosed at my hand, then began the old familiar pretense at savaging my wrist in his great jaws, until I took it away and be-gan to gentle his ears as he wished.
“Something of the kind. Most of us were young, then, and drunk with victory. Now there comes a greater fight, and we grow old and sober.”
“So — and afterward?”
“If God gives us again the victory — the old Heaven and the old Earth patched up to seem a little more secure. A few gained years in which men may sow their fields in reasonable hope of reaping the harvest.”
Aquila’s harsh hawk face was remote in the moonlight, as he looked far off between the dark bothies toward the rim of the Downs, every line of it deep cut as a sword gash; and under the frowning black brows, I had a feeling that it was not the shape of the rounded slopes against the sky that he was seeing, but something further and beyond. “Even that might be worth whatever price was asked for it.”
Abruptly he turned to me. “Bear Cub, will you do something for me?”
“I expect so,” I said. “What is it?”
He pulled the flawed emerald from his signet finger.
“Take this in charge, and if I die tomorrow and Flavian lives, give it to him to wear after me.”
“And if you do not die tomorrow?” I said quickly, as though by that I could turn the thing aside.
“Then give it back to me at sunset.”
“And how if I am no more weapon-proof than you?”
“The mark is not on your forehead yet,” Aquila said, and put the ring into my hand.
I stowed it in the little pouch of leather hanging around my neck inside my tunic, in which I kept sundry other matters of my own. “Until sunset, then. Maybe we shall meet in the thick of things, tomorrow.”
“Maybe,” he said, and touched my shoulder, and went on his way toward the guards’ part of the camp.
When he was gone, I turned into the bothy behind me, where a lantern hung from the center pole and my war shirt from its wooden cross against the wall. I did not call Riada, for the mail was laced at the side, and could be put on easily enough, not like the kind one pulls on over the head, and which is all but impossible to get into without help. I took it down and heaved into it, and was busy with the lacing when a step sounded outside, and Bedwyr ducked in through the low door hole.
He sat himself down on the packsaddle which as usual served the purpose of a chair, and watched me as I drew the broad thongs through the eyelet holes. “Artos, what do we take for our badge tomorrow?”
We still kept up our old custom of riding into action with a sprig of some flowering thing tucked into helmet comb or shoulder buckle — brown feathered rushes in the East Coast years, or sometimes yellow loosestrife or the little white many-thorned roses of the sand dunes; heather in the Caledonian years (“Taking Heather” had come to be the term men used in those years for joining the Companions). It was a privilege jealously guarded from the rest of the war host, a flourish, a grace note that was ours alone. But there was neither feathered rush nor royal heather on Badon Hill. Wild cranesbill along the foot of the chalk ramparts, but the blue flowers would be limp and dead before the first charge.
The grass for my bed had been cut from the northwest face of the hill, where it grew long and thick in tawny waves, for the fall of the land was too steep for the horses that had trampled it flat elsewhere. A few stalks of it were spilling out from under the old half-bald otter skin that Riada had spread for me to lie on, wisps and feathery shreds of seeding grasses and among them the withered head of a moon daisy. I stooped and picked it up, thinking suddenly how the steep drop of the hillside there was freckled white with the swaying flower heads.
Nowadays we number the moon daisy among the flowers of God’s Mother; the gold for her love and compassion, the white for her purity, and the raying petals for the glory that shines about her. But underneath in the warm dark places we have not forgotten that the flower of the moon belonged to the Lady, the White Goddess, before ever men gave it to the Maiden Mary. The Church, claiming as she does that the Old Ones have no place left in the people’s hearts, must forget that, or pretend to forget, and I knew that if I and my Companions were to ride into the coming battle with the flower of God’s Mother for our badge, it must help to strike the weapon against me from the Church’s hand, while still, for those of us who still held to the Old Faith, the old meaning would be there. Also it would show up well in the dust and turmoil of the fight. I looked down at Bedwyr as a man sharing an unspoken jest with his brother, and tossed him the limp wisp of flower head. “This would make a fine panache, and there’s plenty on the west side of the hill; easily picked out in battle and surely most suited of all flowers to a Christian war lord and his Companions.”
And I saw by the quirk of that most devilish eyebrow, that he took my point. “Give it fifty years, and the harpers who sing tomorrow’s battle after us will tell how Artos the Bear rode into Badon Fight with a picture of the Virgin on his shoulder.”
I was finished with the lacing of my war shirt and began to fasten the shoulder buckle. “If there are any harpers of our own people still singing in fifty years’ time.”
Bedwyr was playing with the withered moon daisy, twisting the limp stem between his fingers. He tipped back his head to look at me through half-shut eyes, still fiddling.
“Not so did you speak to the war host a while since.”
“I have the oddest fancy to win this battle,” I said, testing the buckle, “and choose my words to the war host accordingly.”
“Sa! That was a magnificent harangue you gave us.”
“Was it?” I had no clear idea now of what I had said. The usual kind of thing, I suppose. It had not seemed so usual at the time.
It had been just at sunset, and my shadow had streamed away from me forward over the hilltop with a vast fiery arrowhead of sunlight between the straddled legs, and I remembered the coppery glare of the sunset on the faces of the war host turned up to mine, answering to me so that I could play on them as Bedwyr played on his harp. And that and the length of my shadow had filled me with a drunken sense of being a giant.
“You should always speak to your war host before battle, at sunset with the fires behind you,” Bedwyr said. “That is for any leader. It would make even a small man look like a tall one, and a man of your height becomes a hero-giant out of our oldest songs; a fit rider, half a hillside high, for the Sun Horse of the White Horse Vale, with the seven stars of Orion for the jewels in his sword hilt.”
(“A sword of light with the seven stars of Orion for the jewels in its hilt.”) I seemed to catch again the echo of Ambrosius’s voice on the night before he died. But Bedwyr had not been there, only Aquila and I.
“I will remember another time,” I said, and reached for my sword.
We made the late night round of the pickets and guard posts together, as we had made them on so many nights before. There is always something strange, something not quite canny, in making the rounds of a camp at night; the increasing stillness that comes at last to be broken only by the fretful stamp of a horse from the picket lines, or a standard stirring in the night wind, the spear gleaming out of nowhere across one’s path in the moonlight, to vanish as one speaks the password. It is a little like moving through a world of ghosts or, alternatively, like being a ghost oneself. One’s own footsteps seem unnaturally loud, and any incident, the face of another waking man glimpsed in the red glow of a dying campfire, seems fraught with meaning and significance that it would not bear in the daytime.
So it was with Medraut’s face, that night, suddenly seen in the flare of a picket-line torch. By day, to pass Medraut coming up from the horse lines was the merest commonplace of life, save for the vague sense of a shadow passing between me and the sun which any sight of him always woke in me; but at night, that night,“ in the dark solitude of waking men in a camp full of others ”sleeping on their spears,“ the brief unmattering moment stands in my mind even now as vivid as a duel.
Yet he only moved aside to give me right of way among the harness piles, spoke something of having thought at exercise that the big gray might be going lame, and melted on into the dimness of the moon.
Bedwyr glanced after him, and said, “The odd thing is that in some ways he is very much your son.”
“Meaning that in the same circumstances, I also should be down at the picket lines playing leech to a horse that I thought might be going lame? It is not really the horse that he cares about, you know.”
“No,” Bedwyr said, “he cares no more for his horses than he does for his men. But tomorrow will be his first action in command of a squadron and he cannot bear that anything should go amiss under his leadership, be less than perfect as he sees perfect. . . . I was thinking rather of a certain capacity for taking pains, together with a conviction that if a thing must be done, it is needful to do it oneself.“ We walked on for a few paces between the horse rows, and then he added thoughtfully, ”Yet if he has that conviction, assuredly it is the only one he has. In all these fighting years, he has never learned to care for anything beyond the fighting; for him it is enough to strike, without heed as to the thing he strikes for. He likes to kill — the actual skillful process of letting out life — that is a thing that I have met only a few times among fighting men.“
“He is one of the destroyers,” I said. “Most of us have something of destruction in us, I suppose, but mercifully not many are destroyers through and through. Dear God! That I should speak so! It was I who made him what he is!”
“How?”
“His mother ate him as a she-spider eats her mate, but it was I who gave him to her destroying love.”
Neither of us spoke again until we were clear of the horse lines and into the moon-whitened space that lay between them and the wagon park; and there Bedwyr checked as though to tighten a slipping sword buckle. He said at half breath, and with an extraordinary gentleness, “Say the word, Artos, and he shall find an honorable death in tomorrow’s fighting.”
The long silence that followed was ripped asunder at last by the sudden murderous scream of Pharic’s hawk, which he had with him in his bothy.
I stared at Bedwyr in the moonlight, sickened, and then angry, and then neither. “You would take that stain on your hands for my sake?”
“Yes,” he said, and then, “But you must speak the word.”
I shook my head. “I can’t cut this particular knot with a sword; not even yours. You made no such offer the first time, the last time that we spoke so of Medraut.”
“I had not had him in my squadron, then . . .” Bedwyr said.
I did not ask his meaning. Probably he could not have told me, if I had. Medraut committed none of the evils that can be put into words; it was not in what he did, but in what he was; no man may hold the hill mist between his thumb and forefinger nor catch the hovering marsh light in a grain jar.
The clouds blew up from the south that morning, their shadows sweeping like charges of cavalry over Badon Hill and down the long bay of the Downs; like the ghosts of armies that had fought there when the world was young. Turn southward, and you could see the wind coming, laying over the ripening grasses in silvery-brown swathes like the waves of the sea. Turn north again, and from where I stood on the crest of the bush-grown barrow, I could see the whole bay of the White Horse Vale with its flying cloud shadows, rising to the gentler hills again at its farther side. Badon Hill thrust out from the main mass of the Downs a great summer-tanned shoulder, high over the Vale, so that one looked down upon it as a buzzard circling on wind-tilted wings must do. I could see the green Ridgeway with its ragged line of hawthorn trees passing scarce the throw of a slingstone below the strong green wave-lift of our ramparts, dipping to cross the paved road from Corinium where it climbed more gently out of the Vale, to strike southward through the pass; and beyond, where the steep swell of the Downs upheaved itself once more into the sunlight from the morning shadows of the pass, the triple turf ramparts of our sister fort, that the garrison in Badon had always called the Cader Berywen from the sour hill-juniper scrub that speckled the ditches between its earthworks. And everywhere, lining the mouth of the pass, among the thorn scrub of the downland flanks, and thronging the turf ramparts of the forts, was the gray blink of sun on spear blade and shield boss and helmet comb, and the flecks and flashes of color where Marius’s standard flew with Cei’s flickering cavalry pennants above the, triple-staged entrance of Cader Berywen, or where Cador and young Constantino gathered their war bands beneath the saffron-stained banner of Dumnonia, and the tattered Red Dragon of Britain lifted and half flew from its spear shaft in the midst of the Companions where they stood or sat at ease on the grass about me, each man with his arm through his horse’s bridle. There was plenty of time, now, and it is not good to keep men or horses longer than need be in the last stage of waiting.
Signus, who smelled what was coming, snorted down that proud imperial nose of his, tossing his head so that my buckler clanged against the saddlebow; old Cabal lifted his gray muzzle and snuffed the wind, and Bedwyr, who had just ridden up on his raking sorrel, turned beside me and laughed in the old fierce gaiety that had always come upon him in the time before fighting. He no longer carried his harp into battle as he had used to do, but with the knot of moon daisies white in his shoulder buckle, he looked as though he were riding to a festival.
There was a sense of pause, a sense of rising tension, as when the wine in a slowly tilted cup comes to the rim and rises above it and hangs there an instant before it spills over. And in the waiting moments one had time for little things, for the dark crescent-winged swifts darting along the flanks of the Downs, as unaware of us, it seemed, as they were of the cloud shadows drifting by; the fading milky scent of the last pinkish blossom on the hawthorn trees, the way the renewed leather lining of my war shirt chafed my neck where the armorer had made a clumsy job of it. I thrust a finger inside the neckband, seeking to ease it, and tried not to watch Medraut walking his black horse up and down at the foot of the barrow, pausing in passing to break down with his foot the blue cranesbill that grew almost on the edge of last night’s fire scar, and grind it with absorbed precision to pulp under his heel.
The scouts had come in soon after dawn while we were snatching a hasty morning meal, to report the Saxons stirring, but it must have been within two hours of noon when, maybe two miles off along the ridge of the Downs, there came a shadow, not much darker at first than the cloud shadows, but not traveling with the wind. The Saxon war host was in sight.
I waited a short while longer, the chiefs and captains murmuring about me; then spoke to Prosper, my trumpeter. He was growing gray-muzzled like the rest of us, but his wind was as good as ever, and he put the silver mouthpiece of the aurochs horn to his lips and sounded the View. There was a moment’s silence, and then like an echo the call was tossed back to us from the ramparts of Cader Berywen.
Other horns and trumpets were sounding now, the voices answering each other to and fro across the valley; and the great camp of Badon, which a few moments before had been a place of waiting, sprang into eager life, as the fighting companies made for their appointed places, some to guard the entrances against enemy surprise, or man the northern ramparts where great piles of throw stones waited for hurling down on the heads of the Saxon host, while the rest went swinging out through the wide gateway and downhill into the pass.
I was mounted by that time, and sitting my great old Signus on the crest of my lookout place. I was like Janus, half of me turned upon the British line that was forming like a great threefold chain slung across the pass to the south between Badon and Cader Berywen, half of me turned with straining eyes upon the shadow that was not a cloud shadow creeping slowly nearer along the high roof ridge of the hills, deepening to a stain like that of old spilled wine, to a spreading swarm of ants. And then, far off still, and soft with distance, came the booming of a Saxon war horn; and Prosper beside me again raised the horn to his lips and sent the bright notes crowing their defiance across the warm summer wind. Save for those who would remain on guard, the great camp was emptying about me like a cup. Only my own Companions were left now, and they also were swinging into the saddle, squadron after squadron with the spear pennants fluttering, heading at a trot out through the gateway.
Bedwyr was beside me again, his horse dancing. He shouted to me that all was in order. I nodded, still watching the nearing swarm. I could see now how even as they rolled toward us their flanks were torn and harassed by the flying knots of light horsemen that skirmished about them, and my heart went out to Maelgwn and Cynglass, to the men and the little fiery ponies of my own hills. But it was a vast host, still, a spreading murk of men that engulfed half the countryside like the shadow of an advancing storm.
“Sa, here comes the Darkness,” Bedwyr said.
“If ever you prayed to any God, pray now for the strengthening of the Light.”
He leaned a little from the saddle, and set his hand on my shoulder. “I have never known how to pray, unless maybe through Oran Môr, the Great Music — I will make you a song of light driving out darkness, a song of the lightnings of the war host of Artos, when the day’s work is over.” And he wheeled his horse and clattered off to his post with the Companions. And I was alone with Riada sitting his horse just behind me, and the scouts and messengers who came and went.
The advancing darkness had been without sound at first, but now there began to be a soft quiver in the earth rather than the air, the tramp of thousand upon thousand feet, the faint surf of shouts and weapon ring; the merest ripple of sound that came and went at the will of the summer wind that tossed the moon daisies to and fro, but gathering strength, solidifying into the distant earth-shaking many-voiced thunder of an advancing war host. A fold in the Downs had swallowed the vanguard from sight, and then along the nearer ridge, maybe half a mile away, ran a dark quiver of movement, and over it lifted the rain pattern of upraised spears and the white gleam of the horsetail standards; more and more, and then the brown of the war host, with our light horsemen wheeling and re-forming about them and sending in their flights of arrows and slingstones — growing sparse now — as chance offered. The sun splintered into shards of light on shield boss or spear blade, among the onward-rolling mass, and the deep crash of tramping feet and the formless surf of shouting seemed to spring forward ahead of them.
Then I wheeled Signus, and with young Riada his half length behind me, rode down from my vantage point and out by the wide three-angled gate gap to take my place at the head of the Companions. For a few moments, as I came out onto the open hillside, I checked Signus and sat looking down to the road far beneath me, and up the slope beyond to the green triple crown of Cader Berywen, seeing the whole battle line slung between.
Marius with the pick of the veteran foot fighting troops; and forming the center among them, clearly recognizable by their blood-red cloaks, the old royal bodyguard; on either side, the javelin men and light horse of the irregulars, forming the wings. Seeing also, as the advancing Saxons would not see it, the glint of weapons and the small movement of men and horses among the thorn scrub that swept about the lower slopes of the Downs and closed in upon the ancient track where it dropped toward the broad paved road into the heart of Britain.
Then I touched heel to Signus’s flank and rode on around the flank of the hill. Well back beyond the crest, the Companions were waiting, squadron by squadron, each with their captains out in front; Bedwyr and Flavian, my son Medraut and black-browed Pharic and the rest; they tossed up their spears in salute, and my place was waiting for me as the familiar glove waits for the hand.
Beyond, farther down the hillside and screened from the road by a dense bank of elder and thorn scrub, the main light wing of the cavalry waited, the horses fidgeting and swishing their tails against the midges.
The sounds of the nearing Saxon host, which from here had been blanketed by the bulk of Badon Hill, began to swell and sharpen again, but much of the ragged shouting had fallen away, so that I knew that the skirmish troops had broken off action and dropped back to their appointed stations. Yet a long time we waited, while the sounds drew a little nearer, until at last the van of the war host came sweeping down into the mouth of the pass, and the roar of their coming burst upon us like the roar of a charging sea when a sand bar goes. We could not see them as yet, we could see only the farther part, even of our own battle line — but the boom of war horns, the ominous roar of joining battle, told us that their van had met with our own advance troops, and the high note of rage and furious anguish cried aloud the crossfire of arrows from the thorn scrub on their flanks, and one could sense how they checked an instant, then drove forward at an increased speed. I rode forward alone, save for my trumpeter and young Riada, to a little spur of the hillside from which I could see what went forward.
The roar of conflict beat up to me now, with the vast impersonal roar of storm water on a rocky coast, and the whole bell-mouth of the pass was a solid mass of Saxons. At first sight it seemed that this whole bay of the White Horse Vale had turned to armed men, a dark Barbarian tide surging up against the slim barrier of our battle line. Here and there among them men were falling under the flights of arrows, but with such a war host as this, the hidden archers could do little save fret and thin the ranks a little, while the main rush of the Saxon vanguard swept on, their deadly loping battle trot quickening almost to a run. Again Saxon horns and old legionary trumpets flung defiance back and forth between the hosts, and again I heard, as I had heard it so often before, that long-drawn terrible German battle shout that began as the merest cold whisper and rose and rose until it beat in waves of sound upon brain and breast and belly, and then answering it, the shorter, sharper yell of the British.
The Sea Wolves were within casting distance of our main first defense line now, and as the long-drawn battle howl shattered on its final beast note, a volley of throwing axes came rattling against the British shields. Looking down from my high place as God might look down upon the battlefields of men, I saw a gap crumble here and there in our own ranks, but for the most part our men were used to the little deadly missiles, and knew how to cover themselves, and wherever a gap opened in the front rank, the man immediately behind stepped forward to fill it, so that even as the Sea Wolves sprang in across the last few yards, the British ranks were whole again. Next instant the forefront of both war hosts crashed together with a yell and a terrible thunder of meeting shields that no man who has heard it can ever forget.
For an incredibly long time our first line held the full weight of the Saxon charge, but at last, slowly, they began to yield ground. Slowly, slowly, the bright stubborn lightnings of leaping spear and sword blade never for an instant ceasing, they were giving back and back until they merged into the second line behind them, and again the Saxon thrust was held. The boil of battle that had been concentrated at first across the road and the valley bottom was spreading now up the flanks of the Downs among the thorn scrub on either side, where no battle line could be kept; and scarce a spear’s throw below the waiting cavalry the woods were full of struggling knots of warriors, the clash of arms and the high-panted war cry, the thrum of parting bowstring and the squeal of a wounded pony and the death cry of men. And beyond, where the main conflict set the whole valley roaring as a narrow gorge when a river bursts together in spate, our first and second lines, fighting desperately for every foot they yielded, were being forced back, slowly and dreadfully upon the third, the last line, the only line of reserve we had. I had given orders that the task of the center was less to hold ground than to kill men (and truly, if I had not, I think that they would have died where they stood, and Britain gone down into the dark, that day), and most assuredly they were killing men. . . . The ground that the Saxons pressed over was thick with bodies, and Saxon bodies more than British, though there were enough of British bodies, too; God knows that there were enough and more than enough. . . . And always, in the midst of the ragged line, I caught the blood-red color proudly marking out the dwindling ranks of Ambrosius’s old bodyguard.
We no longer had three lines of defense, but one, one seething line that bowed and wavered like a ribband in a high wind, yet somehow never parted, one last supple barrier of gray iron through which it seemed that the Saxon war host could not break.
For a time — short or long — the close-grappled line reeled and strained to and fro, as the ebb and flow of battle set now this way and now that, and then the British broke their hold and drew back, but as a wild animal draws back to spring, and with a bound and a roar, sprang forward with uplifted spears. Again came that rolling thunder of shield meeting shield, for a long desperate moment the two war hosts strained together, locked and immovable; so I have seen wrestlers strain together, or a pair of antler-locked stags in the rutting season, neither for the moment able to gain the least shadow of advantage over the other. And then, with a slow long heave, the British seemed not so much to thrust the Saxons back as to lift up and pass over and engulf them.
By that time the white dust cloud was hanging half the height of the valley, but through it I could still make out dimly how the Saxons gave ground, slowly at first and then more swiftly, falling back in something like disorder upon their own reserves, who had not so far been engaged. Open ground littered with dead and wounded had appeared between Briton and Barbarian, and it was as though both sides paused to draw breath. I remember now, the quietness that rushed in to fill the place of the tumult as it died away, an acute and shining quietness, wind-haunted and filigreed with the churring of grasshoppers among the seeding grasses and the blue cranesbill flowers.
The dust cloud had begun to sink, and through it I saw Aelle of the South Seax, the War King, with his house carls about him and his white horsetail standards, come forward with his reserves. The pause was over and with a roar and a bellowing of war horns, the two hosts sprang again for each, other’s throats.
And again, after a sharp and bitter struggle, I saw the British battle line begin to give ground; slowly as ever, and contesting every yard of the way, back over ground that had been fought over before, back beyond it; they were level with the concealed cavalry wings now; and I knew that it was time to fling in the horse. And in that same instant, I saw what remained of the bodyguard — a score of men, maybe — led by old Aquila, heave forward from the rest of the battle line, cleaving like a wedge of red-hot metal into the battle mass of the enemy.
They too knew it was time for the horse, and were drawing the attention of the whole war host upon themselves to give the best possible chance to the cavalry charge; they were throwing away their lives for the price of taking the greatest possible number of the Barbarians with them. It was a superb and glorious piece at waste, one of those things that men do when for the moment they cease to be quite men, and walk with the high gods.
My hand was already lifting in the signal; Prosper raised the horn to his lips and the swift notes of the cavalry charge took wing across the valley, to be caught up before the last note had died, by the trumpeter on the ramparts of Cader Berywen. Among the thorn scrub a sword flashed up, and the next instant, with Perdius at their head, the cavalry broke forward and were away at a canter, at full flying gallop, their spears swinging down as they went.
I watched them away, as one watches one’s hounds slipped on a boar, but there was no time to see how the charge took effect. I caught up my buckler, and sent Signus plunging back to rejoin the waiting squadrons of the Company. “Our turn now! Come on, lads!”
For us it must be the longer way around, for with the steep slope of the hill northwest, and the spread of the fighting up the flanks of it, it was impossible to bring a rear charge around that way without arriving in disorder that would rob us of half our striking power. We flung our curve right-hand-wise around Badon Camp, riding like the Wild Hunt, for we must have had the best part of a mile to cover. I heard the drum of the squadrons’ hooves behind me and on either side; the wind of our going filled the standard so that the Red Dragon of Britain seemed to spread its wings in flight above us. We struck the Ridgeway and thundered down it toward its meeting point with the road south. Signus’s flying mane whipped back over my buckler, and the round sods flew beneath his shod forehooves; and as we swung into the mouth of the pass, at full pitch of my lungs I raised the war cry of Arfon: “Yr Widdfa! Yr Widdfa!” and heard it caught up behind me into a challenges into a paean.
From both sides the cavalry wings had driven home their charge, crumpling and driving inward the Barbarian flanks to jam their own center, breaking the force of the deadly thrust against the British battle line; and now it was for us to give the crowning blow.
We took the Saxon war host in the rear, crushing in the hastily formed shield-wall as though it had been a thornwork hedge. And I saw before me a swaying and struggling mass of yelling, battle-crazed faces under horned and flanged helmets, a crimson deadly leaping of spears and short seax blades over the rims of the linden bucklers; and then it broke and crumbled back, and with a roar, we hurled through upon the reeling battle mass of the enemy beyond.
The battle of which I had decreed the pattern, and which, so short a while before, I had looked down on, magisterially aloof, seeing it spread below me in its entirety, became for me as for the youngest boy with a javelin, the few yards of howling turmoil closest at hand, the feel of my weapon striking home, the snarling face of the man next before me, the reek of blood and horse’s sweat and choking chalk dust.
My spear broke in my hand at last, as I wrenched it from the body of a gigantic Saxon, and I flung the shaft away and drew my sword as we thrust on. I was making for the place where, dimly through the rolling dust cloud, I could glimpse the white horse standard with its crimson tassels and gilded skull that staggered to and fro above the mob, marking where Aelle of the South Seax fought among his house carls; and suddenly it seemed that the solid battle mass before me was thinning, breaking up as the mailed wedges of cavalry drove into it. The muzzle of a black horse swept up on my right, and snatching a glance that way, I saw Medraut flinging his squadron forward as though the battle were his alone; his face, with a small east-wind smile on it, was white as the moon daisies that he wore like a plume in the comb of his war cap, and his sword blade was blooded to the hilt and over the hand that held it.
An alley of clear space opened for an instant, and as I thrust Signus into it, a naked figure sprang across almost beneath his breast. The Saxons had learned long since that their berserkers were the most terrible weapon they possessed for use against cavalry. For a splintered and sickening instant of time, I saw the drugged, dilated eyes, the lean body reddened from head to heel, the wicked disemboweling blade; then, as the creature dived for Signus’s belly, I took the only chance there was, wrenched the great horse away, and sent him up in a rearing half turn, screaming with rage, his hooves lashing for the man’s head. It was a hideous expedient, for the least misjudgment of time or position would give the berserker a perfect opening for his belly thrust; as it was, hampered by the reeling throng about me, I doubt if I should have made it, but in the same instant, with a deep singsong snarl, Cabal crouched, and launched himself at the man’s throat. Between the lashing forehooves I saw them go down together, and could wait to see no more . . . no more . . . but thrust on toward the white gleam of the horsetail standard that still showed above the sea of conflict. I was within half a spear toss of the royal shield-burg, when a young man — a chieftain to judge by his dragon-scale war shirt and the red gold about his neck — sprang in before me at the head of a yowling knot of his own kind, and caught at Signus’s bridle, and clung on, and even as the horse reared and plunged squealing with fury, his sword rang against mine; and the westering sunlight, slipping over the downland shoulder into the shadows of the pass, fell full upon his face. And for a moment as his fellows swept forward to meet the squadron the fighting that boiled around us fell away. His war cap had been struck off and the wild mane of hair that sprang to his shoulders was red as a fox’s pelt, and the eyes that blazed into mine were filled with a gray-green fire, a kind of furious laughter. And across the years that had made him a man and a leader of men, I knew him again, and he knew me. He shouted to me, “Did you not say that I should come again, and kill you if I was able?”
And I shouted back, “Or I you, Cerdic, son of Vortigern!” and caught his stroke with a shock of blade on blade that ran up my arm in numbing flight of pain sparks, and sent it spinning from his hand, then struck again, at the neck. I saw his face contort into a choking snarl, and the bright spurt of blood, and without a sound, he was gone among the trampling hooves and feet of the battle.
But the horsetail standard had also disappeared from sight.
Presently the host of the Saxons had become a mass of swirling separated war bands that swayed and surged to and fro, each battling desperately for itself; with the cavalry busy among them. They were breaking away in flying groups, and later still, at twilight, when people in houses would be lighting candles for the women to weave by, after the evening stew, we were hunting the defeated rabble of a proud and mighty war host down the White Horse Vale.
Not today, not today, would Britain go down into the dark.
WE hunted hard and slew often, and I remember that we were singing as we rode, one of the old triumph songs out of the Western hills. The singing made me think of Bedwyr who had so often sung us home from battle, but in the deepening twilight I could see no sign of him, and there was no time for asking of this man or that. No time for feeling much, at all, neither for triumph — despite the singing of the squadrons about me — nor for grief; I was spent and empty as I rode, the empty husk of a thing created for the purpose of killing Saxons.
The dusk was almost deepened into the dark when we came to the place below where the Ridgeway crossed the Calleva road. There was a sickly smell to the place, and the ground, even down into the Vale, was cluttered with bodies, British and Saxon; and ahead of us the red gleeds of watch fires showed where the Barbarian host had left their wagon laager. We set up a shout, and settled down into the saddle for more fighting, but the men who had been left with the baggage train had joined the rout of their comrades and nothing and no one was left to draw seax against us. With one accord, the irregulars and a good part of the cavalry dropped out in search of plunder. I could have whipped them off, I suppose, as a hunter whips the hounds off a carcass, but it scarcely seemed to matter now what they did. I left them to their scavenging, and rode on with whoever cared to follow me. But I remember that there was no more singing, we were all too weary.
Indeed we carried the hunt little farther ourselves, but a few miles down the Vale, drew rein by a little chalk stream to breathe and water the horses; and knew as by common consent that for this night, the hunting was over.
The stream ran under the lee of a hazel coppice, and the snail-shine of the rising moon was silvering the world about us, and, unbelievably, in the hazy depths of the thicket a nightingale was singing. A big shadow loomed up beside me, and I saw that it was Cei, drooping in the saddle, with his buckler hanging almost in two halves at his shoulder.
“God! What a day! What a thundering victory! Is this all, or do we hunt them further?”
“Let them go,” I said. “Tomorrow will be time enough to scour out the countryside — when we have learned our own losses and bound up our wounds.” I was looking at the figures on the wood-shore, some still sitting their horses, some sliding like cramped old men from their saddles. Those who, for the most part, still wore somewhere about them the withered rags of a moon daisy had thrust up closest to me. There were maybe two squadrons of them, or rather less. “Is this all that is left of us?”
Someone laughed thickly in his throat, and I knew it for Owain. “Na, Pharic and his wild men dropped off to help rifle the baggage wagons.”
“I did not, then!” Young Riada pushed up beside me. “I am my lord’s armor-bearer.”
“And there are likely a good few of us back among the wounded!” someone else put in.
“What of Bedwyr?” I asked after a moment. “Does anyone know?”
Flavian answered me, that time. “I saw him go down. No more than that.”
And the nightingale was singing as it had sung in the old palace garden on the night small Hylin died.
In a while, when we had breathed and watered the horses, and ourselves drunk and bathed our hurts at the stream, I gave the order to remount, and got them going again.
The moon was well clear of the Downs by now, and as we turned the horses’ heads back the way we had come, there shone out at us, from the turf of the Downs glimmering and gigantic, distorted by the slopeway of the hillside, the chalk-cut sacred Sun Horse of the White Horse Vale.
At the same time we saw, far up the curve of the Vale and sweeping closer, the flare of torches; and a few moments later caught the first faint throb of hooves. “Sa, they have rifled even the watch fires!” someone said. “They have finished with the wagons and remembered the hunt again.”
A flying cloud of dark shapes was taking substance under the torches, heavy cavalry and men on little fiery mountain ponies; some of the light cavalry from the battle had come up, the riders leaning sideways in their saddles, with men on foot leaping along beside them clinging to their stirrups, and man after man carrying makeshift torches kindled from the Saxon watch fires, that streamed in mare’s tails of flame above their heads. Signus stamped and snorted at the nearing fire, and the foremost of the wild riders saw the Red Dragon on the edge of the stream, and set up a great hoarse shout and swung toward us. In a few moments the first of them were dropping from their horses all around, then more and more until the whole loop of the stream was full of men and horses and the swirling, dancing flare of torches that drove out the white light of the rising moon. Some were dumb and dazed with utter weariness, others beginning to be drunk, as much with the aftermath of battle as with the honey beer that they had found in the wagons. One — a long lean man with a brilliant eye — capered wildly in an open spot, wearing a woman’s flame-colored gown hitched to his knees; and another, dismounting from his weary horse while it drank, sat on the stream bank with his head on his knees, and wept bubblingly for a dead friend. It might as well have been myself. Many had twists of blood-soaked rag somewhere about them, and the horses too showed gashes on breast and flanks, so that some of them it was pitiful to see. Men and beasts alike made for the water — even those men who were already awash with Saxon ale, so that for a little, with the bathing of many hurts, as well as drinking, the stream below the torchlight must have run fouled and reddened.
They were all around me, also, a sea of torchlit faces turned up to mine as I sat the great battle-weary horse above them. Men were thrusting in for a closer look, to touch my knee or my sword sheath or my foot in the stirrup, and all I wanted was to get them into some kind of order and back as far as the wagon laager for the night. And then — even now I do not know how it started — one of the veterans, with enough years behind him to remember the old way of things and the last imperial troops still in Britain, set up a shout of “Hail Caesar!” And those nearest about him caught it up, and the thing spread like the ripples in a pool, until the whole of the war host — or such of them as were mustered there — were shouting, bellowing it out and beating it home upon their shields and the shoulders of their comrades. “Hail Caesar! Caesar! Caesar!”
Wounds and weariness were forgotten, and the whole night took fire about us and roared up in triumphal chaos. They plucked me from Signus’s back and flung me up again onto a royal throne made of the shoulders of men; a tossing and swaying throng that lurched to and fro, the whole night lurching with it as the mob surged about us. Cei and Pharic with his tall Caledonians and the rest of the Companions fought their way in to make a bodyguard about me, baying as loud as any. I looked down on battered and filthy faces exultant in the torch glare, spears shaken aloft, a vast, blasphemously uproarious mob, and flung out my arms, shouting too — I do not know what, save that it was no order to be still. Few of them could have heard the words, anyway; but at sound of my bellow they ceased for a moment the roar of “Caesar! Caesar!” and began to cheer, a fierce hot thunder of cheering that rolled the breadth of the war host and curled back and burst upward in waves of sound that set the horses plunging. And then as the cheering sank, somebody cried out, pointing with a spear toward the great beast that pranced half-hillside-high, cut from the turf of the White Horse Down. And that cry too was taken up, and still carrying me shoulder high in their midst, they set off toward it at a stumbling run, the torch flames streaming out behind, until their speed slackened with the steepening slope of the ground.
The, White Horse lost all shape as we drew nearer, becoming only a series of vast white scars across the turf, but never shall I forget the sight of swarming dark figures running low under the moon and the torches, panting up the steepening hillside toward it, myself in the midst of them, in the midst also of a kind of running fight among those who would take next turn when my bearers changed beneath me.
The crowd swelled moment by moment, as the men who had remained behind to tether the horses came panting after us, and others fresh from looting the wagons, some of them still on horseback, joined the comet tail of torches.
We were across the shallow outline ditch and out on the bare chalk now, and the featureless whiteness of it under the moon dizzied and made the head swim, so that any clump of couch grass or sprawl of rest harrow that had escaped the yearly scouring was good to let the eyes cling to, and I could feel the panting of my stumbling steeds under me, as they faced the last steep slope up which, like a royal road, the arched neck of the sacred horse ran to a head that had looked bird-small from the valley. In the midst of the lake of whiteness that was the head, a spear-blade-shaped island of grass, maybe four or five times as long as a man is tall, formed the eye, proud and open, staring back at the sun and the moon and the circling stars and the winds of the sky. In the very midst of this eye, the spark that is the Sun’s answer and touch place, the divine point of power, where Earth Life and Sun Life meet and quicken, stood a rough boulder, a block of limestone, green on the north side with moss almost as the grass about it, but as the torches beat upon it, the probing glare picked out strange circles within circles of eternity, that the weather had all but worn away.
And on this great roughhewn boulder, where I think the forgotten kings of a forgotten people had been enthroned, they set me down for my own throning — not as High King, after all, but as Emperor, even as his own troops had crowned Magnus Maximus my great-grandsire Emperor. Assuredly no emperor of the Roman line ever had a stranger crowning, nor a stranger congregation to see it done. For by this time the uproar had called back the men from the villages who had rounded up their cattle and taken to the hills when they got word of the Sea Wolves coming, and sometimes I thought, though I was never sure, that I glimpsed little dark men in skins on the edge of the torchlight.
And I was made Emperor, I think, with something of the rites of every faith that could still claim a follower among the war host. Pharic and his Caledonians set a circle of seven swords point down in the grass about me, and in all that followed, no man entered the circle save between the two swords at my face, and I was chrismed with armor grease brought from the captured wagons, but the priest who anointed me was a wild-eyed creature who came out of the dark with the villagers, a Christian priest by his frock of undyed sheep’s wool and his shaven forehead, but he wore the Sun cross carved from red amber around his neck, and he made the King marks on my forehead and breast, feet and hands, not in the Christian form but in older symbols. And my own men brought a hastily made circlet of oak leaves from the hill spinney close by, where the young leaves still retained a flush of their springtime gold, and thrust it down on my head for an imperial diadem; and someone — who, I never saw — hoisted an old cloak on a spear point above the heads of the crowd and tossed it to those nearest me, who caught and flung it about my shoulders. It was ragged, and spattered at the hem with dried blood, but it was of wine-red so deep and rich that in the torchlight it had the proud glow of the Purple. I got up and stood before my war host while they roared their acclamation, aware of the Purple and the Diadem as though I were clothed in flame. My sword — I did not remember having drawn it — was naked in my hand. I felt the great carved stone at the back of my heel, and something in me, in the touch of my heel against the stone, in my very loins that linked me with the earth and the gods and the stones of the Earth, and the Sun and the Power of the Sun, and in the thing in the dark at the back of my head that came from my mother’s world and knew the secret of the strange concentric circle that my father’s world had forgotten, told me that this was not a throne but a coronation stone like the Lia Fail of the High Kings of Erin, a stone for the King to stand on at his kingmaking, and I sprang onto it and flashed up my sword to the shouting war host, and all around me a thousand weapons were tossed up in reply, and for a while and a while I knew my feet one with other feet that had been planted on that flaking stone, and other men’s hearts beating in my breast, and a wild weeping exultancy swept through me and on through the human sea around me. And then behind the exultancy, my father’s world pressed in again and I knew soberly that I was a man wearing a crown of oak leaves and a tattered cloak that was almost, but not quite, of the imperial purple, but that none the less, I was chosen by these men, my men, to carry the ragged heritage; and I had as much right to it as many another sword-made emperor of Rome’s latter years.
So I stood above them, alone in my circle of seven swords, and looked down on the roaring sea of torchlit faces, chilled suddenly by a foreshadow of the loneliness above the snow line. And when at last the tumult sank enough for me to make myself heard, I cried out to them in the greatest voice that I could muster, that it might leach to the farthest fringe of them. “Soldiers! Warriors! Ye have called me by the name of Caesar, ye have called me to be your Emperor as your great-grandsires called mine, whose seal I carry in the pommel of my sword. So be it then, my brothers in arms. After forty years there is an Emperor of the West, again. . . . It is in my heart that few beyond our shores will ever hear of this night’s crowning, assuredly the Emperor of the East in his golden city of Constantine will never know that he has a fellow; but what matters that? The Island of Britain is all that still stands of Rome-in-the-West and therefore it is enough that we in Britain know that the light still burns. We have fought today such a battle as the harpers shall sing of for a thousand years! Such a battle as the women shall tell of to the bairns at bedtime to make them bold, and the young men whose fathers’ fathers our great-grandsons shall beget, shall speak of when they boast among themselves at the harvest feast. We have scattered the Sea Wolves so that it will be long and long before they can gather the pack again. Together, we have saved Britain for this time, and together we will hold Britain, that the things worth saving shall not go down into the dark!” I must speak also to my mother’s world. “But because I am not Emperor alone, but Prince of Arfon and a lord in Britain, because I am native-born and native-bred, and learned my first words in my mother’s tongue, I can claim to be yours as no other emperor has ever been, and therefore I swear my faith to you now, by the oath that we of the Tribes have counted most sacred since first we came out of the West. And after, you shall swear your faiths to me.”
I sheathed my sword. Some oaths are sworn weapon in hand, but that one must be taken with the hands empty, since it concerns things that no man may hold. “If I break faith with you, may the green earth gape and swallow me, may the gray seas roll in and overwhelm me, may the heaven of stars fall upon me and crush me out of life forever.”
There was a moment’s silence after I had sworn, and then a tempest-roar of acclamation and a drumming of spear butts on shield, such as even that night I had not heard before. But I was so tired that it boomed and roared hollow in my ears as the sea in a cavern, and when I would have stumbled down from my high place, they had pulled up the circle of swords, and from all sides the chiefs and princes and the captains were thrusting in to kneel and set their hands over my battle-fouled feet. Connory the son of old Kinmarcus, Vortiporus of Dyfed, big wild Maelgwn my kinsman who held the reins of Arfon for me and had brought my own war bands down from the hills; young Constantine, dark and blazing as his father had used to be, but burning, I thought, with a steadier flame. In cold blood he might have been my enemy in this, but caught up with the rest, he swore his faith to me with the rest, and I knew that he would keep it. And among the others came Medraut my son. He cast himself down before me with the grace of a woman or a wildcat, and made the solid, ritual gesture of faith-taking into a thing as airy and delicate as though he played with a feather. Yet there was a filthy rag bound around his sword wrist, and the blood that clotted it was as red as any other man’s, and the face he turned up to mine gray-weary, the face of a man who had spent all his fires. His eyes were without expression, not blank, but veiled over their secrets more closely than I had ever seen them before, so that one could see nothing but the blue color and the surface light reflected from the dying torches. “I fought well for you today, did I not, my father?”
“You fought well today, Medraut my son,” I said, stooping to take his hands and raise him up, and so felt him shaking again. Dear God! Why must he always shake like a nervous horse? And once again the old sense of doom was upon me, a floating down of dark wings, because of the thing I could not see behind my son’s eyes.
In the first gray light of a morning that had turned wild and squally, we returned to Badon, and heard the trumpets sounding from the green ramparts for watch setting. And those who were in the forts cheered us in through the soft rain, but we were far too spent to make a gallant entry.
The Saxon wounded had been dispatched in the usual way, and our own carried up to the hill fort and housed in the wattle huts that normally served the garrison; and cooking fires were bright in the rain under their ragged shelters of wet skins. Men came thronging around me, spoke to me, looked at me with alerted and oddly lengthened gaze, and dazed and dragged as I was with the aftermath of the day and night, I scarce thought to wonder why. . . .
Presently there would be many things to see to. Perdius came with a report of sorts, Marius hard behind him, almost before I was dismounted. I listened, a little drunkenly, while they told of Aelle of the South Seax dead among his house carls, and no sign of Oisc among the bodies, nor of Cerdic. (“Maybe his own men carried him away,” I said. I could have sworn that my blade had found the life.) While they reported on the numbers of dead and wounded both in men and horses; while around us the camp clamored with demands for news, and the news itself shouted from man to man.
I listened, and asked further details of this thing and that, the present placing of troops, the supply situation. . . . And then at last, as Signus was led away, I was free to ask, not Caesar’s questions, but one question of my own. “Bedwyr — what of my old Bedwyr?”
Someone pointed up toward the wattle barrack huts. “Up there, my lord. They have taken the wounded up there.”
For a moment I felt stupid with relief. “Not dead, then?”
“It would take more than a smashed elbow to kill that one,” somebody said. But their tone toward me was subtly changed, and they stood a little farther off, and when I turned to make my way up to the barrack huts, I heard the burst of low eager voices behind me, and felt eyes following me as I went.
The scout Noni, who came running to me before I had gone a dozen paces, was the first person to look at me with unchanged eyes since I entered the fortress; but the eyes of the Dark People seldom betray much, and his mind was full of other things. “My lord, it is the great hound — him you call Cabal.”
I stopped in my tracks. I had accepted in my heart that the old hound was dead. “What of Cabal?”
“I have him under one of the wagons. It was in my belly to hope that I might save him for you, but the hurt is too sore.” He laid a narrow brown hand on my wrist; it is very seldom that the men of the Dark People or their near kin will touch a Sun man (it is different, with a woman); but I think he must have hoped very greatly to be able to come to me with the word that he had saved me my dog. “Come now, and do what must be done.” .
I turned aside toward the wagon park, Noni moving like a shadow beside me.
The disemboweling knife had done its work too well, but Cabal knew me and tried to thump his tail, though clearly the whole hinder part of him was as good as dead, and as I knelt down beside him and touched his great savage head, he even began a whisper of the old deep throat-song that had always been his way of showing his contentment in my company. I did what had to be done with my dagger and got up quickly to go, but checked a moment to look back at the small dark brooding figure of Noni Heron’s Feather. “Who brought him up here?”
“He crawled some of the way himself — Aiee! He was a hero! The throat of the man he slew was torn clean out — and the rest of the way we carried him, one of the drivers and I.”
I thanked him, and again checked on the edge of going my way, because he still seemed to be waiting for something. “What is it, Noni Heron’s Feather?”
“Are you not going to take his heart?” He spoke with a hint of reproach. “He fought well for you; it was a great heart — worthy even of an emperor.”
I shook my head. “That is not the way of the Sun People. We believe that to each man and each hound his own courage.”
But I remembered Irach, as I went on toward the barrack huts.
The camp women were moving to and fro among them, and there was an all-pervading smell of pungent salves and torn humanity mingled with the acrid smoke of the horse-dung fires where the great water crocks were boiling, and once or twice, passing a doorway, I heard a man curse or cry out in pain. In the doorway of one bothy, I found Gwalchmai with a couple of the men he had trained to help him, laving his hands in a pail of reddened water. His face was blotchy and leaden with weariness, but he too looked at me with a suddenly arrested eye. “We laid him in your own quarters when the barrack huts grew overfull,” he said in answer to my question, beginning to dry his hands on a piece of rag.
“Is he —” I began, and changed the end of the sentence. “How bad is the wound?”
“Much as an arrow through the elbow joint usually is,” Gwalchmai said. “I have cut out the barb, and the wound itself will not kill him, unless he takes the wound fever. But —”
He hesitated an instant, and I heard myself speaking the last word after him. “But?”
“He has bled almost white — the arrow severed an artery.”
I remember noticing the little red streaks in Gwalchmai’s eyes, the eyes of a man who needs sleep and knows that he will not get it for a long while yet. I said, “Has he any chance at all?”
Gwalchmai made a small expressive gesture with his hands. “If he still has the life in him three days from now, I believe that he will live.”
I found Bedwyr lying flat under the old otter-skin rug on my bed place, surprisingly flat, not like a grown man at all, but like a young boy, or a woman who has given birth. His left arm, swathed in bloody rags and laid across his body, seemed a thing that did not belong to him at all, and his fantastic face, when I squatted down beside him, had the whiteness of something long since drained of life, fine-lined and skeletal, empty shell and sea-scoured bone, so that for a long moment not so much of grief as of a curious stillness, I thought that he was already dead.
Then as one of the camp women, who had been pounding something in a bowl in the far corner of the bothy, got to her feet to take herself elsewhere, he opened his eyes and lay looking up at me, frowning a little as though not quite sure that either he or I were there. “Artos,” he said after a while, half questioningly, and I do not think he knew that he had fumbled out his sound hand to find mine; and then, “Was it — a good night’s hunting?”
“A good night’s hunting,” I said. “It will be a while and a while before the wolf pack can be done with licking its wounds and gather against us once more.”
“You will — know about Aquila — all the bodyguard.”
“I have Aquila’s signet ring around my neck,” I said. “He gave it into my keeping for Flavian, the night before.”
He was quiet for so long after that, that I thought he was drifting off to sleep, but in a while he opened his eyes again and fixed them on my face, and I think that by a conscious effort he saw me for the first time. Until then he had only seen someone bending over him, and known that it was me. “Hail Caesar!” he said, and then — his voice was no more than a spent whisper, but that wild mocking left brow of his flickered up and flew like a banner — “Greatly am I honored! It is not given to every man to die in an emperor’s bed!”
I had forgotten that I was still wearing the diadem of withering yellow oak leaves. I put up my free hand and pulled it off and let it drop onto the old skin rug beside Bedwyr. “That was a jest in vile taste! Listen to me, Bedwyr, if I am Caesar, you are Caesar’s captain. I cannot and will not do without my captain — listen to me, Bedwyr, listen!” I was bending over him, trying to hold him by the eyes, but already they were closing again. He was not listening any more — I doubted if he could even hear me, and I had to reach him for my own sake I think as much as his, before maybe he went altogether away from me. I bent lower quickly and kissed him on the forehead. The taste of the black pain-sweat was sour and salt on my mouth.
Then I got up and went out to find Flavian and give him his father’s ring, to take up the reins of the many tasks that waited for Caesar’s handling.
THE mighty war host of the Saxon Confederacy had been broken asunder, and we drove the scattered war bands out of the White Horse Vale, out of the Tamesis Valley basin where they had had their settlements for twenty years and more; everywhere, from Portas Ardurni around to the Metaris, we flung them back to their coastal runs, and indeed I believe — I still believe — that we could have flung them into the sea.
But be that as it may, a day came, an autumn day with the gale booming up through the forest from Anderida Marshes, when Artorius Augustus Caesar (few men called him Artos any more) and three Wolf Kings, each with a picked handful of chiefs and captains behind them, met together in the main chamber of the long-derelict posting station on the Londinium road.
Outside, the horses stamped and fidgeted in the old cavalry corral, made restless by the wind, and the wind swooped all ways at once through the holes in the fire-scarred thatch, filling the place with smoke from the burning ashe logs on the hearth that had been cold for years. Always an ashe fire for a peace council — maybe because it is the only wood that will burn green? The green branch of all envoys and those who come in peace . . . ? We had brought our green branch in another form also, Flavian’s young son. I had asked Flavian to bring the boy with him (to his mother it would be excuse enough that he was rising thirteen and it was time that he began to see the ways of men) for an added sign that we had no ill intent and the council was indeed one of peace, for no man takes his twelve-year-old son on the war trail. The Saxons had had the same thought, it seemed, and one of the East Anglian chieftains had come to the meeting place trailing a son like a half-trained puppy at heel. Anlaf and the Minnow; they had eyed each other under their brows at first, stiff-legged and wary; finally they had departed together, walking at arm’s length. “They will come back when their bellies bid them,” someone had said.
We sat, British and Saxon, facing each other across the hearth. I had Perdius with me, and Cei, and Cador of Dumnonia and young Constantino, and Flavian, sitting with the hand on which his father’s ring blinked green as a wolf’s eye in the firelight, clenched on his knee. I longed for the help and support of old Aquila’s wisdom now, almost as deeply as I longed to have Bedwyr beside me.
But at least Bedwyr was alive. It had been five days before we could be sure that he would live, and then after all the wounded had been got back to Venta, the wound had turned sick, and he had been like to die all over again. That had been when I took him out of his bare little cell in the old officers’ quarters and brought him across to my own, for Guenhumara to tend as once she had tended me. If I had not done so, I think he would indeed have died, for we had many sore wounded and there was fever among the troops that summer besides, so that Gwalchmai and his henchmen and even Ben Simeon had more work than any man could do with; and the wound kept shedding bone splinters, and reopened again and again, so that even now it seemed not sure that it was truly healing.
I looked across at the big fair men on the far side of the hearth. They were the lords of a broken kingdom, for the most part very young or very old. Cissa of the South Seax and Ingil of the East Angles were the young untried sons of newly slain fathers, one gray-bearded warrior with the long white scar of an ancient spear wound on his forearm spoke for the Northfolk and the Southfolk who had no king left to them at all. They were defeated, but they did not bow their heads, and despite myself, I felt the stirring of respect for them. They were Barbarians — they are still Barbarians, the Saxon kind, and they will be for centuries yet, for they are a younger people than we, and have never known in any way the Rule of Law. But they had courage, not merely the hot valor that flares in battle, but the courage that continues after the fires are out. These men were of the breed that had burned out Irach’s village and slaughtered his kin; creatures who in some ways were less like men than beasts — the Sea Wolves that we had named them. But now they faced me as though we were equally met, and prepared to fight still for their continuance. And courage I have always loved in any man, no matter what else I have hated in him. Even in Medraut — even in my son.
So we spoke together, to and fro across the blazing ashe logs and through the smoke, with the boom of the wind through Anderida Forest sounding behind our words.
The graybeard had been chosen — for the garnered wisdom of his years I suppose — to act as spokesman for the rest, a gaunt old man with eyes under a gray shag of brows, that were as yellow as a wolf’s, and teeth like an old wolf’s, too, yellow and long in his beard. “We are the conquered, and you are the conquerors,” he said. “Therefore it is for us to ask your mercy and for you to give it.” But he did not ask so much as demand.
I leaned forward with my arms on my knees, and stared into his proud old face. “I am thinking of burning farmsteads and nuns slaughtered like cattle at their altar steps,” I said. “I am thinking of living men mutilated on spent battlefields. I am thinking of a girl I saw once, whose spirit had been driven from her body not by one man’s rape but by many. What mercy did you ever show, when yours was the conqueror’s hand?”
There was a dim growl of voices from both sides of the fire. The old man gave the ghost of a shrug. “War is war. Nay then, we do not ask for mercy, we propose a bargain.”
“A bargain?” I said. “You would talk of bargains with me?”
“A bargain which would be of advantage to us both. It is this, my Lord Artos the Bear. You shall grant to those of us who are left in Britain (the high gods know we are something fewer than we were) leave to abide in the coastal strips where our first settlements were made; cornland and timber and common land sufficient for our needs; and in return, we will undertake to hold those same southward and eastward facing coasts secure from the incoming of others of our kind.”
“I seem to have heard such a tale before,” I said. “Ah, but tell me now, in your country, beyond the North and Narrow Seas, is it a common custom for the hunter to bid the wolf in over his threshold?”
A brief, appreciative twinkle lit the wolf-yellow eyes of the old warrior. “Yet a wolf brought in over the threshold, warmed by the hunter’s fire and fed the occasional bone from the hunter’s hand, may become as a guard dog, in time, and bold to drive the wild wolf pack from the door.”
“So Fox Vortigern thought, forty years ago.”
There was a small, quickly controlled movement among the Saxons behind the spokesman, and looking up to meet the eyes of the man who had made it — the tall red-haired man leaning against the wall a little withdrawn from the rest, as though proclaiming, even with something of a nourish, his awareness that this talk of bargains was a thing that he had no part in — I saw again the newly healed scar on his throat, between the copper of the young beard and the gold of the collar he wore. It had been something of a shock to see Cerdic at the council fire, even though I knew by then that my blade had somehow missed the life spot. I suppose the first sight of a face one last saw in the moment of striking what one believes to be the deathblow, must always be a little as though one saw a ghost. The flickering gray-green eyes were hot with anger at any reference to his father, and yet I could see that he accepted the inference, because he knew as well as I did that it was just.
“Vortigern was one man, and Artos the Bear is another,” said the ancient.
“Honey drips from thy tongue, Old Father,” I said mockingly.
And he shook his head, coughing sharply as a puff of smoke curled across his face, suddenly pettish. “Na na, I speak the thing that all men know. Vortigern was one man and Hengest knew it, Artos is another, and we, the kings and chiefs who follow after Hengest, know that also. We are not fools!”
And looking into the fierce red-rimmed eyes of the old man as the smoke cleared, I knew that at least he was no flatterer of kings. “Yet though I were Tyr himself, and Woden, and the first Caesar joined in one, why should I accept this most dangerous expedient of keeping the brood of Hengest within my borders, when I have the strength to thrust them off the last headland into the sea?”
“Because maybe a thousand miles of coastline facing the Saxon and the Anglish and the Jute lands and needing always to be defended, needing always vigilance and a shield-front maintained, while the Scots folk creep in from the back with their long knives, has its dangers also. I know the land that we come from, from Manopia and the Rhenus mouth around to the northern coast of Juteland; I remember the lean harvests and sea shifting among the sodden islands, and the folk driven too close for the poor land to feed them, and I tell you that so long as ever a wind blows from the east or from the north, my people and the Saxons and the Jutes will come down upon these richer shores.” His face spasmed for an instant into a mass of sword-gash wrinkles, which was his nearest approach to a smile. “It was not we alone who lost good fighting men this summer.”
I was silent, my chin sunk between my fists, hearing the wind roaring up from Anderida marshes; and I knew that what he said was true. I had known it for a long while past, or I would not have been sitting here today, not have bidden Flavian to bring the boy with him. If I had been still the man to whom Ambrosius gave his freedom and his wooden foil, I think that I should not have been there at all, that nothing would have seemed possible to me save to hurl the last Barbarian into the sea. But I had the first white hairs in my muzzle now. . . .
“Tell me why I should trust you the length of my thumbnail?” I said at last, lifting my head from my hands.
“Sa, I will tell you: over that way” — he jerked his head southeastward toward Dubris — “over that way, I saw once a winged horse carved over a gateway, and one told me it was a Totem of the Second Legion, because they had held that place and so marked it for their own. Now front where did the Second Legion draw its men?”
I was silent for a long moment, looking at him. “From the tribes along the Rhenus,” I said slowly.
“From the tribes along the Rhenus. Aiee! I have heard also that the great Magnus Maximus, my lord’s great-grandsire, served a while with the Second Legion and loved them well, and that long, long before that, the Emperor in Romeburg himself made them an Augustan Legion, and none, I think, accused the Second Legion of broken trust!”
And that also was true.
And I had learned some things and lost others in the process of growing old — for I felt old that evening, with the weight of five and forty winters lying heavy on me as though there had been added to them another score. And so I made my decision, though I did not yet let it appear that I had done so, to the men about me. It was a decision that proved sound, insane though I know that many of my own folk thought it; and when the black sorrow came, it was not from the Saxon shore, not from the men with whom I struck that day’s bargain, after all.
“It is in my mind that you speak both truth and something of wisdom,” I said at last. “So be it then, let us go further into this matter of a bargain between your people and mine.”
There was much talk after that, much argument, while the clerks waited to make copies of a treaty, and beyond the door the tawny sunset flamed and faded between the trees, and the light of the burning ashe wood began to bite into the deepening shadows. And then at last the arguing was done, and I stood up to state the final terms, while the clerks scratched on their parchments, a small, hurried, insect sound. I spoke of boundaries and tribal territory, of landholding in yard-lands per man, and rights of wood and water, pasturage and the hunting spear, and of the military service to be rendered in exchange. (“The coasts from Portas Adurni around to the Metaris we will keep for you from all inroads,” the aged spokesman had said, after conferring with the others of his kind, “but you shall not call upon us to carry our spears into any other war of yours, in any other part of Britain.” And I had agreed, for the thing seemed fair enough.) And all the while, as I spoke, something yammered within my head, in stupid astonishment at myself and the words that I was measuring out, as a man issues out arrowheads from a basket. Northfolk and Southfolk, East Angles and South Seax and the Cantii Kingdom, I dealt with them each in turn, so far as they could be dealt with before the agreed frontiers were drawn out in detail.
Last of all, I turned again to the red-haired man with the scarred throat. And when, meeting my gaze, he straightened and stepped forward between two others to the hearthstone, it was as though he had been waiting for me all the while, and I for him. “Cerdic, son of Vortigern, between you and me there can be no bargain struck.”
He stood looking at me, half smiling so that the white dogtooth just lifted his lip at one side. And more even than at our first meeting, he seemed like some fierce and beautiful and dangerous animal. “Is it death, then, my Lord Artos?”
“I do not kill in the council circle,” I said and there was a small thunderous stirring among the Saxons, an eye cocked here and there among my own men, for every man there knew the old ugly tale of how Hengest had called a council feast for Fox Vortigern, and bidden his warriors of the feasting circle to slay each the Briton at his left hand, and how Vortigern had bought his own life with half a British princedom that was not his to pay with.
Cerdic knew it, too. His nostrils dilated, quivering like a stallion’s, and his hand went to the place where his sword hilt should have been — but the weapons were stacked outside, for no man comes armed to the council, unless, like Hengest’s Saxons, he carries his knife hidden in his sleeve. His hand remembered and fell away again. “What does my Lord the Bear propose for me, then?” he said, breathing quickly.
“Nine days to be gone from Britain.”
I saw the surprise flicker in his eyes, and the red brows twitched together. I think he had been prepared for death, but he had not thought of the other thing. “Do I go alone? And in what like? Am I to thank Most Noble Caesar for leave to take my sword with me? If not, I will find means to gain another before I come again.”
“Take your sword. Take your long war boats and any of your own war band who choose to follow you,” I said. “You are free of all the sea that your keel can sail over, and any landfall that opens to you. Only you shall be gone from these shores in nine days.”
“Sa! You offer a prospect strangely pleasant,” said the adventurer in him, in a tone of lingering and half-mocking surprise, and then with a sudden snarl of fury as though the beast crouched to spring: “Tell me in what I have differed from these others, that my fate should differ from theirs? That I should bear a wolf’s head and go landless and driven out, while they hold the lands that Hengest my grandsire took by the strength of his arm?”
Oisc of the Cantish lands looked up from the fire and thrust his word angrily between us. “Hengest was my grandsire also, let you remember!” but neither of us paid him heed.
“I will tell you: for the unjust, yet sufficient reason that you are your father’s son, the blood of your father’s line running in your veins.” ;
“The royal blood of Britain!” he said.
“I would call it, rather, the blood of a Prince of Powys, who married and abandoned a High King’s daughter, and claimed through her the kingship in his turn. The sorry thing for you is that there are still men in Britain who support your father’s claim and so you are a danger to Britain, Cerdic, son of Vortigern, for your heart goes with your Saxon kin. Therefore run your war boats down the beach and gather your sword companions, and carve yourself a kingdom if you can, elsewhere.”
He stared at me in silence for a long moment, with his eyes half closed over their cool flickering affrontery. “The first time we met you bid me go. You bid me go free and said that I should come again when I was a man, and you would kill me if you could, and if I could, I should kill you.” The flash of a smile that had no mirth in it showed for an instant those strong white dogteeth, and his hand went to the scar on his neck. “The thing is not yet ended between us, my Lord Artos the Bear of Britain.”
He would have swirled about, then and there, and stridden out through the doorway, but I called him to heel. “It may be that the thing is not yet ended between us, as you say. But the end must wait for another day. The women are busy about the cooking fires and soon we shall be at the evening meal. Bide then, and eat and drink and be warm at the fire with the rest of us.”
“If I am to be away from my father’s shores within nine days, I have more pressing calls upon my time.”
“Yet all men must eat. I give you half a day’s grace, that you may find the time to sup with the rest of us tonight.”
The smile still lingering at one side of his mouth grew sardonic. “Do you fear that I shall fire this somewhat battered thatch over your heads if you let me from your sight?”
“No more, I think, than you fear my ambush on your road to the coast.”
And suddenly, his gaze still locked with mine, the smile that had been shut and ugly flashed open in his face, fierce and oddly joyful, and he said swiftly in the British tongue, “So be it, oh my brother and my enemy; we two, both of King’s blood, will drink the stars out of tonight’s sky, among this pirate royalty!”
So presently, when the deer and badger meat was brought in smoking from the spits, and the mead began to go round, Cerdic and I drank from the same cup and dipped our fingers in the stirabout bowl together, among the rest of the Companions and house carls who had played no part in the council that went before. The two boys had, as foretold, “come back when their bellies bade them” and took their supper squatting among the hounds. What they had done with their day no one asked, nor did they tell without the asking, but from the state of their faces, it seemed likely that they had spent part of it fighting, and another part in eating blackberries. Now they sat bunched shoulder to shoulder, the dark head and the fair one together in the firelight, while they picked companionably at each other’s brier scratches.
That seemed to me a thing that had in it the seeds of hope for the future. But every time I glanced that way, I saw beyond them the face of Medraut my son, among the other squadron captains, and every time the shuttered and yet strangely devouring gaze, lit to the color of sapphires by the firelight, was on me or on Cerdic beside me, so that at last, even when I did not look, there seemed no escaping it.
The night seemed so full of him that I was not surprised when later, as I went to the sleeping place that had been made for me of turf and branches against the wall of the ruined fodder store, I found him waiting for me. He unfurled his height from the sleeping bench as I entered, and asked in a suppressed voice if he might speak with me alone.
I said to Riada, who had followed me according to custom, “I’ll not be needing you for a while. Go and keep a lookout that we are not disturbed. I’ll call you later.” And when he had gone, I moved forward, letting the heavy wolfskin apron fall again behind me. “Medraut? What is it then, that brings you here?”
“Is it so strange that a son should come to his father’s bothy?”
“It is scarcely a habit, with you.”
“Is that all of my choice?” he said. “If my company gives you pleasure, you have hidden it well.” And then suddenly, “Father, what is it that is amiss between you and me?”
I went and sat on the piled sheepskins of the bed place, and stared into the sea-blue heart of the tallow candle flame. “Is that what you came to ask me? I don’t know. Before God, I don’t know, Medraut; but whatever it is, I admit the fault of it, I and my house — I who kindled the spark of your life in your mother’s womb, my father who first taught her mother how to hate.”
“Hate, yes,” he said broodingly. “I am your guilt made flesh, am I not, Father? You will always smell the dark birth-smell of my mother’s hate on me, and hate me in turn.”
“God forbid that I should hate any man who has done nothing to earn it,” I said. “It is not so simple as that. There is a shadow cast between you and me, Medraut, a web of shadow that there is no escape from, for either of us.”
He came toward me, and before I knew what he was about, knelt beside me and bowed his head onto my knee. It was a horrible womanish gesture. “No escape. . . . It is m what you are and in what I am.” His voice came muffled against my knee. “No, don’t draw away from me. Whatever else I am, I am your son — your most wretched son. If you do not hate me, try to love me a little, Father; it is lonely never to have been loved, only devoured.”
I did not answer. I have never been a man to whom words came easily in the time of most need. The wrongs that had been done to him sickened me, I was torn with furious pity as for some hideous bodily hurt. And for the first tune, in that desperate cry against loneliness, I knew something of myself in the son I had begotten, and through my own dread of loneliness, that had made me flinch from the Purple, like called to like. In a moment more, I think that I should have put my arm around his bowed shoulders. . . .
But before I could do so, he wrenched himself away and sprang to his feet, and the chill, jibing note was back in his voice when at last he broke the silence between us. “Ah, na, that is too much to ask for, isn’t it?”
And the moment was gone beyond catching back. “That would be to ask for a gift, and I must not ask for a gift, I am only your son. If I were a chieftain of the Sea Wolves, then the thing would be different, and we might laugh together, even with the dagger naked between us. Sa, then I demand only my rights.”
I got up from the bed place, and we stood facing each other. “Your rights, Medraut?”
“A son’s rights in place of a son’s gift.” He was speaking half wildly now. “Today you sat in council with the lords of the Sea Wolves, Flavian with you, and Cei — the son of a Roman house who cannot even speak our tongue without the gutturals of the Rhenus half drowning whoever stands nearest him — and Connory and that young whelp Constantine and the rest; and where was I? Outside sitting on my rump with mere squadron captains around the cooking fire!”
“Are you not, then, one of my squadron captains?”
“I am also Prince of Britain; it was my right to sit at the council table — all men know that by blood I am Prince of Britain.”
“By blood, yes,” I said.
“Oh, my father the Emperor, there is small need to remind me that we are both bastards; have you found it to stand in your path?”
In the long silence that came after, the wind lifted the wolfskin over the doorway and teased the candle flame, and high in the darkness overhead, over toward the marshes, I heard the whistle of the wild duck passing. I was thinking suddenly that even on that last night in the upper room, Ambrosius had never spoken of Medraut; it was as though we both knew and tacitly agreed that his entrance into any plans for Britain’s future was unthinkable. Now I was thinking of Medraut coming after us, his hand on the Sword of Britain, and the fear was black on me, for all that I believed in and held sacred.
“If I were to bid you sit in council with me, it would be as though I stood up and cried before all men, ”This is my heir, to come after me! But that is the thing you have in mind, isn’t it?“
“I am your son,” he said again.
“Among the wearers of the Purple, the diadem has never passed of necessity from father to son. Your son’s rights, Medraut, do not include the Sword of Britain after me, unless I speak the word.”
The usual veil over his eyes seemed to thicken until the blueness of them was completely blank; and he said after a moment, in a voice that was suddenly silken: “How if I speak a word, then? How if I shouted the whole foul truth of my begetting to the camp?”
“Shout, and be damned to you,” I said. “The chief shame will not fall on my head, who had no knowledge of that truth, but on your mother’s, who knew it well!” There was another pause, filled with the sea-surge of the wind in the trees. Then I said, “You see, it is not so easy alter all.”
“Na,” he agreed, in the same silken voice. “It is not so simple after all. Yet maybe we shall find a way one day, my father. It is in my heart that we shall find a way.” The threat was clear.
“Maybe,” I said, “but meanwhile it is time for sleep, for the rising time for both of us must come early in the morning; and truth to tell, I wish to be alone.”
And when he had made me his low bow that was a mockery of respect, and ducked out through the skin-hung door hole, I sat thinking for a long while before I called Riada to me. I thought, among other things, that it was as well that there should be no public talk of Constantine coming after me. Cador and I understood each other well enough, that in the nature of things, the boy must be my heir; but it would be better — safer for Constantine and for the kingdom — that the thing should not be put into words and cried aloud in the Forum.
BEFORE the end of the month I was back in Venta. We rode in between roaring crowds who surged forward to fling golden branches and jewel-colored autumn berries under our horses’ hooves, and it seemed that the rejoicing of the whole city clamored like a clash of bells.
It was conqueror’s weather, not the half-regretful glancing back to summer that occurs sometimes in early autumn, but the sudden valiant flare of warmth and color on the very edge of winter that often comes toward the time of Saint Martin’s Mass. The sun shone like a bold yellow dandelion flower tossed into a cloudless sky, and a wind last night had dried the mud of the autumn rains so that the dust curled up beneath the horses’ hooves, the poplar trees stood along the streets as yellow torches, with their shadows under them reflecting the blue of the sky. And next day, when I was able at last to draw breath and turn my back for an hour on matters that concerned the war trail and the kingdom, the sun was still warm to the skin in the Queen’s Courtyard, where Bedwyr and I lounged side by side on the colonnade steps. The light was westering, and the sand-rose in its great stone jar laid an intricate tracery of shadow at our feet, and denser shadow stole out from the far side where the pigeons crooned and strutted on the roof of the store wing. But on the colonnade steps out of the wind, there was warmth to let one’s cloak hang open, a still warmth, lingering like the savor of old wine in an amber cup. The smell of the evening meal stole out from the cook place, and the movements and voices of women, and the fat bubbling laugh of the woman who had taken Blanid’s place when the old creature died last year.
I had been telling Bedwyr of all that had happened at the council table, and the course that I had taken as to the Saxon settlement, while he sat forward with his maimed arm supported across his knees, his narrowed gaze following the pigeons, listening to me without a word. I wished that he would speak, it was hard to tell the thing against this wall of silence. But when I had finished he still maintained it, until I asked him directly, “When I was young, I’d have torn out their living hearts, and my own also, before a Saxon should be left on British ground. Am I learning other things than the use of the sword, Bedwyr? Or am I merely growing old and losing my grasp?”
He stirred then, still watching the pigeons strut and coo. “Na, I do not think that you are losing your grasp; it is that you must learn to play the statesman now. For Artorius Augustus Caesar it is no longer enough to be a soldier, as it was for Artos the Count of Britain.”
I rubbed my forehead which felt as though sheep’s wool were packed behind it. “I have not slept much, these past nights, wondering if I have chosen the wrong course and maybe the rum of Britain. And yet it is still in my mind that it is the lesser of two dangers.”
“In mine also,” Bedwyr said. “We cannot stretch our shield-wall to cover the Forth to Vectis Water — it may be that this way will at any rate gain us more time.”
Time. . . .
We were silent again. And then I heard my own voice, as it were thinking aloud. “I remember once, long ago, Ambrosius said to me that if we fought well enough we might hold back the dark for maybe another hundred years. I asked him, seeing that the end was sure, why we did not merely lie down and let it come, for the end would be easier that way. He said: ‘For a dream.’ ”
“And you? What did you say?”
“Something about a dream being often the best thing to die for . . . I was young, and something of a fool.”
“Yet when there is no dream left worth dying for, that is when the people die,” Bedwyr murmured, “and there is the advantage to it, that the dream can live on, even when hope dies. Yet hope has its value too. . . .”
“Sa sa.” I turned abruptly on the colonnade step, to face him. “Bedwyr, all our lives we have fought a long fight without hope” — I hesitated, seeking the words I needed — “without — ultimate hope. And now, for the first time, it is in my heart that there is a kind of hope for us, after all.”
He turned from the pigeons. “What hope would that be?”
“You remember that I asked Flavian to bring the Minnow with him to the council camp?”
“I remember.”
“There was another boy there, a little younger than the Minnow, the son of one of the Saxon nobles. Like enough, he was brought for the same purpose. They walked around each other on stiff legs at first, like young hounds, and then they went away, and no man saw them again until evening. They came back at suppertime, being hungry, and told no one what they had done with their day, and no one asked, but they looked as though they had spent part of it fighting, and the rest in eating blackberries. They shared the same broth bowl and spent the evening among the hounds by the fire, picking bramble thorns out of each other’s feet. And suddenly I knew, watching them — Ambrosius never knew it — that the longer we can hold off the Saxons, the more we can slow their advance, even at the cost of our heart’s blood, the more time there will be for other boys to pick thorns out of each other’s feet and learn the words for hearth and hound and honey cake in each other’s tongue. . . . Every year that we can hold the Saxons back may well mean that the darkness will engulf us the less completely in the end, that more of what we fight for will survive until the light comes again.”
“It is a good thought,” Bedwyr said softly. “It would be a better one if you could live three or four lives.”
“Surely. And there’s where the harness chafes. Having only one, and that more than half spent — If God had but given me a son to take my sword after me.”
He turned sharply to look at me, but did not speak, for the thought of Medraut leapt naked between us. “In the end it must fall to Constantine,” I said at last. “Cador knows that.”
“And Constantine is — a fine cavalry leader in his own wild way, and will doubtless make a fine prince for Dumnonia.”
“He burns with a steadier flame than his father. But the young ones are of a lesser stature, a lesser breed — both Saxon and British, they are a lesser breed. The giants and heroes are dead, and all save one, the men grow smaller than they used to be when we were young.“
“And that one?”
“If I could have had Cerdic for my son,” I said slowly, “I should have been well content.”
Neither of us spoke again for a long while. Bedwyr returned to his watching of the pigeons, I to staring down at that arabesque of shadows that the sand-rose cast across the pavement at my feet, neither of us thinking much of what we saw. And the slow long silence fell like the soft dust of years over the things that we had been speaking of.
A dry-edged poplar leaf, caught by an eddy of wind, came spuming across the sunlit courtyard to flatten itself for an instant against the bottom step, and in the way that one does such small pointless things, Bedwyr flung out a hand — his left — to catch it, and snatched at his breath swearing softly, and let his arm settle gingerly onto his knees again, while the leaf whirled away.
I looked around at him, seeing afresh the discolored hollows around his eyes and the way the bones stood out under the skin that had bleached from its usual brown to a dingy yellow, and the parching of long-recurrent fever that had left his mouth dry and chapped. “It still catches you, then?” I said. I had asked for that arm of his before, but he had swept my questions aside, caring for nothing but to hear what had happened at the council table.
“It is well enough.”
“ ‘Well enough’ is an answer for the birdcatcher’s grandmother.”
He seemed to be drawing back his mind from a long way away, to give me his full attention. “It still catches me,” he said with mocking exactitude. “The ache runs down here like a red thread — a little Ted worm in the bone — and catches me up short when I would be catching poplar leaves in flight.” He flung back the loose fold of his cloak and held it out to me, and I saw that from the elbow down, the arm was somewhat wasted and brittle-looking, and the elbow itself, below the heavy bronze arm ring that I had given him years ago, was wickedly seamed with livid scars, not only of the wound itself, but of the many lancings and probings after the splinters of shattered bone, some of them scarcely healed even now. “It also does not bend.” I saw the painful drag and thrust of the muscles, but the joint remained immovable, bent at about the angle at which a man carries his shield and bridle.
“What does Gwalchmai say? And Ben Simeon? Has Ben Simeon seen it?”
He quirked up that wild eyebrow, the other grave and level, so that his face wore two expressions at once. “That I am fortunate to be alive. . . . I shall even be able to use it by and by, seeing that it is not my sword arm. When I knew that it must stiffen I bade Gwalchmai to set and strap the thing in the position that I bade him, and before spring I shall be handling horse and buckler again; I shall be fit for service as Caesar’s captain.”
“And the Emperor’s harper?” I glanced at the embroidered doeskin bag that lay as usual beside him.
“Surely, and that already, since a one-handed skill will serve.” He took up the harp and drew it from the bag, using his left arm with a kind of clumsy acquired skill, and settled the slim well-worn instrument between his knee and the hollow of his shoulder. “It is easier with a sound arm, admittedly,” he said, frowning as he fumbled for the familiar supporting hold.
He struck a swelling ripple of tuning notes that sounded like a question, made his adjustments, and began to play. It was a tune from my own hills, that he had picked up from Ambrosius’s harper, small and jaunty as a water wagtail. And listening to him, I lost the Queen’s Courtyard in the westering autumn sunlight, and was back again in the dark of the mountains that walled Nant Ffrancon, with the thunder of horses’ hooves in my ears, and a herdboy playing that tune on his pipes; and for an instant the taste of my youth came back to me, and the green freshness of the morning before Ygerna’s shadow fell across the day.
A quiet step sounded behind us, and I looked up as Guenhumara came across the colonnade with her spindle and distaff. I moved aside to make space for her on the step, but she smiled and shook her head, and leaned herself against the cracked plaster column, looking down at us.
Bedwyr had dropped his hand from the harp strings, and as the small prancing melody fell silent, she said quickly, “Na na, let you go on playing; it was the harp song that called me out.” And he made her a little bow, and caught up the tunelet again where he had tossed it down. And while he played, I had time to look at Guenhumara as I had scarcely had time to look at her since I came home. She was wearing a gown of some soft red-brown stuff, faded a little as the earth fades with sun and rain, and it seemed to me suddenly that there was a new softness about her, a look of harvest. I searched for the woman I had kissed into that one moment of passionate response beside the gray standing stone in the rain, and could not find her, but knew that she had her part in this other woman and was not lost, as the green shoot is not lost in the red corn. There was a warmer quietness in her, fulfillment and content as a cornfield at harvest time. The Corn Queen, I thought. She is like the Corn Queen, and pushed the thought away, for the overtones of sacrifice that clung to it. I wondered whether she was — not forgetting the Small One, but perhaps remembering with less pain.
The small rippling tune that was now the wagtail and now the water, burst into a last running phrase, and was silent. And in the silence, all at once, Guenhumara laughed, with strangely darkened eyes, and the bright color flooded up from her throat to the roots of her hair. “Artos, why do you look at me so? — As though you had never seen me before?”
“Do I? I am sorry. It is that I am looking for the first time at the Queen.”
“The Queen,” she said slowly and carefully, as though testing a strange word on her tongue.
And Bedwyr, laughing also, as he looked up at her with eyes narrowed against the westering light, struck a small triumphal flourish of notes from the leaping harp strings. “Sa! They will sound the trumpets for you, now that Caesar is home, and open the treasure chests and bring out the blue and purple and golden silks that tear like withered leaves, and the queen’s jewels laced with cobwebs, but meanwhile, here is a queen’s fanfare for you that at least has never been worn for a garland by any queen before.”
“Do not listen to him,” and it was as though the same spirit of small quiet laughter had entered into me also. “All that, the Red Fox and his kind carried off long ago. There will be no dusty silks and weight of dead woman’s jewels for you, Cariad. . . . If I were Lord of the Eastern Empire” (the memory of some picture gleaming behind the altar of a church must have put it into my head) “you should have a crown of golden stems and leaves curling in and out together like the sand-dune rose but without the thorns — and in every arch of it a bell of crystal to ring when you walked.“
“Bedwyr told me that a circlet of oak leaves was all the diadem my lord had to crown him Emperor. Then a crown of golden cornstalks — so that my lord give it to me — will serve well enough for my royalty. With that, and your fanfare, Bedwyr, I shall not feel the lack of any dead queen’s jewels.”
A sudden rush of warmth rose in me, and I reached out and put my arm around her knees, these being the nearest part of her. “Oh Guenhumara, it is good to be at home with you again.” Oddly, I was much less shy of touching this new Guenhumara than I had been of touching the old one.
I had half hoped that she would say, “It is good to have you at home with me again,” but she only said, “Is it, my dear?” And I felt her startle for an instant under the heavy folds of her gown. Then she stooped and brushed her hand across my cheek, and I let myself believe that what she had not said in words, she had said in that brief touch.
Bedwyr was returning his beloved harp to its bag, and slinging the strap across his shoulder, and something in the way he did it made me think of a traveler picking up his dusty bundle before he turns again to the track. And without thinking, I said, “You look like a man setting off on a journey.”
He laughed. “Do I? If so, it is but a short one. It is in my mind that tomorrow I will be away back to my own quarters.”
I sat up abruptly, releasing Guenhumara. “You’re not meaning it?”
“I am so.”
“Bedwyr, you’re not fit yet to go back to that kennel of yours.”
“You underestimate the Lady Guenhumara’s care of me. I am almost a sound man again.”
“Almost! And what wrong have I done you, or you me, that you should run like a hen with the wind in your hind feathers, the moment that I am home off the war trail? Guenhumara, Heart-of-my-heart, tell him that he cannot go.”
I thought that a shadow had fallen on Guenhumara, but it was only that the westering sun had slid behind a broken column. She said quietly, “Bedwyr knows that there is his place and his welcome here for as long as he cares to stay, and that they are waiting whenever he chooses to come back. And that he is free to come and go as he chooses.“
Bedwyr was making some adjustment to the harp strap. His fingers checked on the buckle at his shoulder, and he looked up, faintly jibing over his own dark depths. “I have just thought, that we are forgetting the Purple in all this. Men might say that it was an unwise thing, even a dangerous thing, to go when the Emperor says ‘Stay.’”
“If the Emperor ordered you to stay, would you do it?” I said.
“I must needs obey the imperial command.”
We looked at each other a long moment, eye into eye, no longer laughing. Then I said, “Your sword brother bids you go where you will and when you will, and come back when you will.”
We were aware, all of us, that we had lost the fragile contentment of a few moments past, and made, I think, a conscious effort to catch it back. Bedwyr saying that a little later he should maybe go up for another look at the farm I had given him, and Guenhumara asking what it was like. “Hill pasture and upland horse run,” he said, “three cornfields and a cluster of turf bothies. I have not seen it in summer, but there will be snowdrops in the woods above the house in February. That is why they call it Coed Gwyn.” Only for some reason this time I could not enter into the thing that was tossing to and fro like a colored ball between the other two. And suddenly it seemed that Guenhumara gave up the game. She shivered a little. “It grows cold now that the sun is gone. Let us be away to the fire.”
So the small quiet hour that had in it something of sanctuary was over, and a few moments later I stood with Guenhumara in the colonnade and glanced back over the half wall to watch Bedwyr weaving his still slightly uncertain way across the courtyard to make ready for supper. “Guenhumara, do you think that he should go yet?”
She had been watching the retreating figure too, and turned with a little start toward me. It was already dusk indoors though the light still lingered in the courtyard, and Nissa had brought the atrium candles, and in the light from the open doorway her face was softly golden, with its shadows blotted in from the gray twilight. “Yes, I think he should,” she said, and took my hand to lead me into the atrium.
I had another and more formal coronation to undergo in the Basilica, a few days later, but to me it was no more than a husk of the true crowning that I had gone to on the night after Badon; and I remember little of it now, save a vague blur of gold and colors and the gray of naked mail, and the bright cold seagull’s eye of Bishop Dubricius as he set the gold circlet on my head. And the moment when I sprung the great dragon arm ring of Ambrosius onto my arm, and knew that I stood where he would have had me stand.
Life changed, tipping over to a new angle, and I who had been the war leader and was now the High King (crowned Caesar but High King in all things other than the name) had become something of a stranger in a strange land, striving as best I might after the ways of kingship, in the state halls and Council Chamber where Ambrosius had worked himself to death the winter before. But I had the help of Guenhumara, sitting beside me in the Queen’s great chair that had been empty and stored away so many years. . . . Indeed she was nearer to me in that winter than she had been since the time before Hylin died. Bedwyr, on the other hand, seemed farther away.
In the days that followed my second crowning, Venta grew quiet, and quieter yet, as the war host broke up and men drifted off to their own homes to plow for the next year’s harvest and beget the next year’s children. But for the Companions, of course, as well as for a few standing cavalry squadrons and spear bands, there was no breakup; and the usual winter’s work began, as the newly broken two- and three-year-olds came up from the horse yards to be “trained on” for war, while all the while the made war-horses must be kept in fighting practice. Old Hunno had died some years before, and since Amgerit his son was too valuable where he was, to be spared from the breeding runs, my new horse master was a yellow-haired small savage from the Old Iceni country. I had been somewhat anxious as to him at first, not quite believing that any man save Hunno could turn me out the younglings trained as I needed them; but in all justice, I do not think that our cavalry suffered by the change.
Midway between Christ’s Mass and Candle Mass, we held, as we had held them every year, our Winter Cavalry Maneuvers. It helped to keep men and horses on their mettle, and brightened a little, even for the watching townsfolk, the dark of the year when the Midwinter Fires were burned out and spring (which in any case, for these many years, had meant also the Saxons) was still very far away.
I can see now the level meadows below the town walls, winter-pale in the thin sunshine, the shadows blue and opaque like wood-smoke among the bare dappled woods of the surrounding hillsides, the rustling flights of starlings overhead, and the curved sweep of the squadrons that seemed to echo the starlings’ flight; I can hear the drub of hooves and the trumpet sounding thin across the water meadows, which is the music to which my life has been set.
Ever since noon, it had been going on, watched by the crowd huddled thick before the city gates and along the fringes of the practice ground. We had maneuvered all together, the squadron streamers flying in the silver-gilt light, in the mimic warfare that trains hand and eye toward the real thing. We had divided up, squadron by squadron, champion by champion, and with the horses seeming almost to dance to the sound of the trumpets, had thrown off, for the watchers’ benefit, changing and complicated patterns of wheeling lines and arrowheads and spinning circles (but these too, make for skill and control in the day of battle). I had had my squadron out there already, putting them through their paces, and the roar of the crowd and the soft thunder of hooves on the whiter turf behind me was still in my blood, as I sat watching Bedwyr take his turn.
He was sweeping his squadron after him down the long line of practice posts that had been set up, weaving them in and out as the shuttle through the weft, his second behind him with the squadron streamer flying from his spear shaft like a flame of saffron and peacock blue; and I watched anxiously, wondering how it was with him, wondering if, despite the strap across his shoulder, the weight of the heavy black bullhide buckler was dragging too cruelly at his maimed arm, watching for any sign that he was finding it hard to control the big red roan. But he had always had the harper’s trick of controlling his horse with his knees so as to have both hands free for his harp, and it stood him in good stead now. In my anxiety to see how it went with him, I urged Signus forward a few paces, past a clump of bare willows that slightly blocked my view, and as I reined in once more, became aware of a knot of young men still partly screened from me by the branches who, their own part in the day’s work over for the time being, stood talking together while they watched the horsemen. Nearest to me of all, stood Medraut, his hair — he had pulled off his war cap — shone mouse-fair in the wintry light, and he played and finicked with his war mittens as a nervous horse plays with the snaffle bars. They lounged together, watching the horsemen, talking in quick light snatches with laughter between; and I sat my old Signus a little to their rear and watched them, wondering if it was only in my mind that they seemed not of the same metal as the men who had been young when I was young, only that to the old dog the young one seems never to be what his own pack fellows were. These lads were hardy and strong-shouldered as we had been, they had ring-mail shirts gray-bright as salmon skins, where we had ridden to war in old boiled leather, and yet in some intangible way, they seemed diminished, lacking in something that we had possessed. Indeed these — all members of Medraut’s squadron — seemed scarcely to be of the Companions at all. . . . “It has to be so,” I told myself. “This is a different life to the one we knew twenty years ago, and the Company must change with the rest.” It was true, and yet I was aware suddenly, looking at the broad young backs of these lads I felt I scarcely knew, that the old strength of oneness had begun to go out of the Company and it was growing blurred at the edges. And under my own war sark, something ached a little in my breast for the old close-knit brotherhood.
Busy with my own thinking, I heard their voices only as sound, until someone among them spoke Bedwyr’s name, and as though at the opening of a door, I heard the sense of what they said. “He is a tough one, the old Satyr. Christ! He leads like a young man still.” And another returned with half-angry admiration, “If when I am as old as that and one-armed, I can lead as well, I’ll not be complaining. . . . He’s none so ill-looking, either, on a horse and at this distance when you can’t see his face.”
Medraut laughed — a brittle, whinnying laugh, an unhappy sound — and nicked the war gloves he was fiddling with toward the place at a little distance where Guenhumara, with the hood of her marten-skin mantle fallen back from her head, stood with little plump Teleri and a knot of the other women about her. “You’re not the only one of that mind, I’m thinking, though I doubt if she will be finding much amiss with his face at close quarters, either — or with the rest of him, for that matter. Look how our Royal Lady watches him now.”
A third member of the group said, I thought with something of discomfort, “After all, she is not the only one to be watching Caesar’s captain.”
Medraut said softly, almost musically, “Caesar’s captain? The Queen’s captain would be nearer the mark, my child.” And they all laughed.
And despite the stab of anger that had shot through me, I could have laughed too, listening to them; these callow lads who knew nothing of the bonds that ten or twenty years of life could forge. Of course she was watching him, as I was watching him; it was the first time that he had tried out his arm in full war gear.
Still laughing, one of Medraut’s fellows looked around and saw me. The laughter trickled out of his face, and he muttered something to the rest, and flicked out a foot to kick Medraut on the ankle. Medraut gave a small start for appearance’s sake, but it is in my mind that he knew I was there all the while. He looked over his shoulder, and met my eyes with a stare of cool antagonism that assuredly was not the look of one whose words have been overheard by the wrong man, indeed there was a strange kind of satisfaction in it. Then he put up his hand in sketch of salute, and moved away, the others, somewhat unsurely, following him. We had long ago given up all pretense at anything between us that should be between father and son.
I thought that I put the whole thing out of my mind as no more than a casual thorn prick administered by my son in a moment’s idle malice (as though Medraut ever did anything casually!) and yet a little later, when we formed the whole Company in two halves, Bedwyr leading the blue squadron and I the red, and came thundering together from the far end of the practice ground, a strange thing happened, for as the two ranks closed upon each other, and I saw the leader on the tall roan rushing toward me, my sight darkened, and for a strange damned moment I saw the face of my enemy. I even made the first move to swerve Signus in his tracks, that instead of passing between the roan and the next horse, I should bring him crashing into Bedwyr’s mount. I don’t know why, it was certainly no part of cavalry fighting; I suppose with some blind black instinct to kill, not at the remove of a weapon, but with my own hands. . . . The thing was over almost in the instant that it came upon me, the merest flash of darkness, and I saw Bedwyr’s face, crooked and ugly and familiar as my own heartbeat, laughing at me, and yet with something of surprise behind the widened eyes, and wrenched Signus back onto his true line again, so that we drummed past almost brushing knee against knee and crashed on to our two ends of the field.
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