Sword at Sunset (6 page)

‘I do not think I want to know it.’ I dragged the words out.

‘But you must; it is too late now ... I am called Ygerna,’ and she began to sing, very softly, almost under her breath. It might have been a spell – maybe it was, in its way
– but it only sounded like a singing rhyme that I had known all my life; a small caressing song that the women sing to their children, playing with their toes at sleeping time. Her voice was
sweet and soft as wild honey; a dark voice:

The song and the voice were calling to me, calling to the part of me that had its roots in my mother’s world, offering the perfect and complete homecoming that I had failed to find. The
Dark Side, I had called it, the women’s side, the side nearest to the heart. It was calling to me now, arms wide and welcoming, through the woman lying across my knee, finally claiming me, so
that the things I had cared about before the mist came down were forgotten; so that I rose when she did and stumbled after her to the piled sheepskins against the wall.

When I awoke, I was lying still fully clothed on the bed place, and the leather apron had been freed from its pegs and drawn back from the doorway; and in the gray light of dawn that watered the
shadows, I saw the woman sitting beside me, once again with her stillness upon her, as though she had been waiting maybe a lifetime or so for me to waken.

I smiled at her, not desiring her any more, but satisfied, and remembering the fierce joy of her body answering mine in the darkness. She looked back at me with no answering smile, her eyes no
longer blue but merely dark in the leaden light, the discolored lids more deeply stained than ever. I came to my elbow, aware, without full looking, of Cabal lying still asleep beside the hearth,
the fire burned out to frilled white ash, and the cup with its silver rim lying where it had fallen among the fern. And in the woman, too, it seemed that the fires were burned out and cold, deadly
and dreadfully cold. A chill fell on me as I looked at her, and the thought came back to me of waking on a bare mountainside ...

‘I have waited a long time for you to wake,’ she said without moving.

I glanced at the light that was still colorless as moonstone beyond the doorway. ‘It is still early.’

‘Maybe I did not sleep as sound as you.’ And then, ‘If I bear you a son, what would you have me call him?’

I stared at her, and she smiled now, a small bitter twisting of the lips. ‘Did you not think of that? You who were chance-begotten under a hawthorn bush?’

‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘No, I did not think. Tell me what you would have me do. Anything that I can give you—’

‘I do not ask for payment; none save that I may show you this.’ She had been holding something hidden between her two hands; and now she opened them and held out what they contained.
And I saw that it was a massive arm ring of red gold, twisted and coiled into the likeness of the Red Dragon of Britain. I had seen the mate of it on Ambrosius’s arm every day of my life.
‘On a morning such as this one, Utha, your father and mine, gave this ring to my mother before he rode on his way.’

It was a long moment before I understood the full meaning of her words. And then I felt sick. I drew my legs under me and got up, pressing back from her, while she sat watching me under her dark
cloak of hair. ‘I do not believe you,’ I managed at last. But I knew that I did believe her; the look in her face told me that if she had never told the truth in her whole life, she was
telling it now; and I knew at last, now that it was too late, that the likeness that had so puzzled me was to Ambrosius. And she had known; all the while she had known. I heard someone groan and
scarcely knew that it was me. My mouth felt stiff and dry, so that I could scarcely form the words that were in my throat. ‘Why – what made you do it?’

She sat playing with the dragon arm ring between her hands, turning and turning it, just as Ambrosius had done, that night in Venta. ‘There could be two good reasons. One is love, and the
other, hate.’

‘I never harmed you.’

‘No? For the wrong, then, that Utha, Prince of Britain, did to my mother before you were born. Your mother died at your coming – oh, I know – and because you were a son,
bastard or no, your father took and reared you at his hearth, and so you see the thing with your father’s eyes. But I was only a daughter; I was not taken from my mother, and she lived long
enough to teach me to hate, where once she had loved.’

I wanted to look away, not to stare into her face any more, but I could not turn my eyes from her. She had given me her body in a kind of faming and devouring ecstasy, last night; and it was an
ecstasy of hate, as potent as ever that of love could have been. I smelled hate all about me, tangible as the smell of fear in a confined space. And then, as though at last the veil were torn
aside, I saw what was behind her eyes. I saw a woman and a child, a woman and a girl, beside the peat fire in this place, the one teaching and the other absorbing that caressing, soul-destroying
lesson of hate. All at once I saw that what I had taken for the ruins of beauty in Ygerna’s face was the promise of beauty that had been cankered before ever it could come to flowering, and
for one instant pity mingled with the horror that was rising like vomit in my throat. But the two figures in the peat smoke were changing, the girl becoming the mother, and in her place a boy, with
his face, his whole soul, turned to hers, drinking in the same lesson. Dear God! What had I let loose? What had my father let loose before me, into the world?

‘If it is a boy,’ said Ygerna, and her gaze went beyond me, as though she too were seeing past and future, ‘I shall call him – Medraut. I had a little white rat with
rose-red eyes called Medraut, when I was a child. And when he is a man, I will send him to you. May you have much joy of your son when that day comes, my lord.’

Without knowing it, my hand had been fumbling with the hilt of my sword which had lain beside me – strange that she had not disarmed me while I slept. My fingers tightened on it, and it
was half out of the wolfskin sheath. A little hammer was beating in my head. ‘I should like – very much – to kill you!’ I whispered.

She swept up from the floor, dragging back the torn breast of her gown. ‘Why do you not then? See, here is the place. I will not cry out. You can be well away from the steading before my
servants find what is left.’ All at once there was a wailing note in her voice. ‘It might be the best way for both of us. Now – kill me now!’

But my hand dropped away from the sword hilt. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No.’

‘Why not?’

I groaned. ‘Because I am a fool.’ I blundered past her, thrusting her aside so that she stumbled to her knees, and sprang for the door as though all the fends of darkness were behind
me. Cabal, who had roused and come to crouch against my legs, snarling and shaking his head in a way that I remembered afterward, leapt past me into the milky daylight. The steading was already
astir. I heard the milch cows lowing, and the thorn-bush had been pulled aside from the gate gap. I plunged out through it, and behind me heard the woman laughing, a wild, wailing laughter that
followed me long after I had ceased to hear it with the hearing of my body.

The mist was thinning fast, growing ragged and fitful, sometimes smoking around me as thick as ever, at others lifting to show half a hillside of sodden bilberry and last year’s heather.
At the foot of the valley my feet found a track that crossed the stream and headed in the direction I needed, and I turned along it, splashing thigh-deep through the ford. Presently the distance
cleared, and Yr Widdfa frowned down on me from the north, with mist still scarfing its lower glens. I knew where I was now, and turned aside into the steep hazel woods that flanked the lesser
heights.

Once I stopped to vomit; but I had not eaten that morning, and though I seemed to be retching my heart up, nothing came but a little sour slime. I spat it into the heather, and went on. Cabal
ate grass in an urgent and indiscriminate way very different from his usual careful choosing, and was sick also, throwing up all that was in him with the ease of a dog. It would have been the
drugged sweetmeat she gave him last night. I have wondered, in after years, why she did not poison him and be done with it, especially since she must have seen that I loved the dog. But I suppose
her hatred was so focused on me that she had none to spare. Maybe she even feared to lessen its power by dissipating it.

A long while after noon, I struck the hill track from Dynas Pharaon, and came dropping over the last hill shoulder into the head of Nant Ffrancon. Among the first birch and rowan trees I
checked, and stood looking down. The valley lay outstretched below me, sheltered under the dark hills. I saw the greenness of it freckled with the grazing horse herds, smoke rising from the
clustered bothies in the alder-fringed loop of the stream. It was all as it had been yesterday, when I turned here to look back; and the sight steadied me with its message that whatever happened to
a man or a thousand men, life went on. Something in me deep down below the light of reason had been dreading to find the valley blasted and sickness already rife among the horse herds. But that was
foolishness; I was not the High King that my doing should bring evil on the land. The doom was for myself alone, and I knew already that it was sure. However unknowingly, I had sinned the Ancient
Sin, the Great Sin from Which there is no escaping. I had sown a seed, and I knew that the tree which sprang from it would bear the death apple. The taste of vomit was in my very soul, and a shadow
lay between me and the sun.

Cabal, who had been waiting beside me with the patience of his kind until I should be ready to go on again, suddenly pricked his ears and looked away down the track. A moment he stood alert, his
muzzle raised into the little wind that came up from Nant Ffrancon; then he flung up his head and gave a single bell-deep bay. From below among the birch woods was a boy’s voice calling,
long-drawn and joyful. ‘Artos! My Lord Arto-os!’

I cupped my hands about my mouth and called back. ‘Aiee! I am here!’ and with Cabal leaping ahead of me, I went on downhill.

Below me two figures came into view where the track rounded the shoulder of the birch-clad outcrop, and stood looking up; and I saw that they were Hunno and young Flavian. The old horse master
flung up an arm in greeting, and Flavian, outstripping him, came springing eager as a young hound up the track to meet me. ‘Sa sa! It is good to see you safe! We thought that you might be
somewhere on this track.’ He was shouting as he came within word range. ‘Did you find shelter for the night? Did you—’ He reached me and I suppose saw my face, and his voice
stammered and fell away. We looked at each other in silence while old Hunno climbed toward us; and then he said, ‘Sir – what is it? Are you hurt?’

I shook my head. ‘No, I – I am well enough. I have dreamed evil dreams in the night, that is all.’

chapter four

I
CAME DOWN FROM ARFON, HAVING SETTLED WITH
H
UNNO
all things as to the new grazing grounds, and gathered the few fourteen and
fifteen hand mares that I could find among my own horses. Having gathered also the best part of a score of tribesmen to swell the number of the Companions – fiery youngsters with small idea
of obeying orders, but maybe I and the men they would be serving with could hammer that lesson into them; and they were as brave as boars and rode like the Wild Hunt itself.

We descended upon Venta to find that Ambrosius had ridden westward to inspect the Aquae Sulis end of the old frontier defenses, and I snatched with a sense of reprievement the delay in coming
face to face with him again. There were plenty of other men that I must face and drink with as though the world was still as it had been when I rode for Arfon earlier in the spring. It was hard to
believe that it was still the same spring, but I had had time by now to raise a shield of sorts, and I made a good enough showing. I think that Aquila, my father in arms and horse management,
guessed that something was amiss, but he was a man with the ancient scar of a Saxon thrall ring on his neck, and too deep and painful reserves of his own, ever to poke into another man’s
hidden places. At all events, he asked no questions save about the horses, and I was grateful. But indeed I had small leisure for brooding, in the few days that I remained in Venta. There were
arrangements to be made for the horses, my score of tribesmen to be divided among the squadrons of the Companions, under the captains best able to handle them. Arrangements also for the Companions
themselves in my absence; the question of the Septimanians’ purchase gold to be dealt with. Ambrosius had already given me his promised share in weighed gold armorings – coinage meant
nothing, nowadays – but what I had been able to scrape together from my own lands and even my personal gear took many forms from iron and copper currency rings to a silver brittle bit set
with coral, and a fine red and white bullskin and a pair of matched wolfhounds. And the better part of one day I spent with Ephraim the Jew in the Street of the Golden Grasshopper, changing all
these things, save for the hounds, into weighed gold, and haggling like a market crone over the price. Even at the end, I remember, he tried to leave his thumb in the scales, but when I pricked it
up with the point of my dagger, he smiled the soft smile of his people, and held both hands up to show me that the measure was fair, and we parted without malice.

The hounds were bought by Aquila. I do not think that he could afford them, for he had nothing but his pay from the war chest, and a wife to keep on it, even now that Flavian had become my
affair. Save for his horses the only thing of value that he possessed was the flamed emerald signet ring engraved with its dolphin badge, which had come to him from his father and would one day go
to his son; and there was generally a patch somewhere about him. But I would have done the same for him in a like need.