“Well?” Guenhumara said without looking up, when I went back to the outer room.
“She was asleep with her thumb in her mouth.”
She flung back all her hair and looked up at me then, with a pinched spent face. “If you say maybe it is because she is hungry, I shall hit you!”
“I was not going to,” I said quickly, for I knew how she hated that she had not enough milk.
But she flared out at me like the veriest spitcat, none the less. “And do not you use that quieting voice to me! I am not a child nor yet a mare to be gentled past a white rag in a thornbush!” And then before I could answer, though indeed there was no answer in my mind, she got up and tossed the comb aside and came and laid her head against my breast. “Artos, I’m sorry. It is that I am tired. We are both so very tired, the bairn and I, that is why she looks so gray.”
I put my arms around her and kissed the top of her damp head — I always loved the smell of Guenhumara’s hair when it was clean and wet. “Go to bed, love. I must find Bedwyr and make sure that all is well with the lads, and wash off a layer or two of dust. But I’ll not be long behind you.”
“I can’t go to bed yet, I’m too restless. Maybe I’m homesick.” She looked up at me. “When do you take the war trail and leave me alone in this great strange place?”
“Not for ten days. Ambrosius will give you his mother’s chambers that he has let no one use since her day, and I shall be able to see you settled in there before I go. Venta will not seem so great and strange to you, then.” I kissed her again. “Try to be happy here in the South; it is not my country either, but it is a good land, none the less.”
“At least we can be homesick together in the winter evenings,” she said with a shaken breath of laughter.
A familiar step came along the colonnade and she moved back quietly out of my arms as Bedwyr’s voice sounded beyond the part-closed door.
I bade him enter, and he pushed the door open and stepped into the lamplight, with my iron cap in his hand and a shapeless load of glimmering mail flung across one shoulder. “I’ve seen your baggage ponies unloaded,” he said, and flung down cap and war shut with a chiming crash onto the end of the big olivewood chest. “Riada will bring up the rest of your gear later.”
“That should all have been Riada’s work, but thanks, Bedwyr.”
He shrugged. “The boy had not eaten, and I had. The rest of the lads are fed and in some kind of shelter for the night. Cei is seeing to the horses, still — some difficulty about finding a good place for them in the picket lines — you know what horse masters are when there is any question of disturbing their own arrangements.”
“I also know what Cei is. I will go down to the horse lines and see what goes forward, before I head for the bathhouse.” I turned again to Guenhumara. “I may be some while seemingly — longer than I had thought. If you will not go to bed, wake Blanid to keep you company.”
“I shall do well enough with the fire for company.”
But I hated to think of her sitting there alone, combing and combing her hair, it might be far into the night. And then I had a happier idea. “Bedwyr — can you bide for a little? Maybe she will give you a cup of wine for a song. Can you weave a harp spell that is good for the horning hunger?”
He put a hand to the strap of his harp bag, and checked, looking at her with that wild left brow of his flying in inquiry. “If my Lady Guenhumara would have it so?”
Guenhumara hesitated also, and then stooped for her comb. “Anything, so that you play softly and do not wake the baby.”
And he lounged down onto the chest beside my war gear, unslinging his harp as he spoke. “As soft as the wild swan’s down. . . . Bide while I tune the darling, and you shall have the very birds of Rhiannon sung from their tree into your hollow hands, if that will help to pass the evening.”
I whistled Cabal to heel, and went out; Guenhumara’s voice in my ear, calling after me, “Come back soon,” as though I were going, not merely to the horse lines, but on a long journey.
I wished that Bedwyr had not said that, about the birds of Rhiannon.
Within half a moon the old struggle with the Sea Wolves had claimed me again, and with the Brotherhood I was far up into the old Icenian hunting runs. We saw fierce fighting all that summer; but what remains of it to me now? No man remembers the battles of his later years with the clearness, the joy and fire and anguish of the warfare of his youth. I had fought out half a score of pitched battles by then; how many skirmishes and forays and lesser fights, the war gods only know; and the details of one encounter become confused with the details of another, so that now, of all those battles of the later years, the only one to stand out clearly in my mind is the one we fought below Badon Hill. And that was the red flowering and the crown of all that had gone before. But in that first summer of our coming south, Badon was still five years away; and better than the whistle of arrows and the smoke of burning camps, I remember the smell of the saltings, and the wide wind-rippled marsh skies that reminded me of those first campaigns about Lindum when all things were younger and we were still a Brotherhood in the making.
I returned to whiter quarters on a day when, after a month of bitter wind and ram, with the evenings already drawing in to early lamplight, the year turns back for a last regretful look at summer. And when I came to the Queen’s Courtyard, I found Guenhumara and another woman sitting on the colonnade step in the late sunshine, while Hylin and two more babies tumbled about the old beaver-skin rug at their feet, and a dark grave boy of eight or nine, with a wooden sword, went gravely through the practice position of sword fighting. One look was enough to tell me whose son he was, and therefore who the other woman must be — and indeed she was little and brown, even as Flavian had described her. Guenhumara had risen and stood waiting. I think that in all our years, she never ran to meet me, but stood waiting for me to come to her, quite still, not from any lack of welcome but as though she were making something last, not wasting it in flurry and soft outcries; and with the same wish to make the moment last, I seldom hurried toward her. I checked for an instant beside the boy, and asked, “Do they call you Minnow?”
He lowered his guard and looked up. “How did you know, sir?”
“I just thought they might. Keep your point two inches lower when you make that lunge, Minnow. You’re laying yourself open to a belly thrust else.”
He made the movement again, stamping his small feet and recovering as neatly as many a grown man. “Sir — is my father come back?”
“He is with the horses now.”
I went on, Cabal stalking behind me, to where Guenhumara waited at the entrance to the colonnade, while Teleri gathered her brood and flurried softly away into the shadows behind her.
The winter that followed has a sheen to it, a silken texture in my memory, like a flower with the light through its petals, and not much longer-lived. Hylin seemed much stronger, the summer sun had burned her soft skin brown and bleached the ends of her soft wispy hair; she had filled out, and though she could not talk yet — I had half thought she might, but Guenhumara said no, that a year was too young — she had learned to laugh, a small crooning bubbling laugh that was the prettiest sound I had ever heard. I bought her a white boarhound that winter, choosing her a bitch since they are more gentle than dogs and less likely to stray — out of a litter of squirming and whimpering whelps in a huge willow basket which one of Ambrosius’s hunters brought to the courtyard with their anxious mother sniffing behind. I got Bhan the leather-worker to make a puppy collar with tiny five-petaled silver flowers on it, where a grown hound would have had studs of bronze. It was the first time in my life that I had bought a pretty thing for my daughter, and I enjoyed it more than I should have enjoyed laying captured treasure at the feet of a queen. It was a mild whiter, so mild that at midwinter there was still one tattered blossom on the little thorny white rose that grew in an old clay wine jar at the angle of the colonnade; and Guenhumara picked it and brought it in to lie on the table at suppertime on the Eve of Lights, and the scent of it in the warmth of the brazier was fit to tear the heart out of the breast.