The small rippling tune that was now the wagtail and now the water, burst into a last running phrase, and was silent. And in the silence, all at once, Guenhumara laughed, with strangely darkened eyes, and the bright color flooded up from her throat to the roots of her hair. “Artos, why do you look at me so? — As though you had never seen me before?”
“Do I? I am sorry. It is that I am looking for the first time at the Queen.”
“The Queen,” she said slowly and carefully, as though testing a strange word on her tongue.
And Bedwyr, laughing also, as he looked up at her with eyes narrowed against the westering light, struck a small triumphal flourish of notes from the leaping harp strings. “Sa! They will sound the trumpets for you, now that Caesar is home, and open the treasure chests and bring out the blue and purple and golden silks that tear like withered leaves, and the queen’s jewels laced with cobwebs, but meanwhile, here is a queen’s fanfare for you that at least has never been worn for a garland by any queen before.”
“Do not listen to him,” and it was as though the same spirit of small quiet laughter had entered into me also. “All that, the Red Fox and his kind carried off long ago. There will be no dusty silks and weight of dead woman’s jewels for you, Cariad. . . . If I were Lord of the Eastern Empire” (the memory of some picture gleaming behind the altar of a church must have put it into my head) “you should have a crown of golden stems and leaves curling in and out together like the sand-dune rose but without the thorns — and in every arch of it a bell of crystal to ring when you walked.“
“Bedwyr told me that a circlet of oak leaves was all the diadem my lord had to crown him Emperor. Then a crown of golden cornstalks — so that my lord give it to me — will serve well enough for my royalty. With that, and your fanfare, Bedwyr, I shall not feel the lack of any dead queen’s jewels.”
A sudden rush of warmth rose in me, and I reached out and put my arm around her knees, these being the nearest part of her. “Oh Guenhumara, it is good to be at home with you again.” Oddly, I was much less shy of touching this new Guenhumara than I had been of touching the old one.
I had half hoped that she would say, “It is good to have you at home with me again,” but she only said, “Is it, my dear?” And I felt her startle for an instant under the heavy folds of her gown. Then she stooped and brushed her hand across my cheek, and I let myself believe that what she had not said in words, she had said in that brief touch.
Bedwyr was returning his beloved harp to its bag, and slinging the strap across his shoulder, and something in the way he did it made me think of a traveler picking up his dusty bundle before he turns again to the track. And without thinking, I said, “You look like a man setting off on a journey.”
He laughed. “Do I? If so, it is but a short one. It is in my mind that tomorrow I will be away back to my own quarters.”
I sat up abruptly, releasing Guenhumara. “You’re not meaning it?”
“I am so.”
“Bedwyr, you’re not fit yet to go back to that kennel of yours.”
“You underestimate the Lady Guenhumara’s care of me. I am almost a sound man again.”
“Almost! And what wrong have I done you, or you me, that you should run like a hen with the wind in your hind feathers, the moment that I am home off the war trail? Guenhumara, Heart-of-my-heart, tell him that he cannot go.”
I thought that a shadow had fallen on Guenhumara, but it was only that the westering sun had slid behind a broken column. She said quietly, “Bedwyr knows that there is his place and his welcome here for as long as he cares to stay, and that they are waiting whenever he chooses to come back. And that he is free to come and go as he chooses.“
Bedwyr was making some adjustment to the harp strap. His fingers checked on the buckle at his shoulder, and he looked up, faintly jibing over his own dark depths. “I have just thought, that we are forgetting the Purple in all this. Men might say that it was an unwise thing, even a dangerous thing, to go when the Emperor says ‘Stay.’”
“If the Emperor ordered you to stay, would you do it?” I said.
“I must needs obey the imperial command.”
We looked at each other a long moment, eye into eye, no longer laughing. Then I said, “Your sword brother bids you go where you will and when you will, and come back when you will.”
We were aware, all of us, that we had lost the fragile contentment of a few moments past, and made, I think, a conscious effort to catch it back. Bedwyr saying that a little later he should maybe go up for another look at the farm I had given him, and Guenhumara asking what it was like. “Hill pasture and upland horse run,” he said, “three cornfields and a cluster of turf bothies. I have not seen it in summer, but there will be snowdrops in the woods above the house in February. That is why they call it Coed Gwyn.” Only for some reason this time I could not enter into the thing that was tossing to and fro like a colored ball between the other two. And suddenly it seemed that Guenhumara gave up the game. She shivered a little. “It grows cold now that the sun is gone. Let us be away to the fire.”
So the small quiet hour that had in it something of sanctuary was over, and a few moments later I stood with Guenhumara in the colonnade and glanced back over the half wall to watch Bedwyr weaving his still slightly uncertain way across the courtyard to make ready for supper. “Guenhumara, do you think that he should go yet?”
She had been watching the retreating figure too, and turned with a little start toward me. It was already dusk indoors though the light still lingered in the courtyard, and Nissa had brought the atrium candles, and in the light from the open doorway her face was softly golden, with its shadows blotted in from the gray twilight. “Yes, I think he should,” she said, and took my hand to lead me into the atrium.
I had another and more formal coronation to undergo in the Basilica, a few days later, but to me it was no more than a husk of the true crowning that I had gone to on the night after Badon; and I remember little of it now, save a vague blur of gold and colors and the gray of naked mail, and the bright cold seagull’s eye of Bishop Dubricius as he set the gold circlet on my head. And the moment when I sprung the great dragon arm ring of Ambrosius onto my arm, and knew that I stood where he would have had me stand.
Life changed, tipping over to a new angle, and I who had been the war leader and was now the High King (crowned Caesar but High King in all things other than the name) had become something of a stranger in a strange land, striving as best I might after the ways of kingship, in the state halls and Council Chamber where Ambrosius had worked himself to death the winter before. But I had the help of Guenhumara, sitting beside me in the Queen’s great chair that had been empty and stored away so many years. . . . Indeed she was nearer to me in that winter than she had been since the time before Hylin died. Bedwyr, on the other hand, seemed farther away.