He smiled, a smile that was light and sweet as honey smeared on aloes leaves. ‘My father has no need to warn me, I know to the thumbnail’s breadth what I can afford, and I shall not afford more. I never gamble beyond my means.’
‘See that you don’t,’ I said, ‘only see that you don’t, Medraut.’
The smile became yet sweeter, but he still played with his gloves and maybe that was to hide that his hands were shaking. ‘I have my father’s leave to go? I made great haste to answer his summons, and I am something wet.’
In the doorway, his hand on the golden Ophir rug that hung across the ill-fitting door, he checked and turned once more. ‘Has any news come to my father lately out of Arfon?’
‘What news should there be out of Arfon?’
‘Only women’s news, to be sure. They say that Maelgwn has taken a second bride.’
I was surprised, not at the news (for Maelgwn’s first wife had died the previous year, and he was not one to sleep long alone), but that Medraut should trouble with it.
‘And begun to build another oratory,’ added Medraut.
‘So? Is there some connection?’
‘The bride was his nephew’s wife – not his half sister, I grant you, but still, his nephew’s wife – Gwen Alarch, they call her.’ He was as malicious as a gossiping old woman with a young one’s name in her hands. ‘The boy was killed hunting, and some say not by accident, but I doubt if Maelgwn loses as much sleep over that as for another cause ... Maybe he’ll get him a son yet, and I’d not count too much on his faith-keeping hereafter, if that happens.’
‘Na?’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘Na. After all, the Saxon flood will not rise far into the mountains; and with a son to follow him, it must seem the more desirable to make sure of the Lordship of Arfon after you.’
And noticing that he set himself aside from all claim to Arfon, I knew well enough the reason – that he flew at higher game. And again it crossed my mind that it was as well that I had never allowed Constantine to be openly named as my heir. Medraut must know clearly enough where the choice must fall, but as long as nothing was said, he would be in no hurry. There was a deadly patience about him, as there had been about his mother.
The golden rug swung back into place and his light step was swallowed instantly by the wind and the rain – unless he was still standing outside, smiling that light swift sweet smile that made one’s blood feel thin.
Gwalchmai died about that same time, as quietly and suddenly as a tired man falling asleep by the fire after a hard day’s work, Cei told me, weeping for him, when a few days later the first of the Company returned to winter quarters.
The ranks were thinning fast.
chapter thirty-five
The Traitor
NEXT SPRING I WAS PREPARED FOR ANOTHER THRUST OF THE Sea Wolves, but though we heard of more of the long war boats following in the wake of last year’s, and others with women and even children, the thrust never came; and when we moved against them in our turn, they simply melted among the forest and marshlands like a mist.
And so as the years passed, the thing settled into a fitful border warfare which has served to keep the Sea Wolves penned within some kind of frontier, but no more. It seems strange, when one comes to think of it, that we have not been able to drive them back into the sea. And yet – I don’t know – there is Pictish blood in the folk of those parts, left over from the great Pict Wars of Maximus’s day; the Picts are second only to the Little Dark People for knowing the secret possibilities of their own countryside, and they do not love the smell of Rome.
Also, we have never, in all these years, been free to turn the whole war host their way; there has been Eburacum and the Lindum coastline in need of our aid, and the Scots from the West every summer, and not even a whole heart within ourselves, for among the princes of the Cymri, who have always fought like dogs whenever the High King’s hand was off them, the word was running to and fro like a little furtive wind through the grass, that Artos the Bear was one who had forgotten his own people to carry a Roman sword. Maybe someone set that word running; I do not know. I know that three years since, I had to deal with the princedoms of Vortiporus and Cynglass as one deals with enemy territory ...
This summer the Scots made a sudden attack on Môn and the coast of all the northern Cymri (last summer the harvest failed and last winter was a lean one; that always sets the young men wandering) and I went up with two hundred of the Companions, leaving Cei in command at Venta, to the aid of Maelgwn and the coastwise princes who were for the most part still loyal. The Scots are brave men though their fires flare too windily over too little of red heart; and it was the beginning of harvesttime before the flurry of small buffeting wide-spaced attacks were dealt with to the last one.
We made our base camp, our central stronghold all summer, in the old Roman fort of Segontium that clung to the foot of the mountains commanding the Straits of Môn, until with the shores quiet again, it was time to be turning the horses’ heads south once more. It was a soft evening, that last one I spent – the last that I shall ever spend – among my own hills, the sun westering into a smoky haze beyond the low hills of Môn, and every comber of the western sea shot through with translucent gold as it came in to crash and cream below the fortress walls. Arfon tore at my heart that evening, all the shadowed glens of Arfon and swift white falls of mountain water, and the high tops that were tawny now in late summer as a hound’s coat, and the moss-fragrant woods below Dynas Pharaon where I shall not walk again. I would have put off the parting for a few days longer, lingering, finding some excuse, but I knew we should have slow traveling on the way south, for I intended to swing wide of the direct road, in order to pass through as many of the Cymric and border princedoms as might be, and sup in hall with as many of their lords. I thought it might serve some good purpose, that they should see the High King at their own hearths. God help me, I was still fool enough to cling to that old hopeless dream of a Britain strongly enough bonded to stand with shields still linked, when I was no longer there.
Fool! Fool! Fool!
With a short while to waste before supper, I had gone up with Maelgwn into the old watchtower at the southeast angle of the fort, to look at the falcons we had housed there – Maelgwn was a falconer to his fingertips, like Pharic, and where he went his hawks went too. I can see the small round chamber now – lit partly by the coppery sunset light through the archer’s window, partly by the flare of the newly kindled torch in its sconce by the winding stair-head. The hawks and falcons hooded and unhooded on their perches, with the startling black and white slashes of their mutes patterning the wall behind them. I can smell the smoke curling up the stair from the driftwood and sea-wrack fire that the falconers had lit in the chamber below, and hear the harsh cries and wing clappings of feeding time. Maelgwn had pulled on an ancient hawking glove, and was feeding the birds himself, taking from his falconer the gobbets of meat, and holding each in turn to the bird that snatched it from him. The last, and clearly his favorite, was a young golden eagle, whom he took up to feed on the fist. ‘This one I took myself from the eyrie in May; a small thing of down and quills, but a demon even then – eh, my Lucifer?’ He held a bloody partridge to the bird, who took it with a lightning strike of the talons, and began to break it up with the delicacy of its kind; and then, the food being gone, rattled his feathers and sat with distended crop, brooding on his lord’s fist, like a chained Caesar and outglaring the world in general with a mad topaz eye. They were two of a kind, I thought, watching the man standing where he had moved into the window with the great bird on his fist; both predators, both knowing no law but their own, both magnificent in their way, and I wondered again if they were true, those tales of his first wife’s death being no natural one. It was certainly true that he had killed the boy for the sake of Gwen Alarch’s pretty hair and little soft breasts. Well, he would hold Arfon with a strong hand after me, he might ride the princedom with a wolf bit himself, but assured
ly no other would encroach on its borders. I wished that I could be as sure of Constantine’s strength.
Suddenly Maelgwn’s likeness to the eagle sharpened, as his eyes widened, focusing on something a long way off, and his finger checked in the light repeated movement of drawing again and again down the burnished neck feathers.
He said nothing, but I got up from the box on which I had been sitting and crossed to the window.
Far up the track that had once been the military road from Moridunum and the South a small puff of dust caught the last of the sunlight and turned to a golden smudge with a seed of darkness at its heart. It was scarcely larger than a plume of thistle silk, and yet I knew – or maybe it only seemed afterward as though I knew – that it was the doom I had waited for almost forty years, that the rider hammering down the old road through the mountains, with his dust cloud rolling behind him, was the Dark Rider, for me.
‘Someone has an urgent tale to tell, that he carries it at that speed,’ Maelgwn said.
I nodded, but I do not think I spoke; watching that small ominous plume of dust spin nearer at breakneck speed, dropping out of the sunlight that still clung to the skirts of the hills, into the shadows that were already creeping in across the coast. And a few moments later I heard, faintly, faintly as the blood in my own ears, above the soft voice of the sea, the beat of horse’s hooves. In a little, I could see the horseman, bent low over his horse’s neck, and the drum of hooves rose pounding and urgent; it was almost dusk now, below the fortress walls, and men and torches were gathering to the gate. I pushed off with my hands from the high cold window ledge; time to go down ... ‘It will be for me,’ I said, and turned and clattered down the winding stair, my own shadow wheeling darkly ahead of me on the torchlit wall. Maelgwn followed me, still carrying the golden eagle, and at the foot of the stairway Flavian joined us, hurrying from the stables.
The gates were open when we reached the clear space before them, and in the midst of a small startled crowd a man was dropping from the back of a foundered horse. The poor brute was black with sweat and crusted with the summer dust, his flanks heaved distressfully, and the foam dripping from his muzzle as he stood with drooping head was rank and bloody; and the rider, staggering where he stood, was in little better case, white from head to foot with the dust that had made raw red rims around his bleared eyes, save where the trickling sweat had cut channels in it down his haggard forehead and cheeks. Indeed it was small wonder that in the first moment of seeing him neither Flavian nor I recognized his son.
Then Flavian uttered a startled exclamation, and it was as though a film dropped from my eyes. ‘Minnow! What word do you bring me?’
He looked up at sound of my voice, and came and stumbled onto his knees at my feet, his head and shoulders hanging. ‘An ill word.’ The dust was in his throat too, and his voice a mere croak. ‘An ill word, my Lord Artos. Do not make me speak it; it is all here in this letter— ’
I took the roll which he pulled from the breast of his tunic and handed up to me, broke Cei’s familiar seal and snapped the crimson thread, and opened it out. Someone was holding a torch for me, and the flames of it, teased by the light sea wind that was rising with sunset, fluttered over the crabbed writing. Yet I had none of my usual difficulty in reading anything from Cei’s hand; it was as though it read itself, every word striking up at me from the ill-cured parchment with a small cold separate shock. I read on, neither slow nor quick, and when the last word was reached, looked up, with a head that felt cold and clear and oddly separate from my body. I saw the faces of my own Companions and those who followed Maelgwn turned toward me in the torchlight, stilled in waiting and unspoken question.
‘This is from Cei,’ I said. ‘He sends me word that Cerdic of the West Seax has been strengthened by a great war fleet from the Ligis Estuary – a lean summer and a hard winter we had last year, you’ll remember – and that Medraut my son has raised the standard of revolt against me. He has left the war host, taking a goodly following of our young warriors with him, and joined himself to Cerdic at Vindocladia. They have sent out the Cran Tara for the Scots and the Painted People in Gaul to join them.’
The silence closed in over my voice, and went on and on, the sound of the sea echoed hollow in it, and a crying of gulls like lost souls.
Nobody spoke; they were waiting for me to speak again; only somebody swallowed thickly, and I saw Flavian’s hand clench on his sword belt until the knuckles shone waxy white as mutton bone. In the end it was not I, but Maelgwn’s great golden eagle that broke the silence when it had begun to seem unbreakable so that it must endure forever. Disturbed by what he felt around him, and swift as all his kind to catch the mood of men, he began to bate wildly from the fist, leaping against his jesses while his jarring screams tore the silence across and across and his vast beating wingspread seeming to shut out the sky. Maelgwn fought to quieten and control him, cursing softly, while the great wings thrashed about his head, and now that the silence was broken, men’s voices splurged up, and incredulous and impotently raging.
When at last the great bird was quieted, and the men, answering to my upflung fist, had grown silent again, I heard my own voice against the wash of the tide. ‘It will be moonrise in about three hours. In three hours we ride south, my brothers.’ And the words seemed to be an echo of something said before.
(‘For God’s sake come!’ Cei had written. ‘Gathering all men possible by the way. We need every man, but above all, for God’s sake come yourself with all speed, for if ever we needed you to lead us, we need you now!’)
Within the half of an hour, Companions and tribesmen were snatching a meal in the crumbling mess hall. Around the upper fire a little apart from the rest, I had gathered to me Maelgwn himself with a couple of chieftains who had not yet dispersed to their own places after the summer’s fighting, Owain and Flavian and the Minnow still in all his dust; and while we ate we held a hurried council of war. From outside came the sounds of the aroused camp, men’s voices, and the trampling and neighing of horses as they were brought in, the clang of weapons fetched out from the armory and flung down in heaps.
‘If Medraut has but now sent out the Cran Tara, it must be some while before the Scots or the Picts can gather to him in strength,’ I said. ‘If the Fates are not against us we may well be able to take him and Cerdic before their friends can reach them.’
The Minnow, who had been staring with red-rimmed eyes into the fire, looked up and shook his head, which with the dust of his wild ride was grayer than his father’s. ‘If Noni Heron’s Feather and his sons speak truth, the Cran Tara must have gone out in the spring, for a war hosting at harvesttime. With a northwest wind to speed the currachs, the Scots and the Painted People will not be late to the feast.’
And it seemed to me that my heart settled, cold and heavy as flint, under my breastbone. For the wind which had risen at sunset and was siffling through the sand-dune grasses and across the ramparts of the fort blew from the northwest ...
Flavian beat his open hand on his knee. ‘Harvesttime! And three quarters of the war host at home in their own villages, getting in the barley!’
‘So the call must have gone out at least two months before he left Venta,’ I said, but I was speaking more to myself than to the other men about the fire. ‘While he still supped in hall with the rest of us. It is true that one cannot see into his eyes ... ’
‘He has the forethought and the gift for seeing and acting swiftly on the chances of a situation that becomes a High King, if nothing else,’ Maelgwn said, in his throat, not without admiration.
A High King. Yes, the High Kingship was the quarry that Medraut hunted. The Purple would mean nothing to him, it belonged to another world than his. There would not be another Emperor of the West; all that would be over with my going. If he was victorious there would be a High King, and half a length behind him, as it were, a Saxon holding the greatest power in Britain; just as once it had been with Vortigern and the Sea Wolf Hengest. And then
when the time came, as it must, for a trial of strength between them, there would be only the Saxon, and Britain would be torn between the tree and the stallion, and the end would be darkness, after all.
I must have groaned aloud, for there was a small swift movement among the men around the fire, and suddenly they were all looking at me as though I had drawn their attention by some sound. I laughed, to cover the thing, whatever it had been, and tossed the last of my barley crust to the nearest hound, and looked around at them, gathering them in. ‘It is in my mind that with Cerdic and Medraut striking up from Vindocladia, the obvious place for a landing of the Scots, and presumably the Painted People with them, is well up the Sabrina Sea – somewhere in the marsh and reed country northwest of Lindinis – away beyond the Apple Island, maybe – low shores and small wandering waterways to run the war boats inland and ground them, and having landed, they will cut through to join hands with the Saxons as soon as may be.’
‘The old game of cutting the kingdom in two,’ Owain said.
‘Partly, partly also, of course, to combine into their full strength before we can come to grips with them. It seems that they are all too likely to succeed in that, yet even now, if we ride like the hammers of hell, there is still a chance that we may meet one half of the enemy host in time to deal with it before it is joined by the other.’
‘And so?’ Flavian said.
‘We ride like the hammers of hell. But before we ride, I have a Cran Tara of my own to send out. Maelgwn, can you furnish me with ink and parchment or tablets?’