Sword at Sunset (17 page)

There was a great content in me. We should be able to replace half our present mounts, who were mostly fen horses by that time, good willing brutes but without much fire; and they could go to
form a reserve with the rest of the newcomers. (Never wise to put too many raw mounts into the battle line in any one year, however well trained they be.) We had never been able to count on a
reserve of spare mounts until now; and God knew how sorely we had sometimes needed them. God, as Cei had said, was good.

When the jar was empty and many things had been talked over, we took our leave, and set out once more for Deva. The mare’s milk was the most potent liquor that has ever come my way. I have
always had a hard head, but that night the stars were the color of honeysuckle and soft as the stars of midsummer. I think we sang a little, on the road back to the City of Legions. But it was not
all the mare’s milk.

It was well into the second watch of the night when we got back, but a handful of men who were none of mine were standing under the lantern at the entrance to the old officers’ courtyard.
They were well-set-up lads, all young and hard, and they had their weapons with them. What they wanted I thought I could guess, even before one of them – it was the youngster who had carried
my message to Kinmarcus – stepped forward to my stirrup. ‘Sir, my Lord Artos, may we have a word with you?’

‘I expect so.’ I dismounted and handed Arian over to my armor-bearer, with an extra pat because I felt all at once the guilt of disloyalty to him. ‘Take over,’ I said to
Cei, and gesturing the newcomers to follow me, led the way to my quarters. The lantern was lit and there was a small fire burning in an earthenware brazier, and I sat down beside it, holding out my
hands chilled from the bridle rein, for the softness of the past day was turning raw, and looked at the young men crowding before me. ‘Well? What is the thing that you wish to say to
me?’

The one who had been my messenger answered for the rest. ‘Sir, we have brought you our swords, we would join the Company that rides with you.’

I looked into their eager and earnest faces. ‘You are very young, all of you.’

‘Fion is the youngest of us, and he will be eighteen next month. We are all made men and carry our own weapons, my Lord Artos.’

I leaned forward studying them, face after face. What I saw there pleased me, but certainly they were all very young. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘There are two degrees of following me.
I want men for the Company, yes; I always want men for the Company. But I want also—’ I hesitated, seeking for the word: ‘Auxiliaries and irregulars; men to serve with me as light
horsemen, as archers and scouts and spearmen, as faithfully as my Companions serve with me as heavy cavalry; men who will follow me out over their own frontiers when the need arises, and hold to me
for as long as I need them – knowing always that as soon as I can spare them, in a year, or two, or three, they will be free to return again to their own homes. For the men who ride with me
as my Companions, the thing is very different. From them I demand loyalty to myself and to each other, alone and for all time – or at least until the last Saxon looses his hold from the last
headland of the British coast. We are a brotherhood, and for us there can be no bond outside, and no release after a few years. By your faces you would seem to be such men as my heart calls to, and
gladly I will accept your swords in one degree or the other; but before you decide, in God’s name think. You have all your lives to live, and afterward there can be no way back with
honor.’

They glanced at each other; one, a red-haired youth, licked his lower lip, another fidgeted with the handle of his dirk. ‘Go home,’ I said. ‘Talk it over, put it under your
pillow and sleep on it; and come to me again in the morning.’

Another man shook his head. ‘We came this evening to lay our weapons at your feet, and we would not go back to our own hearths again with the thing still unsettled. Give us leave to speak
together in your doorway for a few moments, my Lord Artos.’

‘Surely, for as many moments as you wish.’ I drew my dagger and fell to burnishing it with the tail of my cloak, abandoning them and their councils. They drew aside into the doorway,
and I heard the low mutter of their voices for a while. Then the pad of their feet came across the floor, and I looked up to see them standing before me again. The boy who had been my messenger
stood a little out from the rest, and two more with him. As before, he acted as spokesman for the rest.

‘My Lord Artos, we have taken council together and we have decided. These behind me will serve you truly in the second of the ways you offer. They have bonds of their own that cannot be
broken; two of them have wives and bairns – but we three, Finnen and Corfu here, and myself, Brys Son of Bradman, we have no bond to hold us, therefore we bind yours upon us gladly. If you
will have us for your Companions, then we are yours under the Red Dragon, without thought of sitting at our old hearths again.’

And another asked, ‘Is there an oath to swear? Whatever it is, we will swear it.’

‘You have sworn oath enough,’ I said.

And so the first of the gathering that Kinmarcus had foretold was well begun, the gathering that was to continue through all the dark months ahead until, when spring returned, I found myself
with a goodly war host at my back.

chapter nine

W
E HAD ALL BUT GIVEN UP HOPE OF
B
EDWYR’S RETURN
, when at last he appeared with the grain carts and the escort, looming out
of a snowstorm that drove sideways in mealy drifts before a black wind from the northeast. Men and horses alike were near to the point where they drop and do not rise again; but behind him the
light baggage carts were piled high with grainskins or covered with roped-down tent cloths. ‘It is a thing that has its uses, to be a prince in Arfon,’ he said when we brought him and
his fellows into the mess hall. ‘Even one born under a hawthorn bush,’ and he staggered down beside the fire and sat there, his head hanging, while the snow thawed on his eyelashes. I
think he was not more than half conscious. ‘They say – the harvest was good in Môn. There will be a few more cartloads in the spring, if the roads are open early
enough.’

Somebody brought him a cup of heather beer, and he drank it off, and a little color came back into his ashen face. When I left him to oversee the storing of the grain, he had unslung the doeskin
harp bag from his shoulders, and taken out his beloved harp, and begun to finger the white-bronze strings, making sure that no harm had come to it from the cold.

That winter we had no time to go out of condition, no time for the dullness of spirit that sometimes comes over a winter camp and must be guarded against as one tries to guard against fever and
the flux. We had oats and barley in the granary now, but it had to be ground, and since if we wanted to eat meat we must get it for ourselves, some of us were always on the hunting trail. It was as
I had said to Kinmarcus, we lived as the outposts had done in the old days, the corn in the granary and the boar in the woods; only with us it was mostly red deer and sometimes wolf –
wolfmeat is none so bad eating, if one is hungry enough. There was much work needed about the camp, too, for the old fortress had been little but a ruin when we rode in.

There were the cavalry horses to be tended also; daily weapon practice lest the eye grow slow and the sword arm stiff; armor and gear to be reviewed, and new men and horses broken in. And on
Sundays the priest who had helped Gwalchmai with the wounded on that first night of all came up from the city to preach God’s Word on the weed-grown parade ground. Most of us gathered to
these services, though I think that among the ranks who stood bareheaded in the cold to listen, and afterward turned man to man with the kiss of peace, there were some who made their own prayers to
Mithras or even Nuada of the Silver Hand and the remote and misty gods of their own hills. The kindly little priest would have been saddened if I had told him that, but it has never seemed to me to
matter very greatly. I have always been a follower of the Christos, because it has seemed to me that the Christian faith is the strongest and best fitted to carry the light forward into the
darkness that lies ahead. But I have prayed to too many different gods in my time, to set any very great store by the names that men cry out to for aid, or the form of prayers they use.

The months wore on and the months wore on, and there came no further news out of the north, by the ways that were closed by snow and mire and storm waters. But though there was no more news, I
heard much, that winter, concerning Caledonia, all the same.

From Daglaef the Merchant, I heard it. He came jogging into Deva by the road from the Wall, only the day before Bedwyr and the grain carts returned from Arfon, riding a good horse and followed
by a string of four pack mules with their drivers, and two couple of white-breasted Caledonian boarhounds running in leash behind him.

By and by word drifted up to the fortress that one Daglaef the Merchant had returned to his own place for the winter, after a whole summer spent, as he had spent summers before, trading in
Caledonia. A great thing it is, to be one of the merchant kind, who can pass safe and welcome where a war host could scarce win through. I made haste to inquire of Lucianus, he who was chieftain or
chief magistrate, as to the man’s trustworthiness, and Lucianus’s report on him being good (‘I have never yet got anything cheap from Daglaef, but on the other hand I’ve
never bought a pot from him that cracked the first time spice wine was poured into it, nor a cloak in which the colors ran, nor a hound that turned out to be not the one I paid for’), I sent
to Daglaef himself, bidding him to sup with me.

He came, a square-built, sandy-gray man with a small bright eye that seemed always cocked for a bargain, wrapped in a mantle of magnificently dressed badger skins; and when supper was over and
we drew to the brazier, began proceedings by trying to sell me a dagger of Eastern workmanship, with the ivory hilt carved into the likeness of a naked woman.

‘Na,’ I said, ‘I have already a dagger that feels familiar to my hand. It was not for your wares that I called you here.’

‘For what, then? Assuredly not for the honor of my company, my Lord the Count of Britain?’ He grinned at me, slipping back his mantle in the warmth, and began to play with the string
of silver and coral beads at his throat, in the way that I came to know later was a habit with him.

‘For your knowledge of what lies beyond the Wall.’

‘That is easily summed up – hills and heather, and northward among the forests of Mannan, a people who speak a dark tongue and can seldom be trusted to keep a bargain.’

‘And fire smoldering among the heather,’ I said.

He ceased to finger the bright beads. ‘So you know of that.’

‘Something of that – and I would know more. I would know also the shape of the land and the run of the roads beyond the Wall.’

‘I am a merchant, and frontiers and tongues and peoples are not for me as they are for other men. Are you so sure, then, that I shall tell you the truth?’

‘Lucianus says he never had a cloak from you in which the colors ran, nor a hunting dog that turned out to be not the one he paid for.’

‘So.’ Daglaef cocked an eyebrow at me with cheerful effrontery. ‘But I am very sure he told you also that he never had anything cheap from me – let alone free.’

I took a gold currency bracelet – I could ill spare it – from my wrist, and tossed it to him. ‘I am prepared to pay, so that the hunting dog proves to be the one I paid
for.’

He laughed, tossing the bracelet between his hands, then abruptly stowed it away beneath his mantle, and thrusting aside the strewn fern with his foot, pulled a bit of half-charred stick from
the fire. ‘The land and the roads first, then ... ’

It was late, when at last we were done with my questions and his answers, and with his badger-skin robe already swathed about him to depart, he tried again to sell me the dagger with the hilt
like a naked woman. I bought it as a gift for Cei.

After that, Daglaef the Merchant came on another evening, not to sell, but simply as one man to sit by another’s fire and drink a pot of beer and pass an hour or two. He was a great
talker, and listening to him on those long winter evenings, as I have always loved to listen to the talk of travelers, I heard tales of strange lands and stranger peoples, of beasts as large as
mountains moving and with tails at both ends, of long sea voyages and distant cities; but also, in and out between all these things, much more concerning Caledonia and the Caledonians.

It was February, and I remember that there were snowdrops appearing through the sodden brown of last year’s fallen leaves in what remained of the Commandant’s garden, when Flavian
came looking for me one evening. I had formed a fondness for the place, scarcely larger than a good-sized room, shut within half-ruined walls; it had a quiet of its own, remote from the bustle of
the fortress, that made it a good place to come to when I wanted to think. I had been pacing up and down and then sitting on the bench of green-stained marble, thinking of the things that Daglaef
the Merchant had told me, and wondering how they were going to fit into any plan of action; and when I turned to go back to my quarters, there he was, just behind me.

I noticed that there were three snowdrops, fully out, stuck into the shoulder strap of his worn leather tunic, which struck me as odd, more like Cei than Flavian. ‘Sir—’ he
began. ‘Sir—’ and seemed for the moment unsure how to go further.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘what is it, Flavian? Not trouble with the squadron?’

He shook his head.

‘What, then?’

‘Sir, I – I have come to ask leave to take a girl from her father’s hearth.’

I cursed inwardly. It happened from time to time, and for the Company it was a bad thing. ‘You mean legally, before witnesses?’

He nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

I sat down again on the bench. ‘Minnow, I’ve never forbidden the Companions to marry, you know that; I have no right, and besides, I am well aware that I should have no Company if I
did; but none the less, I don’t like it. Let a man take the girl he fancies to bed with him when he wants to laugh and make love, and be warm in the winter nights; there’s no harm in
that, and afterward he is a free man to kiss and ride away. But the bond that he forges when he takes a wife – that is not good for men who fight the kind of war that
we
fight.’