He gave me a small bow; his face had drained of color so that in the light of the fat-lamp, the faint discoloration of the lids made his eyes seem painted like a woman’s. “My father is overlavish with his praise. . . . There is always, of course, the question of land shape to be considered; this has been a wet summer, and the valley turned oversoft for horses a short distance below our fighting ground. Unfortunately even the most able of your cavalry commanders cannot command a countryside to give him sufficient elbow room.”
I had the sense of trying to hold a marsh light between finger and thumb that one always felt when dealing with Medraut, and knew that whatever purpose I had hoped to serve by this interview, I had served none; none in the world. “So.” I laid Cei’s letter back on the table beside me. “You have accounted for all things most nobly,” and my voice sounded old and hopeless in my own ears.
“That was all my father wished to say to me?”
“Yes. No, one thing more.” I struggled to clear my mind from the gray cloud of weariness that still descended upon me so easily. “I have said that you are among the most able of my cavalry commanders, and that is no more than the truth; you also have the trick of drawing good fortune to you in battle, and so you have a large following. But men do not follow you for love, any more than you lead them for love. If you make more mistakes of that kind you will begin to lose your reputation not only for skill, but for luck, and if you lose that, you will lose your following.”
He smiled, a smile that was light and sweet as honey smeared on aloes, leaves. “My father has no need to warn me, I know to the thumbnail’s breadth what I can afford, and I shall not afford more. I never gamble beyond my means.”
“See that you don’t,” I said, “only see that you don’t, Medraut.”
The smile became yet sweeter, but he still played with his gloves and maybe that was to hide that his hands were shaking. “I have my father’s leave to go? I made great haste to answer his summons, and I am something wet.”
In the doorway, his hand on the golden Ophir rug that hung across the ill-fitting door, he checked and turned once more. “Has any news come to my father lately out of Arfon?”
“What news should there be out of Arfon?”
“Only women’s news, to be sure. They say that Maelgwn has taken a second bride.”
I was surprised, not at the news (for Maelgwn’s first wife had died the previous year, and he was not one to sleep long alone), but that Medraut should trouble with it.
“And begun to build another oratory,” added Medraut.
“So? Is there some connection?”
“The bride was his nephew’s wife — not his half sister, I grant you, but still, his nephew’s wife — Gwen Alarch, they call her.” He was as malicious as a gossiping old woman with a young one’s name in her hands. “The boy was killed hunting, and some say not by accident, but I doubt if Maelgwn loses as much sleep over that as for another cause. . . . Maybe he’ll get him a son yet, and I’d not count too much on his faith-keeping hereafter, if that happens.”
“Na?” I said.
He shook his head. “Na. After all, the Saxon flood will not rise far into the mountains; and with a son to follow him, it must seem the more desirable to make sure of the Lordship of Arfon after you.”
And noticing that he set himself aside from all claim to Arfon, I knew well enough the reason — that he flew at higher game. And again it crossed my mind that it was as well that I had never allowed Constantine to be openly named as my heir. Medraut must know clearly enough where the choice must fall, but as long as nothing was said, he would be in no hurry. There was a deadly patience about him, as there had been about his mother.
The golden rug swung back into place and his light step was swallowed instantly by the wind and the rain — unless he was still standing outside, smiling that light swift sweet smile that made one’s blood feel thin.
Gwalchmai died about that same time, as quietly and suddenly as a tired man falling asleep by the fire after a hard day’s work, Cei told me, weeping for him, when a few days later the first of the Company returned to winter quarters.
The ranks were thinning fast.
NEXT spring I was prepared for another thrust of the Sea Wolves, but though we heard of more of the long war boats following in the wake of last year’s, and others with women and even children, the thrust never came; and when we moved against them in our turn, they simply melted among the forest and marshlands like a mist.
And so as the years passed, the thing settled into a fitful border warfare which has served to keep the Sea Wolves penned within some kind of frontier, but no more. It seems strange, when one comes to think of it, that we have not been able to drive them back into the sea. And yet — I don’t know — there is Pictish blood in the folk of those parts, left over from the great Pict Wars of Maximus’s day; the Picts are second only to the Little Dark People for knowing the secret possibilities of their own countryside, and they do not love the smell of Rome.
Also, we have never, in all these years, been free to turn the whole war host their way; there has been Eburacum and the Lindum coastline in need of our aid, and the Scots from the West every summer, and not even a whole heart within ourselves, for among the princes of the Cymri, who have always fought like dogs whenever the High King’s hand was off them, the word was running to and fro like a little furtive wind through the grass, that Artos the Bear was one who had forgotten his own people to carry a Roman sword. Maybe someone set that word running; I do not know. I know that three years since, I had to deal with the princedoms of Vortiporus and Cynglass as one deals with enemy territory. . . .
This summer the Scots made a sudden attack on Môn and the coast of all the northern Cymri (last summer the harvest failed and last winter was a lean one; that always sets the young men wandering) and I went up with two hundred of the Companions, leaving Cei in command at Venta, to the aid of Maelgwn and the coastwise princes who were for the most part still loyal. The Scots are brave men though their fires flare too windily over too little of red heart; and it was the beginning of harvesttime before the flurry of small buffeting wide-spaced attacks were dealt with to the last one.
We made our base camp, our central stronghold all summer, in the old Roman fort of Segontium that clung to the foot of the mountains commanding the Straits of Môn, until with the shores quiet again, it was time to be turning the horses’ heads south once more. It was a soft evening, that last one I spent — the last that I shall ever spend — among my own hills, the sun westering into a smoky haze beyond the low hills of Môn, and every comber of the western sea shot through with translucent gold as it came in to crash and cream below the fortress walls. Arfon tore at my heart that evening, all the shadowed glens of Arfon and swift white falls of mountain water, and the high tops that were tawny now in late summer as a hound’s coat, and the moss-fragrant woods below Dynas Pharaon where I shall not walk again. I would have put off the parting for a few days longer, lingering, finding some excuse, but I knew we should have slow traveling on the way south, for I intended to swing wide of the direct road, in order to pass through as many of the Cymric and border princedoms as might be, and sup in hall with as many of their lords. I thought it might serve some good purpose, that they should see the High King at their own hearths. God help me, I was still fool enough to cling to that old hopeless dream of a Britain strongly enough bonded to stand with shields still linked, when I was no longer there.