Blodwen came also, and her words I remember. She was not wearing white but a dress of soft brown, the color of beech leaves in winter, and her hair curled gold against it. She stood by the bed and took my hand in its clumsy encasement of linen.
She said: “You are a fool, Luke. But very brave.”
I shook my head and it hurt. Although I had tried to keep my head away from the beast my skin must have grazed it. Part of my face and neck were raw, though less so than my limbs.
I said: “A fool, yes. No more.”
She looked down at me, her wide blue eyes grave.
“The city buzzes with talk of you. The poets are vying as to which will be first with his epic of Luke the Bayemot Slayer, while the minstrels have already made up their songs and people gather in the streets to hear them. There is to be a banquet that will be the most magnificent in a hundred years, where my father will give you some great honor.”
I groaned. “What I did was stupid and after that lucky. I want no banquets nor honors.”
She smiled. “You have no choice. There are penalties to being a hero.”
“I can think of one. They have taken the board from my bed and will not give it back.”
“You must do as the apothecaries say. No one is free of obedience. And when you are well you must attend the banquet and accept the honor politely.”
Her hand was very small against my cocooned fist. I said:
“You will be there?”
She nodded. “Of course I will.”
They drank my health, spilling ale on the damask cloth and clinking their gold pots. It was very noisy and through the open windows—the evening was mild and the assembly generated of itself more heat than it needed—came the distant but even heavier din from the courtyard where the whole city, it seemed, was also drinking my health in the King’s ale. Then the others sat down, but the King remained standing.
He said: “There is no need to dwell on the deed which tonight we celebrate. Some of you were there, and the rest have been told of it. No man before this has killed a Bayemot. No warrior has even dared attack one except with arrows from a distance, and arrows do the beast no hurt. Yet this boy, for he is scarcely more than that, from a foreign country beyond the Burning Lands, braved the monster’s grasp and had the strength and cunning to kill it.
“I have pondered how we may do him honor and it has not been easy to find an answer. Gold would be an insult, and in rank he is already son and brother to Princes, proclaimed a Prince to be. It has not been easy, but I think I have found something worthy of him and which he will not refuse. I offer him, as a gift from all the Wilsh, the greatest treasure we possess. He is worthy of it, and I think he will guard it well.”
He smiled and raised his goblet, whose heavily chased gold was crusted round with pearls.
“I offer him my daughter, your Princess. Rise, and drink to the betrothal of Luke and Blodwen!”
EIGHT
THE BUILDING RATS
I DO NOT KNOW WHAT was in the salve that the apothecaries put on my burns, but it was powerful stuff. The marks disappeared rapidly in the days that followed and a week after the hunt my skin showed no more than a slight redness and roughness.
Wherever I went in the city people stared at me. When I could once more sit a horse without discomfort I persuaded Edmund to ride out. We did not take either road but went north where an old track led up into the hills. The city came to an end in a huddle of workmen’s cottages with neither towers nor domes, and we rode alone. The year was ripening. Trees were heavy with leaf and flowers grew out of the grass. From the thickets songbirds hurled defiance at one another in syllables of cool beauty.
There had been rain that morning and from the look of the clouds there might be more, but the air was fresh and the sky had some blue in it. I breathed it deeply and said:
“This is good. And good to be free of eyes and tongues.”
“Is praise so hard to bear?”
“Maybe not when it is merited.”
“You slew the Bayemot,” Edmund said. “A thing unparalleled.”
“And if instead the Bayemot had eaten me, what would the Wilsh have said?”
“At least that you had courage.”
“Not courage—foolhardiness. And they would have been right in it. I did not save the man. I did not even attack the Bayemot to do so. I rode at it, in an ungovernable temper, because I thought the King mocked me, and jumped because my pride would not let me turn back.”
We rode in silence for a while. Edmund said at last:
“They say it was small for a Bayemot. Usually they are twice that size, or bigger.”
“Had it been even three inches higher from the ground I could not have reached its brain or heart or whatever it was I stabbed. As I say, folly.”
“I saw you ride down at it,” Edmund said. “I called but I do not think you heard me. When I saw you pinned to its side, striking at it with a dagger, I thought that I should go to help you.”
“You could have done no good.”
“So I told myself, and very likely it was true. I think before I act—and then think again. I am not entirely a coward, but I do not lose myself in action as you do.”
I shook my head. “It was stupidity. By rights I should be dead, and it would have been my own fault. Dead and derided by these same people who make up songs about me. The southern fool who tried to fight a dagger duel with the Bayemot. Luck made the difference between life and death, triumph and disgrace.”
“And was it luck that won the Contest for you, those years ago?”
I remembered that spring day, like this one warm after early rain, and how in the last round, Edmund having three men against my two, I had ridden away unguarded and had seen him and his lieutenant come after me. And how, as they closed in from either side, I had thrown myself from my saddle and pulled him from his horse.
“When you leaped at me,” Edmund said, “then, too, I paused to think. But there was no time for thinking. And when we remounted and rode at each other, just the two of us with no helpers, it was knowing I had failed before that made me fail again.”
So many things stemmed from that: within days his father’s death and the plunge from palace into poverty. I said:
“I planned the first part of the Contest. But in the end it was luck.”
“No, I do not think you can call it luck. I know nothing of the Spirits and am not concerned with them, but I think you have a demon who serves you well. I hope he will always do so.”
There was a hill with a crumbling ruin on top. It was too steep for the horses so we tied them to a thorn tree and climbed on foot. Sheep cropped the grass, bells tinkling as they moved. Many were polybeast, either in shape or color—I saw several that were not white but black. I noted this idly, not shocked as I would once have been nor horrified by the thought that they might any day be served as mutton at the King’s table. “They will learn,” the peddler had said, and I was learning.
The ruin was very old, in places no more than a groundwork of stone tracing a plan. There was nothing in it worth seeing. We sat on the remains of a low wall and looked down into the valley. The city was small and peaceful, no faint echo of its tumult reaching us here. Passing sunlight caught it and struck new and sharper colors from its painted spires and domes.
“A fine sight,” Edmund said.
“Yes.”
“When do we leave for home?”
“In a week, Greene says.”
“You still allow him to think he decides such matters?”
“He was named commander by my brother.”
“Tell Cymru that.” He paused and repeated: “A fine sight. Do you think our Winchester would look dull and drab to someone used to this?”