He stood looking at me, half smiling so that the white dogtooth just lifted his lip at one side. And more even than at our first meeting, he seemed like some fierce and beautiful and dangerous animal. “Is it death, then, my Lord Artos?”
“I do not kill in the council circle,” I said and there was a small thunderous stirring among the Saxons, an eye cocked here and there among my own men, for every man there knew the old ugly tale of how Hengest had called a council feast for Fox Vortigern, and bidden his warriors of the feasting circle to slay each the Briton at his left hand, and how Vortigern had bought his own life with half a British princedom that was not his to pay with.
Cerdic knew it, too. His nostrils dilated, quivering like a stallion’s, and his hand went to the place where his sword hilt should have been — but the weapons were stacked outside, for no man comes armed to the council, unless, like Hengest’s Saxons, he carries his knife hidden in his sleeve. His hand remembered and fell away again. “What does my Lord the Bear propose for me, then?” he said, breathing quickly.
“Nine days to be gone from Britain.”
I saw the surprise flicker in his eyes, and the red brows twitched together. I think he had been prepared for death, but he had not thought of the other thing. “Do I go alone? And in what like? Am I to thank Most Noble Caesar for leave to take my sword with me? If not, I will find means to gain another before I come again.”
“Take your sword. Take your long war boats and any of your own war band who choose to follow you,” I said. “You are free of all the sea that your keel can sail over, and any landfall that opens to you. Only you shall be gone from these shores in nine days.”
“Sa! You offer a prospect strangely pleasant,” said the adventurer in him, in a tone of lingering and half-mocking surprise, and then with a sudden snarl of fury as though the beast crouched to spring: “Tell me in what I have differed from these others, that my fate should differ from theirs? That I should bear a wolf’s head and go landless and driven out, while they hold the lands that Hengest my grandsire took by the strength of his arm?”
Oisc of the Cantish lands looked up from the fire and thrust his word angrily between us. “Hengest was my grandsire also, let you remember!” but neither of us paid him heed.
“I will tell you: for the unjust, yet sufficient reason that you are your father’s son, the blood of your father’s line running in your veins.” ;
“The royal blood of Britain!” he said.
“I would call it, rather, the blood of a Prince of Powys, who married and abandoned a High King’s daughter, and claimed through her the kingship in his turn. The sorry thing for you is that there are still men in Britain who support your father’s claim and so you are a danger to Britain, Cerdic, son of Vortigern, for your heart goes with your Saxon kin. Therefore run your war boats down the beach and gather your sword companions, and carve yourself a kingdom if you can, elsewhere.”
He stared at me in silence for a long moment, with his eyes half closed over their cool flickering affrontery. “The first time we met you bid me go. You bid me go free and said that I should come again when I was a man, and you would kill me if you could, and if I could, I should kill you.” The flash of a smile that had no mirth in it showed for an instant those strong white dogteeth, and his hand went to the scar on his neck. “The thing is not yet ended between us, my Lord Artos the Bear of Britain.”
He would have swirled about, then and there, and stridden out through the doorway, but I called him to heel. “It may be that the thing is not yet ended between us, as you say. But the end must wait for another day. The women are busy about the cooking fires and soon we shall be at the evening meal. Bide then, and eat and drink and be warm at the fire with the rest of us.”
“If I am to be away from my father’s shores within nine days, I have more pressing calls upon my time.”
“Yet all men must eat. I give you half a day’s grace, that you may find the time to sup with the rest of us tonight.”
The smile still lingering at one side of his mouth grew sardonic. “Do you fear that I shall fire this somewhat battered thatch over your heads if you let me from your sight?”
“No more, I think, than you fear my ambush on your road to the coast.”
And suddenly, his gaze still locked with mine, the smile that had been shut and ugly flashed open in his face, fierce and oddly joyful, and he said swiftly in the British tongue, “So be it, oh my brother and my enemy; we two, both of King’s blood, will drink the stars out of tonight’s sky, among this pirate royalty!”
So presently, when the deer and badger meat was brought in smoking from the spits, and the mead began to go round, Cerdic and I drank from the same cup and dipped our fingers in the stirabout bowl together, among the rest of the Companions and house carls who had played no part in the council that went before. The two boys had, as foretold, “come back when their bellies bade them” and took their supper squatting among the hounds. What they had done with their day no one asked, nor did they tell without the asking, but from the state of their faces, it seemed likely that they had spent part of it fighting, and another part in eating blackberries. Now they sat bunched shoulder to shoulder, the dark head and the fair one together in the firelight, while they picked companionably at each other’s brier scratches.
That seemed to me a thing that had in it the seeds of hope for the future. But every time I glanced that way, I saw beyond them the face of Medraut my son, among the other squadron captains, and every time the shuttered and yet strangely devouring gaze, lit to the color of sapphires by the firelight, was on me or on Cerdic beside me, so that at last, even when I did not look, there seemed no escaping it.
The night seemed so full of him that I was not surprised when later, as I went to the sleeping place that had been made for me of turf and branches against the wall of the ruined fodder store, I found him waiting for me. He unfurled his height from the sleeping bench as I entered, and asked in a suppressed voice if he might speak with me alone.
I said to Riada, who had followed me according to custom, “I’ll not be needing you for a while. Go and keep a lookout that we are not disturbed. I’ll call you later.” And when he had gone, I moved forward, letting the heavy wolfskin apron fall again behind me. “Medraut? What is it then, that brings you here?”
“Is it so strange that a son should come to his father’s bothy?”
“It is scarcely a habit, with you.”
“Is that all of my choice?” he said. “If my company gives you pleasure, you have hidden it well.” And then suddenly, “Father, what is it that is amiss between you and me?”
I went and sat on the piled sheepskins of the bed place, and stared into the sea-blue heart of the tallow candle flame. “Is that what you came to ask me? I don’t know. Before God, I don’t know, Medraut; but whatever it is, I admit the fault of it, I and my house — I who kindled the spark of your life in your mother’s womb, my father who first taught her mother how to hate.”
“Hate, yes,” he said broodingly. “I am your guilt made flesh, am I not, Father? You will always smell the dark birth-smell of my mother’s hate on me, and hate me in turn.”
“God forbid that I should hate any man who has done nothing to earn it,” I said. “It is not so simple as that. There is a shadow cast between you and me, Medraut, a web of shadow that there is no escape from, for either of us.”
He came toward me, and before I knew what he was about, knelt beside me and bowed his head onto my knee. It was a horrible womanish gesture. “No escape. . . . It is m what you are and in what I am.” His voice came muffled against my knee. “No, don’t draw away from me. Whatever else I am, I am your son — your most wretched son. If you do not hate me, try to love me a little, Father; it is lonely never to have been loved, only devoured.”