“Often enough,” he said. “They used to grow and grow until they were like great banners of light flying all across the sky; and the old men would say that they could hear a rushing of great wings overhead. . . . But one scarcely ever sees them here in the South, and then no more than the red glow that might be a farm burning in the next valley.”
There was a movement behind us, the scrape of a chair being thrust back, and a slow slurred step on the tesserae, and we moved apart to make room for Ambrosius between us. “What is this marvel? This Crown of the North?” He set a hand on my shoulder and the other on Aquila’s, breathing quickly and painfully, as though even the effort to rise and cross the floor had been a day’s labor to him. “So-o,” he said, lingeringly, when he had got his breath back. “A marvel indeed, my brothers.” For in that short while that we had been standing there, the light had strengthened and spread, until one got the impression of a vast arc spanning the whole night, if one could but have seen over the northernmost hills that hid it from our view; and from that unseen arc, as though it were indeed the headband of a crown, a myriad rays sprang out, darting and wheeling to and fro, flickering out half across the sky, like ribbons of colored fire that licked and trembled and died and darted forth again, changing color moment by moment from the red of blood to the green of ice, to the blue of the wildfire that drips along the oar blades of the northern seas in summer nights.
“I too have seen the glow like a burning in the next valley, and a flicker or so in the northern sky, from the high shoulder of Yr Widdfa,” Ambrosius said, in the tone in which a man speaks in the place where he worships his God. “But never the like of this. . . . Never — the like of this.”
Voices, scared and hushed and excited, were sounding in the courtyard, a babble of tongues and a running of feet. Down there they would be pointing and gesticulating, their faces awed and gaping in the strange flickering light. “The others have seen it now,” Aquila said. “They could scarcely make more starling chatter if it were a golden dragon in the sky.”
“There will be many pointing to the north and bidding each other to look, tonight,” Ambrosius said musingly. “And later, all Britain will tell each other that there were strange lights in the sky on the night before Ambrosius Aurelianus died; and later still, it will become Aquila’s dragon, or a sword of light with the seven stars of Orion set for jewels in the hilt.”
I remember feeling as though a cold hand had clenched itself in my belly, making it hard to breathe, and knowing in that instant the second of the reasons that had brought Ambrosius up from his capital to this half-derelict hunting lodge that he had known as a boy; turning back in the end to the place that had been dear at the beginning, just as I, with my own hour upon me, would have turned back if that might be, to some lost glen in the lap of Yr Widdfa of the Snows.
I flung my arm around his shoulders, as though I would have held him to me, and felt the sick skin and bones that he was, and I wanted to cry out to him, “Ambrosius, no! For God’s sake not yet!” But I wanted to cry out for my own sake, not for God’s, not for his. “I have lost too many of the people I love; there is time yet, stay a while longer —” But the pleas and protests died in my heart. Besides, any that could be made, Aquila would have made before me.
So we none of us spoke of the thing in words. And after a while, when the glory of the Northern Lights had begun to fade, and the stars to show again, Ambrosius said conversationally, “I think that the frost will not be hard enough to spoil the scent tomorrow.”
“The scent?” I said. “Oh no, Ambrosius, no hunting; we bide together, we three.”
“Of course. We shall bide together, and together we shall hunt old Kian’s twelve-point stag. The hounds will grow stale else, and the huntsmen also. A day on the game trail will do the three of us more good than all Ben Simeon’s black potions.”
I turned on him, and in doing so, caught sight of Aquila’s face in the strange bluish light, and knew that he was as unprepared for this as I was.
“Ambrosius, don’t be playing the madman! You could never last an hour’s hunting!” I blurted out.
And in the same bluish light, I saw him smile. “Not as I am now; but sometimes it is given to a man, by the Lords of Life, to gather all the strength that is yet in him, enough for a few days, maybe, or a month, and spend it all in an hour or a day as a single moment; that is, if the need be great enough. I believe that it will be so given to me.”
The great lights were dying from the sky, and his face was sinking into the shadows as through dark water, as the winter night returned to its usual seeming. “I have roasted chestnuts with the two dearest friends I have, and I have seen the glory of the God beyond gods in a winter sky. That is a good way to spend a parting evening,” he said, and turned from the window and walked steadily back to the fire, as though something of the strength he spoke of had already come to him.
Aquila slammed the window shut, and tramping after him, defiantly took up the fat-lamp and lit it.
I followed last of all.
The few remaining chestnuts, left forgotten, were charred and glowing on the glowing shovel, each sending up curled tendrils of smoke. As the lamp flame sprang up and steadied, and the soft light flowed out to quench the fierce red dragon’s-eye of the brazier, Ambrosius stooped and took up a half-full wine cup from the table where we had supped; and turned to us, smiling, the cup held high. “Brothers, I drink to tomorrow’s hunting. Good hunting and a clean kill.”
But seeing him standing there, the lamp turning his mane of hair to tarnished silver and filling his eyes, always so pale in the darkness of his face, with a rain-gray light, and burnishing the gold fillet about his skeleton temples; seeing the fault half-triumphant smile on his mouth that was unlike any smile that I had ever seen there, and the great cup burning in his hand, and the shine upon him that was not the lamplight alone, it seemed to me that I was not looking at the Ambrosius I knew, but at the King decked for sacrifice, and my heart shook within me.
Then we heard young Gaheris pounding up the stair to demand whether we had seen the marvel, and he was only Ambrosius again, standing in the candlelight with an empty wine cup in his hand.
NEXT morning when the horses were brought around, Ambrosius mounted Pollux almost as lightly as the rest of us (he had had to be almost lifted into the saddle when we set out from Venta, two days before) and sat there in his greasy weather-stained old hunting leathers, discussing the day’s prospects with Kian his chief huntsman. An extraordinary return of strength had come to him from somewhere, and even his face seemed less skull-like than it had done for a month past, so that all last night might have been no more than a dream.
Yet his renewed strength seemed not quite to belong to the world of men, and something of last night’s shining was still upon him, after all, and the huntsmen and farm folk looked somewhat askance at their lord, and seemed more shy of going near him than ever they had been before — for he was never one to wear the Purple among his own folk, and I have heard him arguing with an armorer about the placing of a rivet, or with some old falconer as to the handling of an eyas, and getting the worst of it in the way of any man who argues with an expert on his own ground.
The world was gray with hoarfrost, under a skim-milk sky still barred with the last silver and saffron of the dawn, but the frost had not been a hard one and would not spoil scent; and the horses danced after their day’s rest, even old Pollux, and the hounds strained forward in eagerness against their leashes as we rode out from the farm courtyard and skirted the brown of the winter wheat field beyond, scaring up the little crested lapwings as we went, and headed for the dark shoreline of the woods beyond.