‘I might have known that nothing but a horse would keep you away from me,’ Ambrosius said, with something that was half laughing and half serious in his voice and eyes. ‘Is all well now?’
‘Aye, all well now,’ Aquila said.
And at that moment Artos leaned forward, exclaiming, ‘Why, Dolphin, this is surely a night of fortunate stars! You have found your ring again!’
For a moment of time no longer than a heart-beat, but it seemed long to him, Aquila did not answer. He could let it go at that for now, and still go to Ambrosius later with the true story, with a fumbled and shamefaced explanation of why he had not spoken out now, in this moment. But to do that would be in a queer way to deny Flavia; to deny something more than Flavia, that had no name to it, a faith that all men must keep within themselves. He must speak out now, before these strangers, and before the men among whom he had grown great, or break some faith that he had not broken before, even when he went wilful-missing and let the galleys sail without him, all those years ago.
‘My ring was sent back to me,’ he said, his voice level and deliberate. And though the answer was for Artos, his eyes met and held Ambrosius’s across the gold-pooled candlelight of the High Table. ‘After our victory in the autumn, I gave it to a certain one of Hengest’s warriors, along with money and a pass to help him on his way, that he might send it back to me for a sign when he was safe among his own kind again.’
Never in his life had he been so aware of silence as he was in the few moments that followed—a silence that reached out and out all down the long room behind him, as men, caught by some sudden sense of drama at the High Table, broke off whatever they were saying or doing, and turned to watch and listen. Never in his life had he been so aware of faces: the faces of strangers and of brothers-in-arms, all turned full upon him. Yet his own gaze never wavered from the still, dark face of Ambrosius, who seemed to sit at the very heart of the silence.
Then Ambrosius said, ‘If the Dolphin, of all men, has had dealings with the barbarians, then it is in my mind that the reason must have been a strong one. Who and what was this certain one among the Saxon kind?’
Aquila stood braced as for a physical ordeal, his head up, his hands clenched under his cloak until the nails bit into his palms. ‘My sister’s son.’
Something flickered far back in Ambrosius’s eyes. ‘I never knew you had a sister.’
‘I—have not spoken of her, these past years,’ Aquila said. He drew a harsh breath. ‘The Saxons who burned my home and slew my father and all our household carried her off with them. In three years I found her again in Hengest’s camp while I still wore a Jutish thrall-ring. She helped me to escape, and I—hoped that she would come with me. But she was not free as I was free, who had only a thrall-ring to hold me. There was a child to bind her to her new people—and a man … So I came away alone, and did not speak of my sister any more.’
Ambrosius bent his head. ‘Go on.’
‘After our victory in the autumn, it was put into my hand to find her son among the fugitives of Hengest’s host. How the thing came about is no matter—I found him, and I did what there was to do, to send him back to her. My Lord Ambrosius, there is no more to tell.’
The silence closed in over his words, and in it Aquila felt horribly alone. Then the silence was broken by a sudden movement among the group of young men standing against the wall, and the Minnow thrust out through his fellows and came across the chamber to his father’s side.
Into the chill of his loneliness, Aquila felt a sudden rush of warmth. The Minnow, whom he had never properly known, who had disobeyed him to follow another leader in his first battle, had come running his neck into trouble to stand with him now. He felt him standing there, bright-eyed and defiant; felt the warmth of his loyalty like a physical touch.
‘Keep out of this, you young fool,’ he muttered. ‘Nothing to do with you.’
The Minnow did not move, stubborn in his loyalty to his father and his determination to share with him whatever was coming. ‘It is only nothing to do with me because I did not know about it,’ he said, and the words were for Ambrosius as much as for his father. ‘If I had known, I’d have done anything—all that was in me—to help!’
Nobody said anything, but Artos made a small gesture with the hand in which he held his wine-cup, as though he raised it to drink with the boy.
Ambrosius was studying Aquila’s set face as though it were the face of someone he had never seen before. ‘Why do you choose to tell me all this?’ he said. ‘Your ring was lost, your ring is found again. Why not let it sleep at that?’
Aquila did not answer at once. He had not expected that particular question, and though his reasons were clear in his own mind, he had no words for them. ‘Because I have not broken faith with you before,’ he said at last. ‘Because I have done a thing, and I am prepared to pay the price. Because I—do not wish to carry shame under my cloak.’ There were other reasons too, reasons that had to do with Flavia; but they were between Flavia and himself.
For a long, long moment Ambrosius continued to sit studying his face with that odd look of questioning and testing and discovery. ‘A strange, and an uncomfortable thing is honour,’ he said reflectively; and then suddenly his own dark face lit with the old, swift warmth. ‘Nay, man, the years and the Saxons have torn gaps enough in the ranks of our Company. Let you sit down now in your own place, for I can ill afford to lose any more of my Companions.’
Aquila drew himself up still further, and made a small, proud gesture of acceptance and salute.
So it was done and over; no shame, no disgrace for Flavian to share with him—but Flavian hadn’t known that when he came out to share it. The boy was standing a little uncertainly now on the point of turning away. Aquila brought a hand down on his shoulder and gripped it in passing. ‘Thanks, Minnow.’ It did not seem much to say, but it covered the situation, and he was not very sure of his own voice just then.
The Minnow said nothing at all, but he looked at his father, and both of them were satisfied.
But it was Artos, thrusting Cabal farther under the table to make room, and pushing his wine-cup towards Aquila as he swung a leg over the cushioned bench and slid into place beside him, who spoke the last words on the matter, very loudly and for all men to hear: ‘I never had a sister; but if I had, I hope I’d be as true to her after twenty years.’
Much later that night, when the feasting was over, Aquila walked home with Eugenus the Physician. The snow had stopped, the thin wind had fallen away, and the sky above the whitened roofs of the old palace was full of stars; but the fresh snow in the lantern-lit courtyard was already becoming churned and trampled, broken up into chains of tracks by the crowding feasters heading for their own quarters in the city or in other wings of the palace. Eugenus had been asking questions—all the questions that Brother Ninnias had never asked. But Aquila found that they no longer made him flinch as they used to do; and there was freedom in that, too. Now, as they turned for an instant in the shadow of the postern doorway, and looked back, there was another thought in both their minds.
‘There has not been a night quite like this for Britain before,’ Aquila said, ‘and there will not be a night quite like it again.’
‘It is wonderful what one victory in the hands of the right man will do,’ Eugenus said musingly beside him. ‘With a Britain bonded together at last, we may yet thrust the barbarians into the sea, and even hold them there—for a while.’
Aquila’s hand was already on the pin of the door behind him, though he still watched the thinning, lantern-touched crowd in the courtyard. ‘For a while?—You sound not over-hopeful.’
‘Oh, I am. In my own way I am the most hopeful man alive. I believe that we shall hold the barbarians off for a while, and maybe for a long while, though—not for ever … It was once told me that the great beacon light of Rutupiae was seen blazing on the night after the last of the Eagles flew from Britain. I have always felt that that was’—he hesitated o
ver the word—‘not an omen: a symbol.’
Aquila glanced at him, but said nothing. Odd, to have started a legend.
‘I sometimes think that we stand at sunset,’ Eugenus said after a pause. ‘It may be that the night will close over us in the end, but I believe that morning will come again. Morning always grows again out of the darkness, though maybe not for the people who saw the sun go down. We are the Lantern Bearers, my friend; for us to keep something burning, to carry what light we can forward into the darkness and the wind.’
Aquila was silent a moment; and then he said an odd thing. ‘I wonder if they will remember us at all, those people on the other side of the darkness.’
Eugenus was looking back towards the main colonnade, where a knot of young warriors, Flavian among them, had parted a little, and the light of a nearby lantern fell full on the mouse-fair head of the tall man who stood in their midst, flushed and laughing, with a great hound against his knee.
‘You and I and all our kind they will forget utterly, though they live and die in our debt,’ he said. ‘Ambrosius they will remember a little; but he is the kind that men make songs about to sing for a thousand years.’
There was a long silence in the shadow of the postern door; then Eugenus shook his plump, muffled shoulders, and turned with a puff of a sigh and a puff of laughter. ‘For you this has been a good night, in more ways than one; but if you wish to stand here and sing songs to the stars like a hound puppy, you must do it alone. I am a very old man with a belly that cannot abide as much wine as it used to do, also my feet grow cold. Therefore I am away to my bed.’
Aquila laughed, and opened the small, deep-set door, and stood aside for Eugenus to go through before him.
A good night, yes. He lingered a little, fastening the doorpin while the old physician scuffed away towards his own quarters. There was a feeling of quietness in him, a feeling of coming into harbour. He had spent half his life fighting the Saxon kind, and he would go on fighting them, he supposed, until he found his death from a Saxon sword or grew too old to carry his own. ‘No more to be turned back than the wild geese in their autumn flighting,’ old Bruni had said of the Saxon kind. And Eugenus’s words of only a few moments ago echoed old Bruni’s in his mind: ‘We may thrust the barbarians into the sea; and even hold them there—for a while.’ No respite in this war, and maybe only darkness at the end of it. But for himself, now, in this present moment, he seemed to have come to a quiet place in which to rest a little before going on. He had all at once a feeling of great riches. Ness had chosen to forsake her own people to be with him; and the Minnow had come out before all men to stand beside him in the face of possible disgrace, which was probably, he thought, the best thing that had ever happened to him; and in some way that he neither understood nor questioned, he had found Flavia again.
He looked up at the old damson tree, and saw the three stars of Orion’s belt tangled in the snowy branches. Someone, maybe Ness, had hung out a lantern in the colonnade, and in the starlight and the faint and far-most fringe of the lantern glow it was as though the damson tree had burst into blossom; fragile, triumphant blossom all along the boughs.
Rosemary Sutcliff was born in Surrey, the daughter of a naval officer. At the age of two she contracted the progessively wasting Still’s disease and spent most of her life in a wheelchair. During her early years she had to lie on her back and was read to by her mother: such authors as Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope, as well as Greek and Roman legends. Apart from reading, she made little progress at school and left at fourteen to attend art school, specializing in miniature painting. In the 1940s she exhibited her first miniature in the Royal Academy and was elected a member of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters just after the war.
In 1950 her first children’s book, The Queen’s Story, was published and from then on she devoted her time to writing the children’s historical novels which have made her such an esteemed and highly respected name in the field of children’s literature.
She received an OBE in the 1975 Birthday Honours List and a CBE in 1992.
Rosemary Sutcliff died at the age of 72 in 1992.
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Table of Contents
THE TERRACE STEPS
RUTUPIAE LIGHT
THE WOLVES OF THE SEA
ULLASFJORD
WILD GEESE FLIGHTING
THE SAXON WIND
THE WOMAN IN THE DOORWAY
SINGING MAGIC
FOREST SANCTUARY
THE FORTRESS OF THE HIGH POWERS
THE YOUNG FOXES
BROWN SISTER , GOLDEN SISTER
THE EMPTY HUT
THE HONOUR OF FIRST BLOOD
THE HAWKING GLOVE
WHITE THORN AND YELLOW IRIS
‘MINNOW, DOLPHIN’S SON’
THE HOSTAGE
‘VICTORY LIKE A TRUMPET BLAST’
THE DARK WARRIOR
THE RETURN OF ODYSSEUS
THE BLOSSOMING TREE
Rosemary Sutcliff, The Lantern Bearers
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