Sword at Sunset (65 page)

‘If I were to bid you sit in council with me, it would be as though I stood up and cried before all men, ‘This is my heir, to come after me! But that is the thing you have in mind,
isn’t it?’

‘I am your son,’ he said again.

‘Among the wearers of the Purple, the diadem has never passed of necessity from father to son. Your son’s rights, Medraut, do not include the Sword of Britain after me, unless I
speak the word.’

The usual veil over his eyes seemed to thicken until the blueness of them was completely blank; and he said after a moment, in a voice that was suddenly silken: ‘How if
I
speak a
word, then? How if I shouted the whole foul truth of my begetting to the camp?’

‘Shout, and be damned to you,’ I said. ‘The chief shame will not fall on my head, who had no knowledge of that truth, but on your mother’s, who knew it well!’ There
was another pause, filled with the sea-surge of the wind in the trees. Then I said, ‘You see, it is not so easy after all.’

‘Na,’ he agreed, in the same silken voice. ‘It is not so simple after all. Yet maybe we shall find a way one day, my father. It is in my heart that we shall find a way.’
The threat was clear.

‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but meanwhile it is time for sleep, for the rising time for both of us must come early in the morning; and truth to tell, I wish to be alone.’

And when he had made me his low bow that was a mockery of respect, and ducked out through the skin-hung door hole, I sat thinking for a long while before I called Riada to me. I thought, among
other things, that it was as well that there should be no public talk of Constantine coming after me. Cador and I understood each other well enough, that in the nature of things, the boy must be my
heir; but it would be better – safer for Constantine and for the kingdom – that the thing should not be put into words and cried aloud in the Forum.

chapter thirty-two

B
EFORE THE END OF THE MONTH
I
WAS BACK IN
V
ENTA.
We rode in between roaring crowds who surged forward to
fling golden branches and jewel-colored autumn berries under our horses’ hooves, and it seemed that the rejoicing of the whole city clamored like a clash of bells.

It was conqueror’s weather, not the half-regretful glancing back to summer that occurs sometimes in early autumn, but the sudden valiant flare of warmth and color on the very edge of
winter that often comes toward the time of Saint Martin’s Mass. The sun shone like a bold yellow dandelion flower tossed into a cloudless sky, and a wind last night had dried the mud of the
autumn rains so that the dust curled up beneath the horses’ hooves, the poplar trees stood along the streets as yellow torches, with their shadows under them reflecting the blue of the sky.
And next day, when I was able at last to draw breath and turn my back for an hour on matters that concerned the war trail and the kingdom, the sun was still warm to the skin in the Queen’s
Courtyard, where Bedwyr and I lounged side by side on the colonnade steps. The light was westering, and the sand-rose in its great stone jar laid an intricate tracery of shadow at our feet, and
denser shadow stole out from the far side where the pigeons crooned and strutted on the roof of the store wing. But on the colonnade steps out of the wind, there was warmth to let one’s cloak
hang open, a still warmth, lingering like the savor of old wine in an amber cup. The smell of the evening meal stole out from the cook place, and the movements and voices of women, and the fat
bubbling laugh of the woman who had taken Blanid’s place when the old creature died last year.

I had been telling Bedwyr of all that had happened at the council table, and the course that I had taken as to the Saxon settlement, while he sat forward with his maimed arm supported across his
knees, his narrowed gaze following the pigeons, listening to me without a word. I wished that he would speak, it was hard to tell the thing against this wall of silence. But when I had finished he
still maintained it, until I asked him directly, ‘When I was young, I’d have torn out their living hearts, and my own also, before a Saxon should be left on British ground. Am I
learning other things than the use of the sword, Bedwyr? Or am I merely growing old and losing my grasp?’

He stirred then, still watching the pigeons strut and coo. ‘Na, I do not think that you are losing your grasp; it is that you must learn to play the statesman now. For Artorius Augustus
Caesar it is no longer enough to be a soldier, as it was for Artos the Count of Britain.’

I rubbed my forehead which felt as though sheep’s wool were packed behind it. ‘I have not slept much, these past nights, wondering if I have chosen the wrong course and maybe the
ruin of Britain. And yet it is still in my mind that it is the lesser of two dangers.’

‘In mine also,’ Bedwyr said. ‘We cannot stretch our shield-wall to cover the Forth to Vectis Water – it may be that this way will at any rate gain us more
time.’

Time ...

We were silent again. And then I heard my own voice, as it were thinking aloud. ‘I remember once, long ago, Ambrosius said to me that if we fought well enough we might hold back the dark
for maybe another hundred years. I asked him, seeing that the end was sure, why we did not merely lie down and let it come, for the end would be easier that way. He said: “For a
dream.”’

‘And you? What did you say?’

‘Something about a dream being often the best thing to die for ... I was young, and something of a fool.’

‘Yet when there is no dream left worth dying for, that is when the people die,’ Bedwyr murmured, ‘and there is the advantage to it, that the dream can live on, even when hope
dies. Yet hope has its value too ... ’

‘Sa sa.’ I turned abruptly on the colonnade step, to face him. ‘Bedwyr, all our lives we have fought a long fight without hope’ – I hesitated, seeking the words I
needed – ‘without –
ultimate
hope. And now, for the first time, it is in my heart that there is a kind of hope for us, after all.’

He turned from the pigeons. ‘What hope would that be?’

‘You remember that I asked Flavian to bring the Minnow with him to the council camp?’

‘I remember.’

‘There was another boy there, a little younger than the Minnow, the son of one of the Saxon nobles. Like enough, he was brought for the same purpose. They walked around each other on stiff
legs at first, like young hounds, and then they went away, and no man saw them again until evening. They came back at suppertime, being hungry, and told no one what they had done with their day,
and no one asked, but they looked as though they had spent part of it fighting, and the rest in eating blackberries. They shared the same broth bowl and spent the evening among the hounds by the
fire, picking bramble thorns out of each other’s feet. And suddenly I knew, watching them – Ambrosius never knew it – that the longer we can hold off the Saxons, the more we can
slow their advance, even at the cost of our heart’s blood, the more time there will be for other boys to pick thorns out of each other’s feet and learn the words for hearth and hound
and honey cake in each other’s tongue ... Every year that we can hold the Saxons back may well mean that the darkness will engulf us the less completely in the end, that more of what we fight
for will survive until the light comes again.’

‘It is a good thought,’ Bedwyr said softly. ‘It would be a better one if you could live three or four lives.’

‘Surely. And there’s where the harness chafes. Having only one, and that more than half spent – If God had but given me a son to take my sword after me.’

He turned sharply to look at me, but did not speak, for the thought of Medraut leapt naked between us. ‘In the end it must fall to Constantine,’ I said at last. ‘Cador knows
that.’

‘And Constantine is – a fine cavalry leader in his own wild way, and will doubtless make a fine prince for Dumnonia.’

‘He burns with a steadier flame than his father. But the young ones are of a lesser stature, a lesser breed – both Saxon and British, they are a lesser breed. The giants and heroes
are dead, and all save one, the men grow smaller than they used to be when we were young.’

‘And that one?’

‘If I could have had Cerdic for my son,’ I said slowly, ‘I should have been well content.’

Neither of us spoke again for a long while. Bedwyr returned to his watching of the pigeons, I to staring down at that arabesque of shadows that the sand-rose cast across the pavement at my feet,
neither of us thinking much of what we saw. And the slow long silence fell like the soft dust of years over the things that we had been speaking of.

A dry-edged poplar leaf, caught by an eddy of wind, came spinning across the sunlit courtyard to flatten itself for an instant against the bottom step, and in the way that one does such small
pointless things, Bedwyr flung out a hand – his left – to catch it, and snatched at his breath swearing softly, and let his arm settle gingerly onto his knees again, while the leaf
whirled away.

I looked around at him, seeing afresh the discolored hollows around his eyes and the way the bones stood out under the skin that had bleached from its usual brown to a dingy yellow, and the
parching of long-recurrent fever that had left his mouth dry and chapped. ‘It still catches you, then?’ I said. I had asked for that arm of his before, but he had swept my questions
aside, caring for nothing but to hear what had happened at the council table.

‘It is well enough.’

‘“Well enough” is an answer for the birdcatcher’s grandmother.’

He seemed to be drawing back his mind from a long way away, to give me his full attention. ‘It still catches me,’ he said with mocking exactitude. ‘The ache runs down here like
a red thread – a little red worm in the bone – and catches me up short when I would be catching poplar leaves in flight.’ He flung back the loose fold of his cloak and held it out
to me, and I saw that from the elbow down, the arm was somewhat wasted and brittle-looking, and the elbow itself, below the heavy bronze arm ring that I had given him years ago, was wickedly seamed
with livid scars, not only of the wound itself, but of the many lancings and probings after the splinters of shattered bone, some of them scarcely healed even now. ‘It also does not
bend.’ I saw the painful drag and thrust of the muscles, but the joint remained immovable, bent at about the angle at which a man carries his shield and bridle.

‘What does Gwalchmai say? And Ben Simeon? Has Ben Simeon seen it?’

He quirked up that wild eyebrow, the other grave and level, so that his face wore two expressions at once. ‘That I am fortunate to be alive ... I shall even be able to use it by and by,
seeing that it is not my sword arm. When I knew that it must stiffen I bade Gwalchmai to set and strap the thing in the position that I bade him, and before spring I shall be handling horse and
buckler again; I shall be fit for service as Caesar’s captain.’

‘And the Emperor’s harper?’ I glanced at the embroidered doeskin bag that lay as usual beside him.

‘Surely, and that already, since a one-handed skill will serve.’ He took up the harp and drew it from the bag, using his left arm with a kind of clumsy acquired skill, and settled
the slim well-worn instrument between his knee and the hollow of his shoulder. ‘It is easier with a sound arm, admittedly,’ he said, frowning as he fumbled for the familiar supporting
hold.

He struck a swelling ripple of tuning notes that sounded like a question, made his adjustments, and began to play. It was a tune from my own hills, that he had picked up from Ambrosius’s
harper, small and jaunty as a water wagtail. And listening to him, I lost the Queen’s Courtyard in the westering autumn sunlight, and was back again in the dark of the mountains that walled
Nant Ffrancon, with the thunder of horses’ hooves in my ears, and a herdboy playing that tune on his pipes; and for an instant the taste of my youth came back to me, and the green freshness
of the morning before Ygerna’s shadow fell across the day.

A quiet step sounded behind us, and I looked up as Guenhumara came across the colonnade with her spindle and distaff. I moved aside to make space for her on the step, but she smiled and shook
her head, and leaned herself against the cracked plaster column, looking down at us.

Bedwyr had dropped his hand from the harp strings, and as the small prancing melody fell silent, she said quickly, ‘Na na, let you go on playing; it was the harp song that called me
out.’ And he made her a little bow, and caught up the tunelet again where he had tossed it down. And while he played, I had time to look at Guenhumara as I had scarcely had time to look at
her since I came home. She was wearing a gown of some soft red-brown stuff, faded a little as the earth fades with sun and rain, and it seemed to me suddenly that there was a new softness about
her, a look of harvest. I searched for the woman I had kissed into that one moment of passionate response beside the gray standing stone in the rain, and could not find her, but knew that she had
her part in this other woman and was not lost, as the green shoot is not lost in the red corn. There was a warmer quietness in her, fulfillment and content as a cornfield at harvest time. The Corn
Queen, I thought. She is like the Corn Queen, and pushed the thought away, for the overtones of sacrifice that clung to it. I wondered whether she was – not forgetting the Small One, but
perhaps remembering with less pain.

The small rippling tune that was now the wagtail and now the water, burst into a last running phrase, and was silent. And in the silence, all at once, Guenhumara laughed, with strangely darkened
eyes, and the bright color flooded up from her throat to the roots of her hair. ‘Artos, why do you look at me so? – As though you had never seen me before?’

‘Do I? I am sorry. It is that I am looking for the first time at the Queen.’

‘The Queen,’ she said slowly and carefully, as though testing a strange word on her tongue.

And Bedwyr, laughing also, as he looked up at her with eyes narrowed against the westering light, struck a small triumphal flourish of notes from the leaping harp strings. ‘Sa! They will
sound the trumpets for you, now that Caesar is home, and open the treasure chests and bring out the blue and purple and golden silks that tear like withered leaves, and the queen’s jewels
laced with cobwebs, but meanwhile, here is a queen’s fanfare for you that at least has never been worn for a garland by any queen before.’