“As to who I am, I am Jason the Swordsmith — it is so that I have this instead of a fence pole or a butcher’s cleaver. And that” — he pointed with the blade to another who passed staggering under the weight of a big wine jar — “was a clerk in the tower corn store; and that is Sylvianus who had land of his own and a whole roomful of books to read — and that is Helen, our golden Helen.” (Looking where he pointed, I knew the woman again for one whom I had seen in the thick of the fighting.) “The Sea Wolves treated her as a common whore, and she liked it little, having been mistress of her own house of girls for ten years and more. Thralls, most of us now, as you can see.” He touched the ring about his neck. “A fine following for the Count of Britain, are we not?”
“A fine following,” I said. “As to the thrall rings, doubtless you can deal with those, Jason the Swordsmith, with my armorers to help you. But for you and your war host, the larger part of mine would like enough be baying before the gates of Eburacum tonight, while I and the foremost of us lay hacked to red rags in the city gutters.” I looked up at him. Clearly he was the leader of the tatterdemalion band. “How did you contrive the thing?”
He shrugged thick shoulders. “We made our plans — two or three of them to be worked according as we found one better than another when the time came; a pleasure, that was. It was easier to come at each other with so many of the masters off on the war trail; easier to escape, too, when that time came. At first we meant just to break out, and then when word came of their defeat and Hengest’s slaying, we guessed how the thing must go, and we thought we’d bide for a while, and then break out to join you or lend a friendly hand from inside, as seemed best.”
“That was your plan, I think.” The boldness of it accorded with the set of his mouth.
“Mine and Helen’s.” He jerked his chin toward the woman in her gaudy rags and glass bangles, who had turned in passing, to flash her painted eyes at the nearest of the Companions. “Helen’s a jewel of a girl. She’s worth ten of the rest of us any day, and she don’t much care to be tossed around from one rutting boar to another without so much as a ‘By your leave’ or a ‘Thank you dearling,’ after being so long a madam in her own right.” He chuckled, a warm rumble of amusement deep beneath the golden fleece of his chest. “’Twas her idea to keep watch for you by sending up one after another of the girls with a bite of food and a beer pot for a kiss and cuddle with the men on the ramparts. And when the shout went up, and the girl that was up there then came flying down skirling that you rode upon the Sea Wolf’s very tail, we knew that the time had come to set things rolling. We was most of us lying hid among the bushes of the old temple garden, by that time, and some of us crept up on the ramparts and dealt with the lookouts up there —” He made a small hideous jabbing motion with his thumbs. “Easy enough if you can get close enough to your man to come at the back of his neck before he hears you. There wasn’t many of them, but their weapons added a bit to our store. The first of the Sea Wolves were falling back on to the bridge by that time, and the rest you know.”
“The rest I know.”
“Simple enough, when you come to think of it.”
“When you come to think of it,” I said, and we looked at each other with content.
All this while the hunt had been baying through the town, some-tunes nearer, sometimes farther off, and the smitch of quenched burning came and went on the wind. A hurrying step sounded on the grass-grown pavement, and I looked around as Flavian came to a halt beside me. “Oisc is clear away, sir,” he said. He was black with burning and none too steady on his feet, but he managed the old proud legionary salute with unusual precision. “We’ve turned the whole town out of doors, but there’s neither hide nor hair of him to be found.”
I shrugged wearily. “Aiee well, I should have liked to have made the kill complete and finished the whole brood, but I suppose that two generations out of three is not to be sniffed at. If he wins back to the Cantii then he’ll be for Ambrosius to deal with — or for us another day. . . . It can’t be helped, Minnow.”
“No sir,” said Flavian, and then quickly: “Sir — there’s something else. We found a boy in one of the houses over toward the east gate. We think he’s one of their great ones.”
“Then why would they be leaving him behind? Is he wounded?”
“No, sir, he-”
“So then. Bring him along.”
Flavian stood his ground in silence for a moment. Then he said, “I think perhaps — I think you should come, sir.”
I looked at him, surprised and questioning, and then got up. “Very well, I’ll come.” I set my hand for an instant on the shoulder of the big swordsmith. “Later, I shall want to speak to all your band. Meanwhile, get whatever wounded you have to my surgeon Gwalchmai; any of my men will tell you where to find him.”
I called to another of the Companions who was passing, and handed Arian over to him with a final pat on the horse’s moist drooping neck; then turned toward the Forum arch, Flavian falling in behind me, and walked out into the main street. “The east gate, you say?”
“Down a narrow street just short of it.”
We walked on in silence. The street, where smoking Saxon hovels huddled among the flaking walls of the Roman city, seemed strangely empty, for the hunt had swept to the farther end of the town and discovered the corn store; empty of the living, that is to say. There were enough bodies lying darkly sprawled in the glare of the angry sunset. Once a party of weeping women and children passed us, herded along by my men in the direction of the old fortress, where they could be more easily pent than in the town, but there were not many, even of them. A good number, I think, had escaped and would be heading for the coast; for the rest, there had been something of a massacre in Eburacum that fiery golden evening. Well, it might put the fear of God as well as Artos the Bear into the coastwise settlements. . . .
We reached the narrow street just short of the east gate, and turned into it; and instantly the fierce sunset light was cut off and the cool waters of the dusk flowed about us. Halfway down the street a gleam of saffron light shone from an open doorway, spilling already a faint yellow stain across the way. Several of the Companions stood beside the door, and they parted in the silence of men utterly weary, to let me through. Someone had brought a torch, kindled I suppose from a smoldering roof or someone’s forsaken hearth; and by its light I saw that the floor beneath my feet was of fine tesserae, though white with the droppings of swallows from their nests in the ragged thatch, and there were traces of color as well as damp stains on the plastered evil-smelling walls. Another door at my shoulder was open, and one of the Bearers of the Blue War Shield stood aside from before it. I glanced at Flavian, and then turned in through it, the man with the torch following me.
The room was a smallish one, but even so the makeshift torch left the walls in shadow, the light, as the man raised his arm, falling full upon the two figures in its midst. A woman lay there on a low pallet bed; a woman in the long straight folds of a crimson gown, with the glint of royal goldwork about her head. And beside her crouched a boy of about fourteen, with one arm circled protectingly across her body. For one wing beat of time, stillness held the scene within it as a bee is held in the heart of a tear of amber. Then as I entered, the boy sprang up like a wild beast and whirled about to face me. But from the woman there came no movement, no quiver under the straight folds of the crimson gown that ran unbroken as the fluting on a column from the white neck to the rigid feet.