Sword at Sunset (69 page)

There were more people than usual that day, but of course all Venta must know by now; they stared and whispered, or I thought they did, and I did not care, if only they would go, if only I need
not sit there seeing their faces – faces after faces after faces – through a haze made by the throbbing in my head.

It was over and the last of the waiting throng in the forecourt had melted away, and the gray light of day was fading in soft spring rain beyond the windows. And I was about to rise and go back
to Ambrosius’s quarters – I had given orders for my gear to be fetched from the Queen’s Courtyard, which was home to me no longer – when a confused tramp of many footsteps
sounded outside, and Pharic’s voice answered by another, and as I glanced questioningly at Cei who stood big and grim and gray-golden beside my chair, Guenhumara’s brother came in by
the lower door, carrying his favorite falcon hooded on his fist, and followed by all that were left of the mounted band who had come to me as her dowry.

He strode up the hall to stand before me, his tall Caledonians tramping behind him. He made the customary salute before the High Seat, and stood there with his head tipped far back and the level
black brows joined into one bar, frowning, and stared at me out of hot red-brown eyes.

‘You have something to say to me?’ I demanded, at last.

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘It is this, Artorius Augustus. It has been told to us that last night you sent Guenhumara my sister and your Queen from the court in shame.’

‘It was not I who set the shame on her forehead,’ I said coldly.

‘Na, and for that reason, because she herself wove the shame, we seek no feud between you and us, no vengeance for your putting her away. Yet still, to me, she is my sister, and to all of
us she is the daughter of our chieftain’s hall, and therefore we, who have been your men loyally for ten years and more, count ourselves no more among the ranks of the Companions, because you
put her away in shame.’

‘I understand,’ I said. ‘You have my leave to go north again to your own place.’

The hot hawk’s stare never changed or wavered from my face. ‘We seek no leave. We go north, back to our own hills, taking with us the women we have married and the bairns we have
bred here in the South. We come to tell you this, no more.’

I remember sitting there in the High Seat, with the carved wolf’s heads on the foreposts biting into my hands, staring and staring into the midst of that proud unswerving gaze. ‘So
be it,’ I said at last. ‘When do you ride?’

‘The horses are already saddled, and there will be something of a moon, later.’

‘Then it seems that there is nothing more to be said.’

‘One thing more.’ Pharic’s gaze, leaving my face for the first time, moved deliberately to that of my armor-bearer, who sat in attendance on the dais steps with my spear and
buckler across his knees. ‘Come, Riada.’

He got up slowly but without hesitation; clearly he had expected the summons and knew that it must be obeyed. But he turned to look at me with a troubled and wretched face. ‘Sir, I do not
wish to go. But they are my tribe.’

‘They are your tribe,’ I said.

He knelt for an instant and touched my foot in the old gesture, then rose and went to join Pharic. And with a last grave salute – there was no hot blood in this parting; it was, as it
were, a matter of honor, almost of ritual – the whole band turned about and strode down the hall.

When they were gone, the great chamber seemed very empty, and I was aware suddenly of the rattle of spring rain against the windows, and the bee still bruising its foolish head against the thick
greenish panes. I got up slowly, and turned to the door behind the dais. Cei followed me in silence like a big faithful hound, and I turned to him in the doorway, resting a hand on his shoulder for
the comfort that I might have found in resting it on Cabal’s head. ‘Do you remember my saying to you once that I’d have no married women to make trouble among the Companions? That
when two men desired one woman, that was when the Brotherhood began to break?’

‘Something of the sort,’ Cei said heavily.

‘I was right, wasn’t I?’

The faithful core of the Brotherhood never broke, save by death, which is another matter. But neither Flavian nor Gwalchmai, not even Cei, were as near to me as Bedwyr had been, and I knew to
the full the solitude above the snow line that I had dreaded all my life. And since, in the years that came after, even fighting had for the most part given place to statecraft, there was little to
do save work. So I worked, while the springs and autumns passed and in the courtyard where I had kept my dogs as a boy, the last branch of the wild pear tree died. I worked at the task of making
Britain strong, of hammering out a stable government; I labored over the treaty with the coastwise Saxons, that the thing might not fall to pieces when I could no longer hold it secure in the
hollow of my hand. It is all without life in my mind as a badly tempered blade. All my life I have been a fighting man by nature, an administrator only by difficult adoption. Also, so far as might
be, I stopped feeling, in those years, and the things that enter only by the head, no man remembers as he does the things that enter by the heart.

Cerdic had taken the three war boats that were his, with a full crew of sword companions to each of them, and before his days of grace were all run out, had left the shores of Britain. We heard
of him from time to time, briefly and uncertainly as the flicker of summer lightning at twilight, now here, now there, chiefly as a raider, occasionally as a sailor of strange seas. We began to
hear of him at Portus Namnetus on the Gaulish coast; the place was the perfect stamping ground for the son of Fox Vortigern and the Lady Rowan, for in the country about the Liger mouth, Celt and
Saxon for no reason had come together and made a mingled race. And as time went by, it seemed that he had made his home quarters there. Until the ninth or tenth summer after Badon, that was
all.

By then, in my efforts to keep the four tribal runs of the Old Kingdom knit together, I had come to spend almost as much time in Sorviodunum, Aquae Sulis and Calleva as I did in Venta, and that
year about midsummer, I took the court up to Sorviodunum. It was a dim and sultry summer, the kind of weather in which fever breeds, and the Yellow Hag had come earlier than usual to the towns; but
I had never taken the fever – indeed I have seldom in all my life been sick without a wound on me – and so when an aching head and a shiver between the shoulders came upon me on the day
after our arrival, I thought only that I had got chilled in the thunder rain that had drenched us on the long ride up from Venta. But within two days I was raving.

At first there were clear intervals, when I returned from the whirling flame-touched world of the fever-madness to the misery of my own body; to darkness that suffocated me or light that clashed
like a hammer even when my eyes were closed. And swimming out of a fiery fog into one such interval, I was aware of sounds of gathering and preparation in the world outside, feet, and voices, and
the yelp of a trumpet call that was answered from the far side of the city, aware also of Cei and Gwalchmai in urgent low-voiced conclave in the doorway of the long room among the rafters of the
King’s Chamber where I lay.

They looked toward me, and with the preternaturally sharpened hearing that comes sometimes with fever, I heard Gwalchmai say: ‘Yes, now. Be as swift about it as you can; there’s no
means of knowing how long before the Yellow Hag claims him again.’

Then Cei was standing over me, with his thumbs thrust into his sword belt in the way that he had, bending forward to peer into my face. ‘My Lord Artos,’ he said, faintly
questioning.

‘What – is it, Cei? What – all that trampling and trumpeting – outside.’ My tongue felt as though it was made of boiled leather, and the worried weather-burned face
and burly big-paunched figure slipped to and fro on my sight the more I tried to hold it still.

‘It is Cerdic – Artos. Can you hear what I say?’

‘What of Cerdic?’

‘He’s landed on the west side of Vectis Water, and a young war host with him. They got in in the rain and murk two days since and were ashore before the coast wardens knew a thing of
their coming. We got the news last night.’

I remember struggling to my elbow and cursing him that I had not been told before – as though any word could have reached me; I remember striving to be out of my bed, and shouting to
Gwalchmai for a draught of some kind that would give me the strength to ride for a few days even if it killed me after, and the two of them holding me back and striving to quieten me as though I
were a fire-maddened horse ... Later, when I was quiet again, I have a dim half memory of setting some kind of scrawl that might serve for a signature to the marching orders and to an authority for
Cei to take command of the war host, and pressing Maximus’s seal onto the hot wax, while Cei steadied the blade of the great sword above my wavering hand. No memory of Cei leaving the room,
for I was off and away on my travels once more.

It seemed a very long while later, and indeed I think it was many days, when I began to know myself within the dark shell of my body again, and later still, grew slowly sure that there was a
dagger in my back, below the left shoulder blade. Presently I found there was no dagger there, only the blade-shaped pain of the dagger. But the pain pierced deeper and deeper all the while, until
I was snatching at my breath like a winded runner, and the world that had just begun to return dissolved about me again into fiery chaos in which the only sure thing was Medraut’s face like a
white death mask hanging in the air wherever I looked, until at last that too was burned up in the fires, and the fire itself engulfed in a last great darkness.

How long I lay slung between life and death, I have never been able to judge with any certainty, but it cannot have been far short of a month between the time I first fell sick and the time I
awoke in fading lamplight and felt the air of very early morning on my face, and knew that I could breathe again and that I was lying cool and sodden in a pool of sweat.

I tried to drag myself out of it, and could not. And then the Minnow, who was now my armor-bearer, was bending over me, feeling my body with eager hands. He said, ‘Oh sir, we thought that
you would die!’ and most surprisingly I felt what seemed to be a drop of warm rain on my face.

I mumbled something about being wet enough already, and the boy began to crow and whimper with laughter, and then Gwalchmai was beside me also, and they were lifting me out of the sodden rugs
and spreading over me dry warm ones that smelled of the storage herbs. And sleep gathered me into a gentle darkness.

Day after day I lay flat on the rug-piled bed place under the musty-smelling thatch that twittered with swallows’ nests (it was the King’s Chamber, but conditions were harsher at
Sorviodunum than at Venta), tended by Gwalchmai and the Minnow, and the small tubby Jew who had stepped into old Ben Simeon’s shoes. There was a sense of gulf behind me, and everything about
me seemed small and bright and far off, like its own reflection in a silver cup. I had no more strength at first than a half-drowned puppy, but at least my mind was my own again, and I was able to
demand and attend to news of the fighting – though indeed there was little news that had any form or coherence to it, only a long confused talking of skirmishes and small-scale indecisive
actions; of Cerdic’s brilliant use of salt marsh and sea inlet and steaming damp-oak forest, which were home conditions to him now to hold off our own war host from coming to grips with the
Saxon kind. At any other time I should have been wild and fuming to take the command myself, but I was so weak, so newly back from the edge of all things, so possessed still with the sense of
everything being small and far away, that I was content to lie still and leave the campaign, such as it was, in Cei’s hands.

Gwalchmai was the impatient one, wanting to be with his wounded. He took pains to hide it, but I had not known my Hawk of May for the better part of a lifetime without being able to read his
mood and his longings ... One evening, when he came to see me after supper as he always did, I remember grumbling to him at the snail pace of my returning strength, and he raised his brows at me.
‘It is not usual that a man who has passed straight from the Yellow Hag to the Lung Fever finds himself ready to outwrestle the wild aurochs within the week. You are mending, my friend.
You’ll do well enough now.’

‘And so I suppose you want to leave me and be away to the war host,’ I said.

He sat down in the big carved cross-legged chair beside the hearth, with a small grunting sigh, and rubbed his knee. ‘I’ll bide as long as you need me.’

I turned toward him, seeing with a sudden warm rush of affection, the tired old man that he had become, dried and withered like the wild pear branch in the well courtyard, and I knew that he was
not fit for the camp and the war trail, and knew also that he must go. ‘As to that, I’ve Ben Eleaza to brew my poisons for me. There’s others needing you more than I do
now.’

‘I’ll not deny that I’ll be glad to get back to the war host and the wounded,’ he said simply. ‘My chief business has been with them a good few years.’

‘A mere thirty or so. There’s a good few of us would be dead at least once before this, if it wasn’t for your sharp little knife and stinking fever potions.’

‘There’s a good few of us dead, even so,’ Gwalchmai said soberly, and we were both thinking back, as men growing old do think back, remembering comrades living and comrades
dead, who had been young with us when the Brotherhood itself was young. So the thing was settled and we bided talking for a while, until it was time for Gwalchmai to make his preparations for the
journey.

When he got up to go, he swayed suddenly and caught at the back of the chair to steady himself, and for the moment, as he stood brushing his hand across his forehead, it seemed to me that a gray
shadow stole over his face, and fear brushed me by. ‘What’s amiss? Oh good God, Gwalchmai, not you, now!’