“No, for you took care that it should not. But because of it, you must not give me this seal of the Royal House.”
He took up again the heavy gold bracelet that he had laid aside when he rose to fetch the sword. “You mistake. I could not give you this that can be worn by right only by the princes of the House. The other was Maximus’s private seal and nothing more. In its way it is more potent than the arm ring, but it is mine to give — to my houndboy if I choose, and I choose that it should follow, shall we say, the dexter line of the royal blood. . . . I have known for a long while that a night such as this must come, and I have known as long, that when it came you must take my sword with you, Bear Cub, because I love you; and Maximus’s seal because you are its true lord.”
“The light burns like a star in the heart of it,” I said. “Maybe I can make it shine a small way further, into the dark. . . . I think we’re both a little drunk, Ambrosius.”
But I do not think that we had touched the wine.
MORE than two months later I was squatting beside another fire — of crackling furze and heather roots that blazed on the open turf before a herdsman’s bothy. It seemed to me bright as only a hill fire could be, just as the clear luminous darkness that pressed behind it could only be the darkness of the hills.
Behind me in Venta I had gathered my hundred men, and now, with a handful of those who were closest to me, I had come up into the Arfon herding grounds to see for myself what Ambrosius’s promised drafts might be likely to yield in the next few years, and choose out the best brood mares for my great stallions from among my own horse kind.
Spring had come to the valleys of Arfon though the white mane of winter snows still lay far down the north side of Yr Widdfa; and the night was full of the voices of running water, and from the heather slopes behind the bothies, the curlews were calling as they would call almost all night long. But under the voices of the high hills, my ears seemed still to throb with the soft thunder of unshod hooves. All day they had been rounding up the horse herds, bringing them in to this deep valley of Nant Ffrancon that in time of danger could give sheltered grazing to all the horses and cattle of Arfon. The made horses had been brought up in small bands, sometimes even singly, to show their paces; and I had stood here in the loop of the stream where the herdsmen had their bothies and their branding pens, to see them brought in; and afterward the leggy two-year-olds whose breaking had been begun that winter, the wild-eyed colts with matted manes and tails, and burrs in their woolly winter coats; awkward and scary, the short hill turf flying in sods from under their stampeding hooves; the mares brought up more quietly, nervous and willful, with bellies beginning to drop as foaling time drew near; the herdsmen on their little swift beasts handling them as a dog handles sheep. It had been a good sound, a good sight. All my life the sight of a made stallion or a mare with her foal running at heel has been to me a thing to shake the heart with delight.
Now the sweating business of the day was over and, herdsmen and Companions, we had gathered together around the blaze, huddling our cloaks about us against the cold that prowled with the darkness at our backs even while our faces scorched. We had eaten broiled mountain mutton and great hunks of rye bread and mare’s-milk cheese and wild honey; our bellies were full and our work done, and as we sat talking, most of us, I think, still about the horses, content folded us around like a homespun blanket.
But for me, the blanket was somewhat threadbare, and a little cold wind blew through. It was good, unbelievably good, to be in the mountains again; but I had come to them as a man comes to the house he has longed for — and found that among my own hills and my own people, something in me had become a stranger.
Beside me, huddled in a wolfskin mantle, sat old Hunno, lord of my own horses, who had known me all my life. We had withdrawn from the general talk around the fire, but we too were speaking of horse matters, at least horses came into it.
“So the mountain horse runs will not be good enough for you, after these lowland years,” the old man was grumbling into the beard that clothed his face as gray lichen clothes a twisted thorn branch.
I had a strong desire to shake him until the yellow fangs rattled in his head, since it seemed that I could reach him in no other way. “There is no question of that. Have I not told you three times already? The mountain pastures are good, but they are too remote for the training herd. How long, think you, it would take to bring a draft of horses down from here even to the beginning of the lowlands? Seven days at the least; seven days that we could maybe ill afford; and if our need came at a time of storms when the rivers are in spate, we might not be able to get them out at all. The horse runs of the Deva Promontory are good also, and from Deva the toads run clear across to Eburacum or south even to Venta, for quick movement.“
“And so you will speak with Kinmarcus of Deva?”
“I have already spoken with him — before he rode north again from Ambrosius’s crowning, and he will yield me the grazing leave. There has always been a strong link, remember, between Deva and the Lords of Arfon.”
He snorted like an aged ram. “And doubtless you will be picking out men of the Deva runs to herd these great new horses for you? Men that only know how to ride on a flat level and have never roped a wild stallion among the rocks on a slope like a falcon’s stoop.”
“You know the answer to that well enough, you sour old devil,” I said; and then as he remained stubbornly silent, “Well? Will you come?”
He lowered at me under the fringe of his shaggy sheepskin hat. “If I come to be your horse master in the lowland runs, who’s to take the reins here and handle these great new breaking runs that you plan?”
“Amgerit, your son,” I said. “You know that he will take them anyway, when you grow too old.”
“It is in my heart that I begin to grow old already — too old to be dragging up my roots from the mountains that saw me born.”
“If you say so,” I said. “It is for you to choose.” And I left him to it. I thought that in the end he would come; but I could not do as I would once have done, taking him by the shoulders and shaking him, laughing and threatening until I had his promise, because of the strangeness that had come between me and my own world; and I knew that he was as much aware of the strangeness, the barrier, as I was.
Young Flavian, Aquila’s son and my armor-bearer, was deep in argument with one of the herdsmen. I saw the white scar on the boy’s temple, heritage of a riding fall in his childhood, when the night wind lifted his dark forelock, and the bright eagerness of his eyes as he drove home some point with a finger into the palm of his hand; and the brown wind-burned face of the herdsman, as vehemently denying the point, whatever it was. I saw Owain and Fulvius who had been boys with me and knew these hills as well as I did, as one passed the beer jar to the other, and wondered whether they also felt the strangeness of their homecoming. I saw Bericus tossing a greasy knucklebone from hand to hand and watching the fall of it idly as a man playing right hand against left watches the fall of the dice. I saw the farsighted hard-bitten faces of the herdsmen, most of them as well known to me almost as the faces of my Companions. I felt the harshness of Cabal’s mane under my fingers, and the softness of his pricked ears; I listened to the calling of the curlews in the dark, trying to lay hold of familiar things again for a defense against the desolation that had come upon me out of nowhere and for no clear reason.