“But can you be sure that you would be left the choice? If I were to name Cador of Dumnonia as my successor, I think that for the most part the British princes would accept him, with a certain amount of muttering among themselves. ‘He is no greater man than we are,’ but also, ‘He is the last of the blood-royal.’ But the whole of this Kingdom of the South, and besides your own war band, the whole of the war host would rise for you, to a man.”
“Not if I did not lead the rising,” I said.
“Artos, my simple Bear Cub, you overestimate — or perhaps underestimate — the power of your hold. When men rise for a leader it is not always at the leader’s instigation. . . . You are the man with the strength to hold Britain after me, and because you are baseborn, I cannot name you formally as my successor before the Council. But I can at least leave you free to win the High Kingship for yourself.”
“I think that still I do not understand,” I said slowly.
“Do you not? If I die without naming my successor, most men will turn to you as a matter of course, and the rest will be for you to handle. Therefore I shall be at pains to die suddenly, without time to name an heir. It will inconvenience the Council somewhat, I imagine, but —”
I sprang up. “My God! Ambrosius! You are sick in your mind! To leave us with no named heir — that will be to leave Britain rent with inward war, at a time when our only hope is to stand together — you cannot have thought — you —”
He sat in the heavy carved chair and looked up at me, his head tipped back, the eyes clear and resolute in his dying face. “Oh yes, I have thought . . . I am not a gambler by nature, Artos, but I can throw the dice when need be. I know perfectly well that in this I am throwing for the highest stakes of my life, and that if I lose, Britain will fall apart like a rotten apple, and lie open for the Barbarians to swarm in; but if I win, we shall have gained a few years more to carry on the battle. And I believe that I shall win — at least with more likelihood than if I were to name Cador of Dumnonia to come after me.” A shadow of wry laughter crept into his tone. “It is a pity that, in the nature of things, I shall not be here to know whether I win or lose; whether I have thrown Venus or the Dog.”
“I still think that it is madness!”
“Madness, maybe; but there is no other way. Sit down again, Artos, and listen to me for a while longer, for we have not all the time in the world.”
I sat down, feeling as though I had taken a blow between the eyes, and aware all the time of old Aquila’s frowning gaze bent in judgment upon me. “I am listening, Ambrosius.”
“So. Then, you know as surely as I do, that the campaigning of this coming summer is not likely to follow the pattern of the past few years.”
I nodded. “So says every wind as it blows over. Yet it is hard to see why the thing should come now, this year and no other, if it did not come five years ago. We have shown the Barbarians clearly enough that in pitched battle in anything even faintly approaching even numbers, we can cut them to pieces with our cavalry; and they must know, for their scouts are not fools, that we are steadily building up the strength of our cavalry forces.”
“It is maybe for that reason that they determine to throw their whole strength against us before it is too late.” Delicately, he shelled off another strip of brown husk from the creamy kernel of the long-cold chestnut. “It is in my mind that the Saxons are learning to combine at last. Certainly the coming and going that there has been all this winter between the Cantish Kingdom and the East Seax would seem to point that way.”
The captain of the bodyguard smiled down his great hooked nose into the fire, and raked out a smoking chestnut with his dagger. “We also have our scouts. It is a good thing, seemingly, to have friends among the Little Dark Men of the hills and forests.”
“Ambrosius, if there is indeed a great push coming in the spring, then at least wait until, by God’s mercy, it has been flung back, before you make your decision past unmaking it again.”
“I shall not last until the spring,” Ambrosius said, simply, and tossed the half-peeled chestnut that he had been playing with so long, back into the fire with a gesture of “Finish.” And then he said — it was the first and only time that I ever heard him speak of his sickness — “I have stood up in my place as long as I could. God knows it; but I am worn through with carrying a wildcat in my vitals — I am rotted and eaten away. Soon there must be an end.” I saw the sweat on his forehead in the firelight.
After we had sat in silence for a while, he spoke again. “Artos, I have a sense of fate on me. It is not merely that our scouts report certain movements of the Saxons. I believe in my bones, in my very soul, that a Saxon thrust such as we have not seen before is coming this spring — by midsummer at latest: and when it comes, there will be a struggle compared with which the battles we have known will be but candles held to a beacon blaze. And believing that, I must believe that this, above all others, is not the time to be leaving Britain in the hands of an untried king, but rather in the hands of a strong and well-proved war leader. As to what comes after, so far as the question of my successor is concerned, the victory in such a struggle would be a mighty weapon in your hand, Bear Cub, and if you fail, then Britain will not need a High King again.”
His voice had died almost to a whisper, hoarse in his throat, and his brilliant eyes were haggard, clinging to my face. Yet still I was half resisting; and not from humility but from lack of courage. I had always been one who dreaded loneliness, the loneliness of the spirit. I needed the touch of other men’s shoulders against mine, the warmth of comradeship. I was a fine war leader, and I knew it, but I shrank from the very thought of what Ambrosius was asking of me. I did not want the loneliness of the mountaintop.
Aquila had risen some time before, and tramped over to the window at the end of the room; he was something of a lone wolf, old Aquila, and his own deep reserve made him flinch from the least probing into the reserves of other men; and I suppose he did not want to see our faces while the last stages of the thing were fought out. Suddenly he spoke, without turning from the window. “Talk of beacon blazes, there’s something big burning over yonder beyond Ink-Pen, by the look of it!”
I got up quickly and went over to him. “Saxons! Open the window, Aquila.” He lifted the pin and swung wide the glazed leaf, and the cold and the smell of frost flowed in against my face. The window looked north, and as the dazzle of the firelight faded from my eyes, and the stars began to prick out in the clear sky, I could make out a dull red glow in the sky, like red reflection of a great fire.
Even as I watched, the glow was spreading, rising higher into the stars. “It would take a whole city burning to yield that glare,” Aquila said, and I could hear the frown in his voice. And then the formless glow began to gather to itself a shape, a great blurred bow, and out of its brightness suddenly a streamer of light flickered up into the dark sky, and then another, and another; and I wondered why I had been such a fool as not to know the thing at once — I suppose because in my mind it belonged to the North, and so I was blind to it here in the South Country. I laughed, and something in me lifted as though at the touch of a familiar magic. “No Saxons tonight, old wolf. It is the Northern Lights, the Crown of the North. Dear God, how many times I have watched those flying ribbons of fire from the ramparts of Trimontium!” I glanced aside at Aquila, whose exclamation told me that he had recognized the thing he looked at, at the same moment as myself. “Sa sa! You too! You must have seen them often enough in your thrall winters in Juteland.”