That night before I slept, I sent for Flavian to the guest place, and told him what must be told. None of the Companions had spoken to me of the chieftain’s offer and the taboo that I had invented on the spur of the moment, though I suppose they must have spoken of it among themselves; and Flavian did not speak now, only stood with one arm against the rooftree and stared into the flame of the little seal-oil lamp, until I had to break the pause myself.
“Well?” I said.
He brought his gaze back from the lamp. “And you are going to have her with you in winter quarters?”
“Yes.”
“Then, of course, since we are to have wives among us at Trimontium, I may send for Teleri?”
My heart sickened and sank, and it was my turn now to stare into the flame of the seal-oil lamp. “No, Flavian.”
“But how is the case different, sir?” His voice still had the levelness it had as a boy.
“Because I am the Count of Britain, the captain of you all,” I said. “Sometimes the leader may have what he denies to his followers. Because I am the leader and there is only one leader, what I do does not make a precedent, but if I give you leave to do the same, how may I refuse it to any man in Trimontium — and within a year we shall be overwhelmed with pregnant women and squalling cubs, a danger to themselves and a danger to us, clogging our sword arms and dividing our hearts!” But the words tasted evil in my mouth, for never before had I used my leaderhood to take for myself anything that was not for my men also; not so much as a mouthful of sour soup or a wound dressed out of turn.
We were silent for a while, and then he said, “Don’t do it, sir.”
“I shall have a dowry of a hundred men and horses with her.”
He looked up quickly. “And that is your whole reason?”
“It is reason enough.”
“Then marry her and leave her at her father’s hearth, as I have had to leave Teleri all this while.”
“That — is not in the bargain.”
He was silent again, a longer silence this time, filled with the soft boom of wind and the hush of storm rain across the thatch, for the night had fulfilled the promise of the sunset. The door apron flapped and bellied against its restraining pegs, and the lamp flame jumped and fluttered, sending fantastic shadows licking along the rafters. Then he said, “This is the first time you have ever done anything unjust, sir.”
And I said, “That is not such a bad record. Bear with me in my injustice, Flavian, I am only a mortal man with my sins heavy on my shoulders, not an archangel.”
“We are not the kind to know much about archangels, we of the Brotherhood; we have thought of you always as — maybe a little larger than life, that is all,” he said, and moved very slowly toward the doorway.
I let him almost get there, but I could not let him go through it. I was fiddling with my sword belt, on the point of slipping it free, for I had sent Amlodd away early; then I abandoned it. I said, “Minnow, don’t desert me.”
He turned instantly, and I saw by the jumping light of the seal-oil lamp, the suspicious brightness of his eyes. “I think I could not.” He came back quickly and dropped on one knee to free the sword belt himself. “Where does Amlodd keep the silver sand? This clasp needs burnishing. He’s not such a good armor-bearer as I was.”
But I lay awake most of the night with a bad taste in my mouth.
In the days that followed, the life of the Dun went on seemingly much as usual, but down in the dark beneath the surface of familiar things, a wild tide was rising. No outward sign told of its rising, and had I been of my father’s world, I doubt that I should have sensed anything at all; but my mother in me knew the look in men’s eyes, and heard the dark familiar singing in the blood.
Three days before Lammas, Maglaunus the chieftain was not in his accustomed place at supper in his high hall; but no man glanced at the empty seat with its great black bearskin spread over it, nor spoke of his absence, for we knew the reason for it. No man can take the godhead upon himself without time apart to make himself ready. . . . Always there must be one to wear the Horns; one to give life and fruitfulness out of his own substance, the King and the Sacrifice in one, to die for the life of the people if need be, as the Christos died. Sometimes it is a priest that becomes the Incarnate God, sometimes even a Christian priest, for in the wilds and the mountain places men do not set such rigid frontiers to their faiths as they do in cities; sometimes it is the king, the chieftain, and that is the old way, and holds within it the true meaning. Lammas fell on a Sabbath that year, and for the first part, the day was as other Sabbaths.
Early in the morning we went down from the Dun to hear mass in the small bracken-thatched church that served both the Dun and the fisher village below it. For once, Cabal was not with me, being too much taken up with the hut where Maglaunus’s favorite hunting bitch was in season; but I remember that Pharic had his hawk with him — indeed he seldom moved far without her — and carried her still, when we reached the church door and went in under the stone lintel. There was room in the church for Maglaunus’s household, and for the small band of Companions who followed me, but for few more, and so for the most part the lesser folk of both Dun and village remained outside in the forecourt like a low-walled sheepcote. It made little difference, for they could hear all that went on through the open doorway, and at the appointed time the three monks of the Holy House at Are Cluta, who lived in the humpbacked bothy beside the church, would bring out to them the Bread and Wine.
I heard little of the service, for with my eyes schooled straight in front of me, I seemed all the while, with every sense I possessed, to be watching Guenhumara with her maidens about her, in the women’s part of the church. When the time came for the Sacred Meal, I knew how she looked around for her brothers, for Pharic most of all, that they might go up together, and I knew that they had always gone up together. I went up next, and knelt at Pharic’s other side — his left side on which he carried his hawk; and it is so that I remember the small unvoiced battle of wills between priest and princeling, the one denying and the other maintaining the right to bring his hawk to the Lord’s Table. Clearly it was a long-standing struggle, and when after a few moments the priest lowered his eyes in defeat, it was a defeat that he had known many times before.
The three dark-frocked brethren must have realized the chieftain’s absence, and understood its reason. They must have known, when they carried out the Host to the kneeling warriors and fisher-folk in the forecourt, that m a few hours they would be up on the moors with the Nine Sisters, stretching eager hands to an older and deeper-rooted Lord than the Christos. But they made no sign; they were withdrawn, showed nothing in their quiet faces; and I knew that they would ask no questions.
When we came out again through the forecourt gate, with the mass of worshippers already thinning, Pharic, still carrying his hawk, was gentling the back of her neck with one finger, so that she bobbed her unhooded head, hunching her shoulders in pleasure. “It is a good hawking day,” he said suddenly, and glanced about him, at his brothers and the rest of us. “The Lord knows we may not have many more chances before the autumn molt, and I am away up to the moors. Laethrig, my Lord Artos — Sulian — Gault — who comes with me?” And swinging on his heel without pause for any answer, to shout for horses and others of his hawks to be brought down.
But indeed the plan fell in with our mood well enough, for I think all of us wanted some outlet for the unrest that was growing in us, something to fill the hours until dark. And when the horses were brought and a couple more hawks, each with its familiar glove, we mounted, and gathered up a few dogs to flush game for us, and headed for the marshy glens northward, in search of heron.