‘It is well enough.’
‘“Well enough” is an answer for the birdcatcher’s grandmother.’
He seemed to be drawing back his mind from a long way away, to give me his full attention. ‘It still catches me,’ he said with mocking exactitude. ‘The ache runs down here like a red thread – a little red worm in the bone – and catches me up short when I would be catching poplar leaves in flight.’ He flung back the loose fold of his cloak and held it out to me, and I saw that from the elbow down, the arm was somewhat wasted and brittle-looking, and the elbow itself, below the heavy bronze arm ring that I had given him years ago, was wickedly seamed with livid scars, not only of the wound itself, but of the many lancings and probings after the splinters of shattered bone, some of them scarcely healed even now. ‘It also does not bend.’ I saw the painful drag and thrust of the muscles, but the joint remained immovable, bent at about the angle at which a man carries his shield and bridle.
‘What does Gwalchmai say? And Ben Simeon? Has Ben Simeon seen it?’
He quirked up that wild eyebrow, the other grave and level, so that his face wore two expressions at once. ‘That I am fortunate to be alive ... I shall even be able to use it by and by, seeing that it is not my sword arm. When I knew that it must stiffen I bade Gwalchmai to set and strap the thing in the position that I bade him, and before spring I shall be handling horse and buckler again; I shall be fit for service as Caesar’s captain.’
‘And the Emperor’s harper?’ I glanced at the embroidered doeskin bag that lay as usual beside him.
‘Surely, and that already, since a one-handed skill will serve.’ He took up the harp and drew it from the bag, using his left arm with a kind of clumsy acquired skill, and settled the slim well-worn instrument between his knee and the hollow of his shoulder. ‘It is easier with a sound arm, admittedly,’ he said, frowning as he fumbled for the familiar supporting hold.
He struck a swelling ripple of tuning notes that sounded like a question, made his adjustments, and began to play. It was a tune from my own hills, that he had picked up from Ambrosius’s harper, small and jaunty as a water wagtail. And listening to him, I lost the Queen’s Courtyard in the westering autumn sunlight, and was back again in the dark of the mountains that walled Nant Ffrancon, with the thunder of horses’ hooves in my ears, and a herdboy playing that tune on his pipes; and for an instant the taste of my youth came back to me, and the green freshness of the morning before Ygerna’s shadow fell across the day.
A quiet step sounded behind us, and I looked up as Guenhumara came across the colonnade with her spindle and distaff. I moved aside to make space for her on the step, but she smiled and shook her head, and leaned herself against the cracked plaster column, looking down at us.
Bedwyr had dropped his hand from the harp strings, and as the small prancing melody fell silent, she said quickly, ‘Na na, let you go on playing; it was the harp song that called me out.’ And he made her a little bow, and caught up the tunelet again where he had tossed it down. And while he played, I had time to look at Guenhumara as I had scarcely had time to look at her since I came home. She was wearing a gown of some soft red-brown stuff, faded a little as the earth fades with sun and rain, and it seemed to me suddenly that there was a new softness about her, a look of harvest. I searched for the woman I had kissed into that one moment of passionate response beside the gray standing stone in the rain, and could not find her, but knew that she had her part in this other woman and was not lost, as the green shoot is not lost in the red corn. There was a warmer quietness in her, fulfillment and content as a cornfield at harvest time. The Corn Queen, I thought. She is like the Corn Queen, and pushed the thought away, for the overtones of sacrifice that clung to it. I wondered whether she was – not forgetting the Small One, but perhaps remembering with less pain.
The small rippling tune that was now the wagtail and now the water, burst into a last running phrase, and was silent. And in the silence, all at once, Guenhumara laughed, with strangely darkened eyes, and the bright color flooded up from her throat to the roots of her hair. ‘Artos, why do you look at me so? – As though you had never seen me before?’
‘Do I? I am sorry. It is that I am looking for the first time at the Queen.’
‘The Queen,’ she said slowly and carefully, as though testing a strange word on her tongue.
And Bedwyr, laughing also, as he looked up at her with eyes narrowed against the westering light, struck a small triumphal flourish of notes from the leaping harp strings. ‘Sa! They will sound the trumpets for you, now that Caesar is home, and open the treasure chests and bring out the blue and purple and golden silks that tear like withered leaves, and the queen’s jewels laced with cobwebs, but meanwhile, here is a queen’s fanfare for you that at least has never been worn for a garland by any queen before.’
‘Do not listen to him,’ and it was as though the same spirit of small quiet laughter had entered into me also. ‘All that, the Red Fox and his kind carried off long ago. There will be no dusty silks and weight of dead woman’s jewels for you, Cariad ... If I were Lord of the Eastern Empire’ (the memory of some picture gleaming behind the altar of a church must have put it into my head) ‘you should have a crown of golden stems and leaves curling in and out together like the sand-dune rose but without the thorns – and in every arch of it a bell of crystal to ring when you walked.’
‘Bedwyr told me that a circlet of oak leaves was all the diadem my lord had to crown him Emperor. Then a crown of golden cornstalks – so that my lord give it to me – will serve well enough for my royalty. With that, and your fanfare, Bedwyr, I shall not feel the lack of any dead queen’s jewels.’
A sudden rush of warmth rose in me, and I reached out and put my arm around her knees, these being the nearest part of her. ‘Oh Guenhumara, it is good to be at home with you again.’ Oddly, I was much less shy of touching this new Guenhumara than I had been of touching the old one.
I had half hoped that she would say, ‘It is good to have you at home with me again,’ but she only said, ‘Is it, my dear?’ And I felt her startle for an instant under the heavy folds of her gown. Then she stooped and brushed her hand across my cheek, and I let myself believe that what she had not said in words, she had said in that brief touch.
Bedwyr was returning his beloved harp to its bag, and slinging the strap across his shoulder, and something in the way he did it made me think of a traveler picking up his dusty bundle before he turns again to the track. And without thinking, I said, ‘You look like a man setting off on a journey.’
He laughed. ‘Do I? If so, it is but a short one. It is in my mind that tomorrow I will be away back to my own quarters.’
I sat up abruptly, releasing Guenhumara. ‘You’re not meaning it?’
‘I am so.’
‘Bedwyr, you’re not fit yet to go back to that kennel of yours.’
‘You underestimate the Lady Guenhumara’s care of me. I am almost a sound man again.’
‘Almost! And what wrong have I done you, or you me, that you should run like a hen with the wind in your hind feathers, the moment that I am home off the war trail? Guenhumara, Heart-of-my-heart, tell him that he cannot go.’
I thought that a shadow had fallen on Guenhumara, but it was only that the westering sun had slid behind a broken column. She said quietly, ‘Bedwyr knows that there is his place and his welcome here for as long as he cares to stay, and that they are waiting whenever he chooses to come back. And that he is free to come and go as he chooses.’
Bedwyr was making some adjustment to the harp strap. His fingers checked on the buckle at his shoulder, and he looked up, faintly jibing over his own dark depths. ‘I have just thought, that we are forgetting the Purple in all this. Men might say that it was an unwise thing, even a dangerous thing, to go when the Emperor says “Stay.”’
‘If the Emperor ordered you to stay, would you do it?’ I said.
‘I must needs obey the imperial command.’
We looked at each other a long moment, eye into eye, no longer laughing. Then I said, ‘Your sword brother bids you go where you will and when you will, and come back when you will.’
We were aware, all of us, that we had lost the fragile contentment of a few moments past, and made, I think, a conscious effort to catch it back. Bedwyr saying that a little later he should maybe go up for another look at the farm I had given him, and Guenhumara asking what it was like. ‘Hill pasture and upland horse run,’ he said, ‘three cornfields and a cluster of turf bothies. I have not seen it in summer, but there will be snowdrops in the woods above the house in February. That is why they call it Coed Gwyn.’ Only for some reason this time I could not enter into the thing that was tossing to and fro like a colored ball between the other two. And suddenly it seemed that Guenhumara gave up the game. She shivered a little. ‘It grows cold now that the sun is gone. Let us be away to the fire.’
So the small quiet hour that had in it something of sanctuary was over, and a few moments later I stood with Guenhumara in the colonnade and glanced back over the half wall to watch Bedwyr weaving his still slightly uncertain way across the courtyard to make ready for supper. ‘Guenhumara, do you think that he should go yet?’
She had been watching the retreating figure too, and turned with a little start toward me. It was already dusk indoors though the light still lingered in the courtyard, and Nissa had brought the atrium candles, and in the light from the open doorway her face was softly golden, with its shadows blotted in from the gray twilight, ‘Yes, I think he should,’ she said, and took my hand to lead me into the atrium.
I had another and more formal coronation to undergo in the Basilica, a few days later, but to me it was no more than a husk of the true crowning that I had gone to on the night after Badon; and I remember little of it now, save a vague blur of gold and colors and the gray of naked mail, and the bright cold seagull’s eye of Bishop Dubricius as he set the gold circlet on my head. And the moment when I sprung the great dragon arm ring of Ambrosius onto my arm, and knew that I stood where he would have had me stand.
Life changed, tipping over to a new angle, and I who had been the war leader and was now the High King (crowned Caesar but High King in all things other than the name) had become something of a stranger in a strange land, striving as best I might after the ways of kingship, in the state halls and Council Chamber where Ambrosius had worked himself to death the winter before. But I had the help of Guenhumara, sitting beside me in the Queen’s great chair that had been empty and stored away so many years ... Indeed she was nearer to me in that winter than she had been since the time before Hylin died. Bedwyr, on the other hand, seemed farther away.
In the days that followed my second crowning, Venta grew quiet, and quieter yet, as the war host broke up and men drifted off to their own homes to plow for the next year’s harvest and beget the next year’s children. But for the Companions, of course, as well as for a few standing cavalry squadrons and spear bands, there was no breakup; and the usual winter’s work began, as the newly broken two- and three-year-olds came up from the horse yards to be ‘trained on’ for war, while all the while the made war-horses must be kept in fighting practice. Old Hunno had died some years before, and since Amgerit his son was too valuable where he was, to be spared from the breeding runs, my new horse master was a yellow-haired small savage from the Old Iceni country. I had been somewhat anxious as to him at first, not quite believing that any man save Hunno could turn me out the younglings trained as I needed them; but in all justice, I do not think that our cavalry suffered by the change.
Midway between Christ’s Mass and Candle Mass, we held, as we had held them every year, our Winter Cavalry Maneuvers. It helped to keep men and horses on their mettle, and brightened a little, even for the watching townsfolk, the dark of the year when the Midwinter Fires were burned out and spring (which in any case, for these many years, had meant also the Saxons) was still very far away.
I can see now the level meadows below the town walls, winter-pale in the thin sunshine, the shadows blue and opaque like wood-smoke among the bare dappled woods of the surrounding hillsides, the rustling flights of starlings overhead, and the curved sweep of the squadrons that seemed to echo the starlings’ flight; I can hear the drub of hooves and the trumpet sounding thin across the water meadows, which is the music to which my life has been set.
Ever since noon, it had been going on, watched by the crowd huddled thick before the city gates and along the fringes of the practice ground. We had maneuvered all together, the squadron streamers flying in the silver-gilt light, in the mimic warfare that trains hand and eye toward the real thing. We had divided up, squadron by squadron, champion by champion, and with the horses seeming almost to dance to the sound of the trumpets, had thrown off, for the watchers’ benefit, changing and complicated patterns of wheeling lines and arrowheads and spinning circles (but these too, make for skill and control in the day of battle). I had had my squadron out there already, putting them through their paces, and the roar of the crowd and the soft thunder of hooves on the winter turf behind me was still in my blood, as I sat watching Bedwyr take his turn.
He was sweeping his squadron after him down the long line of practice posts that had been set up, weaving them in and out as the shuttle through the weft, his second behind him with the squadron streamer flying from his spear shaft like a flame of saffron and peacock blue; and I watched anxiously, wondering how it was with him, wondering if, despite the strap across his shoulder, the weight of the heavy black bullhide buckler was dragging too cruelly at his maimed arm, watching for any sign that he was finding it hard to control the big red roan. But he had always had the harper’s trick of controlling his horse with his knees so as to have both hands free for his harp, and it stood him in good stead now. In my anxiety to see how it went with him, I urged Signus forward a few paces, past a clump of bare willows that slightly blocked my view, and as I reined in once more, became aware of a knot of young men still partly screened from me by the branches who, their own part in the day’s work over for the time being, stood talking together while they watched the horsemen. Nearest to me of all, stood Medraut, his hair – he had pulled off his war cap – shone mouse-fair in the wintry light, and he played and finicked with his war mittens as a nervous horse plays with the snaffle bars. They lounged together, watching the horsemen, talking in quick light snatches with laughter between; and I sat my old Signus a little to their rear and watched them, wondering if it was only in my mind that they seemed not of the same metal as the men who had been young when I was young, only that to the old dog the young one seems never to be what his own pack fellows were. These lads were hardy and strong-shouldered as we had been, they had ring-mail shirts gray-bright as salmon skins, where we had ridden to war in old boiled leather, and yet in some intangible way, they seemed diminished, lacking in something that we had possessed. Indeed these – all members of Medraut’s squadron – seemed scarcely to be of the Companions at all ... ‘It has to be so,’ I told myself. ‘This is a different life to the one we knew twenty years ago, and the Company must change with the rest.’ It was true, and yet I was aware suddenly, looking at the broad young backs of these lads I felt I scarcely knew, that the old strength of oneness had begun to go out of the Company and it was growing blurred at the edges. And under my own war sark, something ached a little in my breast for the old close-knit brotherhood.
Busy with my own thinking, I heard their voices only as sound, until someone among them spoke Bedwyr’s name, and as though at the opening of a door, I heard the sense of what they said. ‘He is a tough one, the old Satyr. Christ! He leads like a young man still.’ And another returned with half-angry admiration, ‘If when I am as old as that and one-armed, I can lead as well, I’ll not be complaining ... He’s none so ill-looking, either, on a horse and at this distance when you can’t see his face.’
Medraut laughed – a brittle, whinnying laugh, an unhappy sound – and flicked the war glove
s he was fiddling with toward the place at a little distance where Guenhumara, with the hood of her marten-skin mantle fallen back from her head, stood with little plump Teleri and a knot of the other women about her. ‘You’re not the only one of that mind, I’m thinking, though I doubt if she will be finding much amiss with his face at close quarters, either – or with the rest of him, for that matter. Look how our Royal Lady watches him now.’
A third member of the group said, I thought with something of discomfort, ‘After all, she is not the only one to be watching Caesar’s captain.’
Medraut said softly, almost musically, ‘Caesar’s captain? The Queen’s captain would be nearer the mark, my child.’ And they all laughed.
And despite the stab of anger that had shot through me, I could have laughed too, listening to them; these callow lads who knew nothing of the bonds that ten or twenty years of life could forge. Of course she was watching him, as I was watching him; it was the first time that he had tried out his arm in full war gear.
Still laughing, one of Medraut’s fellows looked around and saw me. The laughter trickled out of his face, and he muttered something to the rest, and flicked out a foot to kick Medraut on the ankle. Medraut gave a small start for appearance’s sake, but it is in my mind that he knew I was there all the while. He looked over his shoulder, and met my eyes with a stare of cool antagonism that assuredly was not the look of one whose words have been overheard by the wrong man, indeed there was a strange kind of satisfaction in it. Then he put up his hand in sketch of salute, and moved away, the others, somewhat unsurely, following him. We had long ago given up all pretense at anything between us that should be between father and son.
I thought that I put the whole thing out of my mind as no more than a casual thorn prick administered by my son in a moment’s idle malice (as though Medraut ever did anything casually!) and yet a little later, when we formed the whole Company in two halves, Bedwyr leading the blue squadron and I the red, and came thundering together from the far end of the practice ground, a strange thing happened, for as the two ranks closed upon each other, and I saw the leader on the tall roan rushing toward me, my sight darkened, and for a strange damned moment I saw the face of my enemy. I even made the first move to swerve Signus in his tracks, that instead of passing between the roan and the next horse I should bring him crashing into Bedwyr’s mount. I don’t know why, it was certainly no part of cavalry fighting; I suppose with some blind black instinct to kill, not at the remove of a weapon, but with my own hands ... The thing was over almost in the instant that it came upon me, the merest flash of darkness, and I saw Bedwyr’s face, crooked and ugly and familiar as my own heartbeat, laughing at me, and yet with something of surprise behind the widened eyes, and wrenched Signus back onto his true line again, so that we drummed past almost brushing knee against knee and crashed on to our two ends of the field.
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