“Now it is time to be going,” I said.
He swallowed, and suddenly the manhood left him and he was a boy again. “Going? Are you — not going to kill me, then?”
I had been aware for some time past that Bedwyr had come into the room and was standing close behind me. The familiar voice said very quietly in my ear, “Yes!”
“No,” I said. “I do not kill boys. Come back when you are a man, and I will kill you if I can; and if you can, you shall kill me.”
“It may be that I will do that — one day,” he said.
But at the time I scarcely heard him. I turned on Flavian standing by. “Take a couple of the others and see him safely through the gate and three bowshots along the road to the coast.” I looked again at the cub standing beside his dead mother. “After that, you will be on your own. If you run into any of the Blue War Shields, or find that the war boats have already sailed when you reach the coast, then that is the end. There is no more than I can do about you. Now get out.”
He looked from me to the still body on the bed; one long look, and then back again. Then he turned without a word and walked to the door. Flavian turned in behind him, and I heard him call to two of those outside, “Vran, Conan, I want you —” and the knot of footsteps dying away down the narrow street.
In the torchlit room, Bedwyr and I faced each other beside the bed. “I would to God that it had been I who found him, and not that fool Flavian,” Bedwyr said. “I could have arranged matters without troubling the Count of Britain.” He never used that title save in the spirit of mockery.
“How?”
“By having him killed out of hand,” he said simply.
“In Christ’s name, why, Bedwyr?”
“Do you not understand that he is Vortigern’s son? He understood it, if you did not. You blind, bloody fool, Artos, have you forgotten that there are still folk enough in Britain who count Vortigern’s for the true Royal House, and yours for no more than a usurper’s, fathered by a Roman general who was born in Hispania and took the flower of their young men with him to die at Aquileia? That may have little meaning now, while Ambrosius is the High King, but when the time comes for Ambrosius to die —”
Silence flashed down like a sword between us, and held us for a long harsh moment. Then I said, “I suppose I had forgotten something of that. I think I am glad, Bedwyr.”
In the returned silence, the echo of receding footsteps still sounded, fainter with every breath that passed.
“It is still not too late,” said Bedwyr.
I shook my head. “Fate does not allow it to men to unpick part of the pattern.” As I said it, an odd foreboding brushed me by, a sense, not so much of future evil as of the fate that I had spoken of, a sense of the inescapable pattern of things. Whatever it was, it was gone as swiftly as a bird darts across a sunlit clearing, from the shadow into the shadow again. I glanced about me. “Na, the thing is done. Best see to this matter of the burning. Get in brushwood and loose straw and pile it around the bed. And clear back the nearer bushes in the garden. We don’t want another fire spreading through Eburacum tonight.”
“Fire? You want the whole house destroyed?” Bedwyr had said what he had to say, and there was an end of it. So now he turned to the next thing.
“Yes. Fire is the usual way, among her people; and the place stinks anyway.” But it was in my heart also that fire was a cleansing thing, and I was still remembering Aquila’s words, “A golden witch in a crimson gown.”
They were felling and uprooting the overgrown bushes in the little town garden as I came out again into the street, and the dusk had deepened to a soft blue darkness full of voices and hurrying shadows and the spitting flare of torches. They had lit great fires in the Forum by the time I returned to it. Most of the foot had come in by that time, and the whole war host was crowding close about the flames. They had driven in a few cattle, and already the smell of roasting meat was in the air. The whisper of another scent, sweet and heavy with musk, curled across my nose, and the woman Helen drifted out of the shadows and brushed across my path, then checked, glancing up at me over her shoulder. Her bright rags were allowed to slip just a little when she held them at her thin breast; her eyes half laughing, at once bright and unutterably weary under the lids whose green malachite had run in streaks, her body touched against mine, lightly, with a mute invitation.
I looked down at her. “I am so deeply thankful to you, Helen; tonight I cannot even find the words to tell you how thankful.”
“There are other things than words, my Lord Artos; other ways for a man and a woman to speak together.” Her voice was soft and throaty as a ringdove. “I have a little wine in my lodging.”
“Not tonight, darling. I’m too tired.”
Cei strutted into the light of the nearest fire as I spoke, and I jerked a thumb in his direction. “You see that one with the russet beard, and the bracelets? If you would be kind, go and offer him your wine.”
She looked at me without the least rancor, clearly with no sense of rebuff — but indeed I had meant no rebuff — only with a little mockery under the green-painted lids. “But perhaps he also is too tired.”
“He is never too tired,” I said.
WE remained several days in Eburacum to rest both men and horses and get the weapons and war gear mended and renewed and see to the wounded. And almost at once the folk of the city who had escaped fire and seax when the Sea Wolves came, began to trickle back from the refuges to which they had fled farther inland. With their help we cleared the streets of the sprawling dead, and stripped the dead of their war gear, claiming for ourselves as usual the keenest weapons and most finely wrought mail shirts to replace the boiled leather and horn and age-eaten Roman hoop mail that still had to serve for some of us. As Lindum would have had us stay, so would Eburacum, and indeed with better cause, for the Coritani had been almost free of the Sea Wolves when we left, but here we had been able to clear only the city itself and the land toward the coast was still in enemy hands. But the North was smoldering into flame, and I could not bide in Eburacum any more than in Lindum City.
I gathered an oddly assorted council of war: one or two hungry magistrates, leaner than ever they had been in their lives before; a handful of tottering graybeards who had come forward to answer my call for men who had served with the Eagles in their youth; the leaders of Kinmarcus’s tribesmen and of the Brigantian warriors who had joined us on the march; Jason the Swordsmith with the mark of the thrall ring red-raw on his neck, to speak for his own valiant rabble; my own lieutenants Bedwyr and Cei. I summoned them together into the Forum and told them I could not stay to finish the work that was begun, while the fire in the North swept down to engulf us all in the end. I would leave them a war band of trained spearmen to help them trahi themselves. I left them their own warriors, the Bearers of the Blue War Shields — and there were no fiercer fighting men under the sun, as the Eagles had good cause to know. I left them their old soldiers for wisdom and cunning in war craft, if their days for bearing a sword were past. (I saw how that made the men of the Blue Shield stand up straight like emperors, and the veterans begin to look down their noses at the Blue Shields; and began to harangue them on the need to forget all differences and stand together.) I forget now what I said, save that I did my best to strengthen their hearts and their sword hands, that I promised to come again and vowed that we would finish the work together. I know that I crooned over them like a bairn’s nurse, and cursed them like a time-expired centurion with the gutter words of half an empire at his command, and appealed to them like a girl appealing to her lover. I think that many of us were near to tears by the end. I know I felt like a murderer. But I was sure in my heart that now I had cleared out the wolf’s lair, they could hold their own — if only they could stand together! Dear God, let them be able to stand together! Let them learn that one lesson that seems impossible ever to be learned by the British kind!