“Holy Mother,” I said, and did not realize until the words were spoken, how unseemly they were, “I wish I had you among my Companions.”
“Maybe I should make a better fighting man than I do a nun,” she said, and I do not think she felt the words an outrage. “Though God knows that I strive to live by His rule and be worthy of my trust. But as to the Lady Guenhumara — we are a small sisterhood, and poor; we live for the most part on the charity of the good people of this city, and on the outcome of three fields beyond the walls. We have no store of gold, no jeweled image or worked altar cloth to give you for the purchase of horses or sword blades, but we will share most willingly what we have with your wife, and strive to make her happy among us until you come for her again. Let that be our gift, some payment of our debt to you.”
“There could be none greater,” I said. I pulled off a bracelet of enameled bronze that I had worn since I was a boy, and set it on the table beside her. “That is not to destroy the gift, but that Guenhumara need not live on the charity of the good citizens of Eburacum. I thank you, Holy Mother. I am ashamed.”
I knelt for her blessing, the first time I had received a blessing from the Church since the day that I took Gwalchmai from his fenland monastery. And the small scurrying Sister, summoned by a little bronze bell that stood on the table to the Abbess’s hand, led me away and thrust me out into the fine spring rain that was scudding down the Street of Clothworkers, and I heard the heavy door rattle shut on the women’s world that I had left behind me.
That summer we rode the war trail all up the coast, northward and northward and northward, burning and harrying as we went, and gathering an ever-growing war host from the hills and moors, until we rounded the end of the Wall at Segedunum and came up with the traces of our last summer’s southernmost harryings, and knew that at least for an hour, until the next tide rose and the next wind blew from across the sea, our coasts from the Bodotria to the estuary of the Metaris were free of the Saxon scourge. But it was a long trail and a hard one, and there was no return to Eburacum in all that time, so that it was full autumn before I saw Guenhumara again.
We rode into the city on a still October evening full of wood-smoke and the smell of coming frost, with great rustling flights of starlings sweeping homeward overhead. And I do not think that there was one living soul in Eburacum who could walk or crawl or be carried, from the age-palsied beggar on two sticks to the wide-eyed baby held up against its mother’s shoulder, from the chief magistrate with his formal speech of welcome, to the very dunghill curs, who did not come swarming into the streets to see us clatter past and give us a welcome fit for heroes, as though we were newly in from some battle of gods and Titans, instead of a summer spent in burning out Saxon hornets’ nests and getting well stung for our pains. Their voices broke about us in great waves of sound, they cast branches of golden leaves and autumn berries before our horses’ feet, they crashed forward and surged about us so that at times we could barely force a way onward at all. I was riding old Arian, for it was his last campaign that we returned from, and I felt that the triumph was his due — he had always loved a triumph; he was playing to the trumpets now, tossing his head and all but dancing — and indeed it was as well that I did so, for Signus, although magnificent in a charge, was still inclined to fret and turn difficult in a crowd.
I had meant to go straight up to the fortress, get out of my filthy war gear and if possible shake off the crowd, and then go quietly down to the House of the Holy Ladies and ask Guenhumara if she would come with me now or bide where she was for the few days until we marched for Trimontium again.
But as we turned into the Street of the Clothworkers that led up from the main street to the fortress, and I saw the blind wall of the house close before me, it was as though I heard Guenhumara call, not with the ears of my body, but in some quiet place in the very midst of myself, beyond the reach of the joyous uproar all around me. She was calling me, needing me, not later when I had gone up to the fortress and shed my harness and was at leisure for other things, but now in this present moment. I told myself that I was a fool and imagining things, but I knew that I was not — I was not — and in a few moments more I should be swept past the house, with the Companions torrenting up the street behind me, and the light troops and the rattling baggage train, on and up toward the fortress gate, and Guenhumara left crying after me. . . .
“Sound me the Halt!” I cried to Prosper. He shouted back, something that had the note of a question or a protest, but I did not hear the words. “Sound me the Halt, damn you, and keep on sounding it!”
I was already swinging Arian out of the main stream, forcing him through the onlookers, who bunched and scattered squealing, to give me passage, as I heard the horn sounding its brief imperative message. “Halt! Halt! Halt!” I heard the shouts of the watchers and the turmoil break out behind me, the trampling and cursing as the cavalry obeyed the unexpected order. Bedwyr had thrust through to my side, and leaned half out of the saddle to catch Arian’s bridle from me as I dropped to the ground. I turned to the small strong door, thrusting back Cabal, who would have followed me, and beat on it with the hilt of my dirk.
The same small scurrying Sister came in answer to the summons, glancing past me into the street with a white startled face, even as she saw who I was. “My Lord Artos?”
“I have come for my wife,” I said.
In a short while I was standing again in the small lime-washed chamber with the ivory crucifix on the wall. The room was dim with the autumn evening, and empty. But almost at once a slight sound made me swing around to the door; and the Mother Abbess stood there. “This is a house of prayer and contemplation. Are you responsible for this uproar before our door?”
“I have a war host with me, and the people of Eburacum are glad to see them come again. . . . I am come for my wife, Holy Mother.”
“Would it not have been better to have gone up to the fortress first, and come for her in a gentler manner, when the welcome had died down?”
“Much. That was what I meant to do, but when we turned into the Street of the Clothworkers and I saw the nunnery wall before me I — changed my mind.”
She moved aside from the small deep-set door. “So. Go then and fetch her as swiftly as may be; I think that you will find her in our little herb garden, waiting for you. And —” The shimmer of a smile crept once more into her dry low voice. “I believe that she will give you a good enough account of us to save the nunnery roof from a second taste of fire.” She had moved to the table and picked up the little bronze bell that stood there. “Sister Honoria will show you the way.”
A nun, a stranger this time, with the soft anxious eyes and surging flanks of a cow ripe for the ball, answered the summons, and to her the Mother Abbess said, “Take my Lord Artorius into the herber, and send someone to bid Blanid bring out her mistress’s bundles. The Lady Guenhumara is leaving us.”