There were more people than usual that day, but of course all Venta must know by now; they stared and whispered, or I thought they did, and I did not care, if only they would go, if only I need not sit there seeing their faces — faces after faces after faces — through a haze made by the throbbing in my head.
It was over and the last of the waiting throng in the forecourt had melted away, and the gray light of day was fading in soft spring rain beyond the windows. And I was about to rise and go back to Ambrosius’s quarters — I had given orders for my gear to be fetched from the Queen’s Courtyard, which was home to me no longer — when a confused tramp of many footsteps sounded outside, and Pharic’s voice answered by another, and as I glanced questioningly at Cei who stood big and grim and gray-golden beside my chair, Guenhumara’s brother came in by the lower door, carrying his favorite falcon hooded on his fist, and followed by all that were left of the mounted band who had come to me as her dowry.
He strode up the hall to stand before me, his tall Caledonians tramping behind him. He made the customary salute before the High Seat, and stood there with his head tipped far back and the level black brows joined into one bar, frowning, and stared at me out of hot red-brown eyes.
“You have something to say to me?” I demanded, at last.
“Aye,” he said. “It is this, Artorius Augustus. It has been told to us that last night you sent Guenhumara my sister and your Queen from the court in shame.”
“It was not I who set the shame on her forehead,” I said coldly.
“Na, and for that reason, because she herself wove the shame, we seek no feud between you and us, no vengeance for your putting her away. Yet still, to me, she is my sister, and to all of us she is the daughter of our chieftain’s hall, and therefore we, who have been your men loyally for ten years and more, count ourselves no more among the ranks of the Companions, because you put her away in shame.”
“I understand,” I said. “You have my leave to go north again to your own place.”
The hot hawk’s stare never changed or wavered from my face. “We seek no leave. We go north, back to our own hills, taking with us the women we have married and the bairns we have bred here in the South. We come to tell you this, no more.”
I remember sitting there in the High Seat, with the carved wolf’s heads on the foreposts biting into my hands, staring and staring into the midst of that proud unswerving gaze. “So be it,” I said at last. “When do you ride?”
“The horses are already saddled, and there will be something of a moon, later.”
“Then it seems that there is nothing more to be said.”
“One thing more.” Pharic’s gaze, leaving my face for the first time, moved deliberately to that of my armor-bearer, who sat in attendance on the dais steps with my spear and buckler across his knees. “Come, Riada.”
He got up slowly but without hesitation; clearly he had expected the summons and knew that it must be obeyed. But he turned to look at me with a troubled and wretched face. “Sir, I do not wish to go. But they are my tribe.”
“They are your tribe,” I said.
He knelt for an instant and touched my foot in the old gesture, then rose and went to join Pharic. And with a last grave salute — there was no hot blood in this parting; it was, as it were, a matter of honor, almost of ritual — the whole band turned about and strode down the hall.
When they were gone, the great chamber seemed very empty, and I was aware suddenly of the rattle of spring rain against the windows, and the bee still bruising its foolish head against the thick greenish panes. I got up slowly, and turned to the door behind the dais. Cei followed me in silence like a big faithful hound, and I turned to him in the doorway, resting a hand on his shoulder for the comfort that I might have found in resting it on Cabal’s head. “Do you remember my saying to you once that I’d have no married women to make trouble among the Companions? That when two men desired one woman, that was when the Brotherhood began to break?”
“Something of the sort,” Cei said heavily.
“I was right, wasn’t I?”
The faithful core of the Brotherhood never broke, save by death, which is another matter. But neither Flavian nor Gwalchmai, not even Cei, were as near to me as Bedwyr had been, and I knew to the full the solitude above the snow line that I had dreaded all my life. And since, in the years that came after, even fighting had for the most part given place to statecraft, there was little to do save work. So I worked, while the springs and autumns passed and in the courtyard where I had kept my dogs as a boy, the last branch of the wild pear tree died. I worked at the task of making Britain strong, of hammering out a stable government; I labored over the treaty with the coastwise Saxons, that the thing might not fall to pieces when I could no longer hold it secure in the hollow of my hand. It is all without life in my mind as a badly tempered blade. All my life I have been a fighting man by nature, an administrator only by difficult adoption. Also, so far as might be, I stopped feeling, in those years, and the things that enter only by the head, no man remembers as he does the things that enter by the heart.
Cerdic had taken the three war boats that were his, with a full crew of sword companions to each of them, and before his days of grace were all run out, had left the shores of Britain. We heard of him from time to time, briefly and uncertainly as the flicker of summer lightning at twilight, now here, now there, chiefly as a raider, occasionally as a sailor of strange seas. We began to hear of him at Portus Namnetus on the Gaulish coast; the place was the perfect stamping ground for the son of Fox Vortigern and the Lady Rowan, for in the country about the Liger mouth, Celt and Saxon for no reason had come together and made a mingled race. And as time went by, it seemed that he had made his home quarters there. Until the ninth or tenth summer after Badon, that was all.
By then, in my efforts to keep the four tribal runs of the Old Kingdom knit together, I had come to spend almost as much time in Sorviodunum, Aquae Sulis and Calleva as I did in Venta, and that year about midsummer, I took the court up to Sorviodunum. It was a dim and sultry summer, the kind of weather in which fever breeds, and the Yellow Hag had come earlier than usual to the towns; but I had never taken the fever — indeed I have seldom in all my life been sick without a wound on me — and so when an aching head and a shiver between the shoulders came upon me on the day after our arrival, I thought only that I had got chilled in the thunder rain that had drenched us on the long ride up from Venta. But within two days I was raving.
At first there were clear intervals, when I returned from the whirling flame-touched world of the fever-madness to the misery of my own body; to darkness that suffocated me or light that clashed like a hammer even when my eyes were closed. And swimming out of a fiery fog into one such interval, I was aware of sounds of gathering and preparation in the world outside, feet, and voices, and the yelp of a trumpet call that was answered from the far side of the city, aware also of Cei and Gwalchmai in urgent low-voiced conclave in the doorway of the long room among the rafters of the King’s Chamber where I lay.
They looked toward me, and with the preternaturally sharpened hearing that comes sometimes with fever, I heard Gwalchmai say: “Yes, now. Be as swift about it as you can; there’s no means of knowing how long before the Yellow Hag claims him again.”
Then Cei was standing over me, with his thumbs thrust into his sword belt in the way that he had, bending forward to peer into my face. “My Lord Artos,” he said, faintly questioning.