SWORD AT SUNSET

A FEW days later, Bedwyr asked for leave to go up to Coed Gwyn for a while, and for the first time in my life, part of me was glad to see him go. Na, not glad, but conscious of an odd relief in his going, that had in some way to do with that strange evil moment during the final charge, though what, I did not know, for I took care not to look too closely.

Winter wore away while, still deeply meshed in the unfamiliar tasks of kingship, I scarcely noticed that the evenings were growing long and light, and the still-bare woods full of the clear surprised twitterings and flutings of thrush and wren and robin, trying over again the song that they had forgotten since last year. And then suddenly the pale promise of spring was fulfilled and running like the green Solas Sidh, the Fairy Fire, through the woods and heaths; and in the tangle of the old palace gardens, the fragile white stars of the anemones turned their backs to the wind. And when I took three squadrons of the Companions and rode up to see to the defenses around Sabrina head, where the Scots’ attacks had still to be reckoned with, Bedwyr had not yet returned, and Owain took command of his squadron.

It was about the half of a month before we turned the horses’ heads home again.

On the last day of the return ride we reached the derelict villa on the Sorviodunum Road a little before dusk, and in the usual way of things I would have ordered camp there, and covered the last seven or eight miles in the morning, but all at once, even as I drew rein before the nettle-choked gateway of the cattle yard where we often corralled the horses, I was filled with a wild impatience to be home that was in part the mere wish of a tired man to see the lamplight shining from his own door, and his own woman with her hair tumbled on the pillow, in part a sense of desperate urgency, of something wrong, that came to me clear and unmistakable like a bird’s call out of the evening sky. It was a glorious evening, the kind on which the last luminous twilight lingers on far beyond its usual time; there would be the last half of a moon later, and the big sorrel colt I was riding seemed fresh enough, as did the other horses.

I called to the rest, “How say you, brothers? There’s a moon coming. If we bait the horses and ride on again when we’ve eaten, we can be in Venta by midnight. Shall we push forward and give our wives a start?”

We off-saddled the horses, watered them and turned them loose to graze and roll while we ate hard oaten bread and dried curds, and stretched saddle-cramped legs for a while. And all the time I was possessed of that wild impatience to be pushing on, mingled more and more strongly with a sense of dread without cause; a shadow without substance to cast it. It seemed an unbearably long time until I could decently give the order to saddle and remount.

The moon was high when we came up the last straight stretch between the graves and the poplar trees to the west gate of Venta. The gate towers stood up against the glimmering sky, black, like a cliff. But the clatter of our horses’ hooves had given warning of our coming, and the yellow glim of a lantern blinked in the lookout above the gateway, voices sounded, giving orders, and the heavy valves began to grind open before I had need to shout for admittance. And we clattered through into the wide main street of Venta, streets whitened by the moon, between the dark walls of the houses, which might have been the streets of a deserted city for all the sign of life in them, save for a half-wild cat who turned with eyes that were twin green sparks of hate to spit at us before streaking off into the shadows, and here and there a woman flitting like a tawdry night moth along the dark side of the way; and once a strayed reveler late out of some wineshop, and wavering his unsure way home, who shouted something about folks that must come clamoring up the street like the Wild Hunt, waking other folks in their beds, and then continued on his way, singing mournfully but with surprising sweetness:

I have hated that song ever since.

We dismounted in the wide forecourt of the palace. The horses were led away by the grooms and stable servants who came running with lanterns, and the sleep still in their eyes like a century or so of dust, to take charge of them, and the Companions clattered off to their own quarters. I had an idea that Cei wished to come with me, as though he thought that I might have some need of him; if so, I must have got rid of him some way, for when I went on toward the Queen’s Courtyard, I was alone, save for my armor-bearer. But all the happenings of that night are confused and darkened in my mind.

I passed one of my own lads on guard duty at the courtyard entrance, and a few moments later (the door was never barred) was in the atrium. The place was dark save for the few red gleeds still glowing in the brazier, and Margarita, when she sprang up from her place and came with her usual grave delight to greet me, was an enchanted creature, flushed to the color of a pink pearl shell. Nothing could be very wrong, I thought, with the house quiet in sleep and Margarita in her usual place, and I began to call myself all kinds of a fool. I bade Riada light a couple of candles and bring some wine, for there seemed no point in rousing the household, and while he groped for the candles in their prickets and kindled them with a twig from the charcoal embers, I flung off my cloak and stood holding my hands over the dim warmth of the brazier, for there was a chill in me, though the night was not cold.

The light sprang up, quickening from candle to candle, and the familiar room grew warmly out of obscurity, and Margarita was more enchanted than any white hound by candlelight. I glanced about me as Riada departed to carry out the second part of his orders, as I had done at so many homecomings, seeing the kingfisher-colored saint on the wall above the big olivewood rug chest, the signs of Guenhumara’s occupation that had made the big smoky room, so long deserted, into my home. Indeed it was as though she had only just left the room, for a small red Samian bowl on the table, half full of water, still contained a few chill white anemones and beside it lay her scissors and thread and a length of plaited green rushes, as though she had been making a garland or a festival wreath.

And suddenly, looking at these traces of Guenhumara, it seemed to me strange that she had not awakened and come down to me. We had not made much tumult, in our coming in, but she was a light sleeper — light as a leaf — and I had never come home before, even at this hour of night, that she had not roused. Suddenly the sense of disaster, which the sight of all things in their usual places had quieted in me for a short while, flared up again, and I turned from the brazier and ran up the narrow stairway.

The room was white with the moon as it had been on the night that the child died, but it was too early in the year for the nightingale. It had the blank anonymity of emptiness so that I knew Guenhumara was not there, even before I saw the rugs smooth and unrumpled on the bed place, only a faint hollow on the side, as though she had sat there for a while.

I stood for a long moment, thinking too, while the cold emptiness of the room seeped into me. It was warm between thy breasts, Lalage; the old song scurried senselessly round and round in my head, as though in search of escape. I wanted some way of escape, too, but I did not know from what. I went out and down the stairs again.

Riada had returned with wine in my own big silver cup with the ram’s-head handles, and a couple of servants had appeared, blinking and in hurriedly dragged-on clothes. I turned on Sasticca, she who had taken old Blanid’s place, and demanded, “Where is my Lady, the Queen?”

She gaped at me, scarce fully awake. “Eh, my lord, we did not expect you this night, or there should have been a better welcome —”

“The Queen,” I said, “where is the Queen?”

“My mistress could not sleep, she said the moon was too bright. She went out to walk in the garden, and bade us not to bide waiting for her.“

Relief of a sort swept over me. In the garden that stretched beyond the widespread warren of the palace, she would like enough have heard nothing of our return. For a moment it was in my mind to go out after her, and meet her in the crown of windflowers that she had made herself for some whim; but if she had gone to walk in the garden at night, it was maybe because she wanted to walk alone. I could wait a while at least.

So I dismissed the servants back to their sleeping places, and, when they were gone, took the wine cup from Riada, and drank. As I did so, I saw his gaze go past me to the colonnade door at my back, which he had left open when he brought the wine; saw him stiffen a little, and the thick russet brows draw together.

I swung around, and there in the doorway, with the cold sheen of the moonlight behind him, stood Medraut. I had not heard him come, for his footsteps were almost silent, the same light prowling tread that I have noticed in a hunchback before now. But there he was, and there it seemed that, like his mother, he might have stood waiting for a lifetime or so. His eyes pricked with spangles of cold blue fire that seemed not to come from the candles, in a face that would have been a mere white mask save for the working of the muscles about the mouth. I could not see what lay behind the mask. But whatever it was, I knew that it threatened my whole world.

He said — and in some strange way his voice, like his face, gave the impression of being masked — “Artos, my father, thank God that you are back. There is sore need of you here!”

“What need?” I demanded.

“Is there so much trust between you and me that you will believe my word? Come quickly and know the thing for yourself!”

“If you do not tell me, I do not come,” I said.

He stood as still as ever, looking at me; and I could have sworn that whatever else, there was a kind of struggling grief behind the white mask. I daresay he really believed in his own grief just then, for save for hate, he was so empty that he could feel whatever it suited him to feel. “Not even for my stepmother’s sake?” he said.

There was a moment’s complete silence in the atrium, and one fear that was already in me began to thicken like a cold mist. “Very well,” I said at last, and put down the half-empty wine cup.

Young Riada cried out to me sharply, “Sir — my Lord Artos, don’t go,” and his voice cracked with anxiety.

I felt for his shoulder and gave it a little shake, my gaze still holding and held by Medraut’s. “I’ll be back.”

In a kind of cold nightmare, the more terrible because the fear was for no known thing but fear existing in its own right, I walked out into the courtyard. Medraut drew back for me to pass, and then turned in with his light prowling step beside me. “Across the garden, that is the quickest way,” he said. I did not ask where to; I knew that I might as well ask the question of the winter rain as of the man beside me. In some ways he was stronger than I was. We went out through the furry blackness of the low arched alleyway under the store wing, and cut across the corner of the tangled garden, to the sprawl of courts and tumble-down buildings on the far side. This was the oldest part of the palace, dating from the first days of Rome-in-Britain, and had fallen into disuse save as storerooms and the like. A veritable honeycomb of courts and chambers linked one to another, black and white under the moon, empty of life as the city outside had seemed. In one place only, the remoteness of the moon was challenged by a smudge of smoky gold, where a torch high on the angle of two walls shed a little light into the alleyway that made a shortcut to the mews. Medraut reached up and took it from its iron sconce as we passed, and the shadows spun and darted flying before us and crowding in behind as we went on again.

At a gateway in the wall, I felt Medraut’s hand on my arm, urging me through without a word, and then we were in a narrow courtyard in the heart of the old palace. I knew the place well, though I had seen it seldom in the past thirty years, for I had kept my mongrel dog pack there when I was a boy. A well, whose water was still sweet — or had been then — was sunk in the midst of the place, and a wild pear tree overhung the wellhead. It had been a bird-sown sapling when I first came there; it was dead now, black and stark in the moonlight, its beauty turned skeletal, save for one living branch on which a few white flowers still unfurled their fragile petals in a last reaching out to the springtime.

The shadow of the flowering branch fled across the face of the storehouse opposite as Medraut, with the torch held high, moved forward, and the probing torchlight picked out the figure of a man standing with his drawn sword before the arched entrance, and other figures in darker corners, striking out in each case that glint of a drawn weapon.

I remember that for the split instant of time before the scene sprang to life, I wondered whether I had walked into a trap, and was to die as Constantine my grandfather had died, and whipped my hand to my sword hilt. Then as they stepped forward into the full torchlight, I saw that they were four or five of my own Companions, four or five boys of the new generation that I felt I scarcely knew. Now, clearly, they were acting under Medraut’s orders as they moved in toward the storehouse doorway, and Medraut himself stood back formally, that I might go first. I checked in the arched opening, and looked around at him, trying once more to see behind his mask. “What has Guenhumara to do with this place, Medraut? Why all the ugly mystery?”

“Let my father forgive me,” he said. “There was no other way,” and made a little gesture to me to go in and climb the steep curved stairway whose bottom steps showed waveringly in the torchlight.

I went in and began to climb, my giant-wise shadow climbing remorselessly ahead of me in the light of the torch which Medraut carried close behind. At the midway turn of the stair where the tawny light ran up into the darkness, my son slipped past me, and checked before a small deep-set door, and tried the latch with a small decisive rattle. Then, as the door did not open, he whipped out his dagger and beat upon the dusty timbers with its hilt. In the enclosed space of the stairway the sound seemed to beat upon one’s ears, and the echoes woke and flung to and fro like startled bats, but nothing else answered to the summons, and after a moment Medraut began to beat again, crying out in a strange high voice like that of a woman on the edge of hysteria. “Open up! Open in Caesar’s name, or we’ll smash the door in!” And I felt the other men pressing up behind me, eager as hounds that wait for the quarry to break cover. And suddenly I knew that the thing that mattered to me most in the world was that I should not see what lay behind that door.

I caught Medraut’s dagger wrist and dragged it down. “No! Either tell me the meaning of this foolery or else have done with it!”

But in the same instant the man on the step behind me reached forward and caught up something that lay like a snowflake on the threshold of the doorway, and when he held it up to the torchlight with a small puzzled laugh, I saw that it was a wood anemone, one fragile white windflower already beginning to wilt. And I knew that there could be no shelter for me, from what lay beyond that small deep-set door.

There was the light grating sound of a key turning in the lock, the door was flung open from within and the softer light of a fat-lamp flowed out into the stairway to mingle with the flare of the torches, and Bedwyr stood in the doorway, naked under a hastily flung-on cloak, and with his drawn sword in his hand.

There was an instant’s silence so intense that it pressed upon the ears, and in the heart of it — the stillness at the heart of the storm — Bedwyr and I stood face to face. I think that he was scarcely aware of the other men, only of me, and of Guenhumara standing against the wall behind him. “I did not know that you had returned to Venta,” I heard my own voice saying in the stillness, “but it seems you have your reasons that I should not.”

I rounded on the young men crowding the stair. None of them were against me especially; they were against the Queen and Caesar’s captain, because Medraut had taught them to be. Only Medraut had known that the blow was aimed at me, and the rum of the other two only incidental. “You have done your night’s work, now get out!” I shouted at them, and their faces stared up at me, surprised, angry, resentful, out of the gloom of the stairway. “Get out,” I said again, more quietly, “back to your kennels — and for you, Medraut — you too have done your night’s work, and most nobly! I would say that surely there can be no more cunning spy among all the Little Dark People than you have proved yourself, but the Little Dark Ones I have always counted as my friends, and I would not seem to insult them now.”

The white mask was haggard, and I will swear that there was sweat on his forehead. He had lowered the torch somewhat and the copper glare of it beat like a gong in both our faces, and for one instant it was as though his eyes flashed open upon me and I saw in them twin blue sparks lit by the flames of hell. Then the veil, the inner lid, descended again, and he said humbly, “If I have done ill, let my father forgive me. I could not bear that men should laugh behind your back — your own men; and even the Sea Wolves who must come to hear of it, and think the less of Artorius Augustus who let himself be cuckolded by his dear familiar friend!”

“And doubtless all that you told to your dupes who were here just now,” I said. “You have taken great care for my honor, somewhat less for your own. Now get out of my sight, and for God’s sake keep out of it, for if you come near me again for a while, I think that I shall kill you.”

He stood staring at me while the torch spluttered in his hand, and for a moment the muscles worked about his jaw and throat as though there was something more that he would say. Then he turned, with one long look at Bedwyr in passing that could not quite conceal his triumph, and ran down the curling stair as though the hounds of hell were after him.

Bedwyr still stood unmoving, as though on guard before the small deep-set doorway. “Get back inside,” I said.

I saw him swallow, but he did not move, and deliberately I drew my sword and brought up the point to his throat. “Get back.”

His hand tightened convulsively on his own sword hilt, and it hung by a hair, whether or not the next instant we should be fighting for the doorway.

Then Guenhumara cried out harshly, “Bedwyr! Do as he says!”

He hesitated an instant longer, then with his eyes still leveled on my face, took a step backward, and another. I followed, with the point of my sword still kissing his throat, until both of us were within the room; then crashed the door to behind me, and stood leaning against it, looking from him to Guenhumara and back again. The place was a store chamber, half full of cloth bales and raw fleece; several of the fleeces had been pulled out from the stack and piled to make a couch, and on the black ramskin spread uppermost of all, lay a broken garland of wood anemones. I saw all that by the soft light of the fat-oil lamp, yet I never looked at anything but Bedwyr’s face and Guenhumara’s.

“Did you ever go to Coed Gwyn at all?” I drove my sword back into its wolfskin sheath and my own voice seemed to rasp at my throat as the blade rasped against its casing. “Have you had good hunting in the Arfon hills, this half winter past, or was there richer hunting here? Did you merely lie up within a day’s ride of Venta, until I was safely away and the Queen could send for you?”

Bedwyr spoke for the first time, tossing down his own sword, since the sheath was not on him. “The hunting was good in Arfon, and I returned from it yesterday, not even knowing that you were away.”

“A fortunate chance!” I said. “And it seems that you wasted little time in making good use of it!”

Silence took us by the throat. Guenhumara still stood pressed against the wall as though impaled there, so that I might almost have thought to see the spear shaft between her breasts. Her unbound hair fell in a strong tawny smoke about her, and her eyes, straining to mine, seemed mere blind black holes in her deathly face.

“Artos,” Bedwyr said at last, “I plead no excuses for either of us; to do so would be a waste of breath. Guenhumara and I have loved each other, tonight. But I swear to you before whatever gods there be, that this was the first and only time.”

I laughed, and the sound of the laughter was foul and brutal in my own ears. “Did love come on you so suddenly, then? Did you sup with her to keep her from another lonely evening, and find too late that Sasticca had mingled mandrake in the wine cup? How is it then, that all men know what has been going forward? Even my armor-bearer cried out to me not to go with Medraut tonight, knowing well enough what I should find!”

Bedwyr showed neither shame nor anger, only grief in the haggard lines of his face, and of all strange and unexpected things, a certain grave kindliness. He could afford to be kind. “No need for mandrake,” he said. “The care that is between Guenhumara and me grew slowly and in the dark.”

“In the dark!” I echoed bitterly.

“But not as you mean it. Listen to me, Artos, whatever comes after, listen to me now. For more than ten years, you and I and Guenhumara have been closer to each other than to any other living soul, and Guenhumara is a woman. We did not know, any more than you knew, the thing that was happening, until you brought me to her, sick with my wound after Badon.”

“And you had all the summer together, while I was sweating on the war trail.”

“And we had all the summer together, while you were sweating on the war trail. Was that our fault?”

I thought of the autumn evening and the light nonsense that we had tossed like a golden ball, to and fro. “So that was why you went back to your own quarters?”

“Yes, when you came back I knew that I must go because she was yours.”

“You forgot that easily enough tonight. Your memory, it seems, is not of the best.”

“I had been up in the mountains alone, all the end of winter, all the bitter waking spring, sleeping alone and eating my heart out. And when I came back, and saw her again, I forgot that she belonged to you, and remembered only that my love clung to her, and hers to me.”

I remember that it was then, in the pause that followed, that Guenhumara came away from the wall to stand beside him. “It is true, Artos, it is true, every word of it,” she said.

And I, God help me, I knew now where her new kindness, her air of harvest, had come from; and it was as though the dark life-blood were draining away from some wound in me. I had always sworn to myself that if Guenhumara took a lover, I would not be jealous, remembering that I had failed her; but I had never thought, never in my darkest and coldest dreams, that the lover would be Bedwyr. Strange are the ways of the heart. I think that truly I could have allowed Guenhumara her lover: I know that if Bedwyr had taken any other woman it would have troubled me no more than did Cei’s wenchings. But they had turned to each other, the two people I loved best in the world, and doing so, each had taken the other from me, and I was left outcast and alone, and betrayed. The black bitterness rose and rose within me, and there was a little drum pounding, pounding, behind my temples.

Guenhumara came half a step toward me, with her hands held out, and her voice had the throb of a swan’s wings in flight, that had always shaken the heart in my breast. “Artos, for your own sake as well as for ours, try to forgive us!”

And I said, “What is there to forgive? There is only once in your life and mine, that ever I was more than half a man to you. It is but the way of things that the mare needs the stallion at the right season!”

She cried out at that as though I had struck her. “Artos, no!” and gave back the half step again.

And I saw something in her face and in Bedwyr’s that made the hammer stop beating in my head. “My God! You never told him that, did you!”

It was Bedwyr who answered. “No, she never told me that.”

“That was — merciful of her.”

“No,” Guenhumara said. “The things that are between you and me are not for sharing with Bedwyr.”

“Nor the things which are between you and Bedwyr for sharing with me. Did ever you love me at all, Guenhumara?”

She did not come back the half step, but I think that something of her longing was toward me, even then. “Yes,” she said, “only we could never cross each other’s thresholds. I tried as well as you, but we could never cross.”

I stepped sideways from before the door, for it seemed to me that this thing was ended. “That is all there is to say, isn’t it?”

Neither of them moved, and I turned on Bedwyr, who seemed to have drawn aside in spirit from what concerned only Guenhumara and me. “Well then, what now? You have tasted her, and it seems that the taste pleases. Are you not going to claim her from me?”

The old mocking smile twisted his lips an instant. “Does a wise man claim Caesar’s wife from Caesar?”

Guenhumara said quickly, “That is what you will do? You will send us away?”

“What else did you think I should do?”

“I don’t know. If you were a different man, I think that you might have us killed. As it is — I don’t know.” She drew a long shaken breath, and began to bargain, or I thought at the time that she was trying to bargain, though I could not grasp her purpose, for I knew well enough that the queenship mattered little to her. I understand now that she was striving desperately to save something out of the ruin, to salve some rags of good for all three of us, for me most of all. “If you will forgive this one night —” Her voice broke and she steadied it, too proud to use a woman’s weapon of tears. “If it seems to you that the years that I have been your faithful wife, and Bedwyr your loyal lieutenant, have any weight to set against this one night, I will promise you — on my knees if you like-that we will never again be alone together, nor speak one word to each other when you are not by.”

Fool! To think that was the thing that mattered, the mere fact of lovemaking. Fool not to understand that I would have had her lie with Bedwyr a score of tunes, not loving him, rather than know her heart crying out to him while she lay faithful one night in my arms. Bedwyr understood, but in some ways Bedwyr and I were nearer to each other than Guenhumara and I had ever been.

“Bedwyr would need to make the half of that promise,” I said harshly, “and I think that he would not make it. Na na, Guenhumara, you offer a thing too hard for mere mortals, for me as well as you. You are no more my wife — nor you, Bedwyr, my lieutenant and my sword brother; all that is finished. . . . It should be pleasant at Coed Gwyn now, though I fear that the snowdrops will be over. You have until noon to make what arrangements you need, and be out of Venta.”

Guenhumara began to plead again, desperately. “Artos, listen — oh listen! Not both of us! Surely it is enough if you banish one? Send me away — send me home in shame to my father’s hearth, for a bad woman who dishonored your bed; or if you are more merciful, let me go back to the House of Holy Ladies at Eburacum, as of my own free will. Only let you not send Bedwyr from you; the time comes when you will need him as you never needed him before!”

Bedwyr still stood unmoving, an image of silent grief, his chin sunk into his cloak and his sword fallen at his feet. He raised his head and looked at me, and I know we were both thinking of the House of Holy Ladies in the Street of the Clothworkers, and Guenhumara clinging to me, looking back as I carried her away, with that shudder as of a wild goose flying over her grave. . . . “Will you abide by that?” I cried to him. “Great God, man, will you let her take the whole payment on her shoulders?”

“In the part assigned to me, there would perhaps be something of payment also.” His words blurred a little, as though his lips were stiff. “But I think that the question does not arise.”

All the flame of my anger had sunk to gray ash, and I was cold to my inmost soul, and suddenly very weary. I said, “Na, it does not arise, there is no more place for you here than there is for her. Take her and go, for I want neither of you near me ever again.”

I dragged open the door, and with Guenhumara’s voice in my ears, calling my name for the last time, stumbled my way down the stairs in the dark, blundering against the walls like one very drunk.

In the courtyard a breath of wind tossed the last living branch of the wild pear tree, and scattered a few fragile petals into the dark well water. . .

THE next day was the third Sunday in the month, a day when, by long custom, Ambrosius, whenever he was in Venta, had sat in audience for any man who had a wrong to be righted, a grievance to air, a plan to put forward, to come to him in the Great Hall. I had continued that practice after him and so that Sunday I sat in the High Seat on the dais with certain of the Companions ranged for a ceremonial guard behind me, and the Queen’s chair empty at my side, and strove to make my bruised brain take in this man’s need for release from military service, and that woman’s complaint against the corn merchant. The old cloak of imperial purple that had also been Ambrosius’s hung on me as heavily as did the custom of the day, but it was good that I had something that must be done. I think if I could have rested that day, I should have gone mad. . . . The first bumblebee of the year had strayed in from outside and was bruising its head against one of the windows that still had glass in it, in futile attempt at escape, and the sound teased and tangled at the edges of my attention. “No escape, no escape —” I frowned, striving to concentrate on the rights and wrongs of the case being poured out before me.

There were more people than usual that day, but of course all Venta must know by now; they stared and whispered, or I thought they did, and I did not care, if only they would go, if only I need not sit there seeing their faces — faces after faces after faces — through a haze made by the throbbing in my head.

It was over and the last of the waiting throng in the forecourt had melted away, and the gray light of day was fading in soft spring rain beyond the windows. And I was about to rise and go back to Ambrosius’s quarters — I had given orders for my gear to be fetched from the Queen’s Courtyard, which was home to me no longer — when a confused tramp of many footsteps sounded outside, and Pharic’s voice answered by another, and as I glanced questioningly at Cei who stood big and grim and gray-golden beside my chair, Guenhumara’s brother came in by the lower door, carrying his favorite falcon hooded on his fist, and followed by all that were left of the mounted band who had come to me as her dowry.

He strode up the hall to stand before me, his tall Caledonians tramping behind him. He made the customary salute before the High Seat, and stood there with his head tipped far back and the level black brows joined into one bar, frowning, and stared at me out of hot red-brown eyes.

“You have something to say to me?” I demanded, at last.

“Aye,” he said. “It is this, Artorius Augustus. It has been told to us that last night you sent Guenhumara my sister and your Queen from the court in shame.”

“It was not I who set the shame on her forehead,” I said coldly.

“Na, and for that reason, because she herself wove the shame, we seek no feud between you and us, no vengeance for your putting her away. Yet still, to me, she is my sister, and to all of us she is the daughter of our chieftain’s hall, and therefore we, who have been your men loyally for ten years and more, count ourselves no more among the ranks of the Companions, because you put her away in shame.”

“I understand,” I said. “You have my leave to go north again to your own place.”

The hot hawk’s stare never changed or wavered from my face. “We seek no leave. We go north, back to our own hills, taking with us the women we have married and the bairns we have bred here in the South. We come to tell you this, no more.”

I remember sitting there in the High Seat, with the carved wolf’s heads on the foreposts biting into my hands, staring and staring into the midst of that proud unswerving gaze. “So be it,” I said at last. “When do you ride?”

“The horses are already saddled, and there will be something of a moon, later.”

“Then it seems that there is nothing more to be said.”

“One thing more.” Pharic’s gaze, leaving my face for the first time, moved deliberately to that of my armor-bearer, who sat in attendance on the dais steps with my spear and buckler across his knees. “Come, Riada.”

He got up slowly but without hesitation; clearly he had expected the summons and knew that it must be obeyed. But he turned to look at me with a troubled and wretched face. “Sir, I do not wish to go. But they are my tribe.”

“They are your tribe,” I said.

He knelt for an instant and touched my foot in the old gesture, then rose and went to join Pharic. And with a last grave salute — there was no hot blood in this parting; it was, as it were, a matter of honor, almost of ritual — the whole band turned about and strode down the hall.

When they were gone, the great chamber seemed very empty, and I was aware suddenly of the rattle of spring rain against the windows, and the bee still bruising its foolish head against the thick greenish panes. I got up slowly, and turned to the door behind the dais. Cei followed me in silence like a big faithful hound, and I turned to him in the doorway, resting a hand on his shoulder for the comfort that I might have found in resting it on Cabal’s head. “Do you remember my saying to you once that I’d have no married women to make trouble among the Companions? That when two men desired one woman, that was when the Brotherhood began to break?”

“Something of the sort,” Cei said heavily.

“I was right, wasn’t I?”

The faithful core of the Brotherhood never broke, save by death, which is another matter. But neither Flavian nor Gwalchmai, not even Cei, were as near to me as Bedwyr had been, and I knew to the full the solitude above the snow line that I had dreaded all my life. And since, in the years that came after, even fighting had for the most part given place to statecraft, there was little to do save work. So I worked, while the springs and autumns passed and in the courtyard where I had kept my dogs as a boy, the last branch of the wild pear tree died. I worked at the task of making Britain strong, of hammering out a stable government; I labored over the treaty with the coastwise Saxons, that the thing might not fall to pieces when I could no longer hold it secure in the hollow of my hand. It is all without life in my mind as a badly tempered blade. All my life I have been a fighting man by nature, an administrator only by difficult adoption. Also, so far as might be, I stopped feeling, in those years, and the things that enter only by the head, no man remembers as he does the things that enter by the heart.

Cerdic had taken the three war boats that were his, with a full crew of sword companions to each of them, and before his days of grace were all run out, had left the shores of Britain. We heard of him from time to time, briefly and uncertainly as the flicker of summer lightning at twilight, now here, now there, chiefly as a raider, occasionally as a sailor of strange seas. We began to hear of him at Portus Namnetus on the Gaulish coast; the place was the perfect stamping ground for the son of Fox Vortigern and the Lady Rowan, for in the country about the Liger mouth, Celt and Saxon for no reason had come together and made a mingled race. And as time went by, it seemed that he had made his home quarters there. Until the ninth or tenth summer after Badon, that was all.

By then, in my efforts to keep the four tribal runs of the Old Kingdom knit together, I had come to spend almost as much time in Sorviodunum, Aquae Sulis and Calleva as I did in Venta, and that year about midsummer, I took the court up to Sorviodunum. It was a dim and sultry summer, the kind of weather in which fever breeds, and the Yellow Hag had come earlier than usual to the towns; but I had never taken the fever — indeed I have seldom in all my life been sick without a wound on me — and so when an aching head and a shiver between the shoulders came upon me on the day after our arrival, I thought only that I had got chilled in the thunder rain that had drenched us on the long ride up from Venta. But within two days I was raving.

At first there were clear intervals, when I returned from the whirling flame-touched world of the fever-madness to the misery of my own body; to darkness that suffocated me or light that clashed like a hammer even when my eyes were closed. And swimming out of a fiery fog into one such interval, I was aware of sounds of gathering and preparation in the world outside, feet, and voices, and the yelp of a trumpet call that was answered from the far side of the city, aware also of Cei and Gwalchmai in urgent low-voiced conclave in the doorway of the long room among the rafters of the King’s Chamber where I lay.

They looked toward me, and with the preternaturally sharpened hearing that comes sometimes with fever, I heard Gwalchmai say: “Yes, now. Be as swift about it as you can; there’s no means of knowing how long before the Yellow Hag claims him again.”

Then Cei was standing over me, with his thumbs thrust into his sword belt in the way that he had, bending forward to peer into my face. “My Lord Artos,” he said, faintly questioning.

“What — is it, Cei? What — all that trampling and trumpeting — outside.” My tongue felt as though it was made of boiled leather, and the worried weather-burned face and burly big-paunched figure slipped to and fro on my sight the more I tried to hold it still.

“It is Cerdic — Artos. Can you hear what I say?”

“What of Cerdic?”

“He’s landed on the west side of Vectis Water, and a young war host with him. They got in in the rain and murk two days since and were ashore before the coast wardens knew a thing of their coming. We got the news last night.”

I remember struggling to my elbow and cursing him that I had not been told before — as though any word could have reached me; I remember striving to be out of my bed, and shouting to Gwalchmai for a draught of some kind that would give me the strength to ride for a few days even if it killed me after, and the two of them holding me back and striving to quieten me as though I were a fire-maddened horse. . . . Later, when I was quiet again, I have a dim half memory of setting some kind of scrawl that might serve for a signature to the marching orders and to an authority for Cei to take command of the war host, and pressing Maximus’s seal onto the hot wax, while Cei steadied the blade of the great sword above my wavering hand. No memory of Cei leaving the room, for I was off and away on my travels once more.

It seemed a very long while later, and indeed I think it was many days, when I began to know myself within the dark shell of my body again, and later still, grew slowly sure that there was a dagger in my back, below the left shoulder blade. Presently I found there was no dagger there, only the blade-shaped pain of the dagger. But the pain pierced deeper and deeper all the while, until I was snatching at my breath like a winded runner, and the world that had just begun to return dissolved about me again into fiery chaos in which the only sure thing was Medraut’s face like a white death mask hanging in the air wherever I looked, until at last that too was burned up in the fires, and the fire itself engulfed in a last great darkness.

How long I lay slung between life and death, I have never been able to judge with any certainty, but it cannot have been far short of a month between the time I first fell sick and the time I awoke in fading lamplight and felt the air of very early morning on my face, and knew that I could breathe again and that I was lying cool and sodden in a pool of sweat.

I tried to drag myself out of it, and could not. And then the Minnow, who was now my armor-bearer, was bending over me, feeling my body with eager hands. He said, “Oh sir, we thought that you would die!” and most surprisingly I felt what seemed to be a drop of warm ram on my face.

I mumbled something about being wet enough already, and the boy began to crow and whimper with laughter, and then Gwalchmai was beside me also, and they were lifting me out of the sodden rugs and spreading over me dry warm ones that smelled of the storage herbs. And sleep gathered me into a gentle darkness.

Day after day I lay flat on the rug-piled bed place under the musty-smelling thatch that twittered with swallows’ nests (it was the King’s Chamber, but conditions were harsher at Sorviodunum than at Venta), tended by Gwalchmai and the Minnow, and the small tubby Jew who had stepped into old Ben Simeon’s shoes. There was a sense of gulf behind me, and everything about me seemed small and bright and far off, like its own reflection in a silver cup. I had no more strength at first than a half-drowned puppy, but at least my mind was my own again, and I was able to demand and attend to news of the fighting — though indeed there was little news that had any form or coherence to it, only a long confused talking of skirmishes and small-scale indecisive actions; of Cerdic’s brilliant use of salt marsh and sea inlet and steaming damp-oak forest, which were home conditions to him now to hold off our own war host from coming to grips with the Saxon kind. At any other time I should have been wild and fuming to take the command myself, but I was so weak, so newly back from the edge of all things, so possessed still with the sense of everything being small and far away, that I was content to lie still and leave the campaign, such as it was, in Cei’s hands.

Gwalchmai was the impatient one, wanting to be with his wounded. He took pains to hide it, but I had not known my Hawk of May for the better part of a lifetime without being able to read his mood and his longings. . . . One evening, when he came to see me after supper as he always did, I remember grumbling to him at the snail pace of my returning strength, and he raised his brows at me. “It is not usual that a man who has passed straight from the Yellow Hag to the Lung Fever finds himself ready to outwrestle the wild aurochs within the week. You are mending, my friend. You’ll do well enough now.”

“And so I suppose you want to leave me and be away to the war host,” I said.

He sat down in the big carved cross-legged chair beside the hearth, with a small grunting sigh, and rubbed his knee. “I’ll bide as long as you need me.”

I turned toward him, seeing with a sudden warm rush of affection, the tired old man that he had become, dried and withered like the wild pear branch in the well courtyard, and I knew that he was not fit for the camp and the war trail, and knew also that he must go. “As to that, I’ve Ben Eleaza to brew my poisons for me. There’s others needing you more than I do now.”

“I’ll not deny that I’ll be glad to get back to the war host and the wounded,” he said simply. “My chief business has been with them a good few years.”

“A mere thirty or so. There’s a good few of us would be dead at least once before this, if it wasn’t for your sharp little knife and stinking fever potions.”

“There’s a good few of us dead, even so,” Gwalchmai said soberly, and we were both thinking back, as men growing old do think back, remembering comrades living and comrades dead, who had been young with us when the Brotherhood itself was young. So the thing was settled and we bided talking for a while, until it was time for Gwalchmai to make his preparations for the journey.

When he got up to go, he swayed suddenly and caught at the back of the chair to steady himself, and for the moment, as he stood brushing his hand across his forehead, it seemed to me that a gray shadow stole over his face, and fear brushed me by. “What’s amiss? Oh good God, Gwalchmai, not you, now!”

“Eh?” He looked up, shaking his head as though to clear it “Na na, maybe a little tired, that’s all. Sometimes I think I’m getting old.”

“You’re ten years younger than I am.”

“I daresay I’ll last a few years more,” Gwalchmai said, and limped serenely to the door — his limp had worsened in the last few years.

I never saw him again.

I had regained just enough strength to crawl from the bed place to my chair beside the hearth, and sit there muffled in rugs, generally with a couple of hounds at my feet (but no hound of mine was ever called Cabal again) when there came to me a certain dispatch from Cei. My lieutenant’s writing was never overeasy to decipher, oddly small and cramped for such a big tempestuous writer, and I pored over it, holding it to the flickering light of the fire, for though it must be still daylight outside, the shutters were closed over the small ragged windows in the thatch, to keep out wind and rain. Moreover, the letter deserved careful reading, for at last there was something to report; the Saxons brought to action at last, and a full-scale battle on the Cloven Way, almost half distance between Venta and Cerdic’s landing beach. Cei had written me the plain account of it, move by countermove and phase by phase, together with certain facts or seeming facts concerning the left cavalry wing which made ugly reading. I could imagine how he would have bitten at his quill and glared in trouble at the lines as he set them down. And in the end, though the Sea Wolves had indeed been halted and even turned back, at cost of bitter man-loss to ourselves, no decisive victory to report; little gamed from the whole summer’s campaigning, save that Cerdic was still penned to the south side of the Forest. And the first of the equinoctial gales was beating its wings against the rattling shutters as I read, and I knew that the campaigning season was over for that year.

When I had reached the cramped signature, I sat for a long time holding the unrolled parchment in my hand. Then I called up the Minnow, who was squatting between the hounds burnishing a shield, and sent him for one of the clerks to take down a letter in my turn. But mine was to Medraut. I don’t know quite what purpose I hoped to serve by summoning him; I suppose I had some idea that if I confronted him with the thing face to face, I might know whether my almost formless suspicions of him were just or not.

A few days later, sleeping before the fire — I slept a great deal at that time — I dreamed of Coed Gwyn, the White Wood, dreamed of the struck notes of a harp, and Guenhumara combing her hair beside a peat fire and Bedwyr sitting with his head against her knees; and great wings that beat me back when I cried out and would have gone to them. . . . And woke with the wet feel of tears on my face, to the wings of another storm drubbing at the shutters and driving the smoke down from the fire hole, and Medraut standing by the hearth.

The rain was still dark on the shoulders of his flung-back cloak, and he stood with one foot on the warm hearthstone, staring into the red eye of the fire, and stripping and stripping his riding gloves between his fingers; the look on him, as always when one saw him suddenly and alone, of having stood there, quite patiently waiting, for a very long time. His cloak was clasped at the shoulder by a new brooch, a black opal set in braided gold wires, that had the look of a gift from some woman. Generally he had something of the sort about him, for I have seen that often an aging woman with a young lover will make him such gifts, and Medraut picked and handled his loves with care, always older women, and those that would dance the man-and-woman dance charmingly with him and raise little trouble when the dance was over. And yet, lightly and cynically as he turned from one woman to another, I think that some part of him was seeking always his mother. It was that that made his womanizing both foul and oddly piteous.

For an instant, I saw him without his being aware of any eye upon him save those of the hounds at my feet, yet his face betrayed no more than it would have done had he known himself under scrutiny. He had grown a shell of cool assurance that he had not possessed ten years ago, and looking at him it was easy to believe that he was a magnificent cavalry commander — but it would have been as easy to believe that he was anything else, in the empty chamber behind his eyes. As he could blend into the surroundings of his life, so it seemed that he could take on the color of one’s own thoughts, so that I could never be quite sure whether I saw Medraut, or only what I imagined Medraut to be. Only in the opal on his shoulder, the flame and peacock colors woke and shimmered and died again, and I had the strange fancy that in the dark fires of the jewel one might read what never showed behind his eyes.

Then one of the hounds stirred, growling very softly — most dogs disliked Medraut — and he looked my way and saw that I was awake and watching him and stopped playing with his wet riding gloves. “God’s greeting to you, Artos my father. You are better, they tell me.”

“God’s greeting to you, Medraut my son; I grow stronger each day.” It was the first time in ten years that he had stood before me in my own quarters.

“You sent for me,” he said at last.

“I sent for you — in the first place that you may explain to me why this summer’s campaigning against Cerdic and his followers has had no better success.”

He stiffened for a moment and then said quickly, “At least we halted their northward advance, and thrust them back into the lower forest and the marshes.”

“But not back to the coast — and that by the loss, it seems, of many men to our war host and few to theirs.”

“My father knows that the fever has thinned our own ranks; and also what like of country that is to fight over.”

“A land blurred between land and water, swamp and forest. A country, more than any other part of our coastline, well nigh impossible to clear of an enemy, once they have made good their landing.”

“Well?” he said softly and on the faintest note of challenge.

“I have been thinking it something strange that Cerdic should know so well where the soft belly lies most open to the knife. I have been thinking it fortunate for him that he should choose a summer when the Yellow Hag is rife among the war host ranged against him.”

I wondered if it was possible, remembering the night we made the East Coast treaty, that this son of mine, who had come to me eaten with jealousy of Cerdic my enemy, should have common cause with him now. I had a sick feeling that it was perfectly possible. Christos! If only I could look just once behind his eyes. . . .

“Doubtless Cerdic has his scouting parties — and alas! there are traitors in every camp.”

“Not in every camp,” I said, “but undoubtedly in some.” I pulled myself up in the great chair, thrusting back the dark warm wolf furs, for suddenly I seemed suffocating, and reached for the narrow parchment roll that lay on the table beside me, but I did not open it, I knew the contents by heart. “Your arguments are unanswerable. See if you can do as well with the final engagement on the Cloven Way.”

He dropped his gaze for an instant to the letter I held, then raised it again blandly to my face. “Cei will have given you a better and fuller account of that than I can do.”

“Better, doubtless, but not so detailed at certain points. There is, for instance, a curious lack of detail in his account of the breakup of the left wing that robbed us of a fully decisive victory.”

“The left wing being my command,” Medraut said, and began again to play with his gloves. “The detail is very easily supplied. Cei failed to second me at the crucial moment.”

“Cei states that you were in no need of seconding, and he had sharper call for the reserves elsewhere, until the whole center of the wing crumpled without warning.”

“But then, Cei has always hated me,” he said.

“Cei doesn’t know how to hate — not as we understand the word,” I said. “He’s too like a Saxon. It takes the Celtic blood to know truly how to hate.”

And we looked at each other, eye to eye, in a small and powerful stillness in the heart of the storm that battered the shutters and drove the white rain hushing across the thatch. But the opal at his shoulder caught fire from an infinitesimal movement and for an instant was an eye opened on some strange and beautiful half-hell.

Then Medraut retreated a little. “In battle it is not always easy to choose — even to know — where lies the sharpest need. I know that my need of seconding was as the need of lifeblood, but it seemed that Cei did not. Let my father believe I fought the best action that I could without.”

“Cei states here that you wheeled your charge-back on too close a curve, so that the formation became clogged and ragged, and consequently the impact lost its force.”

“It seems that the account was not so lacking in detail!”

“There is no more to it than that,” I said. “But Name of Names! That is the mistake of a raw squadron captain on his first maneuvers; you are among the most able of cavalry commanders, Medraut; that kind of mistake is not for you!”

He gave me a small bow; his face had drained of color so that in the light of the fat-lamp, the faint discoloration of the lids made his eyes seem painted like a woman’s. “My father is overlavish with his praise. . . . There is always, of course, the question of land shape to be considered; this has been a wet summer, and the valley turned oversoft for horses a short distance below our fighting ground. Unfortunately even the most able of your cavalry commanders cannot command a countryside to give him sufficient elbow room.”

I had the sense of trying to hold a marsh light between finger and thumb that one always felt when dealing with Medraut, and knew that whatever purpose I had hoped to serve by this interview, I had served none; none in the world. “So.” I laid Cei’s letter back on the table beside me. “You have accounted for all things most nobly,” and my voice sounded old and hopeless in my own ears.

“That was all my father wished to say to me?”

“Yes. No, one thing more.” I struggled to clear my mind from the gray cloud of weariness that still descended upon me so easily. “I have said that you are among the most able of my cavalry commanders, and that is no more than the truth; you also have the trick of drawing good fortune to you in battle, and so you have a large following. But men do not follow you for love, any more than you lead them for love. If you make more mistakes of that kind you will begin to lose your reputation not only for skill, but for luck, and if you lose that, you will lose your following.”

He smiled, a smile that was light and sweet as honey smeared on aloes, leaves. “My father has no need to warn me, I know to the thumbnail’s breadth what I can afford, and I shall not afford more. I never gamble beyond my means.”

“See that you don’t,” I said, “only see that you don’t, Medraut.”

The smile became yet sweeter, but he still played with his gloves and maybe that was to hide that his hands were shaking. “I have my father’s leave to go? I made great haste to answer his summons, and I am something wet.”

In the doorway, his hand on the golden Ophir rug that hung across the ill-fitting door, he checked and turned once more. “Has any news come to my father lately out of Arfon?”

“What news should there be out of Arfon?”

“Only women’s news, to be sure. They say that Maelgwn has taken a second bride.”

I was surprised, not at the news (for Maelgwn’s first wife had died the previous year, and he was not one to sleep long alone), but that Medraut should trouble with it.

“And begun to build another oratory,” added Medraut.

“So? Is there some connection?”

“The bride was his nephew’s wife — not his half sister, I grant you, but still, his nephew’s wife — Gwen Alarch, they call her.” He was as malicious as a gossiping old woman with a young one’s name in her hands. “The boy was killed hunting, and some say not by accident, but I doubt if Maelgwn loses as much sleep over that as for another cause. . . . Maybe he’ll get him a son yet, and I’d not count too much on his faith-keeping hereafter, if that happens.”

“Na?” I said.

He shook his head. “Na. After all, the Saxon flood will not rise far into the mountains; and with a son to follow him, it must seem the more desirable to make sure of the Lordship of Arfon after you.”

And noticing that he set himself aside from all claim to Arfon, I knew well enough the reason — that he flew at higher game. And again it crossed my mind that it was as well that I had never allowed Constantine to be openly named as my heir. Medraut must know clearly enough where the choice must fall, but as long as nothing was said, he would be in no hurry. There was a deadly patience about him, as there had been about his mother.

The golden rug swung back into place and his light step was swallowed instantly by the wind and the rain — unless he was still standing outside, smiling that light swift sweet smile that made one’s blood feel thin.

Gwalchmai died about that same time, as quietly and suddenly as a tired man falling asleep by the fire after a hard day’s work, Cei told me, weeping for him, when a few days later the first of the Company returned to winter quarters.

The ranks were thinning fast.

NEXT spring I was prepared for another thrust of the Sea Wolves, but though we heard of more of the long war boats following in the wake of last year’s, and others with women and even children, the thrust never came; and when we moved against them in our turn, they simply melted among the forest and marshlands like a mist.

And so as the years passed, the thing settled into a fitful border warfare which has served to keep the Sea Wolves penned within some kind of frontier, but no more. It seems strange, when one comes to think of it, that we have not been able to drive them back into the sea. And yet — I don’t know — there is Pictish blood in the folk of those parts, left over from the great Pict Wars of Maximus’s day; the Picts are second only to the Little Dark People for knowing the secret possibilities of their own countryside, and they do not love the smell of Rome.

Also, we have never, in all these years, been free to turn the whole war host their way; there has been Eburacum and the Lindum coastline in need of our aid, and the Scots from the West every summer, and not even a whole heart within ourselves, for among the princes of the Cymri, who have always fought like dogs whenever the High King’s hand was off them, the word was running to and fro like a little furtive wind through the grass, that Artos the Bear was one who had forgotten his own people to carry a Roman sword. Maybe someone set that word running; I do not know. I know that three years since, I had to deal with the princedoms of Vortiporus and Cynglass as one deals with enemy territory. . . .

This summer the Scots made a sudden attack on Môn and the coast of all the northern Cymri (last summer the harvest failed and last winter was a lean one; that always sets the young men wandering) and I went up with two hundred of the Companions, leaving Cei in command at Venta, to the aid of Maelgwn and the coastwise princes who were for the most part still loyal. The Scots are brave men though their fires flare too windily over too little of red heart; and it was the beginning of harvesttime before the flurry of small buffeting wide-spaced attacks were dealt with to the last one.

We made our base camp, our central stronghold all summer, in the old Roman fort of Segontium that clung to the foot of the mountains commanding the Straits of Môn, until with the shores quiet again, it was time to be turning the horses’ heads south once more. It was a soft evening, that last one I spent — the last that I shall ever spend — among my own hills, the sun westering into a smoky haze beyond the low hills of Môn, and every comber of the western sea shot through with translucent gold as it came in to crash and cream below the fortress walls. Arfon tore at my heart that evening, all the shadowed glens of Arfon and swift white falls of mountain water, and the high tops that were tawny now in late summer as a hound’s coat, and the moss-fragrant woods below Dynas Pharaon where I shall not walk again. I would have put off the parting for a few days longer, lingering, finding some excuse, but I knew we should have slow traveling on the way south, for I intended to swing wide of the direct road, in order to pass through as many of the Cymric and border princedoms as might be, and sup in hall with as many of their lords. I thought it might serve some good purpose, that they should see the High King at their own hearths. God help me, I was still fool enough to cling to that old hopeless dream of a Britain strongly enough bonded to stand with shields still linked, when I was no longer there.

Fool! Fool! Fool!

With a short while to waste before supper, I had gone up with Maelgwn into the old watchtower at the southeast angle of the fort, to look at the falcons we had housed there — Maelgwn was a falconer to his fingertips, like Pharic, and where he went his hawks went too. I can see the small round chamber now — lit partly by the coppery sunset light through the archer’s window, partly by the flare of the newly kindled torch in its sconce by the winding stair-head. The hawks and falcons hooded and unhooded on their perches, with the startling black and white slashes of their mutes patterning the wall behind them. I can smell the smoke curling up the stair from the driftwood and sea-wrack fire that the falconers had lit in the chamber below, and hear the harsh cries and wing clappings of feeding time. Maelgwn had pulled on an ancient hawking glove, and was feeding the birds himself, taking from his falconer the gobbets of meat, and holding each in turn to the bird that snatched it from him. The last, and clearly his favorite, was a young golden eagle, whom he took up to feed on the fist. “This one I took myself from the eyrie in May; a small thing of down and quills, but a demon even then — eh, my Lucifer?” He held a bloody partridge to the bird, who took it with a lightning strike of the talons, and began to break it up with the delicacy of its kind; and then, the food being gone, rattled his feathers and sat with distended crop, brooding on his lord’s fist, like a chained Caesar and outglaring the world in general with a mad topaz eye. They were two of a kind, I thought, watching the man standing where he had moved into the window with the great bird on his fist; both predators, both knowing no law but their own, both magnificent in their way, and I wondered again if they were true, those tales of his first wife’s death being no natural one. It was certainly true that he had killed the boy for the sake of Gwen Alarch’s pretty hair and little soft breasts. Well, he would hold Arfon with a strong hand after me, he might ride the princedom with a wolf bit himself, but assuredly no other would encroach on its borders. I wished that I could be as sure of Constantine’s strength.

Suddenly Maelgwn’s likeness to the eagle sharpened, as his eyes widened, focusing on something a long way off, and his finger checked in the light repeated movement of drawing again and again down the burnished neck feathers.

He said nothing, but I got up from the box on which I had been sitting and crossed to the window.

Far up the track that had once been the military road from Moridunum and the South a small puff of dust caught the last of the sunlight and turned to a golden smudge with a seed of darkness at its heart. It was scarcely larger than a plume of thistle silk, and yet I knew — or maybe it only seemed afterward as though I knew — that it was the doom I had waited for almost forty years, that the rider hammering down the old road through the mountains, with his dust cloud rolling behind him, was the Dark Rider, for me.

“Someone has an urgent tale to tell, that he carries it at that speed,” Maelgwn said.

I nodded, but I do not think I spoke; watching that small ominous plume of dust spin nearer at breakneck speed, dropping out of the sunlight that still clung to the skirts of the hills, into the shadows that were already creeping in across the coast. And a few moments later I heard, faintly, faintly as the blood in my own ears, above the soft voice of the sea, the beat of horse’s hooves. In a little, I could see the horseman, bent low over his horse’s neck, and the drum of hooves rose pounding and urgent; it was almost dusk now, below the fortress walls, and men and torches were gathering to the gate. I pushed off with my hands from the high cold window ledge; time to go down. . . . “It will be for me,” I said, and turned and clattered down the winding stair, my own shadow wheeling darkly ahead of me on the torchlit wall. Maelgwn followed me, still carrying the golden eagle, and at the foot of the stairway Flavian joined us, hurrying from the stables.

The gates were open when we reached the clear space before them, and in the midst of a small startled crowd a man was dropping from the back of a foundered horse. The poor brute was black with sweat and crusted with the summer dust, his flanks heaved distressfully, and the foam dripping from his muzzle as he stood with drooping head was rank and bloody; and the rider, staggering where he stood, was in little better case, white from head to foot with the dust that had made raw red rims around his bleared eyes, save where the trickling sweat had cut channels in it down his haggard forehead and cheeks. Indeed it was small wonder that in the first moment of seeing him neither Flavian nor I recognized his son.

Then Flavian uttered a startled exclamation, and it was as though a film dropped from my eyes. “Minnow! What word do you bring me?”

He looked up at sound of my voice, and came and stumbled onto his knees at my feet, his head and shoulders hanging. “An ill word.” The dust was in his throat too, and his voice a mere croak. “An ill word, my Lord Artos. Do not make me speak it; it is all here in this letter —”

I took the roll which he pulled from the breast of his tunic and handed up to me, broke Cei’s familiar seal and snapped the crimson thread, and opened it out. Someone was holding a torch for me, and the flames of it, teased by the light sea wind that was rising with sunset, fluttered over the crabbed writing. Yet I had none of my usual difficulty in reading anything from Cei’s hand; it was as though it read itself, every word striking up at me from the ill-cured parchment with a small cold separate shock. I read on, neither slow nor quick, and when the last word was reached, looked up, with a head that felt cold and clear and oddly separate from my body. I saw the faces of my own Companions and those who followed Maelgwn turned toward me in the torchlight, stilled in waiting and unspoken question.

“This is from Cei,” I said. “He sends me word that Cerdic of the West Seax has been strengthened by a great war fleet from the Ligis Estuary — a lean summer and a hard winter we had last year, you’ll remember — and that Medraut my son has raised the standard of revolt against me. He has left the war host, taking a goodly following of our young warriors with him, and joined himself to Cerdic at Vindocladia. They have sent out the Cran Tara for the Scots and the Painted People in Gaul to join them.”

The silence closed in over my voice, and went on and on, the sound of the sea echoed hollow in it, and a crying of gulls like lost souls.

Nobody spoke; they were waiting for me to speak again; only somebody swallowed thickly, and I saw Flavian’s hand clench on his sword belt until the knuckles shone waxy white as mutton bone. In the end it was not I, but Maelgwn’s great golden eagle that broke the silence when it had begun to seem unbreakable so that it must endure forever. Disturbed by what he felt around him, and swift as all his kind to catch the mood of men, he began to bate wildly from the fist, leaping against his jesses while his jarring screams tore the silence across and across and his vast beating wingspread seeming to shut out the sky. Maelgwn fought to quieten and control him, cursing softly, while the great wings thrashed about his head, and now that the silence was broken, men’s voices splurged up, and incredulous and impotently raging.

When at last the great bird was quieted, and the men, answering to my upflung fist, had grown silent again, I heard my own voice against the wash of the tide. “It will be moonrise in about three hours. In three hours we ride south, my brothers.” And the words seemed to be an echo of something said before.

(“For God’s sake come!” Cei had written. “Gathering all men possible by the way. We need every man, but above all, for God’s sake come yourself with all speed, for if ever we needed you to lead us, we need you now!”)

Within the half of an hour, Companions and tribesmen were snatching a meal in the crumbling mess hall. Around the upper fire a little apart from the rest, I had gathered to me Maelgwn himself with a couple of chieftains who had not yet dispersed to their own places after the summer’s fighting, Owain and Flavian and the Minnow still in all his dust; and while we ate we held a hurried council of war. From outside came the sounds of the aroused camp, men’s voices, and the trampling and neighing of horses as they were brought in, the clang of weapons fetched out from the armory and flung down in heaps.

“If Medraut has but now sent out the Cran Tara, it must be some while before the Scots or the Picts can gather to him in strength,” I said. “If the Fates are not against us we may well be able to take him and Cerdic before their friends can reach them.”

The Minnow, who had been staring with red-rimmed eyes into the fire, looked up and shook his head, which with the dust of his wild ride was grayer than his father’s. “If Noni Heron’s Feather and his sons speak truth, the Cran Tara must have gone out in the spring, for a war hosting at harvesttime. With a northwest wind to speed the currachs, the Scots and the Painted People will not be late to the feast.”

And it seemed to me that my heart settled, cold and heavy as flint, under my breastbone. For the wind which had risen at sunset and was siffling through the sand-dune grasses and across the ramparts of the fort blew from the northwest. . . .

Flavian beat his open hand on his knee. “Harvesttime! And three quarters of the war host at home in their own villages, getting in the barley!”

“So the call must have gone out at least two months before he left Venta,” I said, but I was speaking more to myself than to the other men about the fire. “While he still supped in hall with the rest of us. It is true that one cannot see into his eyes. . . .”

“He has the forethought and the gift for seeing and acting swiftly on the chances of a situation that becomes a High King, if nothing else,” Maelgwn said, in his throat, not without admiration.

A High King. Yes, the High Kingship was the quarry that Medraut hunted. The Purple would mean nothing to him, it belonged to another world than his. There would not be another Emperor of the West; all that would be over with my going. If he was victorious there would be a High King, and half a length behind him, as it were, a Saxon holding the greatest power in Britain; just as once it had been with Vortigern and the Sea Wolf Hengest. And then when the time came, as it must, for a trial of strength between them, there would be only the Saxon, and Britain would be torn between the tree and the stallion, and the end would be darkness, after all.

I must have groaned aloud, for there was a small swift movement among the men around the fire, and suddenly they were all. looking at me as though I had drawn their attention by some sound. I laughed, to cover the thing, whatever it had been, and tossed the last of my barley crust to the nearest hound, and looked around at them, gathering them in. “It is in my mind that with Cerdic and Medraut striking up from Vindocladia, the obvious place for a landing of the Scots, and presumably the Painted People with them, is well up the Sabrina Sea — somewhere in the marsh and reed country northwest of Lindinis — away beyond the Apple Island, maybe — low shores and small wandering waterways to run the war boats inland and ground them, and having landed, they will cut through to join hands with the Saxons as soon as may be.”

“The old game of cutting the kingdom in two,” Owain said.

“Partly, partly also, of course, to combine into their full strength before we can come to grips with them. It seems that they are all too likely to succeed in that, yet even now, if we ride like the hammers of hell, there is still a chance that we may meet one half of the enemy host in time to deal with it before it is joined by the other.”

“And so?” Flavian said.

“We ride like the hammers of hell. But before we ride, I have a Cran Tara of my own to send out. Maelgwn, can you furnish me with ink and parchment or tablets?”

“Na,” said Maelgwn, lordlywise. “I am no clerk.”

“But good God, man, have you no clerk here with the means of writing a letter?”

In the end he brought, with his own hands, a breviary rich with monk’s work in gold leaf and glimmering colors, that I think he loved next after his hawks and his women, though for its beauty rather than its content, and tossed it to me like a thing of no account. And I tore out the pages I needed, and tossed it back to him. One page, I remember, was half taken up with the initial S, fashioned into the likeness of a dragon with long arched neck and fantastic foliated tail, that was like the royal dragon arm ring that I had worn for twenty years. Another was gemmed with tiny trefoil flowers and leaves among the prayers, another bordered with delicate interlaced strapwork ending in birds’ heads. I turned them over and wrote on their blank sides on my knee, reading the hurried words aloud as I did so, that the others might know what orders I sent, and where.

I wrote to Connory at Deva, to rouse the Northern war bands and bring them down as swiftly as might be; they could not reach us until many days after battle joined, but whichever way it went, they might serve some purpose later. I scrawled my orders to Aurelius the Dog, the Lord of Glevum, to rush every man he could gather, down the Sabrina coast to prevent a landing if it were not already too late. But it would be too late, I knew that in the dark of my bones. To Cador of Dumnonia to get his war bands out before the fangs of the trap closed, and join Cei at — I hesitated, looking at the country in my inner eye — at Sorviodunum. Lastly I wrote to Cei himself, honoring him with the dragon page, bidding him call back the war host from their harvesting (but he would be doing that already) ; bidding him take the gathered host westward as far as Sorviodunum, and make his rallying place there while he waited for my coming. That would put them about midway between Venta and the southern Mendips. If they pushed farther west they might become engaged with the enemy before I could reach them, and I dared not risk the outcome of that.

I had already sent out a summons to any of the tribesmen of my own hills who could join me before moonrise, and Maelgwn had his orders to gather what troops he could within the next day, and bring them after me.

When the letters were written, someone brought me balls of beeswax, and I sealed them with Maximus’s great amethyst seal in the pommel of my sword, with the spread-winged eagle and the proud surrounding legend IMPERATOR. I called up three of the young warriors about the lower fires, all well known to me as swift horsemen and for their knowledge of the hills and hill tracks, and gave Cador’s letter to the first, bidding him take the shortest way south to the Silures coast, and for God’s sake keep out of Vortiporus’s hands, and cross by fisher boat into Dumnonia. The letters for Aurelius the Dog, and for Cei, I gave to the other two, bidding them ride together as far as Glevum, and the one to drop off there while the other pressed straight on to Sorviodunum. And when they had snatched up the last of their supper, flung on their cloaks and gone from the hall, that left only Connory and the North.

I remember looking across the fire to where the Minnow sat half asleep and propped against his father’s knee, and saw how Flavian’s hand with the great flawed emerald rested on the young man’s dusty shoulder. The last man to wear that ring had died in my service twenty years ago; in all likelihood Flavian would be dying with me in a few days from now. Three were too many to take in direct succession from one man’s line.

“Minnow,” I said, and as he roused and shook himself upright in his place, “eat first and sleep after. I can give you four hours for sleeping, after that take a fresh horse — see to that, Maelgwn my brother, since I shall be on the road south before then — and carry my summons up to Connory at Deva. If you can get two changes of horse on the way you should be there in less than three days.”

“Sir — let someone else carry the message,” he said after a moment. “I am one of your Companions, I have been your armor-bearer. It is my place to ride with you.”

“It is your place to obey my orders,” I said, and he got up and came and took the packet, hesitated a perceptible moment longer, then touched it to his forehead before stowing it in the sweat-stained breast of his tunic.

When he flung on his cloak and went out into the night as the others had done, his father got up and strolled after him. And I knew that somewhere in the dark outside — probably Flavian would have taken him to his own sleeping place — they would be taking their leave of each other, almost certainly for the last time.

They wasted no time over it; the Minnow needed his few hours’ sleep, and Flavian had work to do like the rest of us. He came back into the mess hall alone, just as we were making ready to leave it, looking much as usual, save that the old scar on his temple showed up more clearly than was its wont, an odd thing to betray a man. He gave me a long steady look of gratitude, and I noticed that the battered signet ring was no longer on his hand, only the skin was very white where it had been.

We were tightening sword belts and kicking the last bones to the hounds, when he paused beside me and asked in an undertone the question that no other man had asked me yet. “Sir — of the men who followed Medraut, did Cei say were there any of the Company?”

“Sixty-seven,” I said, picking up the cloak that I had laid aside in the heat of the hall.

“Oh God!” he said, and choked on the words, and as he turned to pick up with needless care a fallen ale cup, I thought I heard him sob.

“It will be mostly the young ones — the cubs grow weary of following an old leader.” I gripped his shoulder for an instant in passing. “Not your cub.”

And he was beside me, master of himself again, when I came with the rest of the fighting men behind me, to the entrance. Men and shadows were hurrying to and fro, and the soft blustery darkness of the hills was teased with torches. Maelgwn’s summons had begun to take effect already, for among our own big horses standing ready saddled or being walked up and down on the grass-grown parade ground, the fitful light touched on the shaggy flanks of more than a score of the wiry hill ponies and the bright hair and enameled dagger hilts of the tribesmen who rode them. And for a moment my heart lifted at the sight.

The moon was just shaking clear of the mountains inland when we rode out from Segontium, each man with a rolled-up cloak and a bag of cheese and bannocks strapped behind his saddle, for on this road we must cover the ground too swiftly for even the lightest of pack beasts. At the last, Maelgwn with his household warriors behind him had come to my stirrup, and promised again to be after me with a full war host before the dust had settled behind our horses’ heels. I had leaned down to him from the saddle, and we spat and struck palms on it like men sealing a bargain. He meant his promise, but I knew that he would fail me, even then, as surely as I knew that old Cynglass and Vortiporus of Dyfed were already my enemies. There was a small son up at Dynas Pharaon, with Gwen Alarch, his mother.

WE struck away inland by the mountain road to the head of the Lake of Bala — from there one may look up the long tangle of glens southwestward toward Coed Gwyn, not much over an hour’s ride away — and then turned farther southward by a half-lost herding track, and began the grueling business of getting the horses across country by ridge crests and up and down slopes of rock and scree where even the sure-footed mountain ponies could scarcely pass. Much of the way we walked and scrambled, leading and dragging the poor beasts behind us. The second night we slept chilled and dripping above the cloud line, slept for no more than a few hours and then pushed on again. Once we came near to losing three of the horses in a peat moss. But we got through at last, and in better time than if we had followed the long road around by Mediomanum. The sun was well up, and the mists of the summer morning rising, when we came down from the high moors, past the worked-out copper mines at the head of the stream that fed the first beginnings of the great Sabrina. The cotton grass was in flower and the first harebells in the shelter of the old mine workings, and the little amber bees were busy among the bell heather. And looking back I could still see Yr Widdfa upreared like a cloud shadow in the sky. I made my salute to it, as one does to a chieftain, in farewell, and we pushed on the flagging horses down the broadening streamside toward the Sabrina head, and Viroconium in the lush lowlands.

At Viroconium we managed to get remounts for the worse spent of the horses, and pushed on again, south by Glevum and Corinium and on down the Cunetio road that carried us within a few miles of Badon Hill, and out along the last long rolling stride of the downs to Sorviodunum.

And all the length of our wild ride, as the news spread like forest fire, men came in to join us in ones and twos and little reckless bands of horsemen, so that when we came in sight of the small fortress city crouched on its hilltop, I had more than four hundred flying cavalry behind me, in place of the two hundred that had followed me north. We had been just under six days on the road, but five of the horses died in their picket lines that night.

The war camp was spread across the low ground about the gray walled mount which rose for a citadel in its midst, and the smoke of evening cooking fires lying over it in a haze that softened the outline of fodder stacks and branch-woven bothies; and out of the haze the familiar many-mingled sounds of a great camp came to meet us, the cracked bell note of hammer on armorer’s anvil over all. At any rate Cei had received my message. Our coming must have been seen by the scouts while we were still at a distance, for already men were hurrying down from the higher fringes of the camp to press about the stockade gateway and cheer us in — cheer us as though we had come to lead them to another Badon. And Cei was at my stirrup before I had well reined in — or rather, a gaunt, gray, red-eyed, avenging ghost in the likeness of Cei, with his buckler already clanging behind his shoulder.

“What news?” I demanded.

“The Saxons and the Scots have joined shields, something over a day’s march to the west.”

So we were too late. Well, I had had little hope of catching the two halves of the enemy host before they could combine. I swung a leg over my tired horse’s back, and dropped heavily to the ground. “How many do they muster?”

“All told, some eight thousand, if the scouts make no mistake. Noni Heron’s Feather is in the camp now, if you would speak with him.”

I nodded. “How many of ours?”

“Not much above half that as yet. I dared wait no more than four days before marching. Marius and Tyrnon are gathering more to bring on after us, but the gathering is none so easy, in these times — may his soul rot for it!”

“That he chooses harvesttime? In his place I should do the same,” I said. Neither of us spoke Medraut’s name in that first moment.

He looked at me with a furious grief in his hot blue eyes. “I was not thinking of the harvesttime, not so much of the harvesttime. I was thinking that one toad’s poison may spread a long way. It isn’t only the men who have marched out with him to join the Saxon camp; even over those that bide still in their own places, even over some of those who answered the muster call, he has smeared his own foul slime. Three days since a man said to my very face, ‘Why should we not have peace with Cerdic and his kind as we have with the men of the Saxon shore? With Artos it is all fighting, even with his own people among the hills, and we must leave the harvest to ruin. Medraut knows a better way.’ ”

We stood grimly silent for a few moments; there seemed nothing to be said.

Then I asked, “Have the Glevum troops come in?” for the city had been empty of its fighting men when we rode through (one messenger rides faster than a whole war band) but they might still be scouring the Sabrina marshes for the landing that they had been too late to stop.

“This morning. As soon as they found themselves too late to prevent the Scots landing, they pressed on to the hosting place — indeed, they were here and making themselves free of the city wineshops when our foreguard came up.”

I was glancing about the camp, seeing the great dragon standard upreared among the cooking fires, and farther off, the black deer-hound of Glevum, but nowhere the saffron flash of the Dumnonian banner. “What of Cador and Constantine?”

“No sign as yet.”

“No word at all?”

He shook his head, like that of a gray and ragged old sheep dog beset by flies.

“If they are not here by dawn tomorrow, it will surely mean that they could not get out in time,” I said, “and we must count them lost to us and do as best we may without them. With the traitor princes of my own people already flighting south to join the Saxons, we cannot afford a longer delay, even for Marius and Tyrnon to come up. Call me a council, Cei; we can make plans as we eat as we did at Badon.”

But of all that hurriedly called council I can remember little, save that I ordered a general advance westward at dawn, save also — and this I remember clearly indeed — that seeing how sorely we were outnumbered, I proposed a battle formation that had never been used before, but which seemed to offer some hope of holding off the threat of the longer enemy wings, and that somehow I hammered the rest of the council into agreeing to it. All the rest is lost in a gray shifting murk like the smoke of the cooking fires. Also it seems very long ago — longer ago than our council before Badon fight, and yet it cannot be many days — God knows how many or how few; it grows hard to keep count of time. . . .

In the lag end of the night the long-awaited messenger got through to us from Constantine. “From Constantine?” I said when he was brought to me. “What of Cador, the King?”

“My Lord the King grows old before his tune. He is sick and cannot ride,” the man said, standing before me in the cold flare of torches in the windy dawn. “Therefore he sends his son to lead the war bands.”

“How soon can they join us?”

“Here?” he said, doubtfully.

“No, we march westward in an hour; we shall be within a few miles of the enemy when we camp again.”

“So, then maybe not long past noon tomorrow. They make forced marching.”

“By noon tomorrow the work may be for the wolves and ravens rather than for the men of Dumnonia,” I said. “They must force the march still farther. How large is the force?”

“The household warriors, and such of the war host as we could gather quickly. It is harvesttime.”

Harvesttime, harvesttime!

I said, “Go now and get something in your belly, then get back to Constantine and tell him the need that we have of his coming swiftly.”

Within the hour, we marched; pushing westward over the great summer-pale combers of the Downs, following the Legion’s road at first, then by the alder green ridgeway into the low-lying country below the Mendips. And that night we camped on a patch of rising ground in a soft country of deep woods and ferny hillsides, with the downs of our day’s march rising cloud-dappled, chalk-scarred, behind us, and far ahead, the gleam of water and the curious lightening of the sky that told of marsh country. Far ahead also, unglimpsed, unhinted at in the summer quiet land sweep, were the enemy war host; the enemy war host led against me by my son and the man whom I would have had most joyfully for my son if Fate had woven the pattern that way. They were encamped some five miles off, reported the little dark scouts who brought in word of them, and I would have pushed on then and forced the battle, for there were still some hours of daylight left, and in that way we would have had the advantage of surprise with us; but half my men were blind weary, and to go into battle next day with men strengthened by a few hours’ sleep, would, I judged, be a thing to outweigh the loss of surprise. So we made camp, and mounted a strong watch, with a screen of outpost pickets beyond. And while the main camp was being pitched, I rode the rounds of the outposts with Cei, from one to another of the knots of men lying up wherever there was cover and command of the country westward, in small ferny hillside hollows, or the fringes of an alder thicket, among the last pink smoke of the summer willow herb, while the horses grazed nearby. In one such outpost as we rode nearer, they were singing softly, with their mouths full of bannock; an unlikely war song, but I have noticed that men only sing of fighting in time of peace.

Singing very softly with a swing that was at once grim and merry, their eyes on the track where it passed below them. They rolled over and scrambled to their feet at my coming, and the youngling in charge of them came and stood at my stirrup, looking up, eager for my approval because this was his first command of men. “All well?” I said, in the usual form.

“All well, Caesar,” he returned, and then, forgetting his dignity, grinned, and flashed me the “Thumbs Up” that men used to use in the arena, but only boys use now. I stuck my own thumb skyward, laughing, as I turned my horse away.

I saw his head on a Saxon spear before the same time next evening. It was still recognizable by the big crescent-shaped mole on one cheek.

It was sunset when, the round completed, we turned back toward the camp. But I remember that as though by common consent, with no word spoken between us, we wheeled the horses on a low billow of rising land, and looked westward once more, and having looked, could neither of us look away. I have seen wild sunsets in my time, but seldom, surely never, a sky quite like that one. It was as though beyond the dark, gold-fringed cloud bars of the west, the world itself were burning, and the torn-off rags of the burning, spreading into great wings as they went, were drifting all across the sky so that even when one looked upward to the zenith, still the sky was full of the rush of vast wings of flame. Far off toward the Island of Apples, the winding waters of the reed country caught fire from the burning west, and earth and sky alike blazed into an oriflamme. It was a sunset full of the sound of trumpets and the flying of banners, a sunset that made one feel naked under the eye of God. . . .

“If tomorrow we go down into the Dark,” Cei said at last, with awe in his deep grumble of a voice as the radiance began to fade, “at least we have seen the sunset.”

But for the moment I was looking at something else, at red petals of fire brightening far out in the dusking marshes. The campfires of the Saxon war host.

In a while we turned the horses and rode on into camp, to find Marius and Tyrnon there with their hastily gathered reinforcements who had marched in just ahead of us. God’s face was not turned from us in all things, it seemed.

When all things were in train, we ate well that night, knowing that there would be little time for food in the morning, and as soon as the meal was done with, men began to roll themselves in their cloaks and lie down with their feet to the fires.

I withdrew to my own quarters, to the hut of hurdle roofed with the striped awning of a captured war boat, gay as a horse-fair wine booth save that in place of the vine garland my battered personal standard hung before it for a sign. I pulled off iron cap and sword belt and flung down, still in my war shirt, on a pile of bracken with my saddle for a pillow. A saddle makes a good enough pillow, but a hound’s flank makes a better. . . .

At most times I have been able to sleep on the eve of battle, if I had an hour or so to lie down, but that night I could not, for the thoughts and pictures that whirled through my head almost as though I had the fever.

I lay for a long time staring at the small bright flame-bud of the tallow glim in its lantern, and the flame had no more heart nor comfort to it than the Solas Sidh, and the long upward shadows that it threw all up the wattle walls were the shadows of the future pressing in upon me, crowding me with mouthless questions to which, God knows, I had no answer; shadows that came trailing the past behind them also, so that I caught again the acrid smell of the dung fires at Narbo Martius, and the thunder of my horse’s hooves in Nant Ffrancon and heard again, across the years, my own voice and Ambrosius’s: “Then why don’t we yield now, and make an end . . . ? They say it is easier to drown if you don’t struggle.” “For an idea, for an ideal, for a dream.” “A dream may be the best thing to die for.” But I had no dream left. . . . “When the dream fails, that is when the people die.” But Ambrosius had not said that — Bedwyr had said it — something of the kind — in the sunlight of the Queen’s Courtyard, with the pigeons crooning on the store-wing roof.

So that I longed with a small whimpering longing to set my finger one time more on the rose mole on Guenhumara’s breast, but could not remember whether it was on her left breast or her right. . . .

Gradually past and future began to mingle; tomorrow’s battle and Ambrosius’s last hunting becoming one, as the light of the candle spread and blurred into the shadows, and the sounds of the nighttime camp that had been sharp-edged and assertive grew blurred also, by little and little, until they were no more than the wash of the tide behind the sand dunes that faced toward Môn. . . .

I heard a voice outside, a challenge and a sharp exclamation beyond the nearest watch fire, and shook myself clear of the little dark lapping waves of sleep, thinking that maybe another scout had come in. Then somebody put aside the loose fold of the awning at the bothy entrance, and I turned on my elbow, and saw a man standing there caught between the lights of the watch fire and the tallow glim. A lean old man in a war shirt of glimmering mail. His proud mane of iron-colored hair, bound about the hollow temples with a strip of crimson leather, showed one lock as white as the grinning mask stripe of a badger. And he stood looking at me strangely under one level brow and one that flew wild.

“Bedwyr,” I said. “Bedwyr?” and sat up slowly, and drew my legs under me and got slowly to my feet, and we stood confronting each other for a long time.

“Is it yourself, then, or your ghost?” I said at last, for caught between the two lights, he might have been a ghost indeed, called up to me by my need, by my own nearness to the crossing over.

He moved then, one step forward, and let the striped fold of the awning fall behind him, and I saw that he was living flesh and blood. “No ghost,” he said. “I have disobeyed your orders, and come back, Artos.”

I could have cried out to him, as Jonathan to David, by the forbidden love names that are not used between men; I could have flung my arms about his shoulders. Instead, I stood where I had risen, and said, “Why did you not join me on the road south?”

“The news did not reach me until you were many miles on your way, and from Coed Gwyn the swiftest way is by the coast road so that one does not fall into traitor hands on the way, and so that one can get a fisher boat across the Sabrina. Can you spare me a mount? A river currach is no horse transport.”

“A mount maybe, though we are somewhat short of horses,” I said. “Your old command is Flavian’s now.” Almost I might have been speaking to a stranger.

“I did not come seeking my old command. A fighting place among the Companions, no more.”

The aching silence fell between us again. The loose end of the awning flapped in the light wind like a bird with a broken wing, and the candle flame leapt and fluttered, casting strange shadows on the rough hurdles that formed the walls.

“You will have no illusions as to the likely outcome of tomorrow’s fight?” I said (but already it was today’s).

“Not many.” There was a twist of the old reckless laughter on his lips.

“And so you came back.”

“I have always been one to choose with some care the company that I die in.”

Age had made him uglier than ever; the lines of his face that had been fantastic in his young manhood tipped over into the grotesque. It was a face made for a bitter jest by some God with a crooked sense of humor, and Christos! My heart whimpered for joy at the sight of it.

“Take me back into your service, Artos.”

“What of Guenhumara?”

He said steadily, “I left her at the gate of the little nunnery in Caredegion, out on the headland. You know it? They keep the holy fire burning always for Saint Bride. She will be happier there, I think, than at Eburacum, even if I could have spared the time to take her there.”

And I remembered the House of Holy Ladies in the Street of the Clothworkers, and Guenhumara shuddering in the curve of my bridle arm as she looked back toward it, as though a wild goose had flown over her grave. “She hated cages. She was afraid of them,” was all I could find to say.

“She went in through the door of the wall, of her own free wish,” he said dully.

“Were you not happy together, all those years?”

“Not very.”

“But — Bedwyr, you loved her, and she you?”

He said simply, “Oh yes, we loved each other, but you were always between us.”

It was a small bothy, one step brought us to meet in the midst of it; my arms were around him, and his around me, the strong right arm and the maimed left that felt sapless and brittle as a bit of dead stick, and we held fast together, and wept somewhat, each into the hollow of the other’s shoulder. Maybe it is easier to weep when one grows old, than it was in the flower of life. The strength ebbs, or the wisdom grows. . . . It no longer tears at the soul; there is even something of catharsis, of healing, in it. . . .

In the dark hour before dawn, I was roused to the news, brought in by one of the scouts, that the enemy were showing the first sign of stirring, and with him another rider from Constantine. The men of Dumnonia were pressing on to the limit of their endurance, but the marsh country had forced them around by the long way and they could not be with us much more than an hour before noon. I got up and swallowed a few mouthfuls of bannock and beer, while I armed and made ready. Bedwyr, having no duties of command to hold him now, came and served me as armor-bearer — he was skillful enough with that arm, though he lacked much strength in it — and afterward I did the same for him, so that in the end we armed each other like brothers.

I took especial pains that morning, combing out my hair and beard, and settling the folds of my old weather-worn cloak with care, arranging and rearranging the plume of yellow corn marigold in its shoulder brooch — those of the Brotherhood who yet remained still rode into battle with some such grace note about them. I knew, I had accepted, that Fate had finished the pattern, that the doom was accomplished, and I was to come by my death that day (but I thought that it would be swift and seemly, as the thing should be, as it had been for Ambrosius; not this untidy lingering by the way!). And I could only hope that my death might serve also as ransom for the people. I knew, too, as surely as I knew the other thing, that the pattern demanded that I should take Medraut with me, and prayed that, so, the old sin might be wiped out and the final defeat of Britain not demanded. At the least, with Medraut gone, Britain might be saved the fatal split within herself that must let the darkness in. And hurriedly, for already I could hear through the wattle walls the sound of the squadrons mustering, I made ready as though I rode to take a bride or a triumph, for it was as though something in me, older than my own life, the thing that I had felt at my crowning, knew that there was a certain fitness of things, an outward and visible sign of willingness, to be made in the sight of the gods. . . . I remembered all at once how carefully Ambrosius had made his young armor-bearer trim his hair for him on the morning of his last hunting.

THE stormy promise of last night’s sunset had been fulfilled in a day of soft blustering wind and squalls of rain, and the standards and the squadron pennons flew as though already carried at the charge. Beyond the huts and the cooking fires the whole war host was already mustered, horse and foot, archers and spearmen. The wild riders of my own mountains, sitting their small shaggy steeds as though they and the horses were one; the men of Glevum under the black hound banner of their prince; the men of the high chalk downs, with something of the formidable steadiness of the Legions about them still. If only, among them, I could have caught the saffron gleam of Cador’s standard, but the men of the West must be still many miles away. I wondered how near were Cynglass and Vortiporus. . . . My own Companions were drawn up before the rest, yellow-touched with the corn marigolds that each man wore in his helmet comb or shoulder buckle, waiting with Flavian at their head, for me to join them. My grand old Signus had died three years ago, and the big silver stallion Gray Falcon, who had taken his place as chief among my war steeds, was being walked up and down close by. He whinnied at sight of me, and the men shouted my name in greeting, so that it sounded like the sudden crash of waves on a sandy shore.

I flung up an arm to them in reply, and mounting, wheeled Gray Falcon in among them, with Bedwyr at my side on a tall raking sorrel drawn from the reserves, and suddenly knew the Brotherhood complete again. Pharic and his Caledonians, whose tribe had first loyalty with them, the traitors who had followed Medraut over to the Saxon camp, they were cut away; the familiar faces that were lacking and long since rotted into skulls were another matter, for it was not death could break the Brotherhood; what was left was the hard core, the men who, new-joined last year or with forty years of service behind them, chose to tuck the corn marigold in their war caps and ride into this last battle with me. These were the Companions of the Bear. And I have never loved them quite as I loved them at that moment.

I should speak to them now; almost always before battle I had made them some kind of fighting speech, but there had been so many battles, so many fighting speeches, that there seemed nothing left to say, and looking at their grim faces, I knew it was no time for false heartening. So I cried out to them only, “Brothers, you know the odds against us today; therefore let us fight so that whether we win or whether we die, the harpers shall sing of us for a thousand years!”

I flashed up my hand to Cei in command of the main cavalry, and old Marius who led the foot, and the great aurochs horn sang harshly merry and was echoed across the camp, the notes that ordered the march tossed to and fro on the squally wind that ruffled up and silvered the hazel leaves. And the first band of horse moved off, raising their spears to me in salute as they passed.

Hail Caesar! Those about to die. . . .

We rode in the usual formation for hostile country, for we could not be sure how near the enemy scouts and advance parties might be: foreguards flung out ahead, and knots of light horse screening the flanks of the main body, and I remember that Bedwyr, riding beside me, had his harp slung on his shoulder, as he had used to ride into battles, and presently, though he did not unsling it, he began to sing, so softly that it scarcely broke through the beat of his horse’s hooves, but I caught the breath of it and it was the first song that ever I had heard from him, the lament for the Corn King that helps the crops to grow, the promise of his return — out of the mists, back from the land of youth, strong with the sound of trumpets under the apple boughs . . . and I remembered the big stars and the smell of dung fires and the mule drivers listening on the outfringe of the firelight. . . . He must have heard himself at the same instant as I did, for we glanced aside at each other, and he laughed and flung up his head and broke baying into a cattle-reeving song of the Berwyn Hills.

Presently three of our scouts came riding back over the skyline of the low ridge as though the red-eared hounds of Anwn were after them. The foremost reined up in a smother of dust almost under Gray Falcon’s nose so that the big horse snorted and danced in his tracks. “Caesar, the advance guard is tangled with the Saxon outposts! They’re falling back —”

I sent the three of them out again, and rising in my stirrups shouted to the Companions to come on. The trumpeter beside me raised the great aurochs horn to his lips and sent the echoes flying out over the marshes, and we broke forward at an increased speed, the whole war host changing pattern and deploying for action at full march, so that we became, as it were, two advancing battle lines one behind the other, each with its own spear center and cavalry wings, and the small free bodies of light horse that flanked and partly joined the two together.

Just below the crest of the shallow ridge I checked them, and with Bedwyr and two of my captains rode forward through the furze to get a view of the Saxon position. It was a spur of the same ridge from which, farther back into the hills, I had seen the Saxon watch fires brightening under last night’s sunset.

On the very fringe of the marshes, where soft ground and winding waterways must limit the use of cavalry, the enemy battle line was drawn up not much more than a mile distant. Medraut, with the war training that I had given him — and the inborn skill that I had given him too — had chosen his ground well. In the clear between the soft showers of blowing mizzle, the Barbarian battle line was sharp-edged and pricked with detail; I could make out in their center the horsetail standard of Cerdic, where the Saxon leader held his heavy shield warriors, his hearth companions, white as a gleam of bog grass against the blurred greens and grays of marsh and reedbed; more white, that was the lime-washed Scottish bucklers; the dull glint of shield boss and spear blade and war cap splintering into sudden light where a gleam of wet sunshine fled across the marshes and the northward swell of the hills. No sign as yet of the pied and checkered standards of the traitors Cynglass and Vortiporus. God be thanked for that at least. Above all I saw the blood-red gleam on the right flank where the main part of the enemy cavalry was posted. (Cavalry wings on a Saxon war line!) Medraut was flying the Red Dragon of Britain for his battle standard, and my gorge rose at the sight.

Between the Saxon host and the ridge from which we looked toward it, our advance cavalry was falling back, scattered and pursued by a flying mob of light horsemen and running spears, and even as I looked, another band of riders appeared from behind some thick hawthorn scrub, and came curving across like a skein of wild geese in flight, to cut off our men from all hope of retreat.

I had hoped to draw the enemy up from their chosen position onto ground that would allow us better use of our advantage in cavalry, but to delay for that now would mean the sacrifice of the whole of our advance force. Again I spoke to the trumpeter, and again the notes of the war horn sang thin over the western countryside. The tramp of feet and the smother of hooves came sweeping up behind me, and I swung Gray Falcon into place at the head of the Companions as we spilled like a wave over the comb of the ridge, and on down to join with the advance guard. The enemy broke off as they saw us nearing, and scattered back to their own battle line, and we swept on and down, the advance troops wheeling about once more to join with us. It is seldom good to take foot any distance at the full charge, lest they lose formation and breath together; but there were bowmen among the ranks of the great Saxon battle line, and I must get them across the open ground as swiftly as might be. The first flight of arrows thrummed out at us as we came within range, and men pitched in their stride and went down; then our own horse archers opened up in reply, and in the enemy ranks, also, gaps darkened for an instant, until each was closed up by the springing in of the man behind. Forward and away at the canter and the long loping run, the standards lifting and flying on the air of our going, the war horns yelping, and under the horns I raised the war cry: “Yr Widdfa! Yr Widdfa!”

The enemy also had broken forward, to the booming of their own bulls’ horns and the long-drawn shuddering German war howl, having learned the unwisdom, I suppose, of receiving a cavalry charge while at the halt. And so we swept together, yelling at the speed of both armies.

Far on either side of us spread the Barbarian wings, and I glanced back once as we rode, to make sure that the second line on which our hope depended was keeping station, and saw the solid wave of men and horses sweeping after us, under the standards of Powys and Glevum. So far, so good; but in this country where there could be little free maneuvering for cavalry, to engage solidly all along the line would be to ask to be engulfed, and I began to swing the whole war host slantwise so as to bring the Companions and the flower of the spear ranks against, as I judged, the weakest span of the enemy battle line, that held by the Scottish warriors. The spears were flung, a dark whistling shower, and we charged home with drawn swords. War front and war front rolled together with crash of meeting shields that filled the marsh skies with wheeling and calling clouds of birds, and instantly there rose the clash and grind of weapons, the full-throated roar of war cry against war cry, the screams of horses, all blended into the great formless smother of sound that is the voice of all battles.

The line of white shields wavered, and clouds of lime dust rode into the air, choking and blinding friend and foe alike, and in the midst of the sharp white haze we were hacking and trampling our way forward. Almost it seemed, in one short triumphant burst of time, that we should break through to take them in the rear before our own weaker left wing, which I had held back somewhat by the slantwise charge, became fully engaged. That was when Medraut’s cavalry took us on the flank. The charge was brilliantly timed and handled and, save for the unmounted spearmen I had set amongst us, we must have been crushed in by it. As it was, our outer ranks were forced back, and the thing that I had dreaded and prepared for began to happen: the enemy’s longer flank was curling around our own to engulf us. Behind me I heard the trumpets sounding, and knew that our second-line warriors were wheeling about to make their stand back to back with us, while the farthest right of my own wing, withdrawing under the crash of Medraut’s charge, were linking shields with them.

Now we were a long narrow island, thrust and driven at from all sides, but an island that stood like rock, while again and again the dark waves of destruction came roaring in on us, and again and again we flung them back. I had pulled back the Companions into the slim space between the two fighting lines, to re-form them, and that I might have freedom of movement to come at any part of the war host. And I remember Flavian grinning at me from under the standard. He had lost his helmet and his forehead was streaked with blood, and he shouted to me above the furnace roar of battle: “A hot day, and somewhat dusty!” I saw Cei with every cheap glass ornament he possessed bright upon him, standing like a giant in his stirrups in the midst of a battle all his own. I saw men going down, and others stepping forward to fill their places, and knew that soon the lines would grow perilously thin; soon the island, the British shield-burg, must begin to shrink. Constantine and his war bands could not be far off now — and nor could the traitor Cymri. . . .

In the spot where the Barbarian host had come together, encircling us, it seemed to me suddenly, more by a kind of hunter’s instinct than by anything I could see, that the joining place was weak. I sent the order to Tyrnon and saw him unleash the flower of the war host’s cavalry. They rolled forward, not fast, but remorseless as a wave, the spearmen parting to let them through. . . . And suddenly the pressure against us on that side began to slacken. I heard the triumphant yell as it was torn apart and flung off, and the whole battle mass that had been knotted fast seemed to shake free of the bonds that had held it and grow fluid again. With the incredible swiftness with which the entire nature of a battle can change, the whole field had opened up and was now on the move. The fighting lines were swaying to and fro over ground that had been fought over all morning and was cumbered with dead men and dead horses, slippery with blood, stinking. Our hands and war gear were stained red, and here and there a man with his shield torn away would lift a battered corpse in front of him to receive the enemy spears. In the midst of the swifter swirl of cavalry and light troops, Marius with the heavy spearmen had made for the white horse standard, and was locked with Cerdic’s troops like a pair of tusk-locked boars, while again Medraut’s flying squadrons were sweeping down upon us.

The Saxons had unleashed their berserkers some time before, and when a shadow slid up from the undergrowth of battle almost under Gray Falcon’s breast and turned about with knife in hand, my heart jumped cold and I had already flung myself sideways in the saddle in desperate essay to cut the creature down when I saw that it was no drug-maddened Barbarian, but one of the Little Dark People, and turned the sword point just in time. He cried out something to me, but in the tumult I could not hear and shouted to him in return, “Up! Come up here, then!”

And he set one foot over mine in the stirrup, and next instant was clinging to my saddlebow for support, his narrow face streaked with the clay and ochre war patterns on a level with my own, the three buzzards’ feathers thrust into his knotted-up hair bowed and shivering sideways in the squally wind. “My Lord the Bear, the men from the North are near, those that come to join with the Wolves.”

“How near?”

He held up a spread hand. “As many bowshots as there are fingers on my hands and toes on my feet, maybe less — they come swiftly, swiftly, like a wolf pack on the trail.”

And as swiftly as he had come, he sprang down and was gone into the thickest storm of the fighting, where our ranks were desperately striving to rally under the hammer blow of Medraut’s last charge. One more such charge as that . . . and we should scarce be rallied from this one before the newcomers were upon us also. . . .

I wrenched Gray Falcon half around on his haunches, and thrust in beside Cei who was standing in his stirrups to steady his men, his eyes blue fires in a face smeared with blood and filth, and shouted to him, “Constantine can’t be far off now, but it seems that Cynglass and Vortiporus will be here first.”

“How near?” he roared back, as I had done. (“Ya-ai ya ya ya! Stand firm, you rabble!”)

“Something well under a score of bowshots. Take over, Cei. I’m going to try and draw Medraut off for a while.”

“Don’t be a fool, Artos, you can’t!”

“If I can’t, then there’ll be nothing but the bits for Constantine to pick up when he does get through. It’s your battle now.”

He looked around at me, grinning like a dog in the gray jut of his beard, then flung the half shield away from him, and sent his horse plunging forward, and the fight closed over between him and me.

I drove back somehow through the turmoil to my own squadron, flinging off my cloak of the betraying purple and bundling it under my shield, shouted to them to throw away the yellow corn marigolds and follow me, and a few moments later, with my trumpeter beside me and young Drusus, with my personal standard dragged from its lance pole and bundled under one arm, was leading them out of the boil of battle.

“Is it some game that we play?” Flavian cried, leaning from his saddle toward me.

“A game of marsh lights and played with Medraut. The curs of the Cymri are overnear, and Cei and Marius can do without his attentions as well.”

“This is a game that my father would have enjoyed,” he said, and choked on the last word and pitched from the saddle with a flung spear between his shoulders.

We swung wide, with a small ragged pursuit on our heels, and into cover of the alder woods that fringed the rising ground, then turned and charged them. They scattered back, and we did not wait to ride down the survivors, but turned about once more and headed at full gallop into the soft rolling country that lifted above the marsh to the north. Bedwyr had taken Flavian’s place, and rode stirrup to stirrup with me as we had ridden in the early days, as we struggled upward in desperate haste toward the hill track from Aquae Sulis. Just before we lost the full cover of the woods I called a few moments’ halt. “Now, Drusus, get the standard back on its spear shaft, and you Alun Dryfed, and you Gallgoid, your cloak is a good bright one. Tear it in half and it shall serve us for two —” I flung on my own cloak of the unmistakable purple at the same time, and when we rode on again, widely spaced now to allow for the phantom cavalry among us, we carried on long hazel branch or spearpoint what seemed to be the pennons of a dozen squadrons. We came out on to the bush-scattered ferny hillside, and turning Gray Falcon aside a short distance down the wood-shore, I could see the whole battle spread before me, and the pied flicker of the traitor standards already on the fringe of it. The Little Dark Warrior had spoken truth. I could see also, but still a long way off, the faint dust cloud of marching men on the great causeway road from Lindinis.

“They’ve a long way to go! My God; they’ve a long way to go!”

I turned back to the rest again. “All’s well, raise the standard again. Now your turn, Aidan. Sound me a fanfare.” And touching heel to Gray Falcon’s flank, I rode forward with Drusus close behind me, choosing my line so as to give an uninterrupted view to the enemy, and pausing to let the gleam of the horse’s coat and the red and gold flame of the standard show up against the deep summer colors of the hillside. Beyond me, the bushes and tall form of the trackside would break and blur the numbers and movement of the rest of the squadron, leaving only the pennons clear — those pennons of a dozen squadrons: Artos and his heavy cavalry reserves sweeping around through the higher ground to take them on the flank! Even from that distance I could hear the roar as we were sighted, and looking back before I rejoined the head of the squadron and swung them northward again following the track into a shallow fold of the hills, saw a mass of cavalry already shaking free from the main mass of the Saxon war host, and swinging toward the higher ground.

A short while later we let ourselves be glimpsed again on the crest of another soft billow of moor, then rode like the hammers of hell for the place where the track forded a stream coming down from the higher hills, and beyond it became a stony scramble half lost among the heather of a narrow combe. We gained it ahead of Medraut and his horsemen, splashed through, and wheeled about on the farther side.

“We are not like to find a better place to hold them,” I said.

And Bedwyr nodded, cleaning his sword blade on his horse’s mane that was almost as red, that it might be bright for further use. “I never saw a place more to my mind,” he said, “nor a Company,” and met my eye, and I thought how he had said last night, “I have always been one to choose with care the company I die in.”

Far off and dulled by the swell of the land, I could hear the rumor of battle like the rumor of a storm rushing through distant forest country, and already the nearing beat of hooves drumming up toward us. I looked around me once, I remember, seeing the pocket of level in the quiet lap of the moors, the stream silvering over the ford, the furze coming into its second flowering, bean-scented in the sun and wet. There were linnets in the furze, I heard their song; and the great cloud shadows sailed up from the south as they had done on the morning of Badon fight. A good place for a last stand, with the combe narrowing behind us, and the river ford before.

I remembered, across more than half a lifetime, Irach leaping upon the enemy spears, and for an instant felt again the oneness of all things, that is man’s comfort under his knowledge of being alone. Yes, a good place for a final stand. By the time the last of us fell, Constantine should surely have come up. . . .

I glanced behind me and on either side at the score of men ranged there with me, and saw it in their faces, that they knew their purpose here as well as I did. I wanted to say something to them now, something to toughen the fiber and kindle the heart, but that is for an army, and this was a knot of friends, and instead I said: “My most dear, we have fought many fights together, and this is the last of them and it must be the best. If it is given to men to remember in the life we go to, remember that I loved you, and do not forget that you loved me.”

They looked back at me kindly, as friend looks at friend. Only one of them spoke and that was Drusus my standard-bearer, the youngest of them all. He said: “We have good memories, Artos the Bear.”

And then in a new burst of cloud shadows sweeping up from the marshes, Medraut’s cavalry burst out of the valley before us. They reined in on the farther bank, and for a long trampling pause, each looked to the other across the running water. There were faces that I knew among the horsemen on the farther bank; in the midst and forefront of them, Medraut sitting his tall roan with his naked sword across its neck and on his arm the great dragon arm ring of a Prince of Britain, that was brother to the one I wore on my own. The stream was little more than a couple of spear lengths wide, and we could have spoken to each other as one speaks to the man across the hearth. We looked eye into eye and I saw his nostrils widen and tremble. Then he cried out and heeled his horse into the water, and instantly the foremost of his riders plunged after him.

And we, on the near bank, braced ourselves and spurred forward to meet the coming shock.

We fought hock-deep across the ford, up to the girths on either side, and the water sheeted up, boiling to a yeasty turmoil, white and then stained with rusty streaks that spread down the run of the stream. Men were in the water, and a horse screamed and went down, rolling belly up into shallows like a great wineskin. Again and again they hurled against us, yelling, and again and again we flung them back. More horses were down now, and men fought on foot, knee-deep, thigh-deep, in the boiling shallows, and so far, not one of the traitors had reached the western bank. Small difference if they had; but men fighting as we were must have something to hold, some rampart which is of the spirit as much as of pass or narrows or running water; and for us it was the ford and the line pf that lowland stream. . . . Bedwyr was beside me, the rest of the surviving Companions close-knit on either hand, and if we never fought in all our lives before, God of gods! we fought then! And in the midst of all, Medraut and I came together, naturally and inevitably, as to a meeting long appointed.

Spears had no part in this kind of fighting, it was work for swords, whether on horseback or on foot, and we strove together almost knee to knee, while the water boiled and the spray flew like the spume of breaking waves. The horses slipped and scrambled among the stones of the ford, neighing in fury, and both of us had flung aside the bullhide bucklers which hampered the bridle arm in maneuvering. Medraut was fighting on the defensive, waiting to pounce. His face was set in a small, bright, curiously rigid smile, and I watched his eyes as one watches the eyes of a wild animal, waiting for it to spring.

But in the end it was I who broke through his guard first with a blow that should have landed between neck and shoulder, but in the same instant his roan stumbled, and the stroke caught him on the comb of his war cap and swept him from the saddle.

He went down with a shuddering splash in his heavy mail sark that sent the water sheeting upward, and was on his feet again, still gripping his sword, while the roan plunged snorting away. He leapt in under my guard with shortened blade, and stabbed upward. The point went under the skirts of my war shirt and entered at the groin, and I felt the white shrieking anguish pierce through me, up and up until it seemed to reach my heart; I felt death enter with it, and was aware of the dark blood gouting over Gray Falcon’s shoulder, and Medraut’s face with the small bright smile still frozen upon it. The sky was darkening, but I knew quite clearly that I had time and strength for one more blow, and I wrenched the horse trampling around upon him, and thrust at the throat, bare above his war sark, as he flung back his head to hold me still in sight. The same blow that I had struck at Cerdic, all those years ago. But this time it did not go amiss. The blood burst out with the blade, it spurted in little bright jets through his fingers when he dropped his sword to clutch with both hands at his throat, and in the moment before he fell, I saw his eyes widen in a kind of wonder. That was the moment when he understood that the doom between us demanded for its fulfillment, not that he should kill me or I him, but that each should be the death of the other.

He opened his mouth gasping for air and blood came out of that too, and with it his last breath in a kind of thin bubbling retch.

As he fell, the whole world swam in one vast darkening circle, and I pitched from the saddle on top of him. I remember hitting the water, and the circle turned black.

I tried to cling to the darkness, but the pain was too bright, too fiery, and tore it from my grasp. And I was lying in this place, in this small cell where I lie now, and the cell was full of tall shadows on the lamplit walls. The hooded shadows of monks, the barbed shadows of gray men in war harness, like the ghosts of some long-forgotten battle. But at first the shadows seemed more real than the men, for I had not thought to wake into the world of living men again. I heard a low mutter that might have been prayer or only the beating of a moth’s wings about the light. I heard someone groaning, too, and felt the slow-drawn rasp of it in my own throat, but did not think at first to connect the two. A shadow, darker than the rest against the lamp, was kneeling beside me; it stirred and bent forward, and I saw that it was not a shadow at all, but Bedwyr. But whether all that was of the first time, or whether other tunes came into it, I do not know; indeed all time has seemed confused these last few days, so that there is no saying, “This thing happened after that,” for all things seem present together, and most things far away, farther, farther away than the night that Ambrosius gave me my wooden foil. . . . I said, “Where is this place?”

Or at least the question came to my mind, and I must have spoken it, for an old ancient Brother, whose tonsured head had a silver nimbus like a rain cloud with the sun behind it, said, “Most often men call it ‘The Island of Apples.’ ”

“I have been here before?” For the name chimed in my head, but I could not remember.

And he said, “You have been here before, my Lord Artos. I took your horse, and led you up to the hall, to Ambrosius at supper,” and I thought that he wept, and wondered why.

I fumbled out a hand to the dark shadow between me and the lamp, which was Bedwyr, and he caught it in his own, the sound one, and drew it to his knee and held it there, and something of life seemed to flow from his hand into mine, so that the leaden chill lifted from my heart and brain, and I was able to think and remember again. I said, “Did we gain time enough? Did Constantine get through in time?”

And Bedwyr said, bending closer, “Constantine got through. The victory is yours, Artos, a narrow victory, but it is yours.”

A great wave of relief rose in me, with the next wave of pain, but the pain outstripped the relief so that for a while I could neither see nor think nor even feel save with the feeling of the flesh. Thank God it no longer comes like that — and when at last it ebbed again, the relief that I had known ebbed with it and grew small and thin. “How narrow?”

“As when two hounds fight until their flanks are laid open and their throats in ribbons, and one breaks off and runs howling; and yet for both hounds alike, there is no more that they can do for a while and a while save crawl into a dark place and lick their wounds.” He began to tell me how Connory of Deva had come in together with the Lords of Strathclyde, and were hounding the surviving Saxons and their allies through the reed country and back toward their southern settlements, while Marius was mustering the remains of the war host to regarrison Venta. I did not ask as to Cei and Flavian; I knew. But I asked after a while, “How many of the Company lived?”

“Of those that remained with the main action, something under half,” he said. “Of your own squadron, Alun Dryfed and little Hilarian” — he told off two or three more names — “and myself.”

“It is more than I expected,” I said, “but then I did not expect to live myself long enough to hear the tally.”

“Medraut’s men lost heart after he was dead. They ran. After that it was easy.”

“And so we have won another lease of time,” I said by and by. “A few more years, maybe.”

“Do you remember saying, once, that every year we gained would mean that just so much more of Britain would survive when the flood overwhelms us at the last?” Bedwyr put his face very near my own as though he were trying to reach me across a great distance, as once I had tried to reach him.

“Did I say that? Pray God the truth is in it. I have labored hard to build a Britain strong and united, but it is in my heart that unless Constantine can hold them, the Tribes will have sprung apart once more before three harvests are gathered, and so presently the Saxons will walk in. . . . Yet maybe we have held the pass long enough for something to survive behind us. I don’t know — I don’t know-”

And then another time, I think it was another tune, I asked Bedwyr when we were alone together, “Bedwyr, does the war host know how it is with me?”

“We have told them that you are wounded.”

“Who knows that it is the death wound?”

“Myself and Alun Dryfed, and maybe the reed cutter whom we borrowed with his boat, to bring you here by the swiftest way. The Council must know by now, and Constantine, of course. For the rest, we have let them believe that you are sore wounded and we have taken you up to the monastery for tending. A few may guess, but none will know anything more.”

“That is good. Now listen, my dear; presently there will be more fighting; therefore, lest the Barbarians make a triumph out of my death, and our own soldiers lose heart in the knowledge of it, leave the matter there. Nobody save yourself and the brown Brothers here must see my body once the breath is out of it, and no one must know the place of my grave. So they will maybe fight on with a better heart. You understand?”

“I understand,” Bedwyr said. He was trying to feed me with warm salted milk all the while, like a woman with a sick child, but my belly would not hold it.

“I think you do. It was for that reason that you brought me here instead of carrying me back to camp with the rest of the wounded, was it not?”

“Try to sleep,” he said.

But there was still one thing that I must do. “Constantine, send for Constantine.”

He came, and stood in the doorway until I called him closer; a dark square-set man with his father’s windy fires sunk to a steadier glow in him.

“Constantine, son of Cador, you know that I have no son to hold Britain after me?”

“That I know,” he said, “and I am sorry.”

“Are you? Did the women often tell you how Maximus’s great seal sprang from my sword hilt into your nest of skins beside you, when you were a babe lying at your mother’s feet?”

“The women always tell such things.”

But he knew as well as I did, why I had sent for him.

“Sometimes they may be worth listening to. Now listen to me. Long since, I set my sealed word in the Council’s keeping, naming you, who are the last of the royal blood, as my heir to come after me. But that will scarcely serve now.”

He shook his head.

So I sent for the Father Abbot and his Senior Brethren; Bedwyr I needed not to send for, for he was already there; and with a clerk to make a written record, I called them to witness that Constantine, son of Cador of Dumnonia, is to be High King of Britain after me, and added: “Until I come again.”

And held Constantine’s gaze with my own, until he bowed his head, saying, “I am not Artos the Bear, but I will hold Britain as best I may, or may God turn His face away from me.”

I bade Bedwyr take the great dragon arm ring from above my elbow, and spring it onto Constantine’s arm, and he stood looking down at it, as though he waited. I think he half expected me to add my sword to the gift, until he remembered that it would be taken as certain proof of my death by all who saw him wear it. And yet I knew that in some way I must give it to him; it was his, the Sword of Britain, and carried the High Kingship with it.

After a long pause, he said, “How shall I know when I am in truth the High King?”

“You will not have long to wait,” I said, thinking only that he was impatient. “The death smell has been in the wound for days, now. Does it signify?”

“Because the people will not know? It signifies to me, to know whether I am but Regent or have in truth the right to my sacring.”

And by his use of the word, I knew that he understood and accepted all that the kingship carried with it.

And so I knew what I must do with my sword.

“There is a wildfowl mere only a few miles north of this place, and eastward of it the land rises somewhat. Set a watcher there among the alder woods — one that you can trust — and when I am dead, Bedwyr shall bring my sword and throw it into the mere. That shall be your sign. Will it serve?”

“It will serve,” he said.

In the red sunset light I can see Bedwyr’s face that is darkened when the lamps are lit, and the angry crusted wound that has laid it open from jaw to temple and drawn out that devil’s eyebrow into a yet wilder flare. And when I fumble up my hand to touch it, it is wet with tears like a woman’s — but I do not think I ever knew Guenhumara weep.

But there is something changed about him; something lacking. . . .

“What has happened to your harp, Bedwyr? I have scarcely ever seen you without your harp in all these years.”

“It was torn apart in the fighting. No matter; there will be no more songs.” His head is low so that I cannot see his face any more; his sound arm under my head, a better pillow than a saddle — as good as a hound’s flank when you sleep beside the watch fire with the apple tree branches overhead.

But he is wrong. Suddenly I know he is wrong. We have held the Pass long enough — something will remain.

“There will be more songs — more songs tomorrow, though it is not we who shall sing them.”