The Lantern Bearers (book III) (16 page)

‘You speak, I think, as one who has felt the Saxon wind blow somewhat keenly?’ said the man.

‘Aye,’ Aquila agreed.

The full dark eyes moved in leisurely fashion from the white scar of the thrall-ring on his neck, down to his feet bound in dusty straw and rags, and up again to his face ‘ … And have walked far today.’

‘I am on a journey, and since I have no money for horse hire, I walk.’

The man nodded, and slipped a hand into his girdle, and held out a sesterce. ‘So. This will at least give you a meal and a night’s shelter before your next march. I also have little love for the Saxon kind.’

Aquila stiffened. He was hungry, and he had been hanging round the inn in the hope of earning the price of a meal; but earning, not begging. He could not afford pride, but it rose in his throat all the same. ‘Tell me what I may do to earn it.’

The other smiled, raising his brows a little. ‘Some days ago I left a piece of broken mule-harness to be mended at the saddler’s by the West Gate; and since tomorrow I continue my own journey, I am in need of it. Do you go and fetch it for me.’

‘What name shall I tell them, so that they will give it to me?’

‘Say that Eugenus the Physician sent you to collect his mule-bridle that he left three days ago.’ He fished again in his girdle. ‘Here is some more money to pay for the mending. Now take the other without hurt to your pride.’

And so, with the price of a meal stowed in the breast of his ragged tunic, Aquila set out for the West Gate.

The saddler had not finished his work, so he got a meal in a cheap cook-shop while he waited; and it was near to dusk when he came again up the broad main street towards the inn, the mended bridle in his hand chiming with every step he took, for the fine crimson leather was hung with tiny bronze and silver bells. He had expected to hand the thing over to one of the inn slaves and go his way, but when he came into the courtyard, the man he spoke to jerked a thumb towards the outside stair that led to a kind of gallery and said with obvious disapproval: ‘You’re to take it up yourself, he says. It’s the first door at the head of the stair; you can’t miss it.’

So Aquila went up the stairs, and turned to the first door he came to, and a few moments later, having knocked and been bidden to enter, he stood in a small chamber shadowy with mingled dusk and candlelight, that looked into the inn courtyard. Eugenus, who was standing at the window, looked round as he entered. ‘Ah, you have brought it, then.’

‘Did you think that I had run off with it? It must be worth quite a handful, with all those little chiming bells.’ Aquila laid the gay harness across the foot of the sleeping-couch, and a small bronze coin on the table beside the wine-flask that stood there. ‘I would have come back sooner, but it was not finished, and I had to wait. There is a denarius change from the money that you gave me to pay for it.’

Eugenus took up the coin, looked at Aquila a moment, as though wondering whether to offer it to him, and then returned it to his girdle and reached instead for the wine-flask and a cup of faintly honey-coloured glass. ‘I did not think that you had run off with it, no. I think that you have eaten since I saw you last, and therefore it will do you no harm to drink before you go.’

Aquila was suddenly on his guard, his reason telling him that Eugenus was not the type of man to be asking every chance, dusty wayfarer he met into his chamber to drink with him. He demanded bluntly, ‘Why did you leave word that I was to bring the harness up to you myself, and why do you seek to keep me here, now that I have brought it?’

Eugenus poured out the wine before he answered, and pushed the wine-cup across the table. ‘For a very simple and a very innocent reason. I am interested in people—in interesting people, that is to say.’

Aquila frowned. ‘You find me interesting?’

‘I—think so, yes.’ The physician lowered himself on to the couch and leaned back, fingering his stomach as gently and sensitively as though it were somebody else’s, with a pain in it. But his eyes never left Aquila’s face. ‘You have a very bitter face, my young friend, and I think that it was not always so. Also there are about you certain contradictions. You are—forgive me—extremely ragged and dusty, and carry what looks very much like the scar of a Saxon thrall-ring on your neck; you are without the price of a meal; yet when I proffer you a sesterce in charity, you stiffen, and give me to understand that if you may earn it, and not otherwise, you will do me the favour of accepting it. And all the while you wear on your hand a signet ring that would pay for many meals.’

‘It was my father’s ring, and it is not for sale,’ Aquila said.

‘Your father being dead, I take it? Maybe at the Saxons’ hands?’

Aquila was silent a moment, facing the questing interest in the full, dark eyes. His mouth was tight and hard. ‘My father was killed by the Saxon kind, three years ago,’ he said at last, ‘and I was carried off into thraldom. My father’s ring came to me again in a way that does not matter to anyone save myself. I escaped from the Saxon camp on Tanatus and now I am on a journey. Does that answer all your questions?’

Eugenus smiled; a smile that was big and slow like himself; but there was all at once a new alertness in his gaze. ‘What an inquisitive creature I am. This journey—where does it lead you?’

‘Westward, into the mountains.’

‘So. That is a long journey.
It is all of two hundred miles from Venta to the Mountains
.’

Aquila, who had taken up the cup of wine, set it down again with great care, as though he were afraid of spilling it. He felt exactly as though he had been jolted in the stomach, and the memory of the terrace steps at home and the sharp brown face of the bird-catcher sprang out before his inner eye. There was a long silence, and then he looked up. ‘Why did you say that?’

‘To see if the phrase meant anything to you, and it does, doesn’t it?’

‘My father was one of Ambrosius’s men; it was so that he died by Vortigern’s order,’ Aquila said harshly. ‘What made you guess that the old password would mean anything to me?’

Eugenus made a deprecating gesture of one hand—a plump hand, unexpectedly small for such a big man. ‘Oh, it was nothing so definite as a guess. Merely the wildest arrow loosed in the dark, that could do no harm if it missed its target.’

‘Who are you?’ Aquila demanded.

‘I was personal physician to Constantine when he ruled in Venta Belgarum. Now I serve Ambrosius his son in the same capacity, and occasionally, as at present, as a strictly unofficial envoy.’

There was another silence, and then Aquila said, ‘Do you believe in blind chance?’

‘Meaning, do I believe it was by blind chance that you, on your way, as I take it, to lay your sword—if you had one—at Ambrosius’s feet, should fall in with Ambrosius’s envoy in the gateway of the Golden Grapevine at Uroconium?’

Aquila nodded.

Eugenus puckered his lips a little. ‘Blind chance has about it, somehow, the ugly sound of despair; a world without form or meaning. Let us say that if it was chance, it was a kindly one. For me a most fortunate one; for tomorrow, having completed my mission here, or rather, failed to complete it with any success—as you say, this is so far inland that they have not felt the Saxon wind blowing—I return to Ambrosius in the mountains. And since I am by nature a sociable creature, I shall be delighted to have company on the road.’

The river rushed and sang and dawdled beside the track, and on either side the mountains soared upwards, out of the tawny woodlands into bare, mist-scarfed rock and fading bell heather. The clop of the mule’s hooves and the jingle of little bells that seemed out of place in the great solitude nagged at Aquila’s ears as he trudged beside the beast on which Eugenus rode. Eugenus sat slumped in the saddle, sighing and snorting. He was soft; one of those unfortunates who never seem to get hardened by the things that harden and toughen most people; but his spirit rose above the flabbiness of his big body: Aquila had learned that in the week and more that they had travelled together.

A week and more that had brought them up from Uroconium among its orchards and water-meadows, into the wild heart of the Arfon Mountains. ‘Eryri, the Home of the Eagles,’ Eugenus had said when first they saw the distant mass of interlocking peaks against the sunset, with Yr Widdfa standing like a king in their midst, and Aquila thought that the name was a fitting one.

Presently the valley opened before them, and the track dipped to skirt the alder-grown fringes of a lake. Faint mist hung over the water, rising already among the alders, and creeping up the glens and corries of the far mountain-sides that were already blue with the first twilight of the autumn evening. Rising out of the mist, as he looked away southward beyond the foot of the lake, Aquila saw a great, round hill standing boldly out from the mountains behind, as though to close the valley; and caught even at that distance the trace of rampart walls that lay like a coiled snake about and about and about the huge, up-thrusting mass of it.

‘Ah-h-h!’ Eugenus heaved a gusty and heartfelt sigh of relief. ‘Dynas Ffaraon! And never did I see a more welcome sight, for I am saddle-sore from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet.’ And then, glancing about him at the mist creeping up over the matted heather and bog myrtle, ‘Also I think that we have arrived just in time, for poor, fat, comfort-loving creature that I am, I have no liking for riding blind in one of our mountain mists.’

Aquila nodded, his gaze fixed on the fortress hill that seemed to close the valley. ‘And so that is Ambrosius’s stronghold,’ he said, and there was both wonder and a faint distrust in his tone.

‘That is Ambrosius’s stronghold from the autumn round again to the spring. It was old before the Legions drove their first road through the mountains to build Segontium on the coast, and has served many princes in its time.’ Eugenus gave him a glance of amused understanding. ‘You find it not to your liking?’

‘Maybe it was well enough for some wild mountain princeling of the old time,’ Aquila said.

‘But not for Ambrosius the son of Constantine, the last hope of Britain? You must realize that this old hill fortress has always been the ruling-place of the Lords of Arfon, and as such it has a power in men’s minds that Segontium of the Legions could never have; though it is to Segontium that he calls his young men for training in the summer. Not for nothing is it called Dynas Ffaraon, the Fortress of the High Powers … Also let you not forget that it was from this hill fort that Constantine came down in his day, to drive the Saxons into the sea.’

Aquila looked up at the big, weary man on the mule’s back, and asked the question that he had been on the edge of asking many times since Uroconium. ‘Will Ambrosius ever come down from the mountains as his father did? Is it a living cause, Eugenus, or a dead one that men serve because they loved it when it was alive?’

‘Speaking for myself,’ Eugenus said after a moment, ‘I think that I might die for a dead cause, but I do not think, I really do
not
think, my young friend, that I could bring myself to ride up and down the world on anything so uncomfortable as a mule, in its service.’

And they went on in silence, the mist thickening little by little about them. Aquila had accepted what Eugenus had said, but his uneasiness remained. He had thought of young Ambrosius as the leader of men like his father, but now he began to realize that the son of Constantine was something very much more complicated than that. Not only the leader of the Roman party, but the Lord of Arfon, a man belonging to two worlds. Was he, after all, only another Vortigern?

Slowly the fortress hill drew nearer until it towered right above them in the mist and the lake was left behind; Aquila saw that it did not after all close the valley, but left a narrow pass through which both the track and the river ran on. A rocky path swung right-handed, rounding some stone-walled cattle enclosures, and took the steep upward slope at a bound; and as Aquila took hold of the mule’s head-gear to help the poor brute, suddenly out of the mist that was growing thicker every moment there loomed on either side of them the great, rough-hewn walls of the first defences. The path squeezed its way through, and plunged on upward. In the softer and more level places it was a slithering quagmire, at others it ran out on to bare, mist-wet rock. Other great ramparts, part man-made, part natural outcrop, loomed through the drifting whiteness as the path went leaping and looping upward; and Aquila sensed people near him, and glimpsed the crouching shapes of turf-roofed bothies among the rocks and hazel scrub, for it seemed that all up the slopes of the fortress hill, wherever there was foothold for a bothy, men had their living-places. But they met nobody until they were about half-way up. Then a young man with a couple of huge, rough-coated hounds in leash came round the next corner out of the mist, and stopped at sight of them. ‘Sa ha! Eugenus! I thought it must be you when I heard that fairy chiming of mule bells. What news of the outer world?’

Eugenus brought his weary mule to a halt. ‘None that cannot wait until I have first seen Ambrosius. What news of the world here, Brychan?’

The other shrugged. ‘What news is there ever, here in the mountains? You have come in a good time, though. Belarius has had his thigh laid open by a boar, and that fool Amlodd doesn’t seem able to do much about it.’

Eugenus sighed. ‘Other men may rest at their journey’s end, but so sure as I return weary from distant parts, somebody waits for me with a fever or a gored leg! Where is he?’

‘In his hut.’

‘I’ll go round and take a look at him as soon as I reach the top—if I ever do. I swear by Æsculapius’s Rod, this track grows steeper and longer as the years go by.’

Eugenus was already urging his mule on again; but the young man still stood directly in his path. A very tall young man in a close-fitting tunic of many-coloured plaid, with a smooth cap of darkly golden hair and a laughing, insolent face. He flicked a long finger towards Aquila. ‘Who is this that you have collected on your travels?’

‘A friend,’ Eugenus said. ‘Maybe he will tell you his name himself, later, if you ask him.’