The Circle of the Gods (20 page)

Ansold blinked happily and rubbed a worn, charcoal-grained hand across his chin, saying, “Your welcome warms my heart, Captain Arturo, for the truth is that, although the lying will be harder here than at Corinium. I would rather serve you than Count Ambrosius, who pays poor for good work and that only after long waiting.”

Pushing the cloak cowl free of her dark hair, Daria, straight-faced except for a slight curl at the corners of her berry-red lips, said, “And what welcome does my lord Arturo give me?”

Arturo, smiling now, speaking without thought as though the words flowed from elsewhere through him to her, said, “You have no need of welcome for my heart has given it before to you. And now—although you speak teasingly—I know there is a true kindness to me in your heart since the faces of your father and Lancelo tell me that they have never known until this moment that we had met before. Though I count that caution not needed.”

Daria laughed and shook her head. “Then you count wrong. Give my good father too much mead and in some moments his tongue grows too loose. As for Lancelo, I wanted for him no more favour than rested in his own body and skills. Nor now do any of us ask for undue favours. So long as we are here we are at your commands, knowing that they will always be just.”

Before Arturo could reply, Ansold said gruffly, “She is right about the mead loosening my tongue. But smithying is hot work and hard and a man's throat gets parched.”

When Lancelo led them away to find quarters for them, Arturo went back to the fountain and sat, one hand teasing at Anga's ears. The gods had sent him a master sword maker … a man who could wander the breadth and length of the land and always find a welcome in any camp. And the gods had sent him Daria. In so doing there was no doubt in him that they moved him and the dark-haired, blue-eyed young woman in some pattern of destiny not given yet to the eyes or mind of man to know.

The winter spent its strength at last and spring began swiftly to spread its coloured mantle over the land. The woods grew green-budded and primroses and white and purple violets studded the mossy alder thickets along the valley stream, and the gold of daffodil blooms was spread like largesse over the meadow banks.

There were times now when Arturo, quick with the restlessness of the season, found himself turning away from the ordering of men and horses, from drills and cavalry exercises, to forsake the villa and walk by himself in the surrounding woods. Sitting alone in a clearing, he would become lost in a dream of the campaign that he meant to start as soon as the first days of summer came. Ill-provided and rash he knew it had to be, but there was no doubt in him that the gods would approve his daring. With a handful of men he would do what Gerontius with all his forces had talked long of doing but still had not found the will to effect. Active though his mind was with this dream, there were the times when its place was usurped by his second passion. From thoughts of coming renown and glory, he found himself slipping into thoughts of Daria.

Again and again the gods had put her in his path. He was in love with her and knew that she, for all her challenging and teasing spirit, looked with more than ordinary kindness on him. Yet one doubt tangled his thinking about her. Through her the gods might be tempting and testing him. Many men in history had been drawn from the path of greatness by their love for a woman. Because of this uncertainty in him he had more and more in the past weeks avoided the company of Daria.

Sitting late one afternoon in a small glade above the villa, idly stripping the young bark from a hazel wand with his thumbnail and frowning to himself as he teased his mind with the dilemma which Daria posed for him, he saw her come out of the trees on the far side of the glade and walk toward him. She sat down close to him. He gave her no greeting and kept his eyes from her.

Smiling, Daria said, “There was a time when you had no lack of words boastful or bardlike to greet me.
Aie.
… even in my first weeks here. Does the beginning of greatness which all your men claim for you begin to move you away from ordinary courtesies?”

Throwing the hazel wand from him, Arturo said, “You are right to chide me. But do not think because I lack words that there is no greeting in my heart. You know what is in my heart as I know what is in yours. The gods have brought us together, and for a purpose.”

“But you cannot read that purpose, is that it?”

“Can you?”

“I do not try.”

“But I must.”

“Why?” She leant forward and cradled her brown arms around her knees; and her dark hair fell about her cheeks.

“That I cannot tell you.”

“Then I can give you no help. But when the feast of Beltine is over and the women go from here I shall go with them. There is one who has offered me a place with her people.”

“Your father goes with you?”

“I cannot speak for him. Nor he for himself until the moment comes. I think that you, too, are much like him. You do not know what you will do until the moment comes. But when it does you find good reason for your actions. Like a hare disturbed from its form you bound away and even when you are moving you do not know why you have taken your line:”

Despite himself Arturo smiled, and said, “What need to know till then—since the gods will have put it in my mind?”

“The gods control us, true. But not every moment of the day. There are times when they are too full of their own affairs.”

“For most men, yes. But not for me.”

To his surprise Daria threw back her head and laughed. “Oh, Arturo! You have such faith in the gods. And true—there is that about you which speaks of greatness. Your men mark it and respect it. But the gods cannot be with any man for every minute of his life.”

“The gods are always with me when the moment is of great importance. Since no man would talk to me as you do, then I will talk to you as no man would to a woman without shaming himself. I love you and would make you my wife—but this I cannot do unless I know it is in the will of the gods that it should happen.”

In a low, angry voice Daria said, “My lord Arturo, you forget one thing. Gods or no gods, when a woman takes a man for husband it is a matter of her will, and hers alone.” Then standing up, her eyes narrowed, her cheeks flushed with emotion, she went on, her voice almost contemptuous, “I am no woman to wait on the will of the gods for a husband.
Aie
… I would have been wife to you if you asked me frankly out of your own true love for me. But now I am as far out of your reach to master and to cherish as is the wild white mare that roams these woods!”

She turned from him and walked away through the trees, and Arturo, watching her go, was suddenly filled with a great elation and joy which almost made him call out to bring her back for he knew that through her the gods had spoken and given him the sign he needed.

For the next two weeks he spent much of his time away from the villa camp. He went on foot into the woods, by day and by night, and the only company he had was Anga. He searched the valleys and dales, the remote clearings made by long-dead charcoal burners, the places at streams and pools where deer, boar, fox and other forest animals came to drink. On the high meadows and swampy river pastures he marked the hoof marks and the cropped patches of sweet new grass that told of the passing of the white mare. He followed the trails that she used, found the resting places where she couched at night, and the bare sand patches among the wild heathlands where she rolled in the dust, and from fresh and stale dung droppings he began to have a clear picture of her movements about the country around the villa. Sometimes he heard the distant thud of her galloping as she scented him and Anga and hurried away. Once he saw her break free from a copse of young beech trees and canter away from him down a valley side, her long tail and full mane floating in the wind of her passage like silk, the sun turning her white coat to moving, polished ivory; her beauty made him catch his breath with its wonder. A joy rose in him at the sight of her. She was a fit steed for a great commander and she was god-marked to be his. When the first days of summer came he would ride out on her at the head of his company. But before that he would come astride her, her master, into the villa courtyard and Daria, seeing him, would need no words to know his mind, and to know that he came to claim her as wife, the wife the gods had ordained for him.

Knowing now the ways of her coming and going, he waited three nights running for the break of dawn, lying above a narrow forest track, stretched out on a stout overhanging oak branch, a rope halter thrust inside his tunic, and Anga hidden at his command in a thicket a little way-ahead of the oak at the track side. For two dawns the mare kept away from the track, but on the third as the sun lipped the eastern sky and the birds began to sing, the mare came down the track, trotting gently and tossing her noble head so that her mane was wide-flung like a floating web. When she was almost under his branch Arturo spoke his will silently to Anga with the art which belonged to all men of the tribe of the Enduring Crow.

Anga came out of the thicket and stood in the trackway. The mare shied a little and halted. Then, seeing that she faced no bear or wolf, she moved forward and stamped her right foreleg on the ground. At this moment Arturo rolled from his branch, twisted his body and dropped squarely onto her back. As she began to rear with fear and surprise under him, he jerked the halter from his tunic, slipped it over her head and held its loop in either hand as he clamped his legs and thighs iron-hard to her sides.

From that moment Arturo was translated into a world that held only himself and the wild movement of the white mare. There was no thought in him except to master the white mare, and no art in him except the savage skill of muscled purpose which inhabited legs and knees and thighs and hands to make him one with the racing, plunging, rearing animal beneath him. Neighing with anger and panic, the mare, blind to open track or glade, raced through the forest. Thorn and branch ripped at Arturo's hands and face, and the blood from his cuts dripped and ran from him to stain the white hide of the mare.

Time and place lost their meaning. He lived in a world of savage motion as the mare sought to unseat him. She came out of the forest, bursting through a great bank of gorse thicket like a wind devil to set the new bloom scattered high in a golden drift. She thundered down a valley side and, as though with deliberate malice and intent, raced with long neck outstretched under the low branches of an old yew to sweep him from her so that Arturo, laid low across her back, his face pressed close into the sweet horse smell of her wild mane, felt the slash of scaly branches rip and tear the cloth of his tunic. They went, man and horse like one beast, through copse and pasture, hooves throwing sand clouds high across wild heathland, and the mare's angry neighing filling the bright morning air. He knew the great gathering and surge of her muscle as she jumped brake and stream and when she reared and plunged and swung round on her hind legs the world spun before him in a mist of green and blue chaos. Then, as no sign came of let or stop to the mare's wild panic and anger, there slowly crept over Arturo the black humiliation of knowing that his strength could never outmatch hers. His body was bruised and battered and his hands and thighs grew weaker. He found fresh anger and determination to fight his growing weakness, but only for a while. Silently within himself he cried out to the gods to be with him, but all that rested with him as the mare raced plunging and kicking beneath him was now the certain knowledge that she would master him. The gods were with her and not with him.

The moment of defeat came when the mare, galloping wildly through a forest clearing which held a sedge-ringed pool, suddenly from full pace, her hooves scoring great marks in the soft ground, pulled up to a violent halt such as Arturo had never known horse to make before. His body slid forward with its own momentum, but before he could fall the mare reared suddenly to full height and, as her forelegs pawed and threshed The air, twisted herself in violent pirouette and flung Arturo from her.

He lay on the ground close to the pool's edge, face and hands bloodied and cut, his clothes ripped, and he was lost to the world. The old hound, Anga, long left behind, came loping into the clearing and sat near him, panting with exhaustion, his great tongue lapping free over his jaws, and whined when Arturo made no move. Time passed and the moorfowl which had taken cover in the new sedge growth came out onto the waters of the pool. Anga moved closer to Arturo, sniffed at his face, and then settled beside him and snapped at a fly which teased his muzzle. The sun climbed higher, clearing the treetops, and a shaft of light began to warm Arturo's face. He groaned and moved.

Slowly he sat up and, seeing the pool, crawled toward it on all fours and like a dog lowered his head and lapped at the water. With the easing of his thirst memory came back to him. He sat back on the grass and, resting his aching head in his hands, knew that he was truly forsaken of the gods. They had seen his pride and arrogance and had set him to a task that would break and humble him. For a moment or two he was near to weeping but before his manliness could be breached a new pride suddenly flared in him, starting him to anger and the fire of bitter challenge. This country, his country, torn and parcelled by warring tribes and ravaging Picts and Scotti, knowing no true leader or destiny except the greed and self-seeking of petty princelings like Gerontius, Ambrosius and the discredited, aging Vortigern, was at the mercy of the growing strength and arrogance of the Saxon Hengist. Gods or no gods, from this moment he was dedicated to the cause and the great matter of Britain and would follow it and master it and all his country's enemies so that as the name of the great warring Caesar could never die from men's minds, nor should his. Forsake him the gods might, but there was that in him that forced him to scorn their desertion.