“How if I made you Dux Britanniorum?” Ambrosius said.
“I should still be your man, under your orders. Do you not see? — Britain is broken back into as many kingdoms as before the Eagles came; if I hold to any one king, even you, the rest of Britain will go down. Ambrosius, I shall always be your man in the sense in which a son going out into the world remains son to his father. Always I will play my part with you as best I may in any wider plan, and if you should be so sore pressed at any day that without me you cannot hold back the tide, then I will come, no matter what the cost. But short of that, I must be my own man, free to go where the need is sorest as I see it. . . . If I were to take a Roman title, it would be the one borne by the commander of our mobile cavalry forces in the last days of Rome — not Dux, but Comes Britanniorum.”
“So, the Count of Britain. Three calvary wings and complete freedom,” Ambrosius said.
“I could do it with less; three hundred men, if they were a brotherhood.”
“And with three hundred men you believe that you can save Britain?” He was not mocking me, he never mocked at any man; he was simply asking a question.
But I did not answer at once, for I had to be sure. Once the answer was made, I knew that there could be no unmaking it again. “With three hundred men properly mounted, I believe that I can thrust back the Barbarians at least for a while,” I said at last. “As for saving Britain — I have seen the wild geese flighting this autumn, and who can turn them back? It is more than a hundred years that we have been struggling to stem this Saxon flighting, more than thirty since the last Roman troops left Britain. How much longer, do you think, before the darkness closes over us?” It was a thing that I would not have said to any man save Ambrosius.
And he answered me as I do not think he would have answered any other man. “God knows. If your work and mine be well wrought, maybe another hundred years.”
The shutter banged again, and somewhere in the distance I heard a smothered burst of laughter. I said, “Then why don’t we yield now, and make an end? There would be fewer cities burned and fewer men slain in that way. Why do we go on fighting? Why not merely lie down and let it come? They say it is easier to drown if you don’t struggle.”
“For an idea,” Ambrosius said, beginning again to play with the dragon arm ring; but his eyes were smiling in the firelight, and I think that mine smiled back at him. “Just for an idea, for an ideal, for a dream.”
I said, “A dream may be the best thing to die for.”
Neither of us spoke again for a while after that. Then Ambrosius said, “Pull up that stool. It seems that neither of us has much thought of sleep, and assuredly there are matters that we must speak of.” And I knew that a part of my life had shut behind me, and ahead lay a new way of things.
I pulled up a stool with crossed antelope legs — it was stronger than it looked — and sat down. And still we were silent. Again it was Ambrosius who broke the silence, saying thoughtfully, “Three hundred men and horses, together with spare mounts. What of baggage?”
“As little as may be. We cannot be tied down to a string of lumbering wagons, we must be free-flying as a skein of wildfowl. A few fast mule carts for the field forge and heavy gear, two to three score pack beasts with their drivers — those must be fighting men too, when need arises, and serve as grooms and cooks in camp. The younger among us to act as armor-bearers for their seniors. And for the rest, we must carry our own gear as far as may be, and live on the country.“
“That may not make you beloved of the country on which you live.”
“If men would keep the roofs on their barns, they must pay with some of the grain in them,” I said. It was the first of many times that I was to say much the same thing.
He looked at me with one eyebrow faintly raised. “You have the whole thing at your fingers’ ends.”
“I have thought about it through many nights.”
“So. Three hundred mounted fighting men with spare horses, mule carts, pack beasts — geldings I take it? — with their grooms and drivers. Have you thought where they are to come from?” He leaned forward. “I make no doubt that you could raise the whole number and more, many more, from among the ranks of the war host; you have whistled all the best of the young men to follow you, as it is; and I should be left with Aquila and a few veterans who held to me for old time’s sake.” He tossed the glinting arm ring from right hand to left, and back again. “Only I cannot raise and man my fortress with a few grandsires. I will spare you a hundred fighting men of your own choosing, from among the trained troops, and a draft of twenty horses every other year from among the Arfon horse runs for so long as you need them. The rest, both mounts and men, you must find for yourself.”
“It’s a beginning,” I said. “The problem of horses troubles me more than the men.”
“Why, so?”
“Our native horse breeds have dwindled in size since the Legions ceased to import mounts for their cavalry.”
“They acquitted themselves none so ill at Guoloph last autumn — you of all men should know that,” Ambrosius said, and began to hum very softly, part of the triumph song that old Traherne our harper had made for me on the night after that battle. “Then came Artorius, Artos the Bear, thundering with his squadrons from the hill; then the world shook and the sods flew like startled swallows from beneath his horses’ hooves . . . like leaves before a wind, like waves before a galley’s prow the war hosts of Hengest curled back and scattered. . . .“
“It is in my mind that Traherne had been drinking to our victory and the Gods of the Harp spoke to him in a blaze of heather beer,” I said. “But as for the horses: they are fine little brutes, our native hill breeds; swift and valiant, and surefooted as mountain sheep — and not much larger. Save for Arian there’s scarce a horse in all our runs that is up to my weight with even the lightest armor.”
“Armor?” he said quickly. We had always ridden light, in leather tunics much like the old Auxiliary uniform, with our horses undefended.
“Yes, armor. Chain-mail shuts for the men — they would have to come as and when we could take them in battle, there are no British armorers that have that particular skill. Boiled leather would serve for the horses’ breast guards and cheekpieces. It was so that the Goths broke our Legions at Adrianople close on two hundred years ago; but the Legions never fully learned the lesson.”
“A student of world history.”
I laughed. “Was I not schooled by your old Vipsanius, whose mind was generally a few hundred years and a few thousand miles away? But he talked sense now and then. It is the weight that does it, the difference between a bare fist and one wearing the cestus.”
“Only you need the bigger horses.”
“Only I need the bigger horses,” I agreed.
“What is the answer?”
“The only answer that I can think of is to buy a couple of stallions — the Goths of Septimania breed such horses — of the big forest strain, sixteen or seventeen hands high, and a few mares, and breed from them and the best of our native mares.”
“And as to price? You’ll not get such beasts for the price of a pack pony.”
“They cost, on the average as I gather, the stallions each as much as six oxen; the mares rather more. I can raise perhaps the price of two stallions and seven or eight mares from my own lands that you passed on to me from my father — without selling off the land, that is: I’ll not betray my own folk by selling them like cattle to a new lord.”