In Winter's Shadow (43 page)

“Yes,” I said, after a moment. “Lord Sandde, do you have any horses that might be useful for drawing carts? There must be many on the battlefield who will die before the morning, and if my husband is there…”

“The horses are foundered,” Cuall told me. “Not one in fifty could gallop to save its life. But what we have, we will send off.”

“Don’t despair, noble lady,” said Sandde. “He may well be unharmed.”

“He may be,” I agreed stupidly.

After a long silence, Cuall said, “We do not have enough space for all the men, my lady. Which of the wounded can be moved?”

I bit my lip, trying to think, then realized from the expression of helplessness and confusion on Sandde’s face that I must be weeping. I wiped my face, not caring if my hands smeared more blood onto it. “I will show you who to move,” I said. “Can you give orders about the horses?”

***

The labor, and the counting of names, went on all the night. When the sun rose pink and lovely over the snow-covered land next morning, the dead lay in tall stacks by the wall. By then some of the horses were rested enough to be harnessed again to the bloodstained carts and sent back down the road toward Camlann to pick up what remained.

Our scouts reported that Maelgwn had camped a few miles to the northward, and was burying some of his own dead, who were many. We sent him a messenger requesting an official truce for the burial of the dead, and he at once agreed to this. We also sent a messenger to Camlann, telling the men whom Medraut had left there to guard the fortress that we would permit them to follow Maelgwn home to Gwynedd if they would surrender Camlann without a struggle; they asked to be allowed to send to Maelgwn, which we permitted.

The carts began returning heavy laden with the dead, leading baffled war horses behind them like so many oxen. The horses, like the bodies of their masters, had already been mysteriously stripped of rich harness and ornament, either by pillagers during the night or by the salvage parties themselves. Men and beasts seemed reduced to something unimportant, ordinary, broken, and dishonored. I had the corpses laid out in long lines by the wall for people to claim, and always I looked for one particular body, but never saw it.

“Perhaps he took shelter at some holding for the night,” said Sandde. I nodded wearily and made inventories.

Names. Some of them were Medraut’s followers, the traitors from the Family, men I had known, whose loyalty we had struggled to win: Iddawg and Constans and Cadarn and the rest. There were warriors from the North, who once had followed Urien of Rheged or Ergyriad of Ebrauc, and who now would never return to their masters and the other war. There were Constantius’s men, who died leaving a kingdom kingless and in ruins. And there were members of the Family, many of them, too many, for they had borne the brunt of the battle. Cilydd and Cynddylig; Gwrhyr and Gwythyr ap Greidawl; Gereint ab Erbin, the skilled horseman with the patient smile. Goronwy, who had been called “the Strong,” had died from his wound in the night, unobserved. And Cei, stubborn, quarrelsome, loyal, and courageous, was found lying at the far end of the field, where he had stood firm in resistance when Maelgwn’s forces were about to break through. He was enormous in death, his features locked into a snarling mask, and his red hair was thickly caked with blood. Of that Family which six years before had numbered seven hundred of the finest warriors in the West, scarcely fifty were left alive.

There were many peasants dead as well, but their numbers were hard to determine. Many must have returned directly to their clan holdings after the battle, and many more left Ynys Witrin without waiting to be counted, as soon as they had collected their dead. Thus we were not certain who was dead and who was merely missing. Only one name among them, one still form, remained cut into my heart like the shape carved into a seal: Rhys ap Sion, found dead among the others at the road’s turning, where he had fallen in the first onslaught, to be heaped anonymously with the other dead in the night following the battle, and only recognized the next morning by his wife. Dead, dead, dead: the whole of Ynys Witrin stank of death, and everything I touched, everything I saw, heard, felt, the air I breathed and the food I ate, seemed heavy with it.

In the afternoon Maelgwn Gwynedd sent us a messenger who bore an offer to extend the truce until the spring, and to return to his own kingdom for the time being. We agreed to this. The enemy garrison at Camlann also sent in a message, in which they agreed to our terms and promised to be gone from the fortress the following day, going north with Maelgwn.

“Good,” said Sandde, relieved. “There is more space at Camlann. If we had this kind of crowding much longer we would have to fear the fever.”

And still there was no sign of Arthur.

The next day Maelgwn started north again, and Sandde sent men to all the cities of Dumnonia, proclaiming that we had a victory, peace was restored, and the markets were open again. I had wished in my heart to proclaim a reward to anyone with news of Arthur, or of his body, but I knew that it was unwise to tell the whole countryside that we also did not know if he were living or dead. There might be more risings, or Maelgwn might break his word and come back, and so much of our army was gone that we could risk no further struggle.

Sandde sent the men off to Camlann, where there was both space and supplies enough for them. On the first day he sent off all the uninjured men, then all the less severely wounded. I offered to stay at Ynys Witrin with the more severely injured until they could be moved without risk and, after some hesitation, Sandde agreed, and left me in charge of Ynys Witrin while he went to Camlann.

I waited. The peasant army did not trouble itself with moving to the imperial fortress, but went home in the days after the truce—those that had not gone before it. Sion ap Rhys and his kinsmen left five days after the battle. They would have gone sooner, but they had to send one of their number back to the holding to fetch the ox cart, for another of their number was wounded and could neither walk nor ride. They also wished to bury Rhys in the clan’s lands. I guiltily gave them a few gifts, small return for their kindness to me, and perhaps shamefully like a payment for their kinsman’s life, which was beyond price—yet the things might be useful. And I went down to the gates with them that morning to see them off.

Eivlin went with the others, leaving only one serving girl at my house. She had not said much to me or anyone else since her husband’s death, but went about red-eyed, hard-faced, with the kind of callousness that springs from great grief.

“I am sorry,” I said to her, and to all of them.

Sion ap Rhys shrugged, staring at the long bundle in the back of the cart that had been his eldest son. “We all knew we might die if we went to this war, my lady. We thought it worth the risk.” He picked up the ox goad. “And Rhys believed in your Empire more than any of us, and set much of his life on it. Perhaps it is for the best that he does not see it now. We must all die some time.”

“It is not for the best!” Eivlin cried out sharply, “indeed, how can you say such things, a man to leave his three children fatherless, and they thinking him a finer man than the emperor of Britain, and waiting yet for him to come home and bring them presents? Best? That such a man as my husband should…och,
ochone
!”

Sion set down the goad and covered his face a moment, then lowered his hands, ran one through his hair with a gesture that had been his son’s also. “The children still have their clan, daughter. And they have a mother. And she has them.”

“Indeed,” said Eivlin, more quietly, but looking at the bundle in the back of the cart. She looked up at me again, and saw something on my face I—I do not know what—that made her jump off the cart suddenly and put her arms around me. Something in my heart gave way and I embraced her, biting my tongue so as not to cry out. For a moment I forgot that I was Empress and ruler of the fortress, and we were only two women who had lost the men they loved. Then Eivlin drew away, “I must look to my children, my lady,” she whispered, “or I might stay, for you have not deceived me into thinking you do not feel it and need nothing, whatever the others may believe. God bless you, my lady.”

“And you, my cousin, and your children.”

Eivlin let go of me, nodded, bit her lip, climbed back into the cart, and sat beside her father-in-law. Sion goaded the sullen oxen, and the cart lurched slowly out and down the hill, vanishing into the quiet Farmland of Dumnonia. I never saw them again.

And still I waited.

About a week and a half later, Sandde sent me a messenger from Camlann, bringing more supplies and some trivial news. The news did not surprise me, but the messenger did, for he was Taliesin, who had been Arthur’s chief bard and a sometime cavalry fighter, and of whom I had neither seen nor heard anything during the whole of this last war. When he arrived and presented me with a list of the supplies he brought, I asked him up to my house and, when he was there, poured him some mead.

“I am glad to see you well,” I told him as he sipped the mead. “I had assumed that you were dead.”

He made a face and shook his head. “No. I was merely away from Camlann.”

He offered no further explanation; he never did. He was a mysterious man whom no one knew much about, and he rather enjoyed making himself yet more mysterious. Gwalchmai at least had been firmly convinced that Taliesin was from the Otherworld, and only stayed upon the Earth for some unknown purpose of his own. But many people had thought much the same about Gwalchmai himself.

“Oh?” I asked, impatient with mysteries. “Where?”

Taliesin smiled, a quick acceptance of my impatience, amusement that became sad. “Arthur sent me north to Urien, king of Rheged, when he left for Gaul, first as a messenger, and afterward to reconcile Urien to the absence of half his warriors. The war between Rheged and Ebrauc broke out while I was there, so I stayed in the North until I heard that Arthur was back. I arrived at Camlann two days ago.”

“So you were in the North—when? Two weeks ago? What is happening there?”

He shrugged. “Rheged raids Ebrauc, and Ebrauc raids Rheged and shouts forth bold defiance at the idea of being subject to an emperor. There were no pitched battles and it is unlikely that there will be any, and neither side can take any clear advantage. If Arthur is indeed dead, and there is no emperor for Ebrauc to rebel against, there may be a truce declared again—for a time.”

“If Arthur is dead,” I said. It was the first time anyone had spoken those words to me. “What would you do then?”

He looked down at the desk and traced a pattern idly on its polished surface. “What I have always done, my lady: make songs. I can play in the court of any king in Britain, even that of Maelgwn Gwynedd, and be welcome.”

“Songs about the fall of the Empire?” I asked, before I could stop myself.

He looked up. He had gray eyes, like Arthur or Medraut, but of a lighter shade. In the dim house they looked almost silver. “Songs about the fall of the Empire, yes, and songs about the emperor. There will be no more emperors now, not in the West. No one will claim the title, because everyone now is too weak for it, and none has a better claim than another. There will be many eager for songs about the Emperor Arthur and the Family.” He looked down again and hummed a bar of music softly; one of his new tunes, no doubt, for I did not recognize it as an old one. I felt a slow tide of anger and bitterness rising within me. “The glory will not fade, my lady, because it will have no successors. And my songs will be remembered. The times that come will remember us. Something of you, and something of what we fought for, will survive.”

“Do you think,” I demanded, “that we fought for
songs
?” He looked up again, mildly surprised, calm and unmoved, and the anger, the blind wild loss suddenly took possession of me. I jumped up, swept my hand over the desk, and the jug of mead crashed to the floor and broke. The serving girl came rushing in from the next room, but I waved her back. “Do you think songs feed the hungry, or administer justice, or keep peace between kingdoms, or restore the ruins of the Empire of the Romans? Go and sing your songs to the Saxons; I am sure they will pay great attention to your melodies sung in an unknown tongue. Songs! They are no remedy. Glory is not a consolation. It’s lost, don’t you understand? It is all lost. The Light has gone, and the Darkness covers Britain as closely as the air, and there is nothing left of what we once dreamed and suffered for.

“And if you sing your songs, and if they are the greatest of songs, and able to move men to believe in an ideal, what sort of ideal will it become in a few years? An emperor commits incest with his sister, and begets his own ruin in the person of a treacherous, malicious son; and an Empress divides the realm at the critical time by playing whore with the emperor’s best friend! What a beautiful story! What a theme for songs! Not only is it all lost, it was we who lost it, we who by our own stupidity and weakness allowed ourselves to be divided, and break like a pot flawed in the firing, that spills everything put into it. It is gone like smoke into the air, like mist before the wind. There is nothing left of the Empire, and nothing remaining from which we could build again, and nothing to show for our lives’ effort but guilt, shame, and a few lying songs!”

My voice had grown shriller and shriller as I spoke, and at last I screamed at Taliesin, who sat watching me silently. I had begun shaking, and tried to cover my face. The serving maid rushed out of the doorway again and caught my arm. “My lady, my lady, sit down,” she said, and, to Taliesin, “she is overtired, poor lady, she works so hard. Here, noble lady, I will fetch some water and some more mead. Don’t you fear, your husband will come back.”