“Sir — let someone else carry the message,” he said after a moment. “I am one of your Companions, I have been your armor-bearer. It is my place to ride with you.”
“It is your place to obey my orders,” I said, and he got up and came and took the packet, hesitated a perceptible moment longer, then touched it to his forehead before stowing it in the sweat-stained breast of his tunic.
When he flung on his cloak and went out into the night as the others had done, his father got up and strolled after him. And I knew that somewhere in the dark outside — probably Flavian would have taken him to his own sleeping place — they would be taking their leave of each other, almost certainly for the last time.
They wasted no time over it; the Minnow needed his few hours’ sleep, and Flavian had work to do like the rest of us. He came back into the mess hall alone, just as we were making ready to leave it, looking much as usual, save that the old scar on his temple showed up more clearly than was its wont, an odd thing to betray a man. He gave me a long steady look of gratitude, and I noticed that the battered signet ring was no longer on his hand, only the skin was very white where it had been.
We were tightening sword belts and kicking the last bones to the hounds, when he paused beside me and asked in an undertone the question that no other man had asked me yet. “Sir — of the men who followed Medraut, did Cei say were there any of the Company?”
“Sixty-seven,” I said, picking up the cloak that I had laid aside in the heat of the hall.
“Oh God!” he said, and choked on the words, and as he turned to pick up with needless care a fallen ale cup, I thought I heard him sob.
“It will be mostly the young ones — the cubs grow weary of following an old leader.” I gripped his shoulder for an instant in passing. “Not your cub.”
And he was beside me, master of himself again, when I came with the rest of the fighting men behind me, to the entrance. Men and shadows were hurrying to and fro, and the soft blustery darkness of the hills was teased with torches. Maelgwn’s summons had begun to take effect already, for among our own big horses standing ready saddled or being walked up and down on the grass-grown parade ground, the fitful light touched on the shaggy flanks of more than a score of the wiry hill ponies and the bright hair and enameled dagger hilts of the tribesmen who rode them. And for a moment my heart lifted at the sight.
The moon was just shaking clear of the mountains inland when we rode out from Segontium, each man with a rolled-up cloak and a bag of cheese and bannocks strapped behind his saddle, for on this road we must cover the ground too swiftly for even the lightest of pack beasts. At the last, Maelgwn with his household warriors behind him had come to my stirrup, and promised again to be after me with a full war host before the dust had settled behind our horses’ heels. I had leaned down to him from the saddle, and we spat and struck palms on it like men sealing a bargain. He meant his promise, but I knew that he would fail me, even then, as surely as I knew that old Cynglass and Vortiporus of Dyfed were already my enemies. There was a small son up at Dynas Pharaon, with Gwen Alarch, his mother.
WE struck away inland by the mountain road to the head of the Lake of Bala — from there one may look up the long tangle of glens southwestward toward Coed Gwyn, not much over an hour’s ride away — and then turned farther southward by a half-lost herding track, and began the grueling business of getting the horses across country by ridge crests and up and down slopes of rock and scree where even the sure-footed mountain ponies could scarcely pass. Much of the way we walked and scrambled, leading and dragging the poor beasts behind us. The second night we slept chilled and dripping above the cloud line, slept for no more than a few hours and then pushed on again. Once we came near to losing three of the horses in a peat moss. But we got through at last, and in better time than if we had followed the long road around by Mediomanum. The sun was well up, and the mists of the summer morning rising, when we came down from the high moors, past the worked-out copper mines at the head of the stream that fed the first beginnings of the great Sabrina. The cotton grass was in flower and the first harebells in the shelter of the old mine workings, and the little amber bees were busy among the bell heather. And looking back I could still see Yr Widdfa upreared like a cloud shadow in the sky. I made my salute to it, as one does to a chieftain, in farewell, and we pushed on the flagging horses down the broadening streamside toward the Sabrina head, and Viroconium in the lush lowlands.
At Viroconium we managed to get remounts for the worse spent of the horses, and pushed on again, south by Glevum and Corinium and on down the Cunetio road that carried us within a few miles of Badon Hill, and out along the last long rolling stride of the downs to Sorviodunum.
And all the length of our wild ride, as the news spread like forest fire, men came in to join us in ones and twos and little reckless bands of horsemen, so that when we came in sight of the small fortress city crouched on its hilltop, I had more than four hundred flying cavalry behind me, in place of the two hundred that had followed me north. We had been just under six days on the road, but five of the horses died in their picket lines that night.
The war camp was spread across the low ground about the gray walled mount which rose for a citadel in its midst, and the smoke of evening cooking fires lying over it in a haze that softened the outline of fodder stacks and branch-woven bothies; and out of the haze the familiar many-mingled sounds of a great camp came to meet us, the cracked bell note of hammer on armorer’s anvil over all. At any rate Cei had received my message. Our coming must have been seen by the scouts while we were still at a distance, for already men were hurrying down from the higher fringes of the camp to press about the stockade gateway and cheer us in — cheer us as though we had come to lead them to another Badon. And Cei was at my stirrup before I had well reined in — or rather, a gaunt, gray, red-eyed, avenging ghost in the likeness of Cei, with his buckler already clanging behind his shoulder.
“What news?” I demanded.
“The Saxons and the Scots have joined shields, something over a day’s march to the west.”
So we were too late. Well, I had had little hope of catching the two halves of the enemy host before they could combine. I swung a leg over my tired horse’s back, and dropped heavily to the ground. “How many do they muster?”
“All told, some eight thousand, if the scouts make no mistake. Noni Heron’s Feather is in the camp now, if you would speak with him.”
I nodded. “How many of ours?”
“Not much above half that as yet. I dared wait no more than four days before marching. Marius and Tyrnon are gathering more to bring on after us, but the gathering is none so easy, in these times — may his soul rot for it!”
“That he chooses harvesttime? In his place I should do the same,” I said. Neither of us spoke Medraut’s name in that first moment.
He looked at me with a furious grief in his hot blue eyes. “I was not thinking of the harvesttime, not so much of the harvesttime. I was thinking that one toad’s poison may spread a long way. It isn’t only the men who have marched out with him to join the Saxon camp; even over those that bide still in their own places, even over some of those who answered the muster call, he has smeared his own foul slime. Three days since a man said to my very face, ‘Why should we not have peace with Cerdic and his kind as we have with the men of the Saxon shore? With Artos it is all fighting, even with his own people among the hills, and we must leave the harvest to ruin. Medraut knows a better way.’ ”