He hesitated. “We are not used to the thought of the one and the thought is strange to us. You must give us a little time.” He changed the subject. “Artos, they did not send up any bandage linen or salves with the last supplies. We have had a good few wounded, as I told you, and we cannot go on tearing up our cloaks forever. I cannot go myself, I must get back to Bedwyr tomorrow, but give me leave to send Conon down to raise hell at Carbridge and get some more sent up.”
But Cei was less forbearing, later that night, before we started out to make the late rounds together. “In God’s name, if you wanted the girl why didn’t you take her — and leave her with a pretty necklace, and no harm done?”
“Maglaunus her father would perhaps not have given me a hundred well-mounted men for tumbling his daughter under a broom bush.”
“Aye, there’s no denying that it is a dowry worth the having,” Cei admitted; and then in a deep grumble between disgust and speculation: “But a woman prinking in her mirror. I suppose she’ll bring a swarm of giggling girls to serve her?”
“One woman. I told Guenhumara she might bring one henchwoman: she chose her old nurse — no teeth, Cei, one foot already in the grave and the other on a lump of tallow.”
“An asset indeed!” Cei’s speculation was swallowed up in disgust.
“Agreed, my old ram, and a foul nuisance here in the fort, but by the God’s grace, the other foot will slip one day,” I said savagely. I was angry and sickened with all the things under the sun, myself most of all.
“Love does not seem to have sweetened your temper, Artos mine.”
I was pulling on my rawhide boots, and I did not look up. “Who spoke any word of love?”
“Na, it was a hundred horsemen, wasn’t it? But great God! Man, you can’t have her here, just her and the hag in a fort full of men.”
“There are the gay girls of the baggage train,” I said, and stood up and reached for my sword which lay on the cot beside me.
“If she’s a good woman, she’d sooner die than touch little fingers with one of the sisterhood.”
“Cei, do you know much about good women?”
He laughed unwillingly, and shrugged, but looked up from the lamp flame with trouble in his fierce blue eyes. “You must have the thing your own stubborn way. But Christos! I foresee storm water ahead!” Then he shook himself as though shaking off the trouble like an old cloak, and laughed again, and flung his heavy arm around my shoulders as we went out from the lamplit room into the darkness of the hills. “Like enough I shall try seducing her myself, in the pursuit of further knowledge.”
“Thanks for the warning,” I said, tranquilly enough, and tried to ignore the black pain of jealousy that stabbed through me. In that moment I first understood that I loved Guenhumara.
In the next I fell headlong over a pig — we kept a good deal of livestock by that tune — who rose in squealing affront and lumbered off into the night, leaving me to rub a bruised elbow and curse the Fates who must need strip a man even of his dignity, making a clown of him even while they turn the knife in the wound that they have made.
Everything in Trimontium was in good shape, for despite his hot temper and his wenching, Cei was as reliable as a rock, and so next morning when Gwalchmai headed eastward again, with the reliefs who were going up to free some of the other men for rest, I rode with them. And a few evenings later, I stood with Bedwyr in the lee of a clump of wind-shaped elder scrub that marked the lower end of our picket lines. There was a smell of smoke about him, not the fresh tang of campfires, but the acrid and faintly greasy reek that comes of burning out the places where men live. Bedwyr had been busy since I saw him last.
He was saying, “It is in my mind that the world would be a sun-pier place if the God that Gwalchmai believes in had never taken a rib from Adam’s side and made a woman for him.”
“You would miss her sorely, when you came to tune your harp.”
“There are other matters for a harp song, besides women. Hunting and war, and heather beer — and the brotherhood of men.”
“It is not many days since I found that I must ask the Minnow not to desert me,” I said. “I did not think that I should have to ask it of you, Bedwyr.”
He stood looking out over the camp, where the smoke of the cooking fires trailed sideways into the dusk, and a faint mist was creeping in over the moors from the sea. “If I were to desert you, I think that it would be for something more than a woman.”
“But this goes beyond the woman, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said. “This is more than any woman.” And then he swung around on me, his nostrils flaring, his eyes brighter and more fierce than I had ever seen them in his twisted, mocking face. “You fool, Artos! Don’t you know that if you were deservedly frying in your Christian’s Hell for every sin from broken faith to sodomy, you could count on my buckler to shield your face from the flames?”
“I believe I could,” I said. “You are almost as great a fool as I.”
And we went up past the horse lines together, through the salt-tasting mist that was thickening across the high moors.
Two days later, Gault’s squadron was ambushed and cut to pieces by a Saxon war band. They rode back into camp — what was left of them — battered and bloody, their dead left behind them, the more sorely wounded roped to their horses.
I saw them ride in, and the rest of the camp turn out with grim acceptance of the situation, and few questions asked, to rally around them, help down the wounded and take charge of the horses. I bade Gault see to his men and get a meal, and come to me with a full report afterward — he looked very white and staggered for an instant in dismounting, as though the ground had tilted under his feet; but to see one’s squadron cut to bits is enough to account for that in any man. Then I went back to finish looking through Bedwyr’s muster lists, in the half-ruined shepherd’s bothy that I had taken for my own. It is good for a commander to have some such place when he can, he is easier to find at night, and matters which are not for the camp’s ears can be spoken of in private.
I was sick at heart for the dazed and tattered remnant of my fourth squadron now gathering to the fire and the hastily brought-out food, sick for the loss of so many of my Companions, but it would serve no useful purpose to neglect the muster lists. So I crouched on the packsaddle which generally served me for a seat in camp, and returned to the work in hand. I had just reached the end when a figure loomed into the opening where the door had been, shutting out the blue dark and the flare of the campfire beyond; and looking up, I saw that it was Gault.
He moved in from the doorway, and there was no doubt that he staggered now. “I’ve come to report, sir,” he said in a strained voice that was not like Gault’s at all, and stretched out his hand to the crumbling turf wall and leaned there. I could see the sweat on his ashen face in the lantern light. “But I think I’ve — left it too late.”
I sprang up. “Gault, what is it? Are you wounded?”
“I’ve — got a Saxon arrow in me,” he said. “I broke off the shaft so that the rest shouldn’t see it, but I —” He made as though to push aside his cloak, and in the act of doing so, pitched head foremost into my arms. I laid him down and hurriedly thrust back the concealing folds of his cloak and found the short bloody stump of an arrow shaft projecting from just below the cage of his ribs. The horn scales of his war shut had been split there by a glancing axe blow some while since, and for days he had been intending to get the weak place mended. Now it was too late. He was quite unconscious, not much blood on him, but he must have been bleeding inwardly for hours. I sat for a few moments on my heels beside him, then got up and strode to the door and shouted to the man who stood outside leaning on his spear against the light of the nearest watch fire. “Justin, go and fetch Gwalchmai; no matter what he’s doing — he must have finished with the worst wounded by now. Get him here at once!”