The Lantern Bearers (book III) (35 page)

‘There has not been a night quite like this for Britain before,’ Aquila said, ‘and there will not be a night quite like it again.’

‘It is wonderful what one victory in the hands of the right man will do,’ Eugenus said musingly beside him. ‘With a Britain bonded together at last, we may yet thrust the barbarians into the sea, and even hold them there—for a while.’

Aquila’s hand was already on the pin of the door behind him, though he still watched the thinning, lantern-touched crowd in the courtyard. ‘For a while?—You sound not over-hopeful.’

‘Oh, I am. In my own way I am the most hopeful man alive. I believe that we shall hold the barbarians off for a while, and maybe for a long while, though—not for ever … It was once told me that the great beacon light of Rutupiae was seen blazing on the night
after
the last of the Eagles flew from Britain. I have always felt that that was’—he hesitated over the word—‘not an omen: a symbol.’

Aquila glanced at him, but said nothing. Odd, to have started a legend.

‘I sometimes think that we stand at sunset,’ Eugenus said after a pause. ‘It may be that the night will close over us in the end, but I believe that morning will come again. Morning always grows again out of the darkness, though maybe not for the people who saw the sun go down. We are the Lantern Bearers, my friend; for us to keep something burning, to carry what light we can forward into the darkness and the wind.’

Aquila was silent a moment; and then he said an odd thing. ‘I wonder if they will remember us at all, those people on the other side of the darkness.’

Eugenus was looking back towards the main colonnade, where a knot of young warriors, Flavian among them, had parted a little, and the light of a nearby lantern fell full on the mouse-fair head of the tall man who stood in their midst, flushed and laughing, with a great hound against his knee.

‘You and I and all our kind they will forget utterly, though they live and die in our debt,’ he said. ‘Ambrosius they will remember a little; but
he
is the kind that men make songs about to sing for a thousand years.’

There was a long silence in the shadow of the postern door; then Eugenus shook his plump, muffled shoulders, and turned with a puff of a sigh and a puff of laughter. ‘For you this has been a good night, in more ways than one; but if you wish to stand here and sing songs to the stars like a hound puppy, you must do it alone. I am a very old man with a belly that cannot abide as much wine as it used to do, also my feet grow cold. Therefore I am away to my bed.’

Aquila laughed, and opened the small, deep-set door, and stood aside for Eugenus to go through before him.

A good night, yes. He lingered a little, fastening the doorpin while the old physician scuffed away towards his own quarters. There was a feeling of quietness in him, a feeling of coming into harbour. He had spent half his life fighting the Saxon kind, and he would go on fighting them, he supposed, until he found his death from a Saxon sword or grew too old to carry his own. ‘No more to be turned back than the wild geese in their autumn flighting,’ old Bruni had said of the Saxon kind. And Eugenus’s words of only a few moments ago echoed old Bruni’s in his mind: ‘We may thrust the barbarians into the sea; and even hold them there—for a while.’ No respite in this war, and maybe only darkness at the end of it. But for himself, now, in this present moment, he seemed to have come to a quiet place in which to rest a little before going on. He had all at once a feeling of great riches. Ness had chosen to forsake her own people to be with him; and the Minnow had come out before all men to stand beside him in the face of possible disgrace, which was probably, he thought, the best thing that had ever happened to him; and in some way that he neither understood nor questioned, he had found Flavia again.

He looked up at the old damson tree, and saw the three stars of Orion’s belt tangled in the snowy branches. Someone, maybe Ness, had hung out a lantern in the colonnade, and in the starlight and the faint and far-most fringe of the lantern glow it was as though the damson tree had burst into blossom; fragile, triumphant blossom all along the boughs.

Rosemary Sutcliff was born in Surrey, the daughter of a naval officer. At the age of two she contracted the progessively wasting Still’s disease and spent most of her life in a wheelchair. During her early years she had to lie on her back and was read to by her mother: such authors as Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope, as well as Greek and Roman legends. Apart from reading, she made little progress at school and left at fourteen to attend art school, specializing in miniature painting. In the 1940s she exhibited her first miniature in the Royal Academy and was elected a member of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters just after the war.

In 1950 her first children’s book,
The Queen’s Story
, was published and from then on she devoted her time to writing the children’s historical novels which have made her such an esteemed and highly respected name in the field of children’s literature.

She received an OBE in the 1975 Birthday Honours List and a CBE in 1992.

Rosemary Sutcliff died at the age of 72 in 1992.

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