So I was right; he had been working against time all that year and more, striving to leave Britain strong for another hand to take from his, building toward a victory that, if it ever came, he would not live to see. I could have gone home through the streets of Venta howling like a dog for Ambrosius who had been to me father and friend and captain, not for his death, but for the manner of it, and for its shadow reaching out before.
The early weeks of that winter went by, much as the same weeks in other years. By day we slaved in the training grounds and the colt-breaking yards; or when chance offered, took a day’s hunting in the forests about Venta. Our evenings were passed, for the most part, about the fires in the gymnasium of the old Governor’s Palace, which the Companions had taken for their mess hall; sometimes, the chiefs and captains among us, in Ambrosius’s High Hall which had been the great banqueting chamber, or in my case, and all too seldom, in my own quarters with Guenhumara, like a mere tired soldier or farmer or merchant returning to his woman at the day’s end. And these evenings were at once a deep joy and an abiding sorrow to me.
It was always a joy to me to be with Guenhumara, to look at her, and breathe her quietness, yet beneath the joy, and in some way part of it, as though one were the shadow of the other, lay always the sorrow, the sense of distance between us that I could not cross; the loneliness. She had said that she did not want me to touch her, and I could not come near enough to touch her, nowadays — oh, not physically: physically, when once those first few days after Hylin’s death were past, she never withdrew herself from me, nor did she ever withdraw her kindness, but kindness is not of necessity the same thing as love; and I knew that something within her, her deepest and inmost self, her soul perhaps, had gone away from me and was going further. I think that she did not wish it; I think that at that time she would have come back if she could; but she could not find the way, and I could not find it for her.
Sometimes on those rare evenings, we would be alone together; sometimes a little knot of friends, Cei and Gwalchmai, Pharic and the Minnow . . . very occasionally Bedwyr alone; and those were the best evenings of all.
On those evenings we abandoned the atrium, and sat in Guenhumara’s private chamber, or at least Bedwyr and I sat, while Guenhumara returned to her weaving. I can see her now, as though I were still sitting on the stool beside the brazier with Cabal sprawled on the warm tesserae at my feet, lordlily indifferent to the white boarhound bitch Margarita suckling his squabbling puppies close by. She would be working at her standing loom, and Bedwyr sitting on a pillow beside her, idly fingering his harp, and glancing up at her; she turning perhaps to glance down at his ugly laughing face, and their two shadows flung by the lamp onto the web of her weaving, so that it was almost as though she were weaving them into the pattern of the cloth. And behind the wandering harp notes, the whisper of sleet against the high window shutter.
I liked to watch them so, for it seemed to me good that the two people I loved best in the world should be friends, that we should be a trinity; the clover leaf or the yellow iris, not merely three in row, with myself in the center. On those evenings, too, it was as though Guenhumara came back a little out of her distance, so that I felt that a little more — a little more — and we should find each other again.
Medraut never made one in those quiet evenings. He had begun to gather a following of his own, among the younger of the Companions, and they had their own ways of passing the free hours. And I was only too thankful that it should be so. Perhaps if I had been otherwise, if I had tried harder to fight his mother in him, instead of leaving him in her power, it might have saved much sorrow later. And yet — I don’t know — I do not know. I think he was destroyed, and not merely held captive; and only God can remake what has been destroyed.
The dark of the whiter was past, and the days lengthening, and the hunter in me had begun to sniff the distant unrest of the spring, when Ambrosius sent for me one evening.
I found him in his private chamber, sitting in the great chair beside the brazier. Gaheris his armor-bearer squatted with hunched shoulders on the floor beside him, cleaning a piece of harness, and in the farther shadows I could just make out the dark shape of the Jew physician. We talked for a short while of things that mattered little to either of us; and then in the midst of some quite different subject, he said: “Artos, I am like a beast in a cage, here in Venta. I must get outside the bars for a while.”
“So?” I said.
“So I am going up to the villa for a few days. They tell me that the hunting in Spinae is good after the soft winter.” He smiled at my silence, the old swift smile that kindled his whole face as though a lamp had sprung up inside it — there was little flesh now to shield the light. “Good hunting for the friends who come with me, even though maybe my own hunting days are gone by.” And I saw in his eyes that he knew that Ben Simeon had told me.
“Can you ride so far?”
“Surely. It is but a forenoon’s ride, and my old fat Pollux grows less like a horse and more like a goose-feather bed with every day that passes.”
It would be useless to argue against the plan, I saw that; and indeed I had no wish to. “Who goes with you, Ambrosius?”
“Not many: yourself and Gaheris here and Aquila — my war leader and my armor-bearer, and the captain of my bodyguard. I shall not lack for care and guarding.”
“And Ben Simeon?”
He shook his head. “I have no more need of physicians, Bear Cub.”
And the figure in the. shadows made a movement that was the beginning of urgent protest, and then was still again.
TWO days later we were up at the small villa house — scarcely more than a farmsteading — in the wooded hills north of Venta, which Ambrosius and his father before him had used for a hunting lodge. The old smoke-darkened atrium was full of stored grain baskets and so were the wings, save for a few rooms where the steward and farm servants were housed, as was the case with almost every villa out of the Saxons’ path, for in these days when there was no longer any export trade, the people had given up wool and turned back to corn. But Ambrosius had always kept the two long rooms of the upper story for his own quarters, and the servants sent on ahead had made all ready for us.
On that first day we none of us hunted, but left the dogs in idleness, though Kian the chief hunter told of a twelve-point stag well worth the hunting, and remained together about the farm, lingering over the day as friends linger over a parting meal before each goes his separate way. We supped — the three of us, for young Gaheris had been dispatched to join the hunters in the steward’s quarters — in the long upper chamber, a good country meal of hard-boiled-duck eggs, dark rye bread and ewe’s-milk cheese, and the last of the withered long-biding apples that the steward’s woman brought proudly from the storeroom for our pleasure; and washed it down with thin wine made from the little pinkish grapes that grew on the south wall.
The meal over, and the winter dusk already drawing in from the ends of the room, we gathered about the brazier; gathered close, for the clouds had rolled away and the evening was turning cold under an ice-green sky; and huddled our cloaks about us, scuffling our feet into the rushes where the dogs lay sprawled. The fire was a sweet-scented one, of apple and knotted hawthorn wood laid over the glowing charcoal; the smoke of it fronded upward into the blackened bell-mouth of the smoke louver, touched to gold by the flickering of its own small flames — hawthorn burns neatly, in licking flames like fringed flower petals — and the burning wood gave back the warmth of the sun that it had gathered through a score of summers.