Sword at Sunset (50 page)

‘I can tell you what they whispered: “Look at his scars! He is head and shoulders taller than anyone else hereabouts – and that great hound with him – it must be Artos
the Bear!” And then as soon as you were safely by, they ran to tell their comrades that they had seen you. You are something of a legend, Artos. Didn’t you know that?’

I got up and stretched until the small muscles cracked between my shoulders, laughing. ‘I am a very weary legend – and I must away and see how all things are with Guenhumara and the
babe.’

‘Tomorrow,’ Ambrosius said, ‘I will have the stores cleared out of the Queen’s Courtyard chambers, that Guenhumara may have them.’

‘Your mother’s chambers? You will give her
those?’
I knew that he had used them as storerooms ever since his own return to Venta, that he might avoid having to let
anyone else live there after her.

‘You are all the son I have,’ he said, ‘and she is your wife, this Guenhumara. Therefore it is fitting that she should use them, and bring them back to life again.’

chapter twenty-three

W
HEN
I
GOT BACK TO MY OLD QUARTERS,
R
IADA MY ARMOR
-bearer was squatting before the door with his sword
across his knees. ‘I have looked to them as you bade me,’ he said, getting up, ‘and I got them fire and a lantern.’

‘Sa, that is good. Off with you now, and see if you can still find something to eat.’

The door behind him stood just ajar, spilling soft yellow light across the colonnade, and I pushed it open and went in. Guenhumara was sitting beside the small brazier, combing her hair, which I
saw was damp and clung about her temples in darkened wisps, though the ends were already feathery dry. She looked at me through the strands as she swept them this way and that. ‘I have washed
my hair; it was full of all the wayside dust from here to Trimontium.’

‘It was still bonny,’ I said, ‘but it’s bonnier without the dust.’ I glanced about me. ‘Where is Hylin?’

‘Asleep in the little room through there, with Blanid.’

I went quietly and looked into the room that had been my sleeping cell since I was a boy. A rushlight burned like a star on its bracket high on the wall, and by its light I saw Hylin curled
asleep in a soft dark nest made from the old beaver-skin rug at the head of the cot, just as she had done at Trimontium. Guenhumara always took her up at sleeping time, and lay with her in the
curve of her arm. Blanid slept also, against the wall at the foot of the cot, snoring gently; and I stepped over her and bent to look at Hylin. She was as white as she had been red on the day that
she was born, and the blue showed through at her tight-shut eyelids; and I thought, as I had thought often before, she was too small for a half yearling and thin like the small one of a hound
litter that gets pushed out from the milk. But that was like enough, for Guenhumara had never had enough milk for her and maybe the milk of the little baggage mare had not agreed with her as well
as Guenhumara’s milk would have done. Maybe we could do something about that now; there must be a woman in Venta with milk to spare.

‘Well?’ Guenhumara said without looking up, when I went back to the outer room.

‘She was asleep with her thumb in her mouth.’

She flung back all her hair and looked up at me then, with a pinched spent face. ‘If you say maybe it is because she is hungry, I shall hit you!’

‘I was not going to,’ I said quickly, for I knew how she hated that she had not enough milk.

But she flared out at me like the veriest spitcat, none the less. ‘And do not you use that quieting voice to me! I am not a child nor yet a mare to be gentled past a white rag in a
thornbush!’ And then before I could answer, though indeed there was no answer in my mind, she got up and tossed the comb aside and came and laid her head against my breast. ‘Artos,
I’m sorry. It is that I am tired. We are both so very tired, the bairn and I, that is why she looks so gray.’

I put my arms around her and kissed the top of her damp head – I always loved the smell of Guenhumara’s hair when it was clean and wet. ‘Go to bed, love. I must find Bedwyr and
make sure that all is well with the lads, and wash off a layer or two of dust. But I’ll not be long behind you.’

‘I can’t go to bed yet, I’m too restless. Maybe I’m homesick.’ She looked up at me. ‘When do you take the war trail and leave me alone in this great strange
place?’

‘Not for ten days. Ambrosius will give you his mother’s chambers that he has let no one use since her day, and I shall be able to see you settled in there before I go. Venta will not
seem so great and strange to you, then.’ I kissed her again. ‘Try to be happy here in the South; it is not my country either, but it is a good land, none the less.’

‘At least we can be homesick together in the winter evenings,’ she said with a shaken breath of laughter.

A familiar step came along the colonnade and she moved back quietly out of my arms as Bedwyr’s voice sounded beyond the part-closed door.

I bade him enter, and he pushed the door open and stepped into the lamplight, with my iron cap in his hand and a shapeless load of glimmering mail flung across one shoulder. ‘I’ve
seen your baggage ponies unloaded,’ he said, and flung down cap and war shirt with a chiming crash onto the end of the big olivewood chest. ‘Riada will bring up the rest of your gear
later.’

‘That should all have been Riada’s work, but thanks, Bedwyr.’

He shrugged. ‘The boy had not eaten, and I had. The rest of the lads are fed and in some kind of shelter for the night. Cei is seeing to the horses, still – some difficulty about
finding a good place for them in the picket lines – you know what horse masters are when there is any question of disturbing their own arrangements.’

‘I also know what Cei is. I will go down to the horse lines and see what goes forward, before I head for the bathhouse.’ I turned again to Guenhumara. ‘I may be some while
seemingly – longer than I had thought. If you will not go to bed, wake Blanid to keep you company.’

‘I shall do well enough with the fire for company.’

But I hated to think of her sitting there alone, combing and combing her hair, it might be far into the night. And then I had a happier idea. ‘Bedwyr – can you bide for a little?
Maybe she will give you a cup of wine for a song. Can you weave a harp spell that is good for the homing hunger?’

He put a hand to the strap of his harp bag, and checked, looking at her with that wild left brow of his flying in inquiry. ‘If my Lady Guenhumara would have it so?’

Guenhumara hesitated also, and then stooped for her comb. ‘Anything, so that you play softly and do not wake the baby.’

And he lounged down onto the chest beside my war gear, unslinging his harp as he spoke. ‘As soft as the wild swan’s down ... Bide while I tune the darling, and you shall have the very
birds of Rhiannon sung from their tree into your hollow hands, if that will help to pass the evening.’

I whistled Cabal to heel, and went out; Guenhumara’s voice in my ear, calling after me, ‘Come back soon,’ as though I were going, not merely to the horse lines, but on a long
journey.

I wished that Bedwyr had not said that, about the birds of Rhiannon.

Within half a moon the old struggle with the Sea Wolves had claimed me again, and with the Brotherhood I was far up into the old Icenian hunting runs. We saw fierce fighting all that summer; but
what remains of it to me now? No man remembers the battles of his later years with the clearness, the joy and fire and anguish of the warfare of his youth. I had fought out half a score of pitched
battles by then; how many skirmishes and forays and lesser fights, the war gods only know; and the details of one encounter become confused with the details of another, so that now, of all those
battles of the later years, the only one to stand out clearly in my mind is the one we fought below Badon Hill. And that was the red flowering and the crown of all that had gone before. But in that
first summer of our coming south, Badon was still five years away; and better than the whistle of arrows and the smoke of burning camps, I remember the smell of the saltings, and the wide
wind-rippled marsh skies that reminded me of those first campaigns about Lindum when all things were younger and we were still a Brotherhood in the making.

I returned to winter quarters on a day when, after a month of bitter wind and rain, with the evenings already drawing in to early lamplight, the year turns back for a last regretful look at
summer. And when I came to the Queen’s Courtyard, I found Guenhumara and another woman sitting on the colonnade step in the late sunshine, while Hylin and two more babies tumbled about the
old beaver-skin rug at their feet, and a dark grave boy of eight or nine, with a wooden sword, went gravely through the practice position of sword fighting. One look was enough to tell me whose son
he was, and therefore who the other woman must be – and indeed she was little and brown, even as Flavian had described her. Guenhumara had risen and stood waiting. I think that in all our
years, she never ran to meet me, but stood waiting for me to come to her, quite still, not from any lack of welcome but as though she were making something last, not wasting it in flurry and soft
outcries; and with the same wish to make the moment last, I seldom hurried toward her. I checked for an instant beside the boy, and asked, ‘Do they call you Minnow?’

He lowered his guard and looked up. ‘How did you know, sir?’

‘I just thought they might. Keep your point two inches lower when you make that lunge, Minnow. You’re laying yourself open to a belly thrust else.’

He made the movement again, stamping his small feet and recovering as neatly as many a grown man. ‘Sir – is my father come back?’

‘He is with the horses now.’

I went on, Cabal stalking behind me, to where Guenhumara waited at the entrance to the colonnade, while Teleri gathered her brood and flurried softly away into the shadows behind her.

The winter that followed has a sheen to it, a silken texture in my memory, like a flower with the light through its petals, and not much longer-lived. Hylin seemed much stronger, the summer sun
had burned her soft skin brown and bleached the ends of her soft wispy hair; she had filled out, and though she could not talk yet – I had half thought she might, but Guenhumara said no, that
a year was too young – she had learned to laugh, a small crooning bubbling laugh that was the prettiest sound I had ever heard. I bought her a white boarhound that winter, choosing her a
bitch since they are more gentle than dogs and less likely to stray – out of a litter of squirming and whimpering whelps in a huge willow basket which one of Ambrosius’s hunters brought
to the courtyard with their anxious mother sniffing behind. I got Bhan the leather-worker to make a puppy collar with tiny five-petaled silver flowers on it, where a grown hound would have had
studs of bronze. It was the first time in my life that I had bought a pretty thing for my daughter, and I enjoyed it more than I should have enjoyed laying captured treasure at the feet of a queen.
It was a mild winter, so mild that at midwinter there was still one tattered blossom on the little thorny white rose that grew in an old clay wine jar at the angle of the colonnade; and Guenhumara
picked it and brought it in to lie on the table at suppertime on the Eve of Lights, and the scent of it in the warmth of the brazier was fit to tear the heart out of the breast.

With spring came the time to ride the old weary war trail again. And by the next autumn Hylin was growing thin once more, and had begun to get strange little sweats that came at night and were
gone again in the morning; and Guenhumara, tending her, seemed to have gone away from me to a great distance. I got Gwalchmai to look at the child, and he came with me for kindness’ sake, but
when he looked, he said only, ‘Na na, I have become something of a surgeon in these years; but I know nothing of the sicknesses of bairns. Get Ambrosius’s leech to see her.’ So I
asked Ambrosius for the loan of Ben Simeon his physician, and the little burly Jew came and looked at her, and shook his head, snapped his fingers and clicked his tongue to make her laugh, and went
away using strange words that we did not understand and I think were not meant to understand, and saying that he would send something to help the cough, and soon he would come again.

All that winter the only thing that seemed to soothe Hylin when the fever was on her was the sound of Bedwyr’s harp. And God alone knows how many evenings he came up weary from the
colt-breaking yards, the sweat of his day’s work still rank on him, to squat beside the Small One’s cot and make little tunes for her – tunes simple enough to teach to a whistling
starling, which must have seemed to him as it would have seemed to the man who carved the marble Demeter in the Forum, had he set himself to fashioning dolls from grass stalks and poppy heads
turned inside out.

I was glad that I had already given him a farm from my own estates in Arfon, Coed Gwyn, where the snowdrops whitened the woods in spring, for if I had done it afterward, I should have been
afraid that it might seem like payment, and unforgivable.

I carried a heavy heart with me down the war trail that spring, and yet there was relief in the familiar feel of my battle harness. I have always been a fighting man, and for me there was the
release, the small sweet death of forgetting, in the clash of weapons and the dust cloud of battle that other men find in women or heather beer.

We were encamped a short way east of Combretovium with the Saxons across the valley within their laager of wagons, and I had gone out to a small isolated knoll to get a good view of the enemy
and make some guess at their movements, when a messenger came seeking me out, with word from Guenhumara that Hylin was dying.

It was a very still evening, I remember the shadows lying long from our camp toward the Saxons, and in the stillness I could hear the faint small sound of shouting voices and the ring of the
armorer’s hammer across the valley between.

I do not know what I said to the man; something about getting a meal, I think. Then I went on studying the enemy camp. Cabal looked up into my face, whimpering, sensing something amiss.
Presently Bedwyr brushed out from the furze bushes and came to a silent halt beside me. I looked around at him, carefully, and saw it in his eyes, that he knew. I suppose the messenger had spread
it all over the camp by that time. Neither of us spoke, but he laid his hand briefly on my shoulder, and for an instant I set mine over it. We very seldom made any outward showing of the
long-familiar bond. ‘I have told Riada to saddle Signus,’ he said at last.