Sidra gave in. “I see that,” she said. “I do not approve for many reasons, but it is clear to me that you need to be away from us for a time. You lasted almost a year this visit. Perhaps someday you will not need to go home but only wish to. I will make the arrangements. The men were planning to set out sometime next week. I assume you can be ready by then?”
“Of course I can. Thank you, Sidra.” Guinevere hugged her joyfully, ignoring the disapproval of the older woman. “I will come back again very soon. I promise. Just a few weeks with my parents, time to play with my niece. That’s all I need. Truly!”
She was not so blind to the terrified expression Alswytha gave her when she explained where she was going and how long she would be gone. But all the Saxon girl said was, “Let me help you decide what things you will take. I hope you have good weather for your visit.”
“Alswytha, I’m not leaving forever, just for a little while. Risa will stay with you and Geraldus has promised to remain here until I return. They won’t let anyone hurt you and Sidra will . . . Alswytha, I can’t stand it here any longer.”
Something that was almost anger crossed Alswytha’s face.
“
You
can’t stand it? Then of course you must go!”
She turned away quickly and began folding robes and sorting perfumes. But even the set of her spine told Guinevere what she was thinking. How could anyone be so spoiled, so self-centered?
Guinevere stood uncertainly, not knowing what to do. She stretched her hand out, and spoke softly, begging forgiveness. “I will be back, very soon. Only give me a little time.”
Alswytha’s shoulders dropped. She took the offered hand and clasped it tightly. She spun around and hugged her, holding her wet cheek against Guinevere’s.
“It’s not your fault,” she wept. “Of course you must go.”
That night she told Ecgfrith all about how Guinevere was leaving and how lonely she would be. She was so miserable that she didn’t notice the gleam of triumph in his eyes.
The next morning his bed was empty.
Even the resulting uproar didn’t convince Guinevere to stay. The general opinion was that he had tried to escape but had been crushed on the rocks or drowned and washed out to sea. So few of the Britons could swim that it never occurred to them that anyone was strong enough to enter the sea and survive. If Alswytha was afraid that they would treat her more harshly because of Ecgfrith’s escape, she soon realized that she was wrong. If anything, it improved her position. People felt sorry for her. She was not so threatening now that her brother was not there, glaring sullenly from his corner of the wall.
The air was clear and the wind smelled of damp earth the day they left. Guinevere hated riding pillion behind someone but she had conceded this point and held tightly to Belinus. She had chosen him to show that she held no ill feeling against him in the matter of the bread game. As she had suspected, no one objected to being her guard of honor to the villa.
She kissed everyone good-bye indiscriminately, she was so happy. And she resolutely failed to notice the look in Alswytha’s eyes. As she left, she twisted back to wave. Her last sight was of Geraldus standing behind Alswytha who was, oddly enough, leaning on the shoulder of the raven-haired alto.
Chapter Thirteen
Guenlian knelt in her garden plucking miniscule weeds from among the herbs. The earth was cool and moist under her hands and the sun warm across her back. Laughter dappled the air as Rhianna chased her daughter, Letitia, around the courtyard. Guenlian raised her face and absorbed the peace of the day, the infant plants in the fields and the deep green of the forest blending, far off, into the mountains. It was a morning culled from Eden. The impermanence of it cut into her heart.
She sighed and wiped her forehead with a soil-stained hand as she heard Leodegrance approaching from the villa. His shadow blocked the sun as he stood over her. Guenlian reached out her hand to be helped to her feet.
“Where are you going today? Who among our friends has need of you now?”
“No one,” he grinned. “It seems that I have solved all the problems of our tenants and neighbors.” He swept his arm across the view before them. “You see how smoothly the world functions? I have even arranged for a few gentle clouds to touch up the sky a bit. See them, floating in from the west, just as ordered.”
Guenlian stood next to him for some time, watching. The world was indeed beautiful today. Then she turned away from it. “Why is it then, that I am so sorrowful, so afraid?”
The torture she saw in his face shamed her.
“We have good reason, my dear, to suffer. But while we live we must search for tranquillity at least.”
“It isn’t that. My grief for our sons is a part of my bones now, and I almost believe that I would feel something missing if I woke one morning and it was not with me. This is a different feeling. I can’t understand it. All our lives we have fought, we have given everything to preserve our way of life. When it was certain that we and all our work would become ruins and ashes, I still believed; I still hoped. Now it seems as if Arthur has won this battle for us. The Saxons are truly being pushed back into their holes along the coast. He has dreams of rebuilding the towns and reinstating central government, all the things we planned. Why, when everything is coming right at last, so I feel the threat of certain doom?”
Leodegrance was silent for so long, she feared that he wouldn’t answer. She needed to have an answer, even if he only told her that he didn’t know.
“I have pondered this for many months,” he finally replied. “Yes, I have felt it, too. And I believe that I have found an answer although I hope that I may be proven wrong. It is as I said before. Rome is dead. A togaed king of the Goths sits on the throne of the emperors. Gaul is in flames and is controlled by Germanic tribes. Britain was always the most removed of the outposts. We preserved a life we only knew about from books and proclamations and the rosy memories of our grandparents. Guenlian, our goals were those of the perfect world, a society that never was! Arthur is trying to create a new Rome. But we see what he has to work with. We know the corrupt men who would be senators or proconsuls. They are not Cicero or Pliny. They are only soldiers and badly educated lords with a few acres of land and a dozen or so tenants or slaves. How could they know of the grandeur of a great oration or the glory of a unified world? They are only impressed by an abundance of hot water.”
“This can’t be true,” Guenlian moaned, although she feared he was right. “The world is supposed to be getting better. We are preparing for the millennium, when earth and heaven become one. But you can see that we are drifting away from everything that should bring man closer to God.”
“I will not believe that, my love. I have held my faith too long. We are just blinded by our visions so that we do not see the new order. We think that the end of Roman life is the end of the world. . . .”
“It is. It’s the end of my world.”
“And of mine. I confess that I cannot see how joining hands with barbarians will improve the state of things, and the prospect of my grandchildren living in a land ruled by heathens, who don’t even read their own language, much less ours, terrifies me. But I cannot stop believing that civilized man, in some form, will eventually triumph, even if no one I have loved will live to see it. There is no reason for my certainty. I know it is foolish. But haven’t we learned, my dearest love, that when nothing is left but faith, it is that which we cling to?”
“I find little comfort in your words or in the hope of a victory which none of our blood may see. But I find that somehow I can be strong again. It is a large world and I suppose we have done little to change it, for good or for ill. But that little we have done in our lives may have been what was needed to keep the night from overwhelming us. Perhaps, like you, I cling to that belief because I am growing old and there is little more I can do. Isn’t it ridiculous? I always felt like Lavinia, mother of Rome, waiting in regal certainty for Aeneas to arrive. I never feared for you as I did for our children. We were legend, part of the epic. What has it come to? Here we are, an aging man and woman, not very well educated, influencing a few acres of land and few dozen people and we find we are not able to read the future at all.”
• • •
At the same time, in a semi-ruined house in Chichester, Arthur was explaining to Merlin his plans for a new society. Merlin was listening patiently to the rebirth of the ideas that he had planted twenty years before. As he made appropriate noises, he was really thinking of Arthur and how he had grown and developed over that time.
In the past three years, Arthur had changed. His body had finally filled out his height and he was an awe-inspiring figure to his men, well over six feet tall with flaming red hair and a roaring voice. He had completely mastered the art of claiming obedience not by violence but through the belief of his fellow men in his authority. His men respected him, even though most of his war leaders were senior to him in years. But it was easy, he was learning, to command in time of war, if one continued to win. The next step, much more difficult, was to govern a country in time of peace. Arthur had never lived in a Britain free of fighting, but he had wonderful plans.
“First, we must reestablish the old governmental offices. We need to appoint local officials and make clear divisions between the provinces. Then we must rebuild the roads and convince people to move back to the towns.”
“A day’s work,” Merlin scoffed. “For one thing, our population will not fill even a few towns. Too many have died or fled.”
Arthur waved that problem aside. “Never mind. We’ll rebuild the population, too. There should be little resistance to that suggestion.”
“Besides,” he added, “once it is known that the old order has returned, those who fled the chaos will return, too.”
“Do you believe that those who have spent two generations building estates in Armorica will bother to return to the ruins that they left here? You are not looking at this situation clearly.”
“Merlin,” Arthur said sternly. “You are trying to discourage me. But I have an even better idea, one I didn’t get from you. I want to build a new city, a great, towering, shining town high on a hilltop, so that travelers approaching will see it long before they arrive, glistening in the sun like the Holy City. It will be more beautiful than any spot in the world, and I will call craftsmen, artisans, scribes, teachers, even philosophers to live there with me. Among us we can create a new world where every man can read and learn as he wills. It will be greater than Rome in all its glory. For my city will have a mind and a soul. It will be—why are you staring at me like that?”
Merlin brushed his hand over his eyes. “It is nothing, Arthur. I was only thinking that perhaps I didn’t teach you as well as I should have, or too well. And I was wishing that I was young again, before my visions came to me. I was also marveling that you could have such hope for man with all you have seen of war.”
“I have seen other things, Merlin. You have shown me some of them. And I know you never believed me, but I am certain that my cause is blessed by the Virgin herself. With her face always in my memory it is not so difficult to wash out the horrors I have seen, the deaths I have witnessed. I do not love to fight! Of all people, you must know how I curse this talent I have for battle. My sword and spear may become plow and pruning hook this moment for all I care! Yes, I know I am not a Marcus Aurelius. I can barely read and a stylus seems to slip through my fingers when I try to write. But I am the one who is here, the one who is left to try and salvage what remains of our people. Merlin, why must you always ridicule my plans for the future? Can’t you even allow me my dream?”
The older man leaned back in his chair. He stared at the wall behind Arthur with its once beautiful fresco, now faded and peeling. Even in his memory, the town had been almost empty. What must it have been like full of people, coming and going in such security that there was no wall about the town, no lock upon the gates. The town even had a theater! Even he could not imagine that. Poor Arthur! What chance did he really have?
“My dear son, you cannot afford such dreams. If anyone in this land must be hard and cynical, it is you. When you lead an army, they follow you or they die. Every man knows that. But when the army is disbanded, there are no more soldiers, no more fighting units. There are only a thousand men with a thousand different ways of looking at things using all the emotions that are ignored in war. They will want land of their own and for their children. They will want comfort and security, and those who have served you well will expect preferment even at the expense of one another. They will not care about philosophy but they will remember again all the petty feuds and land disputes they have put aside to fight with you. That is what they will want you to do for them. There are days when I almost wish that we could go on fighting forever. For the moment the war ends there will be such chaos and anarchy! You can’t count on dreams to put that in order. Poetry will not amuse men who want power. And the saddest part is that I do believe in you. All my hopes for the past twenty-five years have been set on you and your dreams. You are the only man alive today who has a chance of uniting Britain and making her live again. But even I can’t see the possibility of building a new city, a refuge of the arts in the midst of this destruction.”
His gesture encompassed not only the room they sat in, but all the world outside. The men and women out there were bred to fear, had never known a summer without the danger of raids, the threat of total annihilation; they huddled now, in the shadows of stone forts, creeping into the fields to plant and reap enough to keep themselves alive one more year. The rough, belching lords and petty tyrants won the people’s allegiance because they were strong enough to protect them. What would these men say to a consul, come to establish Roman law in their holdings? And the Saxons, they were not going to vanish. They were settled in their massive halls of wood. The people of London had gone so far as to establish trade with the Saxon villages south of them, gold and leather for grain and protection. Would the Saxons submit to Arthur’s laws? There were just too many changes, too many differences to bring the old ways back. Yet Arthur wanted to go even beyond that. He wanted to make a kingdom of philosophers, a perfect realm. Merlin studied his own hands. They had never held a sword or an ax. They had never learned a trade beyond writing. And yet his own life had been hard enough so that they were brown and calloused like any farmer’s or soldier’s. He idly wondered if even he could fit into this ideal society. Could Arthur?