“Wine?” she said. We had a very small stock of wine, three amphorae at that tune, I think, but we saved it for the greatest of occasions.
“Wine, Guenhumara.”
She turned without another word and went out by the far door into the colonnade, and I heard her footsteps going quickly along it to the storeroom. Then I went back to the atrium.
Medraut stood where I had left him, beside the brazier, and for the first time I was able to see him clearly. His head was up, a half smile on his lips. He waited for me to take stock of him at my leisure, at the same time taking his own stock of me. He was as tall as I had thought, his shoulders not yet broadened into a man’s, under the shapeless garment of sheepskin with the wool inside, which was belted by a wide bronze-studded strap about his waist. His legs were very slightly bowed, as are the legs of most of us who are bred in the saddle; “suckled on mare’s milk,” as we say in the mountains. His hands too, like my own, were horseman’s hands, and when I looked into his face under the mane of mouse-pale hair, it was as though I looked across five and twenty years or so, at my own fetch, in the days when my beard was a golden chicken down along my jaw, as his was now. And I knew the chill stirring at the back of his neck, that a man may well feel, seeing his own fetch in the firelight. Only his eyes were his mother’s, deeply and hotly blue, veined like the petals of the blue cranesbill, and with the same discolored shadows under them, and they gave to his face a startling beauty that I had never possessed. He was so nearly a son to be deeply proud of; and yet something, somewhere, was horribly amiss with him. He had been too long within his mother, and some part of him was marred and twisted — I could feel the deformity as I could feel Ygerna in him. Lame flesh may be carried off like a tattered cloak, without harm to the spirit — I thought of Gwalchmai; but Medraut was crippled somewhere in his inmost self, and that is another matter.
I told myself that I was merely remembering Ygerna and grafting what I remembered onto her son, and almost made myself believe it.
Then he turned a little, quite deliberately, shaking back the heavy fold of sheepskin from his upper arm, and I saw above the elbow the coiled and entwined dragon of red gold that his mother had shown me on the morning after his begetting. “No need to show me that,” I said. “No man, seeing you, could doubt the truth of your claim.”
He smiled a little, and turned back to the fire, but left the fold of dappled sheepskin flung back from his shoulder.
The outer door opened, and Guenhumara came in, bearing the great silver guest cup with the ram’s-head handles. “Drink, and be welcome,” she said, bringing it to Medraut.
He took it from her with bowed head, saying, in place of the usual formula, “God comfort you, my lady, and ease the sorrow of the house.” I came to know in after time, that he might always be counted on to say the right thing when he wished to. Guenhumara looked up at him, a long clear look that turned from him to me and back again. Then she took the guest cup from his hands, and set it down on the table within easy reach, and without another word, went back through the curtained doorway into her own chamber.
After she was gone, I pulled a stool to the brazier, bidding Medraut to do the same, and we both drank from the guest cup, but the thin cool wine of Burdigala brought no fellowship; only after we had drunk it, it seemed easier to speak.
“It is in my mind that your mother will have taught you to hate me well,” I said, scarcely knowing that I was going to, until the words were spoken.
The dark blue eyes met mine, but I could not see into them, as I had not been able to see into Ygerna’s. “Did I not say? I have learned more of hate than of love. Is it my fault?”
“No,” I said. “What is it that you wish of me?”
“A horse and a sword. I am your son. It is my place and my right to ride among your squadron and sleep at your hearth.”
“Do you care a jot for our struggle against the Saxon flood?”
He shrugged very faintly. “It will not submerge the mountains.”
And I leaned forward, studying him through the faint smoke of the brazier. “Then how if I say to you that there is no place among my squadrons for a man who neither knows nor cares what he fights for?”
“I should say to you that surely it matters little if a man cares what he kills for, so that he is skilled enough as a killer. Give me a horse and a sword, and I will prove to you that I can use both.” He smiled, an odd, unexpected, tremulous smile. “One day I may even learn from you to care for the cause behind the fighting.”
I was silent, still studying him across the brazier. I did not believe in this sudden hint of a hunger after better things, and yet I think that at the moment, he believed in it himself. He was one of those who can always believe as they wish to believe. At last I said, “Tomorrow I ride to rejoin the Company. You shall have your sword and your horse.”
“I thank you, my father.”
“But first, you shall take off that arm ring.”
“It is mine,” he said quickly, and made as though to cover it with the protection of his other hand.
“You fool. I have no wish to take it from you. You can carry it in your breast for all I care. Only I say that you shall not wear it above your elbow, in the sight of all men.”
“My mother gave it to me, and she had it from her mother —”
“Who had it from Utha, my father and your grandfather, on the morning after he mated with her. All that I know as well as you do, and it is for that very reason that you shall take it off.”
“Why?” he demanded, still covering it with his hand.
“Because it is mate to the one which Ambrosius the High King wears above his elbow. It is a royal arm ring of the Princes of Britain.”
He took away the shielding hand and looked down at the heavy gleaming thing.
“The royal arm ring of Britain,” he said musingly. “Yes, it might perhaps be — tactless to wear it about Ambrosius’s court.” Very slowly he pulled off the great arm ring, and thrust it into the breast of his rough sheepskin tunic. “See what a dutiful and obedient son you have, my father.”
I got up, and he rose instantly, with exactly the right show of deference. “It is past midnight, and we must make an early outset in the morning. Come, and I will show you where you can sleep.”
I did not rouse out any of the servants; truth to tell, I shrank too much from anyone else seeing him. I had had all that I could take for one night. The thing would be all over Venta soon enough without any help. I took a spare lantern and lit it at the brazier, and led him out across the courtyard to the small turf-floored storeroom where I had slept for the past two nights.
In the doorway, when I would have left him, he stayed me, standing against the lantern light. “Father —”
“Yes?”
“Are you going to acknowledge me? Or do I ride with you tomorrow simply as a new spear out of nowhere, to join your war bands?”
“Since no man who looks at you can doubt for one moment that you are my son,” I said, “it is in my mind that neither of us has much choice in the matter.”
“Father —” he said again, and checked, and then, “Can you not speak one gentle word to me, on this first night of my coming to you?” and his voice shook.
“I am sorry,” I said. “This is not a night when I have many gentle words to spare,” but I touched his shoulder, and realized with a sense of shock that, like his voice, he was shaking.
He drew a long breath and suddenly thrust out his hands to me as a woman might do. “Artos my father, it is an ill night that I have chosen for my coming; yet how was I to know. . . . And in the child’s death, do not quite forget that I am your living son! May not a son’s coming redeem the night a little for the other loss?”