“I thought Maximus’s seal felt loose in its setting. Seems secure enough now, though; probably I imagined it. . . . I’ll get the next goldsmith I can find, to take a look at it, all the same.”
But the bell was ringing louder, and the sound of singing stole down through the apple trees, and if we were to pay the Brothers the small courtesy of joining them at prayer, we must move. I got up, stirring the unwilling Cabal with my foot. “Up, lazy one!” and with the hound’s cold muzzle thrusting into my hand, walked with Ambrosius up through the orchard. I thought no more about the loosened amethyst, until a later day reminded me. . . .
Well before spring had given place to summer, I and my small band were in Dumnonia, and lodged with Cador the Prince, while we waited for a ship. I had thought to find him in the old frontier town of Isca Dumnoniorum, or at his summer capital on the Tamara River; but it seemed that Cador had as little liking for cities as have the Saxons, and so those few waiting days were spent up on the skirts of the high moors where he had his Dun with his warriors and his women and his wealth of cattle gathered about him, like any wild Hibernian chieftain.
On the last evening, we came back from hunting with a couple of the proud red deer that roam those hills slung across the backs of the ponies. It had been a good day’s hunting, and for a while, just for a while, I seemed to have outdistanced certain pursuing hounds of my own. We came up to the Dun, with our shadows running far ahead of us through the brown of last year’s heather and the fragile green of the spring-sown barley; and the pleasant tiredness that comes of a day’s hunting was in all our limbs. Cabal ran at my horse’s forefoot apart from the rest of the pack. He was the greatest of them all though Cador had fine hounds, too. We clattered through the broad gateway of the Dun, and among the byres and stables of the forecourt, where the tall weapon stone stood for the warriors to sharpen their blades in time of battle, we handed over the ponies and the kill to the men who came for them, and went on together, toward the inner court.
A knot of women sat before the doorway of the long timber hall, in the thin shade of the ancient half-sacred whitethorn tree that grew there. “Sa sa! The fine weather has brought the women out like midges in the sunlight,” Cador said, as we came in sight of them. The sight was a good one to see. The dappling sunspots quivered on the blue and russet and saffron of their tunics, as the small lazy breeze stirred the whitethorn branches and brought down the first thin drifts of fading petals; and they were talking softly, like a huddle of colored birds, some of them spinning, one girl combing out wet hair to dry in the sun; while Esylt, Cador’s wife, sat in their midst, restringing a broken necklace of amber beads, with something small and mewing like a kitten in the soft folds of a fallow doeskin at her feet.
I knew that Cador had a son, born since Ambrosius’s crowning, and named Constantine for my grandsire, but I had not seen him before, though I had heard him yelling like a hungry lamb in the women’s quarters. Cador had been ashamed to show any interest in the thing before other men, but now that he could do so without seeming eager, I think he was pleased to show it off to the stranger within his gates. At all events, his step quickened as we came into the inner court.
Esylt looked up with a melon-shaped bead of amber between her fingers, her eyes narrowed against the watering sunlight. “You are come home early, my lord. Was the hunting not good?”
“Good enough to show the Bear that there are other hunting runs than those of his own mountains,” Cador said. “We killed twice.” He bent down, his hands on his knees, to peer at the small squirming thing in the doeskin, then glanced aside at his woman with a snapping flash of white teeth. “Why then, should I not come home early from my hunting? Is it that I might find something or someone that I am not meant to find?”
“There are three men hidden in the folds of my skirt, and the fourth lies there,” said Esylt, pointing to the child with the hand in which she held the thread. “If you would know his father, you have but to look at him.”
It sounded like a quarrel, but it was a game, the kind of half-fierce, half-laughing game that boys and hounds play together in mimic war. Also it was born of the fact that Cador knew that there was no one that he was not meant to find, and so could afford the jest. I had never seen a man and a woman make that kind of play together, and it seemed to me good.
“So, but I cannot see it all; it might be a small pink pig. What is it bundled up like that for?”
“Because the sun is westering and the wind grows cold,” Esylt said, suddenly laughing. “He is much the same as he was this morning. But see, if you would have it so,” and she turned back the folds of deerskin, so that the man-child lay naked in its nest, save for the bead of coral that every babe wears around its neck to keep off the Evil Eye. “There is your pink pig.”
Cador grinned at it. “Small and useless,” he said, studying to keep the pride from his voice. “When he comes of an age to bear his shield, that is the time when it may be worth while to have a son.”
And for me, at his words, there was suddenly a shadow over the sky, and the hounds were on my track again.
Cabal, who should have been a bitch for his interest in all young things, thrust forward his muzzle to snuff at the babe, and I stooped quickly to catch his collar and pull him back. He would not have dreamed of harming the thing, but it was in my mind that the mother might be frightened. And as I stooped, Maximus’s seal in my sword hilt sprang from its faulty setting, and fell into the nest of deerskin beside the babe and rolled against his far neck, to lie there an instant holding the fires of the sunset in a small fierce flame of imperial purple.
Esylt stooped and caught it up next instant and gave it back to me, and everybody spoke at once, the women exclaiming over the lucky chance that it had not fallen somewhere among the heather, Cador peering into the empty socket of my pommel; while my men and his crowded around to see. And I laughed, and made a jest of the thing, and tossed the gem in the hollow of my hand. It was all over in the time that it takes a gust of wind to sweep up over the shoulder of Yr Widdfa and die into the grass. But an old woman under the May tree whispered something to her neighbor, and they looked from the child to me and back again, as I turned to follow Cador into the hall. And I caught the gist that was not meant for my ear. “It is a sign! A sign! Constantine is an emperor’s name. . . .”
That was the first time I ever saw Constantine Map Cador face to face. The last was only a few days ago — I am not sure how many, it is hard to keep count of tune — when I named him as my successor before the whole war host. That was on the eve of the battle. The Lord God knows how he will bear the leadership, but he is the last of the line of Maximus, and at least he is a warrior. The choice had to fall on him. . . .
“You had best take that down to Urian my swordsmith,” Cador said. “Blades are the business of his heart, but he can make shift to bed a jewel as surely as any goldsmith of Venta Belgarum.”
And so I went down to the lower Dun, following the directions that he gave me, and found Urian the Smith to reset the great seal for me.
I was still standing propped in the forge doorway, watching the little bullock-shouldered smith — for I would not let the seal out of my sight until it was once more securely in its place — when a step sounded behind me, and I turned to find Fulvius, who had gone down to the coast with a couple of Cador’s men to see about our passages, coming from the direction of the stables.