‘Cradoc will give you his daughter if you ask, because you are of my Company, and because he would have died at Aber of the White Shells, if you had not turned the blow that was meant for him.’
Aquila said, ‘If it seems to Ambrosius good that there should be such ties between his folk and Vortimer’s folk, then surely it is for Ambrosius himself to take a wife from the hearth of some greater prince than Cradoc.’
Ambrosius raised his head slowly, and there was a look in his eyes as though he were seeing something at a great distance. ‘To lead Britain is enough for one man; with a whole heart and no other ties.’
Aquila was silent. Because of Flavia he wanted nothing to do with women, ever. They were dangerous, they could hurt too much. But he hoped that if Ambrosius had asked him to walk out of the candle-lit guest place to certain death, because in some way his death could help to bind Britain together and drive the barbarians into the sea, he would have done it. Had he any right to refuse the lesser thing?
Ambrosius smiled a little, looking into his eyes. ‘Rhyanidd is very fair—cream and heather-honey.’
Aquila never knew what made him say it, hanging the hunting shield from its peg on the king-post with great care as he did so. ‘Cream and heather-honey may grow to be a weariness. If I must take one, when I want neither, I’ll take the little brown sister.’
13
The Empty Hut
NEXT morning, with the bustle of preparations for departure already beginning to rise, Aquila sought out Cradoc the Chieftain and asked him for Ness, that he might take her with him for his wife when he rode north again. He did not quite believe, even while he asked, that Ambrosius had been right. But when he had finished asking, he found that Ambrosius had been perfectly right. There was no escape.
When he and Cradoc had done talking together, and everything was settled, he did not at once go to join the rest of the Companions. He should have gone, he knew; they were already gathering, the horses being walked up and down, but he had to be alone for a little. He turned aside into the orchard and walked to and fro under the trees, with his sword gathered into his arms. The gold was gone from the orchard, even the apples had lost their warmth of colour, and the branches swayed in the small, chill wind that turned up the leaves silverly against the drifting, sheep’s-wool sky. He turned at last to go back to the others—and found Ness standing at a little distance, watching him.
He went towards her slowly, and they stood and looked at each other. ‘What is it that you do here, Ness?’ he asked at last, in a tone as grey as the morning.
‘I came to look at you. I must be forgiven if I am a little interested, seeing that I am to go with you among strangers and live the rest of my life in the hollow of your hand.’
‘Cradoc your father has told you, then?’ Aquila asked.
‘Oh yes, my father has told me. That was kind of him. It makes no difference in the end, of course; but it is nice to be told these things at the time, not left to find them out afterwards.’ She looked at him with the cool challenge in her eyes that had been there the first time he saw her, but without the smile. ‘Why do you want to marry me?’
If it had been the golden sister, Aquila knew that he would have had to make some kind of lie for kindness’ sake, but not for Ness; only the truth for Ness. ‘Because unless we can become one people, we shall not save Britain from the barbarians,’ he said. It sounded stiff and pompous, but it was the truth, the best he could do.
Ness studied him for a moment, and there was a twitch of laughter at the corner of her mouth. ‘So it is by Ambrosius’s order! And to think that we killed the pig for him!’ And then, suddenly grave again, she asked curiously, ‘Then if it does not matter which of us it is, why me, and not Rhyanidd?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Aquila simply.
There was a little silence, and then Ness said, ‘I wonder if you ever will. How long have I, to make ready for my wedding?’
‘We shall be in the south upward of a month. Be ready to ride with me when we pass this way on the road north again.’
Ness took her eyes from his face for the first time since he had turned and found her watching him, and looked about her, back towards the thatched roof of her father’s Hall, up through the shivering apple branches to the dark lift of the mountains against the sky. And her look hurt him sharply with the memory of a valley in the Down Country with the trace of old vine terraces on the southern slopes.
‘I have known this orchard for sixteen years,’ she said. ‘And now there’s only a month left.’ But she was not talking to him.
Aquila realized that the prospect of the marriage must be far more overwhelming for her than it was for him, because for her it meant being torn away from all that she knew and loved. But he shut his mind to that thought quickly. Once he began to feel sorry for the girl the whole thing would become unbearable. And he also had been torn away from all that he knew and loved, and more harshly than this.
He heard one of the others calling him. ‘Dolphin! Hi! Dolphin! Are we to wait all day?’ and he turned without another word, leaving her standing under the dipping branches of the apple trees, and strode back to rejoin his fellows.
When Ambrosius and his Companions returned to their winter quarters at Dynas Ffaraon, Aquila no longer had his regular sleeping-place among the young men in Ambrosius’s Hall, but was lord of a turf-roofed bothy below the western rampart, where Ness spread fine skins on the bed-place and fresh bracken on the earthen floor, and cooked for him when he chose to eat at home, and spun wool by herself in the firelight, in the long winter evenings. Aquila was not often there. In this last winter before the great attack there was so much to do, so much to think about, that for most of the time he managed to forget about Ness altogether. She seemed as far away from him as though she had never ridden up from the south in the curve of his bridle arm; and he found it quite easy to forget her.
Winter passed, and spring came to the mountains, the snipe drumming over the matted bog myrtle at the head of the lake, and the purple butterwort in flower among the rocks of the cleft where the little stream came down. Dynas Ffaraon was humming, thrumming with preparations for the march; and all the broad valley below the Dun was an armed camp.
On a close, still evening Aquila sat beside Valarius at supper in the Fire-hall, his legs outstretched beneath the table on which he leaned, his platter of cold bear ham almost untouched before him. The great hall, crowded with leaders from the camp, was hot, despite the earliness of the year; too close and airless to eat, with the heavy, brooding closeness of coming storm. Also there were things in his stomach that came between him and food. Only a few hours since, he had ridden in with his squadron from Segontium, and all evening he had been with Ambrosius and his captains in council. Everything was settled now, as far as it could be in advance. The Cran-tara had been sent out days ago, the stick dipped in goat’s blood and charred at one end, whose summons no tribesman might disobey. They were to host at Canovium, four days from now. That was for northern Cymru. Powys and the south were to join them later on the line of march. Aquila glanced again at the strangers sitting beside Ambrosius in the High Place, men in Roman tunics and with clipped hair and beards. They too had ridden in only a few hours since, bringing Ambrosius word from the Roman party of the support that waited for him in Venta and Aquae Sulis, Calleva and Sorviodunum, the cities of his father’s old lowland territories. Bringing also word of another kind from the world beyond the mountains; word that for the second time Rome had fallen.
They had known for years that there was no more help to be had from Rome, that they were cut off. But now they were not merely cut off, but alone—the solitary outpost of an empire that had ceased to exist. Aquila’s thoughts were suddenly with his old troop from Rutupiae garrison, the men of his own world whom he had known and served with; the old optio, who had taught him all he knew of soldiery and whose teaching he was now sweating in his turn to hammer into his wild mountain tribesmen; Felix, dead under the bla
zing walls of Rome. He jibed at himself for a fool; Felix and his troop might have been dead any time these four years past, they might have been drafted to the Eastern Empire, and be feasting safe in Constantinople tonight. But still the sense of loss was with him.
A woman bent over him to refill the cup that stood empty by his hand. He looked up, vaguely expecting it to be Ness, for the women generally poured for their own men in hall, but it was the wife of one of the other captains; and when he came to think of it, he had seen no sign of Ness in Hall this evening. The woman smiled at him, and passed on. He realized suddenly that men were beginning to leave the Hall, rising as they finished their meal, and taking their weapons and going. There was so much to be done; no time for sitting and staring at nothing. The waiting time was over.
He began to eat again, hurriedly.
‘Sixteen years we have waited for this coming down from the mountains,’ Valarius said beside him, rather thickly. ‘Sixteen crawling years since Constantine was murdered.’
Aquila looked round at him. ‘You were one of those who got Ambrosius and his brother away to safety after that happened, weren’t you?’
Valarius took a long, loud drink from his mead cup, and set it down a little unsteadily, before he answered. ‘Aye.’
‘That must be a proud thing for you; now that the waiting time is over and he comes down to take his father’s place.’
‘Proud? I leave pride to the other two—to old Finnen with his harp and Eugenus with his draughts and stinking salves.’
There was a kind of raw, jeering bitterness in his voice, under the thickness of the mead, that startled Aquila, and he asked quickly, ‘What do you mean?’
‘Eugenus was Constantine’s physician, Finnen was Constantine’s harper; not to them the shame,’ Valarius said dully after a moment. ‘I was one of Constantine’s bodyguard—yet Constantine died at a murderer’s hand.’
There was a small silence. Aquila was suddenly remembering the scene of Aber of the White Shells, remembering that rage of Valarius’s that had seemed out of all proportion to Brychan’s jibe. Odd, he thought, how little one knew about people. He had lived and worked with Valarius for more than a year, and never known anything about him but that he drank too much and was the ruins of a good soldier, never known that for sixteen years he had carried shame with him as a man might carry a scar, a bodily hurt hidden from the eyes of other men. Maybe it was because the waiting was over and they stood on the edge of a great struggle and that somehow loosened things, maybe it was because of his own feeling of loss for Felix—something in him reached out to the older man, stiffly, rather painfully because it was so long since he had reached out to another human being, and he said with unaccustomed gentleness, ‘Assuredly Ambrosius has not thought of the thing in that way.’
‘But I have,’ Valarius said. And it seemed that there was no more to be said.
Aquila finished his own meal quickly, and went out into the dusk. He went first to make sure that all was well down at the horse-lines and with his troop; then made for his own bothy. The skin apron was drawn back from the doorway and there was fresh bracken on the floor; a tallow candle burned low and guttering on the carved kist that held Ness’s clothes, and his own; everything in readiness for him, but no sign of Ness here either.
He stood for a while with his hand on the door post and his head ducked under the lintel, thinking. He was bone weary, and on any other night he would simply have slipped his sword-belt over his head and flung himself down on the piled fern of the bed-place, to sleep. But tonight, because Rome had fallen and Felix was dead, because of Valarius’s shame, the empty hut seemed horribly lonely, and there was a small aching need in him for somebody to notice, even if they were not glad, that he had come home. That frightened him, because it was only as long as you did not need anybody else that you were safe from being hurt. But after a few moments he pinched out the candle and went in search of Ness, all the same.
He thought he knew where to find her: in the little hollow of the bush-lined cleft where he had once found Artos and his hound watching for a grass snake. He had found her there once before, and she had told him, ‘It is a good place. It looks south, and if I close my eyes to shut out the mountains in between, I can see the apples budding in my father’s orchard.’
It was full dark now, though the flat-topped clouds massing above the pass to the coast were still touched with rose-copper on their under-bellies. The air was without freshness, lying like warm silk over one’s face, and the stars were veiled in faint thunder-wrack. Certainly there was a storm coming, Aquila thought, as he made his way round the curve of the hill below the inner rampart, and plunged into the twisting cleft among the rocks. The thin, silver plash of the water under the ferns sounded unnaturally loud in the stillness, and the faint honey scent of the blackthorn breathed up to him. Looking down as he scrambled lower, he saw the pale blur of the blossoms like foam on dark water, where the thorn trees leaned together over the little hollow in the rocks—and the pale blur of a face suddenly turned up to him.
‘Ness! What are you doing here?’ he demanded, slithering to a halt just above her. ‘There’s going to be a storm.’
‘I like storms,’ said Ness composedly.
‘And so you come down here to meet this one, instead of being in Hall this evening?’
He could not see her face, save as a paleness among the cloudier paleness of the blackthorn blossom, but he heard the old challenge in her voice. ‘Why should I be in Hall? I have not the second sight to know that my lord would ride in tonight.’
‘But you did know it, didn’t you, before you came out here? You left all ready for me in the bothy.’
‘What is it, then, that you complain of ? Did no one feed you?’
‘A woman brought me cold meat and bannock and kept my wine cup filled,’ Aquila said, coldly angry now, and not quite sure why. ‘And when I looked up, it was Cordaella, Cenfirth’s wife, and not you.’
‘I wonder that you noticed the difference.’
Aquila leaned down towards her over his bent knee. ‘There is a simple reason for that,’ he said, repaying her in her own coin. ‘Cordaella smiled at me, so I knew that she could not be you.’
Ness sprang up to face him with a movement as swiftly fierce as the leap of a mountain cat. ‘And why should I smile at you? For joy that you took me from my father’s Hall?’
‘You know why I took you,’ Aquila said after a moment.
‘Yes, you told me. For the strengthening of a bond between your people and mine.’ She was breathing quickly, the fierce white blur of her face turned up to his. ‘Oh, I know that you did not want me, any more than I wanted you. The thing was forced on both of us. It was not that you took me, but the way that you took me—’ She began to laugh on a hard, mocking note that made him long to hit her; and as though her wild laughter had called it up, and there was some kinship between her and the coming storm, a long, dank breath of wind came sighing up the cleft, thick with the smell of thunder and the thin, honey sweetness of the blackthorn flowers, and a flicker of lightning played between the dark masses of the mountains. ‘It was not that you laughed at Rhyanidd about the pig, but the way that you laughed. It is never the things that you do, but the way that you do them. You took me from my father’s hearth as you might have taken a dog—no, not a dog; I have seen you playing with Cabal’s ears and gentling him under the chin—as you might have taken a kist or a cooking-pot that you did not much value. Did you never think that I might have knifed you with your own dagger one night, and been away in the darkness? Did you never think that there might have been someone of my own people whom I loved, and who—might have come to love me?’
There was a long silence, filled with the soft uneasy fret of that swiftly rising wind. Aquila’s anger ebbed slowly out of him, leaving only a great tiredness behind. ‘And was there, Ness?’
The fire had sunk in her also, and her voice was spent and lifeless. ‘Yes,’ she said.
?
??I am sorry,’ Aquila said stiffly, awkwardly.
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter now. He is dead. He was killed hunting, nine days ago. Rhyanidd sent me word by the messenger for Ambrosius that came up yesterday.’
‘I am sorry,’ Aquila said again. There seemed nothing else to say.
He knew that she was looking at him intently, as though for her the darkness was daylight. ‘I wonder if you are,’ she said at last. ‘I wonder if you have it in you to be sorry about anything—or glad … ’
‘I had once,’ Aquila said harshly. He made a small, helpless gesture. ‘We march against the Saxons in two days’ time, and maybe you will be loosed from me soon enough. Meanwhile, come back to the bothy before the storm breaks.’
She drew away a little. ‘Let you go back and sleep dry in the warm deerskins. I like storms; did I not tell you? This is my storm, and I am waiting for it. It will be bonnier company than you are to me.’
The wind was blowing in long, fitful gusts now, the blackthorn branches streaming like spray; and a white flicker of lightning showed him Ness with her unbound hair lifting and flying about her head as she crouched against the rocks behind her. She looked like something that belonged to the storm; and how he was to deal with her, now that he had lost his anger, he simply did not know. But deal with her he would; the determination not to be worsted by her rose in him, mingled with a kinder feeling that he could not leave her here to be drenched and beaten by the storm; and he reached out and caught her wrist. ‘Come, Ness.’ He pulled her towards him and caught her other wrist, not at all sure that if he left it free she would not indeed try to knife him with his own dagger.
She struggled wildly for a moment, and then suddenly it was as though all her fighting was spent. She was leaning weakly against him, and if it had been Rhyanidd, he would have thought that she was crying, the quiet crying of utter desolation. But surely Ness would not know how to cry. The first low rumble of thunder was muttering among the mountains. ‘Come, Ness,’ he said again. He released her one wrist, and still grasping the other, turned back to the steep climb; and with a little harsh, exhausted sigh, Ness came.