‘Why?’ he demanded, still covering it with his hand.
‘Because it is mate to the one which Ambrosius the High King wears above his elbow. It is a royal arm ring of the Princes of Britain.’
He took away the shielding hand and looked down at the heavy gleaming thing.
‘The royal arm ring of Britain,’ he said musingly. ‘Yes, it might perhaps be – tactless to wear it about Ambrosius’s court.’ Very slowly he pulled off the great arm ring, and thrust it into the breast of his rough sheepskin tunic. ‘See what a dutiful and obedient son you have, my father.’
I got up, and he rose instantly, with exactly the right show of deference. ‘It is past midnight, and we must make an early outset in the morning. Come, and I will show you where you can sleep.’
I did not rouse out any of the servants; truth to tell, I shrank too much from anyone else seeing him. I had had all that I could take for one night. The thing would be all over Venta soon enough without any help. I took a spare lantern and lit it at the brazier, and led him out across the courtyard to the small turf-floored storeroom where I had slept for the past two nights.
In the doorway, when I would have left him, he stayed me, standing against the lantern light. ‘Father—’
‘Yes?’
‘Are you going to acknowledge me? Or do I ride with you tomorrow simply as a new spear out of nowhere, to join your war bands?’
‘Since no man who looks at you can doubt for one moment that you are my son,’ I said, ‘it is in my mind that neither of us has much choice in the matter.’
‘Father—’ he said again, and checked, and then, ‘Can you not speak one gentle word to me, on this first night of my coming to you?’ and his voice shook.
‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘This is not a night when I have many gentle words to spare,’ but I touched his shoulder, and realized with a sense of shock that, like his voice, he was shaking.
He drew a long breath and suddenly thrust out his hands to me as a woman might do. ‘Artos my father, it is an ill night that I have chosen for my coming; yet how was I to know ... And in the child’s death, do not quite forget that I am your living son! May not a son’s coming redeem the night a little for the other loss?’
It might have been a child’s appeal for warmth, it might have been only an incredibly clumsy attempt at consolation, but I knew already that Medraut was never clumsy, that when he wounded, he did it of deliberate intent; and I could have struck him across the mouth. But he was my son. My God! My only begotten son! I thought blasphemously. And I could not trust myself to speak again, but turned and went back to the atrium.
I had nowhere to sleep now, but I did not want to sleep; I felt as though I should never sleep again. I sat down on the stool by the brazier with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands, and shut my eyes at the light that seemed to claw at my aching eyeballs. The sense of doom was heavy on me, and the room seemed full of Ygerna’s hate reaching out to me still from beyond death. And Medraut was alive, and the child that I had loved was in her grave; and everything that was in me seemed broken and bleeding, and I was lost in a great wilderness.
Guenhumara came and found me there. I heard her step come across the tesserae and caught the faint indefinable scent of her, and knew that she was standing just behind me. But I did not look up.
‘So that was your son,’ she said, after a waiting pause.
‘There’d be little use denying it, would there?’
‘He is very like you. As like as a son can be to his father; only one cannot see into his eyes as one can into yours. And that makes him the more dangerous.’
‘Only if he is dangerous already,’ I said dully.
‘A son of yours, as like to you as that one, coming out of nowhere with the Royal Dragon of Britain on his arm, and if I mistake not, something of your own power to draw men after him.’
‘All that is nothing by itself,’ I said, defending him, I think, to myself more than to her.
‘By itself, no,’ she said, and then, ‘Send him away, Artos.’
‘I cannot – I must not.’
‘Why? Are you afraid of the mischief he may work against you elsewhere, if you do?’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Na. The thing is not so simple as that. If I send him away, I am no more than a horse swerving away from the jump that it must take at last. He is my fate, my doom if you like, Guenhumara. When I first saw him it was as though I looked at my own fetch. No man can escape his doom; better to face it than be taken between the shoulders as one tries to run.’
‘Artos, you make me afraid when you talk like that. It is as though you were already half defeated.’
‘Not unless I try to run.’
‘Then if you will not send him away, I pray to God that he may get his death in battle – and soon.’
I had not been aware that my eyes were shut until I opened them and found myself staring into the red hell-mouth of the brazier. ‘No! Guenhumara, for Christ’s sake no – I am too near to praying that already.’
‘And knowing the things you know, why should you not?’
‘Because whatever he is, it is my fault, mine and my father’s who unleashed the evil.’
‘Your father’s, maybe, though he did nothing that many another man has not done before him,’ she said quickly. ‘Not yours! No more yours than the bear’s when he falls into the trap that has been dug for him.’
Suddenly her hand was on the back of my neck, hesitantly, moving to brush my cheek. But when I put up my own to touch it, it remained only a moment, as though to avoid seeming to repulse me, and then was gently but finally withdrawn. ‘Come to bed, Artos. You need sleep sorely, and as you said, you must ride early in the morning.’
And so I lay beside Guenhumara again in the wide bed, and there was a certain peace in being near her. But the child was between us, as surely as she had been on the night that I brought them both home from the Hollow Hills; as surely as the naked sword that Bedwyr had laid between Guenhumara and himself in the bitter winter before the child was born.
chapter twenty-five
Shadows
NEXT MORNING I GAVE MEDRAUT HIS SWORD, AND A BIG roan from among the reserve herd, and we rode out of Venta in the soft summer rain that had come up with the dawn. Cabal loped ahead as always, and beside him ran the smaller, lighter form of Margarita, both of them looking back at me from time to time. ‘Take the bitch with you,’ Guenhumara had said. ‘She will be happier with you.’ But I knew that the white boarhound’s constant whimpering and searching the same places over and over again were more than she could bear.
At Durocobrivae we made a halt for the night, and I picked up my own horse again; and toward sunset on the second day, we rode into camp.
I took Medraut to my own bothy, and sent him off with my waiting armor-bearer to draw his war gear from the baggage train and get something to eat – turning away to fling down my cloak and saddlebag even as I gave the orders, so that I need not see the look on young Riada’s face. I had seen too many looks on too many faces already; the startled glance and lengthened stare, the suddenly widened or narrowed eyes, as I rode in with Medraut beside me.
Left to myself when they were gone, I stood staring at nothing, fiddling with my dusty harness but getting no further with stripping it off. I should have gone out at once; God knows there were matters enough for me to see to; but still I lingered, giving the news time to run through the camp.
Presently a step came over the trampled turf, and Bedwyr loomed into the ragged doorway, his figure shutting out the rippled flame of sunset as he ducked through. ‘Artos – they said that you were back. What news? What news of the Small One?’
‘Dead,’ I said. ‘She died an hour before I reached home,’ and heard the leaden words as though somebody else had spoken them.
The silence closed over them. I could not see Bedwyr’s face, but I heard him swallow harshly in his throat. Then he said, ‘There are not any words, are there?’
&nb
sp; ‘No,’ I said, ‘there are not any words.’
‘How is it with Guenhumara?’
‘Much as it would be with any woman. If she could weep it might be the better for her.’
Not even to Bedwyr could I tell that story to the full. I had taken up my iron cap and was burnishing it with the rag which Riada kept for that purpose. The sunset light through the doorway was reflected red in the smooth curved surface. ‘She said the child cried for you and your harp, before she fell asleep the last time.’
He gave a smothered exclamation, then nothing more, and after a while I said, ‘So here’s another lament for you to make.’
He folded up abruptly onto a packsaddle, his hands hanging across his knees. ‘No more laments. I have made over-many laments in the past fifteen years.’
‘So long?’ I said. ‘We are growing old, my friend. One day it will be time for the young ones to take our swords in hand, and make one last lament for us – if they remember – and step into our places. And for us the aching will be over.’
‘The young ones – such as the son who rode in with you this evening?’
My hand checked on the war cap of its own accord. ‘You have heard, then?’
‘I have seen him. You never told me you had a son, Artos.’
‘Until two nights since, I hoped very greatly that I had not.’
‘So? Was he, too, fathered under a whitethorn bush?’
‘It amounted to that ... Bedwyr, will you take him into your squadron?’
‘Mine?’ I knew from his voice the upward quirk that would set his left eyebrow flying. ‘I should have thought that you would wish to keep him in your own.’
‘Should you? Na, it is better that he should not ride too much in my saddlebag. He must go to you or Cei, and Cei will not know how to handle him.’
‘Will he take so much handling?’
‘Listen, Bedwyr; he was begotten in hate. It is a foul story, and save for Guenhumara, it is between myself and God – and in hate he was bred up by his mother, and held by her all these years. It is the only thing he truly understands; he is a stranger in the world, and at odds with it, because his mother never truly gave him birth until her own death tore him from her.’ I was straggling for the words I needed. ‘He wants to get back to the warm darkness of his mother’s womb; and failing to escape from it, he will be revenged on the world if he can. How much of all that will Cei understand? Cei, whose idea of hating is a blow and a flare of sparks?’
‘Whereas I ... ?’
‘I think that at least you know how to hate.’
‘A strange recommendation.’
‘Not so strange, since a man understands better in another the thing that he knows in himself. And may even have a surer mercy for it.’
‘That sounds oddly like a counsel of love.’
‘Love?’ I said. ‘No, not love. But I remember also that Cei could never have ridden the Black One as you rode him.’
There was a silence full of the small sharp sounds of the camp about us, and then Bedwyr spoke again, with a curious cold stillness in his voice. And I realized that after all the years that we had been closer than most brothers, I still knew scarcely one thing about him that belonged to the time before Narbo Martius. ‘At least it is true that I know how to hate. I hated my mother. She drowned my bitch’s puppies before my eyes, and the bitch took the milk fever and died. I used to lie awake at night thinking of the different ways to kill my mother, and the only reason, I think, that I did not do it was that once it was done, I should not have it to look forward to. And then I grew to manhood, and I knew that I had left it too long and I should never kill my mother now. So I left home by the road to Constantinople, and you know the rest ... Yes, I’ll take the boy into my squadron.’
He never suggested that I should send Medraut away, as Guenhumara had done; but few men, I think, have the ruthless logic of a woman.
For a while Medraut’s coming was a subject for talk and jest around the watch fires, but the war camp had more pressing matters to occupy them than the Bear’s youthful wenching and its resulting bastard, and soon the thing was to all outward seeming as though it had never been otherwise. It seems strange now, that the ripples should have died so soon ... But indeed my son had an eye for country and an uncanny knack of blending into it which, on one level, enabled him to find and fortify a place for himself among us almost unnoticed (even Bedwyr, I think, was at times, and at first, scarcely aware of the new rider in his squadron) and on another, combined with a kind of cold panache, aided him to swift success in the type of warfare which is carried on by ambush and foray. He began to get a name for being lucky to follow in battle, and that goes far with men who live with their swords in their hands; and so presently some of the young ones began to follow him.
He had plenty of opportunity to enhance his name among them in the next three years.
Three years of ebbing and flowing warfare, while the Barbarians clung onto Cantii Territory and the land strip between the South Chalk and the sea, unable to gain further ground in the face of Ambrosius’s troops; while more and more of the Sea Wolves swarmed into the old Trinovantian and Icenian lands; always, it seemed, a new skein of the tattered black war boats before each easterly wind, a new war camp or settlement springing up overnight in place of the one we had burned out in the morning. For the sea crossing is shorter in the South, and the Sea Wolves, it seemed, better combined and of more steadfast purpose, so that it was like trying to sweep back a river spate with a besom broom. And always, if we turned our backs for an instant in dealing with the flanking thrusts to the north or south, the settlers in the Tamesis Valley would put out another probing tentacle toward the heart of Britain.
For the most part, now that Ambrosius and I had again joined forces, the wolds and marshlands of the East Seax and Northfolk and Southfolk were my hunting grounds even up into Lindum Territory, where the Saxon inroads had begun again; while Ambrosius turned his forces against the Barbarian swarms south of the Tamesis. But as the years went by, Ambrosius himself took the field less and less often. He was High King as well as military commander; for him, not only to lead his troops in war, but to rule the broad central territory that was the heart and the ultimate fortress of Britain; and often affairs of kingship held him in Venta while other men led his war hosts on the outer frontiers. And so little by little the pattern between us changed and codified; and we were no longer sword brothers of a like kind, in our fighting, but he the Monarch and I, who had been the Count of Britain, the Rex Belliorum, the chosen war leader.
But all too often it was not the duties of kingship alone that kept Ambrosius prisoned in Venta. Increasingly, through those years, he was a sick man. One could see it in the gradual wasting of his flesh – he had never much to spare – in the yellowish color of his skin and the growing brilliance of his eyes, and the drawn look of his mouth which bespoke endurance. Those of us nearest to him could see it also, in the way he drove himself – not as one who rides a well-trained horse and rides him hard, but as one with the wolves behind him, lashing a spent beast. But at any suggestion that something was amiss, he simply laughed and went away into his own remoteness where other men could not reach him; and lashed himself the harder, afterward.
It was when we returned to winter quarters in the fourth autumn since we came south, and I saw the change that there was in him since I saw him last, that I asked Ben Simeon, his Hebrew physician, what ailed the High King. He looked at me under his brows, the dark luminous gaze brooding on my face, as he hitched his greasy old kaftan about his shoulders in the way that he had, and inquired, ‘How many of those nearest to the King have asked me that, do you suppose?’
‘More than one, I imagine,’ I said. ‘It so chances that we love him.’
He nodded. ‘So so, and all of them I have put off with answers that sound well and mean nothing. But you are in a son’s place to Ambrosius, and therefore it is right that you should know the truth. In Alexandria where I learned my
trade, and where the priest kind have not yet made it a sin to explore the bodies of the dead for knowledge of the living, they call it the Crab Sickness.’
I did not know what he meant, and I said so.
‘It is a thing, a very evil thing, that grows like a crab in the body; and sometimes it spawns into many of its own kind, and sometimes it remains but one; but either way it devours the body.’
I found it hard to speak through something that seemed to close my throat. ‘And is there no checking this thing?’
‘None,’ he said. ‘Neither by herbs nor by the knife. The secret of it is as deep beyond us as is the secret of life itself – or the secret of death.’
‘Death,’ I said. ‘Is that the end?’
‘Whether the thing runs its course mercifully swift, or crawls through years of time, it is death in the end.’
I remember that I was silent for a while, drawing patterns on the beaten earth with the chape of my sword. Then I asked, ‘Does Ambrosius know?’
‘One does not keep such news from the like of Ambrosius, with the work that he has in his sword hand, still to do, or to be passed on in good order to someone else.’
So I was right; he had been working against time all that year and more, striving to leave Britain strong for another hand to take from his, building toward a victory that, if it ever came, he would not live to see. I could have gone home through the streets of Venta howling like a dog for Ambrosius who had been to me father and friend and captain, not for his death, but for the manner of it, and for its shadow reaching out before.
The early weeks of that winter went by, much as the same weeks in other years. By day we slaved in the training grounds and the colt-breaking yards; or when chance offered, took a day’s hunting in the forests about Venta. Our evenings were passed, for the most part, about the fires in the gymnasium of the old Governor’s Palace, which the Companions had taken for their mess hall; sometimes, the chiefs and captains among us, in Ambrosius’s High Hall which had been the great banqueting chamber, or in my case, and all too seldom, in my own quarters with Guenhumara, like a mere tired soldier or farmer or merchant returning to his woman at the day’s end. And these evenings were at once a deep joy and an abiding sorrow to me.