I stared at Bedwyr in the moonlight, sickened, and then angry, and then neither. “You would take that stain on your hands for my sake?”
“Yes,” he said, and then, “But you must speak the word.”
I shook my head. “I can’t cut this particular knot with a sword; not even yours. You made no such offer the first time, the last time that we spoke so of Medraut.”
“I had not had him in my squadron, then . . .” Bedwyr said.
I did not ask his meaning. Probably he could not have told me, if I had. Medraut committed none of the evils that can be put into words; it was not in what he did, but in what he was; no man may hold the hill mist between his thumb and forefinger nor catch the hovering marsh light in a grain jar.
The clouds blew up from the south that morning, their shadows sweeping like charges of cavalry over Badon Hill and down the long bay of the Downs; like the ghosts of armies that had fought there when the world was young. Turn southward, and you could see the wind coming, laying over the ripening grasses in silvery-brown swathes like the waves of the sea. Turn north again, and from where I stood on the crest of the bush-grown barrow, I could see the whole bay of the White Horse Vale with its flying cloud shadows, rising to the gentler hills again at its farther side. Badon Hill thrust out from the main mass of the Downs a great summer-tanned shoulder, high over the Vale, so that one looked down upon it as a buzzard circling on wind-tilted wings must do. I could see the green Ridgeway with its ragged line of hawthorn trees passing scarce the throw of a slingstone below the strong green wave-lift of our ramparts, dipping to cross the paved road from Corinium where it climbed more gently out of the Vale, to strike southward through the pass; and beyond, where the steep swell of the Downs upheaved itself once more into the sunlight from the morning shadows of the pass, the triple turf ramparts of our sister fort, that the garrison in Badon had always called the Cader Berywen from the sour hill-juniper scrub that speckled the ditches between its earthworks. And everywhere, lining the mouth of the pass, among the thorn scrub of the downland flanks, and thronging the turf ramparts of the forts, was the gray blink of sun on spear blade and shield boss and helmet comb, and the flecks and flashes of color where Marius’s standard flew with Cei’s flickering cavalry pennants above the, triple-staged entrance of Cader Berywen, or where Cador and young Constantino gathered their war bands beneath the saffron-stained banner of Dumnonia, and the tattered Red Dragon of Britain lifted and half flew from its spear shaft in the midst of the Companions where they stood or sat at ease on the grass about me, each man with his arm through his horse’s bridle. There was plenty of time, now, and it is not good to keep men or horses longer than need be in the last stage of waiting.
Signus, who smelled what was coming, snorted down that proud imperial nose of his, tossing his head so that my buckler clanged against the saddlebow; old Cabal lifted his gray muzzle and snuffed the wind, and Bedwyr, who had just ridden up on his raking sorrel, turned beside me and laughed in the old fierce gaiety that had always come upon him in the time before fighting. He no longer carried his harp into battle as he had used to do, but with the knot of moon daisies white in his shoulder buckle, he looked as though he were riding to a festival.
There was a sense of pause, a sense of rising tension, as when the wine in a slowly tilted cup comes to the rim and rises above it and hangs there an instant before it spills over. And in the waiting moments one had time for little things, for the dark crescent-winged swifts darting along the flanks of the Downs, as unaware of us, it seemed, as they were of the cloud shadows drifting by; the fading milky scent of the last pinkish blossom on the hawthorn trees, the way the renewed leather lining of my war shirt chafed my neck where the armorer had made a clumsy job of it. I thrust a finger inside the neckband, seeking to ease it, and tried not to watch Medraut walking his black horse up and down at the foot of the barrow, pausing in passing to break down with his foot the blue cranesbill that grew almost on the edge of last night’s fire scar, and grind it with absorbed precision to pulp under his heel.
The scouts had come in soon after dawn while we were snatching a hasty morning meal, to report the Saxons stirring, but it must have been within two hours of noon when, maybe two miles off along the ridge of the Downs, there came a shadow, not much darker at first than the cloud shadows, but not traveling with the wind. The Saxon war host was in sight.
I waited a short while longer, the chiefs and captains murmuring about me; then spoke to Prosper, my trumpeter. He was growing gray-muzzled like the rest of us, but his wind was as good as ever, and he put the silver mouthpiece of the aurochs horn to his lips and sounded the View. There was a moment’s silence, and then like an echo the call was tossed back to us from the ramparts of Cader Berywen.
Other horns and trumpets were sounding now, the voices answering each other to and fro across the valley; and the great camp of Badon, which a few moments before had been a place of waiting, sprang into eager life, as the fighting companies made for their appointed places, some to guard the entrances against enemy surprise, or man the northern ramparts where great piles of throw stones waited for hurling down on the heads of the Saxon host, while the rest went swinging out through the wide gateway and downhill into the pass.
I was mounted by that time, and sitting my great old Signus on the crest of my lookout place. I was like Janus, half of me turned upon the British line that was forming like a great threefold chain slung across the pass to the south between Badon and Cader Berywen, half of me turned with straining eyes upon the shadow that was not a cloud shadow creeping slowly nearer along the high roof ridge of the hills, deepening to a stain like that of old spilled wine, to a spreading swarm of ants. And then, far off still, and soft with distance, came the booming of a Saxon war horn; and Prosper beside me again raised the horn to his lips and sent the bright notes crowing their defiance across the warm summer wind. Save for those who would remain on guard, the great camp was emptying about me like a cup. Only my own Companions were left now, and they also were swinging into the saddle, squadron after squadron with the spear pennants fluttering, heading at a trot out through the gateway.
Bedwyr was beside me again, his horse dancing. He shouted to me that all was in order. I nodded, still watching the nearing swarm. I could see now how even as they rolled toward us their flanks were torn and harassed by the flying knots of light horsemen that skirmished about them, and my heart went out to Maelgwn and Cynglass, to the men and the little fiery ponies of my own hills. But it was a vast host, still, a spreading murk of men that engulfed half the countryside like the shadow of an advancing storm.
“Sa, here comes the Darkness,” Bedwyr said.
“If ever you prayed to any God, pray now for the strengthening of the Light.”
He leaned a little from the saddle, and set his hand on my shoulder. “I have never known how to pray, unless maybe through Oran Môr, the Great Music — I will make you a song of light driving out darkness, a song of the lightnings of the war host of Artos, when the day’s work is over.” And he wheeled his horse and clattered off to his post with the Companions. And I was alone with Riada sitting his horse just behind me, and the scouts and messengers who came and went.
The advancing darkness had been without sound at first, but now there began to be a soft quiver in the earth rather than the air, the tramp of thousand upon thousand feet, the faint surf of shouts and weapon ring; the merest ripple of sound that came and went at the will of the summer wind that tossed the moon daisies to and fro, but gathering strength, solidifying into the distant earth-shaking many-voiced thunder of an advancing war host. A fold in the Downs had swallowed the vanguard from sight, and then along the nearer ridge, maybe half a mile away, ran a dark quiver of movement, and over it lifted the rain pattern of upraised spears and the white gleam of the horsetail standards; more and more, and then the brown of the war host, with our light horsemen wheeling and re-forming about them and sending in their flights of arrows and slingstones — growing sparse now — as chance offered. The sun splintered into shards of light on shield boss or spear blade, among the onward-rolling mass, and the deep crash of tramping feet and the formless surf of shouting seemed to spring forward ahead of them.