The Lantern Bearers (book III) (23 page)

And then at last they swept forward after the Saxon kind.

When winter came, putting an end to fighting for the next few months, the Saxons were back to the territory from which they had swarmed out in the spring; and settling the better part of his host in winter camps at Durobrivae and Noviomagus, Ambrosius marched the rest back to Venta Belgarum, that had been Constantine’s old capital and would now be his.

He rode in through the streets of Venta in a sleet storm, with a bitter wind blowing; and all the city seemed cold and grey and falling derelict. Aquila, riding through the streets that he had known when he was a boy, saw how far the grass had encroached into the roadways in five years. He saw faces that he knew among the crowds, though none of them knew him, and it seemed to him that on them also the grass had encroached. But there was warmth in Venta that day, for besides the Magistrates and chief citizens who had met them at the city gate, there were many to cry a welcome to Ambrosius; a child threw a branch of glowing winter berries under his horse’s hooves, and an old man called out to him, ‘I knew your father, sir! I served under him in the old days!’ and was rewarded by the swift smile even more than by the coin which the slight, dark man on the black stallion tossed down to him.

‘You are at home among your own people here, as surely as ever you were at Dynas Ffaraon,’ Aquila said to him later that night, when the Magistrates and the chief citizens had departed, and a few of the Companions stood together round the fire in a small side chamber of the old Governor’s Palace.

Ambrosius turned his cold hands before the fire, spreading them so that the light shone through between his fingers. ‘At home.’ He looked up to the high, dark window; and Aquila knew that through the darkness of the sleet-spattered glass in which the reflections of the firelight danced, he was seeing the remote crests of the Arfon skyline, the snow corries of Yr Widdfa; smelling the sweet, cold air of the mountains, and saying his farewells. ‘Yes, at home, and among my own people. I even saw certain faces that I knew among the crowds today—and they remembered me for my father’s and my grandfather’s sakes. One day they may remember me for my own.’

W
HEN
spring came, Aquila was in the mountains again, sent up with an escort of cavalry to bring down the women and children. Little, grim Owain, riding beside him in the rear of the long, winding cavalcade, had been angrily disgusted when Aquila chose him for his second in command of the escort. It was one thing to stand beside the Dolphin to keep Durobrivae Bridge from the Saxons, quite another to follow him away westward when the fighting was just about to start again. He had gloomed all through the lowlands, his narrow, weather-burned face shut like a trap; but the thin mountain air, the wild, free tang of spring among his own hills had lightened his mood little by little until now he was whistling to himself softly as he rode; and the whistling rose small and clear as a distant bird-call above the soft beat of hooves and creak of harness-leather, the wheel-rumble of the oxcarts and the cries of the carters.

Aquila did not whistle, and kept most of his thoughts for the business of getting the ox carts through the soft places. But in him, too, something answered to the blackthorn breaking into flower beside the way, and the plover calling. It was almost a year since he had ridden down from Dynas Ffaraon behind Ambrosius, almost a year since he had seen Ness. He was not sure what he felt about seeing her again, but he wondered a little how it had gone with her through the months between.

‘Ah-ee! There it stands against the sky, as though we had been but an hour away,’ Owain said, breaking off his whistling, and spitting with satisfaction between his horse’s ears.

And Aquila realized that he had been riding without seeing anything for the past mile.

They had sent one of their number on ahead with word of their coming, and men were waiting for them in the cattle enclosures at the foot of the fortress hill. There were hurried greetings, and leaving the tired oxen and the carts in charge of the men who had come to meet them, they set off up the steep track to the inner gateway. In a little while they were clattering between the huge, square-cut gate-timbers; weary men dropping from their saddles, suddenly the centre of a little crowd that seemed to spring out of nowhere to greet them: a crowd of women, for the most part, for there would be few men in the Dun at this hour of the day, with the sun still high in the sky; women asking for news of sons or husbands, and small, excited children who must be scooped back out of danger from the horses’ hooves; and a swarm of half-grown boys led by young Artos and his hound Cabal, who had come running from sword-and-buckler practice at sound of the escort’s arrival. But in all the crowd there was no sign of Ness. Aquila, watching the horses fed and rubbed down and picketed, glanced round for her more than once, but he was not really surprised at not finding her there. Ness had always been good at not being there when he returned from a time away, and it was not likely that she would change now.

He could not bring himself to ask any of the women for news of her, but so much could have happened in a year, and he began to feel vaguely anxious in spite of himself. ‘See to the rest of the picket lines,’ he said suddenly to Owain, and, turning, thrust out through the little throng towards the gateway and the bothies below the rampart. Some of the women looked after him, and glanced at each other smiling after he had gone. But he did not know that.

His own bothy was partly hidden from this side by an outcrop of rock, so that one could not see it clearly from a distance, but came upon it suddenly. And when he did so now, what he saw pulled him up short, with a feeling of having walked into complete unreality. Ness sat in the bothy doorway with something kicking in a nest of deerskin at her feet. She was bending down to look at the thing, and singing almost under her breath; a fainter, huskier singing than the one that Flavia had made when he found her in the Saxon camp, but with a like crooning note in it. Something seemed to catch Aquila by the throat, making it for the moment hard to breathe. But at least she was not combing her hair. She was spinning, the brown of the crotal-dyed wool on her distaff as deeply rich as the velvet of a bee’s back, and the whirling spindle singing its own small, contented song in a kind of undertone to hers.

Then, as he took another step forward and his shadow fell across her feet, she looked up. ‘I heard that you were come,’ she said, as though he had been gone a day instead of a year.

Aquila looked down at the babe in the deerskin, and then at Ness; he felt stupid, woolly headed, as though for the moment he could not properly understand. Ness had not told him before he went away; maybe she had not known herself, or—maybe she would not have told him anyway.

‘Ness—is it mine?’

She laughed, on that hard, mocking, wild bird-note of hers, and laid down spindle and distaff, and stooping, caught up the little creature still muffled in its deerskin, holding it close against her. ‘Oh, my lord, look then! Do you not see that he has your eagle’s beak for a nose, though there is no blue dolphin on his shoulder?’

Aquila looked more closely. The babe did not seem to him to have much nose at all, but he supposed that women saw these things differently. It had a little dark down on its head, like a curlew chick, and out of its small face two solemn, dark eyes frowned up at him, wandering a little, as the eyes of most very young things do before they have learned to focus.

‘He even frowns as you do!’ Ness said. She was still laughing, mocking him, but there was less harshness in her mockery than there had used to be.

Aquila put out a bent finger and brushed the baby’s cheek with his knuckle. It felt extraordinarily soft and alive. A son, he thought, and there was a queer, rather painful stirring deep down in him. This small, living creature frowning up at him out of the soft folds of deerskin was his son; what he had been to his father.

‘Have you given him a name?’

‘Nay, that is for you to do.’

There was a little silence filled with the living sounds of the Dun and the warm droning of a bee among the cushions of wild thyme that clung to a ledge of the outcrop close by. Then Aquila said, ‘I shall call him Flavian.’

‘Flavian?’ She seemed to be testing the name on her tongue. ‘Why Flavian?’

‘It was my father’s name.’

Another silence, longer than the first. ‘So. I have learned two things about my lord,’ Ness said at last. ‘My lord had a father, and his name was Flavian … Na, three things—’ Her voice had lost its mocking note; and looking up, he found her watching him with something of the air of one making a discovery. ‘My lord loved his father. I did not think that it was in my lord to love anyone.’

Before he could answer, a pad of feet and a clear whistle sounded above, and Artos came leaping down the outcrop with the great hound Cabal at his bare, brown heels, full of questions about the return journey and demands to be allowed to ride with the escort. And for a while Aquila had no more time for his own affairs.

The next morning Aquila saw his wife and son into the foremost of the ox carts, along with the other women and children going to join their men. She settled herself in the tail of the cart, drawing her cloak forward about herself and the baby in the crook of her arm; and as Aquila stowed her bundle in after her, an older woman with three children clinging about her leaned forward from the interior of the cart, to help her settle, saying as she did so, ‘The little one grows fatter now. Has he a name yet?’

‘Yes,’ Ness said, ‘he has a name. He is Flavian.’

‘Flavian.’ The other woman seemed to be testing the name as Ness herself had done. ‘What a man’s name, and he so small! Nothing but a minnow.’

Ness looked down at the little creature bundled in her cloak, pressing back the dark green folds with her free hand. ‘Minnow,’ she said, and then a surprising thing happened, for her eyes went to Aquila, sharing the little warm laughter of the moment in the way that she had never shared anything with him before. ‘Minnow, Dolphin’s son.’

Aquila touched her foot briefly in acceptance of the laughter; then turned away to mount Inganiad at the head of the escort.

He was very proud because he had a son; and for the first time in six years, as he led the long, winding convoy of horsemen and ox carts down the road to Canovium, the time ahead seemed to hold something for him.

Young Artos rode between Aquila and Owain on his own pony, with the great hound Cabal loping alongside. They had listened to his demand to be one of the escort, and he rode with his pride shining about him like a scarlet cloak, and his hand on his hunting-knife as though the familiar glens of Arfon through which the track wound were suddenly overnight swarming with Saxons.

‘I go to help Ambrosius,’ he said, not shouting it, but speaking head up into the mountain wind. ‘Soon we shall drive the Sea Wolves back into the sea!’

But it was not to be so simple as that, for despite their hopes last spring, the British were not strong enough to drive the Sea Wolves into the sea. Again and again in the next two years they hurled the Saxons back into the southeast corner of the province, only to have them come swarming out once more as soon as their own thrust was spent. And with the war bands strengthening all the while under Octa in the north, and more coming in down every Saxon wind like the wild geese in October, the menace remained as deadly as ever.

‘If we could have one great victory!’ Ambrosius cried. ‘One victory to sound like a blast of trumpets through the land! Then we should gather to our standard not merely a gallant handful here and there, but the princes of the Dumnonii and the Brigantes with their whole princedoms behind them. Then we might indeed have a Britain whole and bonded together to drive the Sea Wolves into the sea!’

Meanwhile they struggled with the age-old question of how to fight any kind of war with an army that wanted to go home in mid campaign to harvest its own fields, and when it came back, if it did come back, had mostly forgotten its training; struggled also to make one host, one heart, out of lowland Roman and mountain Celt; and so far as the Celts were concerned, it was uphill work.

With the men of Arfon it was well enough; the unbreakable tie between the Chieftain and his warriors bound them to Ambrosius, who was the very heart of the whole movement; but with those who had come in following the Young Foxes, it still seemed to Aquila that one could not be sure.

He spoke of his doubts to Eugenus the Physician, towards dusk of a winter’s day, as they walked back together from the baths.

‘Ye-es, I have long carried a somewhat uneasy mind on that score myself,’ Eugenus said, his words muffled by the folds of his cloak that he had huddled almost to his eyebrows, for in spite of his fat he felt the cold. ‘Despite all Ambrosius’s efforts, despite the friendships—and the marriages—that have sprung up between us, I believe, most sadly, that the only thing that really holds the Celts to our banner is Vortimer. One man’s life is a perilously slender thread. It’s a solemn thought, my friend.’

Aquila glanced aside at him as they walked. ‘There’s young Pascent. He’ll keep faith, I’ll swear.’

‘Aye, but he’s no leader—he’s too good a follower.’ There was a smile in the other’s voice, for, like everyone else, he liked Pascent. ‘He is the stuff that the very best household warriors are made of, brave as a boar and faithful as a hound; but it is not in him to hold the Celtic party, as Vortimer can.’

They walked on in silence, each busy with his own unquiet thoughts, through the winter dusk.

As they walked, the dusk that rose like quiet, grey water in the shabby streets of Venta was rolling in blue and faintly misty over the high northern moors that Octa and his war bands had overrun. And a woman with red-gold hair and eyes that were the shifting grey-green of shallow seas was bending over the fire in a stone-built hut where the blackened heather swept to the walls. She was holding a big leather hawking glove turned inside out, and as she bent forward the firelight darted on the short, bronze pin projecting from the stitching of the thumb. There was a wisp of sheep’s wool in her other hand, and she dipped it again and again into the few drops of some thick, greyish fluid in a bowl among the hot ashes, and painted the bright sliver of metal with infinite care, as one handling a viper’s fang. All the while she crooned softly, words in a tongue much older than the Saxons’ tongue. Many things had gone to the making of those few drops of greyish fluid, and there were charms for them all, to make them do their work more surely. Each time, she let the stuff dry, then painted it again, until the brightness of the bronze was dimmed and darkened as with a grey rust. Then, with the same infinite care, she turned the glove right side out—it was a beautiful glove of honey-pale mare’s skin, embroidered with hair-fine silver wires and silk as deeply blue as the hooded flowers from whose root the woman had distilled her chiefest poison—and laid it aside. She burned the wisp of wool, and broke the little earthen pot and dropped the pieces into the red heart of the fire.