I turned to go and found him almost on me: the snow had muffled his footsteps. We looked at each other, for the first time really since the fire, and I saw the deeper lines in his face, the marks of grief and long brooding. He said:
“Health, Luke. You have come to see me?”
I said stupidly: “To see you? Here? You live here?”
“Why not? It is my home.”
As we both knew, he had left it last summer to join my father in the palace, at the time when Aunt Mary refused the offer of a bigger house. I had assumed that from the palace he had gone to live in the Lines, with the other unmarried Captains.
I said: “You have no woman to tend you.”
“I have the maids.”
“Polymufs . . .”
He shrugged. “They see to things.”
It was unheard of for a man, except sometimes when bereaved and old, to live without human care and companionship, of wife, mother, sister—some womanly relation. It showed how badly he had taken things that he should do so; and made the notion of him turning Christian just a little less incredible. But even apart from the solitariness, how could he bear to go on living with such memories as the house must continually call to mind? I found it bad enough to have to look at the snow-topped ruins of the palace’s north wing. To be in the house—listen to the ticking of the clock she wound each night, look at the plants in pots of which she had been so proud—was to seek pain which anyone in his right mind would shun.
While I hesitated, trying to think of something to say, he said:
“Are you coming in?”
“No. I have . . . someone to see.”
We looked at each other. I do not know what he thought—that I had come to gloat, perhaps—but I knew there was nothing I could say which would bridge the chasm between us. We called each other cousin, and in fact were half brothers. We had been friends. We could not become strangers. It left only one thing: we must be enemies.
• • •
Winter ended at last in a thaw accompanied by rain storms which made the river flood its banks; the waters rose at one point to lap against the block of stone in the High Street which still carried the broken legs of what had been a statue—of a great Prince of ancient times, it was said. But when the rains stopped and the west wind died away there was fitful sunlight and everywhere the trees began to bud, bursting into green as though to make up for time lost.
It was the Spring Fair again, and the Contest. Not a good one: the favorite was Mark Greene and he won without much difficulty and took the jeweled sword. I sat with the spectators, my own sword hanging from my belt, and heard people talk about how much better the Contest had been last year. They said flattering things and I made awkward replies. Later Edmund, who had sat with me, said:
“One would think you did not like praise, you receive it so awkwardly.”
“I like the thought of it,” I said, “but the reality makes me uneasy.”
He smiled. “You must learn to overcome that. Or at least not to show it.”
“Praise is worth having from a few. Those whose judgment one values.”
“And if I tell you it was a better Contest last year?”
We laughed. I said: “And would have been better still with a different ending?”
“True enough!” He paused. “If I had not underrated you as I did . . . I fought it over in my mind often enough afterward and knew I could have beaten you. I would have liked a second chance.”
“There are no second chances.”
“Not in the Contest, I agree.”
“Not in anything that matters.”
He shook his head. “I will not accept that, Luke. I will never accept it.”
It was at this time that my father roused himself from the torpor which had held him for so many months. Orders were given and obeyed. The ruins of the north wing were cleared away by polymufs, and after them came builder dwarfs and there was sawing of wood and hammering of nails all day. Others worked on the rest of the palace, mending and cleaning and painting.
Nor was that the end of the city’s new activity. The dwarfs were also busy in the Armory and at harness-making. People had said that with the Prince sunk in melancholy there would be no fighting this year. Now they knew differently. He still did not smile but he seemed possessed by a fury that drove him toward action. He was up at daybreak and busy all day making preparations for the campaign. In the middle of April the army rode out to the southwest.
I rode with them. Not, it is true, as a warrior, though I wore my sword, but as assistant to the Sergeant in charge of the camp followers. These were the men who looked after the Prince and the Captains in the field, putting up tents, seeing to equipment, cooking and so on. It was work which in the city would have been done by polymufs but no army took polymufs with it even as menials. These were men unfit for one reason or another to be warriors but glad enough to go with the army, for pickings or maybe just for the excitement. They were a rough lot and unruly when they were in drink but the Sergeant, a gray-bearded man called Burke, with a limp that came from an old sword wound, ruled them well.
We made up a baggage train, the gear loaded on carts pulled by mules. We did not always take the same route as the army—the mules were sure-footed but the carts themselves could not always go where horses could. It was particularly true on this campaign, for we were riding against Petersfield which lay in a fold on the far side of the Downs. The ground to be traversed was hilly and often rough. We made our way to appointed places and worked hard, having a longer road to travel.
I learned a lot, from the best way of sleeping on hard ground with only a single blanket to keep out the cold to the techniques of killing and skinning and jointing a bullock: once we were out of our own territory we lived, as raiding armies always did, on the land we were invading. I had thought myself fit but soon became much fitter. My hands were first sore then calloused from the labors of mule-driving, loading and unloading, hauling on ropes to free carts whose wheels were stuck in the mud. I wished often enough that I could be with the main body of the army, riding high up across the shoulder of a hill while we struggled along beneath them, but this at any rate was better than being left with the garrison in the city.
Our boundary followed the river as far north as West Meon. It was there the army crossed, taking the broader southerly route through the Downs, and I looked on foreign fields for the first time in my life. They seemed no different from our own, growing wheat and potatoes, very few with cattle. (Dairy farming was for the most part carried on in parts closer to the cities, where the beasts were not so vulnerable to raiders.) We passed through a hamlet less than a mile inside the border. Its single street was empty, the windows tight shuttered on the houses, silent except for a dog barking somewhere out of sight. But we knew that eyes would be watching us, and that the pigeons would be in flight, carrying word of our coming to Petersfield.
The battle took place a week later and I saw it all. We had come up from cultivated land to higher ground cropped by sheep and halted. We had a spring-fed stream with a good head of water and the sheep kept us in fresh meat. My father waited for the Prince of Petersfield to meet him. The scouts brought news of his coming one drab gray morning with a chill east wind driving gusts of rain in our faces. Our camp was in the lee of a rounded hill topped by a clump of trees, like our own St. Catherine’s. I told Burke I wanted to go up there to watch.
He said: “If you like, Master. I’ve seen enough fights in my time but you’re young enough to have the appetite.”