Authors: Rosemary Sutcliff
(I thought of the dark young man I had hunted with, that spring before Gaul, and the babe into whose nest Maximus’s great seal had fallen.)
I said, ‘Ambrosius, should not all this go before the Council?’
A smile twitched at his lips. ‘I scarcely think so. Listen again: If I call the Council together and tell them that I have chosen Cador of Dumnonia to follow after me, I am putting Britain
– all that was our heritage, all that we of the war host have spent our lives for, all that we still mean when we speak of Rome – into the hands of a man who I am not at all sure is
strong enough to hold them; and if, when I am dead, it appears that my doubts were well founded, it will not be I who suffer, but Britain. Britain and the whole western world that will see the last
lights go out.’
‘Who, then?’ I said.
He looked at me very straightly, speaking no word; and after a moment, I said: ‘Oh no, I am not the stuff that usurpers are made of.’
‘But can you be sure that you would be left the choice? If I were to name Cador of Dumnonia as my successor, I think that for the most part the British princes would accept him, with a
certain amount of muttering among themselves. “He is no greater man than we are,” but also, “He is the last of the blood-royal.” But the whole of this Kingdom of the South,
and besides your own war band, the whole of the war host would rise for you, to a man.’
‘Not if I did not lead the rising,’ I said.
‘Artos, my simple Bear Cub, you overestimate – or perhaps underestimate – the power of your hold. When men rise for a leader it is not always at the leader’s
instigation ... You are the man with the strength to hold Britain after me, and because you are baseborn, I cannot name you formally as my successor before the Council. But I can at least leave you
free to win the High Kingship for yourself.’
‘I think that still I do not understand,’ I said slowly.
‘Do you not? If I die without naming my successor, most men will turn to you as a matter of course, and the rest will be for you to handle. Therefore I shall be at pains to die suddenly,
without time to name an heir. It will inconvenience the Council somewhat, I imagine, but—’
I sprang up. ‘My God! Ambrosius! You are sick in your mind! To leave us with no named heir – that will be to leave Britain rent with inward war, at a time when our only hope is to
stand together – you cannot have thought – you—’
He sat in the heavy carved chair and looked up at me, his head tipped back, the eyes clear and resolute in his dying face. ‘Oh yes, I have thought ... I am not a gambler by nature, Artos,
but I can throw the dice when need be. I know perfectly well that in this I am throwing for the highest stakes of my life, and that if I lose, Britain will fall apart like a rotten apple, and lie
open for the Barbarians to swarm in; but if I win, we shall have gained a few years more to carry on the battle. And I believe that I shall win – at least with more likelihood than if I were
to name Cador of Dumnonia to come after me.’ A shadow of wry laughter crept into his tone. ‘It is a pity that, in the nature of things, I shall not be here to know whether I win or
lose; whether I have thrown Venus or the Dog.’
‘I still think that it is madness!’
‘Madness, maybe; but there is no other way. Sit down again, Artos, and listen to me for a while longer, for we have not all the time in the world.’
I sat down, feeling as though I had taken a blow between the eyes, and aware all the time of old Aquila’s frowning gaze bent in judgment upon me. ‘I am listening,
Ambrosius.’
‘So. Then, you know as surely as I do, that the campaigning of this coming summer is not likely to follow the pattern of the past few years.’
I nodded. ‘So says every wind as it blows over. Yet it is hard to see why the thing should come now, this year and no other, if it did not come five years ago. We have shown the Barbarians
clearly enough that in pitched battle in anything even faintly approaching even numbers, we can cut them to pieces with our cavalry; and they must know, for their scouts are not fools, that we are
steadily building up the strength of our cavalry forces.’
‘It is maybe for that reason that they determine to throw their whole strength against us before it is too late.’ Delicately, he shelled off another strip of brown husk from the
creamy kernel of the long-cold chestnut. ‘It is in my mind that the Saxons are learning to combine at last. Certainly the coming and going that there has been all this winter between the
Cantish Kingdom and the East Seax would seem to point that way.’
The captain of the bodyguard smiled down his great hooked nose into the fire, and raked out a smoking chestnut with his dagger. ‘We also have our scouts. It is a good thing, seemingly, to
have friends among the Little Dark Men of the hills and forests.’
‘Ambrosius, if there is indeed a great push coming in the spring, then at least wait until, by God’s mercy, it has been flung back, before you make your decision past unmaking it
again.’
‘I shall not last until the spring,’ Ambrosius said, simply, and tossed the half-peeled chestnut that he had been playing with so long, back into the fire with a gesture of
‘Finish.’ And then he said – it was the first and only time that I ever heard him speak of his sickness – ‘I have stood up in my place as long as I could. God knows
it; but I am worn through with carrying a wildcat in my vitals – I am rotted and eaten away. Soon there must be an end.’ I saw the sweat on his forehead in the firelight.
After we had sat in silence for a while, he spoke again. ‘Artos, I have a sense of fate on me. It is not merely that our scouts report certain movements of the Saxons. I believe in my
bones, in my very soul, that a Saxon thrust such as we have not seen before is coming this spring – by midsummer at latest: and when it comes, there will be a struggle compared with which the
battles we have known will be but candles held to a beacon blaze. And believing that, I must believe that this, above all others, is not the time to be leaving Britain in the hands of an untried
king, but rather in the hands of a strong and well-proved war leader. As to what comes after, so far as the question of my successor is concerned, the victory in such a struggle would be a mighty
weapon in your hand, Bear Cub, and if you fail, then Britain will not need a High King again.’
His voice had died almost to a whisper, hoarse in his throat, and his brilliant eyes were haggard, clinging to my face. Yet still I was half resisting; and not from humility but from lack of
courage. I had always been one who dreaded loneliness, the loneliness of the spirit. I needed the touch of other men’s shoulders against mine, the warmth of comradeship. I was a fine war
leader, and I knew it, but I shrank from the very thought of what Ambrosius was asking of me. I did not want the loneliness of the mountaintop.
Aquila had risen some time before, and tramped over to the window at the end of the room; he was something of a lone wolf, old Aquila, and his own deep reserve made him flinch from the least
probing into the reserves of other men; and I suppose he did not want to see our faces while the last stages of the thing were fought out. Suddenly he spoke, without turning from the window.
‘Talk of beacon blazes, there’s something big burning over yonder beyond Ink-Pen, by the look of it!’
I got up quickly and went over to him. ‘Saxons! Open the window, Aquila.’ He lifted the pin and swung wide the glazed leaf, and the cold and the smell of frost flowed in against my
face. The window looked north, and as the dazzle of the firelight faded from my eyes, and the stars began to prick out in the clear sky, I could make out a dull red glow in the sky, like red
reflection of a great fire.
Even as I watched, the glow was spreading, rising higher into the stars. ‘It would take a whole city burning to yield that glare,’ Aquila said, and I could hear the frown in his
voice. And then the formless glow began to gather to itself a shape, a great blurred bow, and out of its brightness suddenly a streamer of light flickered up into the dark sky, and then another,
and another; and I wondered why I had been such a fool as not to know the thing at once – I suppose because in my mind it belonged to the North, and so I was blind to it here in the South
Country. I laughed, and something in me lifted as though at the touch of a familiar magic. ‘No Saxons tonight, old wolf. It is the Northern Lights, the Crown of the North. Dear God, how many
times I have watched those flying ribbons of fire from the ramparts of Trimontium!’ I glanced aside at Aquila, whose exclamation told me that he had recognized the thing he looked at, at the
same moment as myself. ‘Sa sa! You too! You must have seen them often enough in your thrall winters in Juteland.’
‘Often enough,’ he said. ‘They used to grow and grow until they were like great banners of light flying all across the sky; and the old men would say that they could hear a
rushing of great wings overhead ... But one scarcely ever sees them here in the South, and then no more than the red glow that might be a farm burning in the next valley.’
There was a movement behind us, the scrape of a chair being thrust back, and a slow slurred step on the tesserae, and we moved apart to make room for Ambrosius between us. ‘What is this
marvel? This Crown of the North?’ He set a hand on my shoulder and the other on Aquila’s, breathing quickly and painfully, as though even the effort to rise and cross the floor had been
a day’s labor to him. ‘So-o,’ he said, lingeringly, when he had got his breath back. ‘A marvel indeed, my brothers.’ For in that short while that we had been standing
there, the light had strengthened and spread, until one got the impression of a vast arc spanning the whole night, if one could but have seen over the northernmost hills that hid it from our view;
and from that unseen arc, as though it were indeed the headband of a crown, a myriad rays sprang out, darting and wheeling to and fro, flickering out half across the sky, like ribbons of colored
fire that licked and trembled and died and darted forth again, changing color moment by moment from the red of blood to the green of ice, to the blue of the wildfire that drips along the oar blades
of the northern seas in summer nights.
‘I too have seen the glow like a burning in the next valley, and a flicker or so in the northern sky, from the high shoulder of Yr Widdfa,’ Ambrosius said, in the tone in which a man
speaks in the place where he worships his God. ‘But never the like of this ... Never – the like of this.’
Voices, scared and hushed and excited, were sounding in the courtyard, a babble of tongues and a running of feet. Down there they would be pointing and gesticulating, their faces awed and gaping
in the strange flickering light. ‘The others have seen it now,’ Aquila said. ‘They could scarcely make more starling chatter if it were a golden dragon in the sky.’
‘There will be many pointing to the north and bidding each other to look, tonight,’ Ambrosius said musingly. ‘And later, all Britain will tell each other that there were
strange lights in the sky on the night before Ambrosius Aurelianus died; and later still, it will become Aquila’s dragon, or a sword of light with the seven stars of Orion set for jewels in
the hilt.’
I remember feeling as though a cold hand had clenched itself in my belly, making it hard to breathe, and knowing in that instant the second of the reasons that had brought Ambrosius up from his
capital to this half-derelict hunting lodge that he had known as a boy; turning back in the end to the place that had been dear at the beginning, just as I, with my own hour upon me, would have
turned back if that might be, to some lost glen in the lap of Yr Widdfa of the Snows.
I flung my arm around his shoulders, as though I would have held him to me, and felt the sick skin and bones that he was, and I wanted to cry out to him, ‘Ambrosius, no! For God’s
sake not yet!’ But I wanted to cry out for my own sake, not for God’s, not for his. ‘I have lost too many of the people I love; there is time yet, stay a while
longer—’ But the pleas and protests died in my heart. Besides, any that could be made, Aquila would have made before me.
So we none of us spoke of the thing in words. And after a while, when the glory of the Northern lights had begun to fade, and the stars to show again, Ambrosius said conversationally, ‘I
think that the frost will not be hard enough to spoil the scent tomorrow.’
‘The scent?’ I said. ‘Oh no, Ambrosius, no hunting; we bide together, we three.’
‘Of course. We shall bide together, and together we shall hunt old Kian’s twelve-point stag. The hounds will grow stale else, and the huntsmen also. A day on the game trail will do
the three of us more good than all Ben Simeon’s black potions.’
I turned on him, and in doing so, caught sight of Aquila’s face in the strange bluish light, and knew that he was as unprepared for this as I was.
‘Ambrosius, don’t be playing the madman! You could never last an hour’s hunting!’ I blurted out.
And in the same bluish light, I saw him smile. ‘Not as I am now; but sometimes it is given to a man, by the Lords of Life, to gather all the strength that is yet in him, enough for a few
days, maybe, or a month, and spend it all in an hour or a day as a single moment; that is, if the need be great enough. I believe that it will be so given to me.’
The great lights were dying from the sky, and his face was sinking into the shadows as through dark water, as the winter night returned to its usual seeming. ‘I have roasted chestnuts with
the two dearest friends I have, and I have seen the glory of the God beyond gods in a winter sky. That is a good way to spend a parting evening,’ he said, and turned from the window and
walked steadily back to the fire, as though something of the strength he spoke of had already come to him.
Aquila slammed the window shut, and tramping after him, defiantly took up the fat-lamp and lit it.
I followed last of all.
The few remaining chestnuts, left forgotten, were charred and glowing on the glowing shovel, each sending up curled tendrils of smoke. As the lamp flame sprang up and steadied, and the soft
light flowed out to quench the fierce red dragon’s-eye of the brazier, Ambrosius stooped and took up a half-full wine cup from the table where we had supped; and turned to us, smiling, the
cup held high. ‘Brothers, I drink to tomorrow’s hunting. Good hunting and a clean kill.’