Time. . . .
We were silent again. And then I heard my own voice, as it were thinking aloud. “I remember once, long ago, Ambrosius said to me that if we fought well enough we might hold back the dark for maybe another hundred years. I asked him, seeing that the end was sure, why we did not merely lie down and let it come, for the end would be easier that way. He said: ‘For a dream.’ ”
“And you? What did you say?”
“Something about a dream being often the best thing to die for . . . I was young, and something of a fool.”
“Yet when there is no dream left worth dying for, that is when the people die,” Bedwyr murmured, “and there is the advantage to it, that the dream can live on, even when hope dies. Yet hope has its value too. . . .”
“Sa sa.” I turned abruptly on the colonnade step, to face him. “Bedwyr, all our lives we have fought a long fight without hope” — I hesitated, seeking the words I needed — “without — ultimate hope. And now, for the first time, it is in my heart that there is a kind of hope for us, after all.”
He turned from the pigeons. “What hope would that be?”
“You remember that I asked Flavian to bring the Minnow with him to the council camp?”
“I remember.”
“There was another boy there, a little younger than the Minnow, the son of one of the Saxon nobles. Like enough, he was brought for the same purpose. They walked around each other on stiff legs at first, like young hounds, and then they went away, and no man saw them again until evening. They came back at suppertime, being hungry, and told no one what they had done with their day, and no one asked, but they looked as though they had spent part of it fighting, and the rest in eating blackberries. They shared the same broth bowl and spent the evening among the hounds by the fire, picking bramble thorns out of each other’s feet. And suddenly I knew, watching them — Ambrosius never knew it — that the longer we can hold off the Saxons, the more we can slow their advance, even at the cost of our heart’s blood, the more time there will be for other boys to pick thorns out of each other’s feet and learn the words for hearth and hound and honey cake in each other’s tongue. . . . Every year that we can hold the Saxons back may well mean that the darkness will engulf us the less completely in the end, that more of what we fight for will survive until the light comes again.”
“It is a good thought,” Bedwyr said softly. “It would be a better one if you could live three or four lives.”
“Surely. And there’s where the harness chafes. Having only one, and that more than half spent — If God had but given me a son to take my sword after me.”
He turned sharply to look at me, but did not speak, for the thought of Medraut leapt naked between us. “In the end it must fall to Constantine,” I said at last. “Cador knows that.”
“And Constantine is — a fine cavalry leader in his own wild way, and will doubtless make a fine prince for Dumnonia.”
“He burns with a steadier flame than his father. But the young ones are of a lesser stature, a lesser breed — both Saxon and British, they are a lesser breed. The giants and heroes are dead, and all save one, the men grow smaller than they used to be when we were young.“
“And that one?”
“If I could have had Cerdic for my son,” I said slowly, “I should have been well content.”
Neither of us spoke again for a long while. Bedwyr returned to his watching of the pigeons, I to staring down at that arabesque of shadows that the sand-rose cast across the pavement at my feet, neither of us thinking much of what we saw. And the slow long silence fell like the soft dust of years over the things that we had been speaking of.
A dry-edged poplar leaf, caught by an eddy of wind, came spuming across the sunlit courtyard to flatten itself for an instant against the bottom step, and in the way that one does such small pointless things, Bedwyr flung out a hand — his left — to catch it, and snatched at his breath swearing softly, and let his arm settle gingerly onto his knees again, while the leaf whirled away.
I looked around at him, seeing afresh the discolored hollows around his eyes and the way the bones stood out under the skin that had bleached from its usual brown to a dingy yellow, and the parching of long-recurrent fever that had left his mouth dry and chapped. “It still catches you, then?” I said. I had asked for that arm of his before, but he had swept my questions aside, caring for nothing but to hear what had happened at the council table.
“It is well enough.”
“ ‘Well enough’ is an answer for the birdcatcher’s grandmother.”
He seemed to be drawing back his mind from a long way away, to give me his full attention. “It still catches me,” he said with mocking exactitude. “The ache runs down here like a red thread — a little Ted worm in the bone — and catches me up short when I would be catching poplar leaves in flight.” He flung back the loose fold of his cloak and held it out to me, and I saw that from the elbow down, the arm was somewhat wasted and brittle-looking, and the elbow itself, below the heavy bronze arm ring that I had given him years ago, was wickedly seamed with livid scars, not only of the wound itself, but of the many lancings and probings after the splinters of shattered bone, some of them scarcely healed even now. “It also does not bend.” I saw the painful drag and thrust of the muscles, but the joint remained immovable, bent at about the angle at which a man carries his shield and bridle.
“What does Gwalchmai say? And Ben Simeon? Has Ben Simeon seen it?”
He quirked up that wild eyebrow, the other grave and level, so that his face wore two expressions at once. “That I am fortunate to be alive. . . . I shall even be able to use it by and by, seeing that it is not my sword arm. When I knew that it must stiffen I bade Gwalchmai to set and strap the thing in the position that I bade him, and before spring I shall be handling horse and buckler again; I shall be fit for service as Caesar’s captain.”
“And the Emperor’s harper?” I glanced at the embroidered doeskin bag that lay as usual beside him.
“Surely, and that already, since a one-handed skill will serve.” He took up the harp and drew it from the bag, using his left arm with a kind of clumsy acquired skill, and settled the slim well-worn instrument between his knee and the hollow of his shoulder. “It is easier with a sound arm, admittedly,” he said, frowning as he fumbled for the familiar supporting hold.
He struck a swelling ripple of tuning notes that sounded like a question, made his adjustments, and began to play. It was a tune from my own hills, that he had picked up from Ambrosius’s harper, small and jaunty as a water wagtail. And listening to him, I lost the Queen’s Courtyard in the westering autumn sunlight, and was back again in the dark of the mountains that walled Nant Ffrancon, with the thunder of horses’ hooves in my ears, and a herdboy playing that tune on his pipes; and for an instant the taste of my youth came back to me, and the green freshness of the morning before Ygerna’s shadow fell across the day.
A quiet step sounded behind us, and I looked up as Guenhumara came across the colonnade with her spindle and distaff. I moved aside to make space for her on the step, but she smiled and shook her head, and leaned herself against the cracked plaster column, looking down at us.
Bedwyr had dropped his hand from the harp strings, and as the small prancing melody fell silent, she said quickly, “Na na, let you go on playing; it was the harp song that called me out.” And he made her a little bow, and caught up the tunelet again where he had tossed it down. And while he played, I had time to look at Guenhumara as I had scarcely had time to look at her since I came home. She was wearing a gown of some soft red-brown stuff, faded a little as the earth fades with sun and rain, and it seemed to me suddenly that there was a new softness about her, a look of harvest. I searched for the woman I had kissed into that one moment of passionate response beside the gray standing stone in the rain, and could not find her, but knew that she had her part in this other woman and was not lost, as the green shoot is not lost in the red corn. There was a warmer quietness in her, fulfillment and content as a cornfield at harvest time. The Corn Queen, I thought. She is like the Corn Queen, and pushed the thought away, for the overtones of sacrifice that clung to it. I wondered whether she was — not forgetting the Small One, but perhaps remembering with less pain.