The hunters were shouting, running from all directions. And we — we were running too, now that it was too late, bounding upward with bursting hearts. He can have been only two or three spears’ lengths ahead of us, but it seemed a mile before we reached him. Then I was kneeling beside the tangle of beast and man, hauling the still faintly kicking stag off Ambrosius’s body, while Aquila and the boy drew him clear, and the hunters whipped off the hounds. Ambrosius’s knife was still in the great brute’s throat, and when I drew it out the blood burst out after it in a red wave. There was blood everywhere, soaking into the thorn roots, curling in rusty tendrils downstream with the flow of the little hill torrent. I dispatched the deer, and turned back to Ambrosius. And all the while the words of the old saw were chanting themselves maddeningly over and over in my head. “After the boar, the leech; after the hart, the bier.”
Ambrosius was quite dead, horribly dead, the whole lower forepart of his body smashed to red rags, one great gash where the tine had entered at the groin and burst out again below the breastbone, gaping raggedly over blood and torn gut and wet soft things that I could not look at. I was not Ben Simeon who had been to Alexandria. But his face was not touched. It wore a look of faint surprise (so many dead faces that I have seen have looked surprised; it must be that death is not like anything that we have imagined it to be), and under the surprise, a look harder to define, something of triumph, but not personal triumph, the look, perhaps, of a man who has fulfilled his fate, and gone gladly to the fulfillment.
Above the battered and mutilated body, Aquila and I looked at each other, and then bowed our heads. I don’t think any of us spoke — any of the three of us, that is; the hunters were murmuring among themselves, white-faced, as they got the dogs leashed, and turned again and again to stare in our direction. I looked at the ashen face and quivering mouth of Ambrosius’s young armorbearer, and knew that the boy must instantly be got away and given something to do. Besides, he was the obvious choice, for he was the lightest rider of us all. “Take the least tired of the horses, and ride back to the farm. Tell them the High King is dead, and bring back a hurdle — no, stay — three of the hunters had best take the other horses and go with you. You’ll be quicker so than by rounding up three of the farm people.”
When they were gone Aquila and I straightened the King’s body somewhat, that it might not lie tumbled and unseemly when it began to stiffen. Then I stripped off hunting leathers and under-tunic, and tore the tunic into strips and bound them about his loins and waist, that none of the red wet ruin of things might fall out when we came to move him. Aquila held him for me the while; and when it was done, I picked him up and carried him down to the foot of the narrow combe, clear of the thorn scrub where they would be able to get the hurdle, clear of the blood and mess. The remaining hunters with their hounds had gathered at a little distance, and we forgot that they were there. I do not think that in all that time either of us spoke one word. Only I remember Aquila’s harsh painful breathing, for with the running and the struggle he must have all but torn the breast wound asunder.
In a while the party from the farm came back with the hurdle, and stood gazing down at the dead King, almost as silent as ourselves. Then we lifted his wasted body — he was nothing but yellow skin over the light bones — and laid him on the hurdle, and set off back to the farm. Somebody had gralloched the deer, and they flung its carcass across the back of a pony and brought it after us.
It was not so very far, traveling straight across the country, for the stag had looped and doubled many times in his flight, and the dusk had scarcely deepened into the dark when we stumbled into the courtyard, where the flare of torches beat harshly on our eyes and the farm folk came crowding around, and the sound of women’s wailing was in the air.
We carried him upstairs and laid him in the long upper chamber, at just about the time that he had stood last night with the half-empty wine cup in his hand and that strange brightness upon him, crying to us, “I drink to tomorrow’s hunting. A good hunting and a clean kill!” But he himself was the kill, as he had known that he would be.
We left him to the women, and when they had done their work, and he lay stiff and seemly on thinly piled bracken from the fodder stack, his sword beside him, Aquila’s cloak for a royal coverlet, and the household’s best honey-wax candles burning about the long chamber, Aquila and I took up our stand at his head and feet to keep the death vigil. We had brought the hounds into the room — my old Cabal and a leash of his own hunting dogs — that they might draw any evil spirits from his body, according to the rites of Mithras, though presently he would be buried according to the rites of Christ. That was the one thing that we could still do for him.
I had sent Gaheris off on the steward’s horse to carry the word back to Venta, to Bishop Dubricius the father of the Council, to Justus Valens the second-in-command of the guard. “Tell them that we shall start to bring him back at dawn, and bid them come to meet us. Hurry, and you should be there well before first light.” He had not wanted to go, he had begged to share our watch, and I remember that he was crying. And I had promised him that he should share the watch that must be kept in Venta, and that for the moment he was of more service to his lord on the road south.
It was very quiet in the long upper chamber, for the farm folk and the hunters had betaken themselves to their own quarters in their own huddle of shocked stillness; only we heard each other’s breathing, and the soughing of the thin north wind in the bare chestnut tree outside, and the creaking of the old house at night, and once a dog howled and a voice stilled him, and later he began to howl again. 1 could understand why Ambrosius had wished to come back to this place to die. Tomorrow there must come all the solemn panoply of a High King’s death, the slow chanting of the Christian priests, the flaring torches illuminating the bull masks of Mithra, the bier hung with gold and imperial purple, the curling smoke of the death incense making the senses swim. But tonight there was only bracken to lie on and familiar rafters overhead, the smell of the winter night and burning hawthorn logs, the harping of the icy drafts along the floor; and Aquila who was not a brother to stand at his feet, and I who was not a son to stand at his head.
Ambrosius’s face had lost the look of surprise and the other, more strange look that had been upon it earlier. It had no expression now save a sternness infinitely remote. It was no longer a face but a mask, with the brand of Mithras showing between the brows more clearly than it had done between those of the living man; a head nobly carved in gray marble for his own tomb, that had caught the austere strength but missed the gentler things. It was not even very like Ambrosius any more. But looking down at it as I stood leaning on my sword, I saw it for the face of the King Sacrifice; older than either Christos or Mithras, reaching back and forward into all time until the two met and the circle was complete. Always the god, the king, the hero, who must die for the people when the call comes.
I suppose there must have been something in his ending, of the man who goes out to meet a quick death rather than wait for the slow and hideous one that he knows is coming to him. But more than that, he had chosen his way for the deliberate purpose he had spoken of so reasonably last night, peeling chestnuts beside the fire, and for another that had nothing to do with reason. . . . I remembered suddenly across the years, Irach flinging himself forward upon the Saxon spears at Eburacum. And for the second time in my life I glimpsed the oneness of all things. . . .