We had not lit the fat-lamp, and the light of the brazier beat up into our faces, throwing curious upward shadows from cheekbone and jaw and brow. Ambrosius sat forward, with his hands hanging relaxed about his knees, as he had always done when he was very tired, and his face in the upward light was the face of a skull wearing the gold circle of kingship about its hollow brows. Aquila’s face with its great hooked nose was that of an old outworn falcon. He had been sick a long time with the breast wound, and though it had healed at last, he would never be fit for hard service again; it was for that reason that Ambrosius had made him captain of his guard. But a worse wound to him had been the loss of his wife the previous summer — a little brown fierce thing with a taste in plumage that was bright as a woodpecker’s; but I think to Aquila she had not seemed like that. . . .
Presently Ambrosius roused from his thoughts, and glanced from one of us to the other with contentment, a great peace and quietness on his face. The wooden bowl of apples stood on a stool close by, and among them a couple of handfuls of sweet chestnuts from the tree in the courtyard. He reached out and took one of them, and sat turning the glossy brownness of it in his fingers with the lingering touch that means memory. “Constantine my father brought me up here on my first hunting trip, in the whiter before he — died,” he said after a while. “Utha he had brought up for three years, but that was the first winter that I was judged old enough. I was nine, and a man among men. . . . Utha and I used to roast chestnuts in the evenings; but in those days we still used the atrium and there was the hot edge of the hearthstone to roast them on.” He smiled ruefully, as though at his own foolishness. “I suppose one couldn’t roast chestnuts on a brazier.”
“I don’t see why not,” I said. “You have been High King so long that you have forgotten how to make one thing do the work of another. You have forgotten cooking ribs of stolen beef over a watch fire in a snowstorm,” and I got up.
He made to stay me, laughing. “Na na, it was but a trick of the mind — a whim of the moment.”
But suddenly, and out of all proportion to the size of the matter, I was determined that Ambrosius should have his chestnut roasting. “The whim is a pleasant one, though. I also have roasted chestnuts here before I was old enough to carry my shield.” And I went down to the steward’s quarters where the cook place was, and called to the steward’s woman, “Mother, give me a shovel or an old fry pan. The High King has a mind to roast chestnuts.”
When I came back to the upper room, bearing a battered shovel, I had the impression that Ambrosius and Aquila had been in earnest speech together, and that they had stopped abruptly when they heard my returning foot on the stair. I was vaguely surprised, but they had been sword brothers when I still ran barefoot among the hunting dogs, and must have many things to speak of in which I had no part. I showed them the shovel in triumph, and set to building the glowing hawthorn logs into the best shape for my purpose, feeling suddenly my own morning time come back upon me as I did so; and setting half a dozen chestnuts on the shovel, slid it into the hot heart of the fire. “See? I have not wasted my years in the wild places.”
So we roasted chestnuts, like three urchins, while Cabal propped himself against my knee and looked on, singing his deep throat-song of contentment in the warmth; and scorched our fingers raking them out, cursing and laughing, but never very loud, for a mood of quiet seemed to hold us all, that evening. . . . After a while Ambrosius looked up from the hot chestnut he was peeling, and I found the gaze of his sunken eyes drawing mine across the firelight. Then he leaned forward, the hot nut forgotten in his fingers.
He said, “Artos, when I determined on this hunting trip, and spoke of feeling caged in Venta, did you think ‘sick men have odd fancies’?”
“I know too well the feeling of the cage bars that comes upon a man toward the end of winter quarters, when the life of the world is stirring but spring and the time to march out again is still far away.”
He nodded. “Yet that was not the whole reason, nor the chief reason that I wished to come up here into the hunting hills.”
“So? And the chief reason?”
“There were two,” he said. “Two, conjoined like the two halves of a damson stone. And one of them was this, that I knew the time had come to speak to you of certain matters concerning the man who takes the Sword of Britain after me.”
Aquila made a harsh sound of protest in his throat; and Ambrosius answered it as though it had been spoken. “Ah, but it has. . . . Na na, my friends, never wear such grim faces for me. I am not an old man — not old in years — but assuredly I am not going out in my flower. I have had a long enough life, and a good one that has brought me faithful friends and a few to love me; and there is little more that any man can ask — save perhaps that there shall be one to carry the tools of his trade after him and work more greatly with them than he has ever done.”
He was silent for a long moment, looking down at the half-peeled chestnut in his hand, and we also were silent, waiting for what came next. I had an odd feeling, though I do not think he had actually moved at all, that Aquila had drawn back from us a little, as from a thing that was chiefly between Ambrosius and myself. “The time has come when I must choose out a man to carry the tools of my trade after me.” Ambrosius raised his head again and looked full at me. “Artos, save for the small accident of birth, you are my son; all the son I ever had. I have told you that before. Furthermore, you are of the Royal House in blood, as surely as I am myself.”
I cut in, thinking to make the matter easier for him. “Utha’s son in blood, but not in name, and so I cannot be the one to carry the tools of your trade after you. Never fret, Ambrosius, I have known that always. I am the war leader. I have no hunger to be the High King.” I reached out, I remember, and set my hand over his. “Long ago, you promised me Arfon, and that is enough for me.”
“Na, you do not understand,” he said. “Listen now: If I set you on one side, the choice must fall upon Cador of Dumnonia, or upon young Constantine, his son. They are the last that have the royal blood of Britain in them, and I am not sure of Cador; he has the inner fires of a leader, but his flame flares and sinks, and his purposes shift like wind-driven sand dunes. I cannot feel in my heart that he is the man to hold together a mixed kingdom and a pack of native princelings straining at the leash. The boy’s mettle I have had no chance to judge at all, but whatever he may be later, he can be little but a half-broken colt yet.”
(I thought of the dark young man I had hunted with, that spring before Gaul, and the babe into whose nest Maximus’s great seal had fallen.)
I said, “Ambrosius, should not all this go before the Council?”
A smile twitched at his lips. “I scarcely think so. Listen again: If I call the Council together and tell them that I have chosen Cador of Dumnonia to follow after me, I am putting Britain — all that was our heritage, all that we of the war host have spent our lives for, all that we still mean when we speak of Rome — into the hands of a man who I am not at all sure is strong enough to hold them; and if, when I am dead, it appears that my doubts were well founded, it will not be I who suffer, but Britain. Britain and the whole western world that will see the last lights go out.”
“Who, then?” I said.
He looked at me very straightly, speaking no word; and after a moment, I said: “Oh no, I am not the stuff that usurpers are made of.”