Levin raised his haggard gaze to my face. “I must help bear him.”
“Very well, but return to me here, as soon as all is done.”
He did not answer, but in the last moment before the men were at the door, he ripped his sword from its wolfskin sheath.
I sprang forward. “Levin! No!”
And he looked up again, choking with an ugly laughter. “Ah no, not yet. Time for that later,” and with a movement as swift as the other had been, he drew the blade that lay by Gault’s side, where I had put it down when we cut away his harness, and slammed it home into his own empty sheath. “You’ll be returning one sword to store, but I’ll have the one he carried,” and got to his feet as the newcomers ducked in through the doorway.
When the heavy tread of men carrying a burden had stumbled away into the night sounds of the camp, I sat down again on the packsaddle to wait, and Cabal shook himself clear of the shadows and came, a little uncertainly, as though questioning whether the reason for his banishment was yet over, and collapsed with a gusty sigh in his usual lying place at my feet. After a moment he raised his head and looked up at me, whining and uneasy, and as I reached my hand down to stroke his head I felt the harsh hairs raised a little on his neck. He was a war dog, and killing in battle he understood, but not this. The lists that I had been working on lay scattered beside me. There was blood on them now, the stains turning brown around the edges as they dried. There was blood soaked into the beaten-earth floor, and the smell of it was everywhere, and the smell of death. It is one thing to have the friend killed beside you in battle (though that strikes sore enough), but quite another to feel him die under your hands in the cold blood that comes afterward. I wondered whether Levin would come back, or whether I should have to send for him, for I was not sure that he had even heard my order.
I had waited a long time, and was on the point of sending, when he appeared once more in the doorway.
“You have been a long time, Levin.”
“The ground is hard and stony in these parts,” he said dully. “What is it that you wish with me, Artos?”
“Gault should have furnished me with a full report of what happened, but he had no time. Therefore, as his second, the duty falls to you.”
He got through it quite creditably; there was not, after all, so very much to tell, and then, when it was finished, he broke down, with his arm along the rotting roof beam and his head on his arm. I gave him a little time, and then said, “A sorry business, and has cost us dear in men and horses. But it seems that no blame clings to Gault.”
He swung around on me, his eyes wide and blazing. “No blame?”
“None whatever,” I said, pretending to misunderstand him. “And you have given your report well and clearly.”
“Thank you, sit,” he said bitterly. “Is there anything more?”
“First, have you anything to say to me?”
“Yes. I wish to ask for leave to go away from here.”
“And fall on your sword?”
“What is it to my Lord Artos what I do, when once I am no more of the Brotherhood?”
“Only this — that we are short of men as it is, and I cannot spare another for no good cause.”
“No good cause?”
“None,” I said. I got up and walked across to him. “Listen to me, Levin. For more than ten years I have counted you and Gault among the best and bravest of my Companions. That is because each of you has striven always to outdo the other in valor and endurance, not from any rivalry, but that each of you might be worthy of his friend. So it has been since you were boys; and are you going to be a shame to Gault, to break the old covenant between you, now in the first hour that he is dead?”
He stared back at me with dilated eyes. “Maybe I’m not as strong as Gault. I can’t go on — I can’t.”
I took him by the shoulders and shook him a little. “That is a weakling’s cry. There’s water in that jar in the corner; wash your face, and go down and take over command of the squadron. Choose whichever of your lads you judge most suitable for your second; that is your affair, so don’t come troubling me with it.”
“You — you’re giving me command of the squadron?”
“Assuredly. You have been Gault’s second for five years, and you have it in you to make a good leader.”
“I cannot do it,” he said pitifully. “Artos, have some mercy on me — I can’t. It is all true as you say, but I can’t go on!”
But already, though he was not yet aware of it himself, I could feel him strengthening under my hands, bracing himself to take up the intolerable burden.
“Oh yes you can. One can always go on. And as to mercy, I keep that for when and where it is needed. If Gault could break off the arrow shaft so that his men should not know and lose heart, and get the rags of you out of ambush and back to camp, with a mortal wound in him., then you can wash your face so that the rest won’t mistake you for a woman, and go and take over his squadron and keep it what he made it, one of the best squadrons of the Company.” I gripped and gripped at his shoulders, driving in my fingers until I felt the bone. “If you cannot — then you were never as he thought you were, after all.”
He stood unmoving for a long moment, though I had dropped my hands. Then his head went up very slowly, and I saw him swallow thick in his throat; and he turned and crossed to the jar of water in the corner.
Through the rest of that summer I watched him anxiously. But there was little need. He proved, as I had believed he would, to be as fine a leader as Gault had been; and under his handling, the battered remnant gathered itself up and began to be a squadron again. He was careful of his men, but utterly careless of himself — so reckless that, though there was no more talk of falling on his sword, it was clear he hoped for death. And as so often happens when a man is in that state, death passed him by as if he had a charmed life.
We campaigned late into October that year. At most times in the North, one cannot hold to the war trail much beyond the end of September, but it was a soft autumn, and the last yellow leaves were still clinging to the birches when at last we rode into Trimontium to make our winter quarters again.
There were only a few days left, and many things to be seen to in them, before I must ride for Castra Cunetium to meet Guenhumara. But in the time that I had, I did what I could to make ready for her. I furbished up the much larger chamber next to the narrow one in the half-ruined officers’ block where I had slept since we first came to Trimontium. The commandant’s dining room, I think it must have been, to judge by the crudely painted trophies and goats’ masks that still showed here and there like shadows on the shreds of plaster that still clung to one wall. I bought a thick striped native blanket and a rug of soft beaver skins from Druim Dhu and his brothers, who bought and sold all things in common, to cover the piled fern of the bed place. I pegged up a fine embroidered hanging of some saint or other, all glimmering blues and russets, kingfisher colors, to cover the crumbling red sandstone of the most ruinous wall and give some richness to the chamber. It was part of the loot that we had taken from the Sea Wolves that summer, and they, I suppose, had reaved it from some rich religious house in the gentler Lowlands. Well, the Church could count it as part of the debt they owed me, there was a certain satisfaction in the thought.