The Lantern Bearers (book III) (33 page)

They were all around him before they checked again, their mouths loose and laughing, their eyes fiercely bright in the moonlight.

‘Why, it’s the Dolphin!’ someone said. ‘It’s Ambrosius’s old Lone Wolf. What’s doing here, Lone Wolf ?’

‘Getting a gashed flank salved by the Holy Man,’ Aquila said. ‘What do you, for the matter of that? Lost your way back to camp in the haze from a wine-jar?’

A tall, fair-haired youngster with a gold torc round his neck laughed, swaying on his heels. ‘We been hunting.
Good
hunting! We killed three times, and now we’re thirsty again.’

‘The stream is yonder; if that’s not to your liking, best be getting back to camp and look for whatever else the Saxons have overlooked.’

Another man cocked his chin at the thatched skeps against the wall. ‘Bees,’ he said thickly. ‘Might be heather beer in this doghole—or even mead.’

‘There might be,’ Aquila agreed. ‘But in actual fact there’s naught but salves and colic water and a little barley gruel.’

‘Under the hearthstone, perhaps,’ a third man put in. ‘Let’s turn the place upside down and see!’

Aquila did not move from before the door. ‘You’ve enough vine leaves in your hair without adding bee bloom to it,’ he said. And then more sternly, ‘Leave robbing the church to the Saxon kind. Go back to camp, you fools, or you’ll be in no state to ride south in the morning.’

His tone of authority seemed to sober them a little, for they had, after all, begun to be used to discipline. The tall stripling with the golden collar, who seemed to be a leader among them, shrugged. ‘Maybe you are right.’

‘I am very sure I am right,’ said Aquila cordially. ‘God speed you on your way back to camp, my heroes.’

They were a little uncertain, looking all ways at once; then the tall stripling made him a flourishing salute, and swung on his heel. ‘Come away, lads; he doesn’t want us. It’s my belief he’s got a girl in there.’

And with that parting shot, howling with laughter at their own wit, they turned back the way that they had come.

When the last sound of their going had died away, Aquila sat down on the threshold, his hands hanging lax across his knees and his head low between his shoulders. In a while a hand came on his bowed shoulder, and Brother Ninnias’s voice said, ‘That was very well done, my friend.’

‘How is the boy?’ he said muzzily, without looking up.

‘Asleep. It passed into sleep; and the longer before he wakes, the better. I am going to begin burning his rags now; the byrnie I shall take out and lose, later.’

Aquila nodded, and leaned sideways with a little sigh to prop himself against the door-post. He did not feel the Holy Man’s hand leave his shoulder. It was in his mind to keep watch, there in the doorway; and part of him did remain on guard, but part of him slept, while the last of the three day storm blew itself out around him.

It was not far from dawn, and the night full of a soft, wet, woody-scented hush after the storm, when he came fully back to himself, and realized that life was moving again in the bothy behind him. He lurched to his feet, stood a few moments looking about him, and turning, ducked into the firelit hut again. Flavia’s son was awake, and strained up on to an elbow at his coming, flinging back the wild black hair from his eyes, as he glared up at him. ‘My sword! Where is my sword?’

‘In the stream yonder,’ Aquila said, ‘with the alder roots to hold it under.’

‘So! You have taken pains that I should have no weapon against you!’

‘You fool, do you really think that I felt it needful to disarm you in the state you are in at present?’ Aquila said wearily. ‘It isn’t healthy to be found with a Saxon sword in these parts.’

Mull began to laugh, taunting, furious, weak laughter that seemed to buffet him as though it were a wind outside himself. ‘I do not doubt that you have a vast care for my health! Ah, but of course, fool that I am! It is your own skin that you look to!’

‘Easy, my son,’ Brother Ninnias said from the farther shadows. ‘It so chances that he cared enough for your skin to carry you here last night and doubtless reopen a gash in his own skin doing it. And you have him to thank you were not later dragged out of this hut like a badger out of its hole, and knifed on the threshold by a pack of wine-lit British soldiers in search of more wine or Saxons.’

Mull’s rage fell still, and his laughter with it. For a long moment he lay looking at Aquila, catching his lower lip between his teeth, as Flavia had done when she was puzzled.

‘I do not understand. Why did you do that?’ he said at last.

‘For your mother’s sake.’

‘My mother? What can my mother be to you?’

‘My sister,’ Aquila said levelly.

‘Your—sister.’ Mull spoke as though he were testing the words. His frowning gaze moved over Aquila, over the fine workmanship of his sword-belt and the long Roman cavalry sword, and the bronze-and-silver brooch that held his weather-worn cloak, and returned to his dark, harsh, hawk-nosed face, taking in something that had gathered to him during twenty years of commanding men. ‘A great man among your own people,’ he said slowly. ‘A bitter thing it must be for you to have a kinsman among Hengest’s war host.’

‘It is,’ Aquila said. ‘God knows that it is. But not quite as you mean it.’ He straightened his shoulders, turning to the more practical side of things. ‘We shall be riding south in a few hours, and there should be little enough risk for you now, while you lie up here.’ He never questioned whether Brother Ninnias would accept the charge and the risk that there was; he had too sure a faith in the little brown man for that. He turned to him now. ‘Nevertheless, the sooner he is away, the better. When should he be able to travel?’

‘Not for two or three weeks.’ Brother Ninnias looked up from the bowl in which he was preparing barley stirrabout. ‘Two or three weeks for me to take joy in another guest that the Lord has sent me. But for his own sake he shall go in the first hour that I judge him strong enough.’

Aquila was thinking quickly: ‘How long a march from here to the nearest point on the border? Ah, but there isn’t a fixed border any longer. How far to the nearest of his own kind, I wonder?’

‘That is a thing that there is no means of knowing,’ Brother Ninnias said. ‘But I know the forest northward of this for a good way, and can set him far on his road.’

Aquila nodded, settling down on to one heel. He pulled his purse from the breast of his stained leather tunic, and tossed it down on to the bracken, where it fell with a faint clink. ‘There’s a little money—all I have by me. It’s not much, but it will help. Get him a tunic, Ninnias, one that doesn’t shout “Saxon” by its cut and long sleeves.’ Then he took out his tablet and stylus, and while the other two watched him, hurriedly scratched a few words on the wax. He looked for a moment at what he had written, then returned his stylus to his folded girdle, and put the tablet down softly and precisely beside his purse. ‘You will pass well enough for British, until you open your mouth. Therefore you must pretend to be dumb. If you run up against anyone, show them this pass. Signed by the Commander of Ambrosius’s Second Cavalry Wing, it should get you out of any trouble. Understand?’

‘I—understand,’ Mull said after a moment. He swallowed. ‘There seems nothing more, but—that I should thank you.’

‘One thing more.’ Aquila pulled the battered signet ring from his finger. ‘This was my father’s ring. When you come to the fringes of your own people, you must find means to send it back to Brother Ninnias here. Brother Ninnias will find means to get it back to me: and I shall know that you are safe away.’

‘Safe like a beaten cur that runs with its tail between its legs,’ Mull said with a sudden furious bitterness.

Aquila looked at his drawn face, proud and bitter and sullenly ashamed. The boy’s eyes were much too bright. Probably he had some fever from the wound. Well, Ninnias would see to that. ‘Hengest did not die when the shield burg went; he is safe away with the rags of his host,’ he said abruptly. ‘You’re not deserting a dead leader, you’re following back a living one. There’s no shame in that.’

‘A gentle enemy!’ Mull said jibingly.

‘No, I am not a gentle enemy. I loved your mother, my sister; that is all.’

They looked at each other in silence for a moment; and then—it was as though he laid down his weapons—Mull reached out and took the ring from Aquila. ‘Even after she—even after
that
happened.’

‘I once wagered her a pair of crimson slippers that she could not run faster than I,’ Aquila said with careful lightness. ‘She won, and I—never had the chance to pay my debt. You must tell her that I send her son back to her, in place of a pair of crimson slippers.’

‘If I—when I see her again, is there any other word that you would have me say to her?’ Mull asked.

Aquila was staring into the fire, his arm across his knees. What was there to say to Flavia, after their last meeting, and the years between? And then he knew. He put up his hand and freed the shoulder-buckle of his leather tunic, and pulled it back; he dragged up the loose woollen sleeve beneath, to bare his shoulder, and leaned toward Mull in the firelight. ‘Look.’

Mull strained up higher on his sound arm, and looked. ‘It is a dolphin,’ he said.

‘A friend did it for me when I was a boy.’ He let his sleeve fall and began to refasten the buckle. ‘Ask her if she remembers the terrace steps under the damson tree at home. Ask her if she remembers the talk that we had there once, about Odysseus coming home. Say to her—as though it were I who spoke through you, “Look. I’ve a dolphin on my shoulder. I’m your long-lost brother.”’

‘The terrace steps under the damson tree. Odysseus coming home. “Look, I’ve a dolphin on my shoulder. I’m your long-lost brother”,’ Mull repeated. ‘Will she understand?’

‘If she remembers the steps under the damson tree, she will understand,’ Aquila said. He got up, and turned to the dark doorway. He looked back once, at Mull still propped on one elbow and staring after him, then ducked out into the first paling of the dawn.

Brother Ninnias came with him to the end of the bean-rows, and there they turned towards each other in parting. Aquila had half expected that the monk would say something about what had happened, about the part of the old story that he had not known before. But, tipping up his head to look about him with a wide, quiet, all-embracing gladness, he said only, ‘The storm is over, and it is going to be a glorious day.’

And Aquila, looking about him also, saw that the moon was down; but the dark had paled to grey, and the grey was growing luminous. The eastern sky was awash with silver light, and somewhere down by the stream a willow wren was singing, and the whole world seemed poised on the edge of revelation, about to spread its wings …

‘Do you believe in blind chance?’ he asked, as he had asked it once of Eugenus the Physician, long ago. ‘No, I remember that you believe in a pattern of things.’

‘I also believe in God, and in the Grace of God,’ Brother Ninnias said.

Aquila stood quite still, his face lifted to the light above the wooded valley that was setting the east singing like the willow wren. At last he stirred. ‘I must be away to my men. Give me your blessing before I go.’

A few moments later he was striding down the stream side towards the camp and his men and the long, long battle for Britain. He knew that he would not see Brother Ninnias again.

S
LEET
whispered against the high windows of the old house in Venta, and in the living-room of Aquila’s quarters the little mean wind of early winter made icy draughts along the floor and teased the flames of the candles in the bronze lamp-holder. The last of the daylight was fading, and the light of the candles was taking over. Aquila stood in the glow of warmth from the brazier where apple logs were burning on the charcoal, buckling his bronze-bossed crimson belt over a fresh tunic, while his cast-off daytime garments lay at his feet. It was so cold in the sleeping-cells that he had snatched up his festival clothes spread ready for him, and brought them in here to change beside the fire.

Earlier that day, Ambrosius Aurelianus had been crowned High King of Britain; crowned with the same slim, golden circlet that he had worn for so many years, with his Companions and the leaders of his fighting men there to see the thing done, before he went out to show himself to his people from the Basilica steps where once he had confronted Guitolinus and the Celtic party. The roar of their acclamation was a thing that Aquila thought he should never forget. And this evening, in the banqueting chamber of the old Governor’s Palace, he was feasting with the men who had seen him crowned. Aquila reached for his best cloak, where it lay in a tumble, dark as spilled wine, across the foot of the low couch, and flung it round him, hastily settling the shoulder-folds. He was late, for there had been some trouble down at the horse-lines over the new Cymric steeds that he must see to, and the feast would have begun by now; this crowning feast for a new High King who was the hope of Britain. He stabbed home the pin of the great bronze-and-silver shoulder brooch, and when he looked up again, there seemed to be all at once more warmth in the room, and more colour; for Ness stood in the inner doorway in a gown of thick, soft wool the colour of the apple flames. Roman in so many things nowadays, she had never taken to the pale colours that the Roman ladies wore, and suddenly he was glad of that.

‘I feel as though I could warm my hands at you, in that gown,’ he said.

She laughed; something of the old mockery in her laughter still, but the sting gone from it. ‘My lord learns to say pretty things in his old age!’ She came forward into the inner circle of warmth and light about the brazier. ‘A man has just left this for you,’ and he saw that she was holding out something that looked like a little ivory ball.

He took it from her, and realized that it was a ball of white honey-wax, and instantly knew the sender, though no word was scratched on the smooth, creamy surface. ‘Is the messenger still here?’