Sword at Sunset (51 page)

‘Then you must be telling him to unsaddle again. I’ll not be needing Signus until the morning.’

I suppose he thought that I was stunned by what had happened, for he said, ‘Artos, don’t you understand? The message has been a day and a night on its way to you,
already—’

‘And if I do not leave now, I may not see the bairn alive. Yes, I understand.’

‘Then why—’

‘If I go now, I leave my men to face tomorrow’s Saxons without their leader.’

‘Don’t be a fool, Artos. Have Cei and I never led troops against the Saxons, yet?’

‘Never troops that the Bear had deserted on the eve of battle, to ride off about his own affairs ... With three squadrons away, the chances hang unevenly balanced between us and this
particular pack of the Sea Wolves. Listen, Bedwyr, I know you and love you, every man, and I know that I can depend on your loyalty to the last ditch; I know there is not one man among the Company
will blame me, if I ride away now. But there are the others – I know also what a chancy thing is the mood of a war host. I do not think that I can be well spared until tomorrow’s
fighting is over.’

‘How if you were killed or laid out in the first charge? We should have to spare you then.’

‘That would be another thing. I believe that you would all fight like fiends out of Tartarus to avenge me.’ I patted his shoulder clumsily. ‘Go and tell Riada I shall not be
wanting Signus until mounting time at first light tomorrow.’

‘And Guenhumara?’

‘Guenhumara knows that I will come when I can. She will remember that I was Comes Britanniorum before ever I took her from her father’s hearth; and the old bargain between us.’
But in that, I suppose I was expecting Guenhumara to think like a man.

Of the next day’s fighting I remember nothing at all. They told me afterward that at one time we were as near to defeat as ever we had been without being actually driven from the field.
And I heard men talking among themselves outside the bothy as I was stripping off my harness while Riada brought around my spare horse, and one said to the other, ‘Trust the Bear to know the
perfect moment to fling in his charge,’ and spat appreciatively. So I suppose that I played my part none so ill. A wonderful thing is habit.

I left the clearing up of the day’s end to Cei and Bedwyr, the wounded to Gwalchmai as usual; and when I had snatched a bite of bannock and a hurried draught of beer, and went out to the
horse which Riada had brought around, I was surprised to find that the shadows had scarcely begun to lengthen. The smoke of a great burning rose from the Saxon camp, and all across the valley the
women were moving among the dead and wounded; and already the ravens were gathering overhead.

I mounted, and rode out of the camp that was silent and full of faces, and set my horse’s head toward the low ridge of hills that carried the old Icenian Way. Riada had provided for me the
swiftest and most enduring of my remounts, since Signus, having been in battle, was in no state for a long hard ride that day; but I would have give much to have had him between my knees now, for I
never knew his like for speed and endurance. I came near to breaking the willing heart of my mount, for I rode as though the Wild Hunt were on my heels. I rode the sun out of the sky and the moon
clear of the hills, drumming mile after long mile down the old ridgeway without let or pause or mercy. Toward midnight I came to the hill fort at Durocobrivae, the first outpost of
Ambrosius’s stronghold, and there changed my foundered horse for a fresh one, and rode on again.

Dawn was not far off when, my horse rocking in his stride, I came up the last straight stretch to the north gate of Venta, and the guards opened the great valves, the ironshod newels shrieking
in their stone sockets, and passed me through. I was clattering up the still-sleeping streets. The guards at the palace gates passed me through in turn, and I dropped from the saddle in the outer
courtyard, staggering as the solid pavement heaved up to meet me like the deck of a galley in a swell. I tossed the reins to someone who came with a stable lantern as though he had been waiting for
me, and headed at a drunken stumbling run for the inner court and the Queen’s Court beyond.

The moonlight broke in a silver wave against the far side of the courtyard, whitening the leaves of the rose in its great jar and casting its tracery of shadow in perfect echo on the wall behind
it. The door of the atrium stood open and the lantern light spilled its yellow pool across the colonnade, together with the sound of a woman keening. Guenhumara came into the doorway, and stood
outlined against the light waiting for me; but it was not she who was keening.

I had checked my headlong pace, and came across the courtyard at a walk – it seemed very wide, a vast space like an arena – and up the step of the colonnade into the lantern light. I
remember trying not to hear the keening, trying not to hear its meaning in my heart and loins and belly.

‘The bairn?’ I croaked; and put out a hand to steady myself against the doorpost, for I was almost as near to foundering as the horse that I had ridden half to death that night.
‘How is it with the bairn?’

Guenhumara never moved. She said, ‘The bairn died an hour ago.’

chapter twenty-four

G
UENHUMARA WAS STILL STANDING IN THE DOORWAY.
I
SAID
something, or tried to, I do not know what, and she replied in a hoarse
flat tone that had nothing of her voice’s usual beauty. ‘Why did you not come before?’

‘I came as soon as I could, Guenhumara.’

‘I suppose you had some fighting to finish first.’ Still the same hoarse level tone.

‘Yes,’ I said. And then as she never moved from the doorway, ‘Let me in, Guenhumara.’

She moved back quickly, before I could touch her with the hands I held out, and I lurched through into the atrium. The room seemed strange, the lantern set low so that the shadows leapt gigantic
up the walls; making the blue and russet saint in the tapestry stir as though on the edge of life, and I was vaguely aware of the black huddle that was Blanid in the corner, rocking to and fro and
keening as the Northern women keen for their dead, and another woman on the edge of the lantern light, who I suppose must have been Teleri.

‘Where is she?’ I said.

‘In her usual sleeping place.’

I turned to the open doorway of the sleeping chamber, and went in, all but stumbling over Margarita, the boarhound bitch, who lay across the threshold. There was a quietness in the room that
seemed to shut out the keening from the atrium, as though it had passed beyond such things. There was a scent of burning herbs, and the rushlight on its pricket glimmered like a small high star,
its yellow light quenched and washed away by the silver tide of moonlight that flooded in through the window and lay across the bed. Small Hylin lay as she had always done, in her soft nest of
beaver skin at the head of the bed, but straight and stiffly neat, not curled like a kitten. Why could they not have left her thumb in her mouth, I wondered dazedly, and buried her as one buries a
favorite hound, in the familiar position of his lifetime sleeping? Cabal, who had followed me in, thrust forward his muzzle inquiringly, then looked up into my face and whimpered, crouching away
into the shadows. Margarita had crawled to my feet, whimpering also, and pawing at the bed rugs, frightened by what she could not understand. Guenhumara stood at the foot of the bed and never
moved.

The stillness seeped with an icy chill into my heart, numbing it, and I could have turned away I think without much show of my grief ... Then a nightingale began to sing somewhere in the tangled
wilderness of the old palace gardens, and the white throbbing ecstasy of the notes pierced through the merciful numbness with a sharp sword of beauty that was more than I could bear. And I knelt
down by the bed and drove my face into the soft darkness of the fur beside the little still face that no longer looked like Hylin’s, and cried.

The moonlight was graying into the cobweb darkness of day-spring when I stumbled up from my knees, and the song of robin and willow wren was waking in the wild garden. Guenhumara still stood at
the bed foot, unmoving as the Nine Sisters on the moors above her father’s Dun and as remote. I would have put my arms around her, but she stepped back, saying quickly, ‘Na, don’t
touch me, not yet.’

And I let my arms fall to my sides. ‘I could not come before, Guenhumara.’

‘Oh, I know,’ she said drearily. ‘All that I accepted for part of the bargain on the day that you took me from my father’s hearth ... It was of no great matter that you
were not here, it was not you she cried for – she cried for Bedwyr and his harp, before she fell asleep.’

The blow was struck quite deliberately, and she was not a woman given to striking with such weapons. Suddenly I had a panic sense of Guenhumara’s going away from me, and I caught hold of
her whether she would or no. ‘Guenhumara, what is it? For God’s sake tell me what you are holding against me!’

For a moment, standing there beside the Small One’s body, she put out all her strength to fling me off; then the resistance went out of her, and she said in a low wail, ‘Why did you
leave us those three days and nights in the Fairy Howe?’

‘Because you were both too weak to be carried off within an hour of bearing and being born. If I had carried you off then, I might so easily have lost you both.’

‘If you had, then at least I should have died very happy, and the bairn would have escaped all that she has suffered these past months,’ she said. ‘As it is, I think that you
have lost us both, now,’ and the chill of her words struck me through as the nightingale’s song had done.

‘Guenhumara, cannot you understand? I left you safe among friends for three days, because I was afraid for you if I did otherwise. In God’s name tell me, is that so great a
sin?’

‘Safe among friends,’ she flashed. ‘Because you were afraid? What do you know of being afraid? Oh yes, you know the tightening of the belly that comes before battle. You have
never known in all your big trampling sword-smiting life, what it is to be afraid as I was afraid, those three long days and nights! I begged you – I knew how it would be, and I begged you to
take us away, but you would not listen, you would not even hear – and now the bairn is dead.’

‘Because she spent her first three days of life in a house of the Dark People? Heart-of-my-heart, how can you believe such a thing?’

‘Everyone knows what the Dark People do to the children of men – it was in the very air of that place. And on the last night, the third night, I dreamed dark dreams and woke with a
start, and they had taken the babe from my arms! That terrible old woman was sitting by the fire, holding her up and crooning over her – a little dark song that made my heart beat cold. And
there was a man there, with a badger’s pelt over his head and shoulders and his face painted in badger stripes, and he was making signs on her forehead with his thumb as a potter marks clay;
and Itha and all the other women were there, and they threw herbs on the fire so that it leapt up with a strange bitter smell and curled all about the bairn. I cried out, and Itha brought her and
gave her back to me and said that I had dreamed ill dreams and must sleep again, and despite all that I could do, I slept as she bade me.’

‘Anwylin, Anwylin, there was no waking; it was all the same ill dream.’

‘The smell of the bitter smoke was still about her in the morning.’

‘Then it was some ceremony of purifying. All faiths have their hidden ceremonies.’

‘They were drawing her life out,’ Guenhumara said. ‘I know. They were drawing her life out, to give it to their own sick child – it began to mend next day – and
they left her not enough for three years.’

The thing was hopeless. I would have trusted the household of Druim Dhu with my own soul or hers, but I knew that nothing I could do or say would change her own belief in the matter.
Nevertheless, I tried once more, desperately. ‘Guenhumara, there was good faith between me and the people of Druim Dhu, and whatever of evil the Dark People may work from time to time, they
do not break faith unless one first breaks faith with them. If I had let slip Cei to forage among their corn pits that winter—’

But she was not even listening. She was not conscious of my hands on her, and I dropped them to my sides with a feeling of leaden hopelessness. When she spoke again, it was more gently, but the
gentleness brought her no nearer to me than she had been before. ‘I know that you loved her too, and I know that you could not understand what you were doing. But I shall remember always that
it was because of you that the bairn died ... No, don’t touch me; I don’t want to touch you or be touched by you – not for a long while, maybe never any more.’

I was defeated, and I knew it with a helpless despair.

I took one last look at the Small One’s body, and went past Guenhumara, Cabal faithful at my heels. It was her right to be left alone with the child. I went out through the dim-lit atrium
and across the courtyard to the storeroom, where a cot was always kept furnished with rugs and a pillow in case I sent back a messenger or came myself too late at night to rouse the household, and
flung myself down there. And the strange thing is that I slept until close on noon.

We buried Hylin the next night, and so I was able to help carry the little bier, before I rode back to join the Brotherhood next day. Aquila, who was at home nursing a breast wound, came with
me; and Ambrosius and a few others. I had not many friends in Venta at that time of year. We carried her from the house after dark, with torches, in the Roman manner. The men of the Roman heritage
who were old when I was a boy used to say that a woman’s whole life was ‘lived between the torches,’ for she left her home at night and by torchlight only twice, the first time in
her bridal litter and the second on her bier. But for small Hylin there was only once, and she would never know a bridal litter.

It was a windy night, and the torches streamed raggedly in the wind that made a soft turmoil in the leaves of the poplar trees; and the shadows leapt and ran all about the small grave.