Fool! Fool! Fool!
With a short while to waste before supper, I had gone up with Maelgwn into the old watchtower at the southeast angle of the fort, to look at the falcons we had housed there — Maelgwn was a falconer to his fingertips, like Pharic, and where he went his hawks went too. I can see the small round chamber now — lit partly by the coppery sunset light through the archer’s window, partly by the flare of the newly kindled torch in its sconce by the winding stair-head. The hawks and falcons hooded and unhooded on their perches, with the startling black and white slashes of their mutes patterning the wall behind them. I can smell the smoke curling up the stair from the driftwood and sea-wrack fire that the falconers had lit in the chamber below, and hear the harsh cries and wing clappings of feeding time. Maelgwn had pulled on an ancient hawking glove, and was feeding the birds himself, taking from his falconer the gobbets of meat, and holding each in turn to the bird that snatched it from him. The last, and clearly his favorite, was a young golden eagle, whom he took up to feed on the fist. “This one I took myself from the eyrie in May; a small thing of down and quills, but a demon even then — eh, my Lucifer?” He held a bloody partridge to the bird, who took it with a lightning strike of the talons, and began to break it up with the delicacy of its kind; and then, the food being gone, rattled his feathers and sat with distended crop, brooding on his lord’s fist, like a chained Caesar and outglaring the world in general with a mad topaz eye. They were two of a kind, I thought, watching the man standing where he had moved into the window with the great bird on his fist; both predators, both knowing no law but their own, both magnificent in their way, and I wondered again if they were true, those tales of his first wife’s death being no natural one. It was certainly true that he had killed the boy for the sake of Gwen Alarch’s pretty hair and little soft breasts. Well, he would hold Arfon with a strong hand after me, he might ride the princedom with a wolf bit himself, but assuredly no other would encroach on its borders. I wished that I could be as sure of Constantine’s strength.
Suddenly Maelgwn’s likeness to the eagle sharpened, as his eyes widened, focusing on something a long way off, and his finger checked in the light repeated movement of drawing again and again down the burnished neck feathers.
He said nothing, but I got up from the box on which I had been sitting and crossed to the window.
Far up the track that had once been the military road from Moridunum and the South a small puff of dust caught the last of the sunlight and turned to a golden smudge with a seed of darkness at its heart. It was scarcely larger than a plume of thistle silk, and yet I knew — or maybe it only seemed afterward as though I knew — that it was the doom I had waited for almost forty years, that the rider hammering down the old road through the mountains, with his dust cloud rolling behind him, was the Dark Rider, for me.
“Someone has an urgent tale to tell, that he carries it at that speed,” Maelgwn said.
I nodded, but I do not think I spoke; watching that small ominous plume of dust spin nearer at breakneck speed, dropping out of the sunlight that still clung to the skirts of the hills, into the shadows that were already creeping in across the coast. And a few moments later I heard, faintly, faintly as the blood in my own ears, above the soft voice of the sea, the beat of horse’s hooves. In a little, I could see the horseman, bent low over his horse’s neck, and the drum of hooves rose pounding and urgent; it was almost dusk now, below the fortress walls, and men and torches were gathering to the gate. I pushed off with my hands from the high cold window ledge; time to go down. . . . “It will be for me,” I said, and turned and clattered down the winding stair, my own shadow wheeling darkly ahead of me on the torchlit wall. Maelgwn followed me, still carrying the golden eagle, and at the foot of the stairway Flavian joined us, hurrying from the stables.
The gates were open when we reached the clear space before them, and in the midst of a small startled crowd a man was dropping from the back of a foundered horse. The poor brute was black with sweat and crusted with the summer dust, his flanks heaved distressfully, and the foam dripping from his muzzle as he stood with drooping head was rank and bloody; and the rider, staggering where he stood, was in little better case, white from head to foot with the dust that had made raw red rims around his bleared eyes, save where the trickling sweat had cut channels in it down his haggard forehead and cheeks. Indeed it was small wonder that in the first moment of seeing him neither Flavian nor I recognized his son.
Then Flavian uttered a startled exclamation, and it was as though a film dropped from my eyes. “Minnow! What word do you bring me?”
He looked up at sound of my voice, and came and stumbled onto his knees at my feet, his head and shoulders hanging. “An ill word.” The dust was in his throat too, and his voice a mere croak. “An ill word, my Lord Artos. Do not make me speak it; it is all here in this letter —”
I took the roll which he pulled from the breast of his tunic and handed up to me, broke Cei’s familiar seal and snapped the crimson thread, and opened it out. Someone was holding a torch for me, and the flames of it, teased by the light sea wind that was rising with sunset, fluttered over the crabbed writing. Yet I had none of my usual difficulty in reading anything from Cei’s hand; it was as though it read itself, every word striking up at me from the ill-cured parchment with a small cold separate shock. I read on, neither slow nor quick, and when the last word was reached, looked up, with a head that felt cold and clear and oddly separate from my body. I saw the faces of my own Companions and those who followed Maelgwn turned toward me in the torchlight, stilled in waiting and unspoken question.
“This is from Cei,” I said. “He sends me word that Cerdic of the West Seax has been strengthened by a great war fleet from the Ligis Estuary — a lean summer and a hard winter we had last year, you’ll remember — and that Medraut my son has raised the standard of revolt against me. He has left the war host, taking a goodly following of our young warriors with him, and joined himself to Cerdic at Vindocladia. They have sent out the Cran Tara for the Scots and the Painted People in Gaul to join them.”
The silence closed in over my voice, and went on and on, the sound of the sea echoed hollow in it, and a crying of gulls like lost souls.
Nobody spoke; they were waiting for me to speak again; only somebody swallowed thickly, and I saw Flavian’s hand clench on his sword belt until the knuckles shone waxy white as mutton bone. In the end it was not I, but Maelgwn’s great golden eagle that broke the silence when it had begun to seem unbreakable so that it must endure forever. Disturbed by what he felt around him, and swift as all his kind to catch the mood of men, he began to bate wildly from the fist, leaping against his jesses while his jarring screams tore the silence across and across and his vast beating wingspread seeming to shut out the sky. Maelgwn fought to quieten and control him, cursing softly, while the great wings thrashed about his head, and now that the silence was broken, men’s voices splurged up, and incredulous and impotently raging.
When at last the great bird was quieted, and the men, answering to my upflung fist, had grown silent again, I heard my own voice against the wash of the tide. “It will be moonrise in about three hours. In three hours we ride south, my brothers.” And the words seemed to be an echo of something said before.
(“For God’s sake come!” Cei had written. “Gathering all men possible by the way. We need every man, but above all, for God’s sake come yourself with all speed, for if ever we needed you to lead us, we need you now!”)