Sword at Sunset

  chapter thirty-three

  ‘It Was Warm Between Thy Breasts, Lalage’

  A FEW DAYS LATER, BEDWYR ASKED FOR LEAVE TO GO UP to Coed Gwyn for a while, and for the first time in my life, part of me was glad to see him go. Na, not glad, but conscious of an odd relief in his going, that had in some way to do with that strange evil moment during the final charge, though what, I did not know, for I took care not to look too closely.

  Winter wore away while, still deeply meshed in the unfamiliar tasks of kingship, I scarcely noticed that the evenings were growing long and light, and the still-bare woods full of the clear surprised twitterings and flutings of thrush and wren and robin, trying over again the song that they had forgotten since last year. And then suddenly the pale promise of spring was fulfilled and running like the green Solas Sidh, the Fairy Fire, through the woods and heaths; and in the tangle of the old palace gardens, the fragile white stars of the anemones turned their backs to the wind. And when I took three squadrons of the Companions and rode up to see to the defenses around Sabrina head, where the Scots’ attacks had still to be reckoned with, Bedwyr had not yet returned, and Owain took command of his squadron.

  It was about the half of a month before we turned the horses’ heads home again.

  On the last day of the return ride we reached the derelict villa on the Sorviodunum Road a little before dusk, and in the usual way of things I would have ordered camp there, and covered the last seven or eight miles in the morning, but all at once, even as I drew rein before the nettle-choked gateway of the cattle yard where we often corralled the horses, I was filled with a wild impatience to be home that was in part the mere wish of a tired man to see the lamplight shining from his own door, and his own woman with her hair tumbled on the pillow, in part a sense of desperate urgency, of something wrong, that came to me clear and unmistakable like a bird’s call out of the evening sky. It was a glorious evening, the kind on which the last luminous twilight lingers on far beyond its usual time; there would be the last half of a moon later, and the big sorrel colt I was riding seemed fresh enough, as did the other horses.

  I called to the rest, ‘How say you, brothers? There’s a moon coming. If we bait the horses and ride on again when we’ve eaten, we can be in Venta by midnight. Shall we push forward and give our wives a start?’

  We off-saddled the horses, watered them and turned them loose to graze and roll while we ate hard oaten bread and dried curds, and stretched saddle-cramped legs for a while. And all the time I was possessed of that wild impatience to be pushing on, mingled more and more strongly with a sense of dread without cause; a shadow without substance to cast it. It seemed an unbearably long time until I could decently give the order to saddle and remount.

  The moon was high when we came up the last straight stretch between the graves and the poplar trees to the west gate of Venta. The gate towers stood up against the glimmering sky, black, like a cliff. But the clatter of our horses’ hooves had given warning of our coming, and the yellow glim of a lantern blinked in the lookout above the gateway, voices sounded, giving orders, and the heavy valves began to grind open before I had need to shout for admittance. And we clattered through into the wide main street of Venta, streets whitened by the moon, between the dark walls of the houses, which might have been the streets of a deserted city for all the sign of life in them, save for a half-wild cat who turned with eyes that were twin green sparks of hate to spit at us before streaking off into the shadows, and here and there a woman flitting like a tawdry night moth along the dark side of the way; and once a strayed reveler late out of some wineshop, and wavering his unsure way home, who shouted something about folks that must come clamoring up the street like the Wild Hunt, waking other folks in their beds, and then continued on his way, singing mournfully but with surprising sweetness:

  The wind blows cold tonight,

  And the black rain falls chill,

  And the hillside’s cheerless sleeping

  Wi’ a broken sword to hand ...

  It was warm between thy breasts, Lalage.

  I have hated that song ever since.

  We dismounted in the wide forecourt of the palace. The horses were led away by the grooms and stable servants who came running with lanterns, and the sleep still in their eyes like a century or so of dust, to take charge of them, and the Companions clattered off to their own quarters. I had an idea that Cei wished to come with me, as though he thought that I might have some need of him; if so, I must have got rid of him some way, for when I went on toward the Queen’s Courtyard, I was alone, save for my armor-bearer. But all the happenings of that night are confused and darkened in my mind.

  I passed one of my own lads on guard duty at the courtyard entrance, and a few moments later (the door was never barred) was in the atrium. The place was dark save for the few red gleeds still glowing in the brazier, and Margarita, when she sprang up from her place and came with her usual grave delight to greet me, was an enchanted creature, flushed to the color of a pink pearl shell. Nothing could be very wrong, I thought, with the house quiet in sleep and Margarita in her usual place, and I began to call myself all kinds of a fool. I bade Riada light a couple of candles and bring some wine, for there seemed no point in rousing the household, and while he groped for the candles in their prickets and kindled them with a twig from the charcoal embers, I flung off my cloak and stood holding my hands over the dim warmth of the brazier, for there was a chill in me, though the night was not cold.

  The light sprang up, quickening from candle to candle, and the familiar room grew warmly out of obscurity, and Margarita was more enchanted than any white hound by candlelight. I glanced about me as Riada departed to carry out the second part of his orders, as I had done at so many homecomings, seeing the kingfisher-colored saint on the wall above the big olivewood rug chest, the signs of Guenhumara’s occupation that had made the big smoky room, so long deserted, into my home. Indeed it was as though she had only just left the room, for a small red Samian bowl on the table, half full of water, still contained a few chill white anemones and beside it lay her scissors and thread and a length of plaited green rushes, as though she had been making a garland or a festival wreath.

  And suddenly, looking at these traces of Guenhumara, it seemed to me strange that she had not awakened and come down to me. We had not made much tumult, in our coming in, but she was a light sleeper – light as a leaf – and I had never come home before, even at this hour of night, that she had not roused. Suddenly the sense of disaster, which the sight of all things in their usual places had quieted in me for a short while, flared up again, and I turned from the brazier and ran up the narrow stairway.

  The room was white with the moon as it had been on the night that the child died, but it was too early in the year for the nightingale. It had the blank anonymity of emptiness so that I knew Guenhumara was not there, even before I saw the rugs smooth and unrumpled on the bed place, only a faint hollow on the side, as though she had sat there for a while.

  I stood for a long moment, thinking too, while the cold emptiness of the room seeped into me. It was warm between thy breasts, Lalage; the old song scurried senselessly round and round in my head, as though in search of escape. I wanted some way of escape, too, but I did not know from what. I went out and down the stairs again.

  Riada had returned with wine in my own big silver cup with the ram’s-head handles, and a couple of servants had appeared, blinking and in hurriedly dragged-on clothes. I turned on Sasticca, she who had taken old Blanid’s place, and demanded, ‘Where is my Lady, the Queen?’

  She gaped at me, scarce fully awake. ‘Eh, my lord, we did not expect you this night, or there should have been a better welcome—’

  ‘The Queen,’ I said, ‘where is the Queen?’

  ‘My mistress could not sleep, she said the moon was too bright. She went out to walk in the garden, and bade us not to bide waiting for her.’

  Relief of a sort swept over me. In the garden that stretched
beyond the widespread warren of the palace, she would like enough have heard nothing of our return. For a moment it was in my mind to go out after her, and meet her in the crown of windflowers that she had made herself for some whim; but if she had gone to walk in the garden at night, it was maybe because she wanted to walk alone. I could wait a while at least.

  So I dismissed the servants back to their sleeping places, and, when they were gone, took the wine cup from Riada, and drank. As I did so, I saw his gaze go past me to the colonnade door at my back, which he had left open when he brought the wine; saw him stiffen a little, and the thick russet brows draw together.

  I swung around, and there in the doorway, with the cold sheen of the moonlight behind him, stood Medraut. I had not heard him come, for his footsteps were almost silent, the same light prowling tread that I have noticed in a hunchback before now. But there he was, and there it seemed that, like his mother, he might have stood waiting for a lifetime or so. His eyes pricked with spangles of cold blue fire that seemed not to come from the candles, in a face that would have been a mere white mask save for the working of the muscles about the mouth. I could not see what lay behind the mask. But whatever it was, I knew that it threatened my whole world.

  He said – and in some strange way his voice, like his face, gave the impression of being masked – ‘Artos, my father, thank God that you are back. There is sore need of you here!’

  ‘What need?’ I demanded.

  ‘Is there so much trust between you and me that you will believe my word? Come quickly and know the thing for yourself!’

  ‘If you do not tell me, I do not come,’ I said.

  He stood as still as ever, looking at me; and I could have sworn that whatever else, there was a kind of struggling grief behind the white mask. I daresay he really believed in his own grief just then, for save for hate, he was so empty that he could feel whatever it suited him to feel. ‘Not even for my stepmother’s sake?’ he said.

  There was a moment’s complete silence in the atrium, and one fear that was already in me began to thicken like a cold mist. ‘Very well,’ I said at last, and put down the half-empty wine cup.

  Young Riada cried out to me sharply, ‘Sir – my Lord Artos, don’t go,’ and his voice cracked with anxiety.

  I felt for his shoulder and gave it a little shake, my gaze still holding and held by Medraut’s. ‘I’ll be back.’

  In a kind of cold nightmare, the more terrible because the fear was for no known thing but fear existing in its own right, I walked out into the courtyard. Medraut drew back for me to pass, and then turned in with his light prowling step beside me. ‘Across the garden, that is the quickest way,’ he said. I did not ask where to; I knew that I might as well ask the question of the winter rain as of the man beside me. In some ways he was stronger than I was. We went out through the furry blackness of the low arched alleyway under the store wing, and cut across the corner of the tangled garden, to the sprawl of courts and tumble-down buildings on the far side. This was the oldest part of the palace, dating from the first days of Rome-in-Britain, and had fallen into disuse save as storerooms and the like. A veritable honeycomb of courts and chambers linked one to another, black and white under the moon, empty of life as the city outside had seemed. In one place only, the remoteness of the moon was challenged by a smudge of smoky gold, where a torch high on the angle of two walls shed a little light into the alleyway that made a shortcut to the mews. Medraut reached up and took it from its iron sconce as we passed, and the shadows spun and darted flying before us and crowding in behind as we went on again.

  At a gateway in the wall, I felt Medraut’s hand on my arm, urging me through without a word, and then we were in a narrow courtyard in the heart of the old palace. I knew the place well, though I had seen it seldom in the past thirty years, for I had kept my mongrel dog pack there when I was a boy. A well, whose water was still sweet – or had been then – was sunk in the midst of the place, and a wild pear tree overhung the wellhead. It had been a bird-sown sapling when I first came there; it was dead now, black and stark in the moonlight, its beauty turned skeletal, save for one living branch on which a few white flowers still unfurled their fragile petals in a last reaching out to the springtime.

  The shadow of the flowering branch fled across the face of the storehouse opposite as Medraut, with the torch held high, moved forward, and the probing torchlight picked out the figure of a man standing with his drawn sword before the arched entrance, and other figures in darker corners, striking out in each case that glint of a drawn weapon.

  I remember that for the split instant of time before the scene sprang to life, I wondered whether I had walked into a trap, and was to die as Constantine my grandfather had died, and whipped my hand to my sword hilt. Then as they stepped forward into the full torchlight, I saw that they were four or five of my own Companions, four or five boys of the new generation that I felt I scarcely knew. Now, clearly, they were acting under Medraut’s orders as they moved in toward the storehouse doorway, and Medraut himself stood back formally, that I might go first. I checked in the arched opening, and looked around at him, trying once more to see behind his mask. ‘What has Guenhumara to do with this place, Medraut? Why all the ugly mystery?’

  ‘Let my father forgive me,’ he said. ‘There was no other way,’ and made a little gesture to me to go in and climb the steep curved stairway whose bottom steps showed waveringly in the torchlight.

  I went in and began to climb, my giant-wise shadow climbing remorselessly ahead of me in the light of the torch which Medraut carried close behind. At the midway turn of the stair where the tawny light ran up into the darkness, my son slipped past me, and checked before a small deep-set door, and tried the latch with a small decisive rattle. Then, as the door did not open, he whipped out his dagger and beat upon the dusty timbers with its hilt. In the enclosed space of the stairway the sound seemed to beat upon one’s ears, and the echoes woke and flung to and fro like startled bats, but nothing else answered to the summons, and after a moment Medraut began to beat again, crying out in a strange high voice like that of a woman on the edge of hysteria. ‘Open up! Open in Caesar’s name, or we’ll smash the door in!’ And I felt the other men pressing up behind me, eager as hounds that wait for the quarry to break cover. And suddenly I knew that the thing that mattered to me most in the world was that I should not see what lay behind that door.

  I caught Medraut’s dagger wrist and dragged it down. ‘No! Either tell me the meaning of this foolery or else have done with it!’

  But in the same instant the man on the step behind me reached forward and caught up something that lay like a snowflake on the threshold of the doorway, and when he held it up to the torchlight with a small puzzled laugh, I saw that it was a wood anemone, one fragile white windflower already beginning to wilt. And I knew that there could be no shelter for me, from what lay beyond that small deep-set door.

  There was the light grating sound of a key turning in the lock, the door was flung open from within and the softer light of a fat-lamp flowed out into the stairway to mingle with the flare of the torches, and Bedwyr stood in the doorway, naked under a hastily flung-on cloak, and with his drawn sword in his hand.

  There was an instant’s silence so intense that it pressed upon the ears, and in the heart of it – the stillness at the heart of the storm – Bedwyr and I stood face to face. I think that he was scarcely aware of the other men, only of me, and of Guenhumara standing against the wall behind him. ‘I did not know that you had returned to Venta,’ I heard my own voice saying in the stillness, ‘but it seems you have your reasons that I should not.’

  I rounded on the young men crowding the stair. None of them were against me especially; they were against the Queen and Caesar’s captain, because Medraut had taught them to be. Only Medraut had known that the blow was aimed at me, and the ruin of the other two only incidental. ‘You have done your night’s work, now get out!’ I shouted at them, and their faces stared up at
me, surprised, angry, resentful, out of the gloom of the stairway. ‘Get out,’ I said again, more quietly, ‘back to your kennels – and for you, Medraut – you too have done your night’s work, and most nobly! I would say that surely there can be no more cunning spy among all the Little Dark People than you have proved yourself, but the Little Dark Ones I have always counted as my friends, and I would not seem to insult them now.’

  The white mask was haggard, and I will swear that there was sweat on his forehead. He had lowered the torch somewhat and the copper glare of it beat like a gong in both our faces, and for one instant it was as though his eyes flashed open upon me and I saw in them twin blue sparks lit by the flames of hell. Then the veil, the inner lid, descended again, and he said humbly, ‘If I have done ill, let my father forgive me. I could not bear that men should laugh behind your back – your own men; and even the Sea Wolves who must come to hear of it, and think the less of Artorius Augustus who let himself be cuckolded by his dear familiar friend!’