The Lantern Bearers (book III) (21 page)

Winter passed, and spring came to the mountains, the snipe drumming over the matted bog myrtle at the head of the lake, and the purple butterwort in flower among the rocks of the cleft where the little stream came down. Dynas Ffaraon was humming, thrumming with preparations for the march; and all the broad valley below the Dun was an armed camp.

On a close, still evening Aquila sat beside Valarius at supper in the Fire-hall, his legs outstretched beneath the table on which he leaned, his platter of cold bear ham almost untouched before him. The great hall, crowded with leaders from the camp, was hot, despite the earliness of the year; too close and airless to eat, with the heavy, brooding closeness of coming storm. Also there were things in his stomach that came between him and food. Only a few hours since, he had ridden in with his squadron from Segontium, and all evening he had been with Ambrosius and his captains in council. Everything was settled now, as far as it could be in advance. The Cran-tara had been sent out days ago, the stick dipped in goat’s blood and charred at one end, whose summons no tribesman might disobey. They were to host at Canovium, four days from now. That was for northern Cymru. Powys and the south were to join them later on the line of march. Aquila glanced again at the strangers sitting beside Ambrosius in the High Place, men in Roman tunics and with clipped hair and beards. They too had ridden in only a few hours since, bringing Ambrosius word from the Roman party of the support that waited for him in Venta and Aquae Sulis, Calleva and Sorviodunum, the cities of his father’s old lowland territories. Bringing also word of another kind from the world beyond the mountains; word that for the second time Rome had fallen.

They had known for years that there was no more help to be had from Rome, that they were cut off. But now they were not merely cut off, but
alone
—the solitary outpost of an empire that had ceased to exist. Aquila’s thoughts were suddenly with his old troop from Rutupiae garrison, the men of his own world whom he had known and served with; the old optio, who had taught him all he knew of soldiery and whose teaching he was now sweating in his turn to hammer into his wild mountain tribesmen; Felix, dead under the blazing walls of Rome. He jibed at himself for a fool; Felix and his troop might have been dead any time these four years past, they might have been drafted to the Eastern Empire, and be feasting safe in Constantinople tonight. But still the sense of loss was with him.

A woman bent over him to refill the cup that stood empty by his hand. He looked up, vaguely expecting it to be Ness, for the women generally poured for their own men in hall, but it was the wife of one of the other captains; and when he came to think of it, he had seen no sign of Ness in Hall this evening. The woman smiled at him, and passed on. He realized suddenly that men were beginning to leave the Hall, rising as they finished their meal, and taking their weapons and going. There was so much to be done; no time for sitting and staring at nothing. The waiting time was over.

He began to eat again, hurriedly.

‘Sixteen years we have waited for this coming down from the mountains,’ Valarius said beside him, rather thickly. ‘Sixteen crawling years since Constantine was murdered.’

Aquila looked round at him. ‘You were one of those who got Ambrosius and his brother away to safety after that happened, weren’t you?’

Valarius took a long, loud drink from his mead cup, and set it down a little unsteadily, before he answered. ‘Aye.’

‘That must be a proud thing for you; now that the waiting time is over and he comes down to take his father’s place.’

‘Proud? I leave pride to the other two—to old Finnen with his harp and Eugenus with his draughts and stinking salves.’

There was a kind of raw, jeering bitterness in his voice, under the thickness of the mead, that startled Aquila, and he asked quickly, ‘What do you mean?’

‘Eugenus was Constantine’s physician, Finnen was Constantine’s harper; not to them the shame,’ Valarius said dully after a moment. ‘
I
was one of Constantine’s bodyguard—yet Constantine died at a murderer’s hand.’

There was a small silence. Aquila was suddenly remembering the scene of Aber of the White Shells, remembering that rage of Valarius’s that had seemed out of all proportion to Brychan’s jibe. Odd, he thought, how little one knew about people. He had lived and worked with Valarius for more than a year, and never known anything about him but that he drank too much and was the ruins of a good soldier, never known that for sixteen years he had carried shame with him as a man might carry a scar, a bodily hurt hidden from the eyes of other men. Maybe it was because the waiting was over and they stood on the edge of a great struggle and that somehow loosened things, maybe it was because of his own feeling of loss for Felix—something in him reached out to the older man, stiffly, rather painfully because it was so long since he had reached out to another human being, and he said with unaccustomed gentleness, ‘Assuredly Ambrosius has not thought of the thing in that way.’

‘But I have,’ Valarius said. And it seemed that there was no more to be said.

Aquila finished his own meal quickly, and went out into the dusk. He went first to make sure that all was well down at the horse-lines and with his troop; then made for his own bothy. The skin apron was drawn back from the doorway and there was fresh bracken on the floor; a tallow candle burned low and guttering on the carved kist that held Ness’s clothes, and his own; everything in readiness for him, but no sign of Ness here either.

He stood for a while with his hand on the door post and his head ducked under the lintel, thinking. He was bone weary, and on any other night he would simply have slipped his sword-belt over his head and flung himself down on the piled fern of the bed-place, to sleep. But tonight, because Rome had fallen and Felix was dead, because of Valarius’s shame, the empty hut seemed horribly lonely, and there was a small aching need in him for somebody to notice, even if they were not glad, that he had come home. That frightened him, because it was only as long as you did not need anybody else that you were safe from being hurt. But after a few moments he pinched out the candle and went in search of Ness, all the same.

He thought he knew where to find her: in the little hollow of the bush-lined cleft where he had once found Artos and his hound watching for a grass snake. He had found her there once before, and she had told him, ‘It is a good place. It looks south, and if I close my eyes to shut out the mountains in between, I can see the apples budding in my father’s orchard.’

It was full dark now, though the flat-topped clouds massing above the pass to the coast were still touched with rose-copper on their under-bellies. The air was without freshness, lying like warm silk over one’s face, and the stars were veiled in faint thunder-wrack. Certainly there was a storm coming, Aquila thought, as he made his way round the curve of the hill below the inner rampart, and plunged into the twisting cleft among the rocks. The thin, silver plash of the water under the ferns sounded unnaturally loud in the stillness, and the faint honey scent of the blackthorn breathed up to him. Looking down as he scrambled lower, he saw the pale blur of the blossoms like foam on dark water, where the thorn trees leaned together over the little hollow in the rocks—and the pale blur of a face suddenly turned up to him.

‘Ness! What are you doing here?’ he demanded, slithering to a halt just above her. ‘There’s going to be a storm.’

‘I like storms,’ said Ness composedly.

‘And so you come down here to meet this one, instead of being in Hall this evening?’

He could not see her face, save as a paleness among the cloudier paleness of the blackthorn blossom, but he heard the old challenge in her voice. ‘Why should I be in Hall? I have not the second sight to know that my lord would ride in tonight.’

‘But you did know it, didn’t you, before you came out here? You left all ready for me in the bothy.’

‘What is it, then, that you complain of ? Did no one feed you?’

‘A woman brought me cold meat and bannock and kept my wine cup filled,’ Aquila said, coldly angry now, and not quite sure why. ‘And when I looked up, it was Cordaella, Cenfirth’s wife, and not you.’

‘I wonder that you noticed the difference.’

Aquila leaned down towards her over his bent knee. ‘There is a simple reason for that,’ he said, repaying her in her own coin. ‘Cordaella smiled at me, so I knew that she could not be you.’

Ness sprang up to face him with a movement as swiftly fierce as the leap of a mountain cat. ‘And why should I smile at you? For joy that you took me from my father’s Hall?’

‘You know why I took you,’ Aquila said after a moment.

‘Yes, you told me. For the strengthening of a bond between your people and mine.’ She was breathing quickly, the fierce white blur of her face turned up to his. ‘Oh, I know that you did not want me, any more than I wanted you. The thing was forced on both of us. It was not that you took me, but the
way
that you took me—’ She began to laugh on a hard, mocking note that made him long to hit her; and as though her wild laughter had called it up, and there was some kinship between her and the coming storm, a long, dank breath of wind came sighing up the cleft, thick with the smell of thunder and the thin, honey sweetness of the blackthorn flowers, and a flicker of lightning played between the dark masses of the mountains. ‘It was not that you laughed at Rhyanidd about the pig, but the
way
that you laughed. It is never the things that you do, but the way that you do them. You took me from my father’s hearth as you might have taken a dog—no, not a dog; I have seen you playing with Cabal’s ears and gentling him under the chin—as you might have taken a kist or a cooking-pot that you did not much value. Did you never think that I might have knifed you with your own dagger one night, and been away in the darkness? Did you never think that there might have been someone of my own people whom I loved, and who—might have come to love
me
?’

There was a long silence, filled with the soft uneasy fret of that swiftly rising wind. Aquila’s anger ebbed slowly out of him, leaving only a great tiredness behind. ‘And was there, Ness?’

The fire had sunk in her also, and her voice was spent and lifeless. ‘Yes,’ she said.

‘I am sorry,’ Aquila said stiffly, awkwardly.

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter now. He is dead. He was killed hunting, nine days ago. Rhyanidd sent me word by the messenger for Ambrosius that came up yesterday.’

‘I am sorry,’ Aquila said again. There seemed nothing else to say.

He knew that she was looking at him intently, as though for her the darkness was daylight. ‘I wonder if you are,’ she said at last. ‘I wonder if you have it in you to be sorry about anything—or glad … ’

‘I had once,’ Aquila said harshly. He made a small, helpless gesture. ‘We march against the Saxons in two days’ time, and maybe you will be loosed from me soon enough. Meanwhile, come back to the bothy before the storm breaks.’

She drew away a little. ‘Let you go back and sleep dry in the warm deerskins. I like storms; did I not tell you? This is my storm, and I am waiting for it. It will be bonnier company than you are to me.’

The wind was blowing in long, fitful gusts now, the blackthorn branches streaming like spray; and a white flicker of lightning showed him Ness with her unbound hair lifting and flying about her head as she crouched against the rocks behind her. She looked like something that belonged to the storm; and how he was to deal with her, now that he had lost his anger, he simply did not know. But deal with her he would; the determination not to be worsted by her rose in him, mingled with a kinder feeling that he could not leave her here to be drenched and beaten by the storm; and he reached out and caught her wrist. ‘Come, Ness.’ He pulled her towards him and caught her other wrist, not at all sure that if he left it free she would not indeed try to knife him with his own dagger.

She struggled wildly for a moment, and then suddenly it was as though all her fighting was spent. She was leaning weakly against him, and if it had been Rhyanidd, he would have thought that she was crying, the quiet crying of utter desolation. But surely Ness would not know how to cry. The first low rumble of thunder was muttering among the mountains. ‘Come, Ness,’ he said again. He released her one wrist, and still grasping the other, turned back to the steep climb; and with a little harsh, exhausted sigh, Ness came.

But he had no feeling of victory.

I
N
front of Aquila the main street of Durobrivae ran uphill, deserted in the evening sunlight. The town must have been growing emptier for years, falling gradually into decay, as happened to most of the towns nearest to the Saxon country, until now, before the threat of the Saxon inrush, the few people who were left had streamed away westward. The utter, heart-cold emptiness made Aquila think suddenly of Rutupiae on the night the last of the Eagles flew from Britain. Nothing left alive in Durobrivae but a half-wild yellow cat sitting on a wall; a stillness so complete that the shadow of a wheeling gull sweeping across the cobbles seemed important.

That was in front. Behind Aquila and the knot of champions who stood with him at the town end of the bridge was the ring of axes on heavy timbers, and a hoarse shouting of orders; all the sounds of desperate activity, of labour against time. Time. Aquila sent a swift glance over his shoulder to see how the bridge-felling was going forward. Men were swarming over the long, timber-built bridge, townsmen and Celtic warriors labouring side by side. He saw the blink of axes in the evening light, as they rose and fell, crashing into the bridge timbers; and Catigern, the second of the Young Foxes, standing in the midst of his men, directing operations, the sunset turning his red hair to the colour of fire. It was a wild sunset, beyond the low, wooded hills, touching woods and marshes and mudflats with its own singing gold, and kindling the water to flame. It seemed to Aquila, in that one swift glance before he turned face forward again, somehow fitting that they should fight with the sunset behind them.