Ambrosius was staring into the red heart of the brazier, his black brows drawn together in thought. Then he said, “Too long. It will take too long. With twice as many you might have enough of your big brutes grown and broken to mount at least your best men in three or four years; within ten you might well be able to mount your whole force.”
“I know,” I said, and we looked at each other through the faint smoke drift and the tawny upward glow of the brazier that threw into relief the old brand of Mithras between Ambrosius’s brows that scarcely showed by daylight.
“You spoke of yourself a while since, as of a son going out into the world,” he said at last. “So be it, you are all the son I ever had or ever shall have, and the Lord of Light forbid that I should send you out with an empty hand. We are none of us rich in these days, and one cannot build a fortress for nothing, or you should have more. I will give you the price of another ten beasts.” And then before I could thank him, he rose with the controlled swiftness that was part of him, and turned away, saying, “More light, Bear Cub, the candles are at your elbow.”
And while I lit a twig at the brazier and kindled the thick honey-wax candles on the writing table, he crossed to the big chest against the far wall, and stooped and flung back the lid. The candle flames sank, and then sprang up into the shape of laurel leaves, gold fringed with the perfect blue of the sky’s zenith at the heart, and the room that had been lost in shadows sprang to life, the bull’s-head frescoes on the walls, the scroll ends of Ambrosius’s treasured library making a dim black-and-gold lozenge pattern in their shelves; and the storm and darkness of the night seemed to crouch back a little.
Ambrosius had taken something long and narrow from the chest and was turning back the folds of oiled linen that had been bound about it. “A while since also,” he said, “you spoke of my giving you your wooden foil. Let this serve instead — Give me your own in exchange for it.” And he turned and put into my hands a sword. It was a long cavalry spatha exactly like the one that I had carried since I became a man; and not knowing quite what to do, I drew it from its black wolfskin sheath, and let the light run like water on the blade. It was a fine weapon, perfectly balanced so that as I cut the air with it, it came up again into my hand almost of its own accord; but so did my own blade. Then I made a discovery. “Ambrosius, it is your sword!”
I suppose he saw my bewilderment, for sitting down again in his chair by the fire, he half smiled. “Yes, it is my sword. But not all my sword. Look at the pommel.”
The hilt was of bronze finely inlaid with silver along the shoulders, the grip bound with silver wires, and as I reversed it, holding it point down, I saw that set into the pommel was a great square amethyst. It was so dark in color as to be almost of the imperial purple, and as I moved it, suddenly the light of the candles gathered in it, and far down through the lucid depth, a spark of violet radiance blazed for an instant like a small fierce jet of flame. And above it, clear on the pale surface sheen of the gem, I saw an imperial eagle, intaglio cut, grasping in its claws a double M; and spelled out around the edge, turning the sword to catch the light on the letters, the single word IMPERATOR.
“Do you remember that?” Ambrosius asked.
“Yes, you showed it to me once; it is Maximus’s seal.” It had been kept always at Dynas Pharaon m the home hall of the Lords of Arfon, and so had escaped the rising that swept so much away. “But it was not in any sword then.”
“No, I had it set for you, and the sword seemed the most fit setting.”
I remember that I stood for a long time looking at the great seal, waking and losing the star in the heart of the amethyst, oddly moved by the link across the years with my great-grandsire, the proud Spanish general who had married a princess of Arfon and so founded our line before his own legionaries had proclaimed him Emperor and he had marched out to his Gaulish campaigns and his death at Aquileia. After his execution, one of his officers had got his seal back to Arfon, to the princess his wife; and now it seemed to me that I was holding the whole history of our line in the dark depth of the gem that was so nearly the color of an emperor’s mantle. A stormy and a bitter history, but a proud one; of Maximus himself; of Constantine, the son he had left, sweeping down from the Arfon glens, out of the very snows of Yr Widdfa, to drive back the Saxon hordes, dying at last of a murderer’s javelin in the throat, here at Venta in his own hall. Ambrosius had told me that story often enough; he had been only nine years old, and Utha two years older, for they were the sons of their father’s old age; but he had told me once that he still dreamed of the firebrands and the shouting, and being carried off across somebody’s saddlebow with a cloak flung over his head. It had been days before he knew that he and Utha, snatched away by a faithful few of their father’s household warriors, were all that was left of the Royal House of Britain; months before he knew that Vortigern of Powys, Vortigern the Red Fox, their marriage-kinsman, had usurped the chief power in the land. Vortigern’s story was in the seal, too; Vortigern the dreamer of magnificent twilight dreams, to whom all that had to do however distantly with Rome was a worse thing than the menace of the Saxon hordes; who had brought in Saxon war bands to hold down the Picts for him, and found too late that he had called the Wolves in over his threshold. And there in the seal, too, was I, who now held it. . . . My mother died when I was born, and either because he felt himself guilty of her death, or because I was, after all, a son, Utha took me into his household and put me to nurse with the wife of his chief hunter; and after Utha’s death on a boar’s tusk, Ambrosius took me in his stead. I was four summers old then, and thrust among the hounds for the place next to his knee, and when I got it, was content. I was, as he had said, the only son he ever knew, and assuredly he was all the father I had ever needed. Through the years of waiting and making ready that were the years of my own growing up, through the years of long-drawn warfare that followed, quickening at last to our autumn’s victory, I had ridden with Ambrosius since I was fifteen and first judged man enough to carry my sword. Therefore it had not been easy to tell him tonight that henceforth I must ride alone. But I think that he had known it already.
Again the star blazed up in the royal depth of the amethyst, and I thought of another thing, and looked up. “Ambrosius — you cannot give me this. The sword, yes, I take that gladly in exchange for mine; but the seal is another matter. It is of the Royal House, even as you say.”
“Well? And are you not of the Royal House? Not your father’s son?”
“My mother’s also,” I said.
“Who, then, should I give it to?”
“You have not so many gray hairs that you need take much thought of that as yet. When the time comes — Cador of Dumnonia, I suppose.” I saw in my mind’s eye the dark reckless face of the prince of the Dumnonia, close to Ambrosius’s at the coronation feast. Thin and fiery like the fierce spirit that our people make from grain. A warrior, yes; but a High King . . . ?
“He has less of the royal blood in him than you, and that on the mother’s side.”
“He is not a bastard,” I said. And the word sounded harshly in my own ears.
There was another silence; Cabal whimpered in his sleep, chasing dream hares, and the sleet spattered more sharply at the window. Then Ambrosius said, “Bear Cub, has that left a scar?”