The Lantern Bearers

  By noon the storm had broken, and the white, lashing swathes of rain were sweeping across the downs before the gale. The great battle of the Dragon and the White Horse had scattered over a score of downland and marshy miles, into a score of lesser battles; and there were dead men and horses lying in the little chalky stream and scattered grotesquely over the hillsides and down the wide valley. Guitolinus lay dead, his emerald cloak darkened and sodden with the driving rain, under a whitethorn bush on whose tossing and streaming branches the berries were already the colour of dried blood. The storm-cock was still shouting his shining song over the battlefield. And Artos and the British Cavalry were hunting the tattered remnant of Hengest’s war host over the bare, chalky uplands north of Sorviodunum.

  For Aquila, riding on the wing of that ruthless hunt, there had been a time of sickening anxiety when he realized that the Minnow was no longer with his squadron. It had not lasted long, for when he had demanded of Owain what had become of the boy, that grim little man had laughed, jerking his head sideways. ‘The last I saw of him he was riding half a length behind Artos and yelling like all the fiends in hell!’

  Now he was merely angry, and that with only half his mind; for the other half was twisted and tangled with the dark young warrior he had seen for one jagged instant of time as the shield burg crumbled.

  20

  The Dark Warrior

  FAR up towards the old frontier below Cunetio a great villa, and one that had been rich in the old days, stood with its cornland and orchards spread below it in a bay of the wooded downs. Its people had fled before the Saxon break-through, and Hengest’s host, sweeping southward, had found it empty, plundered it and set torch to it in passing. But for some reason the fire had not spread through the whole three-sided range of buildings, and the main house-place had stood deserted with its one burnt-out wing, until, two days after the great battle for Britain, Artos had called off the chase some miles north of Cunetio, and drawn his men back into British territory. Now, in the light of a wild sunset, the place was thrumming with life again, though not the life of its own people.

  Men slow and half blind with weariness dropped from horses as weary as themselves in the pale gold of the stubble-field below the garden wall; there were makeshift horse-lines in the lee of the orchard, and in the wide greenness of the garden court, camp-fires began to echo the colours of the windy sunset.

  Aquila, riding in with his men, late from their scouring of the hills, found the whole bay of the downs between the woods and the river already turned into a great camp. And almost the first person he saw as he reined in below the orchard where the apples were gold and russet on the wind-tossed branches, was Flavian plodding up from the horse-lines with a saddle on his shoulder.

  The boy caught sight of him at the same instant, and Aquila saw him hesitate, and brace himself for whatever might be coming. Then he changed direction and came to meet his father. He halted at Falcon’s shoulder, and stood looking up.

  ‘I hope that you had good hunting with Artos,’ Aquila said formally, after a moment.

  Flavian flushed scarlet, but his eyes never wavered. ‘I am sorry about that, Father. It—it just happened.’

  Aquila nodded wearily. He had been very angry, but now he felt too weary to be angry any more, too weary to be anything very definite. ‘Things do—just happen, in the heat of battle,’ he said, and saw the quick relief in his son’s face.

  Flavian put up a hand to caress Falcon’s neck. ‘Sir, I was close behind you—I mean—I was still close behind you when you charged the Saxon shield burg. I’m glad I didn’t miss that; it was magnificent!’

  Aquila did not answer at once. He was wondering rather desperately why he could not remember that charge and the shield burg crumbling without seeing again and again a dark face that was so like Flavian’s, so like Flavia’s, starting out at him from the press. All these two days past he had been looking for that dark Saxon warrior, looking for him in every live Saxon he saw, and every dead one. Again and again he had told himself that he was a fool, that the thing had been no more than a chance resemblance; that whatever it had been, the man was surely dead back there under the ramparts of the old green hill fort, and he would look for him no more. But he had gone on looking.

  ‘I rejoice that it won your approval,’ he said briefly at last. Then, turning away from the thought of the crumbling shield burg, ‘Is Artos up at the house?’

  ‘Yes, Father.’ Flavian dropped his hand from Falcon’s neck, as though it were the horse that had rebuffed him. ‘He has made his headquarters in the main block.’

  Aquila nodded, and swung himself stiffly out of the saddle. ‘Do you know where they are dealing with the wounded?’

  ‘Up at the house too. Somewhere in the north wing, I think. The Saxons have burned the south one.’

  ‘So.’ Aquila turned round on the weary and battered men who had dropped from their horses behind him. ‘Take over, Owain; send Dunod and Capell, and whoever else needs it, up to get their wounds tended. I’ll not be long.’

  ‘I’ll see to Falcon,’ Flavian said a little breathlessly, as Owain saluted and turned away to carry out his orders. ‘There’s a sheltered spot at the other end of the orchard, and we’ve got some fodder—’

  So the Minnow was trying to make amends. Aquila smiled suddenly. ‘Thanks, Flavian,’ he said. He gave Falcon into the boy’s charge with a pat, and then turned away to find Artos and make his report.

  The fires of the sunset were dying over beyond the high downs, and the fires in the wide green court flowering brighter as the daylight faded. The rain had passed, but the wind that had sunk for a little while had risen again, though not so high as before, and all the place was full of side-blown smoke and the remains of sodden, burned thatch that flapped along the ground and whirled up in corners like singed birds. Some of the men had rounded up a few sheep on the hill pastures, and driven them in for slaughter; others were questing to and fro through the house and out-buildings and among the ruins, in search of anything that the barbarians had overlooked; they must have unearthed a secret wine-store, for two men staggered by him, grinning, with a huge wine-jar between them, and he passed a red-bearded tribesman sitting with his back to a column and his long legs stuck straight before him, with the lap of his tunic full of apples and a wine-flask of jewel-coloured glass in his hand. When it came to damage, Aquila reckoned that a British host could do nearly as well as a Saxon one.

  He threaded his way through the fringes of the shifting throng, heading for the main house-place across the far end of the court. But before he reached it a tall figure whose hair—he had taken off his helmet and it hung at his shoulder-strap—shone mouse-fair in the windy firelight, turned away from the knot of men about a fire that he was passing, and saw him.

  ‘Sa ha! Dolphin! You have come in, then.’

  ‘Reporting back,’ Aquila agreed. ‘My Lord Artos.’

  Artos had come out to join him, his great footsore hound stalking at heel, and they turned aside together into the shadow of the burned-out colonnade. He cast a quick glance over his shoulder, to where the house-place door glowed dim saffron across the terrace, and said almost apologetically, ‘They lit a fire for me in the atrium, and three candles. But it is so desolate in there; the house is dead, and I want to be with my own men tonight.’ They stood together on the fringe of the firelight, greeting each other, but without words. Presently they would be triumphant, knowing their share in the triumph that was already roaring through the crowded camp and would sweep like a forest fire through Britain; but now they were still too close to their victory for any outcry. Then Artos said very quietly, fondling Cabal’s pricked ears as the great hound sat against his knee, ‘A good hunting?’

  ‘A good hunting,’ Aquila said, as quietly.

  ‘What of your losses?’

  ‘Until we rejoin the main host I cannot be sure; but I think not too heavy. Several of the men who rode in with me are wounded, and I have sent them up to the nor
th wing for tending—if there is anyone there to tend them.’

  ‘We have routed out a few women,’ Artos said. ‘There’s a village up yonder over the downs, safe out of the Saxon’s path … Anything else to report?’

  ‘Nothing save what every captain who comes near you tonight will have reported already. That Hengest is safe away with the rags of his war host.’

  ‘Aye: I think that not many men could have pulled back even the rags of an army from—what it was like on the Sorviodunum road, two days ago,’ Artos said, with slow and considered admiration for his enemy. ‘They are foes worthy of each other, Ambrosius and Hengest, and they are not done with each other yet.’ He laid a great arm across Aquila’s shoulder with one of the warm, faintly clumsy gestures that were so much a part of him. ‘We ride a long road, old Dolphin, and this is only the beginning. Even here in the south it is only the beginning; and in the north, where Octa and his war bands still hold the land unchallenged, the thing is not yet even begun. But by Our Lord, it has been a beginning for men to tell their grandsons of, in the years ahead!’ He was looking out over the fires and the shifting crowd, far out into some distance of his own beyond the windy twilight. ‘When I was small, I remember Ambrosius crying out for one great victory to sound like a blast of trumpets through the land … ’

  ‘A blast of trumpets through the land,’ Aquila said. ‘Aye, we have that now: and so in a while we may have a Britain standing together against the Saxon swarms at last.’

  ‘Bonded together under one King,’ Artos said. ‘It is in my mind that we shall see Ambrosius crowned High King in Venta Belgarum this winter.’

  A long pause fell between them, full of the voices of the makeshift camp and the long-drawn hushing of the wind along the ruined colonnade. Aquila wondered suddenly what it meant to Ambrosius, who would be crowned High King this winter, that the tall, slow young man who could lead men like a flame, who was son to him in all but fact, was base born and could not rule Britain after him. He wondered what it meant to Artos himself, and scarcely knowing that he did so, looked round at his companion. Artos turned his head at the same instant, and the light of the nearest fire showed them each other’s face.

  ‘For myself, I don’t mind very much,’ Artos said, as though the thing had been spoken. ‘By and by I shall lead Britain in war, and that is enough for me. I do not want to rule Britain in peace. I do not want the loneliness.’ He had turned back to his distance beyond the firelight and the dusk; and Aquila, still looking at him, thought suddenly of the way he had come out from the atrium to join his men about the fires. Ambrosius would have known that his place was solitary in the atrium with the three candles that had been lit for him; Artos wanted the cooking-fires below the terrace, and the touch of other men’s shoulders against his. ‘I should like to be Ambrosius’s son, of course,’ Artos said after a little, very simply. ‘But only because I should like to be his son, bastard or no, not for any other reason.’

  ‘To be father and son does not always bring any kind of nearness,’ Aquila said harshly; and it was Artos’s turn to look round quickly. There was a rather painful silence.

  ‘I am sorry about young Flavian,’ he said awkwardly. ‘One may so easily be carried away in the heat of fighting, without any idea afterwards of how it came about.’

  Aquila’s mouth curled into a wry smile, though the old frown lines were still bitten deep between his brows. ‘I said as much to the boy himself a while since. There’s not much need that you should defend him to me, Bear Cub.’ Then, deliberately, he changed the subject, as he had grown used to doing whenever it drew too near to his own raw places. ‘We have just won a battle that may save Britain from the dark. Does it seem to you at all strange that we stand here talking of our own affairs?’

  ‘Not really,’ Artos said. ‘Our own affairs are small enough for words; the other thing is too great.’

  It was full dusk now, and the scene in the wide court was a confusion of armed men and firelight under the rising moon that came and went, blurred silver through the scudding cloud-drift. They had killed the sheep, and the carcasses, hacked into rough joints for quicker cooking, were already scorching and sizzling over the flames. Round one of the fires the men had begun to sing, some wild and haunting victory song of their own mountains that they took up one from another, tossing it to and fro. And between gust and gust of the wind, between fall and rise of the singing, suddenly from the dark woods above the house a cry leapt into the night; a cry that rose and rose high and agonized and only part human and ended as though it were cut off with a knife, leaving the night again to the wind and the mountain men singing.

  Some of the men about the fire glanced at each other, some grinned or cocked their heads in the direction from which it had come, but not all. It was nothing unusual.

  ‘Another Saxon straggler,’ Artos said. ‘He and his kind would have done as much and more for any man of ours, if the victory had gone the other way. Nevertheless, this is a part of victory that I do not like,’ and his heavy arm slipped lightly enough from Aquila’s shoulder.

  Aquila, with that ghastly cry still seeming in his ears to tear the night apart, was staring into the heart of the nearest fire. But he did not see it. He saw the darkness of the wind-lashed woods, and a flurry of desperate movement in the undergrowth, the white blink of moonlight on a dagger blade, and shapes that closed in as men close in to finish a deer that the hounds have brought to bay. He saw the face of the quarry turned up for an instant to the whitening moon, snarling as it had snarled up at him over a broken shield-rim, two days ago … He pulled himself together with an angry jerk, and saw the fire again. Fool, fool that he was, and fanciful as a green girl!

  A fox-haired man was making his way towards them from the gateway, and he pushed himself off from the column against which, without knowing it, he had been leaning. ‘Yonder comes Pascent to report that Hengest is safe away. And I must go back to my own men.’ He put up his hand to Artos in a way that was half salute and half a gesture beween friends. ‘It was a good hunting, Bear Cub.’

  He strode down the shallow steps, exchanged a quick greeting with Pascent, and continued on his way.

  He went down to the horse-lines and made sure that all was well there; saw his men in a fair way to being fed, spoke with Owain about guard duty and arrangements for the night. Then he sat himself down beside one of the fires to eat stolen mutton. But though he was wolf-hungry, he could eat little, and the men about him—even Artos, moving from fire to fire among his beloved fighting men—looked at his dark, inward-turned face, and left him to himself. In a while he got up and looked about him as though he were a little lost. There was nothing more that he could do but go now and find some corner out of the wind, and crawl into it like a tired dog and sleep. But something in him dreaded lying down to sleep; something that he could give no name to, that was to do with the face that he could not stop seeing. There was a wild unrest in him, a sense of urgency, something to be done that would not let him rest, though his body ached and his eyes were hot in his head with the need for sleep.

  He raised his arms above his head, stretching until the small muscles cracked behind his shoulders—and caught his breath at the sudden twinge and smart of the gash in his side that he had carried out of battle. He had almost forgotten about it; it was no more than a shallow cut along the ribs. But now it was an excuse for something else to do. He would go up to the north wing, where they had dealt with the wounded, and get some woman to bathe it and put on a smear of salve, and that would hold off for a little longer the time when there was really nothing to do but to lie down.

  He made his way through the camp again to the north wing, and dragged his feet up the three shallow steps to the open colonnade that ran the length of the place. The rooms beyond seemed to be mainly farm workshops, wool stores, and chambers for drying corn. He turned to a door through which smoky lantern-light shone, and found himself on the threshold of a long chamber half filled with wool-sacks and other sto
res, whose tessellated floor, cracked and damaged now, showed that it must once have been a living-room, and a beautiful one. Some women were moving about, water was heating in an iron cauldron propped over a fire in the centre of the floor that was half filling the place with smoke; and a few of the men who had come in to have wounds dressed still lingered, sitting or sprawling on wool-sacks round the blaze. In the light of a lantern hanging from the rafters a man stood wiping his hands and arms, who turned to look inquiringly towards the door. A small, strong-shouldered man in a brown tunic, the loose sleeves rolled high, with a deeply tanned, intensely quiet face, and a fuzz of hair round his head that shone in the pool of light from the lantern like the seed-silk of the wild clematis, or the silver fringe round a cloud with the sun behind it.

  For the first moment that silver fuzz put Aquila off; and then he remembered that it must be twelve years since their last meeting, on the track below the ash woods.

  ‘Brother Ninnias! So here is our third meeting that you promised me.’

  The little man watched him with a look that was more a warmth than an actual smile, as he came forward into the fire-glow, then strode to meet him, tossing aside the piece of rag on which he had been cleaning his stained hands. ‘And a third meeting should surely be the richest. God’s greeting to you, Aquila my friend.’

  ‘So you remember me this time,’ Aquila said.

  ‘This time my eyes were open because I was already looking for you. When word was brought to me that Ambrosius’s cavalry was descended upon this valley, and I gathered a few salves and came down to see what help I might be to any who rode in with wounds upon them, I was wondering whether I might find you among those that rode with Artos the Bear.’ He smiled. ‘But it is you that have found me. Do you bring me a wound for salving?’