“What of the Cantish settlements?”
“As yet, nothing; but it is in my mind that they also prepare to move. Have you heard in your northern fastness that Oisc, Hengest’s grandson, has proclaimed the Kentish Kingdom and that our kinsman Cerdic grows to be a mighty war leader in his own right?”
“No,” I said, “I have not heard that. Oisc slipped through my fingers at Eburacum, but I had Cerdic in my hand, and I let him go. I was a fool not to have him killed. But it is hard to be wise, with a fifteen-year-old boy standing at bay over his mother’s body.”
He nodded, and then a few moments later, raised those pale bright eyes of his abruptly from the red heart of the brazier. “How soon can you take the war trail?”
“Give me ten days,” I said. “We’ve had a long hard march after a long hard winter, and we’re still out of condition, horses and men alike. Some of us — you remember Flavian, Aquila’s son — have to send for waiting wives, and I have arrangements of my own to make, for getting down part of the Deva horse herd. We’re new out of the wilderness, Ambrosius; give us ten days to see to our own affairs and taste the fleshpots — get drunk for a night or two and play Jupiter among the women of the town, and straighten our sword belts again thereafter, and we are all yours.”
The smile flickered again behind his eyes. “That seems a modest enough request. The last time it was a whole campaigning summer.”
“I promised you the North, in exchange for that summer,” I said, and picked a withered ivy leaf from among the stacked logs by the brazier, and handed it to him, “and here it is.”
He took it and began to play with it between his fingers; but it was so dry that it crumbled away.
We sat talking on in the fading light, discussing possible plans of campaign, discussing the broader issues that I had all but forgotten, fighting my own war away in the North, exchanging the story of the years that lay divided between us. Presently, speaking of the fortifying of the Royal Territory, the Old Kingdom that was one of the chief things he had to show for those years, of his plans for defense in depth, using again the hill forts of our forefathers, Ambrosius pulled a bit of charred stick from the brazier and fell to drawing maps on the tesserae, as I had seen him do so many tunes before; until there was no more light to see by save the dim rose-red glow of the brazier itself, and he shouted for his armor-bearer to bring lights.
The boy brought candles in a tall three-branched bronze pricket, and set them on the chest top beside Ambrosius’s sword, and went away again. Sitting there with Ambrosius in the gathering dusk, I had forgotten the change in him, but now as the light strengthened and steadied, I saw him again clearly as I had done in that first moment of entering the room, the deeply bitten lines of his dark narrow face under the gray hair, the way his eyes had sunk back into his head, and the faint discoloring of the skin about them. I thought that he looked not only old, but ill.
He caught me looking at him and smiled. “Yes, I have changed.”
“I did not say so.”
“Not in words, no. Have I not always told you that you showed too clearly in your eyes everything that is going on behind them?”
“Ambrosius,” I said, “are you sick?”
“Sick? Na, na, I grow old, that is all. An old gray-muzzled sheepdog. . . . Ah well, I shall sleep in the sun now, and scratch for fleas, while a younger dog guards the flock from wolves. . . .” He bent forward and set another log with meticulous care over the red cavern of the brazier. “It is thirteen years, Artos.”
Thirteen years. Wonderful what one could forget in thirteen years. . . . Almost, I had forgotten that my own war with the Saxons was not all the war there was. Almost, seeing the Sea Wolves flung back at this point and that along the coast, I had forgotten that, like the harsh gods of the Saxon kind themselves, we were carrying on a struggle which must end in darkness at the last. It was another kind of coming back from the Hollow Hills . . . Remembering again . . . Finding all things and all people a little changed, a little strange, and myself the strangest of all . . .
“On my way here a while since, I could have thought it was a hundred,” I said. “With the campaigning season started, there was scarcely a face I knew, and two boys that I passed exercising hounds stared and whispered as I went by as though I were something out of another world.”
“I can tell you what they whispered: ‘Look at his scars! He is head and shoulders taller than anyone else hereabouts — and that great hound with him — it must be Artos the Bear!’ And then as soon as you were safely by, they ran to tell their comrades that they had seen you. You are something of a legend, Artos. Didn’t you know that?”
I got up and stretched until the small muscles cracked between my shoulders, laughing. “I am a very weary legend — and I must away and see how all things are with Guenhumara and the babe.”
“Tomorrow,” Ambrosius said, “I will have the stores cleared out of the Queen’s Courtyard chambers, that Guenhumara may have them.”
“Your mother’s chambers? You will give her those?” I knew that he had used them as storerooms ever since his own return to Venta, that he might avoid having to let anyone else live there after her.
“You are all the son I have,” he said, “and she is your wife, this Guenhumara. Therefore it is fitting that she should use them, and bring them back to life again.”
WHEN I got back to my old quarters, Riada my armor-bearer was squatting before the door with his sword across his knees. “I have looked to them as you bade me,” he said, getting up, “and I got them fire and a lantern.”
“Sa, that is good. Off with you now, and see if you can still find something to eat.”
The door behind him stood just ajar, spilling soft yellow light across the colonnade, and I pushed it open and went in. Guenhumara was sitting beside the small brazier, combing her hair, which I saw was damp and clung about her temples in darkened wisps, though the ends were already feathery dry. She looked at me through the strands as she swept them this way and that. “I have washed my hair; it was full of all the wayside dust from here to Trimontium.”
“It was still bonny,” I said, “but it’s bonnier without the dust.” I glanced about me. “Where is Hylin?”
“Asleep in the little room through there, with Blanid.”
I went quietly and looked into the room that had been my sleeping cell since I was a boy. A rushlight burned like a star on its bracket high on the wall, and by its light I saw Hylin curled asleep in a soft dark nest made from the old beaver-skin rug at the head of the cot, just as she had done at Trimontium. Guenhumara always took her up at sleeping time, and lay with her in the curve of her arm. Blanid slept also, against the wall at the foot of the cot, snoring gently; and I stepped over her and bent to look at Hylin. She was as white as she had been red on the day that she was born, and the blue showed through at her tight-shut eyelids; and I thought, as I had thought often before, she was too small for a half yearling and thin like the small one of a hound litter that gets pushed out from the milk. But that was like enough, for Guenhumara had never had enough milk for her and maybe the milk of the little baggage mare had not agreed with her as well as Guenhumara’s milk would have done. Maybe we could do something about that now; there must be a woman in Venta with milk to spare.