The grass for my bed had been cut from the northwest face of the hill, where it grew long and thick in tawny waves, for the fall of the land was too steep for the horses that had trampled it flat elsewhere. A few stalks of it were spilling out from under the old half-bald otter skin that Riada had spread for me to lie on, wisps and feathery shreds of seeding grasses and among them the withered head of a moon daisy. I stooped and picked it up, thinking suddenly how the steep drop of the hillside there was freckled white with the swaying flower heads.
Nowadays we number the moon daisy among the flowers of God’s Mother; the gold for her love and compassion, the white for her purity, and the raying petals for the glory that shines about her. But underneath in the warm dark places we have not forgotten that the flower of the moon belonged to the Lady, the White Goddess, before ever men gave it to the Maiden Mary. The Church, claiming as she does that the Old Ones have no place left in the people’s hearts, must forget that, or pretend to forget, and I knew that if I and my Companions were to ride into the coming battle with the flower of God’s Mother for our badge, it must help to strike the weapon against me from the Church’s hand, while still, for those of us who still held to the Old Faith, the old meaning would be there. Also it would show up well in the dust and turmoil of the fight. I looked down at Bedwyr as a man sharing an unspoken jest with his brother, and tossed him the limp wisp of flower head. “This would make a fine panache, and there’s plenty on the west side of the hill; easily picked out in battle and surely most suited of all flowers to a Christian war lord and his Companions.”
And I saw by the quirk of that most devilish eyebrow, that he took my point. “Give it fifty years, and the harpers who sing tomorrow’s battle after us will tell how Artos the Bear rode into Badon Fight with a picture of the Virgin on his shoulder.”
I was finished with the lacing of my war shirt and began to fasten the shoulder buckle. “If there are any harpers of our own people still singing in fifty years’ time.”
Bedwyr was playing with the withered moon daisy, twisting the limp stem between his fingers. He tipped back his head to look at me through half-shut eyes, still fiddling.
“Not so did you speak to the war host a while since.”
“I have the oddest fancy to win this battle,” I said, testing the buckle, “and choose my words to the war host accordingly.”
“Sa! That was a magnificent harangue you gave us.”
“Was it?” I had no clear idea now of what I had said. The usual kind of thing, I suppose. It had not seemed so usual at the time.
It had been just at sunset, and my shadow had streamed away from me forward over the hilltop with a vast fiery arrowhead of sunlight between the straddled legs, and I remembered the coppery glare of the sunset on the faces of the war host turned up to mine, answering to me so that I could play on them as Bedwyr played on his harp. And that and the length of my shadow had filled me with a drunken sense of being a giant.
“You should always speak to your war host before battle, at sunset with the fires behind you,” Bedwyr said. “That is for any leader. It would make even a small man look like a tall one, and a man of your height becomes a hero-giant out of our oldest songs; a fit rider, half a hillside high, for the Sun Horse of the White Horse Vale, with the seven stars of Orion for the jewels in his sword hilt.”
(“A sword of light with the seven stars of Orion for the jewels in its hilt.”) I seemed to catch again the echo of Ambrosius’s voice on the night before he died. But Bedwyr had not been there, only Aquila and I.
“I will remember another time,” I said, and reached for my sword.
We made the late night round of the pickets and guard posts together, as we had made them on so many nights before. There is always something strange, something not quite canny, in making the rounds of a camp at night; the increasing stillness that comes at last to be broken only by the fretful stamp of a horse from the picket lines, or a standard stirring in the night wind, the spear gleaming out of nowhere across one’s path in the moonlight, to vanish as one speaks the password. It is a little like moving through a world of ghosts or, alternatively, like being a ghost oneself. One’s own footsteps seem unnaturally loud, and any incident, the face of another waking man glimpsed in the red glow of a dying campfire, seems fraught with meaning and significance that it would not bear in the daytime.
So it was with Medraut’s face, that night, suddenly seen in the flare of a picket-line torch. By day, to pass Medraut coming up from the horse lines was the merest commonplace of life, save for the vague sense of a shadow passing between me and the sun which any sight of him always woke in me; but at night, that night,“ in the dark solitude of waking men in a camp full of others ”sleeping on their spears,“ the brief unmattering moment stands in my mind even now as vivid as a duel.
Yet he only moved aside to give me right of way among the harness piles, spoke something of having thought at exercise that the big gray might be going lame, and melted on into the dimness of the moon.
Bedwyr glanced after him, and said, “The odd thing is that in some ways he is very much your son.”
“Meaning that in the same circumstances, I also should be down at the picket lines playing leech to a horse that I thought might be going lame? It is not really the horse that he cares about, you know.”
“No,” Bedwyr said, “he cares no more for his horses than he does for his men. But tomorrow will be his first action in command of a squadron and he cannot bear that anything should go amiss under his leadership, be less than perfect as he sees perfect. . . . I was thinking rather of a certain capacity for taking pains, together with a conviction that if a thing must be done, it is needful to do it oneself.“ We walked on for a few paces between the horse rows, and then he added thoughtfully, ”Yet if he has that conviction, assuredly it is the only one he has. In all these fighting years, he has never learned to care for anything beyond the fighting; for him it is enough to strike, without heed as to the thing he strikes for. He likes to kill — the actual skillful process of letting out life — that is a thing that I have met only a few times among fighting men.“
“He is one of the destroyers,” I said. “Most of us have something of destruction in us, I suppose, but mercifully not many are destroyers through and through. Dear God! That I should speak so! It was I who made him what he is!”
“How?”
“His mother ate him as a she-spider eats her mate, but it was I who gave him to her destroying love.”
Neither of us spoke again until we were clear of the horse lines and into the moon-whitened space that lay between them and the wagon park; and there Bedwyr checked as though to tighten a slipping sword buckle. He said at half breath, and with an extraordinary gentleness, “Say the word, Artos, and he shall find an honorable death in tomorrow’s fighting.”
The long silence that followed was ripped asunder at last by the sudden murderous scream of Pharic’s hawk, which he had with him in his bothy.