In Winter's Shadow (4 page)

“What is it?” I asked wearily.

“M-most n-noble queen,” he began, then switched to a surprisingly good formal Latin. “Your Grace, I have come here hoping to find a place in the emperor’s service.”

I had expected some complaint about a neighboring clan, and I looked at the farmer whose cart the boy had been sitting in, surprised. “Isn’t he your son?”

The farmer shook his head. “No, noble lady. I only gave him a ride from Baddon. He is a good, biddable lad, though; listen to him.”

I sighed and brushed back a loose strand of my hair. Another petition for service at Camlann. People came all the time, offering to practice any imaginable trade, and many of them we accepted, and many we did not. I did not feel like weighing this boy’s qualifications now, after the letter and with Cei looming behind me. But I reminded myself to be strong, be gracious, and smiled at the boy. Cei snorted impatiently.

“What manner of place, young man?” I asked, also in Latin, studying him. He looked about thirteen, of average height for that age, with a mass of pale hair above a thin face and a pair of surprisingly dark eyes. He was not a farm lad, I decided. His Latin was too good, and there was a nervous sensitivity to his face which argued some education.

“I…Your Sacred Kindness, I am willing to do almost anything. But I wish to learn how to be a warrior.”

Cei snorted again. “Boy, do not trouble the lady. Go back to your family and don’t run away from it in future.”

The boy flushed deep crimson. “I…I…” he stammered.

I smiled again to reassure him. “What is your name?” I asked. “And where is your family? You are young to seek service on your own.”

“They call me Gwyn,” he said. “I don’t know my father’s name. And I have no family, except for my mother, and she is in a convent in Elmet. Your grace, I am willing to do almost anything, if you will let me stay here and train to be a warrior. I know you must train boys to be warriors here. All the sons of the great warriors—like this lord here” (with a nervous, appeasing smile at Cei)—“they must become warriors as well. Surely it would be no trouble for one more to join them?”

“So he is a nun’s bastard, raised at a nunnery,” said Cei. “My lady, send him away. We have more servants than we can feed already, and don’t need some half-grown dreamer of a nun’s bastard.”

The boy had gone an even deeper red when Cei began, but went white at the end of his speech. He jumped to his feet, began to stammer a reply, then was quiet, blinking miserably. He evidently was a nun’s bastard, and must be a dreamer, if he wished to be a warrior so badly that he was willing to leave what home he had, alone, and travel to Camlann to offer to do “almost anything” to learn the arts of war.

“My lady,” Cei began again, going back to the subject which had been his sole concern all the while, “how can I apologize to Rhuawn after his slanders?”

But I felt sorry for the boy now. “You are too old to learn to be a warrior,” I told him gently, for a moment ignoring Cei and the farmers. “Most boys begin their training between the ages of seven and nine.”

“But I did start then, noble lady, on my own!” he cried, slipping back into British. “And a monk at the brother foundation to my mother’s convent, he taught me, too—he used to be a warrior, you see. Only I need to know more.”

“Be quiet, boy,” Cei snapped, but I raised my hand for him to wait.

“Can you read, Gwyn?” I asked.

He nodded eagerly. “Yes, noble lady. And I can write, book hand and cursive both. My mother wanted me to be a priest, and made certain that I learned how to write. She taught me herself.”

I looked at Cei, lifting an eyebrow. “There is a shortage of servants who can read, even here,” I said. “I could use a copy clerk to take down inventories and keep records for me.”

Cei shrugged. “As you please, my lady. It is a waste of time to teach some priestly little bastard from a convent the arts of war, but if you need a clerk, by all means keep him. Will you speak with Rhuawn?”

“You may stay,” I told the boy. “Go to the Hall and ask for Gweir, the steward; he will look after you, and tonight I will ask my lord Arthur to confirm you in a place as a servant. Yes, Cei, I will speak to Rhuawn, but I will promise him that if he apologizes you will as well. Good fellows,” to the farmers, “if you will come with me I will arrange for you to receive the price of your grain.”

The farmers were satisfied, Cei grumbled agreement, and the boy Gwyn was overjoyed. The next matter, then, was to talk to Rhuawn—though while I was in the storerooms I ought to see about the wool for the weavers. And then there was the feast for that night.

I spoke with Rhuawn before the afternoon was half over, and eventually persuaded him to apologize to Cei. But I knew that neither of the warriors would be content. Their reconciliation was like the forcing together, of two fragments of a broken dish, which might hold together for a little while if undisturbed, but which left the break as deep and unremedied as before. And at first Rhuawn had not listened to me, but only eyed me with a kind of suspicion and given polite, noncommittal replies. By the end of our talk he had grown warmer, and told me how he regretted his harsh words, but that Cei’s insult had been too much for any honorable man to endure, and so on and on.

Yet when walking back up the hill toward the Hall I kept remembering the way his eyes slid sideways from mine at the first. The mistrust was growing. I could scarcely bridge the gap between the two factions now, and if things continued as they were, Rhuawn and his friends would soon regard me as an enemy. Indeed, I was aware of rumors about me circulating, conversations suddenly hushed at my approach. Only up to now no rumors about me had been believed.

As I approached the kitchens, where I would check the arrangements for the feast to be given that night, my name was called and I found Arthur’s second-in-command, the warleader and cavalry commander Bedwyr ap Brendan, hurrying toward me.

“My lady Gwynhwyfar!” he called again. “My lord Arthur asked me to find you. He wishes to have a conference upon the situation in Less Britain before the feast tonight.”

I stopped, trying to order my thoughts and rearrange my plans for the afternoon. “Very well, lord,” I said, after a moment, “but I must give some orders to the kitchens first or there will
be
no feast tonight.”

He nodded, smiling, and fell in step beside me. As Arthur’s warleader, Bedwyr would naturally be at the conference as well, so he had nothing to do but wait for me.

Bedwyr was a complex man. He was Arthur’s best friend and Cei’s as well. But he was as different from Cei as a man can be, and different from most other warriors as well. He dressed plainly, without any of the bright colors or jewelery they love. He had very dark brown hair, brown eyes, wore his beard close-trimmed, and his usual expression was one of quiet attention. Very little escaped his notice. He was a Breton, from the southeast of Less Britain, of a noble, Roman-descended family. He had had a Roman education, for the Roman ways are stronger in Gaul than in Britain, but he had not paid much heed to it. He joined the warband of Bran, the younger son of the king of Less Britain, who became Arthur’s ally. There he quickly gained in fame and authority, for he was a dangerous cavalry fighter, and had the clarity of thought, the self-possession, and the force of personality that make a leader in war. When his lord Bran crossed the sea to help Arthur in his struggle against the kings of Britain for the purple, Bedwyr was one of his captains. But he was wounded in the battle in which Arthur won the title, and lost his shield hand—he had since fought with his shield strapped tightly to his arm. This brush with death had put an end to his former ruthlessness, and he was converted to the philosophy he had read as a boy, and intended to return to Less Britain and become a monk. Instead he met Arthur, and after one conversation had decided that it was better to fight for God than to contemplate him in a monastery. Some dozen warriors had followed him in swearing the oath of allegiance to Arthur, and Lord Bran had ruefully remarked that he had come to Britain to help Arthur to a title, not to his own best warriors. But Arthur smiled and made Bedwyr his cavalry commander.

Yet even as commander of Arthur’s cavalry, and later, when Arthur relinquished that position, as warleader, Bedwyr had kept a philosophic detachment. He was a very good man, who had never since his conversion had one base or cruel action reported of him, and he had a passion for honor, but when I first met him, that seemed his only passion. I found him cold. He was never discourteous, but he had had very little to say to me, and would not even look at me for long. After trying for some time to be friends with him and achieving nothing, I presumed that, like many philosophers, he had little use for women. I found this the more irritating because he was only four years older than I, and no gray-bearded sage. I was puzzled that so many others, whom I loved, loved him, and I began to return his coldness with an (equally courteous!) dislike.

When Medraut arrived in Camlann, however, and the quarrels began, I decided that the fortress could not afford this quiet enmity between the emperor’s wife and his warleader, and once again set out to be friends with him. For a long time, again, I made no progress—and then, one afternoon over something quite trivial, Bedwyr smiled at me. His smile transformed his face in a way I had never noticed before, perhaps because I had never received a smile from him before. The dark eyes were warm and delighted, fixed on my face with an attention which had ceased to be quiet and considering and had become alive, eager. Then I saw that I had been wrong all along: he was not cold. His detachment was the protection of a proud and honorable mind against a passionate nature. He had once been ruthless and violent, swayed by impulse, and was now determined to trust his mind alone. And I decided that his philosophic honor had led him to avoid women, so that he scarcely knew how to speak to them, but that he had never consciously been an enemy to me. I began to like him then, and he had ceased to be cold and distant with me, so that I came to love and trust him as Arthur did. It was the one good thing that came out of Medraut’s presence at Camlann.

Bedwyr waited while I gave some orders to the steward’s wife about the feast, then escorted me out of the kitchens. “My lord Arthur must have been waiting for us for some time now,” he commented, without anxiety. “Where were you, my lady? I expected to find you at the storerooms; indeed, I was told you had gone there.”

I sighed. “I left the storerooms to visit Rhuawn—yes, another quarrel. With Cei!”

“Ach! And will Rhuawn apologize?”

“Yes. As will Cei. But God knows how long it will last.” And I thought again of Rhuawn’s eyes slipping aside from mine, the distrust, the suspicion.

Bedwyr looked at me another moment, then said, “And?”

“And? And I am concerned for the future. Soon I will be able to coax no more apologies from Rhuawn or from any of…his party. But for the quarrel itself, it was no worse than the other quarrels.”

“Well. And yet you look troubled, my lady, more than by the other quarrels.”

I walked on a few steps before looking at him. His eyes were on my face, waiting, “I am troubled, yes,” I told him. “But it is a personal matter.”

His expression cleared. “Your father. Forgive me. I should have remembered and kept silent.”

“Even you cannot remember everything, noble lord. There is nothing to forgive.”

“You have heard from your clan since?”

He was trying to ease the grief of the death by reminding me that I had other family, trying to be kind, and I confused him when I stopped abruptly and clenched my hands together, struggling with myself. I was tired, I thought, or I would not weaken like this, not be so subject to my grief and anger. There had been too much to do in the past month, and the mood of the fortress had been so embittered that often I had been too tense to sleep.

“My lady?” Bedwyr had stopped, facing me, and was watching me with concern.

I waved him back. “I had a letter from my cousin Menw. He…we quarreled, years ago. He is now clan chieftain. He…” I stopped, because I was ashamed that Menw had demanded what he had, and ashamed to accuse him, my own cousin. I did not want to talk of that letter.

Bedwyr’s jaw set. He turned and began to walk on, not looking at me, and I joined him. “You should not allow small-minded men to distress you, my lady,” he said.

“More easily advised than done, Lord Bedwyr. Like most philosophic advice.”

He looked at me again, not smiling, not distracted by my attempt to divert him. Half unwilling, I began to tell him about the letter.

We arrived at my house before I finished. The spring sun was still high, although the afternoon was drawing on, and it fell warm and heavy upon our heads and sides. Inside the house someone was playing a harp, and the soft sound carried clear and liquid into the silence when we stopped and I hurriedly ended my account. Bedwyr and I looked at each other.

“It was bravely done, lady,” he said softly. “It was no doubt a most bitter thing, to accept exile from your home, but it was bravely done. If there were time—but our lord is waiting.”

Arthur was indeed waiting, sitting and staring into the fire with his feet propped against the grate. Lord Gwalchmai ap Lot, who was to be the emissary to Less Britain, was also there: it was he who had been playing the harp. Arthur could not play, for harping is a noble skill not taught at monasteries such as the one where he was raised—but he loved to listen. When Gwalchmai saw us, however, he at once set the harp down and stood to greet us, and Arthur straightened, took his feet off the grate, and waved to us to be seated.