Sword at Sunset (23 page)

The moment passed. ‘Who told you that?’ I demanded. ‘About the flesh and the blood?’

He controlled his panting in one long shaken breath. ‘My mother. But all men know that it is true.’

‘Listen – listen to me, Cerdic, and believe me: it is
not
true, as you understand it. Your mother was – mistaken.’

‘I do not believe you.’

‘You must. In all faiths there are mysteries; you are old enough, maybe, to have been initiated into the mysteries of your own. When we who call ourselves Christians feast with our God, we
eat bread and drink wine; the rest is the mystery. But before the mystery, the bread is but bread as other bread, and the wine is but wine as other wine.’

‘That is a thing easy to say.’

‘It is the true thing. No harm will come to your mother’s body at our hands.’

‘That also is a thing easy to say.’ But I thought that there was beginning to be a flicker of uncertainty in his eyes. ‘How may I know that it is true?’

‘I can give you no proof beyond my word. I will swear it, if you like.’

He was silent a moment; then he said, ‘On what?’

‘On the blade and the pommel of my sword.’

‘The sword which is to drive me and my folk into the sea?’

‘It is none the less sacred to me.’

He stood for a long silent moment looking me eye into eye. Then I released him and drew the sword from its sheath, and swore. The star of violet light woke under the torchlight in the heart of
the great amethyst. ‘This is the seal of my great-grandsire, Magnus Maximus, Emperor of Britain,’ I said when I had sworn. And he watched the great jewel as I slammed the sword back
into its sheath, then raised his eyes again to my face, with something of challenge in them, something else, too; a strange farsighted expression as though he were looking into a distance, not of
place, but of time. But he spoke no word.

‘Now it is time to be going,’ I said.

He swallowed, and suddenly the manhood left him and he was a boy again. ‘Going? Are you – not going to kill me, then?’

I had been aware for some time past that Bedwyr had come into the room and was standing close behind me. The familiar voice said very quietly in my ear, ‘Yes!’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I do not kill boys. Come back when you are a man, and I will kill you if I can; and if you can, you shall kill me.’

‘It may be that I will do that – one day,’ he said.

But at the time I scarcely heard him. I turned on Flavian standing by. ‘Take a couple of the others and see him safely through the gate and three bowshots along the road to the
coast.’ I looked again at the cub standing beside his dead mother. ‘After that, you will be on your own. If you run into any of the Blue War Shields, or find that the war boats have
already sailed when you reach the coast, then that is the end. There is no more that I can do about you. Now get out.’

He looked from me to the still body on the bed; one long look, and then back again. Then he turned without a word and walked to the door. Flavian turned in behind him, and I heard him call to
two of those outside, ‘Vran, Conan, I want you—’ and the knot of footsteps dying away down the narrow street.

In the torchlit room, Bedwyr and I faced each other beside the bed. ‘I would to God that it had been I who found him, and not that fool Flavian,’ Bedwyr said. ‘I could have
arranged matters without troubling the Count of Britain.’ He never used that title save in the spirit of mockery.

‘How?’

‘By having him killed out of hand,’ he said simply.

‘In Christ’s name, why, Bedwyr?’

‘Do you not understand that he is Vortigern’s son? He understood it, if you did not. You blind, bloody fool, Artos, have you forgotten that there are still folk enough in Britain who
count Vortigern’s for the true Royal House, and yours for no more than a usurper’s, fathered by a Roman general who was born in Hispania and took the flower of their young men with him
to die at Aquileia? That may have little meaning now, while Ambrosius is the High King, but when the time comes for Ambrosius to die—’

Silence flashed down like a sword between us, and held us for a long harsh moment. Then I said, ‘I suppose I had forgotten something of that. I think I am glad, Bedwyr.’

In the returned silence, the echo of receding footsteps still sounded, fainter with every breath that passed.

‘It is still not too late,’ said Bedwyr.

I shook my head. ‘Fate does not allow it to men to unpick part of the pattern.’ As I said it, an odd foreboding brushed me by, a sense, not so much of future evil as of the fate that
I had spoken of, a sense of the inescapable pattern of things. Whatever it was, it was gone as swiftly as a bird darts across a sunlit clearing, from the shadow into the shadow again. I glanced
about me. ‘Na, the thing is done. Best see to this matter of the burning. Get in brushwood and loose straw and pile it around the bed. And clear back the nearer bushes in the garden. We
don’t want another fire spreading through Eburacum tonight.’

‘Fire? You want the whole house destroyed?’ Bedwyr had said what he had to say, and there was an end of it. So now he turned to the next thing.

‘Yes. Fire is the usual way, among her people; and the place stinks anyway.’ But it was in my heart also that fire was a cleansing thing, and I was still remembering Aquila’s
words, ‘A golden witch in a crimson gown.’

They were felling and uprooting the overgrown bushes in the little town garden as I came out again into the street, and the dusk had deepened to a soft blue darkness full of voices and hurrying
shadows and the spitting flare of torches. They had lit great fires in the Forum by the time I returned to it. Most of the foot had come in by that time, and the whole war host was crowding close
about the flames. They had driven in a few cattle, and already the smell of roasting meat was in the air. The whisper of another scent, sweet and heavy with musk, curled across my nose, and the
woman Helen drifted out of the shadows and brushed across my path, then checked, glancing up at me over her shoulder. Her bright rags were allowed to slip just a little when she held them at her
thin breast; her eyes half laughing, at once bright and unutterably weary under the lids whose green malachite had run in streaks, her body touched against mine, lightly, with a mute
invitation.

I looked down at her. ‘I am so deeply thankful to you, Helen; tonight I cannot even find the words to tell you how thankful.’

‘There are other things than words, my Lord Artos; other ways for a man and a woman to speak together.’ Her voice was soft and throaty as a ringdove. ‘I have a little wine in
my lodging.’

‘Not tonight, darling. I’m too tired.’

Cei strutted into the light of the nearest fire as I spoke, and I jerked a thumb in his direction. ‘You see that one with the russet beard, and the bracelets? If you would be kind, go and
offer him your wine.’

She looked at me without the least rancor, clearly with no sense of rebuff – but indeed I had meant no rebuff – only with a little mockery under the green-painted lids. ‘But
perhaps he also is too tired.’

‘He is never too tired,’ I said.

chapter twelve

W
E REMAINED SEVERAL DAYS IN
E
BURACUM TO REST BOTH
men and horses and get the weapons and war gear mended and renewed and see to
the wounded. And almost at once the folk of the city who had escaped fire and seax when the Sea Wolves came, began to trickle back from the refuges to which they had fled farther inland. With their
help we cleared the streets of the sprawling dead, and stripped the dead of their war gear, claiming for ourselves as usual the keenest weapons and most finely wrought mail shirts to replace the
boiled leather and horn and age-eaten Roman hoop mail that still had to serve for some of us. As Lindum would have had us stay, so would Eburacum, and indeed with better cause, for the Contain had
been almost free of the Sea Wolves when we left, but here we had been able to clear only the city itself and the land toward the coast was still in enemy hands. But the North was smoldering into
flame, and I could not bide in Eburacum any more than in Lindum City.

I gathered an oddly assorted council of war: one or two hungry magistrates, leaner than ever they had been in their lives before; a handful of tottering graybeards who had come forward to answer
my call for men who had served with the Eagles in their youth; the leaders of Kinmarcus’s tribesmen and of the Brigantian warriors who had joined us on the march; Jason the Swordsmith with
the mark of the thrall ring red-raw on his neck, to speak for his own valiant rabble; my own lieutenants Bedwyr and Cei. I summoned them together into the Forum and told them I could not stay to
finish the work that was begun, while the fire in the North swept down to engulf us all in the end. I would leave them a war band of trained spearmen to help them train themselves. I left them
their own warriors, the Bearers of the Blue War Shields – and there were no fiercer fighting men under the sun, as the Eagles had good cause to know. I left them their old soldiers for wisdom
and cunning in war craft, if their days for bearing a sword were past. (I saw how that made the men of the Blue Shield stand up straight like emperors, and the veterans begin to look down their
noses at the Blue Shields; and began to harangue them on the need to forget all differences and stand together.) I forget now what I said, save that I did my best to strengthen their hearts and
their sword hands, that I promised to come again and vowed that we would finish the work together. I know that I crooned over them like a bairn’s nurse, and cursed them like a time-expired
centurion with the gutter words of half an empire at his command, and appealed to them like a girl appealing to her lover. I think that many of us were near to tears by the end. I know I felt like
a murderer. But I was sure in my heart that now I had cleared out the wolf’s lair, they could hold their own – if only they could stand together! Dear God, let them be able to stand
together! Let them learn that one lesson that seems impossible ever to be learned by the British kind!

Two days before we marched, a messenger came from the Prince Guidarius in Lindum, to tell me that the Coritani territory was still free of the Sea Wolves, but that even so, my old place still
waited for me if I chose to return to it. I gave orders for the messenger to be fed and housed, and sent him back next day with word that I thanked the Prince Guidarius, but that I had not changed
my plans. I had little time to weave courtesy into my reply, for I had both hands full with arrangements for food and war supplies to come up after us from Eburacum before the autumn’s end.
(I had already sent word back to Deva of the victory, together with a forewarning to Kinmarcus that we should need the same kind of supplies from him and from the Môn grainlands later.) With
making plans for a supply depot at Corstopitum, the old depot town for the Wall fortress; with convincing the Bishop of Eburacum, who was among the returned survivors, that the income from certain
Church orchard land, luckily undamaged by the Saxons, would be better spent on well-made arrows and salt and saddle leather, than laid by in gold to the Glory of God. He was not easy to convince,
being less of a mouse than his brother of Lindum. But he saw my point in the end.

And the next day we marched out of Eburacum by the northern gate, and took the Legion’s road to the Wall.

It must have been a fine sight in its day, the Wall, when the sentries came and went along the rampart walks and bronze-mailed cohorts held the fortress towers and the statues and the altars to
the Legion’s gods were thick along the crest; and between it and the road and the vallum ditch that followed it like its own shadow, one great string of towns, one long-drawn town under many
names, straggling all the four days’ march from Segedunum to Luguvallium. The towns were as dead as the Wall, now, for the menace of the North was too near, the raids too frequent for them to
have outlived the protection of the Eagles; and we rode into a ghost town, the roofs long since fallen in and the walls crumbling away, the tall armies of nettles where the merchants had spread
their wares and the Auxiliaries had taken their pleasure in off-duty hours, where the married quarters had been, and children and dogs had tumbled in the sunshine under the very feet of the
marching cohorts, and the drink shops had spilled beery song into the night, and the smiths and sandalmakers, the horse dealers and the harlots had plied their trades; and all that moved was a blue
hare among the fallen gravestones of forgotten men, and above us a hoodie crow perching on the rotting carcass of what had once been one of the great catapults of the Wall, that flew off croaking,
with a slow flap of indignant wings as we drew near.

We camped that night around the crumbling gate tower where the road from Corstopitum, and Eburacum beyond, passed through into lowland Caledonia, into the old lost province of Valentia. I called
the captains together after the evening meal, and took a bit of stick and began to draw maps in the ashes on the edge of the campfire. How often I had seen Ambrosius doing that, on the eve of a
campaign. I was mapping, for my own information as well as theirs, a countryside that I had never seen; but it was not for nothing that I had spent those long winter evenings listening to Daglaef
the Merchant. ‘See – here we sit now at the Hunnum Gate; from here the road runs – so, north and a little west, to Trimontium, three days’ march.’ (It was odd how,
never having known the Legions, one still thought of the old legionary march of twenty miles, when one wanted to work out a distance.) ‘Here it crosses the Tweed – so, and runs on
through the lowland hills and into the fringes of the Caledon Forest, to come out in the levels below the Highland Line.’ Bedwyr and the others gathered closer in the firelight, peering over
my shoulders. I went on scrawling lines and curves in the warm ash. ‘Now from Luguvallium, where I put this pebble, a second road runs north to Castra Cunetium, here, five marches by reason
of the way the road sinks to avoid marsh country and high moors. And on, also, toward the Highland Line through the very heart of the Pict lands.’ I returned to Trimontium, trying to remember
exactly how the merchant had described to me the run of the Tweed. ‘Here the Tweed Valley narrows into a gorge, running so. Easy to see the strategic importance of the place, isn’t it,
with the river valley and the road forming between them the main highways from Caledonia to the south; and the Inner Kingdom of the Picts thrusting down through the Forest in the northwest ... Then
if Daglaef spake truth, there is a lateral road from Trimontium running thus, up toward the headwaters of the Tweed and across the high tongue of the Forest to those of the Cluta, and downvalley to
Castra Cunetium ... Now have you all got that safely behind your foreheads? Then make sure that the rest of the lads have it, too, for it is in my mind that those three roads and those two forts are
the pattern of our fate for a good while to come, for on our holding and our handling of them depends our hold of Caledonia.’