There was a dim growl of voices from both sides of the fire. The old man gave the ghost of a shrug. “War is war. Nay then, we do not ask for mercy, we propose a bargain.”
“A bargain?” I said. “You would talk of bargains with me?”
“A bargain which would be of advantage to us both. It is this, my Lord Artos the Bear. You shall grant to those of us who are left in Britain (the high gods know we are something fewer than we were) leave to abide in the coastal strips where our first settlements were made; cornland and timber and common land sufficient for our needs; and in return, we will undertake to hold those same southward and eastward facing coasts secure from the incoming of others of our kind.”
“I seem to have heard such a tale before,” I said. “Ah, but tell me now, in your country, beyond the North and Narrow Seas, is it a common custom for the hunter to bid the wolf in over his threshold?”
A brief, appreciative twinkle lit the wolf-yellow eyes of the old warrior. “Yet a wolf brought in over the threshold, warmed by the hunter’s fire and fed the occasional bone from the hunter’s hand, may become as a guard dog, in time, and bold to drive the wild wolf pack from the door.”
“So Fox Vortigern thought, forty years ago.”
There was a small, quickly controlled movement among the Saxons behind the spokesman, and looking up to meet the eyes of the man who had made it — the tall red-haired man leaning against the wall a little withdrawn from the rest, as though proclaiming, even with something of a nourish, his awareness that this talk of bargains was a thing that he had no part in — I saw again the newly healed scar on his throat, between the copper of the young beard and the gold of the collar he wore. It had been something of a shock to see Cerdic at the council fire, even though I knew by then that my blade had somehow missed the life spot. I suppose the first sight of a face one last saw in the moment of striking what one believes to be the deathblow, must always be a little as though one saw a ghost. The flickering gray-green eyes were hot with anger at any reference to his father, and yet I could see that he accepted the inference, because he knew as well as I did that it was just.
“Vortigern was one man, and Artos the Bear is another,” said the ancient.
“Honey drips from thy tongue, Old Father,” I said mockingly.
And he shook his head, coughing sharply as a puff of smoke curled across his face, suddenly pettish. “Na na, I speak the thing that all men know. Vortigern was one man and Hengest knew it, Artos is another, and we, the kings and chiefs who follow after Hengest, know that also. We are not fools!”
And looking into the fierce red-rimmed eyes of the old man as the smoke cleared, I knew that at least he was no flatterer of kings. “Yet though I were Tyr himself, and Woden, and the first Caesar joined in one, why should I accept this most dangerous expedient of keeping the brood of Hengest within my borders, when I have the strength to thrust them off the last headland into the sea?”
“Because maybe a thousand miles of coastline facing the Saxon and the Anglish and the Jute lands and needing always to be defended, needing always vigilance and a shield-front maintained, while the Scots folk creep in from the back with their long knives, has its dangers also. I know the land that we come from, from Manopia and the Rhenus mouth around to the northern coast of Juteland; I remember the lean harvests and sea shifting among the sodden islands, and the folk driven too close for the poor land to feed them, and I tell you that so long as ever a wind blows from the east or from the north, my people and the Saxons and the Jutes will come down upon these richer shores.” His face spasmed for an instant into a mass of sword-gash wrinkles, which was his nearest approach to a smile. “It was not we alone who lost good fighting men this summer.”
I was silent, my chin sunk between my fists, hearing the wind roaring up from Anderida marshes; and I knew that what he said was true. I had known it for a long while past, or I would not have been sitting here today, not have bidden Flavian to bring the boy with him. If I had been still the man to whom Ambrosius gave his freedom and his wooden foil, I think that I should not have been there at all, that nothing would have seemed possible to me save to hurl the last Barbarian into the sea. But I had the first white hairs in my muzzle now. . . .
“Tell me why I should trust you the length of my thumbnail?” I said at last, lifting my head from my hands.
“Sa, I will tell you: over that way” — he jerked his head southeastward toward Dubris — “over that way, I saw once a winged horse carved over a gateway, and one told me it was a Totem of the Second Legion, because they had held that place and so marked it for their own. Now front where did the Second Legion draw its men?”
I was silent for a long moment, looking at him. “From the tribes along the Rhenus,” I said slowly.
“From the tribes along the Rhenus. Aiee! I have heard also that the great Magnus Maximus, my lord’s great-grandsire, served a while with the Second Legion and loved them well, and that long, long before that, the Emperor in Romeburg himself made them an Augustan Legion, and none, I think, accused the Second Legion of broken trust!”
And that also was true.
And I had learned some things and lost others in the process of growing old — for I felt old that evening, with the weight of five and forty winters lying heavy on me as though there had been added to them another score. And so I made my decision, though I did not yet let it appear that I had done so, to the men about me. It was a decision that proved sound, insane though I know that many of my own folk thought it; and when the black sorrow came, it was not from the Saxon shore, not from the men with whom I struck that day’s bargain, after all.
“It is in my mind that you speak both truth and something of wisdom,” I said at last. “So be it then, let us go further into this matter of a bargain between your people and mine.”
There was much talk after that, much argument, while the clerks waited to make copies of a treaty, and beyond the door the tawny sunset flamed and faded between the trees, and the light of the burning ashe wood began to bite into the deepening shadows. And then at last the arguing was done, and I stood up to state the final terms, while the clerks scratched on their parchments, a small, hurried, insect sound. I spoke of boundaries and tribal territory, of landholding in yard-lands per man, and rights of wood and water, pasturage and the hunting spear, and of the military service to be rendered in exchange. (“The coasts from Portas Adurni around to the Metaris we will keep for you from all inroads,” the aged spokesman had said, after conferring with the others of his kind, “but you shall not call upon us to carry our spears into any other war of yours, in any other part of Britain.” And I had agreed, for the thing seemed fair enough.) And all the while, as I spoke, something yammered within my head, in stupid astonishment at myself and the words that I was measuring out, as a man issues out arrowheads from a basket. Northfolk and Southfolk, East Angles and South Seax and the Cantii Kingdom, I dealt with them each in turn, so far as they could be dealt with before the agreed frontiers were drawn out in detail.
Last of all, I turned again to the red-haired man with the scarred throat. And when, meeting my gaze, he straightened and stepped forward between two others to the hearthstone, it was as though he had been waiting for me all the while, and I for him. “Cerdic, son of Vortigern, between you and me there can be no bargain struck.”