Sword at Sunset (64 page)

I was silent, my chin sunk between my fists, hearing the wind roaring up from Anderida marshes; and I knew that what he said was true. I had known it for a long while past, or I would not have
been sitting here today, not have bidden Flavian to bring the boy with him. If I had been still the man to whom Ambrosius gave his freedom and his wooden foil, I think that I should not have been
there at all, that nothing would have seemed possible to me save to hurl the last Barbarian into the sea. But I had the first white hairs in my muzzle now ...

‘Tell me why I should trust you the length of my thumbnail?’ I said at last, lifting my head from my hands.

‘Sa, I will tell you: over that way’ – he jerked his head southeastward toward Dubris – ‘over that way, I saw once a winged horse carved over a gateway, and one
told me it was a Totem of the Second Legion, because they had held that place and so marked it for their own. Now from where did the Second Legion draw its men?’

I was silent for a long moment, looking at him. ‘From the tribes along the Rhenus,’ I said slowly.

‘From the tribes along the Rhenus. Aiee! I have heard also that the great Magnus Maximus, my lord’s great-grandsire, served a while with the Second Legion and loved them well, and
that long, long before that, the Emperor in Romeburg himself made them an Augustan Legion, and none, I think, accused the Second Legion of broken trust!’

And that also was true.

And I had learned some things and lost others in the process of growing old – for I felt old that evening, with the weight of five and forty winters lying heavy on me as though there had
been added to them another score. And so I made my decision, though I did not yet let it appear that I had done so, to the men about me. It was a decision that proved sound, insane though I know
that many of my own folk thought it; and when the black sorrow came, it was not from the Saxon shore, not from the men with whom I struck that day’s bargain, after all.

‘It is in my mind that you speak both truth and something of wisdom,’ I said at last. ‘So be it then, let us go further into this matter of a bargain between your people and
mine.’

There was much talk after that, much argument, while the clerks waited to make copies of a treaty, and beyond the door the tawny sunset flamed and faded between the trees, and the light of the
burning ashe wood began to bite into the deepening shadows. And then at last the arguing was done, and I stood up to state the final terms, while the clerks scratched on their parchments, a small,
hurried, insect sound. I spoke of boundaries and tribal territory, of landholding in yard-lands per man, and rights of wood and water, pasturage and the hunting spear, and of the military service
to be rendered in exchange. (‘The coasts from Portus Adurni around to the Metaris we will keep for you from all inroads,’ the aged spokesman had said, after conferring with the others
of his kind, ‘but you shall not call upon us to carry our spears into any other war of yours, in any other part of Britain.’ And I had agreed, for the thing seemed fair enough.) And all
the while, as I spoke, something yammered within my head, in stupid astonishment at myself and the words that I was measuring out, as a man issues out arrowheads from a basket. Northfolk and
Southfolk, East Angles and South Seax and the Cantii Kingdom, I dealt with them each in turn, so far as they could be dealt with before the agreed frontiers were drawn out in detail.

Last of all, I turned again to the red-haired man with the scarred throat. And when, meeting my gaze, he straightened and stepped forward between two others to the hearthstone, it was as though
he had been waiting for me all the while, and I for him. ‘Cerdic, son of Vortigern, between you and me there can be no bargain struck.’

He stood looking at me, half smiling so that the white dogtooth just lifted his lip at one side. And more even than at our first meeting, he seemed like some fierce and beautiful and dangerous
animal. ‘Is it death, then, my Lord Artos?’

‘
I
do not kill in the council circle,’ I said and there was a small thunderous stirring among the Saxons, an eye cocked here and there among my own men, for every man there
knew the old ugly tale of how Hengest had called a council feast for Fox Vortigern, and bidden his warriors of the feasting circle to slay each the Briton at his left hand, and how Vortigern had
bought his own life with half a British princedom that was not his to pay with.

Cerdic knew it, too. His nostrils dilated, quivering like a stallion’s, and his hand went to the place where his sword hilt should have been – but the weapons were stacked outside,
for no man comes armed to the council, unless, like Hengest’s Saxons, he carries his knife hidden in his sleeve. His hand remembered and fell away again. ‘What does my Lord the Bear
propose for me, then?’ he said, breathing quickly.

‘Nine days to be gone from Britain.’

I saw the surprise flicker in his eyes, and the red brows twitched together. I think he had been prepared for death, but he had not thought of the other thing. ‘Do I go alone? And in what
like? Am I to thank Most Noble Caesar for leave to take my sword with me? If not, I will find means to gain another before I come again.’

‘Take your sword. Take your long war boats and any of your own war band who choose to follow you,’ I said. ‘You are free of all the sea that your keel can sail over, and any
landfall that opens to you. Only you shall be gone from these shores in nine days.’

‘Sa! You offer a prospect strangely pleasant,’ said the adventurer in him, in a tone of lingering and half-mocking surprise, and then with a sudden snarl of fury as though the beast
crouched to spring: ‘Tell me in what I have differed from these others, that my fate should differ from theirs? That I should bear a wolf’s head and go landless and driven out, while
they hold the lands that Hengest my grandsire took by the strength of his arm?’

Oisc of the Cantish lands looked up from the fire and thrust his word angrily between us. ‘Hengest was my grandsire also, let you remember!’ but neither of us paid him heed.

‘I will tell you: for the unjust, yet sufficient reason that you are your father’s son, the blood of your father’s line running in your veins.’

‘The royal blood of Britain!’ he said.

‘I would call it, rather, the blood of a Prince of Powys, who married and abandoned a High King’s daughter, and claimed through her the kingship in his turn. The sorry thing for you
is that there are still men in Britain who support your father’s claim, and so you are a danger to Britain, Cerdic, son of Vortigern, for your heart goes with your Saxon kin. Therefore run
your war boats down the beach and gather your sword companions, and carve yourself a kingdom if you can, elsewhere.’

He stared at me in silence for a long moment, with his eyes half closed over their cool flickering affrontery. ‘The first time we met you bid me go. You bid me go free and said that I
should come again when I was a man, and you would kill me if you could, and if
I
could, I should kill
you.
’ The flash of a smile that had no mirth in it showed for an instant
those strong white dogteeth, and his hand went to the scar on his neck. ‘The thing is not yet ended between us, my Lord Artos the Bear of Britain.’

He would have swirled about, then and there, and stridden out through the doorway, but I called him to heel. ‘It may be that the thing is not yet ended between us, as you say. But the end
must wait for another day. The women are busy about the cooking fires and soon we shall be at the evening meal. Bide then, and eat and drink and be warm at the fire with the rest of us.’

‘If I am to be away from my father’s shores within nine days, I have more pressing calls upon my time.’

‘Yet all men must eat. I give you half a day’s grace, that you may find the time to sup with the rest of us tonight.’

The smile still lingering at one side of his mouth grew sardonic. ‘Do you fear that I shall fire this somewhat battered thatch over your heads if you let me from your sight?’

‘No more, I think, than you fear my ambush on your road to the coast.’

And suddenly, his gaze still locked with mine, the smile that had been shut and ugly flashed open in his face, fierce and oddly joyful, and he said swiftly in the British tongue, ‘So be
it, oh my brother and my enemy; we two, both of King’s blood, will drink the stars out of tonight’s sky, among this pirate royalty!’

So presently, when the deer and badger meat was brought in smoking from the spits, and the mead began to go round, Cerdic and I drank from the same cup and dipped our fingers in the stir-about
bowl together, among the rest of the Companions and house carls who had played no part in the council that went before. The two boys had, as foretold, ‘come back when their bellies bade
them’ and took their supper squatting among the hounds. What they had done with their day no one asked, nor did they tell without the asking, but from the state of their faces, it seemed
likely that they had spent part of it fighting, and another part in eating blackberries. Now they sat bunched shoulder to shoulder, the dark head and the fair one together in the firelight, while
they picked companionably at each other’s brier scratches.

That seemed to me a thing that had in it the seeds of hope for the future. But every time I glanced that way, I saw beyond them the face of Medraut my son, among the other squadron captains, and
every time the shuttered and yet strangely devouring gaze, lit to the color of sapphires by the firelight, was on me or on Cerdic beside me, so that at last, even when I did not look, there seemed
no escaping it.

The night seemed so full of him that I was not surprised when later, as I went to the sleeping place that had been made for me of turf and branches against the wall of the ruined fodder store, I
found him waiting for me. He unfurled his height from the sleeping bench as I entered, and asked in a suppressed voice if he might speak with me alone.

I said to Riada, who had followed me according to custom, ‘I’ll not be needing you for a while. Go and keep a lookout that we are not disturbed. I’ll call you later.’ And
when he had gone, I moved forward, letting the heavy wolfskin apron fall again behind me. ‘Medraut? What is it then, that brings you here?’

‘Is it so strange that a son should come to his father’s bothy?’

‘It is scarcely a habit, with you.’

‘Is that all of my choice?’ he said. ‘If my company gives you pleasure, you have hidden it well.’ And then suddenly, ‘Father, what is it that is amiss between you
and me?’

I went and sat on the piled sheepskins of the bed place, and stared into the sea-blue heart of the tallow candle flame. ‘Is that what you came to ask me? I don’t know. Before God, I
don’t know, Medraut; but whatever it is, I admit the fault of it, I and my house – I who kindled the spark of your life in your mother’s womb, my father who first taught
her
mother how to hate.’

‘Hate, yes,’ he said broodingly. ‘I am your guilt made flesh, am I not, Father? You will always smell the dark birth-smell of my mother’s hate on me, and hate me in
turn.’

‘God forbid that I should hate any man who has done nothing to earn it,’ I said. ‘It is not so simple as that. There is a shadow cast between you and me, Medraut, a web of
shadow that there is no escape from, for either of us.’

He came toward me, and before I knew what he was about, knelt beside me and bowed his head onto my knee. It was a horrible womanish gesture. ‘No escape ... It is in what you are and in what
I am.’ His voice came muffled against my knee. ‘No, don’t draw away from me. Whatever else I am, I am your son – your most wretched son. If you do not hate me, try to love
me a little, Father; it is lonely never to have been loved, only devoured.’

I did not answer. I have never been a man to whom words came easily in the time of most need. The wrongs that had been done to him sickened me, I was torn with furious pity as for some hideous
bodily hurt. And for the first time, in that desperate cry against loneliness, I knew something of myself in the son I had begotten, and through my own dread of loneliness, that had made me flinch
from the Purple, like called to like. In a moment more, I think that I should have put my arm around his bowed shoulders ...

But before I could do so, he wrenched himself away and sprang to his feet, and the chill, jibing note was back in his voice when at last he broke the silence between us. ‘Ah, na, that is
too much to ask for, isn’t it?’

And the moment was gone beyond catching back. ‘That would be to ask for a gift, and I must not ask for a gift, I am only your son. If I were a chieftain of the Sea Wolves, then the thing
would be different, and we might laugh together, even with the dagger naked between us. Sa, then I demand only my rights.’

I got up from the bed place, and we stood facing each other. ‘Your rights, Medraut?’

‘A son’s rights in place of a son’s gift.’ He was speaking half wildly now. ‘Today you sat in council with the lords of the Sea Wolves, Flavian with you, and Cei
– the son of a Roman house who cannot even speak our tongue without the gutturals of the Rhenus half drowning whoever stands nearest him – and Connory and that young whelp Constantine
and the rest; and where was I? Outside sitting on my rump with mere squadron captains around the cooking fire!’

‘Are you not, then, one of my squadron captains?’

‘I am also Prince of Britain; it was my right to sit at the council table – all men know that by blood I am Prince of Britain.’

‘By blood, yes,’ I said.

‘Oh, my father the Emperor, there is small need to remind me that we are both bastards; have you found it to stand in
your
path?’

In the long silence that came after, the wind lifted the wolfskin over the doorway and teased the candle flame, and high in the darkness overhead, over toward the marshes, I heard the whistle of
the wild duck passing. I was thinking suddenly that even on that last night in the upper room, Ambrosius had never spoken of Medraut; it was as though we both knew and tacitly agreed that his
entrance into any plans for Britain’s future was unthinkable. Now I was thinking of Medraut coming after us, his hand on the Sword of Britain, and the fear was black on me, for all that I
believed in and held sacred.