I had him saddled up, and called to Amlodd standing by to bring a spear and follow me, and took him down then and there to the practice field to try him out. We had cleared the old practice field during our first long months in whiter quarters, hauling out the elder bushes and the furze that had overrun it, and setting up the brushwood jumps and spear targets. And there I spent the better part of that evening, one of the happiest evenings, I think, that I have ever known. I tested his paces, and tried him for ease in maneuvering, bending him this way and that, reining him up short and wheeling him almost on his haunches; and found his mouth sensitive and his heart high and willing even when clearly he did not understand what I wanted of him. I took him over the jumps and ditches — it is very seldom that one needs a war-horse to jump, but when one does, one needs it as never anything in life before. In his eagerness he was prone to stretch out his neck and jump off too soon, but confidence and scorn of the obstacle ahead was in the very gathering of his lean haunches under him, and his landings were sure as a cat’s. He must be schooled against overconfidence; ah, but too much fire, too fierce a scorn of obstacles, are better than too little, in horse or man. I took him at full gallop down the curved line of practice posts, swerving him in and out with the torn sods flying back from his hooves, and fell more and more in love with him at every drumming hoofbeat. He shook his head, when I brought him to a halt at last, scattering foam on his breast, and I could sense in him as though one life flowed through both of us, the joy in his own speed and power and the hand beginning to grow familiar on his reins. This would make a war-horse indeed! Only when I took the spear from Amlodd and set him at the target, he was somewhat lacking, for he did not yet understand what was wanted of him, and the target itself, which looked like a man and yet was not a man, was a thing to be shied and snorted and trembled at, lest there be some hidden menace in it. But time and training would amend that. And in the ultimate task of a warhorse I knew that he would need scarce any training at all, for the use of his own teeth and front hooves as weapons is born into every stallion.
By the time that I had done, the sun was low and the three-peaked shadow of Eildon had engulfed the whole river valley and the old red fort on its headland and the marshes eastward. I turned Signus toward the gateway, and saw what looked like half the war host crowded there to watch the show. From deep within the gloom of the gate arch one figure moved forward and started down the length of the practice field toward me, and I saw with a small sharp stab of pleasure that it was Guenhumara. Cabal, who had gone through every trial and test with us, bounded to meet her, and mouthed the hand she held to him in his great jaws. That gentle pretense at savaging, which had in it all the loving laughter of intimacy, was a thing that he bestowed sometimes on me, very occasionally on Guenhumara, on Bedwyr and Druim Dhu, never on anyone else. I noticed that in the curve of her other arm, she carried a small deep rush basket, tenderly as though it contained something fragile and precious.
I had dropped from the saddle, with my tunic sticking to my back, for the evening was warm for April and Signus had been no armchair ride; and when she reached me with Cabal stalking beside her, she stood watching while I rewarded the big colt with another lick of salt. “Flavian told me that you were trying out the white colt, and so I came to watch. Is he all that he should be?”
“He is all that I hoped and believed he would be,” I said, fondling the muzzle that thrust against my breast.
“Believed? You have seen him before, then?”
“Three years ago — a foal still running at his mother’s heel. I marked him for mine, then, and gave him his name for a covenant between us.”
“And the name?”
“Signus. He was an autumn foal, and a white one, and I called him for the star of the Great Swan that rises at the time of the first autumn gales.”
“So — and he is swift and fierce and beautiful like the wild swans that used to fly over my home. It is a good name for him.”
Amlodd had come panting up from the far side of the practice field, and I handed the white colt over to him, and once more turned toward the fortress gates with Guenhumara.
“What will you do now, with Arian?”
“For the next year or two, God willing, I shall ride him equally with Signus. In two years the young one will have gamed experience, and I shall send Arian back to Ambrosius who first gave him to me. He will be past his best by then, poor old lad.”
“He will hate that.”
“He will remember Ambrosius. It would break his heart to hear the trumpets and know that I had gone into battle without him.”
“Poor Arian. It is sad to grow old.”
“It happens,” I said, “to men and horses, and I suppose to the stars themselves, until the time comes that they fall from the sky on a winter’s night. . . . You sound like Flavian; he says that Teleri’s breasts are not pointed any more, but round.”
“That is not age,” said Guenhumara, softly. “That is because she has borne a child and given suck.”
And a sudden silence took us as we walked, a small silence, but painful.
All through the autumn, even while I dreaded her coming, I had hoped, hoped for some kind of miracle, I don’t know what. But when she came, nothing had been changed between us. And Guenhumara, though she never spoke of it, I think had hoped for a miracle, too. If we could have spoken of the trouble, we might have drawn closer together, but we could not. And the silence made a sword-blade barrier between us more impassable than the thing itself. The fact that I could not be fully a man to her made me shy of her in other ways, and as I held back and drew away, so, by no will of her own, it seemed, must she draw away also. And yet I believe she loved me then. I know that I loved her.
“What have you in that basket that you carry as though it were eggs?” I asked at last; anything to break the silence.
And she laughed a little breathlessly and hurried to help me. “But it is eggs! Look!” And coming to a standstill, she turned to me and put back a wad of grass and moss with which the basket seemed to be filled, and showed me, lying as it were in a nest of moss, seven greenish waxen-surfaced mallard’s eggs. “Gwalchmai found them in the marshes and brought them to me to hatch.”
As she carefully re-covered them to keep their warmth in, I thought that that was like Gwalchmai, thought also that the gift showed the place that she had found for herself among us and taken with quiet certainty as her own. “I’ll have no married women to raise trouble among the men,” I had said, long ago, to Flavian. But if trouble of that kind were to come with Guenhumara, it still lay hidden in the future days. Maybe that was in part because she was mine, and I was Artos the Bear, with a bear’s blow to defend my own; maybe, a little, because they too were mine; but chiefly, I think, it was something in Guenhumara herself.
“And how is it you think you are going to hatch them? Will you make a nest and sit on them turn and turn about with Blanid?” I asked, making a foolish jest of it.
We had moved on again, and the onlookers about the gate, now that the show was over, were beginning to drift away.
“One of Caradawg’s hens has gone broody,” she said. “That was why Gwalchmai brought them to me, because he thought that there was a good chance of hatching them.”
It was more than I did. Caradawg the armorer whiled away the time when work was slack by breeding fighting cocks and trading them through the fort and with the merchants who came occasionally in the summer, and I could not see one of his fierce little red game hens sitting placidly on a clutch of mallard’s eggs. “I was going to find Caradawg when Flavian told me about the colt, and I saw the crowd gathering and came down to watch with the rest.” .Guenhumara checked, and added after a moment, “Only of course I shall not be here to see them hatch out; Caradawg must see to that for me. That was the one thing that Gwalchmai forgot.”