“What — is it, Cei? What — all that trampling and trumpeting — outside.” My tongue felt as though it was made of boiled leather, and the worried weather-burned face and burly big-paunched figure slipped to and fro on my sight the more I tried to hold it still.
“It is Cerdic — Artos. Can you hear what I say?”
“What of Cerdic?”
“He’s landed on the west side of Vectis Water, and a young war host with him. They got in in the rain and murk two days since and were ashore before the coast wardens knew a thing of their coming. We got the news last night.”
I remember struggling to my elbow and cursing him that I had not been told before — as though any word could have reached me; I remember striving to be out of my bed, and shouting to Gwalchmai for a draught of some kind that would give me the strength to ride for a few days even if it killed me after, and the two of them holding me back and striving to quieten me as though I were a fire-maddened horse. . . . Later, when I was quiet again, I have a dim half memory of setting some kind of scrawl that might serve for a signature to the marching orders and to an authority for Cei to take command of the war host, and pressing Maximus’s seal onto the hot wax, while Cei steadied the blade of the great sword above my wavering hand. No memory of Cei leaving the room, for I was off and away on my travels once more.
It seemed a very long while later, and indeed I think it was many days, when I began to know myself within the dark shell of my body again, and later still, grew slowly sure that there was a dagger in my back, below the left shoulder blade. Presently I found there was no dagger there, only the blade-shaped pain of the dagger. But the pain pierced deeper and deeper all the while, until I was snatching at my breath like a winded runner, and the world that had just begun to return dissolved about me again into fiery chaos in which the only sure thing was Medraut’s face like a white death mask hanging in the air wherever I looked, until at last that too was burned up in the fires, and the fire itself engulfed in a last great darkness.
How long I lay slung between life and death, I have never been able to judge with any certainty, but it cannot have been far short of a month between the time I first fell sick and the time I awoke in fading lamplight and felt the air of very early morning on my face, and knew that I could breathe again and that I was lying cool and sodden in a pool of sweat.
I tried to drag myself out of it, and could not. And then the Minnow, who was now my armor-bearer, was bending over me, feeling my body with eager hands. He said, “Oh sir, we thought that you would die!” and most surprisingly I felt what seemed to be a drop of warm ram on my face.
I mumbled something about being wet enough already, and the boy began to crow and whimper with laughter, and then Gwalchmai was beside me also, and they were lifting me out of the sodden rugs and spreading over me dry warm ones that smelled of the storage herbs. And sleep gathered me into a gentle darkness.
Day after day I lay flat on the rug-piled bed place under the musty-smelling thatch that twittered with swallows’ nests (it was the King’s Chamber, but conditions were harsher at Sorviodunum than at Venta), tended by Gwalchmai and the Minnow, and the small tubby Jew who had stepped into old Ben Simeon’s shoes. There was a sense of gulf behind me, and everything about me seemed small and bright and far off, like its own reflection in a silver cup. I had no more strength at first than a half-drowned puppy, but at least my mind was my own again, and I was able to demand and attend to news of the fighting — though indeed there was little news that had any form or coherence to it, only a long confused talking of skirmishes and small-scale indecisive actions; of Cerdic’s brilliant use of salt marsh and sea inlet and steaming damp-oak forest, which were home conditions to him now to hold off our own war host from coming to grips with the Saxon kind. At any other time I should have been wild and fuming to take the command myself, but I was so weak, so newly back from the edge of all things, so possessed still with the sense of everything being small and far away, that I was content to lie still and leave the campaign, such as it was, in Cei’s hands.
Gwalchmai was the impatient one, wanting to be with his wounded. He took pains to hide it, but I had not known my Hawk of May for the better part of a lifetime without being able to read his mood and his longings. . . . One evening, when he came to see me after supper as he always did, I remember grumbling to him at the snail pace of my returning strength, and he raised his brows at me. “It is not usual that a man who has passed straight from the Yellow Hag to the Lung Fever finds himself ready to outwrestle the wild aurochs within the week. You are mending, my friend. You’ll do well enough now.”
“And so I suppose you want to leave me and be away to the war host,” I said.
He sat down in the big carved cross-legged chair beside the hearth, with a small grunting sigh, and rubbed his knee. “I’ll bide as long as you need me.”
I turned toward him, seeing with a sudden warm rush of affection, the tired old man that he had become, dried and withered like the wild pear branch in the well courtyard, and I knew that he was not fit for the camp and the war trail, and knew also that he must go. “As to that, I’ve Ben Eleaza to brew my poisons for me. There’s others needing you more than I do now.”
“I’ll not deny that I’ll be glad to get back to the war host and the wounded,” he said simply. “My chief business has been with them a good few years.”
“A mere thirty or so. There’s a good few of us would be dead at least once before this, if it wasn’t for your sharp little knife and stinking fever potions.”
“There’s a good few of us dead, even so,” Gwalchmai said soberly, and we were both thinking back, as men growing old do think back, remembering comrades living and comrades dead, who had been young with us when the Brotherhood itself was young. So the thing was settled and we bided talking for a while, until it was time for Gwalchmai to make his preparations for the journey.
When he got up to go, he swayed suddenly and caught at the back of the chair to steady himself, and for the moment, as he stood brushing his hand across his forehead, it seemed to me that a gray shadow stole over his face, and fear brushed me by. “What’s amiss? Oh good God, Gwalchmai, not you, now!”
“Eh?” He looked up, shaking his head as though to clear it “Na na, maybe a little tired, that’s all. Sometimes I think I’m getting old.”
“You’re ten years younger than I am.”
“I daresay I’ll last a few years more,” Gwalchmai said, and limped serenely to the door — his limp had worsened in the last few years.
I never saw him again.
I had regained just enough strength to crawl from the bed place to my chair beside the hearth, and sit there muffled in rugs, generally with a couple of hounds at my feet (but no hound of mine was ever called Cabal again) when there came to me a certain dispatch from Cei. My lieutenant’s writing was never overeasy to decipher, oddly small and cramped for such a big tempestuous writer, and I pored over it, holding it to the flickering light of the fire, for though it must be still daylight outside, the shutters were closed over the small ragged windows in the thatch, to keep out wind and rain. Moreover, the letter deserved careful reading, for at last there was something to report; the Saxons brought to action at last, and a full-scale battle on the Cloven Way, almost half distance between Venta and Cerdic’s landing beach. Cei had written me the plain account of it, move by countermove and phase by phase, together with certain facts or seeming facts concerning the left cavalry wing which made ugly reading. I could imagine how he would have bitten at his quill and glared in trouble at the lines as he set them down. And in the end, though the Sea Wolves had indeed been halted and even turned back, at cost of bitter man-loss to ourselves, no decisive victory to report; little gamed from the whole summer’s campaigning, save that Cerdic was still penned to the south side of the Forest. And the first of the equinoctial gales was beating its wings against the rattling shutters as I read, and I knew that the campaigning season was over for that year.