The, White Horse lost all shape as we drew nearer, becoming only a series of vast white scars across the turf, but never shall I forget the sight of swarming dark figures running low under the moon and the torches, panting up the steepening hillside toward it, myself in the midst of them, in the midst also of a kind of running fight among those who would take next turn when my bearers changed beneath me.
The crowd swelled moment by moment, as the men who had remained behind to tether the horses came panting after us, and others fresh from looting the wagons, some of them still on horseback, joined the comet tail of torches.
We were across the shallow outline ditch and out on the bare chalk now, and the featureless whiteness of it under the moon dizzied and made the head swim, so that any clump of couch grass or sprawl of rest harrow that had escaped the yearly scouring was good to let the eyes cling to, and I could feel the panting of my stumbling steeds under me, as they faced the last steep slope up which, like a royal road, the arched neck of the sacred horse ran to a head that had looked bird-small from the valley. In the midst of the lake of whiteness that was the head, a spear-blade-shaped island of grass, maybe four or five times as long as a man is tall, formed the eye, proud and open, staring back at the sun and the moon and the circling stars and the winds of the sky. In the very midst of this eye, the spark that is the Sun’s answer and touch place, the divine point of power, where Earth Life and Sun Life meet and quicken, stood a rough boulder, a block of limestone, green on the north side with moss almost as the grass about it, but as the torches beat upon it, the probing glare picked out strange circles within circles of eternity, that the weather had all but worn away.
And on this great roughhewn boulder, where I think the forgotten kings of a forgotten people had been enthroned, they set me down for my own throning — not as High King, after all, but as Emperor, even as his own troops had crowned Magnus Maximus my great-grandsire Emperor. Assuredly no emperor of the Roman line ever had a stranger crowning, nor a stranger congregation to see it done. For by this time the uproar had called back the men from the villages who had rounded up their cattle and taken to the hills when they got word of the Sea Wolves coming, and sometimes I thought, though I was never sure, that I glimpsed little dark men in skins on the edge of the torchlight.
And I was made Emperor, I think, with something of the rites of every faith that could still claim a follower among the war host. Pharic and his Caledonians set a circle of seven swords point down in the grass about me, and in all that followed, no man entered the circle save between the two swords at my face, and I was chrismed with armor grease brought from the captured wagons, but the priest who anointed me was a wild-eyed creature who came out of the dark with the villagers, a Christian priest by his frock of undyed sheep’s wool and his shaven forehead, but he wore the Sun cross carved from red amber around his neck, and he made the King marks on my forehead and breast, feet and hands, not in the Christian form but in older symbols. And my own men brought a hastily made circlet of oak leaves from the hill spinney close by, where the young leaves still retained a flush of their springtime gold, and thrust it down on my head for an imperial diadem; and someone — who, I never saw — hoisted an old cloak on a spear point above the heads of the crowd and tossed it to those nearest me, who caught and flung it about my shoulders. It was ragged, and spattered at the hem with dried blood, but it was of wine-red so deep and rich that in the torchlight it had the proud glow of the Purple. I got up and stood before my war host while they roared their acclamation, aware of the Purple and the Diadem as though I were clothed in flame. My sword — I did not remember having drawn it — was naked in my hand. I felt the great carved stone at the back of my heel, and something in me, in the touch of my heel against the stone, in my very loins that linked me with the earth and the gods and the stones of the Earth, and the Sun and the Power of the Sun, and in the thing in the dark at the back of my head that came from my mother’s world and knew the secret of the strange concentric circle that my father’s world had forgotten, told me that this was not a throne but a coronation stone like the Lia Fail of the High Kings of Erin, a stone for the King to stand on at his kingmaking, and I sprang onto it and flashed up my sword to the shouting war host, and all around me a thousand weapons were tossed up in reply, and for a while and a while I knew my feet one with other feet that had been planted on that flaking stone, and other men’s hearts beating in my breast, and a wild weeping exultancy swept through me and on through the human sea around me. And then behind the exultancy, my father’s world pressed in again and I knew soberly that I was a man wearing a crown of oak leaves and a tattered cloak that was almost, but not quite, of the imperial purple, but that none the less, I was chosen by these men, my men, to carry the ragged heritage; and I had as much right to it as many another sword-made emperor of Rome’s latter years.
So I stood above them, alone in my circle of seven swords, and looked down on the roaring sea of torchlit faces, chilled suddenly by a foreshadow of the loneliness above the snow line. And when at last the tumult sank enough for me to make myself heard, I cried out to them in the greatest voice that I could muster, that it might leach to the farthest fringe of them. “Soldiers! Warriors! Ye have called me by the name of Caesar, ye have called me to be your Emperor as your great-grandsires called mine, whose seal I carry in the pommel of my sword. So be it then, my brothers in arms. After forty years there is an Emperor of the West, again. . . . It is in my heart that few beyond our shores will ever hear of this night’s crowning, assuredly the Emperor of the East in his golden city of Constantine will never know that he has a fellow; but what matters that? The Island of Britain is all that still stands of Rome-in-the-West and therefore it is enough that we in Britain know that the light still burns. We have fought today such a battle as the harpers shall sing of for a thousand years! Such a battle as the women shall tell of to the bairns at bedtime to make them bold, and the young men whose fathers’ fathers our great-grandsons shall beget, shall speak of when they boast among themselves at the harvest feast. We have scattered the Sea Wolves so that it will be long and long before they can gather the pack again. Together, we have saved Britain for this time, and together we will hold Britain, that the things worth saving shall not go down into the dark!” I must speak also to my mother’s world. “But because I am not Emperor alone, but Prince of Arfon and a lord in Britain, because I am native-born and native-bred, and learned my first words in my mother’s tongue, I can claim to be yours as no other emperor has ever been, and therefore I swear my faith to you now, by the oath that we of the Tribes have counted most sacred since first we came out of the West. And after, you shall swear your faiths to me.”
I sheathed my sword. Some oaths are sworn weapon in hand, but that one must be taken with the hands empty, since it concerns things that no man may hold. “If I break faith with you, may the green earth gape and swallow me, may the gray seas roll in and overwhelm me, may the heaven of stars fall upon me and crush me out of life forever.”