“What of the one with the barley-colored hair — Gault, his name was,” she asked in a little.
“Why Gault in particular?”
“I don’t know. I thought of him at that moment — just a thought that passed by.”
“Maybe it was himself that passed, coming in to the fire,” I said, thinking of the empty places kept beside the mess hall hearth, and the food and drink set ready for men who came no more in the body to the evening meal among their comrades. But it would be at Trimontium that Gault’s place was kept for him, beside Levin, this Samhain night.
I felt Guenhumara startle and stir in the curve of my arm. “Dead?”
“Almost two months ago.”
“Was there a woman left lonely for him — or a bairn?”
“No, Guenhumara.” I put both arms around her then, and pulled her close, as though trying to shield her from something, I am not sure what. She was too weary to quicken, spent as a bird that one finds sometimes fallen on the shore after a long storm-driven journey over the sea. But she leaned against me as though there was some kind of shelter in that. And standing there in the wind and the sharp spitting darkness, I had a sudden sense of light and strength and quietness, and it seemed to me that Ygerna’s power could not last forever; that it might even be fought off and broken, and in the end I might be free, and Guenhumara with me.
“May the fire be warm for him,” Guenhumara said softly, against the breast folds of my cloak, “or may the birds of Rhiannon sing for him, if it hurts less, to forget.” (“Forget . . . Forget . . . Are you afraid to hear the singing of Rhiannon’s birds, that makes men forget?”)
And the light went out, and I knew that the Samhain wind was dreary cold, and the ram spitting down my neck, and no man may escape his doom. I kissed Guenhumara, and it was like kissing her good-bye. “Anwyl, you must go in to your bed.”
She kissed me again, with a great and lovely kindness, as she had kissed me on our wedding night. “Come soon, then, Artos the Bear, for it is lonely in this place.”
“I will come soon,” I promised.
And she drew back out of my arms, and went away down the rampart stair.
FLAVIAN returned to us early in the spring, before even the first supply carts of the year got through. I was out on old Arian, beginning the long business of getting him back into condition after the winter, and we came together with a suddenness that set the horses trampling, at the bend where the Cunetium road ran out from the shadows of the river gorge. “Artos!” he shouted, and I, “Minnow!” and laughing and exclaiming and cursing the horses, we leaned together from the saddle to strike hands, while Cabal sprang around us with his tail lashing.
“How is it with Teleri and the bairn?” I asked, when we had quieted the beasts and turned them back toward the gates of Trimontium.
“It is very well with both of them; he is a fine cub and uses his fists like a warrior already.” He spoke with the lingering tone and inward-turning smile of a man looking back on past contentment so strong that the flavor of it lingers with him still. And then in a changed note, “She came then?”
“Guenhumara? She came. But what tells you so?”
“You have a new cloak.”
I glanced down at the dark thick plaid I had flung about me against the March wind that cut like a fleshing knife. Guenhumara had not been two days in Trimontium before she asked for a loom, and when two of our craftsmen made it for her, the first thing that she wove on it had been a cloak for me. “I have a new cloak,” I agreed, “but must it be of Guenhumara’s weaving?”
“They always weave a cloak for their lord, to keep him warm,” said Flavian, with the air of one grown suddenly wise in the ways of women. “Mine wove this for me,” and he shook out and resettled the folds of a fine dark blue cloak bordered with black and flame red.
“It is a bonny cloak,” I said, “and a bonny target for Saxon arrows you’ll make wearing it. Now I have but to squat still enough in this dim plaid of mine, and the Dark People themselves will take me for a hole in the hillside.”
“Ah, you are jealous, my Lord the Bear!” And so I was, but not of his cloak with the black and scarlet border.
We rode on, exchanging the news of the camp for news of the world outside, until we came down to the ford, and splashed through; and as we set the horses to the steep rough-paved slope on the far side, Flavian said suddenly, “Fool that I am. I should have told you at first. Hunno bade me remind you that he will be sending your Signus up with the horse drafts, this spring.”
I had almost forgotten that the white foal would be three years old now. In war and in the wilderness one easily loses count of tune. I twisted in the saddle to look at my companion. “You have seen him? He has fulfilled his promise?”
“I believe you will think so. He’s a good hand taller than Arian, and more powerful, and his heart is as high as his crest. Hunno says he is the crown and the flowering of all the colts that ever came under his hands, and that the Horned One has granted it to him to make a perfect horse at the end of his days. . . . I think he forgets that the dam had anything to do with it.”
“The end of his days?” I said quickly. “Is anything amiss with Hunno?”
“Nothing but that he grows old,” Flavian said, and suddenly he sighed. “It happens — it happens to all of us.”
“You have noticed that? Sa! You are growing up, my Minnow.”
“Even Teleri was a little older than when I saw her last. Her breasts are not pointed any more, but round. Maybe by the time I see her again she will have found a white hair and pulled it out and grown seven more.”
It was the best part of a month later that Hunno sent up the yearly draft of horses. They were a good lot. Trained on for battle (that was the task that fell to the summer garrison every year), they would serve to remount some of Pharic’s contingent before the end of the campaigning season.
And among them, as promised, was Signus. The big white war-colt was certainly, I thought, walking all around him in the first moments of our reunion, everything that Hunno had claimed for him. He stood rising sixteen hands at the shoulder, strength and endurance promised though not yet fulfilled in his deep shoulders and long, finely sloping haunches, pride and fire in every line of him from high crest to sweeping, restless tail, and as he stamped and tossed his head and wheeled about to keep me in view, my soul went out to him as it had done at our last meeting, when his muzzle was still flecked with his mother’s milk. I went closer, and felt the quivering bowstring fineness of the tendons at wrist and hock, the life and the instant response shiver through him as I ran my hands over his body. He swung his head toward me in interest, his wariness forgotten, his ears pricked forward, nuzzling with delicate outthrust lip for the lick of salt that he was all at once sure I had brought him. I shook some into my palm from the small rawhide bag I usually carried with me, and gave it to him, drawing my free hand again and again down his nose from forelock to quivering nostril, while he sucked and slobbered at the gray salt. His head was broad and intelligent, his eyes like a falcon’s, dark and luminous, under the veil of white lashes. “Did I not say that we should go into battle together, you and I? Did I not tell thee?” I said, in the British tongue that he would be used to. And he ruckled softly in his nose, butting against me for more salt.