Spears had no part in this kind of fighting, it was work for swords, whether on horseback or on foot, and we strove together almost knee to knee, while the water boiled and the spray flew like the spume of breaking waves. The horses slipped and scrambled among the stones of the ford, neighing in fury, and both of us had flung aside the bullhide bucklers which hampered the bridle arm in maneuvering. Medraut was fighting on the defensive, waiting to pounce. His face was set in a small, bright, curiously rigid smile, and I watched his eyes as one watches the eyes of a wild animal, waiting for it to spring.
But in the end it was I who broke through his guard first with a blow that should have landed between neck and shoulder, but in the same instant his roan stumbled, and the stroke caught him on the comb of his war cap and swept him from the saddle.
He went down with a shuddering splash in his heavy mail sark that sent the water sheeting upward, and was on his feet again, still gripping his sword, while the roan plunged snorting away. He leapt in under my guard with shortened blade, and stabbed upward. The point went under the skirts of my war shirt and entered at the groin, and I felt the white shrieking anguish pierce through me, up and up until it seemed to reach my heart; I felt death enter with it, and was aware of the dark blood gouting over Gray Falcon’s shoulder, and Medraut’s face with the small bright smile still frozen upon it. The sky was darkening, but I knew quite clearly that I had time and strength for one more blow, and I wrenched the horse trampling around upon him, and thrust at the throat, bare above his war sark, as he flung back his head to hold me still in sight. The same blow that I had struck at Cerdic, all those years ago. But this time it did not go amiss. The blood burst out with the blade, it spurted in little bright jets through his fingers when he dropped his sword to clutch with both hands at his throat, and in the moment before he fell, I saw his eyes widen in a kind of wonder. That was the moment when he understood that the doom between us demanded for its fulfillment, not that he should kill me or I him, but that each should be the death of the other.
He opened his mouth gasping for air and blood came out of that too, and with it his last breath in a kind of thin bubbling retch.
As he fell, the whole world swam in one vast darkening circle, and I pitched from the saddle on top of him. I remember hitting the water, and the circle turned black.
I tried to cling to the darkness, but the pain was too bright, too fiery, and tore it from my grasp. And I was lying in this place, in this small cell where I lie now, and the cell was full of tall shadows on the lamplit walls. The hooded shadows of monks, the barbed shadows of gray men in war harness, like the ghosts of some long-forgotten battle. But at first the shadows seemed more real than the men, for I had not thought to wake into the world of living men again. I heard a low mutter that might have been prayer or only the beating of a moth’s wings about the light. I heard someone groaning, too, and felt the slow-drawn rasp of it in my own throat, but did not think at first to connect the two. A shadow, darker than the rest against the lamp, was kneeling beside me; it stirred and bent forward, and I saw that it was not a shadow at all, but Bedwyr. But whether all that was of the first time, or whether other tunes came into it, I do not know; indeed all time has seemed confused these last few days, so that there is no saying, “This thing happened after that,” for all things seem present together, and most things far away, farther, farther away than the night that Ambrosius gave me my wooden foil. . . . I said, “Where is this place?”
Or at least the question came to my mind, and I must have spoken it, for an old ancient Brother, whose tonsured head had a silver nimbus like a rain cloud with the sun behind it, said, “Most often men call it ‘The Island of Apples.’ ”
“I have been here before?” For the name chimed in my head, but I could not remember.
And he said, “You have been here before, my Lord Artos. I took your horse, and led you up to the hall, to Ambrosius at supper,” and I thought that he wept, and wondered why.
I fumbled out a hand to the dark shadow between me and the lamp, which was Bedwyr, and he caught it in his own, the sound one, and drew it to his knee and held it there, and something of life seemed to flow from his hand into mine, so that the leaden chill lifted from my heart and brain, and I was able to think and remember again. I said, “Did we gain time enough? Did Constantine get through in time?”
And Bedwyr said, bending closer, “Constantine got through. The victory is yours, Artos, a narrow victory, but it is yours.”
A great wave of relief rose in me, with the next wave of pain, but the pain outstripped the relief so that for a while I could neither see nor think nor even feel save with the feeling of the flesh. Thank God it no longer comes like that — and when at last it ebbed again, the relief that I had known ebbed with it and grew small and thin. “How narrow?”
“As when two hounds fight until their flanks are laid open and their throats in ribbons, and one breaks off and runs howling; and yet for both hounds alike, there is no more that they can do for a while and a while save crawl into a dark place and lick their wounds.” He began to tell me how Connory of Deva had come in together with the Lords of Strathclyde, and were hounding the surviving Saxons and their allies through the reed country and back toward their southern settlements, while Marius was mustering the remains of the war host to regarrison Venta. I did not ask as to Cei and Flavian; I knew. But I asked after a while, “How many of the Company lived?”
“Of those that remained with the main action, something under half,” he said. “Of your own squadron, Alun Dryfed and little Hilarian” — he told off two or three more names — “and myself.”
“It is more than I expected,” I said, “but then I did not expect to live myself long enough to hear the tally.”
“Medraut’s men lost heart after he was dead. They ran. After that it was easy.”
“And so we have won another lease of time,” I said by and by. “A few more years, maybe.”
“Do you remember saying, once, that every year we gained would mean that just so much more of Britain would survive when the flood overwhelms us at the last?” Bedwyr put his face very near my own as though he were trying to reach me across a great distance, as once I had tried to reach him.
“Did I say that? Pray God the truth is in it. I have labored hard to build a Britain strong and united, but it is in my heart that unless Constantine can hold them, the Tribes will have sprung apart once more before three harvests are gathered, and so presently the Saxons will walk in. . . . Yet maybe we have held the pass long enough for something to survive behind us. I don’t know — I don’t know-”
And then another time, I think it was another tune, I asked Bedwyr when we were alone together, “Bedwyr, does the war host know how it is with me?”