by Harper Fox
“You’ve no idea. Summer didn’t come this year. It only arrived...” Lance choked faintly, and once more told the impossible truth. “It only arrived with you. They can’t all be dead, Art. They can’t be gone.”
Arthur swung easily down from the saddle. If he noticed that his new friend had cut short his name and dispensed with honorifics, he gave no sign. “Of course they’re not dead.” He looked around. “We’ll find them. Tell me—if there was no food here, and you’ve been gone for two nights, have you had nothing to eat yourself in all that time?”
“No. I chased a hare, but she turned into an old woman and gave me a fish and the sword.”
“Oh, Gods.” Arthur took a firm grip on his arm and glanced anxiously back up the track. “Father Ector! Guy! Hurry up, will you? This poor prince has gone mad for want of food.”
The rest of the party clattered up behind them. Lance drew a breath to try and explain himself, then lost it at the sight of a ragged figure in robes bursting forth from the praetorium.
He braced up. Any sign of life was a relief, but he was surely in deadly trouble with Father Tomas now. “I’m sorry,” he began, and tried to put together in his mind the story he’d just offered Arthur, the one about the fish and the witch and the hare. “I’m sorry, Father. I only meant to go up and fetch the frozen deer Cerys and Dana found dead on the path. Oh, there you are, Dana,” he added distractedly, as the girl emerged from behind Tomas, overtook him, dashed across the courtyard and flung her arms around Lance’s waist. She was still coughing, and wrapped in Elena’s cloak. He patted her hair. “But it came back to life and ran away. I must tell the men not to hunt the white hart, Tomas. Where are all the men?”
Tomas stumbled to a halt. His eyes were red-rimmed with sleeplessness. “Where do you think they are?” he demanded in a croak. “Every able-bodied man—and woman, for that matter—is out on the moortops, looking for you.” At last the old man noticed the visitors. “You see,” he offered helplessly, spreading his hands, “once upon a time we had a king. A queen too, and although an unrepenting heathen, she doctored and cared for us, brought babies into the world with her own hands. We had this boy’s brothers and sisters too, a horde of them, barely tamed puppies, but good. All gone, all gone. And these two long nights past, we thought our Lance was lost to us too. He’s all we have left, you see.”
Ector and Gaius dismounted. “You are priest of this village?” Ector asked gruffly, surveying the dilapidated house and outbuildings, the various infants who had crept out of unknown hiding-places and followed Dana’s lead in attaching themselves to Lance however they could. “A priest of Christ?”
“Alas for me! I came from the shrine at Brocolitia. I have known better days. If you be heathen sons of Mithras, slay me if you will.”
“Good grief, no.” Stiffly Ector went down on his knees. “My name is Ectorius, a stranger here, but a Christian like yourself, and no cause for fear. These are my sons, Gaius and Arthur, just as...” He tugged sharply at Guy’s swordbelt. Arthur was out of reach of anything more than a ferocious look, but both he and his foster-brother guiltily knelt too. “Just as devout as I am. God be with you, Father Tomas.”
“And also with you.” The old man’s response was reflexive. His face was a blank of astonishment. Lance had gone down at Arthur’s side, not in an access of humility but under the weight of children. He felt extremely strange. We thought we’d lost our Lance. All the men and women out looking for you. All we have left, you see. The shepherd’s little boy, fat somehow despite the endless winter, tried to climb into his arms. Lance tried to help, and instead went down sideways, making the infant shriek and the flagstones change place with the blessed sun reborn.
Arthur stared up in horror at his guardian. “None of your doing, Bearcub,” Ector said, taking pity. “The boy’s half dead of hunger, that’s all. Gaius, carry him indoors—but take that sword from him first, before he runs himself through.”
“Should I keep it safe for him, Father?”
“No, you weasel. Take it with him and set it by his bed.” Ector turned to the nearest of his grooms and lowered his voice: the skin-and-bones priest and all the wide-eyed children of the settlement were gazing at him and his party as if they’d tumbled from heaven. “Take gold and ride back to the last decent-sized town we came through—Corstopitum, was it, the place by the river? Buy grain and meat, and tell them to have a dozen ewes and a tup sent up here to replenish these flocks. Oh, and bring wine. Damned if I’m drinking whatever goat’s piss these poor bastards have been living on. Well, what are you waiting for? Go!”
Chapter Eight
“You shouldn’t have let him. I said we’d provide for you tonight.”
“Well, we’ve quartered ourselves upon you. Sir Ector is an old Roman. If you garrison your troops upon a town, unless there’s some political point to be made, you don’t expect them to feed you. It’s not just for tonight, you see. We’re badly in need of rest, and we hope to stay longer.” Arthur tucked his foot up onto a bar of the high stool against the wall near Lance’s bed. He’d made himself very comfortable there, while visitors came and went.
Far more of them than Lance could have anticipated. Figures from his childhood: the blacksmith, the farmers who worked Ban’s fields, the butcher, enduring presences to whom Lance and his siblings had been little more than a nuisance in their younger years, children underfoot—all of them had come, singly or in groups, as they arrived back from their search on the moors. They’d stood awkwardly at the foot of the bed or sat boldly upon it, each according to his nature. None of them had said much. Lance, who would have expected a clout around the ear for causing false alarms and uproar, was confounded. “Have you been given chambers? Stabling and feed for your horses?”
“Yes, and your housekeeper—Edern, is it?—is busy at this moment preparing an evening meal. Which you may or may not be allowed to attend, so carry on eating your broth.”
He had a nerve, Lance thought. Lance could hear running feet, scufflings and banging doors as Ban’s household rushed to do this imperious newcomer’s bidding. He also had a way of making nobody mind, just as Lance didn’t mind being ordered to eat, or threatened with exclusion from dinner as if he’d been a five year old. He was feeling stronger by the minute, and would soon show this grey-eyed invader who was master in the praetor’s house.
Meanwhile, it was a bone-melting relief to lie here. He’d been laid down carefully in Ban and Elena’s bed, not his own, and Edern’s wife had come clucking and crying to help him out of his clothes. Someone—Gaius, he thought—had placed the marvellous sword in an empty rack, on the wall opposite the bed where he could see it. The earthenware soup bowl was warm in his hands, the deerhound sprawled across his lap a pungent, flea-scratching comfort. “I didn’t faint, you know. Your brother didn’t have to carry me in.”
“Oh, don’t mind Gaius. He’s so much older and uglier than I am, whenever I used to annoy him, he’d hoist me up like a sack of barley and cart me away.”
“Does he still do that now?”
“I’d like to see him try. Just to be correct, he’s my foster brother. Ectorius is my guardian.” Arthur paused delicately. “There’s quite a story there.”
Lance blushed. Did his guest think he wished to pry? “I didn’t ask for it.”
“No, I know. I’m hoping to get yours, though, and I don’t think the diplomatic wiles I’ve recently learned will work on you. I was thinking to trade.”
Lance set the bowl aside. He tugged at the sleeping dog’s ears. One good tale did deserve another, and he was longing to hear what had brought this prince to the tumbledown barns of Vindolanda. He was far from sure, however, that he was ready to reply in kind. “I don’t know,” he said cautiously. “Part of mine is dull, part sad and shameful. And the rest—the last two days—sound like a fantasy, something you’d dream after eating ergot wheat.”
Arthur took this in quietly. “All right,” he said at length. “I’ll start, then you can
decide if I’ve earned a return, or if my ergot dreams are wilder than yours.”
So Arthur told the story of the storm in the Forest Wild, of the night sixteen years ago when he’d been given into Sir Ector’s keeping—a child out of nowhere, allegedly the heir of Cerniw’s dragon king. Lance’s eyes grew obligingly wide, and his hand ceased its movement on the deerhound’s head. He was a perfect audience. Only when Arthur had finished, and was watching him in amusement, did he even visibly draw breath.
“But did you know? When you were younger, I mean—who you were?”
“Who I might be,” Arthur gently corrected. “Not for many years. The old man told Ector to bring me up as his own son, and so he did, if cleaning the stables and pigsties and getting my backside whipped if I did wrong was any measure. But a time came when I thought I should learn to be Guy’s squire, since Ector isn’t rich and couldn’t afford to make noble young soldiers of both of us.” He shook his head. “Believe me, I didn’t want to lug saddles and swords about for the great lump. I had to do something, though, and so I asked them about it one day.”
“What happened?”
“Well, Guy went the colour of that beautiful sunset out there and stared at his boots, and Ector... Ector wept, the first and only time I ever knew him do it. And they both knelt in front of me, though Ector had to pull Guy down to make him, just as he had to with your priest out there. And Ector begged my pardon for lying to me all these years, and said he wasn’t my father at all. And so I found out that I was to be...”
He spread his hands helplessly. “A king,” Lance finished for him, sitting up in bed. “How did it feel?”
“Horrible. I wanted to drop through the floor. I couldn’t stand to see Ector and Guy kneeling there. I made them stand up, and then I ran off into the kennels to hide with the bloodhound’s new pups.” He snorted. “Very royal.”
“I’d have done the same,” Lance averred, brow knotted with sincerity. “You must have felt... orphaned. To lose the idea of a father like Ector, even if your real one is Pendragon... I couldn’t have borne it, not calmly.”
Arthur examined him with interest. Dark-eyed Celtic handsome, quite unaware of it, proud as the devil nonetheless. It was time to call in the debt on the exchange of stories. “I’m certain you’ve borne worse.”
“No. Only different.”
“Your priest said your whole family is gone.”
“Yes, in a Pictish raid. It was over a year ago. My grief is done.”
No, Arthur thought, and managed to keep it to himself. Not by half. You almost wept over my poor sorrows not half a minute ago. He got down off the stool and shoved the deerhound aside far enough to sit on the edge of Lance’s bed. “If that’s all you’ve got to say, you have to listen to me some more.”
“I’d be happy to do so. No more stables and pigsties for you, I’d guess.”
“And you’d be wrong. Well, not about the pigsties. But the first rule of Ector’s household is—no man rests or eats until the horses are fed.”
“Quite right, too.”
“Oh, you’re another like him, aren’t you? No wonder he’s taken to you. I’ll be lucky if he doesn’t adopt another son, and leave me here. I bet you’d make a better job of it than I will.”
“Of what?”
Arthur sighed. The sun was setting in emerald bands to the west, the strange light filtering through the fort’s Roman glass. He lifted his face to it yearningly. “Of becoming the future king of the Britons, of course.”
Lance sat up. “Of the Britons? Not just Cerniw?”
“Since Ector told me my origins, I have had to behave like Pendragon’s heir in more than name. The old sorcerer swore him to secrecy, but he promised to return and never did, and a time came when we couldn’t wait. Saxon raiders are making deeper inroads every day in the south, just as the Danes are here. The Cerniw chieftains can’t tackle them alone, or won’t—sometimes it’s easier to yield and make terms than to fight. So I have set off on what I believe is called a diplomatic mission.”
“All the way from—what did Sir Ector call it? The Forest Wild?”
“That’s right. Ector’s name for his stronghold, deep in the woods to the northeast of Cerniw. Dumnonia is the Roman name for it. A long, hard journey, but we have friends in the north, it seems. I’ve spent the last month making myself pleasant with old Pendragon’s relatives among the Votadini on the east coast. We were on our way west to Caer Lir when you crossed our path. I have another distant great-uncle there, the ruler of Rheged. If I can make friends and promises enough, we’ll have allies at both ends of Hadrian’s old wall—good strategy, I’m sure you’ll agree.”
“What about the Romans? Don’t you believe they’ll return?”
“I don’t think so. They’ve got too many problems of their own. Ector still gets news from Gaul, but less and less often now. It seems to me that the battle everywhere is being painfully lost.”
“My mother was a Votadini queen.”
Arthur stopped short. More an avowal than a piece of information, that. Sudden intense focus in the brown eyes. “What was her name?”
“Elena. I am your ally by birth. My fight is your fight.”
I offer you my services and sword? Arthur waited for it. This was the effect he had on men, from rusty old knights to striplings like this. Ector had told him the power was a good thing, when managed with humility and grace, but sometimes he had neither, and the responsibility scared him.
He wouldn’t have minded it from this boy, though. He’d seen how he could fight. When half-dead from hunger, at that: what a force he’d be, after a few good meals and some lessons in swordsmanship from Guy! His new friend had nothing here in this godsforsaken village, not even family to defend. Arthur waited expectantly. For once he could accept with a good heart.
Nothing happened. Lance remained silent and still. The sudden fires died, replaced by something sterner, older. “Do you like it?” he asked. “Making yourself pleasant, I mean—all the diplomacy?”
“No. Bores me to tears. But I’ll have nothing left to rule if I don’t, so I have to find and meet the rulers in the north, and hope that they’ll support me in my cause.”
“You make me understand that my father was a king in name only.”
“Oh. I didn’t mean to—”
“You’ve travelled the whole island. You’ve met with these fierce chieftains, men of resources. You could raise an army if you wished.”
“Not quite yet. But... yes, that’s the general idea.”
“While I tend Ban’s farmyard and fields.”
Then leave them. Ride into battle with me. Once more the words died on Arthur’s lips. This skinny prince had a dignity unconnected to the insignificance of his father’s realm. “Not tonight, you don’t,” Arthur said, almost shyly. “You’ve got to rest, Ector says. I know you don’t approve, but he’s having a meat-cow the size of three wagons brought up for tonight. If you sleep, you might be well enough to come down and do the honours of your house later on.”
“Wait,” Lance said, as Arthur stood up to leave. “I know I haven’t earned answers—not under the terms of our agreement—but there’s so much I want to ask you.”
“Try me. I have to be kind to defaulting allies, Ector says, if their reasons are good enough.”
“And if they aren’t...”
“Why, make a hideous example of them, of course.”
Lance hitched a half-smile. “Of course. What is it like in the Forest Wild, then? Why are you sometimes called Bear? And...” He paused, attention noticeably caught by a gleam at Arthur’s chest, between the laces of his jerkin. “Sir Ector and Gaius knelt to my village’s priest. They’re Christians, then?”
“Yes.” Arthur gave a tiny shrug. “Isn’t everyone these days? Aren’t you?”
“Er... yes, of course. You wear the solar disc, though. Forgive me if I wasn’t meant to see.”
“Oh, damn.” Clumsily Arthur fished the pendant out. It was heavy and old
, and on its reverse bore the signs of moon and dragon too, worse still in these days of the gentle, humble new god. “It was on a longer chain, but that got broken. This strip of hide’s too short to keep it properly...”
“Concealed?”
Arthur met his gaze, amused and resentful. “I do believe that answering questions from you might be harder than I’d bargained for. You can just wait for the rest.”
Lance settled back. He tucked his hands behind his head. “I’ll see you at dinner, then. I tell you what—go down to my blacksmith, Garva. Say I sent you, and he’ll make you a longer chain.”
Chapter Nine
Early next morning, Lance was up and about, Father Tomas hobbling at his side. He filtered out the old man’s chatter and fuss as they made the rounds of the settlement. He wanted to see for himself all the blessed signs of life he had heard upon waking at dawn: the clatter from the forge, the mewing of gulls coming in from the coast for new-broken plough, their voices skeining with the village children’s cries. To his surprise, the prince of Cerniw joined them, emerging from an alley as if he’d lived here all his life and falling into pace at Lance’s side. Although he looked fresh as the morning itself in dove-grey tunic and cloak, Lance sensed a change in him—that, this morning, he wished to be ordinary—and kept his remaining questions from the night before to himself.
He guessed that the stop in this wild place might serve as a welcome hiatus from Arthur’s duties as well as his travels. There was no-one here to appease, no need to establish a diplomatic rapport with any of the shepherds or farmworkers he met. He went with Lance and Tomas through the vicus, admiring the smithy, talking to the bakers about their ovens and their grain, while Lance counted heads among the children to make sure that the last bitter nights—unreal as a dream to him now that he too was freshly clothed and fed—hadn’t borne anyone away, and sought out the men and women who’d searched the moors for him to say shy thanks.
