The Lantern Bearers (book III) (24 page)

Better for both Hengest and for Vortigern her lord (whose good, in this thing, was Hengest’s good) that the Young Fox should be out of the way. But she had not told Vortigern what she did. He was a dreaming fool whose purpose always broke under any strain, and he might shrink from his own good. Later, when the thing was done, and maybe Ambrosius’s following had fallen apart like a rotten apple, she would tell him what he owed to her, and watch him writhe.

A day came when they were ploughing on the downs above Venta, and the alders in the water-meadows were brown and woolly with catkins, and Ambrosius’s host was mustering again for the fighting that would come with summer, as it came every summer now.

On the evening of that day, Vortimer, going to his sleeping-quarters in the old Governor’s Palace, found lying on his clothes chest, where the light of the candle fell full, a hawking glove that was certainly not his. A honey-pale mare’s-skin glove, fringed and exquisitely worked with deep blue silk and fine silver wires. He summoned his armour-bearer, and asked where it had come from.

‘A slave brought it this evening, from the Lord Ambrosius’s chambers,’ the man said.

‘For me? You are sure that it was for me?’

‘The slave said that Ambrosius had noticed your old one was all but worn through.’

Vortigern had picked up the glove, a little puzzled. ‘It is a pretty thing—more like a woman’s gift.’ He looked up, laughing, at his hooded peregrine on her perch. ‘Too fine for your sharp talons, eh, beloved?’

He slipped his hand into the loose glove; and snatched it out again with a curse. ‘Ah! the thing has talons of its own! Whoever made it has left the needle inside!’ And he sucked the jagged scratch on the ball of his thumb, half laughing, half angry, and rather more puzzled.

By midnight he was dead, as a man dies who has been bitten by a poisonous snake.

In a few hours the news was all over Venta, spreading out through the newly gathered host like a dark stain. And Ambrosius, with a face that seemed to have set into stone, was himself heading a ruthless search for the slave who had brought the glove to Vortimer’s quarters.

It was all quite useless; the slave would never be found, Aquila was thinking that evening down by the river, watching the water riffle round Inganiad’s muzzle as she drank with the other horses of his squadron. And he saw, not the misty grey-and-amber shadows under the budding willows and the blink of oyster light in every spreading ripple, but Rowena in Hengest’s Mead Hall, singing; a golden witch in a crimson gown. He did not know why he was so sure that Rowena stood behind that poisoned hawking glove, but he was sure. And with the dusk creeping up the valley, the foreshadowing of evil to come seemed to rise also.

What happened a few days later surprised nobody, for it grew directly out of what had gone before. Several of the Companions were gathered with Ambrosius about the table in the room where he kept his lists and records of men and horses, his pay-rolls and the old Roman itineraries that told him how many marches it was from one place to another and so helped him in the planning of his campaigns; they were going over plans for the summer’s fighting, so far as one could make any plans in advance. Seeing him now, his dark, fine-drawn face caught out of the shadows into the candle-light as he leaned forward to point out something on the unrolled parchment on which the old map so often sketched with a charred stick was drawn in ink, Aquila thought how little of the mountains seemed left in him. It was not only that he looked older, nor that he wore a Roman tunic and his dark hair was clipped short; it was something deeper, a turning back to the world that he had been bred in until he was nine years old. Only the flame that had burned in the Lord of Arfon burned in the Roman leader also.

They heard footsteps coming along the colonnade, heard the sentry outside challenge, and a quick word in answer; and Pascent was standing in the doorway, with the courtyard quenched in the green spring twilight behind him. Looking towards him with the rest, Aquila thought, ‘So it has happened.’

Pascent came forward to the table. His face was white and haggard in the candle-light, and little beads of sweat shone on his forehead beneath the heavy lock of foxy hair. He looked at Ambrosius across the table, and they saw his mouth work for a moment as he tried to speak and could not. Then he said, ‘My Lord Ambrosius, I cannot hold them.’

‘So,’ Ambrosius said, and let the map roll up, very slowly and carefully. No need for it now, there could be no carrying the war into the Saxon’s country this year. ‘I had been more than half expecting that, I think. What reason do they give for deserting my standard?’

Pascent made a small, helpless gesture. ‘So many reasons. They say that Vortigern my father is after all their lord, and I am only his youngest son. They say that the Saxons will never reach to Central Cymru (that is, those who
come
from Central Cymru), and what is the rest of Britain to them, when all things are said and done? They say that my Lord Ambrosius has forgotten his own people to carry a Roman sword, and that they are weary of obeying Roman trumpets and leaving their fields to be harvested by their women.’ He broke off, and stared down at the table before him, then dragged his gaze up again. ‘They say—some of them say—that the slave who brought my brother his death said that he brought it from the Lord Ambrosius; and that maybe the slave spoke the truth.’

Ambrosius’s face was suddenly very cold. ‘And why, in the Name of Light, should the Lord Ambrosius be sending death to the chiefest of his allies?’

Pascent’s hands were clenched on the table, and in his face there was an agony of shame. ‘Because Guitolinus my father’s kinsman has put it into their hearts that the Lord Ambrosius was jealous, fearing that Vortimer might gain too much power.’

There was a long silence, flat and hard. No one moved about the table. Then Ambrosius said in a quiet, curiously smooth voice—a voice as smooth as a sword-blade, that Aquila had never heard from him before—‘Let you bid all the chiefs that have yet gathered here to meet me in the Forum, tomorrow at the third hour.’

‘It will make no difference,’ Pascent groaned.

‘That I know well. Whatever I can say to them, they will go. But they shall not desert my standard and the standard of Britain without telling me face to face that they do so—and why.’ Ambrosius was silent a moment, his gaze never moving from Pascent’s haggard face. ‘And you? Do you go with your own people?’

Pascent said, ‘I am Ambrosius’s man—since the day that I swore faith, I and my brothers.’ His eyes clung to Ambrosius’s like a dog’s. ‘I am ashamed with my people’s shame; so ashamed that I do not think I want to live. I will serve you living, with a whole heart, or if you ask for such a payment, I will go out of here and fall on my own sword tonight. But either way, I am Ambrosius’s man.’

It might have sounded hysterical, but Aquila knew that it was not. It was a simple offer. Pascent felt the shame of what his people were doing so keenly that he was perfectly prepared to pay for it with his own death, if his death seemed any sort of recompense to Ambrosius.

Ambrosius looked at him for a moment, still in silence, and then the white coldness of his face gentled suddenly. ‘Not to you the shame, my kinsman. Nay, then, you are of more worth to me living than dead.’

‘I
AM
Ambrosius’s man, since the day that I swore faith; I and my brothers.’

The words were still sounding in Aquila’s inner ear next noon, as he made his way from the Basilica; not as he had heard them spoken in defeat last night, but as he had heard them spoken in proud defiance, less than an hour since, in the thin spring sunlight of the Forum court. The scene was still sharp-edged and vivid in his mind; he could see Ambrosius standing on the shallow steps before the great Basilica door, his face a white mask of scorn: Ambrosius, wearing what he scarcely ever wore, a mantle of the Imperial Purple, the straight folds burning in the sunlight with a living depth of colour that drained into itself all the colour from the world around him. A very lonely figure, for he would have none of his officers with him, though they waited in the shadows of the colonnade. And below him, gathered on the grass that was still tawny with winter, the princes and chieftains of the Celtic party; foremost among them, those dark-blue fanatic’s eyes of his blazing with triumph, Guitolinus, who had taken it upon himself to act as spokesman for the rest.

It had been over quite quickly, the talking and the shouting and the brandished fists and the shame that seemed to wash to and fro about the stillness of the purple-clad figure dominating the scene from the portico steps. And when it was over, Pascent had walked deliberately out from among his own people, and turned at the foot of the steps to cry to them in fury, ‘You have listened to Guitolinus the Traitor, and not to me. You have broken your faith. So be it; you are curs that run back to your own dung-heap. But you shall run without me!’ And without another glance at them, he had mounted the shallow steps to kneel at Ambrosius’s feet with the proud submission of a hound, and set his hands between Ambrosius’s hands.

Afterwards, Cradoc, his father-in-law, who had come in to the muster five days ago, had been waiting for Aquila in the shadow of an archway. They came together so suddenly in that shadowed place that Aquila’s hand flew to his dagger. But the other stayed him. ‘Na, na, my lad, I am Cradoc, and no robber. I was waiting for you.’

‘Why?’ demanded Aquila uncompromisingly.

‘Only for this. To say to you that I have not forgotten how at Aber of the White Shells you turned the blow that was meant for me.’ Cradoc’s face was more deeply lined than usual, more full of old regrets. ‘Therefore I will not go to Ness before I leave Venta with my spears. I will not seek to persuade her to come back to her own people.’

Aquila stared at him a few moments, with a feeling of sickening shock. ‘As to that, she must go or stay as she chooses,’ he said at last, very slowly, and turned away into the street.

He heard the disturbed hum of the city as he walked. He knew the full tragedy of what had happened. He knew that in the years to come it might make the difference between victory and defeat for Britain. But for the moment all that was a dark background to trouble of his own.

After Flavia, he had felt that whatever happened to him, he had nothing to lose. It was a very safe feeling, a kind of armour, and he clung to it because he had been afraid to go unarmed. But now he had something to lose again, and all too likely he was going to lose it. Once he could have kept Ness against her will if need be, and risked her knifing him as he slept. The irony of the thing was that that had been in the days when he did not want her. It was different now, though he had only just realized it. He did not want Ness to go; and so he could not keep her against her will.

He came to the great house beside the old Governor’s Palace that he shared with Eugenus and three other officers with their families, and went in, past the porter dozing in the doorway. The atrium, the central room of the house, was shared by all the families that lived there. But today it was deserted; no women chattering in the doorway, no children and hounds tumbling about the cracked tessarae of the floor. Another cube of pink sandstone had come out of Ganymede’s face, he saw, as he crossed to the colonnade door and went out into the sunlit courtyard. The children prised them up to play games with. It must have been a lovely and gracious house once; it was gracious still, but with the sad graciousness of decay; and today he noticed the decay as he seldom did, for he had grown used to it in two years. One couldn’t get the fallen plaster and crumbling stonework put right in the winter, and in the summer there were always the Saxons. There was grass along the foot of the walls, and green moss creeping here and there up the foot of a column. The stone basin in the centre of the paved court had nothing in it but a little green slime and a few crumbled last-year’s leaves and a pigeon’s feather; and the dolphin on the rim no longer spouted water from its open mouth, for the water supply, like the drains, was not what it had been. Only a few days ago Ness had held the Minnow—he was still Pilcod the Minnow, his greater name kept for state occasions and when he was in disgrace—up in her arms to pat the gaping creature, saying, ‘See, it is like the blue creature on Father’s shoulder.’ And watching them as he sat on the half-wall of the colonnade, cleaning a piece of equipment, Aquila had been absurdly pleased, without stopping to wonder why.

He crossed the courtyard, and turned into the colonnade beyond, heading for the rooms that were his and Ness’s. And when he came into the inner court, Ness was sitting in the sunlight beside the little postern door that gave into the court of the Governor’s Palace. The damson tree that grew beside the door was thickening into bud, the shadows of its branches stirring and dappling on the old sunlit wall and over Ness herself. But nothing else about her moved. Her spindle and distaff lay beside her on the stone bench where she had abandoned them, and she sat with her hands linked round her knees. Close beside her Flavian and a hound puppy lay tumbled together, sound asleep on the grass. The puppy’s coat was brindled in bars of black and amber, shining in the sun, and the small boy, in a once-bright blue tunic, faded with many washings, lay with his dark head on the puppy’s flank; together, Aquila thought, they were supremely good to look at. But Ness was not looking at them, only staring straight before her.

She looked up as he came out from the colonnade, but she did not greet him, only sat watching him out of that waiting stillness.

He came and stood leaning his shoulder against the wall beside her, as though he were very tired. And still she watched him, though she had to look sharply upward now, to do so.

‘What is it, then, that brings you home at this hour of day?’ she asked at last.

‘I came to tell you that your people are leaving Ambrosius’s standard,’ Aquila said heavily. ‘In a day or so, maybe before tonight, they will be gone.’