I hesitated, and he said quietly, ‘A new Heaven and a new Earth?’
Cabal nosed at my hand, then began the old familiar pretense at savaging my wrist in his great jaws, until I took it away and began to gentle his ears as he wished.
‘Something of the kind. Most of us were young, then, and drunk with victory. Now there comes a greater fight, and we grow old and sober.’
‘So – and afterward?’
‘If God gives us again the victory – the old Heaven and the old Earth patched up to seem a little more secure. A few gained years in which men may sow their fields in reasonable hope of reaping the harvest.’
Aquila’s harsh hawk face was remote in the moonlight, as he looked far off between the dark bothies toward the rim of the Downs, every line of it deep cut as a sword gash; and under the frowning black brows, I had a feeling that it was not the shape of the rounded slopes against the sky that he was seeing, but something further and beyond. ‘Even that might be worth whatever price was asked for it.’
Abruptly he turned to me. ‘Bear Cub, will you do something for me?’
‘I expect so,’ I said. ‘What is it?’
He pulled the flawed emerald from his signet finger.
‘Take this in charge, and if I die tomorrow and Flavian lives, give it to him to wear after me.’
‘And if you do not die tomorrow?’ I said quickly, as though by that I could turn the thing aside.
‘Then give it back to me at sunset.’
‘And how if I am no more weapon-proof than you?’
‘The mark is not on your forehead yet,’ Aquila said, and put the ring into my hand.
I stowed it in the little pouch of leather hanging around my neck inside my tunic, in which I kept sundry other matters of my own. ‘Until sunset, then. Maybe we shall meet in the thick of things, tomorrow.’
‘Maybe,’ he said, and touched my shoulder, and went on his way toward the guards’ part of the camp.
When he was gone, I turned into the bothy behind me, where a lantern hung from the center pole and my war shirt from its wooden cross against the wall. I did not call Riada, for the mail was laced at the side, and could be put on easily enough, not like the kind one pulls on over the head, and which is all but impossible to get into without help. I took it down and heaved into it, and was busy with the lacing when a step sounded outside, and Bedwyr ducked in through the low door hole.
He sat himself down on the packsaddle which as usual served the purpose of a chair, and watched me as I drew the broad thongs through the eyelet holes. ‘Artos, what do we take for our badge tomorrow?’
We still kept up our old custom of riding into action with a sprig of some flowering thing tucked into helmet comb or shoulder buckle – brown feathered rushes in the East Coast years, or sometimes yellow loosestrife or the little white many-thorned roses of the sand dunes; heather in the Caledonian years (‘Taking Heather’ had come to be the term men used in those years for joining the Companions). It was a privilege jealously guarded from the rest of the war host, a flourish, a grace note that was ours alone. But there was neither feathered rush nor royal heather on Badon Hill. Wild cranesbill along the foot of the chalk ramparts, but the blue flowers would be limp and dead before the first charge.
The grass for my bed had been cut from the northwest face of the hill, where it grew long and thick in tawny waves, for the fall of the land was too steep for the horses that had trampled it flat elsewhere. A few stalks of it were spilling out from under the old half-bald otter skin that Riada had spread for me to lie on, wisps and feathery shreds of seeding grasses and among them the withered head of a moon daisy. I stooped and picked it up, thinking suddenly how the steep drop of the hillside there was freckled white with the swaying flower heads.
Nowadays we number the moon daisy among the flowers of God’s Mother; the gold for her love and compassion, the white for her purity, and the raying petals for the glory that shines about her. But underneath in the warm dark places we have not forgotten that the flower of the moon belonged to the Lady, the White Goddess, before ever men gave it to the Maiden Mary. The Church, claiming as she does that the Old Ones have no place left in the people’s hearts, must forget that, or pretend to forget, and I knew that if I and my Companions were to ride into the coming battle with the flower of God’s Mother for our badge, it must help to strike the weapon against me from the Church’s hand, while still, for those of us who still held to the Old Faith, the old meaning would be there. Also it would show up well in the dust and turmoil of the fight. I looked down at Bedwyr as a man sharing an unspoken jest with his brother, and tossed him the limp wisp of flower head. ‘This would make a fine panache, and there’s plenty on the west side of the hill; easily picked out in battle and surely most suited of all flowers to a Christian war lord and his Companions.’
And I saw by the quirk of that most devilish eyebrow, that he took my point. ‘Give it fifty years, and the harpers who sing tomorrow’s battle after us will tell how Artos the Bear rode into Badon Fight with a picture of the Virgin on his shoulder.’
I was finished with the lacing of my war shirt and began to fasten the shoulder buckle. ‘If there are any harpers of our own people still singing in fifty years’ time.’
Bedwyr was playing with the withered moon daisy, twisting the limp stem between his fingers. He tipped back his head to look at me through half-shut eyes, still fiddling.
‘Not so did you speak to the war host a while since.’
‘I have the oddest fancy to win this battle,’ I said, testing the buckle, ‘and choose my words to the war host accordingly.’
‘Sa! That was a magnificent harangue you gave us.’
‘Was it?’ I had no clear idea now of what I had said. The usual kind of thing, I suppose. It had not seemed so usual at the time.
It had been just at sunset, and my shadow had streamed away from me forward over the hilltop with a vast fiery arrowhead of sunlight between the straddled legs, and I remembered the coppery glare of the sunset on the faces of the war host turned up to mine, answering to me so that I could play on them as Bedwyr played on his harp. And that and the length of my shadow had filled me with a drunken sense of being a giant.
‘You should always speak to your war host before battle, at sunset with the fires behind you,’ Bedwyr said. ‘That is for any leader. It would make even a small man look like a tall one, and a man of your height becomes a hero-giant out of our oldest songs; a fit rider, half a hillside high, for the Sun Horse of the White Horse Vale, with the seven stars of Orion for the jewels in his sword hilt.’
(‘A sword of light with the seven stars of Orion for the jewels in its hilt.’) I seemed to catch again the echo of Ambrosius’s voice on the night before he died. But Bedwyr had not been there, only Aquila and I.
‘I will remember another time,’ I said, and reached for my sword.
We made the late night round of the pickets and guard posts together, as we had made them on so many nights before. There is always something strange, something not quite canny, in making the rounds of a camp at night; the increasing stillness that comes at last to be broken only by the fretful stamp of a horse from the picket lines, or a standard stirring in the night wind, the spear gleaming out of nowhere across one’s path in the moonlight, to vanish as one speaks the password. It is a little like moving through a world of ghosts or, alternatively, like being a ghost oneself. One’s own footsteps seem unnaturally loud, and any incident, the face of another waking man glimpsed in the red glow of a dying campfire, seems fraught with meaning and significance that it would not bear in the daytime.
So it was with Medraut’s face, that night, suddenly seen in the flare of a picket-line torch. By day, to pass Medraut coming up from the horse lines was the merest commonplace of life, save for the vague sense of a shadow passing between me and the sun which any sight of him always woke in me; but at night, that night, in the dark solitude of waking men in a camp full of others ‘sleeping on th
eir spears,’ the brief unmattering moment stands in my mind even now as vivid as a duel.
Yet he only moved aside to give me right of way among the harness piles, spoke something of having thought at exercise that the big gray might be going lame, and melted on into the dimness of the moon.
Bedwyr glanced after him, and said, ‘The odd thing is that in some ways he is very much your son.’
‘Meaning that in the same circumstances, I also should be down at the picket lines playing leech to a horse that I thought might be going lame? It is not really the horse that he cares about, you know.’
‘No,’ Bedwyr said, ‘he cares no more for his horses than he does for his men. But tomorrow will be his first action in command of a squadron and he cannot bear that anything should go amiss under his leadership, be less than perfect as he sees perfect ... I was thinking rather of a certain capacity for taking pains, together with a conviction that if a thing must be done, it is needful to do it oneself.’ We walked on for a few paces between the horse rows, and then he added thoughtfully, ‘Yet if he has that conviction, assuredly it is the only one he has. In all these fighting years, he has never learned to care for anything beyond the fighting; for him it is enough to strike, without heed as to the thing he strikes for. He likes to kill – the actual skillful process of letting out life – that is a thing that I have met only a few times among fighting men.’
‘He is one of the destroyers,’ I said. ‘Most of us have something of destruction in us, I suppose, but mercifully not many are destroyers through and through. Dear God! That I should speak so! It was I who made him what he is!’
‘How?’
‘His mother ate him as a she-spider eats her mate, but it was I who gave him to her destroying love.’
Neither of us spoke again until we were clear of the horse lines and into the moon-whitened space that lay between them and the wagon park; and there Bedwyr checked as though to tighten a slipping sword buckle. He said at half breath, and with an extraordinary gentleness, ‘Say the word, Artos, and he shall find an honorable death in tomorrow’s fighting.’
The long silence that followed was ripped asunder at last by the sudden murderous scream of Pharic’s hawk, which he had with him in his bothy.
I stared at Bedwyr in the moonlight, sickened, and then angry, and then neither. ‘You would take that stain on your hands for my sake?’
‘Yes,’ he said, and then, ‘But you must speak the word.’
I shook my head. ‘I can’t cut this particular knot with a sword; not even yours. You made no such offer the first time, the last time that we spoke so of Medraut.’
‘I had not had him in my squadron, then ... ’ Bedwyr said.
I did not ask his meaning. Probably he could not have told me, if I had. Medraut committed none of the evils that can be put into words; it was not in what he did, but in what he was; no man may hold the hill mist between his thumb and forefinger nor catch the hovering marsh light in a grain jar.
The clouds blew up from the south that morning, their shadows sweeping like charges of cavalry over Badon Hill and down the long bay of the Downs; like the ghosts of armies that had fought there when the world was young. Turn southward, and you could see the wind coming, laying over the ripening grasses in silvery-brown swathes like the waves of the sea. Turn north again, and from where I stood on the crest of the bush-grown barrow, I could see the whole bay of the White Horse Vale with its flying cloud shadows, rising to the gentler hills again at its farther side. Badon Hill thrust out from the main mass of the Downs a great summer-tanned shoulder, high over the Vale, so that one looked down upon it as a buzzard circling on wind-tilted wings must do. I could see the green Ridgeway with its ragged line of hawthorn trees passing scarce the throw of a slingstone below the strong green wave-lift of our ramparts, dipping to cross the paved road from Corinium where it climbed more gently out of the Vale, to strike southward through the pass; and beyond, where the steep swell of the Downs upheaved itself once more into the sunlight from the morning shadows of the pass, the triple turf ramparts of our sister fort, that the garrison in Badon had always called the Cader Berywen from the sour hill-juniper scrub that speckled the ditches between its earthworks. And everywhere, lining the mouth of the pass, among the thorn scrub of the downland flanks, and thronging the turf ramparts of the forts, was the gray blink of sun on spear blade and shield boss and helmet comb, and the flecks and flashes of color where Marius’s standard flew with Cei’s flickering cavalry pennants above the triple-staged entrance of Cader Berywen, or where Cador and young Constantine gathered their war bands beneath the saffron-stained banner of Dumnonia, and the tattered Red Dragon of Britain lifted and half flew from its spear shaft in the midst of the Companions where they stood or sat at ease on the grass about me, each man with his arm through his horse’s bridle. There was plenty of time, now, and it is not good to keep men or horses longer than need be in the last stage of waiting.
Signus, who smelled what was coming, snorted down that proud imperial nose of his, tossing his head so that my buckler clanged against the saddlebow; old Cabal lifted his gray muzzle and snuffed the wind, and Bedwyr, who had just ridden up on his raking sorrel, turned beside me and laughed in the old fierce gaiety that had always come upon him in the time before fighting. He no longer carried his harp into battle as he had used to do, but with the knot of moon daisies white in his shoulder buckle, he looked as though he were riding to a festival.
There was a sense of pause, a sense of rising tension, as when the wine in a slowly tilted cup comes to the rim and rises above it and hangs there an instant before it spills over. And in the waiting moments one had time for little things, for the dark crescent-winged swifts darting along the flanks of the Downs, as unaware of us, it seemed, as they were of the cloud shadows drifting by; the fading milky scent of the last pinkish blossom on the hawthorn trees, the way the renewed leather lining of my war shirt chafed my neck where the armorer had made a clumsy job of it. I thrust a finger inside the neckband, seeking to ease it, and tried not to watch Medraut walking his black horse up and down at the foot of the barrow, pausing in passing to break down with his foot the blue cranesbill that grew almost on the edge of last night’s fire scar, and grind it with absorbed precision to pulp under his heel.
The scouts had come in soon after dawn while we were snatching a hasty morning meal, to report the Saxons stirring, but it must have been within two hours of noon when, maybe two miles off along the ridge of the Downs, there came a shadow, not much darker at first than the cloud shadows, but not traveling with the wind. The Saxon war host was in sight.
I waited a short while longer, the chiefs and captains murmuring about me; then spoke to Prosper, my trumpeter. He was growing gray-muzzled like the rest of us, but his wind was as good as ever, and he put the silver mouthpiece of the aurochs horn to his lips and sounded the View. There was a moment’s silence, and then like an echo the call was tossed back to us from the ramparts of Cader Berywen.
Other horns and trumpets were sounding now, the voices answering each other to and fro across the valley; and the great camp of Badon, which a few moments before had been a place of waiting, sprang into eager life, as the fighting companies made for their appointed places, some to guard the entrances against enemy surprise, or man the northern ramparts where great piles of throw stones waited for hurling down on the heads of the Saxon host, while the rest went swinging out through the wide gateway and downhill into the pass.
I was mounted by that time, and sitting my great old Signus on the crest of my lookout place. I was like Janus, half of me turned upon the British line that was forming like a great threefold chain slung across the pass to the south between Badon and Cader Berywen, half of me turned with straining eyes upon the shadow that was not a cloud shadow creeping slowly nearer along the high roof ridge of the hills, deepening to a stain like that of old spilled wine, to a spreading swarm of ants. And then, far off still, and soft with distance, came the booming o
f a Saxon war horn; and Prosper beside me again raised the horn to his lips and sent the bright notes crowing their defiance across the warm summer wind. Save for those who would remain on guard, the great camp was emptying about me like a cup. Only my own Companions were left now, and they also were swinging into the saddle, squadron after squadron with the spear pennants fluttering, heading at a trot out through the gateway.
Bedwyr was beside me again, his horse dancing. He shouted to me that all was in order. I nodded, still watching the nearing swarm. I could see now how even as they rolled toward us their flanks were torn and harassed by the flying knots of light horsemen that skirmished about them, and my heart went out to Maelgwn and Cynglass, to the men and the little fiery ponies of my own hills. But it was a vast host, still, a spreading murk of men that engulfed half the countryside like the shadow of an advancing storm.
‘Sa, here comes the Darkness,’ Bedwyr said.
‘If ever you prayed to any God, pray now for the strengthening of the Light.’
He leaned a little from the saddle, and set his hand on my shoulder. ‘I have never known how to pray, unless maybe through Oran Môr, the Great Music – I will make you a song of light driving out darkness, a song of the lightnings of the war host of Artos, when the day’s work is over.’ And he wheeled his horse and clattered off to his post with the Companions. And I was alone with Riada sitting his horse just behind me, and the scouts and messengers who came and went.
The advancing darkness had been without sound at first, but now there began to be a soft quiver in the earth rather than the air, the tramp of thousand upon thousand feet, the faint surf of shouts and weapon ring; the merest ripple of sound that came and went at the will of the summer wind that tossed the moon daisies to and fro, but gathering strength, solidifying into the distant earth-shaking many-voiced thunder of an advancing war host. A fold in the Downs had swallowed the vanguard from sight, and then along the nearer ridge, maybe half a mile away, ran a dark quiver of movement, and over it lifted the rain pattern of upraised spears and the white gleam of the horsetail standards; more and more, and then the brown of the war host, with our light horsemen wheeling and re-forming about them and sending in their flights of arrows and slingstones – growing sparse now – as chance offered. The sun splintered into shards of light on shield boss or spear blade, among the onward-rolling mass, and the deep crash of tramping feet and the formless surf of shouting seemed to spring forward ahead of them.