Sword at Sunset

  It was always a joy to me to be with Guenhumara, to look at her, and breathe her quietness; yet beneath the joy, and in some way part of it, as though one were the shadow of the other, lay always the sorrow, the sense of distance between us that I could not cross; the loneliness. She had said that she did not want me to touch her, and I could not come near enough to touch her, nowadays – oh, not physically: physically, when once those first few days after Hylin’s death were past, she never withdrew herself from me, nor did she ever withdraw her kindness, but kindness is not of necessity the same thing as love; and I knew that something within her, her deepest and inmost self, her soul perhaps, had gone away from me and was going further. I think that she did not wish it; I think that at that time she would have come back if she could; but she could not find the way, and I could not find it for her.

  Sometimes on those rare evenings, we would be alone together; sometimes a little knot of friends, Cei and Gwalchmai, Pharic and the Minnow ... very occasionally Bedwyr alone; and those were the best evenings of all.

  On those evenings we abandoned the atrium, and sat in Guenhumara’s private chamber, or at least Bedwyr and I sat, while Guenhumara returned to her weaving. I can see her now, as though I were still sitting on the stool beside the brazier with Cabal sprawled on the warm tesserae at my feet, lordlily indifferent to the white boarhound bitch Margarita suckling his squabbling puppies close by. She would be working at her standing loom, and Bedwyr sitting on a pillow beside her, idly fingering his harp, and glancing up at her; she turning perhaps to glance down at his ugly laughing face, and their two shadows flung by the lamp onto the web of her weaving, so that it was almost as though she were weaving them into the pattern of the cloth. And behind the wandering harp notes, the whisper of sleet against the high window shutter.

  I liked to watch them so, for it seemed to me good that the two people I loved best in the world should be friends, that we should be a trinity; the clover leaf or the yellow iris, not merely three in row, with myself in the center. On those evenings, too, it was as though Guenhumara came back a little out of her distance, so that I felt that a little more – a little more – and we should find each other again.

  Medraut never made one in those quiet evenings. He had begun to gather a following of his own, among the younger of the Companions, and they had their own ways of passing the free hours. And I was only too thankful that it should be so. Perhaps if I had been otherwise, if I had tried harder to fight his mother in him, instead of leaving him in her power, it might have saved much sorrow later. And yet – I don’t know – I do not know. I think he was destroyed, and not merely held captive; and only God can remake what has been destroyed.

  The dark of the winter was past, and the days lengthening, and the hunter in me had begun to sniff the distant unrest of the spring, when Ambrosius sent for me one evening.

  I found him in his private chamber, sitting in the great chair beside the brazier. Gaheris his armor-bearer squatted with hunched shoulders on the floor beside him, cleaning a piece of harness, and in the farther shadows I could just make out the dark shape of the Jew physician. We talked for a short while of things that mattered little to either of us; and then in the midst of some quite different subject, he said: ‘Artos, I am like a beast in a cage, here in Venta. I must get outside the bars for a while.’

  ‘So?’ I said.

  ‘So I am going up to the villa for a few days. They tell me that the hunting in Spinae is good after the soft winter.’ He smiled at my silence, the old swift smile that kindled his whole face as though a lamp had sprung up inside it – there was little flesh now to shield the light. ‘Good hunting for the friends who come with me, even though maybe my own hunting days are gone by.’ And I saw in his eyes that he knew that Ben Simeon had told me.

  ‘Can you ride so far?’

  ‘Surely. It is but a forenoon’s ride, and my old fat Pollux grows less like a horse and more like a goose-feather bed with every day that passes.’

  It would be useless to argue against the plan, I saw that; and indeed I had no wish to. ‘Who goes with you, Ambrosius?’

  ‘Not many: yourself and Gaheris here and Aquila – my war leader and my armor-bearer, and the captain of my bodyguard. I shall not lack for care and guarding.’

  ‘And Ben Simeon?’

  He shook his head. ‘I have no more need of physicians, Bear Cub.’

  And the figure in the shadows made a movement that was the beginning of urgent protest, and then was still again.

  chapter twenty-six

  The Sword in the Sky

  TWO DAYS LATER WE WERE UP AT THE SMALL VILLA HOUSE – scarcely more than a farmsteading – in the wooded hills north of Venta, which Ambrosius and his father before him had used for a hunting lodge. The old smoke-darkened atrium was full of stored grain baskets and so were the wings, save for a few rooms where the steward and farm servants were housed, as was the case with almost every villa out of the Saxons’ path, for in these days when there was no longer any export trade, the people had given up wool and turned back to corn. But Ambrosius had always kept the two long rooms of the upper story for his own quarters, and the servants sent on ahead had made all ready for us.

  On that first day we none of us hunted, but left the dogs in idleness, though Kian the chief hunter told of a twelve-point stag well worth the hunting, and remained together about the farm, lingering over the day as friends linger over a parting meal before each goes his separate way. We supped – the three of us, for young Gaheris had been dispatched to join the hunters in the steward’s quarters – in the long upper chamber, a good country meal of hard-boiled duck eggs, dark rye bread and ewe’s-milk cheese, and the last of the withered long-biding apples that the steward’s woman brought proudly from the storeroom for our pleasure; and washed it down with thin wine made from the little pinkish grapes that grew on the south wall.

  The meal over, and the winter dusk already drawing in from the ends of the room, we gathered about the brazier; gathered close, for the clouds had rolled away and the evening was turning cold under an ice-green sky; and huddled our cloaks about us, scuffing our feet into the rushes where the dogs lay sprawled. The fire was a sweet-scented one, of apple and knotted hawthorn wood laid over the glowing charcoal; the smoke of it fronded upward into the blackened bell-mouth of the smoke louver, touched to gold by the flickering of its own small flames – hawthorn burns neatly, in licking flames like fringed flower petals – and the burning wood gave back the warmth of the sun that it had gathered through a score of summers.

  We had not lit the fat-lamp, and the light of the brazier beat up into our faces, throwing curious upward shadows from cheekbone and jaw and brow. Ambrosius sat forward, with his hands hanging relaxed about his knees, as he had always done when he was very tired, and his face in the upward light was the face of a skull wearing the gold circle of kingship about its hollow brows. Aquila’s face with its great hooked nose was that of an old outworn falcon. He had been sick a long time with the breast wound, and though it had healed at last, he would never be fit for hard service again; it was for that reason that Ambrosius had made him captain of his guard. But a worse wound to him had been the loss of his wife the previous summer – a little brown fierce thing with a taste in plumage that was bright as a woodpecker’s; but I think to Aquila she had not seemed like that ...

  Presently Ambrosius roused from his thoughts, and glanced from one of us to the other with contentment, a great peace and quietness on his face. The wooden bowl of apples stood on a stool close by, and among them a couple of handfuls of sweet chestnuts from the tree in the courtyard. He reached out and took one of them, and sat turning the glossy brownness of it in his fingers with the lingering touch that means memory. ‘Constantine my father brought me up here on my first hunting trip, in the winter before he – died,’ he said after a while. ‘Utha he had brought up for three years, but that was the first winter that I was judged old enough. I was nine, and a man among men ... Uth
a and I used to roast chestnuts in the evenings; but in those days we still used the atrium and there was the hot edge of the hearthstone to roast them on.’ He smiled ruefully, as though at his own foolishness. ‘I suppose one couldn’t roast chestnuts on a brazier.’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ I said. ‘You have been High King so long that you have forgotten how to make one thing do the work of another. You have forgotten cooking ribs of stolen beef over a watch fire in a snowstorm,’ and I got up.

  He made to stay me, laughing. ‘Na na, it was but a trick of the mind – a whim of the moment.’

  But suddenly, and out of all proportion to the size of the matter, I was determined that Ambrosius should have his chestnut roasting. ‘The whim is a pleasant one, though. I also have roasted chestnuts here before I was old enough to carry my shield.’ And I went down to the steward’s quarters where the cook place was, and called to the steward’s woman, ‘Mother, give me a shovel or an old fry pan. The High King has a mind to roast chestnuts.’

  When I came back to the upper room, bearing a battered shovel, I had the impression that Ambrosius and Aquila had been in earnest speech together, and that they had stopped abruptly when they heard my returning foot on the stair. I was vaguely surprised, but they had been sword brothers when I still ran barefoot among the hunting dogs, and must have many things to speak of in which I had no part. I showed them the shovel in triumph, and set to building the glowing hawthorn logs into the best shape for my purpose, feeling suddenly my own morning time come back upon me as I did so; and setting half a dozen chestnuts on the shovel, slid it into the hot heart of the fire. ‘See? I have not wasted my years in the wild places.’

  So we roasted chestnuts, like three urchins, while Cabal propped himself against my knee and looked on, singing his deep throat-song of contentment in the warmth; and scorched our fingers raking them out, cursing and laughing, but never very loud, for a mood of quiet seemed to hold us all, that evening ... After a while Ambrosius looked up from the hot chestnut he was peeling, and I found the gaze of his sunken eyes drawing mine across the firelight. Then he leaned forward, the hot nut forgotten in his fingers.

  He said, ‘Artos, when I determined on this hunting trip, and spoke of feeling caged in Venta, did you think “sick men have odd fancies”?’

  ‘I know too well the feeling of the cage bars that comes upon a man toward the end of winter quarters, when the life of the world is stirring but spring and the time to march out again is still far away.’

  He nodded. ‘Yet that was not the whole reason, nor the chief reason that I wished to come up here into the hunting hills.’

  ‘So? And the chief reason?’

  ‘There were two,’ he said. ‘Two, conjoined like the two halves of a damson stone. And one of them was this, that I knew the time had come to speak to you of certain matters concerning the man who takes the Sword of Britain after me.’

  Aquila made a harsh sound of protest in his throat; and Ambrosius answered it as though it had been spoken. ‘Ah, but it has ... Na na, my friends, never wear such grim faces for me. I am not an old man – not old in years – but assuredly I am not going out in my flower. I have had a long enough life, and a good one that has brought me faithful friends and a few to love me; and there is little more that any man can ask – save perhaps that there shall be one to carry the tools of his trade after him and work more greatly with them than he has ever done.’

  He was silent for a long moment, looking down at the half-peeled chestnut in his hand, and we also were silent, waiting for what came next. I had an odd feeling, though I do not think he had actually moved at all, that Aquila had drawn back from us a little, as from a thing that was chiefly between Ambrosius and myself. ‘The time has come when I must choose out a man to carry the tools of my trade after me.’ Ambrosius raised his head again and looked full at me. ‘Artos, save for the small accident of birth, you are my son; all the son I ever had. I have told you that before. Furthermore, you are of the Royal House in blood, as surely as I am myself.’

  I cut in, thinking to make the matter easier for him. ‘Utha’s son in blood, but not in name, and so I cannot be the one to carry the tools of your trade after you. Never fret, Ambrosius, I have known that always. I am the war leader. I have no hunger to be the High King.’ I reached out, I remember, and set my hand over his. ‘Long ago, you promised me Arfon, and that is enough for me.’

  ‘Na, you do not understand,’ he said. ‘Listen now: If I set you on one side, the choice must fall upon Cador of Dumnonia, or upon young Constantine, his son. They are the last that have the royal blood of Britain in them, and I am not sure of Cador; he has the inner fires of a leader, but his flame flares and sinks, and his purposes shift like wind-driven sand dunes. I cannot feel in my heart that he is the man to hold together a mixed kingdom and a pack of native princelings straining at the leash. The boy’s mettle I have had no chance to judge at all, but whatever he may be later, he can be little but a half-broken colt yet.’

  (I thought of the dark young man I had hunted with, that spring before Gaul, and the babe into whose nest Maximus’s great seal had fallen.)

  I said, ‘Ambrosius, should not all this go before the Council?’

  A smile twitched at his lips. ‘I scarcely think so. Listen again: If I call the Council together and tell them that I have chosen Cador of Dumnonia to follow after me, I am putting Britain – all that was our heritage, all that we of the war host have spent our lives for, all that we still mean when we speak of Rome – into the hands of a man who I am not at all sure is strong enough to hold them; and if, when I am dead, it appears that my doubts were well founded, it will not be I who suffer, but Britain. Britain and the whole western world that will see the last lights go out.’

  ‘Who, then?’ I said.

  He looked at me very straightly, speaking no word; and after a moment, I said: ‘Oh no, I am not the stuff that usurpers are made of.’

  ‘But can you be sure that you would be left the choice? If I were to name Cador of Dumnonia as my successor, I think that for the most part the British princes would accept him, with a certain amount of muttering among themselves. “He is no greater man than we are,” but also, “He is the last of the blood-royal.” But the whole of this Kingdom of the South, and besides your own war band, the whole of the war host would rise for you, to a man.’

  ‘Not if I did not lead the rising,’ I said.

  ‘Artos, my simple Bear Cub, you overestimate – or perhaps underestimate – the power of your hold. When men rise for a leader it is not always at the leader’s instigation ... You are the man with the strength to hold Britain after me, and because you are baseborn, I cannot name you formally as my successor before the Council. But I can at least leave you free to win the High Kingship for yourself.’

  ‘I think that still I do not understand,’ I said slowly.

  ‘Do you not? If I die without naming my successor, most men will turn to you as a matter of course, and the rest will be for you to handle. Therefore I shall be at pains to die suddenly, without time to name an heir. It will inconvenience the Council somewhat, I imagine, but—’

  I sprang up. ‘My God! Ambrosius! You are sick in your mind! To leave us with no named heir – that will be to leave Britain rent with inward war, at a time when our only hope is to stand together – you cannot have thought – you—’

  He sat in the heavy carved chair and looked up at me, his head tipped back, the eyes clear and resolute in his dying face. ‘Oh yes, I have thought ... I am not a gambler by nature, Artos, but I can throw the dice when need be. I know perfectly well that in this I am throwing for the highest stakes of my life, and that if I lose, Britain will fall apart like a rotten apple, and lie open for the Barbarians to swarm in; but if I win, we shall have gained a few years more to carry on the battle. And I believe that I shall win – at least with more likelihood than if I were to name Cador of Dumnonia to come after me.’ A shadow of wry laughter crept into his tone. ‘It i
s a pity that, in the nature of things, I shall not be here to know whether I win or lose; whether I have thrown Venus or the Dog.’

  ‘I still think that it is madness!’

  ‘Madness, maybe; but there is no other way. Sit down again, Artos, and listen to me for a while longer, for we have not all the time in the world.’

  I sat down, feeling as though I had taken a blow between the eyes, and aware all the time of old Aquila’s frowning gaze bent in judgment upon me. ‘I am listening, Ambrosius.’

  ‘So. Then, you know as surely as I do, that the campaigning of this coming summer is not likely to follow the pattern of the past few years.’

  I nodded. ‘So says every wind as it blows over. Yet it is hard to see why the thing should come now, this year and no other, if it did not come five years ago. We have shown the Barbarians clearly enough that in pitched battle in anything even faintly approaching even numbers, we can cut them to pieces with our cavalry; and they must know, for their scouts are not fools, that we are steadily building up the strength of our cavalry forces.’

  ‘It is maybe for that reason that they determine to throw their whole strength against us before it is too late.’ Delicately, he shelled off another strip of brown husk from the creamy kernel of the long-cold chestnut. ‘It is in my mind that the Saxons are learning to combine at last. Certainly the coming and going that there has been all this winter between the Cantish Kingdom and the East Seax would seem to point that way.’

  The captain of the bodyguard smiled down his great hooked nose into the fire, and raked out a smoking chestnut with his dagger. ‘We also have our scouts. It is a good thing, seemingly, to have friends among the Little Dark Men of the hills and forests.’