Three days later we rode into this place, this place among the reedbeds and the western marshes, which the Celts among us call the Island of Apples; and found Ambrosius’s big black stallion Hesperus tethered with a few other horses among the trees of the monks’ orchard — for there were holy men here then, even as there are now, and as they claim there had been almost since the time of Christ. We tethered our horses with Ambrosius’s, under the apple trees where the grass grew sweet and tall for grazing, and followed the young brown-clad Brother who had taken us in charge, up to the long hall beside the wattle church, which formed as it were the center of the cluster of small thatched cells, like the queen cell in a bumblebee’s nest. The place was thick with the smoky light of the fat-lamps hanging from the rafters, and the Brothers were already gathering to the evening meal of bread and kale broth, for it was a fast day, and Ambrosius and his handful of Companions sat with the Abbot at the head of the rough plank table. I had been dreading the meeting, fearing, I think, not so much what he might see in my face as what I might see in his; fearing in some confused and nightmare way that because I had seen the likeness to him in Ygerna, I must see the likeness to Ygerna in him. Indeed if it were not for shame, I would not have taken this road at all, but held westward by the lower way and so shirked the meeting. . . .
I did not look at him fully as I walked up the timber hall, and knelt with bowed head before him, according to the custom. He made the gesture to me to rise, and I got slowly to my feet, and looked at last into his face.
Ygerna was not there. There was a surface likeness of form and color, the dark skin and the slender bones beneath it, and the way the brows were set. It was that that had tugged at my memory with its unavailing warning. But the man whose face flashed open to smile at me out of the strange rain-gray eyes was Ambrosius as he had always been. The breath broke in my throat with relief and I bent forward to receive his kinsman’s embrace.
When the simple meal was over, we left the Brothers to their souls and our own men to playing knucklebones about the fire, and went out, the two of us, with Cabal stalking as usual at my heel, to sit on the low turf wall that held the orchard from the marsh; and talked together as we had had no chance to since the night that Ambrosius gave me my sword.
The moon was up and the mist rising over the marshes and the withy beds like the rising tide of a ghost sea; the higher ground stood clear of it, islands above high-water mark, rising to the steep thrust of the hill crowned with its sacred thorns; but at the lower levels of the orchard a lantern tossing its way along the horse lines had a faint golden smoke about it. The first pale petals were drifting from the apple trees, with no wind to flurry them abroad. Behind us we heard the quiet voices of the camp and the holy place. The marsh was silent until somewhere far out in the mist a bittern boomed, and was silent again. It was a very peaceful place. It still is.
After a while, carefully keeping to the obvious, Ambrosius said, “So we meet on your road to Septimania.”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“You still feel that you must needs go yourself on this journey? You do not feel that the sorer need of you is here?”
I was dandling my sword between my knees, looking out into the mist that crept nearer across the marsh. “God knows I have thought the thing over through enough of nights. God knows how bitterly I grudge a whole summer’s campaigning; but I cannot trust another man to pick my war-horses for me; too much depends on them.”
“Not even Aquila?”
“Aquila?” I said reflectively. “Yes, I’d trust old Aquila; but I cannot find it in my mind to think that you would lend me Aquila.”
“No,” Ambrosius said. “I would not — I could not lend you Aquila; not both of you in one year.” He turned toward me abruptly. “What of your men, Bear Cub, while you’re away?”
“I lend them back to you. Hunt my pack for me, Ambrosius, till I come again.”
For a while we talked over the mares I had chosen for my breeding herd, and the plans that I had made with Hunno, and the money I had raised off my own estates; of the defenses that Ambrosius had been riding here in the West, and a score of other things, until at last we fell silent again, a long silence while the mist and the moon rose together, until presently Ambrosius said, “It was good, to get back to the mountains?”
“It was good, yes.” But I suppose something in my voice rang false, for he turned his head and sat looking at me fixedly. And in the stillness, somewhere among the reedbeds the bittern boomed again, and again was silent.
“But something I think was not so good. What was it?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
I felt my hands tighten on my sword hilt until the pommel with its great square-edged amethyst cut into my palm, and forced a laugh. “More times than once, you have told me that I show all things too clearly in my face. But this time you ride your own fancy. There is nothing there to show.”
“Nothing?” he said again.
And I turned deliberately to face him in the full white moonlight. “Do I seem changed in some way?”
“No,” he said slowly, consideringly. “More as though you found us — our world — changed; or were afraid to find it so. When you came into the holy men’s hall this evening, you held yourself as long as might be, from looking into my face. And when you looked at last, it was as though you feared to see the face of a stranger — even an enemy. It is —” His voice dropped even lower, and all the while he had been speaking scarcely above his breath. “You make me think of a man such as the harpers sing of, who has passed a night in the Hollow Hills.”
I was silent a long time, and I think I nearly told him all the story. But in the end I could not; I could not though my soul had depended upon it. I said, “Maybe I have passed my night in the Hollow Hills.”
And even as I spoke, up beyond the apple trees the bell of the wattle church began to ring, calling the Brothers to evening prayer; a bronze sound, a brown sound in the moonlight, falling among the apple trees. Ambrosius went on looking at me for a moment, but I knew that he would press the thing no further; and I remained for the same moment, playing with the hilt of the great sword across my knees, and letting the quiet of the moment soak into me before I must rouse myself to go forward again. “If I were indeed newcome from the Hollow Hills, at least this must be the place of all others, with the bell calling my soul back to the Christian’s God. . . . It is a good place — peace rises in it as the mist over the reedbeds. It would be a good place to come back to in the end.”
“In the end?”
“When the last battle is fought and the last song sung, and the sword sheathed for the last time,” I said. “Maybe one day when I am past fighting the Saxon kind, I shall give my sword to whoever comes after me, and come back here as an old dog creeps home to die. Shave my forehead and bare my feet, and strive to make my soul in whatever time is left to me.”
“That is the oldest dream in the world,” Ambrosius said, getting to his feet. “To lay down the sword and the Purple and take up the begging bowl. I don’t see you with bare feet and a shaven forehead, Artos my friend.”
But even as he spoke, it seemed to me that the great purple amethyst in my sword pommel tilted a fraction under my finger, as though it were not quite secure in its bed. I bent quickly to examine it and Ambrosius checked in the act of turning away. “Something amiss?”