Then as one of the camp women, who had been pounding something in a bowl in the far corner of the bothy, got to her feet to take herself elsewhere, he opened his eyes and lay looking up at me, frowning a little as though not quite sure that either he or I were there. “Artos,” he said after a while, half questioningly, and I do not think he knew that he had fumbled out his sound hand to find mine; and then, “Was it — a good night’s hunting?”
“A good night’s hunting,” I said. “It will be a while and a while before the wolf pack can be done with licking its wounds and gather against us once more.”
“You will — know about Aquila — all the bodyguard.”
“I have Aquila’s signet ring around my neck,” I said. “He gave it into my keeping for Flavian, the night before.”
He was quiet for so long after that, that I thought he was drifting off to sleep, but in a while he opened his eyes again and fixed them on my face, and I think that by a conscious effort he saw me for the first time. Until then he had only seen someone bending over him, and known that it was me. “Hail Caesar!” he said, and then — his voice was no more than a spent whisper, but that wild mocking left brow of his flickered up and flew like a banner — “Greatly am I honored! It is not given to every man to die in an emperor’s bed!”
I had forgotten that I was still wearing the diadem of withering yellow oak leaves. I put up my free hand and pulled it off and let it drop onto the old skin rug beside Bedwyr. “That was a jest in vile taste! Listen to me, Bedwyr, if I am Caesar, you are Caesar’s captain. I cannot and will not do without my captain — listen to me, Bedwyr, listen!” I was bending over him, trying to hold him by the eyes, but already they were closing again. He was not listening any more — I doubted if he could even hear me, and I had to reach him for my own sake I think as much as his, before maybe he went altogether away from me. I bent lower quickly and kissed him on the forehead. The taste of the black pain-sweat was sour and salt on my mouth.
Then I got up and went out to find Flavian and give him his father’s ring, to take up the reins of the many tasks that waited for Caesar’s handling.
THE mighty war host of the Saxon Confederacy had been broken asunder, and we drove the scattered war bands out of the White Horse Vale, out of the Tamesis Valley basin where they had had their settlements for twenty years and more; everywhere, from Portas Ardurni around to the Metaris, we flung them back to their coastal runs, and indeed I believe — I still believe — that we could have flung them into the sea.
But be that as it may, a day came, an autumn day with the gale booming up through the forest from Anderida Marshes, when Artorius Augustus Caesar (few men called him Artos any more) and three Wolf Kings, each with a picked handful of chiefs and captains behind them, met together in the main chamber of the long-derelict posting station on the Londinium road.
Outside, the horses stamped and fidgeted in the old cavalry corral, made restless by the wind, and the wind swooped all ways at once through the holes in the fire-scarred thatch, filling the place with smoke from the burning ashe logs on the hearth that had been cold for years. Always an ashe fire for a peace council — maybe because it is the only wood that will burn green? The green branch of all envoys and those who come in peace . . . ? We had brought our green branch in another form also, Flavian’s young son. I had asked Flavian to bring the boy with him (to his mother it would be excuse enough that he was rising thirteen and it was time that he began to see the ways of men) for an added sign that we had no ill intent and the council was indeed one of peace, for no man takes his twelve-year-old son on the war trail. The Saxons had had the same thought, it seemed, and one of the East Anglian chieftains had come to the meeting place trailing a son like a half-trained puppy at heel. Anlaf and the Minnow; they had eyed each other under their brows at first, stiff-legged and wary; finally they had departed together, walking at arm’s length. “They will come back when their bellies bid them,” someone had said.
We sat, British and Saxon, facing each other across the hearth. I had Perdius with me, and Cei, and Cador of Dumnonia and young Constantino, and Flavian, sitting with the hand on which his father’s ring blinked green as a wolf’s eye in the firelight, clenched on his knee. I longed for the help and support of old Aquila’s wisdom now, almost as deeply as I longed to have Bedwyr beside me.
But at least Bedwyr was alive. It had been five days before we could be sure that he would live, and then after all the wounded had been got back to Venta, the wound had turned sick, and he had been like to die all over again. That had been when I took him out of his bare little cell in the old officers’ quarters and brought him across to my own, for Guenhumara to tend as once she had tended me. If I had not done so, I think he would indeed have died, for we had many sore wounded and there was fever among the troops that summer besides, so that Gwalchmai and his henchmen and even Ben Simeon had more work than any man could do with; and the wound kept shedding bone splinters, and reopened again and again, so that even now it seemed not sure that it was truly healing.
I looked across at the big fair men on the far side of the hearth. They were the lords of a broken kingdom, for the most part very young or very old. Cissa of the South Seax and Ingil of the East Angles were the young untried sons of newly slain fathers, one gray-bearded warrior with the long white scar of an ancient spear wound on his forearm spoke for the Northfolk and the Southfolk who had no king left to them at all. They were defeated, but they did not bow their heads, and despite myself, I felt the stirring of respect for them. They were Barbarians — they are still Barbarians, the Saxon kind, and they will be for centuries yet, for they are a younger people than we, and have never known in any way the Rule of Law. But they had courage, not merely the hot valor that flares in battle, but the courage that continues after the fires are out. These men were of the breed that had burned out Irach’s village and slaughtered his kin; creatures who in some ways were less like men than beasts — the Sea Wolves that we had named them. But now they faced me as though we were equally met, and prepared to fight still for their continuance. And courage I have always loved in any man, no matter what else I have hated in him. Even in Medraut — even in my son.
So we spoke together, to and fro across the blazing ashe logs and through the smoke, with the boom of the wind through Anderida Forest sounding behind our words.
The graybeard had been chosen — for the garnered wisdom of his years I suppose — to act as spokesman for the rest, a gaunt old man with eyes under a gray shag of brows, that were as yellow as a wolf’s, and teeth like an old wolf’s, too, yellow and long in his beard. “We are the conquered, and you are the conquerors,” he said. “Therefore it is for us to ask your mercy and for you to give it.” But he did not ask so much as demand.
I leaned forward with my arms on my knees, and stared into his proud old face. “I am thinking of burning farmsteads and nuns slaughtered like cattle at their altar steps,” I said. “I am thinking of living men mutilated on spent battlefields. I am thinking of a girl I saw once, whose spirit had been driven from her body not by one man’s rape but by many. What mercy did you ever show, when yours was the conqueror’s hand?”