The Lantern Bearers (book III) (28 page)

‘Sa, sa! my young fighting cock!’ Brychan stood looking down at him an instant, laughing again, his darkly golden head seeming very far up among the twisted branches of the damson tree. ‘What it is to be a son, and what it is to have one!’ and he swung on his heel and went with his long, lazy stride across the court and disappeared into the shadows of the colonnade.

Aquila looked down at his son. If only they could have had a little longer, he thought, they might have begun to know each other. Now maybe there wouldn’t be another chance. Even if he came back, it would probably be too late, and the time would have gone by. He saw suddenly how the buds were swelling on the damson tree, and it came to him that he had never seen the damson tree in flower. The Saxons came before the buds broke.

‘Back to bed with you,’ he said, and picked up his son, very silent now, and carried him back into his sleeping cell and set him down on the bed.

‘What did you begin to say, before Brychan came?’ Flavian asked.

‘Did I begin to say anything? I have forgotten.’ Aquila gave him a hurried and awkward hug, and strode out, shouting to one of the stable slaves to bring round Inganiad; then went to pick up his saddle bag and find Ness.

A
FEW
days later, on the fringe of the Tamesis Valley, the British and Saxon war hosts met in battle; and five days later still, terribly, shamefully, unbelievably, the leaders of both sides met in the Basilica at Calleva, to discuss an agreed peace.

The Basilica at Calleva had been burned down, like most of the town, in the troubles that ended the reign of Emperor Allectus a hundred and fifty years ago, and, like the rest of the town, rebuilt on its own blackened rubble. Standing with the other British leaders at the council table that had been set up on the tribunal dais, Aquila could see by the clumsier workmanship where the new walls joined on to the old ones; even the stain of the burning, reddish as a stain of almost washed-out blood, showed up in the dusty sunlight that fell through the high clerestory windows of the vast hall. Odd how one noticed things like that—things that didn’t matter, when the Lord God knew that there were things enough that did, to think about …

What had happened five days ago? How had it come about, this grey state of things between defeat and victory? The slackening of an army’s fibre through too many years of waiting? ‘Have we waited too long?’ he had said to Brychan when the order came to march. ‘We had something once—something that wins battles. Have we got it still?’ And Brychan had said, ‘We have got Artos.’ That had been a true word; they had got Artos, whose crashing cavalry charges had wrenched a drawn battle out of what would otherwise have been a British defeat. He glanced aside, and saw the tall, mouse-fair head upraised above the heads of the other men round Ambrosius’s chair. Ambrosius was one whom men followed for love, into the dark if need be, but Artos was already one whom men would feel that they were following into the light; a great burst of light that had somehow the warmth of laughter in it as well as the sound of trumpets. But not even Artos had been able to drag victory out of that battle five days ago. Aquila’s eye went for an instant in search of Brychan, before he remembered that Brychan was dead, like Inganiad. Not for the red mare the old age in quiet meadows that he had planned for her … Strange, the tricks that your mind could play, so that you forgot for a moment, as though it were a light thing, that your sword brother was dead.

He looked at Hengest, sitting on the far side of the table with his leaders about him. He was a little more grey, a little less golden than he had been on the night that Rowena made her singing magic, a little broader and heavier of body, but with the same shifting, grey-green light in his eyes; the same womanish trick of playing with the same string of raw amber round his neck as he sat sideways in his chair, his other hand on the narwhal ivory hilt of his sword, and watched Ambrosius under his brows.

Ambrosius was speaking levelly and a little harshly, putting into a few words the thing that they had been arguing about, it seemed to Aquila, for hours. ‘Assuredly it goes as hardly with you as with us, to speak of an agreed peace, O my enemy. Yet weakened as we both of us are by the battle that we have fought, we must both of us know that there is no other road that we can take. You cannot sleep secure in your new settlements, knowing that we may be upon your flanks at any hour, and that we are too strong for you to crush us out of existence. We, alas, are not strong enough to drive you into the sea. And so the matter stands.’

The heavy creases in Hengest’s wind-bitten cheeks deepened in a ferocious smile. ‘And so the matter stands.’ His eyes never leaving Ambrosius’s face, he leaned forward, and dropping his hand from the amber about his neck, made on the table the unmistakable gesture of a man moving a piece on a chess-board. ‘Stalemate. It remains only, O my enemy, to draw a frontier between us.’

Ambrosius rose, pulled his dagger from the crimson scarf knotted about his waist, and, bending forward a little, he drew a long curved line on the table, crossing it with a straight one, then another, the sharp point of the dagger scoring cruelly deep into the fine, polished citron wood with a sound that set one’s teeth on edge. Ambrosius, the last leader of Rome-in-Britain, was very quiet, very controlled, very civilized; but the searing, screeching line of the dagger’s wake, white on the precious wood, showed his mood clearly enough. Aquila, watching, saw the familiar map beginning to take shape, the map that he had seen drawn so often in charred stick beside the hearth at Dynas Ffaraon, now scratched with a dagger on a polished table-top, for the making of an agreed frontier with the barbarians.

Hengest, who had been frowning down at the thing growing on the table-top, bent forward suddenly with a grunt. ‘Sa! A picture of a land! I have seen the country so—spread out—when I lay on the High Chalk and looked down as an eagle might.’

‘A picture of a land,’ Ambrosius said. ‘Here is Aquae Sulis, here Cunetio, here runs the High Chalk, and here’—he stabbed downward with the dagger and left it quivering in the table between them—‘we stand in the Basilica at Calleva Atrebatum, talking of a frontier.’

They talked long, very long, and heavily and hotly, before at last the matter was talked out; and Ambrosius plucked up his dagger again and drew one great, jagged furrow screeching across the map, from agreed point to agreed point, making of Calleva almost a frontier town. He drew it with careful precision, but so deeply that Aquila saw his wrist quiver.

‘So, it is done,’ Hengest said. ‘Now swear,’ and took from the breast of his ring-mail byrnie a great arm-ring of beaten gold, and laid it on the table, midway across the frontier that Ambrosius had drawn.

Ambrosius looked down at it, shining in the cool, greenish light of the great hall. ‘On what am I to swear?’

‘On Thor’s ring.’

‘Thor is not my God,’ Ambrosius said. ‘I will swear by the name of my own God, and in the words that have bound my people for a thousand years. If we break faith in this peace that has been agreed between your people and mine, may the green earth open and swallow us, may the grey seas roll in and overwhelm us, may the sky of stars fall on us and crush us out of life for ever.’

Hengest smiled, a little contemptuously. ‘So, I accept it. And now I swear for my people on Thor’s Ring.’ He rose as he spoke, his great hand was on the ring. ‘Hear me, Thor the Thunderer, hear me swear for my people, that we also keep the faith.’

There was a silence, echoing in the high emptiness of the hall; then Ambrosius said, ‘And now all that is left is to choose the men from either host who are to trace out the frontier.’

Hengest’s eyes narrowed a little. ‘One thing more.’

‘So? And what is that?’

‘The question of hostages.’

That time the silence was a long one, broken only by a quick and furious movement from Artos, instantly stilled. Then Ambrosius said, ‘Is a most sacred oath, then, not a thing to be relied upon?’

‘A hostage who is dear to his lord makes it yet more to be relied upon,’ Hengest said, inexorably.

Ambrosius’s hand on his dagger-hilt clenched until the knuckles shone white as the scars that he had made on the polished citron wood. He looked at Hengest for a long moment, eye into eye.

‘Very well,’ he said at last; and the words, though icily clear, sounded as though his lips were stiff. He turned his head, and looked consideringly into face after face of the men about him. Artos looked back, smiling a little from his great height; Pascent’s face was wide open to him, both of them offering themselves. But his dark gaze passed them over and came to rest on the pouchy, slack-lined face of the man who had been one of his father’s bodyguard. ‘Valarius, will you do this for me?’

Aquila saw an odd look in the older man’s face, as though the blurred lines grew clearer, saw his head go up with a new pride. ‘Yes, sir, most joyfully I will do this for you,’ Valarius said.

One or two of the Saxons muttered together, and Hengest said, ‘Who, then, is this man that you offer as hostage?’

‘Valarius, one of my father’s bodyguard, to whom I owe my life,’ Ambrosius said, ‘and my friend.’

Hengest looked from the Prince of Britain to the old soldier and back again, studying both faces under his brows, and nodded. ‘So be it, then. For my own hostage—’

Ambrosius cut him short, in that voice as smooth as a sword blade that Aquila had heard only once before. ‘I ask no hostage in return. If Hengest is not bound by his sacred oath, I do not believe that the life of one of his hearth-companions will bind him. Therefore I accept his oath alone, though he does not accept mine.’

If he had hoped to reach some kind of chivalry in his enemy, the hope was a vain one. Hengest merely shrugged his great shoulders, his flickering stare still on Ambrosius’s face. ‘It is for Ambrosius to do as he chooses,’ he said. But the flickering gaze said as clearly as could be, that if Ambrosius chose to be a fool . .

Aquila stood leaning on his spear beside the gap in the bank and ditch where the road came through, and looked away north-eastward. Almost from his feet the land began its gentle, undulating fall-away to the smoke-blue distances of the Tamesis Valley: wood and pasture and winding water, all blurred over with a blueness that was like smoke. It might have been the smoke of burning cities, but the Saxons had not burned the cities. They had looted sometimes, but for the most part, having no use for town life, they had simply left the cities alone to live as best they could, to grow emptier and poorer, and fall more and more into decay, until the few people left in them drifted out at last to the Saxon way of life. It was all Saxon land down there now.

Summer was nearly gone, the sixth summer since Hengest and Ambrosius had faced each other across the council table at Calleva Atrebatum; and the goldfinches were busy among the silk-headed seeding thistles in the ditch, and the hawthorn bushes of the slopes below were already growing red as rust with berries, though there were still harebells in the grass of the bank beside Aquila, where the turf was tawny as a hound’s coat. Five years ago that bank had been bare, chalky earth, raw with newness; a dyke cast up to mark the frontier between two worlds where it crossed the open downs and had nothing else to mark it; now it looked as old and settled in its ways as the downs themselves.

A faint waft of woodsmoke came to Aquila on the evening air, mingling with the warm, dry scent of the turf, and a horse whinnied, and somebody began to sing, and he heard the rattle of a bucket from the huddled bothies of the guard-post behind him. They had not had guards along the downs at first, but the years of peace had grown more strained and uneasy as they went by, and the simple line had become little by little a guarded frontier. Aquila, who had spent much of those five years on the frontier, thought sometimes that he knew something of what it must have been like on Hadrian’s Wall in the old days; the long waiting with one’s eyes always on the north; not enough to do, yet never able to relax. And behind the frontiers, as those five years went by, Ambrosius, with Artos at his shoulder, had been at the old struggle to keep their fighting men together, to make some kind of oneness with their neighbours, against the time when the war hosts of Britain and the barbarians crashed together again. For, despite oaths and hostages, all men knew that that time would come one day. Last year there had been so much unrest along the borders that they had thought it was upon them. But this year had passed more quietly again; and now the campaigning season was almost over.

The light was beginning to fade, and he was on the point of turning away to go down to the guard-post for the evening meal, when his eye was caught by a movement among the bushes lower down the slope.

He checked, instantly alert, watching for it to come again. For a long, waiting moment nothing moved down there save an indignant blackbird that flew scolding out of a hawthorn bush; and then the movement flickered again under the turf-tangle of the autumn scrub. Something, someone was working his way through the bushes towards the road. Aquila’s hand tightened automatically on the shaft of his spear, his frowning gaze following the small, stealthy movements as they drew nearer—nearer—until, between one instant and the other, a man broke from cover of the whitethorn scrub on to the open turf. An oldish man, for his head was cobweb colour in the fading light: a man who ran low, swerving and zigzagging as a snipe flies, but with none of the lightness of a snipe, for he stumbled and lurched as he ran, as though he were far spent, with unmistakably the look of a hunted man putting on one last, heart-tearing burst of speed to reach the bank that marked the frontier before the hunt was upon him. Aquila’s mouth was open to shout for his men, but he shut it again. He could see no sign of pursuit, and if the fugitive had for the moment shaken off whoever it was that he ran from, to shout would betray him. Aquila took a long step forward, poised for instant action. The fugitive had stumbled out on to the road now; he was very near the gap in the bank, so near that for a moment he looked as though he might make it. Then a kind of snapping hum sounded behind him in the bushes, something thrummed like a hornet through the air towards him, and he staggered and half fell, then recovered himself and ran on. Aquila sprang forward, yelling to the men behind him in the guard-post as he ran. Another arrow thrummed out of the bushes, but in the fading light it missed, and stood quivering in the roadway. Aquila cast his spear at the bushes from which it had come, and heard a cry as he ripped out his sword, still running. A few moments later, with his own men already pounding down towards him, he reached the reeling fugitive just as he fell, and saw the short Saxon arrow in his back: saw also, with a feeling of shocked unbelief, who the man was. The hostage had returned in a strange manner to his own people.