Sword at Sunset (52 page)

Afterward there was no funeral feast. It was such a little death, too little for such things. We walked back in a silent knot, the torches quenched, and parted at the gate of the old
Governor’s Palace. Aquila would have walked with me all the way and so I think would Ambrosius, but I wanted no man with me, and they knew and loved me well enough to let me go alone.

The moon was several nights past the full, but when I came into the Queen’s Court there was enough light to show me the figure of a man sitting on the broad rim of the old cracked fountain
basin.

Cabal growled softly in his throat, until I stilled him with a hand on his collar. And the man got up and turned toward me. I could see little in that light, save that he was of nearly my own
height, fair-haired, and very young, but something in his voice, when he spoke in the British tongue, stirred and crept in my memory. ‘You are Artos the Bear, him that they call the Count of
Britain?’

‘I am Artos the Bear. You have some business with me? A message?’ But I knew he was no man of the war host that I had ever seen.

‘No message,’ he said. ‘A matter of my own, but hearing of the sorrow upon your house, it seemed better that I wait for you here, rather than walk in unheralded at such a
time.’

‘Surely it must be a matter of great urgency, that it will not keep until the morning, even over such a night as this one.’

He said, ‘Forgive me. I am a stranger here, new come from the mountains and unused to cities of any kind. What place should I turn to on my first night in Venta Belgarum, save to my
father’s house?’

Utter silence came upon me; a dark and icy stillness. And in it the words seemed to spread and spread like the ringwise ripples when a pebble is dropped into still water. And when the last
ripple died into the dark edge of the stillness, I could only repeat his last words, and set them spreading again.

‘Your father’s house?’

So Ygerna had kept her word. I knew the timbre of his voice now. Across the years I heard it again: ‘May you have much joy in your son, my lord – much joy in your son – much
joy ... ’

‘I am called Medraut,’ he said. ‘My mother said that she told you I should be called Medraut, after the pet white rat that she had, with ruby eyes.’

‘She did; and that she would send you to me when you came to manhood. It will have cost her something to redeem that promise, for she must miss you sorely – or are there others born
after you?’ I tried to catch the insult back, remembering that she was his mother. ‘Forgive me, Medraut, I should not have said that.’

He gave a small bitter laugh. ‘Na na, I make no mistake as to the cause you had to love my mother, or she to love you. But she will not miss me. She is dead. It was when she lay dying that
she bade me come to you.’

We were silent again, and then I said, ‘For your sake, I should be sorry.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Doubtless you loved her.’

‘Loved her?’ he said musingly. ‘I do not know. I have learned more of hate than of love. I only know that I was part of her and she of me, as though there was still some cord
between us ... ’ He was fingering the carved acanthus leaves of the old fountain curb, watching his own hand in the moonlight. Then he looked up, and said a horrible thing – horrible in
its piteousness and self-betrayal. ‘It is cold outside my mother. I know now why the newly born draw their first breath in weeping.’

And in reply I had a thought that was equally horrible. I wondered if he was in truth born into life even now, or whether his mother had devoured him as a wildcat in captivity will devour her
young. But I only said, ‘It is cold in this wind. Come into the house, Medraut.’

‘As my father bids me,’ he said.

There was no one in the atrium, but a low fire still burned in the brazier, and the candles were lit as usual in their tall prickets, and from Guenhumara’s private chamber came the click
of a shuttle to and fro. I left him standing by the brazier and crossed to the farther door and went in, letting the heavy curtains fall again behind me.

Guenhumara stood weaving at her loom – a piece of saffron cloth with a border of some intricate many-colored design. She never turned around when I entered, though she must have heard me,
and Margarita, crouched against an upright of the loom, lifted her head from her paws and thumped her feathered tail as Cabal padded into the room. ‘Guenhumara,’ I said.

She tossed the shuttle across and let it fall into its resting place; then turned slowly to face me, and I saw by the dry brilliance of her eyes that she had not shed one tear. ‘Artos
– it is over, then.’

‘It is over.’ I glanced about me into the shadows. ‘How long have you been here alone? Where is Teleri and old Blanid?’

‘I do not know. I sent them away, sometime. They did not want to go.’

‘It is not good that you should have been alone!’

The gray shadow of a smile touched her mouth but never the hot bright eyes. ‘You mistake. It is good for me to have been alone. Better than to be stifled by the soft sympathy of other
women. Who is the man that I heard come in with you? I thought it was agreed there was to be no death feast for the child.’

‘A man I found waiting for me outside. Bring wine into the atrium, Guenhumara.’

‘Wine?’ she said. We had a very small stock of wine, three amphorae at that time, I think, but we saved it for the greatest of occasions.

‘Wine, Guenhumara.’

She turned without another word and went out by the far door into the colonnade, and I heard her footsteps going quickly along it to the storeroom. Then I went back to the atrium.

Medraut stood where I had left him, beside the brazier, and for the first time I was able to see him clearly. His head was up, a half smile on his lips. He waited for me to take stock of him at
my leisure, at the same time taking his own stock of me. He was as tall as I had thought, his shoulders not yet broadened into a man’s, under the shapeless garment of sheepskin with the wool
inside, which was belted by a wide bronze-studded strap about his waist. His legs were very slightly bowed, as are the legs of most of us who are bred in the saddle; ‘suckled on mare’s
milk,’ as we say in the mountains. His hands too, like my own, were horseman’s hands, and when I looked into his face under the mane of mouse-pale hair, it was as though I looked across
five and twenty years or so, at my own fetch, in the days when my beard was a golden chicken down along my jaw, as his was now. And I knew the chill stirring at the back of his neck, that a man may
well feel, seeing his own fetch in the firelight. Only his eyes were his mother’s, deeply and hotly blue, veined like the petals of the blue cranesbill, and with the same discolored shadows
under them, and they gave to his face a startling beauty that I had never possessed. He was so nearly a son to be deeply proud of; and yet something, somewhere, was horribly amiss with him. He had
been too long within his mother, and some part of him was marred and twisted – I could feel the deformity as I could feel Ygerna in him. Lame flesh may be carried off like a tattered cloak,
without harm to the spirit – I thought of Gwalchmai; but Medraut was crippled somewhere in his inmost self, and that is another matter.

I told myself that I was merely remembering Ygerna and grafting what I remembered onto her son, and almost made myself believe it.

Then he turned a little, quite deliberately, shaking back the heavy fold of sheepskin from his upper arm, and I saw above the elbow the coiled and entwined dragon of red gold that his mother had
shown me on the morning after his begetting. ‘No need to show me that,’ I said. ‘No man, seeing you, could doubt the truth of your claim.’

He smiled a little, and turned back to the fire, but left the fold of dappled sheepskin flung back from his shoulder.

The outer door opened, and Guenhumara came in, bearing the great silver guest cup with the ram’s-head handles. ‘Drink, and be welcome,’ she said, bringing it to Medraut.

He took it from her with bowed head, saying, in place of the usual formula, ‘God comfort you, my lady, and ease the sorrow of the house.’ I came to know in after time, that he might
always be counted on to say the right thing when he wished to. Guenhumara looked up at him, a long clear look that turned from him to me and back again. Then she took the guest cup from his hands,
and set it down on the table within easy reach, and without another word, went back through the curtained doorway into her own chamber.

After she was gone, I pulled a stool to the brazier, bidding Medraut to do the same, and we both drank from the guest cup, but the thin cool wine of Burdigala brought no fellowship; only after
we had drunk it, it seemed easier to speak.

‘It is in my mind that your mother will have taught you to hate me well,’ I said, scarcely knowing that I was going to, until the words were spoken.

The dark blue eyes met mine, but I could not see into them, as I had not been able to see into Ygerna’s. ‘Did I not say? I have learned more of hate than of love. Is it my
fault?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘What is it that you wish of me?’

‘A horse and a sword. I am your son. It is my place and my right to ride among your squadron and sleep at your hearth.’

‘Do you care a jot for our struggle against the Saxon flood?’

He shrugged very faintly. ‘It will not submerge the mountains.’

And I leaned forward, studying him through the faint smoke of the brazier. ‘Then how if I say to you that there is no place among my squadrons for a man who neither knows nor cares what he
fights for?’

‘I should say to you that surely it matters little if a man cares what he kills for, so that he is skilled enough as a killer. Give me a horse and a sword, and I will prove to you that I
can use both.’ He smiled, an odd, unexpected, tremulous smile. ‘One day I may even learn from you to care for the cause behind the fighting.’

I was silent, still studying him across the brazier. I did not believe in this sudden hint of a hunger after better things, and yet I think that at the moment, he believed in it himself. He was
one of those who can always believe as they wish to believe. At last I said, ‘Tomorrow I ride to rejoin the Company. You shall have your sword and your horse.’

‘I thank you, my father.’

‘But first, you shall take off that arm ring.’

‘It is mine,’ he said quickly, and made as though to cover it with the protection of his other hand.

‘You fool. I have no wish to take it from you. You can carry it in your breast for all I care. Only I say that you shall not wear it above your elbow, in the sight of all men.’

‘My mother gave it to me, and she had it from her mother—’

‘Who had it from Utha, my father and your grandfather, on the morning after he mated with her. All that I know as well as you do, and it is for that very reason that you shall take it
off.’

‘Why?’ he demanded, still covering it with his hand.

‘Because it is mate to the one which Ambrosius the High King wears above his elbow. It is a royal arm ring of the Princes of Britain.’

He took away the shielding hand and looked down at the heavy gleaming thing.

‘The royal arm ring of Britain,’ he said musingly. ‘Yes, it might perhaps be – tactless to wear it about Ambrosius’s court.’ Very slowly he pulled off the
great arm ring, and thrust it into the breast of his rough sheepskin tunic. ‘See what a dutiful and obedient son you have, my father.’

I got up, and he rose instantly, with exactly the right show of deference. ‘It is past midnight, and we must make an early outset in the morning. Come, and I will show you where you can
sleep.’

I did not rouse out any of the servants; truth to tell, I shrank too much from anyone else seeing him. I had had all that I could take for one night. The thing would be all over Venta soon
enough without any help. I took a spare lantern and lit it at the brazier, and led him out across the courtyard to the small turf-floored storeroom where I had slept for the past two nights.

In the doorway, when I would have left him, he stayed me, standing against the lantern light. ‘Father—’

‘Yes?’

‘Are you going to acknowledge me? Or do I ride with you tomorrow simply as a new spear out of nowhere, to join your war bands?’

‘Since no man who looks at you can doubt for one moment that you are my son,’ I said, ‘it is in my mind that neither of us has much choice in the matter.’

‘Father—’ he said again, and checked, and then, ‘Can you not speak one gentle word to me, on this first night of my coming to you?’ and his voice shook.

‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘This is not a night when I have many gentle words to spare,’ but I touched his shoulder, and realized with a sense of shock that, like his voice,
he was shaking.

He drew a long breath and suddenly thrust out his hands to me as a woman might do. ‘Artos my father, it is an ill night that I have chosen for my coming; yet how was I to know ... And in the
child’s death, do not quite forget that I am your living son! May not a son’s coming redeem the night a little for the other loss?’

It might have been a child’s appeal for warmth, it might have been only an incredibly clumsy attempt at consolation, but I knew already that Medraut was never clumsy, that when he wounded,
he did it of deliberate intent; and I could have struck him across the mouth. But he was my son. My God! My only begotten son! I thought blasphemously. And I could not trust myself to speak again,
but turned and went back to the atrium.

I had nowhere to sleep now, but I did not want to sleep; I felt as though I should never sleep again. I sat down on the stool by the brazier with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands,
and shut my eyes at the light that seemed to claw at my aching eyeballs. The sense of doom was heavy on me, and the room seemed full of Ygerna’s hate reaching out to me still from beyond
death. And Medraut was alive, and the child that I had loved was in her grave; and everything that was in me seemed broken and bleeding, and I was lost in a great wilderness.

Guenhumara came and found me there. I heard her step come across the tesserae and caught the faint indefinable scent of her, and knew that she was standing just behind me. But I did not look
up.