I had thought of those things a good deal, in the past few days, and now it came upon me as I sat there rubbing my chin with the pumice stone and already half stripped for sleep, that the time had come to be done with the thinking.
Why that night I do not know; it was not a good time to choose; Ambrosius had been in council all day, it was late, and he might even have gone to his bed by now, but I knew suddenly that I must go to him that night. I leaned sideways to peer into the burnished curve of my war cap hanging at the head of the couch, which was the only mirror I had, feeling my cheeks and chin for any stubble still to be rubbed away, and my face looked back at me, distorted by the curve of the metal, but clear enough in the light of the dribbling candles, big-boned as a Jute’s, and brown-skinned under hair the color of a hayfield when it pales at harvesttime. I suppose that I must have had all that from my mother, for assuredly there was nothing there of dark narrow-boned Ambrosius; nor, consequently, of Utha his brother and my father, who men had told me was like him. Nobody had ever told me what my mother was like; maybe no one had noticed, save for Utha who had begotten me on her under a hawthorn bush, in sheer lightness of heart after a good day’s hunting. Maybe even he had not noticed much.
The pumice stone had done its work, and I set it aside, and getting to my feet, caught up the heavy cloak that lay across the couch and flung it around me over my light undertunic. I called to my armor-bearer whom I could still hear moving in the next room, that I should want him no more that night, and went out into the colonnade with my favorite hound Cabal padding at heel. The old Governor’s Palace had sunk into quiet, much as a war camp does about midnight when even the horses cease to fidget to their picket lines. Only here and there the china saffron square of a window showed where someone was still wakeful on watch. The few colonnade lanterns that had not yet been put out swung to and fro in the thin cold wind, sending bursts of light and shadow along the pavements. The snow had driven in over the dwarf wall of the colonnade, but it would not lie long; already the damp chill of thaw was in the air. The cold licked about my bare shins and smarted on my newly pumiced chin; but faint warmth met me on the threshold of Ambrosius’s quarters, as the guards lowered their spears to let me pass into the anteroom. In the inner chamber there was applewood burning above the charcoal in the brazier, and the aromatic sweetness of it filled the room. Ambrosius the High King sat in his big cross-legged chair beside the brazier, and Kuno his armor-bearer stood in the far shadows by the door that opened into his sleeping cell beyond. And as I halted an instant on the threshold, it was as though I saw my kinsman with the clear-seeing eye of a stranger: a dark fine-boned man with a still and very purposeful face; a man who, in any multitude, would wear solitude almost as tangibly as he wore the purple mantle flung about his shoulders. I had been aware always of that solitude in him, but never so sharply as in that moment, and I was thankful that I should never be High King. Not for me that unbearable peak above the snow line. Yet now I think that it had little to do with the High Kingship but was in the man himself, for I had known it in him always, and he had been crowned only three days.
He was still fully dressed, though he sat forward, his arms across his knees, as he did when he was tired. The slender gold fillet that bound his dark brows gave back a blink of light to the brazier, and the straight folds of the cloak that glowed imperial purple in the daylight was ringstraked with black and the color of wine. He looked up as I entered, and his shuttered face flashed open as it did for few men save myself and Aquila. “Artos! So you too do not feel like sleeping.”
I shook my head. “Na; and so I hoped that I should find you awake.”
Cabal padded in past me, as one very much at home in that place, and cast himself down beside the brazier with a contented sigh.
Ambrosius looked at me for a moment, and then bade his armor-bearer bring some wine and leave us. But when the stripling had finally gone, I did not at once begin on the matter that had brought me, only stood warming my hands at the brazier and wondering how to make the beginning. I heard the whisper of sleet against the high window and the thin whining of the draft along the floor. Somewhere a shutter banged in the wind; steps passed along the colonnade and died into the distance. I was acutely aware of the small firelit room, and the darkness of the winter night pressing in upon its fragile shell.
A gust of wind swooped out of the night, driving a sharp spatter of sleet against the window, the aromatic smoke billowed from the brazier, and an apple log fell with a tinselly rustle into the red cavern of the charcoal. Ambrosius said, “Well, my great Bear Cub?” and I knew that he had been watching me all the time.
“Well?” I said.
“What is the thing that you come to say to me?”
I stooped, and took up a lichened log from the basket beside the brazier, and set it carefully on the fire. “Once,” I said, “when I was a cub indeed, I remember hearing you cry out for one great victory to sound like a trumpet blast through Britain, that the Saxon legend might be broken in men’s minds, and the tribes and the people might hear it and gather to your standard, not in ones and twos and scattered war bands, but in whole princedoms. . . . You gamed that victory at Guoloph in the autumn. For a while at least, the Saxons are broken here in the South; Hengest is fled; and the princes of Dumnonia and the Cymri who have held back for thirty years got drunk three nights since at your Crowning Feast. It is maybe the turning of the tide — this tide. But still it is only a beginning, isn’t it?”
“Only a beginning,” Ambrosius said, “and even that, only in the South.”
“And now?”
He had pulled off the great arm ring he wore above his left elbow; an arm ring of red gold wrought in the likeness of a dragon, and sat turning and turning it between his fingers, watching the firelight run and play in the interlocking coils. “Now to make strong our gains, to build up the Old Kingdom here in the South into a strength that can stand like a rock in the face of all that the seas can hurl against it.”
I turned full to face him. “That is for you to do, to make your fortress here behind the old frontier, from the Thames’s valley to the Sabrina Sea, and hold it against the Barbarians. . . .” I was fumbling for the words I wanted, trying desperately to find the right ones, thinking the thing out as I went along. “Something that may be to the rest of Britain not only a rallying place, but as the heart is to a man and the eagle used to be to a legion. But for me, ^ there is another way that I must go.”
He ceased playing with the arm ring and raised his eyes to mine. They were strange eyes for so dark a man; gray like winter rain, yet with a flame behind them. But he never spoke. And so after a while, I had to stumble on unaided. “Ambrosius, the time comes that you must give me my wooden foil and set me free.”
“I thought that might be it,” he said, after a long silence.
“You thought? How?”
His face, normally so still and shut, again flashed open into its rare smile. “You show too clearly in your eyes what goes on behind them, my friend. You should learn to put up your shield a little.”
But as we looked at each other, there was no shield for either of us. I said, “You are the High King, and here in the South it may be indeed that you can rebuild the kingdom and restore something of the heritage; but everywhere the Barbarians press in; the Scots from Hibernia harry the western coasts and make then: settlements in the very shadow of Yr Widdfa of the Snows; the Picts with their javelins come leaping over the Wall; northward and eastward the war boats of the Sea Wolves come creeping in along the estuaries, near and nearer to the heart of the land.”