“Don’t touch her!” he said between his teeth. I have seldom known anyone to do that in truth, but this boy did it. They were white strong teeth, and I felt that I was looking at some beautiful, shining wild animal that at any moment might spring at my throat. “Do not you dare to touch her!” And I scarcely noticed at the time that he spoke — after a fashion — in the British tongue.
I moved slowly forward, my hands open at my sides. “I’ll not touch her.”
I stood looking down at the woman, hearing the distant uproar of the city, the growl of voices in the outer chamber; hearing the short panting breaths of the boy beside me; and underneath, more potent than all else, the silence in the room. A great lady, dead and made ready for her pyre, in her finest gown with the gold-work of her rank wreathed about her head. A royal lady among her own folk, by the look of her; and a most beautiful woman. She was not young. It is hard to judge the summers of the dead, for sometimes youth comes upon the face, and sometimes age; but the hair that was spread over the pillow caught the torchlight with the ripe glow of a wheat field in low sunshine, despite the gray hairs in the brightness of it; and not all the gauntness of long fever, not the first faint stains of death beneath the eyes and at the corners of the winged nostrils, could dim the beauty of the face, nor soften its utter ruthlessness. Her eyes were decently closed, but as I looked down at her, the conviction grew on me that open, they would be the same greenish-gray as another pair of eyes that I had seen lately. I had never seen this woman before, I was as sure of that as I had been in Ygerna’s case. But I was glad they were shut; I did not like the thought of them open — there might be too much power in them, and the power not for good. Suddenly, for no seeming reason, I remembered the words of old Aquila, describing to me the Lady Rowen, who in the days of his captivity he had seen once in her father’s hall. “A witch, a golden witch in a crimson gown.” The Lady Rowen, Earl Hengest’s daughter, who had spell-drawn Vortigern the Red Fox into casting aside his own wife for love of her, and then used her power as a weapon against him in her father’s cause. The Lady Rowen who had deserted him and returned to her own people when his shamed and outcast days came upon him — but not, it was said, before she had conceived his son.
I turned and looked at the boy who stood on wide planted feet, still as far as he could come between me and her, and found myself looking into a pair of gray-green eyes, the color of shallow water on a cloudy day — Hengest’s eyes, though they had been smashed and full of blood the last time I saw them; Octa’s eyes, blazing up at me under the white horsetail standard only that evening, in the moment before I struck. But the boy’s hair was darker than theirs, darker than his mother’s; it was the fierce russet of a fox’s pelt.
So I knew the answer to my question even as I asked it. “Who are you?”
“I am Cerdic, son to Vortigern King of Britain. And the Lady Rowen who was my mother was daughter to Earl Hengest of the Jutish folk.” His voice was level, with the levelness of a boy’s who is desperately afraid that it may break.
“And what do you here, Cerdic, Son of Vortigern?”
“I bide with my mother.”
“You must think of a better story. Oisc is safe away; and would you ask me to believe that your own people, your mother’s people, would leave you here to the power of Artos the Bear?”
He was a valiant stripling; I could see that he was desperately afraid of me, but the strange gray-green eyes never wavered, and his head was thrown back, above the slim golden tore that circled his throat. “Not if they knew it. In a turmoil such as there has been here, it is easy enough to slip aside. They will be thinking me killed, no more.”
“Your mother is dead,” I said after a silence. “You know that, don’t you?”
“She died yesterday. I saw her made ready for the pyre.” The voice was steadier than ever.
“Then what purpose could you think to serve by staying here?”
This time the answer came at me like the clawed leap of the wild beast I had been thinking him. “I hope to guard her a little while. I hoped to kill at least one of you and maybe fire the thatch before you could come at her with your filthy ways, but you were too quick for me.” His hand went to his belt, where the hilt of his dirk should have been, then fell away again. “Is it that you think I don’t know the foul ways that you Christians have with the bodies of the dead? Is it that you think I don’t know about the flesh and the chalice of blood when you feast with your God?”
And with the words scarce spoken, suddenly he was upon me as though he would have torn my throat out.
I caught and held him, pinioning his arms and crashing him against me, while a burst of voices and the thud of a swift footstep came behind me. “Let be, damn you!” I said to the voices and the footstep. I was crushing the boy’s body to mine as hard as I dared. I was afraid to hit him. I was always afraid of hitting; the blow was prone to do too much damage. He struggled like a wildcat in my grasp. Once he managed to drive his head down and got his teeth in my arm, and held on; but his struggles were growing weaker because he could not breathe. I could feel his young breast fighting and thrusting for air under my own ribs, and tightened my hold still further. “Stop it, you young fool! Stop it or I shall have to hurt you.” But my words never reached him.
And then suddenly he was drooping in my arms, half fainting; I loosed him slowly, letting the air come back into his lungs, and as he began to find his legs again, held him off at arm’s length. He was quiet enough now, drawing his breath in great sobbing gasps, but I doubted whether if I relaxed my hold completely, he would not be at my throat again next instant. And all at once, looking into the sullen stone-set face, I knew that I could have loved this boy if he were my son. This boy and not the son whom I knew in my dark innermost places, was being reared for me by another witch among my own mountains. Indeed I think that in that one moment we were neither of us far from love of the other, so strange and wayward and terrible are the ways of the human heart.
The moment passed. “Who told you that?” I demanded. “About the flesh and the blood?”
He controlled his panting in one long shaken breath. “My mother. But all men know that it is true.”
“Listen — listen to me, Cerdic, and believe me: it is not true, as you understand it. Your mother was — mistaken.”
“I do not believe you.”
“You must. In all faiths there are mysteries; you are old enough, maybe, to have been initiated into the mysteries of your own. When we who call ourselves Christians feast with our God, we eat bread and drink wine; the rest is the mystery. But before the mystery, the bread is but bread as other bread, and the wine is but wine as other wine.”
“That is a thing easy to say.”
“It is the true thing. No harm will come to your mother’s body at our hands.”
“That also is a thing easy to say.” But I thought that there was beginning to be a flicker of uncertainty in Ms eyes. “How may I know that it is true?”
“I can give you no proof beyond my word. I will swear it, if you like.”
He was silent a moment; then he said, “On what?”
“On the blade and the pommel of my sword.”
“The sword which is to drive me and my folk into the sea?”
“It is none the less sacred to me.”
He stood for a long silent moment looking me eye into eye. Then I released him and drew the sword from its sheath, and swore. The star of violet light woke under the torchlight in the heart of the great amethyst. “This is the seal of my great-grandsire, Magnus Maximus, Emperor of Britain,” I said when I had sworn. And he watched the great jewel as I slammed the sword back into its sheath, then raised his eyes again to my face, with something of challenge in them, something else, too; a strange farsighted expression as though he were looking into a distance, not of place, but of time. But he spoke no word.