I had not thought of her as being of any special age, but I had realized, without much thought, that she was long past the age at which most women go to a husband’s hearth; and I wondered for the first time why it was that she had not done so. As though she caught the question in my mind, as though, also, she had lowered her own defenses a little further, with the quenching of the too-probing firelight, she said, “When I was fifteen, I was betrothed to a chieftain’s son from farther south. It was arranged in the usual way, but I loved him, none the less — I thought I loved him. I am not sure now; I was only fifteen. He was killed hunting, before the time came for him to take me, and I thought that the sun and moon had fallen from the skies. His memory came between me and all things, between me and all men, and when my father would have betrothed me again, I begged and prayed — I swore that I would kill myself; and in the end — I was beside myself, and I think he feared that I had it in me to carry out my threat — he yielded partway, and promised that at least I should have five summers’ respite.”
“And this is the sixth summer,” I said.
“This is the sixth summer. But —” I heard a small bitter laugh of self-mockery. “Scarcely two summers were gone by before I knew that I had been a fool. I tried to hold his memory, but it turned thin like woodsmoke and melted through my fingers, and I had nothing left.”
“Why did you not tell your father?”
“I was too proud. If you were a girl of seventeen who had shrieked down the roof of her father’s hall, vowing to die for her dead love if she were forced into another man’s bed, could you have gone to your father and said, ‘Oh my father, I made a mistake, a simple mistake; anyone might make it. It was not love; I have forgotten what his face looked like, and the sound of his voice, and now I am ready for a living husband, after all.’ ”
I took up my sword and carried it across to the bed place and laid it to hand. Then I lay down beside Guenhumara. The moon-moth fluttered across my face, but there was no other movement in the dark beside me.
Her body was good to the touch, to explore; the skin smooth and silky despite its brownness, and I could feel the strong light bones under it; the light cage of her ribs, the long slim flanks. She was too thin for most men’s taste, but suddenly I loved the feel of her bones. I had seen, while she lay there in the firelight, that there was a rose mole on her left breast, and I searched for it by touch and pressed my finger onto it. It was soft and curiously alive, like the bud of a flower, like another smaller nipple, infinitely small and soft, and the feel of it sent a shimmer of delight through my body and into my loins. I flung my arms around her and strained her against me. She lay completely passive, neither giving nor withholding, as the furrow lies passive for the seed at sowing time. . . . And in that instant came like a black frost the memory, the very flavor, of the last time that I had lain with a woman, a mating half battle, half ecstasy, like mating with a wildcat. The cold miasma of hate seemed all about me, suffocating, chilling me to the soul, sapping all my powers. I clutched Guenhumara closer — no, rather I clung to her as one drowning — struggling to drive out the horror of my spirit, struggling to drive out the chill with her warmth, the death with her life. Her body was no longer passive under mine, and I must have hurt her, for she cried out, and I knew in that moment that she was a virgin; but even so, I hurt her more than is the nature of things, and I had no mercy. I was fighting desperately against some barrier, some denial that was not of her making. . . . It was, save for one other, the bitterest fight that ever I have known.
In the end I managed the man’s part none so ill, but it was empty and joyless, the mere husk of what had once been a living thing; and I knew that for Guenhumara also, there had been no joy to transmute the pain. I remembered my first girl, taken laughing in the warm lee of a bean stack, clumsily but with delight. That had been whole and sweet, but this was a maimed thing. And I knew to the full then what Ygerna had done to me; that in some way she had robbed me of the spearpoint of my manhood.
I released Guenhumara, and rolled away from her. I think I groaned. I know that I was sweating and shaking from head to foot like a man after a mortal struggle; and I buried my head in my arms, waiting for her to turn away from me in disgust or bitter mockery.
Instead, she said calmly, but as though something in her throat was tight, “It should not be like that, should it?”
“No,” I said. “It should not be like that.” I drove my face harder onto my arms and little clouds of colored light whirled through the darkness before my eyes. I heard my own voice, muffled in my arms. “A few days since, I was watching one of your dunghill cocks. He was tethered with his hens about him, but the one he wanted was beyond his reach, and every time he leapt on her his tether brought him up short at the last moment, and tumbled him in the dung, until his feathers were all mired and draggled. God have mercy on me, I thought at first that it was funny.”
There was a long silence; and then Guenhumara said, “Has it always been so?”
“If it had, do you think that I’d have taken you with a whole war host for your dowry? I haven’t been with a woman for ten years. I did not know.”
Another silence; the flutter of the flames had died away and outside I heard the soft whisper of falling rain; the scent of it on the warm earth breathed in at the open doorway. And beyond again, I heard the silence of the forsaken Dun.
Then Guenhumara said, “What happened? Let you tell me the once, and be done with the telling.”
And lying there with my head still buried in my arms, I told her the whole foul story that I had not told in ten years, even to Bedwyr who was nearer to me than my own heart. It was her right to know.
When the thing was told to the last word, I waited for her horror and her drawing away. She did not speak for so long, in the end I lifted my head from my arms and turned again to look at her in the dark. And as I did so, a strange thing happened, for she turned a little toward me, and felt for my face and took it between her hands; and kissed me like the mother I never had. “God help us both, my dear,” she said.
WORD of what had happened was in Castra Cunetium and the Place of Three Hills ahead of me. Maybe the word had run through the tribes, maybe it had been carried by the Little Dark People, who know everything. I saw it in men’s eyes that met mine a little too long or not quite long enough, as I rode in, but only two of my Companions spoke of the thing without waiting for me to speak first.
Gwalchmai came limping into my quarters while I was still washing off the dust and sweat of the summer tracks. He had ridden in only a few hours ahead of me, on some business of supplies, and began by giving me a report of how things were going with Bedwyr among the Saxon settlements, so that at first I thought that was all he had come for. Indeed he had actually got up to go, when he turned back to me, clearly hesitating over something more that he wished to say. He was a man who seldom found it easy to speak of the things that mattered to him. “The whole fort is throbbing with the word that you have taken a wife from the Damnonii,” he managed at last, “and that she comes here to joui you when we settle into winter quarters. Artos, is it true?”
“It is true that I have taken a wife, yes,” I said.
“And that she comes here?”
“Yes, also a hundred of her father’s best horsemen, captained by her brother.”
“The hundred will be welcome, at all events.”
“But not the one?”