It might have been a child’s appeal for warmth, it might have been only an incredibly clumsy attempt at consolation, but I knew already that Medraut was never clumsy, that when he wounded, he did it of deliberate intent; and I could have struck him across the mouth. But he was my son. My God! My only begotten son! I thought blasphemously. And I could not trust myself to speak again, but turned and went back to the atrium.
I had nowhere to sleep now, but I did not want to sleep; I felt as though I should never sleep again. I sat down on the stool by the brazier with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands, and shut my eyes at the light that seemed to claw at my aching eyeballs. The sense of doom was heavy on me, and the room seemed full of Ygerna’s hate reaching out to me still from beyond death. And Medraut was alive, and the child that I had loved was in her grave; and everything that was in me seemed broken and bleeding, and I was lost in a great wilderness.
Guenhumara came and found me there. I heard her step come across the tesserae and caught the faint indefinable scent of her, and knew that she was standing just behind me. But I did not look up.
“So that was your son,” she said, after a waiting pause.
“There’d be little use denying it, would there?”
“He is very like you. As like as a son can be to his father; only one cannot see into his eyes as one can into yours. And that makes him the more dangerous.”
“Only if he is dangerous already,” I said dully.
“A son of yours, as like to you as that one, coming out of nowhere with the Royal Dragon of Britain on his arm, and if I mistake not, something of your own power to draw men after him.”
“All that is nothing by itself,” I said, defending him, I think, to myself more than to her.
“By itself, no,” she said, and then, “Send him away, Artos.”
“I cannot — I must not.”
“Why? Are you afraid of the mischief he may work against you elsewhere, if you do?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Na. The thing is not so simple as that. If I send him away, I am no more than a horse swerving away from the jump that it must take at last. He is my fate, my doom if you like, Guenhumara. When I first saw him it was as though I looked at my own fetch. No man can escape his doom; better to face it than be taken between the shoulders as one tries to run.”
“Artos, you make me afraid when you talk like that. It is as though you were already half defeated.”
“Not unless I try to run.”
“Then if you will not send him away, I pray to God that he may get his death in battle — and soon.”
I had not been aware that my eyes were shut until I opened them and found myself staring into the red hell-mouth of the brazier. “No! Guenhumara, for Christ’s sake no — I am too near to praying that already.”
“And knowing the things you know, why should you not?”
“Because whatever he is, it is my fault, mine and my father’s who unleashed the evil.”
“Your father’s, maybe, though he did nothing that many another man has not done before him,” she said quickly. “Not yours! No more yours than the bear’s when he falls into the trap that has been dug for him.”
Suddenly her hand was on the back of my neck, hesitantly, moving to brush my cheek. But when I put up my own to touch it, it remained only a moment, as though to avoid seeming to repulse me, and then was gently but finally withdrawn. “Come to bed, Artos. You need sleep sorely, and as you said, you must ride early in the morning.”
And so I lay beside Guenhumara again in the wide bed, and there was a certain peace in being near her. But the child was between us, as surely as she had been on the night that I brought them both home from the Hollow Hills; as surely as the naked sword that Bedwyr had laid between Guenhumara and himself in the bitter winter before the child was born.
NEXT morning I gave Medraut his sword, and a big roan from among the reserve herd, and we rode out of Venta in the soft summer rain that had come up with the dawn. Cabal loped ahead as always, and beside him ran the smaller, lighter form of Margarita, both of them looking back at me from time to time. “Take the bitch with you,” Guenhumara had said. “She will be happier with you.” But I knew that the white boarhound’s constant whimpering and searching the same places over and over again were more than she could bear.
At Durocobrivae we made a halt for the night, and I picked up my own horse again; and toward sunset on the second day, we rode into camp.
I took Medraut to my own bothy, and sent him off with my waiting armor-bearer to draw his war gear from the baggage train and get something to eat — turning away to fling down my cloak and saddlebag even as I gave the orders, so that I need not see the look on young Riada’s face. I had seen too many looks on too many faces already; the startled glance and lengthened stare, the suddenly widened or narrowed eyes, as I rode in with Medraut beside me.
Left to myself when they were gone, I stood staring at nothing, fiddling with my dusty harness but getting no further with stripping it off. I should have gone out at once; God knows there were matters enough for me to see to; but still I lingered, giving the news time to run through the camp.
Presently a step came over the trampled turf, and Bedwyr loomed into the ragged doorway, his figure shutting out the rippled flame of sunset as he ducked through. “Artos — they said that you were back. What news? What news of the Small One?”
“Dead,” I said. “She died an hour before I reached home,” and heard the leaden words as though somebody else had spoken them.
The silence closed over them. I could not see Bedwyr’s face, but I heard him swallow harshly in his throat. Then he said, “There are not any words, are there?”
“No,” I said, “there are not any words.”
“How is it with Guenhumara?”
“Much as it would be with any woman. If she could weep it might be the better for her.”
Not even to Bedwyr could I tell that story to the full. I had taken up my iron cap and was burnishing it with the rag which Riada kept for that purpose. The sunset light through the doorway was reflected red in the smooth curved surface. “She said the child cried for you and your harp, before she fell asleep the last time.”
He gave a smothered exclamation, then nothing more, and after a while I said, “So here’s another lament for you to make.”
He folded up abruptly onto a packsaddle, his hands hanging across his knees. “No more laments. I have made overmany laments in the past fifteen years.”
“So long?” I said. “We are growing old, my friend. One day it will be time for the young ones to take our swords in hand, and make one last lament for us — if they remember — and step into our places. And for us the aching will be over.”
“The young ones — such as the son who rode in with you this evening?”
My hand checked on the war cap of its own accord. “You have heard, then?”
“I have seen him. You never told me you had a son, Artos.”
“Until two nights since, I hoped very greatly that I had not.”
“So? Was he, too, fathered under a whitethorn bush?”
“It amounted to that. . . . Bedwyr, will you take him into your squadron?”
“Mine?” I knew from his voice the upward quirk that would set his left eyebrow flying. “I should have thought that you would wish to keep him in your own.”