Sword at Sunset (42 page)

‘Much. That was what I meant to do, but when we turned into the Street of the Clothworkers and I saw the nunnery wall before me I – changed my mind.’

She moved aside from the small deep-set door. ‘So. Go then and fetch her as swiftly as may be; I think that you will find her in our little herb garden, waiting for you. And—’
The shimmer of a smile crept once more into her dry low voice. ‘I believe that she will give you a good enough account of us to save the nunnery roof from a second taste of fire.’ She
had moved to the table and picked up the little bronze bell that stood there. ‘Sister Honoria will show you the way.’

A nun, a stranger this time, with the soft anxious eyes and surging flanks of a cow ripe for the bull, answered the summons, and to her the Mother Abbess said, ‘Take my Lord Artorius into
the herber, and send someone to bid Blanid bring out her mistress’s bundles. The Lady Guenhumara is leaving us.’

She turned to me for the last time. ‘You have been hunting Saxons into the sea all summer, they tell me. Our gratitude and our prayers together with those of all Britain must be yours for
that – and I think you may need our prayers more than you do our gratitude. Do not bring Guenhumara to take her leave; Sister Ancheret our Infirmarer is sick herself, and I am very busy in
her place, with the poor sick folk who come to us morning and evening. She has my blessing already.’

I thanked her, and followed the broad black back as it surged deliberately down a stone-flagged passage, through a bare hall set with trestle tables and benches, and out into a narrow courtyard
with a well in the midst of it. A young nun was drawing water at the well, but never looked up as we passed. I suppose it would have been a sin. On the far side of the courtyard was an archway in a
high curved crumbling wall that looked as though it might have been part of the outer wall of the theatre in the old days. And the fat nun took one hand from the loose sleeves of her habit and
pointed to it, never lifting her eyes to my face. ‘If you go through there, you will find her. But pray be careful for our little cat. She will suckle her kittens always in the midst of the
path; and striped tabby as they are, it is not easy to see them if they chance to be in the shade of the cherry tree ... I will go and tell Blanid about the Lady Guenhumara’s clothes. She has
such pretty kirtles, blue and violet, and a checkered cloak; but she has only worn a gray one here ... ’

I heard the flap of her clumsy sandals recrossing the court behind me, as I went on through the doorway in the wall.

Beyond was a long irregular strip of garden, high-walled on all sides, and seemingly with no way out save the one by which I had come. A place filled with the soft dusty grays and greens and
silky mouse-browns of herbs and medicinal plants now run to seed, where the sinking turmoil of the street outside came only as the roar of surf on a distant shore. And at the far end, her face
turned to the archway, stood Guenhumara, dim-colored as the garden, save for the brightness of her hair.

She took a hurried step forward when she saw me, then checked, and stood quite still to wait my coming. I came near to treading on the tabby cat after all, for my eyes were filled with
Guenhumara, but I was aware of it just in time, where the striped shade of the cherry tree lay in the last dregs of sunlight across the path, and stepped safely over it and the guzzling kittens.
Then I was with Guenhumara, taking the hands she held out to me. I wanted to fling my arms around her and bruise her body, and her mouth against mine, but she seemed so remote in the old gray gown
she wore, remote and far away from me, like a nun herself, and I could not.

‘Guenhumara! Guenhumara, is it well with you?’

‘Well enough,’ she said; and then echoing my tone in that low vibrant voice of hers: ‘Artos! Artos, are you really here so soon?’

‘I did not mean to come until I had got rid of my war gear and the good folk of Eburacum. But I had a sudden feeling that you wanted me – it was as though you called to me,
Guenhumara.’

‘And so you came.’

‘And so I came.’ I had her by the hand and was drawing her back toward the archway. I did not know why I had the feeling that there was no time to be lost in getting her away from
the place. It was certainly nothing to do with the tumult outside; it was more like a sudden sense of danger. And yet it was hard to see what could menace her in that quiet nunnery garden.

‘I left the good folk of Eburacum and the whole war host giving tongue like the Wild Hunt before the door.
Did
you call me, Guenhumara?’

She looked up into my face with grave smoke-colored eyes under the feathered tawny brows. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Old Marcipor who chops wood for the Sisters and helps with the
heaviest part of the gardening, he brought us word this morning that the Count of Britain would ride in before dusk; and all day the city has been humming to itself, and all day I have waited. And
then I heard the shouting and the trumpets and the horses’ hooves, and I knew that you were back in Eburacum and that you must pass up this street to the fortress, and I thought, Presently,
when he has seen his mess safe into camp, and stripped off his sweaty harness and perhaps eaten, and found time to breathe, then he will come for me. Tonight, or maybe tomorrow morning he will come
for me. And then quite suddenly I knew that I could not wait. I have waited, not too impatiently, all summer, but when I heard the horses, and the people shouting “Artos!” I knew that I
could not wait any longer – it was as though I were suffocating within these walls. I believe if you had passed, I should have made them open the door, and run after you to catch your
stirrup.’ She broke off. ‘No, I should not – of course I should not. I should have waited somehow, till you came.’

We had passed under the narrow arched doorway into the courtyard again. The strange sense of danger was less pressing now, and I had begun to tell myself that I was a fool. I checked beside the
wellhead and turned to look at her. She seemed not so remote now, as though from her, too, the shadow was passing, as though the life were waking in her again; and I noticed for the first time that
she had left off her braids and knotted up the heavy masses of her hair at the back of her head after the manner of Roman women; that was partly what had made her seem strange to me. I would have
caught her into my arms and kissed her then, heedless of the eyes looking on, but she held me off with both hands on my breast, begging with a strange urgency, ‘No, Artos! Not here! Please,
please
not here!’ and the moment passed, and there were the dark figures of nuns about us, and she was turning from one to another, taking her leave of them, with old Blanid clutching
her bundle on the outskirts of the cluster. ‘God be with you, Sister Honoria, Sister Rufia – pray for me – Sister Praxedes.’ But it was not a time to be lingering over
farewells. I caught her up and bore her out through the fluttering black-robed throng, across the eating hall and down the passageway and the shallow steps beyond. A Sister scurried ahead to draw
the bolts and bars of the door. Blanid flapped along with toothless cluckings of delight in our rear. And so, much as though I were bearing off a bride by force, I carried Guenhumara out into the
crowded street.

We were greeted by a roar from those near enough to see what was happening, a high, delighted squealing from the women, a crash of laughter and shouted welcome from my own Companions. Bedwyr had
dismounted, and stood holding Arian’s bridle besides his own horse’s, while Cabal, sitting alert and quivering where I had left him, sprang up with wildly lashing tail. I tossed
Guenhumara up onto Arian’s back and taking the reins from Bedwyr, mounted behind her and settled her into the crook of my bridle arm. Bedwyr was laughing up at me, his crooked face alight and
on fire with his laughter. ‘Sa sa! Bravely done, old Hero! Here is matter for a harp song!’

‘Make it for us after supper!’ I cried, and struck my heel into the horse’s flank.

Arian broke forward, Bedwyr swung into his saddle, Pharic pressed up on my other side calling greetings to his sister, and the rest of the Company came jingling and clattering after me.
Guenhumara looked back over my shoulder at the small deep-set door in the eyeless nunnery wall, and I felt her shiver. The kind of swift convulsive shudder that is supposed to mean a gray goose
flying over one’s grave; and instinctively I tightened my arm about her. ‘What is it? Were you unhappy there? Were they not kind to you after all?’ Under the roar of voices, the
clatter of hooves and jinkety-jink of harness, we could speak together as privately as though we were alone on Eildon slopes with only the curlew to overhear. ‘Because if that is the way of
it, I’ll—’

She shook her head. ‘They were very kind to me, the Sisters, and even the Mother Abbess whom they all fear. But it was like being in a cage. I could not breathe or stretch my wings –
and no fresh wind ever blew through the bars ... ’

‘You have always hated cages, haven’t you – cages and chains.’

‘Always. I think in a way I have always been afraid of them.’ She gave a small shaken laugh. ‘When I was fourteen, the man I was to marry gave me a pair of linnets in a wicker
cage. You were supposed to hang it in a tree, and the linnet would sing to you all day long. I kept them for three days because they were his gift and I loved him, and then I could not bear it any
more, and I opened the little door and let them go.’

The corner of the street hid the House of the Holy Ladies from view, and she fetched a quick sigh that sounded like relief, and turned face forward again.

chapter twenty

I
HAVE NEVER KNOWN SUCH AN AUTUMN FOR BERRIES AS WE
had that year. Every dog-rose tangle was flame-flecked with hips, every whitethorn looked from a
little distance to be the color of dried blood, bryony and honeysuckle ramped along the wood-shores scattering their red fire-jewels among the gray seed-smoke of the clematis, and old Blanid shook
her head and mumbled darkly of a cruel winter on the way. But it has often seemed to me that the threat of an especially hard winter after a big berry crop is no more than a tale that the old wives
tell each other; and I paid little heed. We always made ready as best we could for a hard winter, at Trimontium, and most years we got it.

On the third day after we returned to our winter quarters, word was brought to me that Druim Dhu had come into camp, seeking to speak with me. By this time the Dark People of our nearest hills
had lost much of their strangeness in our eyes. Many of our lads even forgot to cross their fingers if they stepped in a Dark One’s shadow, and the Dark People on their side had lost much of
their fear of us. It was no unusual thing nowadays for Druim Dhu or one of his brothers to come and set themselves down by our cooking fires, even eat if they were hungry, borrow a hammer or a
cooking pot – they were great borrowers, but more scrupulous in their returning than many churched Christians are – and perhaps leave a gift of a freshly taken wild honeycomb or a
couple of salmon trout behind, when they disappeared as silently as they had come.

So I found Druim now, squatting beside the master armorer in his dark cavern of a workshop, and watching with attentive interest, head a little on one side as a dog sits beside a mousehole,
while he renewed some broken links in a war shirt. He got up when he saw me coming, and came to meet me with his usual palm-to-forehead salutation. ‘May the sun shine on my lord’s face
by day and the moon guide his feet in the darkness.’

I returned the greeting, and waited for whatever it was that he had come to say to me. It was never any good trying to hurry matters with Druim Dhu, or any of his kind. One waited for them to be
ready, and when they were ready, they spoke. He watched a peregrine hovering above the fort until I could have shaken him, and then said without any preamble, ‘Let my lord send the horses
south this winter.’

I looked at him keenly. That was a course that I had always striven to avoid. ‘Why?’ I demanded. ‘We have always kept them with us in winter quarters before.’

‘Not through such a winter as this one will be.’

‘You believe that it is going to be a hard one?’ If he talked to me of berries, I should send him to old Blanid, and they could tell each other their old wives’ tales until
suppertime.

‘There will be such a winter as there has not been since I was a cub scarce done with sucking my mother. A winter like a white beast that strives to tear your heart out.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Earth Mother has told the Old Woman in my house.’

There was something in the way he spoke, something in the dark wild eyes, that chilled me suddenly. This was a different thing from Blanid’s talk of berries. ‘What do you mean? How
does Earth Mother speak to the Old Woman in your house?’

He shrugged, but his gaze never left my face. ‘I do not know. I am not a woman, and not old. Earth Mother does not speak to me, though I too should look for a hard winter, taking my
fore-tidings from the changed ways of the deer and the wolf kind. I know only that when Earth Mother speaks to the Old Woman, what she tells is true.’

‘And so in my place, you would send the horses south.’

‘If I wished still to be a horse lord in the spring. There will be no grazing-out in mild spells, this year; and the Hairy Ones, the Wolf-People, will hunt to the very gates of the
fortress.’

‘So. I will think upon it. Go now and get something to eat. My thanks for bringing me the warning of Earth Mother.’

I did think upon it, deeply, all the rest of that day; and when the evening meal was over, I called Cei and Bedwyr and Pharic and the rest of my chiefs and captains to my own quarters. We had a
little fire of peat and birch bark and wild cherry logs in a battered brazier, for already the evenings were turning cold, and when all of us were gathered about it, I told them. ‘Brothers, I
have been thinking; and out of my thinking, I am decided this year to make a change in our usual custom, and send the horses south for the winter.’