‘Ambrosius, if there is indeed a great push coming in the spring, then at least wait until, by God’s mercy, it has been flung back, before you make your decision past unmaking it again.’
‘I shall not last until the spring,’ Ambrosius said, simply, and tossed the half-peeled chestnut that he had been playing with so long, back into the fire with a gesture of ‘Finish.’ And then he said – it was the first and only time that I ever heard him speak of his sickness – ‘I have stood up in my place as long as I could. God knows it; but I am worn through with carrying a wildcat in my vitals – I am rotted and eaten away. Soon there must be an end.’ I saw the sweat on his forehead in the firelight.
After we had sat in silence for a while, he spoke again. ‘Artos, I have a sense of fate on me. It is not merely that our scouts report certain movements of the Saxons. I believe in my bones, in my very soul, that a Saxon thrust such as we have not seen before is coming this spring – by midsummer at latest: and when it comes, there will be a struggle compared with which the battles we have known will be but candles held to a beacon blaze. And believing that, I must believe that this, above all others, is not the time to be leaving Britain in the hands of an untried king, but rather in the hands of a strong and well-proved war leader. As to what comes after, so far as the question of my successor is concerned, the victory in such a struggle would be a mighty weapon in your hand, Bear Cub, and if you fail, then Britain will not need a High King again.’
His voice had died almost to a whisper, hoarse in his throat, and his brilliant eyes were haggard, clinging to my face. Yet still I was half resisting; and not from humility but from lack of courage. I had always been one who dreaded loneliness, the loneliness of the spirit. I needed the touch of other men’s shoulders against mine, the warmth of comradeship. I was a fine war leader, and I knew it, but I shrank from the very thought of what Ambrosius was asking of me. I did not want the loneliness of the mountaintop.
Aquila had risen some time before, and tramped over to the window at the end of the room; he was something of a lone wolf, old Aquila, and his own deep reserve made him flinch from the least probing into the reserves of other men; and I suppose he did not want to see our faces while the last stages of the thing were fought out. Suddenly he spoke, without turning from the window. ‘Talk of beacon blazes, there’s something big burning over yonder beyond Ink-Pen, by the look of it!’
I got up quickly and went over to him. ‘Saxons! Open the window, Aquila.’ He lifted the pin and swung wide the glazed leaf, and the cold and the smell of frost flowed in against my face. The window looked north, and as the dazzle of the firelight faded from my eyes, and the stars began to prick out in the clear sky, I could make out a dull red glow in the sky, like red reflection of a great fire.
Even as I watched, the glow was spreading, rising higher into the stars. ‘It would take a whole city burning to yield that glare,’ Aquila said, and I could hear the frown in his voice. And then the formless glow began to gather to itself a shape, a great blurred bow, and out of its brightness suddenly a streamer of light flickered up into the dark sky, and then another, and another; and I wondered why I had been such a fool as not to know the thing at once – I suppose because in my mind it belonged to the North, and so I was blind to it here in the South Country. I laughed, and something in me lifted as though at the touch of a familiar magic. ‘No Saxons tonight, old wolf. It is the Northern Lights, the Crown of the North. Dear God, how many times I have watched those flying ribbons of fire from the ramparts of Trimontium!’ I glanced aside at Aquila, whose exclamation told me that he had recognized the thing he looked at, at the same moment as myself. ‘Sa sa! You too! You must have seen them often enough in your thrall winters in Juteland.’
‘Often enough,’ he said. ‘They used to grow and grow until they were like great banners of light flying all across the sky; and the old men would say that they could hear a rushing of great wings overhead ... But one scarcely ever sees them here in the South, and then no more than the red glow that might be a farm burning in the next valley.’
There was a movement behind us, the scrape of a chair being thrust back, and a slow slurred step on the tesserae, and we moved apart to make room for Ambrosius between us. ‘What is this marvel? This Crown of the North?’ He set a hand on my shoulder and the other on Aquila’s, breathing quickly and painfully, as though even the effort to rise and cross the floor had been a day’s labor to him. ‘So-o,’ he said, lingeringly, when he had got his breath back. ‘A marvel indeed, my brothers.’ For in that short while that we had been standing there, the light had strengthened and spread, until one got the impression of a vast arc spanning the whole night, if one could but have seen over the northernmost hills that hid it from our view; and from that unseen arc, as though it were indeed the headband of a crown, a myriad rays sprang out, darting and wheeling to and fro, flickering out half across the sky, like ribbons of colored fire that licked and trembled and died and darted forth again, changing color moment by moment from the red of blood to the green of ice, to the blue of the wildfire that drips along the oar blades of the northern seas in summer nights.
‘I too have seen the glow like a burning in the next valley, and a flicker or so in the northern sky, from the high shoulder of Yr Widdfa,’ Ambrosius said, in the tone in which a man speaks in the place where he worships his God. ‘But never the like of this ... Never – the like of this.’
Voices, scared and hushed and excited, were sounding in the courtyard, a babble of tongues and a running of feet. Down there they would be pointing and gesticulating, their faces awed and gaping in the strange flickering light. ‘The others have seen it now,’ Aquila said. ‘They could scarcely make more starling chatter if it were a golden dragon in the sky.’
‘There will be many pointing to the north and bidding each other to look, tonight,’ Ambrosius said musingly. ‘And later, all Britain will tell each other that there were strange lights in the sky on the night before Ambrosius Aurelianus died; and later still, it will become Aquila’s dragon, or a sword of light with the seven stars of Orion set for jewels in the hilt.’
I remember feeling as though a cold hand had clenched itself in my belly, making it hard to breathe, and knowing in that instant the second of the reasons that had brought Ambrosius up from his capital to this half-derelict hunting lodge that he had known as a boy; turning back in the end to the place that had been dear at the beginning, just as I, with my own hour upon me, would have turned back if that might be, to some lost glen in the lap of Yr Widdfa of the Snows.
I flung my arm around his shoulders, as though I would have held him to me, and felt the sick skin and bones that he was, and I wanted to cry out to him, ‘Ambrosius, no! For God’s sake not yet!’ But I wanted to cry out for my own sake, not for God’s, not for his. ‘I have lost too many of the people I love; there is time yet, stay a while longer—’ But the pleas and protests died in my heart. Besides, any that could be made, Aquila would have made before me.
So we none of us spoke of the thing in words. And after a while, when the glory of the Northern lights had begun to fade, and the stars to show again, Ambrosius said conversationally, ‘I think that the frost will not be hard enough to spoil the scent tomorrow.’
‘The scent?’ I said. ‘Oh no, Ambrosius, no hunting; we bide together, we three.’
‘Of course. We shall bide together, and together we shall hunt old Kian’s twelve-point stag. The hounds will grow stale else, and the huntsmen also. A day on the game trail will do the three of us more good than all Ben Simeon’s black potions.’
I turned on him, and in doing so, caught sight of Aquila’s face in the strange bluish light, and knew that he was as unprepared for this as I was.
‘Ambrosius, don’t be playing the madman! You could never last an hour’s hunting!’ I blurted out.
And in the same bluish light, I saw him smile. ‘Not as I am now; but sometimes it is given to a man, by the Lords of Life, to gather all the str
ength that is yet in him, enough for a few days, maybe, or a month, and spend it all in an hour or a day as a single moment; that is, if the need be great enough. I believe that it will be so given to me.’
The great lights were dying from the sky, and his face was sinking into the shadows as through dark water, as the winter night returned to its usual seeming. ‘I have roasted chestnuts with the two dearest friends I have, and I have seen the glory of the God beyond gods in a winter sky. That is a good way to spend a parting evening,’ he said, and turned from the window and walked steadily back to the fire, as though something of the strength he spoke of had already come to him.
Aquila slammed the window shut, and tramping after him, defiantly took up the fat-lamp and lit it.
I followed last of all.
The few remaining chestnuts, left forgotten, were charred and glowing on the glowing shovel, each sending up curled tendrils of smoke. As the lamp flame sprang up and steadied, and the soft light flowed out to quench the fierce red dragon’s-eye of the brazier, Ambrosius stooped and took up a half-full wine cup from the table where we had supped; and turned to us, smiling, the cup held high. ‘Brothers, I drink to tomorrow’s hunting. Good hunting and a clean kill.’
But seeing him standing there, the lamp turning his mane of hair to tarnished silver and filling his eyes, always so pale in the darkness of his face, with a rain-gray light, and burnishing the gold fillet about his skeleton temples; seeing the faint half-triumphant smile on his mouth that was unlike any smile that I had ever seen there, and the great cup burning in his hand, and the shine upon him that was not the lamplight alone, it seemed to me that I was not looking at the Ambrosius I knew, but at the King decked for sacrifice, and my heart shook within me.
Then we heard young Gaheris pounding up the stair to demand whether we had seen the marvel, and he was only Ambrosius again, standing in the candlelight with an empty wine cup in his hand.
chapter twenty-seven
The King’s Hunting
NEXT MORNING WHEN THE HORSES WERE BROUGHT AROUND, Ambrosius mounted Pollux almost as lightly as the rest of us (he had had to be almost lifted into the saddle when we set out from Venta, two days before) and sat there in his greasy weather-stained old hunting leathers, discussing the day’s prospects with Kian his chief huntsman. An extraordinary return of strength had come to him from somewhere, and even his face seemed less skull-like than it had done for a month past, so that all last night might have been no more than a dream.
Yet his renewed strength seemed not quite to belong to the world of men, and something of last night’s shining was still upon him, after all, and the huntsmen and farm folk looked somewhat askance at their lord, and seemed more shy of going near him than ever they had been before – for he was never one to wear the Purple among his own folk, and I have heard him arguing with an armorer about the placing of a rivet, or with some old falconer as to the handling of an eyas, and getting the worst of it in the way of any man who argues with an expert on his own ground.
The world was gray with hoarfrost, under a skim-milk sky still barred with the last silver and saffron of the dawn, but the frost had not been a hard one and would not spoil scent; and the horses danced after their day’s rest, even old Pollux, and the hounds strained forward in eagerness against their leashes as we rode out from the farm courtyard and skirted the brown of the winter wheat field beyond, scaring up the little crested lapwings as we went, and headed for the dark shoreline of the woods beyond.
The sun came up, and the frost melted around us as we rode, giving place to a thin white mist lying close to the ground in the hollows. The horses waded through it as through shallow seas of gossamer as we dropped into the valley, and small bright drops trembled in the light, hanging from every dried hemlock head and half-silken, half-sodden feather of last year’s willow herb. And I remember that over the open fallow the larks were singing. In a sheltered hollow of the woodshore, the first hazel catkins were hanging out, and as we brushed through, shaking the whippy sprays, the air was suddenly stained with a sun-mist of yellow pollen for yards around. And I wondered how it all seemed to Ambrosius: whether he had yet freed himself utterly from the dearness and strangeness and piercing beauty of the world, from the lark song and the smell of melting frost on the cold moss under the trees, and the thrust of a horse’s flanks beneath him, and the faces of his friends. His own face betrayed nothing, but I thought that he looked about him from time to time, as though he wished to see very clearly the winter woods dappled like a curlew’s breast, the prick of a hound’s ears, the crimson thread tips of a woman-bud on a hazel spray, the flying shadow of a bird across the turf, to draw them in and make them part of himself, part of his own soul, so that he might carry them with him where he was going.
The hounds picked up the scent of the stag beside the pool where he had come down to drink at dawn, and the instant they were slipped from the leash they were off and away, filling the winter morning with their music under the high thin sounding of the hunting horn. So, following the hounds, and with the hunters running hound-swift alongside, we swung westward and up onto high ground. Ambrosius rode that day like a sound man. I have wondered since, if Ben Simeon had given him some such draught as they say the Jutes give to their berserkers, but I do not think so, I think it was something that, at God knows what cost, he himself had summoned up, the last valiant flare of a dying torch before it gutters out. He had drawn a little ahead of Aquila and me, and we glanced at each other and marveled; and young Gaheris had a look of puzzled hope as though he half believed his lord’s sickness was passing.
We hunted long and hard, and it must have been close on noon when, toiling up a slope of bare winter-tawny turf, we sighted our quarry on the skyline. A magnificent twelve-point stag, a royal hart, in the instant before he bounded forward over the ridge. Old Aquila sounded the View, and the hounds who, for some time past, had been running almost in silence, businesslike, muzzles to ground, broke out into fierce music and sprang forward with a burst of eagerness.
When we crested the ridge, the stag was nowhere in sight, but a few moments later he came into view again, flying like the wind above his own shadow along the opposite hillside. The hounds were hunting by sight now, and swung right-handed, streaming out on a line that would carry them straight across the valley to cut him off; but he saw us in time, and doubling in his tracks was away down-valley toward the refuge of the woods that crept up from the low river country, and for a while we lost him among the hazel scrub and thickets of thorn and wayfaring trees that were the outer fringes of the forest; and the music of the hounds turned thin and querulous. ‘He has taken to the water,’ said the chief hunter, and we swung away down the riverside, splashing our way across by a shallow stickle, the hounds swimming for it, and pushed on down again, along the farther bank. Sure enough, a mile or maybe more downstream, at a place where the bank had been pulled away, exposing torn earth and a tangle of willow roots, the hounds picked up the scent again. Hunters and hunted swung back toward open country, for the quarry could not strike into the denseness of the damp-oak forest with its low growth of branches to entangle his antlers, any more than we could force a way through on horseback. And when next we had him in full view the great stag, though running swiftly as ever, was clearly laboring. ‘I think we have him!’ I cried, and the big brindled hounds swept on, baying and belling. Our horses were tiring, but we urged them on to one last burst of speed. Ahead of us, the stag was slowing visibly, struggling on with his proud diadem of antlers lowered now; once he all but stumbled to his knees, then regathered himself and fled on in one last desperate flare of swiftness, with the hounds almost upon him.
Over a last hill shoulder and down into the valley beyond, stumbling and struggling through the sodden wreck of the past year’s bracken, with the brindled hounds running low and baying on his heels, and behind, crouched on our horses’ necks, we four, and Ambrosius’s hunters racing and leaping at our stirrups. In a narrow side combe, scarc
ely more than a stream channel down the slope of the hill, among flint boulders and the tangled roots and spiny maze of ancient thorn trees, the stag turned at bay; his head up, the great antlers like tree branches themselves; a king again, and no mere hunted fugitive, though his eyes were wild and his flanks sobbed in and out, and his nostrils seemed full of blood. And as we reined in below the great beast, there was a majesty about him that gave us all pause; not a hunted beast but a king brought to his death. Ambrosius flung up his hand, I remember, and it was as though brother greeted brother.
The brindled hounds checked an instant, then sprang in, yelling; the hunters making a wide bow on either side and siccing them on with jibes and encouragement in the dark tongue in which hunters talk to the hound pack. The rest of us dismounted, for it was impossible to take horses up into that steep tangle. But Ambrosius, who yesterday had been a dying man, had flung himself from the saddle, with the familiar hunting shout ‘I claim kill!’ and was away ahead of us, scrambling among the tree roots and under the low thorn branches, and I caught the wintry light flash on the blade of the hunting knife in his hand.
He was among the hounds now, and I saw that he meant to make the kill himself. I had seen him do that before, in the Western hills when I was yet the height of another hound. It is accounted the crowning feat of a hunter, also the most hideously dangerous, work for a young man in the flower of his strength and speed; but to put oneself forward to aid in the kill after another man has cried his claim is one of the unforgivable things, and I knew also, as surely as ever I had known anything in this world, that Ambrosius had cried it for a warning to us to hold back from more than his kill. Only Gaheris, not knowing the truth, ran at lung-bursting speed to reach him against all the law of the hunting trail. But the boy caught his foot in a thorn root and fell headlong, driving the wind from his body, and by the time he had struggled still crowing to his feet again, and Aquila and I, with our own knives drawn, had come pounding more slowly up behind, the thing was finished.