The Lantern Bearers (book III) (25 page)

Her face never lost its waiting stillness. ‘I know. All Venta hums with that news.’

‘I—spoke with Cradoc your father a while since. He said that because I once turned the blow that was meant for him, he would leave you free to choose for yourself, Ness.’

‘And you? Do you also leave me free to choose for myself?’

‘If you choose your own people, I will not hold you,’ Aquila said.

She rose from the bench and stood facing him, her eyes full of the old challenge. ‘And the child?’

Aquila did not answer at once. The words seemed to stick in his throat and choke him. He looked at the small boy and the hound puppy. ‘Take the Minnow too,’ he said at last, and his voice was hoarse and strained. ‘He is so little, he needs you more than me. Only—let him come back to me when he is of age to bear his shield.’ He pulled himself up. ‘No, you cannot promise that; it might be to send him to fight against his own kind. Take him and keep him, Ness.’

‘A strange man you are, my lord,’ Ness said. ‘Three autumns ago you took me from my father’s hearth as though I were a mere piece of household gear that you did not much want. And now you will let me go—you will let the child go—because, I
think
you would fain have us stay.’

Aquila nodded, wordlessly. He knew so little of Ness, scarcely anything at all; certainly not enough to guess what was going on behind her thin, brown face.

She stared at him a long moment, then flung up her head and began to laugh, on the old clear, wild bird-note, waking the Minnow so that he sat up blinking, puzzled at finding his father suddenly there and startled by his mother’s wild laughter; he clutched the puppy against him for comfort. But her laughter broke in the middle, and she bent her face into her hands. ‘I used to dream night after night of being free; free to go back to my people—my own people … But it is too late. I belong to you now, I and the child.’

It seemed to Aquila that there was suddenly a great quietness all about him. ‘They will say that you betrayed your own people to stay with me,’ he said.

She lifted her face from her hands, with the look of accepting something. ‘I
am
betraying my own people—my own world—to stay with you.’

And suddenly out of the quietness he seemed to hear Flavia’s voice sounding behind Ness’s; Flavia’s pretty voice made hoarse and toneless by grief. ‘Our Lord help me! He is
my
man.’

It was not the same thing. He was not the enemy, as the Saxons were the enemy; he was not one of a band that had killed Ness’s father. Yet he knew that deep down at the heart of things Ness’s choosing and Flavia’s choosing sprang from the same kind of seed. He had a sudden longing, which wasn’t a bit like him now, though it was like the person he had been before the Saxons burned his home, to give Ness things; to bring them and heap them into her lap. New songs and the three stars of Orion’s belt, and honey-in-the-comb, and branches of white flowering thorn at mid-winter; not only for her sake, but for Flavia’s sake as well.

He heard himself giving her the only thing that he had to give in that way; his own voice, hoarse and a little stumbling, begging her to understand and accept what he gave. ‘I had a sister once, Ness. She was carried off by the Saxons when they burned our home. I thought—I prayed—that she was dead, until I found her again years later in the Saxon camp. I would have taken her away with me, but for her also it—was too late, by then. Her name was Flavia.’

It was the first time that he had spoken of his sister in all those years.

Ness made a small gesture with her cupped hands, as though she received a gift into them. ‘Poor Aquila—and poor Flavia—and poor Ness.’

Then a party of horsemen passed cantering up the street beyond the house, and she dropped her hands; and the world outside was back with them again.

Aquila hitched at his sword-belt, thrusting his own affairs into the background. ‘I must be away and see to sending up some of our men to take over the outposts that Vortimer’s people were to have manned.’

He said ‘Vortimer’s people’ not ‘your people’ now, and did not even notice that it was so. Ness noticed, and there was a faint smile on her mouth, bitter and sweet together, like the juice of the crab apple, as she watched him go striding back to his man’s world. Then she turned herself to comfort the Minnow, who, thoroughly upset by all this, had burst into tears.

Somehow Aquila had felt that the desertion of Vortimer’s troops must bring the long struggle to a head, and the future down on them like a tide when the sea-wall goes; and he strode out past the dozing porter into the street again with his hands instinctively making sure that his sword was loose in its sheath, as though he expected already to hear the Saxon war cry rise beyond the walls of Venta, and the clash of weapons at the gates.

Instead, all that summer there was a long, uneasy hush, while the weakened British host waited under arms, to guard their borders from an attack that somehow never came. In the nerve-racking hush, as summer dragged by, news filtered through to them now and again from the rest of Britain. With his followers returned to him after his son’s death, Vortigern was striving to make a stronger stand than he had done of old, striving to make firmer treaties with the Saxons.

‘The fool! The fool!’ Ambrosius said. ‘Of what use to make bargains in the Fire-hall with the Wolf that you have welcomed in over the threshold.’ And he set himself and his Companions with yet grimmer urgency to the task of making an army, and hammering the territories of Calleva and Venta, Aquae Sulis and Sorviodunum into one, after the years of being left to their own devices that had broken them down into separate states and turned their Magistrates, whose forbears had been petty princes, back into petty princes again.

They heard that there was to be a great gathering of the Saxon and Celtic leaders at Durnovaria to make a treaty that would fix for ever the Saxon frontiers in Britain; and they laughed with a small, grim laughter around their watch fires. ‘When the last Sea Wolf is dead, then the Saxon frontiers in Britain will be fixed for all time, and not before.’

At summer’s end, they heard how that gathering had ended.

It had a name by then; the name of ‘The Treachery of the Long Knives’ by which it was to be known for generations to come. In accordance with the usual custom that no man should carry weapons to the council circle, Vortigern and his men had gone unarmed to the gathering. But Hengest’s house carls sitting with them on the same benches at the feasting which followed the council, a Saxon and a Celt alternately, had had each his dirk concealed inside his sleeve (‘Well may the Saxons wear long sleeves’ and ‘Never trust a man with long sleeves,’ said the British for a thousand years). At a given signal each man had ripped out his dagger and stabbed the man on his left. More than a hundred of the Celtic nobles died at that council, but not Vortigern himself. Vortigern, who styled himself High King, had been kept to pay head ransom for his life; and Vortigern had paid it, with the last rags of his pride torn from him, with a dagger at his throat under the thin red beard, and a scribe to write the whole thing down in fair Latin that it might not be denied afterwards; paid it in huge grants of land in the Great Forest and the Down Country and up the Tamesis almost to Londinium.

After that a few of the Celtic party returned to Ambrosius like beaten hounds with their tails between their legs, but for the most part they simply melted away back to their own mountains. Lacking more support—even having to send back some of the troops he had left to help strengthen the western coasts against the Scots pirates—all that Ambrosius could do was to hold his father’s old territory as a kind of island, a fortress within its own frontiers. So almost another year went by, and it was full summer again.

The brown floor of the woods dropped gently away before Inganiad’s hooves; the trunks of the ash trees rose straight and pale on either hand, and the light under the high canopy of leaves was palely green, so that Aquila seemed to be moving under water as one does in an ash wood. He heard the faint jingle of the patrol coming down behind him; no sound of voices, for they were men used to riding quietly in the woods. Young Artos, riding at his side, with Cabal loping along before, cocked up his head suddenly, caught into swift delight.

‘Look, Dolphin—squirrel! There on that branch—Ah, look, there he goes.’

Aquila followed the direction of the boy’s gaze, and saw a streak of reddish fur flicker out along the limb of a tree a little to their right. It clung an instant in the crotch where two branches met, chittering at them angrily, then darted on, out on to the slender, swaying, tipmost spray and, scarcely seeming to spring, was in the next tree, floating and lilting through the branches as though it had no more weight than a wind-blown flame. Then it was gone, only they heard it still chittering in the distance. Artos chittered back, then, laughing, took up the alarm call of a jay.

Silence fell on them again, as they rode on, the reins slack on the horses’ necks, through the woodland ways.

Presently Aquila glanced again at the boy riding beside him. Young Artos was fourteen, with still a year to wait before Ambrosius judged him ready for battle (if it ever came to open battle again), but he had been like a restive colt all that spring, so that Ambrosius had finally sent him up to Aquila, keeping watch on the northern borders, to get the smell of the camp into his nose and begin to be a man. Artos the Bear. In some ways the name suited him, Aquila thought, for already his body under the leather tunic showed signs of great physical strength, and he had something of the clumsiness of a bear cub in his movements, though not when he was on horseback. Artos on horseback was beautiful with the beauty that comes of a thing’s absolute fitness for the purpose for which it was created: a longship at sea, a bird in flight, Artos on horseback.

They were dropping down towards the trackway, the ancient track under the North Chalk, on which, four years ago and forty miles towards the sunrise, Vortimer had held the river line against the host of Hengest. They were out of the straight green aisles of the ash wood now, into the thickets of hazel and alder and crack willow that bordered the track, brushing through the undergrowth with the warm smell of sunshine and open country in their nostrils. Then Artos’s head went up again. ‘Listen.’

Aquila heard it too; the rumble of wheels and the pelting hooves of cattle on the track; and a few moments later they glimpsed through the twig-tangle of the scrub about them a pathetic little convoy coming into sight: a few lean cattle herded by boys ahead of the rest, a couple of ox carts loaded with gear and women and children, several men on ponies, or on foot, two herd dogs. Aquila had seen many such little bands of refugees in the past year, as the Saxons with their new land grants spread farther over the south-east of Britain.

‘More of the poor devils,’ he said over his shoulder to the men behind him, reining Inganiad to a halt. ‘Let them go by before we cross.’

Among the scrub of the wood-shore they sat their horses, waiting. The cattle went by, white to the belly with dust, hot and weary, with low heads and the strings of slime hanging from their soft muzzles; the first ox cart drawn by its patient, wide-horned oxen, its load of sad women and children and kitchen pots and poultry.

‘Those poor people! And Vortigern sitting safe and full fed in his stronghold of Geronwy!’ Artos said fiercely.

Aquila looked at him again, and saw his face white and pinched, and his fists clenched on the reins. Artos was very angry; but it wasn’t anger alone in his face, it was misery. That was always the way with young Artos; a horse or a hound or a man in pain or trouble, and Artos seemed to feel the ache of it in his own belly. It would make life hard for him, harder than it would otherwise have been; but it would also, Aquila thought, make him very much beloved. He turned his attention back to the fugitives on the track. The men on their ponies were spread out on either side, brushing through the meadowsweet that grew thick along the open verge. In the second cart, surrounded by all her household gear, an old woman sat dozing under a great hat of dock leaves, on a rough wicker crate of poultry. In the back of that cart was a heather-thatched bee-skep, carefully wedged in position. And behind the cart, the last of the convoy save for a footsore dog with a frilled wet ribbon of tongue drooling from its open jaws, trudged a man with a bundle on his shoulder; a small, strong man, clearly as footsore as the dog, in a rough, brown tunic powdered white with dust.

Something about him tugged at Aquila’s memory with a kind of half recognition such as one may feel for a figure seen afar off, that begins, as it draws nearer, to take on the look of a friend.

He turned abruptly to Artos. ‘Take the troop back to camp—and see the horses fed and picketed if I have not come by then.’

‘Why—what—?’ Artos began.

‘I go to speak with one of the men down there—an old friend. Take over command, Artos.’

He saw the anger that had been in the boy’s face lost in the sudden pride of his first command, and cast a quick glance over his head to the grim little weather-beaten man behind him; Owain would see that all went well. Then he lifted the reins, sending Inganiad down slantwise towards the track, out of the scrub, parting the creamy surf of meadowsweet that swayed together again behind him, sending up its thick sweetness of scent to mingle with the rising dust. The folk at the rear of the convoy had seen him coming now; they were startled, beginning to huddle as sheep huddle, having seen maybe too many armed men lately. He shouted to them reassuringly; there was nothing to make them afraid; he would speak with the Holy Man, that was all; and he brought Inganiad out on to the track beside the small man with the bundle on his shoulder.

‘Brother Ninnias, is that your bee-skep?’

The man, who had not looked round with the rest to watch him coming, turned to him now with no more show of surprise than he had made at their first meeting; and with the same serene courtesy. Clearly at first he did not recognize him.

‘God’s greeting to you, friend. You know my name, and my bees. Forgive me, and grant me but a moment to remember you.’