In Winter's Shadow

by Gillian Bradshaw

  “What?” demanded Sandde.

  “If you have any news of me he wishes to know it. And he says to treat me honorably if I should come here. He says that you can trust me with authority, especially for finding supplies.”

  Sandde smiled. “Unneeded advice. You can write to him yourself, now. But what shall we do? He has trusted too little to ink and too much to his messenger’s health.” He fixed his eyes on Rhys again, started, and demanded, “Do you know what your lord was to have told me?”

  Rhys shrugged, ran his hand through his hair again. “Some of it.” He glanced round, then lowered his voice, “When we left the emperor the Family was already riding toward Gwynedd at a good pace. Our lord Arthur judges that Maelgwn will not consider fighting you worth the risk of having his own kingdom plundered, and will set out in hot pursuit. Medraut dare not risk fighting you with only his own followers—most of those who have joined him since the start of the rebellion are sure to stay with Maelgwn, for they wish to fight Arthur, and trust that the kingdom’s ruined if they can kill him. But while they are following, the emperor will send his men away in various groups, with spare horses and most of the supplies, and these will wait at assembly points southward. Sometime before he reaches the Saefern river, he will abandon the rest of his supplies, circle round his pursuers, and come south as fast as he can. He will pick up the rest of his men, and fresh horses, at the assembly points—and he may want supplies then, for, though we had goods from Cerdic, we could not transport enough to last long. Then, I think, he hopes that Maelgwn and Medraut will be following close behind him, and if he has your troops placed in an ambush, he doubtless hopes to lead the rebels directly into it.”

  “Ach!” exclaimed Sandde. “That is an excellent plan, and worthy of the emperor. But these assembly points, where are they? I must find a place for an ambush, and tell the emperor where I think would be best. Where shall I send the message?”

  “I do not know,” Rhys said. “Gwalchmai knows—that, and the watchwords, and the timing.”

  Sandde exclaimed loudly and wordlessly, fell silent. “Then what shall we do?” he demanded, after a minute, “Is your lord likely to wake again?”

  Rhys smiled bitterly. “How should I know? Your surgeon couldn’t tell me. He said only that my lord would die in a few hours.”

  “Here,” I said. “Find me some wax tablets and I will wait here and write the information down if Gwalchmai wakes.” I walked over to the door of the other room, and stepped again into the torchlight. After a moment Rhys followed me, then Sandde.

  The surgeon was sitting on a sleeping pallet in the corner, taking his shoes off. He looked up at us with an expression of irritation, but stood and bowed to Sandde.

  Sandde walked over to the bed and looked at Gwalchmai, then at the surgeon. “Is there nothing you can do?” he asked. “Will he wake, before the end?”

  The surgeon shrugged. “Possibly. It depends how soon that is. Soon indeed, if there is noise and he is disturbed.”

  “I will stay here, but be quiet,” I said, looking about for and finding a stool. I moved it to the bedside and sat down.

  “As you please, noble lady,” said the surgeon, “if your benignity does not object, I wish to sleep.” There was a tone of bitter irony in his voice. He must have long shared his monastery’s hostility to Arthur, and doubtless found this alliance displeasing.

  “Sleep while you can,” I told him. He bowed again, extinguished one of the torches, then lay down on his pallet, covered himself with his blanket, and turned his back on us.

  “I will have someone bring you the writing materials,” Sandde whispered to me. “I thank you, my lady. And I pray God he wakes!” He left, taking another of the torches to light his way back to the Hall.

  Rhys sat down on the floor at the foot of the bed, leaned back against the bedpost, then covered his face with his hands.

  “I am sorry,” I said, not knowing quite what I meant by it. “Rhys, you have had a long journey, and must be very tired. Rest, and I will wake you if anything happens.”

  Rhys shook his head. “Thank you, my lady. But I will wait.”

  We waited in a silence so deep that we could hear each flicker of the single remaining torch, hear the soft brush of ash falling to the floor, the breathing of each person in the room, and the loud wind outside the house. A servant arrived with the wax tablets, a stylus, and parchment, ink, and pens, then left again.

  I rested my head on my hands, looking at Gwalchmai. I had noticed first how gaunt his face had grown, eaten away by grief and sickness. But now in the torchlight he looked fearfully young, almost as he had looked when first I saw him, when he lay wounded in my father’s house. He had always had a look of being haunted by something greater than the world; now he looked as though he were melting into it, balanced between Earth and the Otherworld. The red torchlight on his sweat-damp skin made it look hot, like metal in a fire, as though the bones beneath were melting into another shape. I touched his forehead lightly, but it was not hot. My hand brushed the bandage and it fell aside, for it had only been drawn across his head, and not fastened. I drew it back hurriedly: his head had been dented by Bedwyr’s sword, bone very white in a ruin of red and black cauterized flesh, now crushed and broken by the fall and the surgery even to the shapeless gray of the brain.

  I twisted my hands together to make myself keep still, thinking of him in the past, riding his stallion about the practice field at Camlann, dropping in a falcon’s swoop upon the ring left on the ground. Then I thought of Gwyn trying the same move; of the way I had seen the boy most recently, crawling on his knees in the road to Caer Ceri, dragging in puzzlement at Bedwyr’s spear. And I thought of Bedwyr standing in Macsen’s stables, saying farewell to me—his calm face and the total, bleak despair in his eyes. Of such had been our Empire, so much it had meant, and now it was all come to this. I wanted to weep, but there were no tears in me, only a great blank horror of all that was. And around was only silence and, outside, the wind.

  About the hour of dawn I glanced up from some momentary abstraction to find that Gwalchmai’s eyes were open and he was watching me.

  “Gwalchmai,” I said, my breath catching. I put my hand out to touch his, then remembered his last words to me and drew back. Doubtless I was the last person he wished to see—but perhaps not, and there was the message. “Can you understand me?”

  His lips formed the word “yes,” soundlessly. Rhys stood and hurried over. Gwalchmai’s eyes focused on him, and he smiled very slightly. “Rhys,” he said, in the faintest whisper. “Is it real, then?”

  “My lord? Eh, my lord, we are at Ynys Witrin. This is real.”

  “And she…was she here, before? I talked to her before.”

  “Ah, the Empress! Yes, she is really here, now. You were dreaming on the road, my lord, but she is here now.”

  He closed his eyes, then opened them again and looked at me. “My lady,” he said, still in that almost inaudible whisper. “But, of course you are here. Of course. Medraut did not…”

  “He did not harm me.”

  “Good.” The eyes fixed on Rhys again. “This time I am dying, cousin.”

  The servant said nothing for a moment, then glanced down and muttered, “They say so.”

  Again the slight smile. “It is true. Have they cut my legs off? No? I cannot feel anything. I had not thought…to die this way. Rhys, where is my horse?”

  “In Sandde’s stables. I told them they were to look after him well or they would need looking after themselves.”

  “Good.” The smile, slow and painful. “Thank you. You must let him go. No one must ride him after I am dead. Let him see…that I am dead. Then let him go.”

  “Very well, my lord.”

  “And my sword…fasten that to his saddle. Let them go together. I will give them back.”

  Rhys swallowed a few times, nodded.

  Gwalchmai looked back at me. “I…am…glad you are here, my lady. I should…no, I must say that
later. Arthur gave me a message for Sandde. It is important.”

  I nodded and picked up the writing tablet, and Gwalchmai smiled again.

  He had just begun telling of the movements Arthur planned when the surgeon woke and came over. He took the warrior’s pulse and shook his head. Gwalchmai politely asked him to leave. “Though you are a surgeon, I must speak of my lord’s secrets, which you should not hear.”

  “Very well,” said the surgeon. “There is at any rate nothing more surgery can do for you. Yet I am also a monk, a man of God. You would do well to make a confession of your sins, and receive the sacrament.”

  “Later, if there is time,” said Gwalchmai.

  The monk gave us all a look of venomous displeasure. “You would do better to go before God with a mind hallowed and absolved of sin, not one bound up in worldly concerns and the secret policies of kings.”

  “I would not go to my lord God leaving obligations unfulfilled behind me, and that through selfishness,” returned Gwalchmai. “I beg you, go. If there is time, when I am free of what I am yet bound to, you will be called.”

  The monk snorted and stalked out, and Gwalchmai resumed Arthur’s message, laboriously, but with careful steadiness.

  Presently he stopped for the fourth or fifth time, and closed his eyes. He scarcely seemed to be breathing, and I thought It is now, and felt my heart in my throat. But he opened his eyes again and looked at me.

  “That is all,” he said. “The last act I will do in Arthur’s service. You must…you must give him my greetings, and my thanks, and say…say that I regret nothing in my choice of a lord, except that I did not serve him better. So. My lady, I…I wish now to send a letter. Will you write it?”

  “Of course. Speak. I have parchment.”

  He watched while I sharpened the pen and dipped it in the ink, resting the parchment across my knees. Then he closed his eyes.

  “Gwalchmai to Bedwyr son of Brendan, greetings,” he said, in a voice louder than any he had used yet. The tip of the pen I was using went through the parchment and broke. Gwalchmai opened his eyes at the sound, and I pulled the pen out and stared at him.

  “To Bedwyr?” I asked in despair.

  “You agreed. You must write it; I cannot. My lady, there is not much time. This is the greatest debt yet binding me, and I have not much time left to pay it.”

  I resharpened the pen hurriedly. “Speak then. I will write. Only…remember, I have loved him, and he has been your friend as well.”

  “I have remembered it.” Gwalchmai closed his eyes again. “I wished to…and now I do not know what to say. I dreamed I was speaking with Bedwyr. It must have been after I fell. ‘Greetings. My cousin, I am dying. I wished to write, because…because now…’—no, don’t say ‘now,’ say, ‘Because I so desired your death. And now bitterness seems pointless. I wished for justice with a longing greater than was just, and so…so I brought ruin upon our lord, and all we fought for, greater ruin than any you caused. You said…’—but no, he cannot have said it. That was in the dream—‘If the justice I desired were in the world, there would be none left living. How can a man be justly punished for a crime he did not intend? You were right when you said that mercy alone is just. I…I forgive you my son’s death. Forgive me my vengeance. I…’” He stopped abruptly, looked puzzledly over my shoulder for a moment, then, suddenly, his dark eyes flooded with brilliant life and he smiled. “You?” he asked.

  I looked over my shoulder. There was no one there. I turned back, frightened, and caught his arm. Rhys had said that Gwalchmai had raved on the road, and had talked with people who were not there; it seemed now as though he might again. “Gwalchmai, what is it?” I asked.

  He looked back at me, puzzled. “Can’t you see? Och ai, then it is the end. But there is no more to the letter, only that I pray God’s mercy for us all. Rhys…” The servant caught his hand, “Rhys, mo chara, farewell. My lady, farewell—and if you can, tell my brother I loved him. I am coming.” He looked again into the empty air, smiling like a child. Beneath my hand I felt the muscles of his arm tense, realized that he was trying to sit up, and seized him and leaned against him. I felt his heart beat against me, once, twice, pause…

  Stillness. I sat up, looking at him desperately for a sign that he lived yet. But the look he had had all his life, the haunted brilliance, had vanished, and the face was almost unknown, my friend’s face and a stranger’s.

  Rhys crossed himself. He was weeping silently. “Lord God have mercy,” he said, in British, then crossed himself again and added the accustomed form in the Latin of the Church, “Grant him eternal rest.”

  “And let light perpetual shine upon him,” I replied mechanically. But I thought all light in all the world was dead or dying, and my own heart plunged in the darkness.

  We pulled the blanket over Gwalchmai’s face, and I went over to the last, guttering torch and extinguished it. The day had broken, and the room was already streaked with new sunlight. When I opened the door into the adjoining room I saw that the morning fire had been lit, and a number of people were sitting about it, breakfasting on bread, cheese, and warmed ale.

  “He is dead,” I told them all.

  The monk nodded, took a last bite of bread, and dusted off his fingers. He was beginning to speak when another figure leapt up from beside the fire and shouted, “Rhys!”

  “Eivlin!” Rhys shouted from behind me, and pushed past roughly. He and his wife locked together like a latch fitting into its place, each holding the other fiercely and painfully. Only when I saw them so did I realize how much each must have feared for the other—and realize how much I myself now longed for Arthur.

  “Och, Rhys,” Eivlin said, as I moved from the door, “Rhys, it is your lord, it is the lord Gwalchmai, that is dead?”

  Rhys nodded, tried to speak, and choked on the words.

  “Yes,” I answered for him. “You came here looking only for me, then, Eivlin? Well, see to your husband. Will one of you,” I looked at the men by the fire, the monk and those who had slept in the room over the night, “tell Lord Sandde of this, and ask him to make arrangements for the burial. Tell him also that I have the message and that I will join him presently.” One of the men nodded, and went with me from the room, outside into the morning.

  There was fresh snow upon the ground, and the sky was patched with clouds. While my messenger trudged up the hill I leaned against the outer wall of the house and swallowed the cold air in great gulps, crushing the letter and tablets against me. The pain about my heart seemed almost stifling. But I could not weep, and presently I started back up the hill to my own house, to wash and change before seeing Sandde. There was still much to be done that day.

  I wrote letters all that morning to everyone I could think of who might be willing to provide additional supplies on credit—a desperately short list of names, but one very difficult to compile. In the afternoon, when I wrote to Arthur, the bulk of my letter was concerned only with the question of supplies. Only when I was done with it did I realize with a shock that I had not said that Gwalchmai was dead. After only a few hours, with the body yet waiting for burial, it seemed already a thing fixed. You are tired, I told myself, to still the wave of sickness that came over me then, and I dipped the pen in the ink and wrote out a full account. At the end, I ran out of space on the sheet of vellum, and had to end abruptly. Almost I added nothing more, but then, turning the page over I saw the amount of space I had left above the superscription, and I added, in my smallest lettering, “I escaped before Medraut could harm me. I want only to see you again. My soul, my dearest life, tell me to come and join you with Sandde and the army. But in all events, God defend you.” There was no more space, and the cramped letters seemed meaningless, set against the thought of his presence, so I added no more, but folded the letter over, sealed it, and gave it to a messenger. I sat for a moment staring at Sandde’s desk, wondering when Arthur would get the letter, of what he would be doing, and when we would see one another again. I wis
hed then, and wished again many times afterward, that I had demanded another page of parchment and crammed the margins with words. But perhaps I did say what was most important—and perhaps I could not have said more if I had meant to.

  We buried Gwalchmai that evening in the grounds of the monastery of Ynys Witrin. While the procession of mourners moved to the grave, Rhys held Gwalchmai’s horse, with the jeweled hilt of the sword gleaming beside the empty saddle. The stallion nickered earnestly when the body was brought out, recognizing it, but became increasingly uneasy as the monks prayed and chanted, and when the body was lowered into the ground, neighed loudly and fought to pull away from Rhys. When the burial was finished, Rhys slipped the bridle from the stallion’s head, and the horse cantered over to the grave and stamped about over it, looking about and sniffing the air and the ground, and then threw its head back and neighed. The monks crossed themselves and whispered.

  “Let him be,” Rhys said and, turning on his heel, started back up the hill. I followed, and the other mourners and the monks dispersed. But when I glanced back, I saw the stallion, very white and splendid in the dusk by the damp grave, tossing its head and neighing again, and again. But in the morning the horse was gone. I feared for a time that someone might have stolen it, it and the sword that was supposed to burn any hand that drew it against its owner’s will. But such a horse, let alone such a sword, was too fine to be mistaken for another, or pass unremarked, and they were never heard of again, even in rumor. Gwalchmai had always claimed that the sword, and the horse, had come from the Otherworld. Perhaps the stallion did turn from that dark grave and run off through the night into a day that was now entirely separate from the Earth, to a place where no human grief could reach it, where no further love could hold it back. However that may be, it went, leaving only a few hoof marks around the new grave. And I did not have much time to worry about it.