Meanwhile, I knew that Ambrosius had made his stronghold against the Dark and was taking his stand there against old and mighty Hengest and against a new enemy, one Aelle, who had landed with his war fleet south of Regnum and made himself a sore menace to the British eastern flank. All that had nothing to do with me now; but nevertheless, I think that I would have abandoned Guidarius for the time being, and left the work half done and doubtless all to do again, and ridden south to Ambrosius if he had sent for me. But he did not send, and so I went on with the work at hand.
They were hard years, and we did not always carry home the victor’s laurels but sometimes only our wounds to lick. But by the seventh autumn, Lindum Territory and the northern part of the Icenian coast was almost clear, and so unhealthy for the Saxon kind that for a while their crazy war boats no longer descended on the coast with every east wind that blew. (We used to call the east wind “the Saxon Wind” in those days.) And we knew that when spring opened the country, and the time for the war trail came again, it would be time to strike north across the Abus against Eburacum, where Octa and his hordes had made their new war camp in the old Brigantian country.
That autumn, Cabal died. I had never gone into battle without him running at my stirrup since he was three parts grown, and all that last summer he went with me as he had always done. But he was old, very old, gray-muzzled and scarred by wounds, and in the end his valiant heart wore out. One evening he lay as usual at my feet beside the fire in the hall, and suddenly he raised his head to look up at me, as though he were puzzled by something that he did not understand. I stooped and began to fondle the soft hollow under his chin, and he gave a small sigh and laid his head in my hand. I did not realize what was happening, even then; only his head grew heavier and heavier in my hand, until I knew that the time had come to lay it down.
I went out then, and stood leaning on the colonnade wall for a long time in the darkness.
But there was little time, after all, to spare for grieving over a dead hound that autumn.
“Not many evenings later, we were once again in the hall, the mess hall of the old legionary fortress, where the badges and titles of the ill-fated Ninth Legion were painted on the peeling plaster over the door. There were hounds sprawled about the central fire, hounds belonging to one or other of the Companions. I watched Fulvius’s red bitch suckling her puppies, and thought how perfectly easily I could come by another hound to fill with his padding and the rattle of his long nails, the silence that walked at my heels. But he would not be Cabal. Only fate could send me another Cabal. . . . Supper was over, and the lads were about their evening’s amusements. Beyond the fire, two of them, stripped to their breeks, were wrestling, while a knot of others gathered about them to watch and cheer them on. I could hear their panting breaths and the laughter and advice of the onlookers. In a corner somewhat withdrawn from the rest, Gwalchmai leaned over a draughtboard, confronting Flavian, my onetime armor-bearer. They had long since formed a liking for playing draughts together, those two, maybe because they played almost equally badly. We had sweated the fat of Gwalchmai in the past six years, and he no longer bore the least resemblance to a partridge; a lean wiry young man with a quiet face. I had done well, I thought, when I whistled Gwalchmai from his fenland monastery; his father had been wrong, for he had proved himself a formidable fighter on horseback, though on foot his lameness made him slow; but above all he had proved himself the surgeon that I had taken him for. More than one of us owed our lives to him by now. Whatever mistakes I might make in the men I took for my Companions, I had certainly made none there, nor in Bedwyr’s case, nor in Cei’s. Those three, above all others, had become, as it were, an inner core of the Brotherhood, in the years since we first rode together.
Cei slept with his back against one of the benches, his legs in their black and crimson trews stretched wide to the fire. Presently he would get up, shake himself like a dog, so that his bright glass arm ring and necklaces jingled, and stroll off to the Street of Women at the lower end of the town. When Cei slept in the evening it generally meant that he had plans for a night with more amusing things in it than sleep. Some of us mended harness or cast the dice, talked idly by fits and starts, or simply stared into the fire, waiting for Bedwyr sitting on a white bullskin at my feet to sing again. It was never any use to clamor for song or saga from Bedwyr; when he chose, he would give it of his own free will, harping the bird off the tree, and when he did not choose, nothing on the earth would force him.
A movement in the shadows caught at the tail of my eye, and glancing that way, I saw where on one of the side benches, withdrawn as though into a world of their own, Gault and Levin leaned on each other’s shoulders and shared the same ale cup, talking together in low voices and with quiet laughter. It is a thing that happens on campaign, where women are scarce, every commander knows that; but sometimes, as with those two, it becomes a part of life.
Bedwyr saw where I was looking, and said with a breath of laughter, “It is as well, perhaps, that our good Bishop Felicus is not here to see that. The Church would hold up its hands in horror and talk of mortal sin.”
“Mortal sin . . . But then the Church and I have seldom seen eye to eye, these six years or so. If it keeps the lads happy and in fighting trim . . .” For it did keep them in fighting trim, each of them striving to be worthy of his friend, each to make the other proud of him; and I have known the love of a yellow-haired girl to make life too sweet and unnerve a man’s sword hand, before now.
“Give me a whole squadron of such sinners — so that they be young — and I’ll not complain.”
“What when they grow old?”
“They will not grow old,” I said. “The flame is too bright.” And I knew the grief that I suppose all commanders know from time to time, when they look about them at the men who answer to their trumpets; grief for the young men who will never grow old. . . .
A hurried step came along the colonnade, and Owain who was on guard duty appeared in the doorway (we always mounted a light guard whether in camp or winter quarters, especially since Ambrosius had sent me word that Hengest was gathering a war fleet in the Tamesis mouth). “Artos, one of the scouts has come in, and another man with him. They say they must have word with you at once.”
“I’ll come,” I said. “Keep the next song until I get back, Bedwyr,” and got up and went out with Owain into the autumn darkness of the colonnade.
The two men were waiting for me in the Sacculum where the Legion had kept its Eagle, its altars and its pay chest. We kept our own pay chest there now, and the muster roll, and the Red Dragon on its painted spear shaft propped in one corner; and it was the place where I usually saw any scouts or messengers that came hi. This man I knew of old; he was one of Guidarius’s hunters, who knew the northern marshes as a man knows his own bean patch; a little ferret of a man, but completely reliable. The other was a stranger to me, a tall youngster carrying the woad-stained war buckle that proclaimed him for one of the Brigantes, and wearing the gold tore of a chieftain about his throat — like my own mountain people, the folk of the Northern Moors had gone back to their old ways in dress as in most other things, since the Legions left. I listened to what they had to tell me, and when they were finished, dispatched them to get a meal and a night’s rest, for clearly they were too spent for our company that night. Then I went back to the mess hall, and called Cei and Bedwyr out to me.
We went back to the Sacculum, and Cei, still yawning his way out of his interrupted sleep, kicked the door shut behind us. “Well?” he grumbled. “What’s the word? I was just going down into the town.” Cei generally woke from sleep in a grumbling mood.