“Yes,” I said, “that is the one thing that Gwalchmai forgot.”
“Let me stay a while longer,” she said suddenly, “until the ducklings are safely hatched.”
I shook my head. “Mid-April is late enough for you to be making the journey. It is not even as though I could spare the time to ride all the way with you and leave you safe in your father’s hall.”
“Is not Pharic’s arm strong enough to get me there, even with an escort behind him?”
“In mid-April, yes. By mid-May, for all that we can know, it might take the whole war host.”
There was a small pause. We were out on the roadway now, and had slackened to a snail’s pace; as though without actually admitting it by stopping, neither of us wished to reach the gates. Then Guenhumara said, “Very well, if you fear an ambush for me on the journey, let me stay here all summer. I shall be safe enough within these great red walls.”
“Will you? We hold Trimontium with a garrison cut to the very bone in summer, to free every possible man for the war trail. You have a certain value as a hostage, and if word that the Bear’s wife was here with so small a force to guard her came to the ears of our enemies, broken and divided as they are, you might bring deadly peril both on yourself and Trimontium. I can’t afford to lose either of you.”
“But principally Trimontium,” said Guenhumara, and drew away from me a little as we walked. “Ah well, I promised, did I not, that you should not find me a too clinging wife.”
I made a clumsy, protesting gesture of some sort toward her, and then checked it because of the men who still lounged in the gateway. Even alone with Guenhumara I was shy of any ultimate gesture, being a hamstrung lover in all things; and before other eyes I could not touch her at all. The gate was very near now, and she spoke quickly and very quietly, with a breath of unhappy laughter. “Na na, you need not pretend, my lord; part of you will breathe a great breath of relief when I am gone.”
“And part of me will miss you as a newly blinded man misses the first light of morning,” I said in the same suppressed tone.
She looked around at me, then, and in the last few steps, drew nearer again. “God help us both!” she said, as she had said it on the first night of all. The long evening shadow of the gate towers fell across us.
By the end of that year’s war trail, I knew that I could safely leave Valentia to itself, at least for a while, and turn south at last, to redeem my four-year-old promise to Eburacum. And that following summer I did not send Guenhumara back to her father, but for the first and only time in our years together, carried her with me. It seems an odd decision now, and looking back, I am not sure how I came to make it. I suppose at the roots of the thing, because I wanted to so sorely. I knew that the small Sisterhood who had fled with the rest of Eburacum when the Sea Wolves came, had returned to what was left of their house in the city; and I could leave Guenhumara with them, and perhaps, if the chances of war fell so, see her from time to time through the summer.
So we rode south, leaving behind us the usual small garrisons in Three Hills and Castra Cunetium. Old Blanid rode with the baggage train, like a battered old rook clinging to the tail of a wagon, but Guenhumara put on again the breeks and short tunic that, with her hair hidden, still made her look like a boy, and rode ahead with the Companions.
The men of Eburacum welcomed us back as though we had been their long-lost kindred, crowding the streets to cheer us in: I looked for Helen among the throng, and did not see her until a knot of poppy-red ribbons flung from above hit Cei on the mouth as he rode beside me, and glancing up, I saw her raddled face laughing down from an upper window. She waved to both of us, and I waved back. Cei thrust the ribbons into his bosom and blew her smacking kisses through his fiery beard as though he had not loved every girl of the baggage train and a score of others besides, and wearied of them all since the last time that he lay in her arms.
They had given a good account of themselves in the past four years, the men of Eburacum and the Brigantian territory; they had held their city free of the Sea Wolves, and here and there even thrust back the Saxon settlement from along the coast and river mouths, and they carried themselves like hounds with two tails. But there still waited work enough for us to do. We made camp in the old fortress as we had done before, while the war host made itself battle-ready; and for days the bargaining that rose from the corn merchants’ stores and the sellers of dried meat and sour wine, the fletchers and the leatherworkers bade fair to drown the rasp of file and the ring of hammer on anvil from Jason the Sword-smith, and the armorers’ shops throughout all the city.
It was not until the last day before we marched out that I took Guenhumara, with Blanid still grumbling and flapping in attendance, to the House of the Holy Ladies. It was a long low building turning a blank eyeless face upon the Street of the Clothmakers that ran toward the fortress gates. The patched walls with scars of burning still upon them, the clumsy new thatch that showed the ends of charred beams here and there under the eaves, told clearly enough of the state in which the Saxons had left it. We spoke with the Mother Abbess in her little private chamber, and after Guenhumara had been made gently welcome, and led away from me by a small scurrying Sister like a sad little bird, I lingered for a last word with the woman who ruled this narrow enclosed world.
She was a tall woman, and I think had been beautiful. Her hands folded in her dark robed lap were beautiful still, and strong, though knotted with rheumatism and yellow-white as the ivory of the crucifix hanging on the lime-washed wall behind her, a big hand that I could imagine holding a sword. She would make a foe worthy of any man’s blade, I felt that instinctively, and liked her the more for it, as one good fighting man recognizes his brotherhood with another. “There was something more you wished to say to me, my Lord Count of Britain?”
“Only this.” It was a thing that must be set clear and straight between us. “That I would not have you shelter the Lady Guenhumara under any false hope of a gift for your nunnery. What money I have, whatever treasure I can gather, goes to feeding my men, in the purchase of war-horses and the retempering of sword blades. And furthermore, it has been in my mind these many years that since I fight, among other matters, to keep the roof over the Church’s head and the light unquenched on the altar and its holy ones with their throats uncut, it is the Church that owes to me, not I that owe to the Church.”
“So I have heard, these many years also,” the Abbess said gravely.
And I had another thought, and came a step nearer to the tall chair in which she sat. “One thing more, Holy Mother; I mean no disrespect in this, but I ride away tomorrow, and Guenhumara will be in your hands. I am not greatly loved by the Church of Christ, as both you and I know, and to speak truth that has not held me long from my sleep at nights; and if, when I come back, I find that my wife has not been well and kindly used in every way, then women as you are —”
“You will see whether this house of God will not burn as brightly a second time as it did the first,” said the Mother Abbess. “Do not spend your threat on me, Artos the Bear, for there is no need, I assure you.” Suddenly and most unexpectedly she smiled, a smile that was somewhat grim about the mouth, but danced behind her eyes. “As Abbess of this house of Holy Sisters, it is my duty to tell you that you are a most sinful man, a despoiler of Christ’s Garden second only to the Saxon kind, and that on the day when Almighty God in His Glory parts the sheep from the goats, you are assuredly damned. But as a mere woman, and one perhaps not overblest with meekness, it is in my heart to spoil all by telling you that if I were a man and fighting to hold back the Barbarian flood and the darkness from the land, I believe that I should feel and act much as you have done, and deserve damnation also, in the Day of Judgment.”