“I’ll not keep you long,” I said. “There’ll still be plenty of the night left. And while you’re with her you can bid good-bye to Cordaella or Lalage or whoever it is this time.”
His eyes opened fully, and his temper sweetened in the moment while I looked at him. “Sa sa! It is like that, is it?”
And Bedwyr, who had come out still carrying his harp, and was leaning against the wall watching us, struck a little spurt of notes that was like an exclamation.
“It is like that. It seems that we have wrought too well, hereabouts, for Earl Hengest’s peace of mind. He has come up to the aid of his son — landed on the coast north of the Abus and heading for Eburacum.”
“So that was what he was gathering his war boats for,” Bedwyr said. And I nodded.
Cei hitched at his sword belt. “And so now we march north to meet them.”
“Yes.”
Bedwyr said, “It is something late in the year to be riding out on a new campaign.”
“I know. It is in my mind that Hengest knows it also, and is banking on the knowledge.” I began to walk up and down the small room; four paces from the window to the door, four paces back again — I have always found it easier to think walking. “If we leave him to himself now, with the whole winter to strengthen his position, he will be all the tougher nut to crack open in the spring; and there is always the risk that he may make the first move, and come down on us. We have a month of possible campaigning weather left — if we’re lucky. We must risk the weather breaking early.”
“Aye well, there’ll be girls in Eburacum, I dare say,” Cei remarked philosophically.
Bedwyr quirked up that flaring eyebrow, and the laughter flickered in his voice. “Is it any girl for you, Brother Cei? Any girl in any city?”
“Any girl that is warm and willing.” The golden man turned to me. “What is the word, Artos?”
“How soon can we march?”
“In three days,” they both said together; and Cei added, “That is for the Companions; for Guidarius’s men — who can say?”
I was looking at Bedwyr. His fingers were still on the harp strings, but he made no sound. He lifted his eyes to meet mine, gravely considering, under their odd brows. “Who can say? — Guidarius, I suppose. But it is in my heart to wonder if we can count on the Lindum men at all.”
I had been wondering that also. We had fought through all those last coast summers together, Guidarius’s ragged war host acting as spearmen and mounted archers — their sturdy dependable little horses were well suited to that work, and for scouting, though they had not the weight for a charge; and we knew each other as well as men can who have fought together for more than seven years. It was not them that I doubted, but Guidarius himself. “That’s as may be,” I said. “Let the others know, and get things moving, Bedwyr. I must go and speak with Guidarius now, but I’ll be back in an hour.”
“And myself?” said Cei, his thumbs, as they most often were, in his sword belt.
“Go and bid good-bye to Lalage. You can take over double your share of work in the morning, to even the count.”
I west out through the main gate of the camp, hearing it already beginning to stir and thrum behind me, and across the street to the old Governor’s Palace, close to the Forum. The bitter-smelling mist of early autumn was creeping up from the river marshes, over the lower town, and the lantern that hung in the entrance to Guidarius’s forecourt shed a yellow pool of light on to a drift of yellow poplar leaves across the threshold. It was indeed perilously late in the year to be riding out on a new campaign.
I roused the doorkeeper who was sleeping peacefully with his empty beer jar beside him, and told him that I must speak with the Prince Guidarius.
Guidarius was in his private apartments, spending a domestic evening with his wife and daughters. The room seemed, when I was shown into it after a maddening delay, to be very bright with candlelight, very hot from the brazier which glowed clear red in the midst of it, and very full of girls.
Guidarius, reclining on a wolf-headed couch with his wife sitting dutifully at his feet, was very Roman as to outward seeming, his pouchy face carefully shaved, the few remaining hairs of his head trimmed short, his paunchy little body clad in a Roman tunic of fine white wool, and his wife’s gown cross-girdled in the classic manner, as few women still wore it, even when I was young. I never saw him without a feeling of surprise that he should have turned back, after the generations that his fathers had been magistrates and even provincial governors, to the title of Prince, that had been theirs before the Eagles came. Other men, yes, it had happened up and down Britain, as our old native states woke out of the Roman years, but not men who still wore Roman tunics and swore by Roma Dea and supped, as Guidarius had clearly done (for the remains were still hanging around his ears), with wreaths of rosemary and autumn violets on their bald heads.
He looked up when I entered, and nodded affably. “Ah, my Lord Artorius. I grieve that you were kept waiting, but you know how it is, we must all ease our shoulders from the cares of state sometimes; I am never easy to gain access to when I am spending a quiet hour with my family.”
“I know how it is,” I agreed. “But my business is urgent. I would not have broken in on you else.”
He stared at me a moment, then made shooing gestures to his women folk who had already risen uncertainly to their feet; and they fluttered out, leaving behind them a half-played game of draughts, a wisp of some soft embroidered stuff with the needle shining in it; all the pretty clutter that collects where women have been.
When they had gone, and the heavy curtain had fallen across the doorway behind them, he swung his feet to the floor and sat up. “Well? Well well? What is it?”
I walked over to him. “Prince Guidarius, I received word not an hour since, that Earl Hengest is come north to the aid of his kinsmen; he has landed beyond the Abus and is heading for Eburacum.”
He looked at me, startled, and then the blood rose into his mottled cheeks. “You received? Why was the word not brought in the first place to me?”
“The thing is beyond your frontiers,” I told him. “But I am the Count of Britain, and therefore my frontiers are wider than yours.”
It was foolish, when I should have been trying to conciliate him, but something about the man had always raised my hackles, since the first day that I entered Lindum, and the years that I had tried to work with him had not altered that. But truly, I think it would have made no difference if I had crawled on my belly at his feet.
He made sounds in his throat, then evidently decided to let it pass; only he said testily, “Well, well, young dogs bark loudest, so they say. Though you be Alexander himself, pull out that stool and sit down. It gives me a crick in the neck to be trying to talk to you while you stand over me like a pine tree.”
I did as he bade me, and then went on with what I had it in me to say. “I am come to bring you the word now, and to tell you that I am marching north in three days.”
He stared at me in good earnest then, with a frown puckering his forehead. “It is too late in the year to start a new campaign,” he said at last, much as Bedwyr had done.
“Almost, but not quite.”
He shrugged. “You should know best; you are, as you have pointed out, the Count of Britain. Well, I suppose if you can finish the thing in one good sharp encounter, you may be back here and snug in winter quarters before the bad weather sets in.”