In Winter's Shadow (2 page)

Sometimes I would feel ashamed of myself for avoiding the work, and yet more ashamed for manipulating my father in such a way, and I would resolve to be better in future, and work very hard at the things I most disliked. But always wonder or astonishment at the past would stir in me again, and I would go back to the books looking for an answer to one question, and stay to answer twenty while the day’s concerns sank into the centuries.

Our clan was always fairly busy. Most of our land was only good for sheep, but we received wheat from dependent clans further south, and raised cattle and horses in the valley pastures. The lands my cousin Menw now coveted were good cattle lands. But we did not need them to make us wealthy. Our family had always been one of the most important in the north of Ebrauc. To the south and to the west, and even north across the border into Rheged, we were respected, honored, feared. About the east we did not speak when I was young, for there lay the Saxon kingdom of Deira, from which, at any time, bands of raiders might march to burn down holdings and drive off cattle. An eastern dependency of ours suffered such a fate, one bad winter, and there was very little we could do to aid the survivors. Sometimes whispered accounts spread that such-and-such a holding had been taken, and with what deaths, rapes and brutalities the victims had suffered. Sometimes wretches would turn up begging at our holding, half-starved and desperate: they had lost lands and livelihood to the Saxons. It grew worse as I grew older. While Uther Pendragon remained emperor there was some degree of order, but when he died the kings of Britain fought over who was to succeed him, and were too busy fighting to pay much heed to keeping out the Saxons.

Then, in the autumn of my twenty-first year, the new emperor, Arthur, rode with his men from the east, leaving a Saxon army shattered behind him. He asked my father for hospitality and for a place to leave his wounded.

I was awed by it. I had been listening to reports of him for as long as I could remember. At first he had been the leader of the imperial warband under the old emperor, then, when the civil war broke out, he had been the one man who continued to fight the Saxons. But after the war had dragged on for several years, and after a massive Saxon invasion in the South, Arthur claimed the imperial purple for himself, and defeated the other contenders to win the title of emperor. He had no legal right to it. He was the emperor Uther’s son, true, but a bastard son by an unknown peasant mother, and a clanless man, an orphan raised out of charity at a monastery. At first all Britain was outraged by his usurpation. But he was an incomparable warleader. He not only defended the borders of Britain against Saxon invasions, but actually invaded the Saxons, and compelled their kings to become his tributaries and subjects of the Empire. Many of the British kings continued to hate him because of his birth, and the Church called him anti-Christ and devil because he taxed it to support his war against the Saxons, but my father said, “I don’t mind if he is a devil so long as he rules like an angel of God,” and began to support him. So, when Arthur turned up at our holding one gray morning with the whole of his warband after him, my father spared nothing and no one to make them welcome.

I was shaken awake by one of my aunts, given a babbled account of what was happening, and told to come and help. I went out into the dawn and found the yard full of armed men on tall horses, looming out of the mist. Their spears looked like a forest in winter. I saw my father in the center of the yard and hurried over to him. He was talking to a tall, fair-haired man who glanced up as I came over; his eyes were the color of the mist. “Ach, there you are,” my father said. He sounded calm, but I could tell that he was very excited. “This is my daughter Gwynhwyfar, Your Excellency. She is a sensible girl. You can give her charge of the wounded.” And, to me, in an undertone, “This is the emperor, my girl. He has just defeated Fflamddwyn. Do you think we could put the wounded in the cow-byre? There’s no room for them all in the house.”

I had expected Arthur to be middle-aged. I had pictured him as a gray, gaunt old warrior, wearing the imperial purple as clumsily as the crow in the fable wore its stolen peacock feathers. But he was barely thirty, with hair and beard the color of wheat before the harvest, and his eyes seemed to have the sun behind them. When I stammered out that all we had for the wounded was a cow-byre, he smiled, said, “It will do,” summoned various men out of the mist like a conjurer calling them from the air, and told me to tell them what to do. Of course, on the whole, they told me what to do, and Arthur strode in when it was half done and most of the wounded were cared for, to see them settled. He had already settled the rest.

I had seen wounded men before, the times being what they were, but not so many, fresh from a battle. I was confused, horrified, and could scarcely manage to tell Arthur’s surgeons where the supplies were, or give reasonable orders to the servants. The world beyond our holding, the remnant of the Empire of my visions, had burst in upon us like a storm.

Arthur did not stay long, as he was eager to continue his campaign against the Saxons before the winter closed the roads. But he left his wounded with us, and asked if he might use our holding as one of his bases, promising (with a glint of dry humor) to find his own supplies and not borrow from us. That was essential. However welcome he was, his warband, the Pendragon’s “Family,” numbered nearly seven hundred trained warriors, as well as doctors, grooms, armorers, and a few servants, with more than twice their number of horses. It required a kingdom or two to support them all, and most of the kingdoms of Britain were notoriously reluctant to contribute to that support, with the result that, while the Family relied principally on plunder from the Saxons, it also tended to take supplies wherever it could find them. Most men in my father’s position would have done their utmost to persuade the emperor to take his Family elsewhere—one cannot refuse an emperor outright—but my father hesitated only for a moment before agreeing to provide a base. It was plain that Arthur was surprised by this, and more than a little pleased.

The emperor was in and out of the holding at intervals over the next year, continuing his campaign against the northern Saxon kingdoms. He could not hurry the campaign because his force was far smaller than that which the Saxon kings could raise, so he did not dare meet them in pitched battles. Instead he tried to wear them out by raiding, and would turn up suddenly when they thought he was a hundred miles away and had sent most of their army home. When he judged that the time was ripe he would ask his British subject kings to raise their armies and risk a pitched battle against the Saxons, but for a long time they would be too strong for that. He had used these tactics against the southern Saxons with some success, but he told us that they were not defeated, as we had thought, but merely stalled. “It will take another three or five years to settle them properly,” he said.

He had time to talk to us on the later visits. He talked mainly about the Empire. Defeating the Saxons was, to Arthur, only the first step toward the goal of preserving the Empire. His monastic education had forced him to read books, and he knew that the Empire had once meant more than just a man in a purple cloak leading a force to crush the Saxons if they invaded too often. He had thought about the value of peace and of impartial justice, and could imagine what it might be like to live in a world that was not constantly at war with itself. He and my father were soon talking easily, eagerly. When Arthur spoke of the Empire his eyes shone, and when he thought out some new idea he would be unable to sit still, but would leap up and stride about the room, his purple cloak flapping, and stop suddenly when he understood what he wanted to say. I used to watch him and think of the man in the mosaic I had never seen, driving the chariot of fire. A chariot like Arthur’s Empire, whirling precariously through the dark ruins of the West. I only prayed that it would not break among the winds.

If I had been a man I would probably have begged Arthur to allow me to join his warband. As it was, all I could do was try to see that our holding was a smoothly managed, effective base for him, and listen while he and my father talked—occasionally forgetting the modesty required of an unmarried woman, and joining in. Once, on his third visit, Arthur and I found ourselves speaking alone together while my father watched us, and we stopped, embarrassed, and, on my part, suddenly afraid. We watched each other out of a great silence. Afterward I saddled my mare and rode out to the Wall, recklessly alone in the gray afternoon. I walked the horse along the ruined fortification, trying to be reasonable. Why should the lord Arthur, Augustus, emperor of Britain, take any notice of the daughter of an obscure northern nobleman? I would be sensible, I resolved, and eventually the constriction that had locked about my heart when he looked at me would go away.

But when I returned to the holding and turned my mare out to pasture—there was no room for her in the stables, which were full of Arthur’s men—I met Arthur again. He saw me carrying my saddle back, and hurried over to me and took it from me. Then, arranging it over his arm he frowned, looked at me and said, “You must have ridden some distance, Lady Gwynhwyfar: the saddle cloths are damp. That is no safe thing for a woman to do, in times such as these, and so near the border. You especially should not do it.”

“Why me especially, your excellency?” I asked, before I thought.

For a moment he stared at the saddle, then looked up suddenly and directly at my face. Without answering he turned away and took the saddle into the stables, returning it to its place. I stood outside, realizing that I had had no need to reason with myself, and feeling even more afraid.

***

We were married after the harvest, the year after Arthur’s first visit. My father could not but be glad at the marriage. He had put my worth very high, which was why I was unmarried until I was twenty-two, an age when most women have two or three children. But now I was the wife of an emperor, and in a strange way it confirmed my father’s love for me, and proved his devotion to the old Empire as well. He was proud and happy. But his grief went deeper than the gladness, for I left him alone. I went south to Camlann with an escort of wounded and cripples whom Arthur was sending home from the war, to hold Arthur’s fortress for him and to find supplies while Arthur completed his campaign in the North.

Menw had spoken with bitter envy of the “riches and honors” I had received. But, God knows, honors were few those first years, and as for riches, I was hard put to it to find enough to keep the fortress and the army alive. Most of the kings of Britain still hated us as usurpers, and refused to pay the tribute, and our allies we had to conciliate with gifts. Arthur took plunder from the Saxons—cattle and grain, sheep and woolen clothing, arms, armor and cooking pots—which were very useful. Occasionally he sent me some uninjured men whom I could send to various kings to demand the tribute—but it was desperately hard! And I was at first an intruder in his fortress, a northerner among southerners, a woman of twenty-two suddenly put in authority over men who had served at Camlann since the Emperor Uther’s time. Moreover, there had been a bad harvest that first year, and food was scarce. I remembered one of Arthur’s grim letters to me, that first winter:

“The alliance with Urien wears badly. He begins to complain that he cannot support his own warband these days. I will need him to raise his army for me in a few months: make him a gift of six hundred head of cattle and something golden—I have given all my own plunder to Ergyriad. We have nothing to eat and are living off the land. The horses are sick. Ten men have the fever; I pray it does not spread. Beg Urien to send something, especially grain, to supply us at Yrechwydd, for I have told the men there will be food there. We will be there in three weeks.”

And I, who had been making the servants at Camlann live on boiled cabbage, wrote madly to every king between Camlann and Caledon to produce those wretched cattle, and wrested a gold crucifix from a monastery. It worked. Arthur got the supplies, and his campaign was able to continue to its eventual success. But the cost of it, the cost! Kings and the Church offended, less tribute received the next year, and, at Camlann, a sullen anger poisoning everything. You cannot blame a man for being angry when he has lived on cabbage for a month, only to see six hundred head of fat cattle sent north, and not even to his own king, but to a wealthy ally. After one appalling day, when I really feared that half the servants would run off and rob the local farmers, I had to lock myself into the empty house and weep until I was sick. I was alone, distant from my family and from my new husband, and the people in Camlann appeared to hate me. I do not know how I survived that first winter, and the winter that followed was worse. That was the year I lost my baby, the only child I ever carried. Perhaps I had been working too hard, or perhaps my body had always been at fault, but I lost the child, a boy, in the sixth month, with a great deal of pain and blood, so that I was very sick for a month afterward.

The war in the north ended; Arthur came back and campaigned in the south, all the second year of our marriage. That campaign took another four years, and ended at last in victory. We worked together on the peace, thinking that now all our hopes would be realized, believing that now all would be well. But the hope that had been dearest to me receded slowly, and when I was thirty I had at last to admit that something was wrong, that I would never conceive, that I was barren and would die so. It was just over a year later that Menw flung my childlessness in my face and I gave him the blow he regarded as a dishonor and would never forget.

Riches and honors. In these years of peace, there might be some things that Menw would recognize under that name. Most of those kings who had hated us were reconciled to us now, and even the Church was growing less vehement. The Saxons showed some signs that they began to feel part of the Empire, no longer sullen and conquered enemies. The tribute came in regularly, and we were able to set the warband to sweeping bandits from the roads of Britain and to protecting trade and good order. But even now there was little ease or comfort in wearing the purple. It was like trying to walk the edge of a sword. And there were new problems now, splintered alliances and, worse, internal quarrels, so that I sometimes wished we were back in the years of the war, when at least one had open enemies and a plain solution to the problems.