The Lantern Bearers (book III) (19 page)

Aquila’s neighbour was a middle-aged man, Cradoc by name, with sandy hair like the ruffled feathers of a bird in a high wind, and a face full of old regrets. He was a Chieftain from farther south, and found all things here in the north of Cymru to be less good than in his own mountains.

‘In Powys,’ he was saying, ‘where I have my hall, the turf is richer even at mid-winter than this valley is now; and the soil is red and strong. I have an apple orchard running to the river, and in the autumn every tree in it bows to the ground under its weight of apples.’ And then, looking regretfully into his cup, ‘Our mead is better than this, too.’

Ambrosius rose in his place, that on other nights was Dogfael the Chieftain’s, holding high his golden cup, and turned to Vortimer beside him. ‘I drink to our friendship, and the new bond between us.’

He drank, and gave the cup to the Young Fox, who took it from him with a bend of the head, and stood for a moment spear-straight in the firelight with the great cup shining between his hands. Then, almost in the act of drinking, he checked, and his head whipped up, as, clear in the hush that had fallen on the hall, from somewhere seaward beyond the village rose a long-drawn cry.

There was a moment’s tingling silence, while the men about the fire looked each into his neighbour’s eyes, and then a scatter of shouting broke out in the village itself.

‘It is in my mind that the Scots wind blows again from Erin,’ Ambrosius said, and stooped for his sword.

As though the action had broken a spell of stillness, a splurge of voices burst up in the hall; and every man had sprung to his feet, catching up his weapons, when a man burst through the doorway into the firelight, crying, ‘The Scots! They’re close in shore, heading for the bay!’

Ambrosius whirled about on them, his light eyes blazing, his sword naked in his hand. ‘We are to fight our first battle together sooner than we thought! Come, my brothers!’

The big, silver-fringed clouds were drifting overhead before a light sea wind as they headed for the shore, joined as they ran by every man and boy in Aber of the White Shells, and the moon rode high in the deep blue of the sky between. The tide was in, covering the sand where they had raced their horses a few hours earlier, and out on the tossing, quicksilver surface of the bay three vessels showed dark: low amidships, high at stem and stern like venomous sea creatures with head and tail upreared to strike: many-legged creatures, for the sails were down and they were creeping in under oars.

‘Down into the cover of the dunes,’ Ambrosius ordered. ‘Let them not see you until the ships are fairly beached and I give the word. So maybe there shall be three Scots ships the less to come raiding our shores in another summer.’ And the order ran from man to man. ‘Get down—keep out of sight!’

As he crouched in the lee of the furze tangle, Aquila’s view of the shore was cut off by the shoulder of the long dune where the stream came through, but that made no odds: there was nothing to do but wait until Ambrosius gave the word … He found that Cradoc was still at his shoulder, suddenly much happier and with the superiority of the south quite forgotten.

‘Sa! This is better than feasting!’ Cradoc said softly.

Aquila nodded, shifting his hand a little on the grip of his buckler. Better than feasting; there was not much pleasure for him in feasting, these days; but in that moment of waiting there was a keen, cold pleasure as sharp as the blade in his hand. The moments passed, silent save for the sea wind in the furze and the creamings of the tide beyond the dunes. Then, very faintly, his straining ears caught the dip of oars; and a shiver of expectancy ran through the waiting men. A few moments more, and there came, faint but unmistakable, the light splash of men slipping overboard and the grating of a keel on the beach. A pause, and then the sounds were repeated as the second galley was run up the sand, the third following so close that Aquila could not tell where one ended and the other began. There was a grumble of orders, and a low, daring laugh. He could hear men splashing ashore through the shallows now; and he drew a deep, slow breath, his body tensing under him like that of a runner in the instant before the white garland falls. And then, on the very crest of the dune before him, Ambrosius rose with a yell, his sword above his head.

‘Now! With me, my brothers!’

They saw him stand for an instant against the drifting sky; then they rose like a wave and swept after him, across the crest and down over the slipping sand.

The three raiders lay in the shallows, their dark bows on shore like so many stranded sea-beasts, and men were swarming up the beach, the moon on their weapons and the lime-whitened discs of their shields. The sea-raiders and the British—for all those who followed Ambrosius were British in that moment, with no thought of Celt or Roman—came together above the tide-line in the soft sand at the foot of the dunes, sword to sword, shield to shield, in a ragged burst of shouting. The Scots, taken by surprise when they had thought the surprise to be on their side, attacked furiously at first, shouting their battle-cry as they closed buckler to buckler and strove to break through; and for a time the fight hung in the balance, as now one side drove forward and now the other, the whole skirmish wavering this way and that like a banner streaming in the wind. Aquila’s ears were full of a great yelling, and the clash and rasp of weapons. The soft, shifting sand clogged his feet and the fine lime-dust from the enemy shields rose white in the moonlight. Cradoc was still at his shoulder, shouting some wild, rhythmic battle-song of his own people that rose and rose above the tumult of the fighting into a kind of triumphant raving that was horrible to hear. From the swaying line of warriors a tall Scot leapt in with war-axe upswung, and Cradoc’s war-song ended in a grunt. Aquila was aware of the place at his shoulder suddenly empty, and the moonlit flash of the axe blade raised to finish the work it had begun, and in the same instant he had sprung astride the fallen man, who was already struggling to his elbow among the trampling feet of the mêlée. He took the blow, as it came whistling down, on his upflung buckler, and the axe blade sheared through the bull’s hide and beaten bronze, so that it was hacked almost in two. He bore down with all his force on the shield with the axe blade still embedded in it, and stabbed wildly with shortened sword point, and saw the Scot fling wide his arms and stagger back, gaping stupidly, as the blow went home.

He realized suddenly that the Scots were beginning to give ground, the wavering of the fighting line going all one way. Stubbornly, valiantly, fighting for every step before yielding it, they were back into the shallows now, the trampled spray sheeting up all about them in the moonlight, falling back more swiftly: no aim left them but to win back to their ships. But around the stranded ships also there was fighting, as more of the British, led by the Young Foxes, flung themselves upon the men who had been left to guard them; and suddenly, from one of the galleys, from another, from the third, yellow tongues of fire shot up, licking about the masts. Someone had brought a fire-brand from the village, and there was to be no escape for this band of raiders. A yell, a howl rose from them as they saw the flames, and they turned as a doomed boar turns at bay, to make their last stand in the shallows about their blazing ships.

The silver of the moon was ousted by the angry gold of the burning vessels as the flames leapt higher, and there was gold in the hollow of every ripple that spread shoreward; gold, and then red … It was over at last, and the glare of the blazing galleys shone on dead men lying like sea-wrack along the tide-line; and the sea wind and the hushing of the tide sounded clear again. The British were taking stock of their own dead and wounded, and Aquila knelt over Cradoc, helping him staunch the blood that ran from the base of his neck.

Cradoc looked up at him with a twisted smile. ‘Sa! It seems that they teach men to fight under the Eagles! It was a good fight; and that I am here to say so instead of lying in the sand with my head smitten from my shoulders is a thing that I owe to you. Also it is a thing that I shall not forget.’

‘In the heat of battle it is no more to ward a blow from a comrade than to ward it from oneself,’ Aquila said. ‘Hold still or I cannot stop this bleeding. It is not a thing for remembering afterwards.’

A few paces off, in the full glare of the flames that leapt from the snarling prow of the nearest galley, Vortimer, with his gay crocus tunic gashed and stained and sodden about him, leaned on his reddened sword and smiled at Ambrosius as he stood in the gilded foam-fringe, starkly outlined against the flames. ‘It is a good covenant, and we have sealed it in blood, which is better than the mead of feasting.’

C
RADOC
had exaggerated the richness of his own valley, Aquila thought, as he rode down from the low saddle of the hills, following the track that the man at the ford in the last valley had pointed out to him. The place was mostly under bracken—bracken beginning to turn now, and patched with bright buttercup gold where it had been cut for litter and not yet carried; and the hall that he glimpsed below him in the bend of the valley, with its huddle of turf bothies around it, was the usual squat, heather-thatched hall of every petty Chieftain, lord of a few mountain valleys, a few hundred cattle, a few score spears. But maybe one’s own valley, when one was away from it, was always richer than anyone else’s; one’s own orchard bore sweeter apples. Maybe even his own valley in the Down Country … He reined back his mind from the memory as he might have reined the red mare Inganiad back from a pit in the track before them.

It was almost a year since he had come up with Eugenus the Physician to take service with the Prince of Britain. A year in which he had made some kind of mended life for himself, some kind of place among Ambrosius’s Companions, some kind of name for himself—and the name, he knew, was not altogether a pleasant one. The dark man with the scarred forehead and the frown always between his eyes had no friends. He went always in a kind of armour, and a man who does that cannot have friends. They called him the Dolphin, as old Bruni had done, because of the pattern on his shoulder; and they called him the Lone Wolf. Felix could have told them that he hadn’t always been like that; Felix, with whom he had laughed, and shot wild fowl over Tanatus Marshes. But Felix was like enough dead by now in the Padus marshes in defence of Rome. They said the Vandals were pressing down Italy again.

Automatically he gathered the mare, steadying her for the stony, downward plunge of the track; but his thoughts went wandering back over the summer that had gone by since the Young Foxes had come in with their Chieftains behind them; the summer that he had spent training men as he had spent winter breaking horses, striving to hammer into wild, mounted tribesmen some idea of what made disciplined cavalry. It was odd to find himself something like a Decurion of Horse again.

Only a few weeks ago they had heard that Vortigern, deserted by his sons and most of his followers, had fled north, to the lands held by Octa and his war bands, and now Ambrosius rode south to hold counsel with his new allies. It was so that Aquila, sent ahead of the main party, was riding down into Cradoc’s valley this still autumn day, to warn him that Ambrosius would be there by dusk, claiming lord’s shelter for himself and his Companions as they passed by.

The Hall and its huddled bothies was drawing nearer, and he saw the hearth-smoke rising blue against the tawny flank of the mountain beyond, and a few people moving about the kale plots and the cattle-byres. The track swung right hand, towards the village, skirting a small orchard, an orchard cradled in the loop of the river, the apples ripe on the dipping branches of the little half-wild trees; and the bright shadow of a song came into his mind.

‘The apples are silver on the boughs, low bending;

A tree of chiming, of singing as the wind blows by.’

But these apples were homely russet, not silver, and no wind stirred the branches; only the still, autumn sunlight slanted through the orchard, casting each tree’s shadow to the foot of the next. But there was movement among the trees, a girl’s laugh, and the flicker of colours under the leaves, dark red and saffron and tawny, and a deep, living blue like a kingfisher’s mantle, and he realized that a group of girls were at the apple-picking.

It seemed that they became aware of the rider on the track at the same moment as he became aware of them. Their laughter stopped, and there was a moment’s hush among the trees, and then two of the girls broke away from the rest, and ran back towards the Chieftain’s Hall as though to carry word of his coming.

He rode on slowly, the bridle loose on Inganiad’s neck. He heard the chink of a smith’s hammer on anvil as he came up between the bracken-thatched bothies, and a woman coming from the weaving-shed with a piece of new cloth over her arm, the long threads still dangling where it had been cut from the loom, turned to watch him as he rode by; and a child and a hound puppy were struggling for possession of a wild cherry branch with the coral and scarlet leaves still upon it. Then, as he rode out into the open space before Cradoc’s hall, he saw the two girls again, waiting for him in the doorway, and realized that they must be Cradoc’s womenfolk and had run ahead to receive him as a stranger should be received, on the threshold of the house.

The taller of the two held a cup between her hands, and as he reined in and dropped from the saddle, she came forward, holding it out to him, saying in a very soft and gentle voice, ‘God’s greeting to you, stranger. Drink, and forget the dust of the journey.’

Aquila took the cup and drank as custom demanded. It was an ancient cup of flame-grained birch inlaid with gold and age-blackened silver, and the drink was mead; a thin mead with the aromatic tang of heather in it. He gave the cup back into her hands, looking at her for the first time, and saw that her hair was bright in the sunshine, brighter than the gold clasp at the shoulder of her tawny kirtle, and he supposed vaguely that she was pretty.