When I had reached the cramped signature, I sat for a long time holding the unrolled parchment in my hand. Then I called up the Minnow, who was squatting between the hounds burnishing a shield, and sent him for one of the clerks to take down a letter in my turn. But mine was to Medraut. I don’t know quite what purpose I hoped to serve by summoning him; I suppose I had some idea that if I confronted him with the thing face to face, I might know whether my almost formless suspicions of him were just or not.
A few days later, sleeping before the fire — I slept a great deal at that time — I dreamed of Coed Gwyn, the White Wood, dreamed of the struck notes of a harp, and Guenhumara combing her hair beside a peat fire and Bedwyr sitting with his head against her knees; and great wings that beat me back when I cried out and would have gone to them. . . . And woke with the wet feel of tears on my face, to the wings of another storm drubbing at the shutters and driving the smoke down from the fire hole, and Medraut standing by the hearth.
The rain was still dark on the shoulders of his flung-back cloak, and he stood with one foot on the warm hearthstone, staring into the red eye of the fire, and stripping and stripping his riding gloves between his fingers; the look on him, as always when one saw him suddenly and alone, of having stood there, quite patiently waiting, for a very long time. His cloak was clasped at the shoulder by a new brooch, a black opal set in braided gold wires, that had the look of a gift from some woman. Generally he had something of the sort about him, for I have seen that often an aging woman with a young lover will make him such gifts, and Medraut picked and handled his loves with care, always older women, and those that would dance the man-and-woman dance charmingly with him and raise little trouble when the dance was over. And yet, lightly and cynically as he turned from one woman to another, I think that some part of him was seeking always his mother. It was that that made his womanizing both foul and oddly piteous.
For an instant, I saw him without his being aware of any eye upon him save those of the hounds at my feet, yet his face betrayed no more than it would have done had he known himself under scrutiny. He had grown a shell of cool assurance that he had not possessed ten years ago, and looking at him it was easy to believe that he was a magnificent cavalry commander — but it would have been as easy to believe that he was anything else, in the empty chamber behind his eyes. As he could blend into the surroundings of his life, so it seemed that he could take on the color of one’s own thoughts, so that I could never be quite sure whether I saw Medraut, or only what I imagined Medraut to be. Only in the opal on his shoulder, the flame and peacock colors woke and shimmered and died again, and I had the strange fancy that in the dark fires of the jewel one might read what never showed behind his eyes.
Then one of the hounds stirred, growling very softly — most dogs disliked Medraut — and he looked my way and saw that I was awake and watching him and stopped playing with his wet riding gloves. “God’s greeting to you, Artos my father. You are better, they tell me.”
“God’s greeting to you, Medraut my son; I grow stronger each day.” It was the first time in ten years that he had stood before me in my own quarters.
“You sent for me,” he said at last.
“I sent for you — in the first place that you may explain to me why this summer’s campaigning against Cerdic and his followers has had no better success.”
He stiffened for a moment and then said quickly, “At least we halted their northward advance, and thrust them back into the lower forest and the marshes.”
“But not back to the coast — and that by the loss, it seems, of many men to our war host and few to theirs.”
“My father knows that the fever has thinned our own ranks; and also what like of country that is to fight over.”
“A land blurred between land and water, swamp and forest. A country, more than any other part of our coastline, well nigh impossible to clear of an enemy, once they have made good their landing.”
“Well?” he said softly and on the faintest note of challenge.
“I have been thinking it something strange that Cerdic should know so well where the soft belly lies most open to the knife. I have been thinking it fortunate for him that he should choose a summer when the Yellow Hag is rife among the war host ranged against him.”
I wondered if it was possible, remembering the night we made the East Coast treaty, that this son of mine, who had come to me eaten with jealousy of Cerdic my enemy, should have common cause with him now. I had a sick feeling that it was perfectly possible. Christos! If only I could look just once behind his eyes. . . .
“Doubtless Cerdic has his scouting parties — and alas! there are traitors in every camp.”
“Not in every camp,” I said, “but undoubtedly in some.” I pulled myself up in the great chair, thrusting back the dark warm wolf furs, for suddenly I seemed suffocating, and reached for the narrow parchment roll that lay on the table beside me, but I did not open it, I knew the contents by heart. “Your arguments are unanswerable. See if you can do as well with the final engagement on the Cloven Way.”
He dropped his gaze for an instant to the letter I held, then raised it again blandly to my face. “Cei will have given you a better and fuller account of that than I can do.”
“Better, doubtless, but not so detailed at certain points. There is, for instance, a curious lack of detail in his account of the breakup of the left wing that robbed us of a fully decisive victory.”
“The left wing being my command,” Medraut said, and began again to play with his gloves. “The detail is very easily supplied. Cei failed to second me at the crucial moment.”
“Cei states that you were in no need of seconding, and he had sharper call for the reserves elsewhere, until the whole center of the wing crumpled without warning.”
“But then, Cei has always hated me,” he said.
“Cei doesn’t know how to hate — not as we understand the word,” I said. “He’s too like a Saxon. It takes the Celtic blood to know truly how to hate.”
And we looked at each other, eye to eye, in a small and powerful stillness in the heart of the storm that battered the shutters and drove the white rain hushing across the thatch. But the opal at his shoulder caught fire from an infinitesimal movement and for an instant was an eye opened on some strange and beautiful half-hell.
Then Medraut retreated a little. “In battle it is not always easy to choose — even to know — where lies the sharpest need. I know that my need of seconding was as the need of lifeblood, but it seemed that Cei did not. Let my father believe I fought the best action that I could without.”
“Cei states here that you wheeled your charge-back on too close a curve, so that the formation became clogged and ragged, and consequently the impact lost its force.”
“It seems that the account was not so lacking in detail!”
“There is no more to it than that,” I said. “But Name of Names! That is the mistake of a raw squadron captain on his first maneuvers; you are among the most able of cavalry commanders, Medraut; that kind of mistake is not for you!”