A little above the spring that had been, as it were, Itha’s gift to the war host on our first coming, we stopped, and stood silent.
“We have had good hunting together, Sun Lord,” Druim Dhu said at last, “in Cit Coit Caledon above all. That was a great hunting, a most great hunting.”
“A most great hunting,” I said, “Dark Man.”
“And now it is over.”
“Maybe I shall come back, one day.”
“Maybe, Sun Lord,” he agreed with courtesy; but we both knew that I should not come back, one day or any day. And I knew suddenly why he had painted his forehead and put on the necklaces — and that I was going to miss the little dark hunter, south of the Wall, more than anything or anyone that I left north of it.
“It will seem strange to hear the foxes barking again in the Place of the Three Hills,” he said. “And whiles and whiles, when we are moving the cattle over, I will be looking to see if there is a garland on the branch of the big alder tree up Horse Burn.”
I said, “And whiles and whiles, I will be looking across the fire between sleeping and waking, and thinking to see the white clay marks and the green glint of woodpecker feathers.”
It was a light enough leave-taking, yet as I watched the small lithe figure dissolve into the hill mist, I knew that I was bidding farewell not only to Druim Dhu, but to a whole part of my life. As in Ambrosius’s study on the night that he gave me my wooden foil of freedom, so now on this steep hill path with the river sounding through the mist below me, I was standing on a threshold. . . .
I turned, and went back up the track to the postern gate, and stepped across the foot-hollowed stone sill, and the guard thrust the dead thornbush into place behind me.
It was the familiar room in which Ambrosius had given me my wooden foil. The familiar frescoes of bulls’ heads and garlands on the walls a little more faded than they had used to be, in the fading daylight; the bronze brazier in the center, casting its dim rose of light up to the rafters, for the spring evening had turned cold with an east wind; the dim black and gold lozenge pattern of scroll ends on the shelves of the far wall; Ambrosius’s sword lying where his sword always lay when he was not wearing it, ready to his hand on the big olivewood chest. Only the man standing with his back to me and his head bent to catch the last light of the west as it fell through a high window, on the scroll in his hands, seemed a stranger. A slight, faintly stooping man, with hair the dim silken gray of seeding willow herb, bound about the temples with the narrow gold fillet that so many of the Cymric nobles wear.
I even wondered for a moment, who was making free with Ambrosius’s private quarters. And then as I checked in the doorway, the man turned — and it was Ambrosius.
I suppose we said something, cried out each other’s name. And the instant after, we had come together with arms about each other’s shoulders. In a little, we held off at arm’s length, and stood looking each at the other. “Well may men call you the Bear!” Ambrosius said, laughing, “especially those who have suffered your love grip! Ah, but it is good to see you again, Bear Cub! The hours since your messenger came have seemed long indeed!”
“And to see you, Ambrosius! It is Sun and Moon on my heart to see you again! I waited for nothing save to leave Guenhumara and the bairn in my old quarters — not even to wash off the dust of the road, before I came seeking you.”
His hands were on my shoulders, and he looked up, searchingly, into my face. His own dark narrow features looked strange under the paleness of gray hair, but his eyes were the same as they had always been. “Ah yes, this Guenhumara,” he said at last. “Do you know, I used to think that you would be all your life as I am, who have never taken a woman from her father’s hearth.”
“I used to think so, too.”
“Is she very fair, this woman of yours?”
“No,” I said. “She is thin and tawny, but she has beautiful hair.”
“And she brought you a hundred horsemen for a dowry, which I think might make any woman beautiful in your eyes.”
“It was the horsemen that were beautiful. Guenhumara does not need to be. She is like —” I hesitated, trying to think what Guenhumara was like, for I had never sought to describe her before, even to myself.
And the laughter twitched for an instant at Ambrosius’s lips. “A flower? Or a falcon? I have heard it all before, Bear Cub. Na na, never trouble, I shall see her for myself before long.”
But I was still trying to think what Guenhumara was like. “Not a flower — maybe one of those dry aromatic herbs that only give out their full scent to the touch.”
Presently he was sitting in the cross-legged camp chair with the wolf heads carved on the arms, that had been his seat as long as I could remember. I had pulled up the same old stool to the brazier, and Cabal, who had stood until now, watching us, with slowly swinging tail, collapsed at my feet with a contented grunt, seemingly as much at home here as that other Cabal had been. And we looked at each other with the strangeness of the long separation making a sudden silence between us. Ambrosius broke it at last. “You will have brought your whole Company south with you?”
“A full muster of three hundred, with spare mounts and the usual baggage train.”
“So, that makes good hearing. What became of the auxiliaries you wrote of?”
“They went back to their own places — they were always a shifting population. They gathered to the Red Dragon to fight for their own hunting runs, and each time I moved on a few would follow me, and the rest drift back to their own hearths, while others gathered in their stead. It meant training raw troops all the time; but they were good lads.” I fell silent, staring into the red heart of the brazier, realizing suddenly a thing that I had never thought of before; that the Companions, also, were a shifting population. I was remembering men who had marched with me from Venta thirteen years ago, men from the Wolds and the wide-skied Lindum marshes; men out of Deva and Eburacum, little bands of hotheads from my own hills, from the Lake Lands and all across the dark North of Britain, all my Companions in their time, lying dead among the heather through the length and breadth of Lowland Caledonia, their places filled by the young warriors of the land that had killed them. Yet I had not thought of the Brotherhood as a thing that shifted and changed. When we rode south once more and the last of the auxiliaries fell away, I had been glad that we were just the Company again, the old tight-knit Brotherhood that we had been at first. And sitting beside the brazier on that chill spring evening in Ambrosius’s chamber, with a thrush singing in the old pear tree under the courtyard wall, I knew that that was because the Company had a living entity of its own, stronger than the individuals who made it up.
“If you have work for us, I think you will find us equal to somewhat more than the same number of spears drawn at random,” I said, thinking that he might be regretting those fallen-off auxiliaries.
He too had been staring into the heart of the brazier, but he looked up, smiling behind his eyes. “I am very sure of it. As to the work that I may have for you — I sent you the word last autumn of a new tide flowing.”
“It came to me.”
“That tide flows more strongly now. The Sea Wolves are on the move again, swarming into the Trinovantes territory, spilling inland over the old Icenian lands from the Abus River to the Metaris. We are holding them, but none the less, you are come in a fortunate hour, you and your three hundred.”