I think it had been in my mind all that end-of-summer that my work in the North was done, and now I knew it without doubt. My plans of campaign had been turned toward the level horselands of the Iceni that the Saxons were already calling for their own Northfolk and Southfolk, before ever the sudden flare of revolt in Valentia had called me across the Wall. Now when the time for winter quarters was past, it would be time for turning south again, taking up the old campaigning plans where they had been laid down ... Time, perhaps, to be standing shield to shield with Ambrosius once more ...
On our last evening in Trimontium there was a soft growing rain that later turned to mist, and the green plover calling unseen from the skirts of Eildon. There was a certain sadness over most of us, that evening, a sense of leave-taking; and as the mist thickened, it was as though the familiar moors, knowing that we no more belonged here, had withdrawn themselves from us and turned their faces away; even the roughhewn walls and the ragged thatch that dripped mist-beads from the reed ends had lost something of substance and reality, and the fortress was already returning to the ghost camp that it had been before we came.
‘It might have waited until we were gone,’ Bedwyr said, looking about him as we made our way up from the baggage lines where everything stood in readiness, toward the mess hall at suppertime.
‘The mist?’ I said. ‘It will clear by dawn, it’s not the sort that lasts.’ Because I did not want to understand what he meant.
We passed the mound where the girl of the Hollow Hills lay, and the horses above her. I had never known her name. The Dark People do not speak the names of the dead. It was grassed over now, and brambles arched about it, and it looked as time-rooted as the rest of old red Trimontium; the small white flower that was nameless also was in bud already, the bud of a white star among gray soft hound’s-ear leaves. And I had the sudden foolish thought that I hoped she would not be lonely when the cooking fires were quenched and there were no more voices in the Place of Three Hills.
When we got back to the mess hall, there beside the fire, having appeared out of nowhere in his usual manner, sat Druim Dhu in his best green-dyed catskin kilt, white clay patterns on his arms and forehead, and about his neck his finest necklace of dried berries and blue glass beads and woodpecker feathers.
He sprang to his feet when I came close, and stood in the firelight holding up the bow that had been resting across his knees, and conscious of his decorated beauty as a flower or a woman might be.
‘Is it a festival?’ I asked.
‘Na, I do honor to my friends that are going away.’ But the dark eyes were inscrutable as ever; and even now, though I would have trusted him with my life, I did not know whether the strange forehead patterns and the glowing necklaces had been put on in sorrow, for a kind of parting gift, or in triumph that the Dark People were left masters of their own hills once more.
When the food was ready he ate with us. Silent as usual – but indeed it was a somewhat silent meal for most of us, though from time to time the silence flared up into sudden noisy horseplay and somewhat unreal merriment – and after the meal was over and he had eaten his fill, and most of the men had scattered again to the various tasks and preparations that were still to be accomplished before tomorrow’s march, we walked together toward the postern gate above the river, and I went out with him a short way onto the track.
A little above the spring that had been, as it were, Itha’s gift to the war host on our first coming, we stopped, and stood silent.
‘We have had good hunting together, Sun Lord,’ Druim Dhu said at last, ‘in Cit Coit Caledon above all. That was a great hunting, a most great hunting.’
‘A most great hunting,’ I said, ‘Dark Man.’
‘And now it is over.’
‘Maybe I shall come back, one day.’
‘Maybe, Sun Lord,’ he agreed with courtesy; but we both knew that I should not come back, one day or any day. And I knew suddenly why he had painted his forehead and put on the necklaces – and that I was going to miss the little dark hunter, south of the Wall, more than anything or anyone that I left north of it.
‘It will seem strange to hear the foxes barking again in the Place of the Three Hills,’ he said. ‘And whiles and whiles, when we are moving the cattle over, I will be looking to see if there is a garland on the branch of the big alder tree up Horse Burn.’
I said, ‘And whiles and whiles, I will be looking across the fire between sleeping and waking, and thinking to see the white clay marks and the green glint of woodpecker feathers.’
It was a light enough leave-taking, yet as I watched the small lithe figure dissolve into the hill mist, I knew that I was bidding farewell not only to Druim Dhu, but to a whole part of my life. As in Ambrosius’s study on the night that he gave me my wooden foil of freedom, so now on this steep hill path with the river sounding through the mist below me, I was standing on a threshold ...
I turned, and went back up the track to the postern gate, and stepped across the foot-hollowed stone sill, and the guard thrust the dead thorn-bush into place behind me.
It was the familiar room in which Ambrosius had given me my wooden foil. The familiar frescoes of bulls’ heads and garlands on the walls a little more faded than they had used to be, in the fading daylight; the bronze brazier in the center, casting its dim rose of light up to the rafters, for the spring evening had turned cold with an east wind; the dim black and gold lozenge pattern of scroll ends on the shelves of the far wall; Ambrosius’s sword lying where his sword always lay when he was not wearing it, ready to his hand on the big olivewood chest. Only the man standing with his back to me and his head bent to catch the last light of the west as it fell through a high window, on the scroll in his hands, seemed a stranger. A slight, faintly stooping man, with hair the dim silken gray of seeding willow herb, bound about the temples with the narrow gold fillet that so many of the Cymric nobles wear.
I even wondered for a moment, who was making free with Ambrosius’s private quarters. And then as I checked in the doorway, the man turned – and it was Ambrosius.
I suppose we said something, cried out each other’s name. And the instant after, we had come together with arms about each other’s shoulders. In a little, we held off at arm’s length, and stood looking each at the other. ‘Well may men call you the Bear!’ Ambrosius said, laughing, ‘especially those who have suffered your love grip! Ah, but it is good to see you again, Bear Cub! The hours since your messenger came have seemed long indeed!’
‘And to see you, Ambrosius! It is Sun and Moon on my heart to see you again! I waited for nothing save to leave Guenhumara and the bairn in my old quarters – not even to wash off the dust of the road, before I came seeking you.’
His hands were on my shoulders, and he looked up, searchingly, into my face. His own dark narrow features looked strange under the paleness of gray hair, but his eyes were the same as they had always been. ‘Ah yes, this Guenhumara,’ he said at last. ‘Do you know, I used to think that you would be all your life as I am, who have never taken a woman from her father’s hearth.’
‘I used to think so, too.’
‘Is she very fair, this woman of yours?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘She is thin and tawny, but she has beautiful hair.’
‘And she brought you a hundred horsemen for a dowry, which I think might make any woman beautiful in your eyes.’
‘It was the horsemen that were beautiful. Guenhumara does not need to be. She is like—’ I hesitated, trying to think what Guenhumara was like, for I had never sought to describe her before, even to myself.
And the laughter twitched for an instant at Ambrosius’s lips. ‘A flower? Or a falcon? I have heard it all before, Bear Cub. Na na, never trouble, I shall see her for myself before long.’
But I was still trying to think what Guenhumara was like. ‘Not a flower – maybe one of those dry aromatic herbs that only give out their full scent to the touch.’
Presently he was sitting in the cr
oss-legged camp chair with the wolf heads carved on the arms, that had been his seat as long as I could remember. I had pulled up the same old stool to the brazier, and Cabal, who had stood until now, watching us, with slowly swinging tail, collapsed at my feet with a contented grunt, seemingly as much at home here as that other Cabal had been. And we looked at each other with the strangeness of the long separation making a sudden silence between us. Ambrosius broke it at last. ‘You will have brought your whole Company south with you?’
‘A full muster of three hundred, with spare mounts and the usual baggage train.’
‘So, that makes good hearing. What became of the auxiliaries you wrote of?’
‘They went back to their own places – they were always a shifting population. They gathered to the Red Dragon to fight for their own hunting runs, and each time I moved on a few would follow me, and the rest drift back to their own hearths, while others gathered in their stead. It meant training raw troops all the time; but they were good lads.’ I fell silent, staring into the red heart of the brazier, realizing suddenly a thing that I had never thought of before; that the Companions, also, were a shifting population. I was remembering men who had marched with me from Venta thirteen years ago, men from the Wolds and the wide-skied Lindum marshes; men out of Deva and Eburacum, little bands of hotheads from my own hills, from the Lake Lands and all across the dark North of Britain, all my Companions in their time, lying dead among the heather through the length and breadth of Lowland Caledonia, their places filled by the young warriors of the land that had killed them. Yet I had not thought of the Brotherhood as a thing that shifted and changed. When we rode south once more and the last of the auxiliaries fell away, I had been glad that we were just the Company again, the old tight-knit Brotherhood that we had been at first. And sitting beside the brazier on that chill spring evening in Ambrosius’s chamber, with a thrush singing in the old pear tree under the courtyard wall, I knew that that was because the Company had a living entity of its own, stronger than the individuals who made it up.
‘If you have work for us, I think you will find us equal to somewhat more than the same number of spears drawn at random,’ I said, thinking that he might be regretting those fallen-off auxiliaries.
He too had been staring into the heart of the brazier, but he looked up, smiling behind his eyes. ‘I am very sure of it. As to the work that I may have for you – I sent you the word last autumn of a new tide flowing.’
‘It came to me.’
‘That tide flows more strongly now. The Sea Wolves are on the move again, swarming into the Trinovantes territory, spilling inland over the old Icenian lands from the Abus River to the Metaris. We are holding them, but none the less, you are come in a fortunate hour, you and your three hundred.’
‘What of the Cantish settlements?’
‘As yet, nothing; but it is in my mind that they also prepare to move. Have you heard in your northern fastness that Oisc, Hengest’s grandson, has proclaimed the Kentish Kingdom and that our kinsman Cerdic grows to be a mighty war leader in his own right?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I have not heard that. Oisc slipped through my fingers at Eburacum, but I had Cerdic in my hand, and I let him go. I was a fool not to have him killed. But it is hard to be wise, with a fifteen-year-old boy standing at bay over his mother’s body.’
He nodded, and then a few moments later, raised those pale bright eyes of his abruptly from the red heart of the brazier. ‘How soon can you take the war trail?’
‘Give me ten days,’ I said. ‘We’ve had a long hard march after a long hard winter, and we’re still out of condition, horses and men alike. Some of us – you remember Flavian, Aquila’s son – have to send for waiting wives, and I have arrangements of my own to make, for getting down part of the Deva horse herd. We’re new out of the wilderness, Ambrosius; give us ten days to see to our own affairs and taste the fleshpots – get drunk for a night or two and play Jupiter among the women of the town, and straighten our sword belts again thereafter, and we are all yours.’
The smile flickered again behind his eyes. ‘That seems a modest enough request. The last time it was a whole campaigning summer.’
‘I promised you the North, in exchange for that summer,’ I said, and picked a withered ivy leaf from among the stacked logs by the brazier, and handed it to him, ‘and here it is.’
He took it and began to play with it between his fingers; but it was so dry that it crumbled away.
We sat talking on in the fading light, discussing possible plans of campaign, discussing the broader issues that I had all but forgotten, fighting my own war away in the North, exchanging the story of the years that lay divided between us. Presently, speaking of the fortifying of the Royal Territory, the Old Kingdom that was one of the chief things he had to show for those years, of his plans for defense in depth, using again the hill forts of our forefathers, Ambrosius pulled a bit of charred stick from the brazier and fell to drawing maps on the tesserae, as I had seen him do so many times before; until there was no more light to see by save the dim rose-red glow of the brazier itself, and he shouted for his armor-bearer to bring lights.
The boy brought candles in a tall three-branched bronze pricket, and set them on the chest top beside Ambrosius’s sword, and went away again. Sitting there with Ambrosius in the gathering dusk, I had forgotten the change in him, but now as the light strengthened and steadied, I saw him again clearly as I had done in that first moment of entering the room, the deeply bitten lines of his dark narrow face under the gray hair, the way his eyes had sunk back into his head, and the faint discoloring of the skin about them. I thought that he looked not only old, but ill.
He caught me looking at him and smiled. ‘Yes, I have changed.’
‘I did not say so.’
‘Not in words, no. Have I not always told you that you showed too clearly in your eyes everything that is going on behind them?’
‘Ambrosius,’ I said, ‘are you sick?’
‘Sick? Na, na, I grow old, that is all. An old gray-muzzled sheepdog ... Ah well, I shall sleep in the sun now, and scratch for fleas, while a younger dog guards the flock from wolves ... ’ He bent forward and set another log with meticulous care over the red cavern of the brazier. ‘It is thirteen years, Artos.’
Thirteen years. Wonderful what one could forget in thirteen years ... Almost, I had forgotten that my own war with the Saxons was not all the war there was. Almost, seeing the Sea Wolves flung back at this point and that along the coast, I had forgotten that, like the harsh gods of the Saxon kind themselves, we were carrying on a struggle which must end in darkness at the last. It was another kind of coming back from the Hollow Hills ... Remembering again ... Finding all things and all people a little changed, a little strange, and myself the strangest of all ...
‘On my way here a while since, I could have thought it was a hundred,’ I said. ‘With the campaigning season started, there was scarcely a face I knew, and two boys that I passed exercising hounds stared and whispered as I went by as though I were something out of another world.’
‘I can tell you what they whispered: “Look at his scars! He is head and shoulders taller than anyone else hereabouts – and that great hound with him – it must be Artos the Bear!” And then as soon as you were safely by, they ran to tell their comrades that they had seen you. You are something of a legend, Artos. Didn’t you know that?’
I got up and stretched until the small muscles cracked between my shoulders, laughing. ‘I am a very weary legend – and I must away and see how all things are with Guenhumara and the babe.’
‘Tomorrow,’ Ambrosius said, ‘I will have the stores cleared out of the Queen’s Courtyard chambers, that Guenhumara may have them.’
‘Your mother’s chambers? You will give her those?’ I knew that he had used them as storerooms ever since his own return to Venta, that he might avoid having to let anyone else live there after her.
‘You are all the son I have,’ he said, ‘and sh
e is your wife, this Guenhumara. Therefore it is fitting that she should use them, and bring them back to life again.’
chapter twenty-three
Threnody
WHEN I GOT BACK TO MY OLD QUARTERS, RIADA MY ARMOR-bearer was squatting before the door with his sword across his knees. ‘I have looked to them as you bade me,’ he said, getting up, ‘and I got them fire and a lantern.’
‘Sa, that is good. Off with you now, and see if you can still find something to eat.’
The door behind him stood just ajar, spilling soft yellow light across the colonnade, and I pushed it open and went in. Guenhumara was sitting beside the small brazier, combing her hair, which I saw was damp and clung about her temples in darkened wisps, though the ends were already feathery dry. She looked at me through the strands as she swept them this way and that. ‘I have washed my hair; it was full of all the wayside dust from here to Trimontium.’
‘It was still bonny,’ I said, ‘but it’s bonnier without the dust.’ I glanced about me. ‘Where is Hylin?’
‘Asleep in the little room through there, with Blanid.’
I went quietly and looked into the room that had been my sleeping cell since I was a boy. A rushlight burned like a star on its bracket high on the wall, and by its light I saw Hylin curled asleep in a soft dark nest made from the old beaver-skin rug at the head of the cot, just as she had done at Trimontium. Guenhumara always took her up at sleeping time, and lay with her in the curve of her arm. Blanid slept also, against the wall at the foot of the cot, snoring gently; and I stepped over her and bent to look at Hylin. She was as white as she had been red on the day that she was born, and the blue showed through at her tight-shut eyelids; and I thought, as I had thought often before, she was too small for a half yearling and thin like the small one of a hound litter that gets pushed out from the milk. But that was like enough, for Guenhumara had never had enough milk for her and maybe the milk of the little baggage mare had not agreed with her as well as Guenhumara’s milk would have done. Maybe we could do something about that now; there must be a woman in Venta with milk to spare.