I saw the harper looking at me through the blue smoke drift of the dung fire. But it was Fulvius who spoke first. “I should scarce have thought to hear that song in Septimania, unless it was one of our own pack that gave tongue to it.”
Bedwyr the Harper smiled, his crooked mouth touched with mockery. “I am from the settlement that the Emperor Maximus made with his Sixth Legion veterans in Armorica and my father’s mother was from Powys. Does that answer your question?” His speaking voice was deep, a singer’s voice, and touched with mockery also.
Fulvius nodded, and passed him the wine jar. Flavian set the basket of cold meat and olives before him, and he accepted both without comment, returning the harp gently to the embroidered doeskin bag like a man rehooding his falcon. The mule drivers, seeing that there would be no more singing, at least for a while, had drifted away.
I said, “It explains how you came to have the songs of Britain in your harp bag, but scarcely why you should choose one of them for us. Do we wear Britannicus branded on our foreheads?“
“All Narbo Martius knows that the chieftains are from Britain to buy stallions and brood mares,” he said, eating bread and olives in alternate bites. And then he said the thing that I knew he had come to say. “Why did you refuse the Black One? He would sire fine sons.”
“Does all Narbo Martius know that the stallions are for siring?”
“Is it not clear to see? Every horse that my lord has chosen, the points that he has looked for are those that make for strong breeding, in the stallions as well as the mares. My lord has been buying, not these horses but their sons. . . . Why turn from the Black One?”
“We are from Britain, as you have said yourself. That means a long road north and a sea crossing. If I mistake not, the horse is a killer.”
“Your true killer slays for pleasure like a wildcat,” Bedwyr said. “This one’s heart is angry, that is a different thing. He is what he is because he was mishandled in his colt days.”
“You know him, then?”
“I never saw him until today. But brother may know brother . . .”
That was the only time, I think, in twenty years, that I ever heard him speak, however indirectly, of his own colt days, and I would sooner, I think, have asked Aquila how it felt to wear a Saxon thrall ring, than have probed into what he did not choose to tell me.
“I think maybe you are right. Certainly he handled well enough for you,” I said, and scarcely noticed at the time, though I remembered it after, how he looked up at that as though a new thought had opened in him, and then returned to the meat in his hand. “But nevertheless, he must find another master than me.”
But I wished that it need not be so. The Black One had taken my fancy more than almost any other of the horses that I had seen in Narbo Martius.
The wine jar came my way, and I drank and passed it on to Bericus beside me, and returned to an earlier thing. “And now — since you know so clearly what it is that we do in Narbo Martius, do you make fair return, and tell us what brings you here, so far from your own hunting runs.”
On the face of it, it was a foolish question to ask of a strolling harper, but there was something about this man that set him apart from the ordinary wandering minstrel drifting from lord’s hall to fairground; a purpose about him that was at odds with any kind of drifting; and I thought it unlikely that a professional harper would have turned his hand to the kind of work that he had been doing that morning.
And suddenly his eyes, meeting mine through the acid smoke, flashed into a mocking awareness of what I was thinking. “I am on my way to Constantinople, in hope of joining the Emperor’s bodyguard,” he said, and watched me to see what I would make of it.
“I think you hope that I will not believe you,” I said, “but oddly enough, I do.” I was leaning forward as he was, arms across knees, and we spoke to each other through the dung smoke as though the others around the fire did not exist.
“I wonder why.”
“Because for one thing, if for some reason you were lying, you would choose a less wild tale to tell.”
“Sa! I will remember that for a future need; if I wish to lie and be believed, always to make the lie great enough. Does the tale seem so very wild, then? They say that nowadays, with the Ostrogoths pressing against the frontiers, the Emperor will give his sword to any good fighting man of any nation that comes his way. And it will be good to see Constantinople, and a splendor that does not lie in ruins; good to have a sword, and a cause to use it in.” For one moment his manhood and his mocking reserves fell away from him, and I saw through the smoke a boy looking at me with hopeful eyes.
“It is only the length of the road that makes it seem strange. I have heard that now the old posting services are dead, for a traveler without great store of gold it takes the best part of two years.”
“So — but I am well on my way already, and as to the gold, my harp and the odd task such as I had today will see that I do not starve.” Bedwyr reached for another olive and sat tossing it idly from hand to hand, and the boy was a man again, and the subject closed. “Doubtless I should travel swifter with a Lucitanian colt between my knees. But I should see less of the road on the way, and since I shall travel it but once, I’d as lief see more of it than a cloud of my own dust.”
“Are they so swift then, this Lucitanian breed?”
He looked at me, still tossing the olive from hand to hand. “The mares are served by the west wind, so I have heard, and the foals are as swift as their sire, but live only three years. You should strike a bargain with the west wind, my lord — it might come cheaper in the long run than buying Septimanian stallions.”
“I can well believe in this Powys-born grandmother of yours, for you have a true Cymric tongue in your head. . . . But as for me, I need size and strength in my war-horses — the striking power of Camulus’s thunderbolts, not the speed of the west wind.”
“War-horses?” he said.
“Did you think I wished to breed them for the Hippodrome? Our need is for war-horses, in Britain. Here it has been the Goths, but with us it is still the Saxons, and compared to the Saxon, the Goth is the very flower of gentleness. Gaul has not known the tearing of the Sea Wolf’s fangs, and for the most part Gaul has had the sense to lie quietly in the dust while the conquerors ride over. But in Britain we choose another way, and our need is for war-horses.”
He sat back on his heels, and looked at me with level eyes. “Who are you, my lord, that speak of Britain as a chieftain speaks of his war band?”
“I was named Artorius on my ninth day, but most men call me Artos the Bear,” I said, thinking that the name would mean nothing to him.
“So. We have heard that name — a little — even in Armorica where the Sea Wolves do not run,” he said; and then, “Truly my lord should take the Dark One, for they are worthy of each other.”
And suddenly we were all laughing, whirled up into choking mirth by his persistence; and Bedwyr laughed with us, over the rim of the wine jar that he had caught up; but it seemed to me that the laughter only brushed his surface as a puff of wind brushes the surface of a dark pool.
That night when we lay down to sleep with our feet to the fire, I could have laughed at my idiot fancy of the night before, for the day was passed and nothing, apart from the newly purchased; horses in the picket lines, had come of it, after all. Yet I thought about Bedwyr in the time that followed, almost as much as I did about the black horse, and next day constantly found myself looking out for them in the sweating and trampling and the dust clouds of the horse yards. The horse I glimpsed twice, though I did not go near him again, and guessed that other men besides myself must have seen the killer in his eyes, that he hung so long in the market. Bedwyr I did not see at all in the horse yards; but at evening I passed him among the crowd about one of the cheap wine booths. He was drunk, to judge by the flush along his cheekbones and the hectic brightness of his eyes; he had a little dark red rose stuck behind one ear, and flourished a wine jug at me as I passed, shouting something about damping the dust on the road to Constantinople.