by Harper Fox
No-one questioned him overmuch. The child he’d been before his absence would not have escaped interrogation, but the young man who’d returned with royalty in tow was allowed his reserve, his new dignity. By the time he reached the outskirts of the town, he found to his amusement that rumour had raced ahead of him. He’d gone off into the night, it seemed, not to hunt but to answer a summons from Arthur himself, to bring him home for who knew what future splendours and promotions. After an exchanged glance with the prince of Cerniw to check that that he too was enjoying the joke, he let the story lie.
Later, when Tomas had grown tired and shambled off to his chapel, Lance rode out with Arthur to the fields. Sir Ector had loaned him Balana again, and he was entranced. He tried desperately not to get used to her powerful stride underneath him, but she was such an old hand that she had rocked him into a state of submission before they were clear of the village. All he had to do was sit down into her canter and keep the lightest touch on her reins, and allow the sunny morning to blossom out around him.
White Meadows had transformed overnight from barren silence to a rich mosaic of life. As well as Ector’s generous gift of ewes and tups, every sheep the farmsteads possessed seemed to have given birth overnight, and the lambs were everywhere, scattering like snowflakes. Wind and hawthorn blossom whipped and flew in the crystalline air.
Arthur caught the joyous infection of the day and sent his black stallion bounding past Balana. “Where are you going?” Lance called after him, laughing.
“Not the least idea. Up to the top of that hill there, where the old road runs through.”
That was the route Lance had taken in the bitter night, in a different world than this one, surely. He glanced up at the turret with a flicker of unease: his memories of Viviana and the moonlit lough were still too fresh for him to share the strange realm beyond the Wall with this new friend. Arthur sailed blithely past, however, only reining in when he reached the first crest of the road. “Look at that!” he cried, as if the sweet gape of the landscape beyond could somehow be new to Lance too, and somehow he made it so, with the flash of his smile and his broad, encompassing gesture. “The moors sweep from the tops of those escarpments like waves rushing onto the shore.”
Lance drew Balana to a halt at his side. “I’ve only once seen the sea,” he said breathlessly. “I travelled with my father to Caer Lir. It didn’t look much like that, though—quite flat and grey.”
“Ah, you should see Cerniw’s beaches. The rollers come in like thunder.”
“Are there many beaches there?”
“Dozens. Cerniw is nothing but coast—that, and strange circles of stone left by men who vanished so long ago, even the Druids have no name for them. Do you have those here?”
“Yes,” Lance said, oddly pleased to be able to give him something in return for the vision of the great waves. “In the far north, a circle that looks like arrows fired into the earth from the clouds. And nearer to here, within a day’s ride, four stones with little hollow cups in them. A fierce goblin’s supposed to sleep under those, guarding a wonderful treasure.” He paused, embarrassed. “A children’s tale. Father Tomas says he knows who made these things—your stones and mine.”
“Ah, of course. The devil.”
Balana gave a great snort. The sound and the timing of it cracked helpless laughter from Lance, and he let her surge onwards to hide his response. “I’ll take you to see the goblin stones. Other places too, if you have time.”
“Please. Ector says we should stay until the moon gets full again, if you can bear us. We’ll feed ourselves, of course.” Arthur drew level and held out a hand to silence Lance’s objection. “You really must accept this. It’s just what soldiers do.”
Lance shut his mouth. Soldiers had included him. As the son of a military man, the idea wasn’t new to him, but for a long time now he’d felt like anything but. The army Ban had served was long gone. Once the moon was full, he’d be nothing but a farmhand again, and had no right to be making a Roman charger dance and clatter on the sunny road, which might yet be treacherous with ice. He made the smallest sign to Balana, who dropped into a sober walk. “All right,” he said, sounding ungracious to himself. “I’m sorry. I mean that you and your people are truly welcome here, and I’m only ashamed that the vicus can’t support you.”
“Well, you’ve had a bad...” Arthur looked around him at the glittering, glorious day. “A bad winter. Why do you think the spring didn’t come?”
“Oh, our sins, no doubt. Tell me more about Cerniw, or the Forest Wild. I bet it’s never like this down there.”
“The winters in Cerniw are seldom severe. It’s a gentle land, if you don’t mind being knocked off your feet by the gales nine days out of ten. The forest, though, where I grew up... We were often snowbound there for months, though we never suffered hardship in Ector’s stronghold. And then there were the summers.”
The faint catch of yearning in his voice transferred itself to Lance, who yearned suddenly too. “I can’t imagine.”
“Think of a deep land, sheltered. None of your great barren stretches, bare rock and thin sheep-nibbled soil like this. Deep earth, and time for the trees to grow three times as tall as the praetor’s house.”
“Ah. Even the tallest birches here scarcely reach past my shoulder.”
“Think of stately oak and ash, miles and miles of it, unbroken but for sunshine, the meadow land of little farms, a few clearings where the deer and new fawns come to gather in the spring. It’s easy to get lost. You can wander for days on the mossy tracks and never meet another human soul.”
“You must love it there.”
“You know, as a child growing up, I didn’t. I didn’t really see it. The glades, the tumbled rocks with half a dozen different kinds of ferns growing out from the cracks—all that was just the world. I see it now. Does that seem ungrateful, or strange?”
“To see with the mind what the eye has lost—to see properly then for the first time? No, not strange at all.”
They rode on in silence. For Lance, the quiet between them was fraught: he’d gone too far, surely. This visitor was perceptive, and would perhaps ask next what Lance had lost, and seen properly for the first time only when it was gone. “Why do they call you Bear?” he demanded abruptly to forestall him, and was relieved to hear him laugh. “That was my other question—the one you wouldn’t let me ask last night.”
“Because we were trading, and you hadn’t given me half enough. Still haven’t, for that matter. I’m willing to bet your village priest never dipped you in the font and named you Lance.”
“No,” Lance agreed calmly. “I’m Tertius, just like most other Roman third sons. And I will explain, but...” He shielded his eyes and looked out across the gorse bushes, whose butter-gold flowers in the distance were being shaken by more than the wind. “You go first.”
“Very well. My Latin name’s Artorius, as you know. But I may have been... just a bit of a handful in my younger days, and Ector said it was like having a wild beast in the house, upending the furniture and rolling down the stairs. So, given my origins, he called me by the older word from my mother’s language, Art or Urt—a little bear.”
“I see,” Lance said, smiling. From habit he’d brought out with him Ban’s army spear, secured through a hoop on the saddle. “I’m sure you’re far too dignified and well behaved to deserve the name now.”
“Sometimes. Why? What did you have in mind?”
“Boar for your dinner, if you’d like it.” He unhitched the spear. “Come for the gallop, but keep well in the rear of me—he’s an old one, and mean. Gored a bairn to death two summers gone.”
“Wait. It’s your turn to tell me why they call you Lance.”
“I’m about to do that very thing.”
***
After that, Lance and the prince rode out almost every day. Lance still had his duties around the village, long hours to be spent in farmyards and fields in a game of frantic catch-up with the
spring, but Father Tomas, still oddly frail and uncertain, wasn’t enforcing this work with his usual vigour. He had befriended Sir Ector, who in his turn and for his own reasons was allowing his boy a long leash during these windswept days on the hills, and the two old men were often to be seen on the steps outside the little chapel, heads together in discussion.
Freed from sword-practice, battle drills and Latin reading lessons, Arthur followed Lance to the places he’d described—the standing stones and cup-marked outcrops, the crag-top where the goblin was meant to crouch, guarding treasure in the earth. Lance had a hundred half-forgotten stories about the land, and if these always stopped short of the lake and the wonderful sword, which remained on its rack in the praetorium—if the journeys themselves would stop short of the moors to the north of the Wall—Arthur on instinct held his tongue. The days were too sweet to him, the sun too bright.
Except on the shortest trips, Gaius accompanied them. He was slower, and much less enthralled by the sights and the myths, but Arthur was scrupulous about his inclusion. He knew that Guy was obliged to look after him, whether either of them liked it or not, and was determined not to make his foster brother’s duties unpleasant to him. Arthur, growing up in a family not his own, had lived through the grief of not belonging—often, indeed, inflicted on him by Guy himself, whose jealousy had at times been bitter. But they had long since made their peace and were fast friends. So Guy made a third in their party, not just on guard duty, a participant in their chatter and jokes, although he tried his best not to show himself amused. Rich with companionship and action, time began to rush by like the beat of the curlews’ wings.
Chapter Ten
When the moon was once more growing large, Ectorius told his ward that it was time they resumed their journey. He did so reluctantly: Art was tanned, and premature shadows of responsibility were fading from his eyes. It had been good for him, Ector thought, to have such a companion as King Ban’s son. After giving his confession to Father Tomas, Ector had talked with the old priest long into the night, hearing with wonder and compassion what had befallen the village and Ban’s one surviving child. Ector thought there could not be much wrong with a young man who had wrought himself so cleanly from such grief.
That night, when they had taken supper together and Lance had gone off, as he always did, to walk around the bounds of the vicus and see that all was secure, Ector broached the subject with Art.
“This Lance,” he began. “He is of noble blood, and a good brave lad in his own right. He would make a suitable companion, and the time is coming when you should be looking about you for such friends. If you like it, I would be willing to have him travel on with us.”
Art, sitting opposite him at the table, chin propped on one hand, smiled wryly. “Don’t you think we’d better find out if he likes it?”
Ector had the grace to look embarrassed. He did sometimes forget, in his anxiety to fulfil his mission, that other people were more than adjuncts to it. “Well, why wouldn’t he?” he demanded gruffly, and tossed the future king a torn saddlebag to mend. “Shall I ask him?”
“Leave it to me,” Arthur said, with very transparent solemnity. “Such a request should come from the throne, not a... faithful servant.”
For a moment Ectorius looked at him from beneath his eyebrows like a hawk. “Why, you little…” Then he sat back, with an inward smile of satisfaction at the heir he had raised. If you could see him now, Uther. “Very well, Your Highness,” he said. “Quite so.”
***
Yet it wasn’t so easy to ask. Lance was not someone you picked up like a new horse at the mart. Despite their short acquaintance, he had impressed Arthur deeply with his strength in the face of loss, his lack of fuss. He seemed to have come to terms with himself, creating his world from the materials at hand: Art, who was painfully full of ambition, admired it greatly. Was it not appalling arrogance on his part, to ask such a person to uproot himself and follow him? And what if he said no? Following him up onto a steep, glorious stretch of the ridge, Arthur shook his head: that would be a blow to the royal ego, and probably a salutary one.
He was quiet, as they made their way east along the path of the Wall on their last ride. This was such an unusual state of affairs that after a while Lance looked at him and enquired gravely if some merciful god had struck him mute.
Arthur laughed, shook off his worries and immersed himself gladly in the present. The matter did not have to be settled immediately: they would spend tonight at Vindolanda, and not set off west until the next morning. As if in honour of the day before departure, Lance had at last taken down the sword from the lake from its rack and brought it out with him instead of his usual spear.
He had also finally offered to show Art the mysterious terrain beyond the gap in the ridge, the moors beyond that turreted gateway where he had dreamed his strange dream. Art was honoured to be invited there, onto the land Lance had been ready to defend with his life. For once Guy’s presence was onerous to him. Art had entered all too easily into Lance’s half-hypnotised recall of the place. To Guy it would be just another ride.
But this was the very type of distinction he had sworn not to make between himself and his brother. Art and Lance were picking their way down the slopes to the turret and the burn now, a long way ahead of Guy, who’d stopped—ever mindful of the rearguard, his duty of vigilance—to make sure a distant group of horsemen were only local farmers on their way home from market.
Art halted to let him catch up. Lance, riding at his side, stopped too. A thought leapt between them, like sun off a blade, not the first time each had known the other’s intentions without so much as an exchanged glance. Both simultaneously reined their horses back, gesturing Guy ahead of them, and Guy splashed under the arch smiling broadly, indefinably pleased to be first into a new world.
Lance barely recognised the place in sunlight. It had been like this long ago, when he’d come here as a child, with no thought in his head but the prospect of adventure and enjoyment. The lough had cast off its cold grey skin and turned into a million points of light. Coltsfoot and harebells shook in the breeze, and even the deep marsh was illumined by flowering rushes, opening their feathery heads to the warmth. Art exclaimed and pointed at the family of swans serenely emerging from the banks, then shot a warning look at Guy, who had reflexively drawn his bow. No killing here, not today. The two followed Lance quietly westward along the foot of the cliff.
The cave was so small! For a moment Lance thought he must have mistaken the place. Art and Guy stopped with him outside it, gazing silently into the gap in the rock, barely visible in the strong light. “I sheltered here with Viviana,” Lance said, wonderingly. “When I first arrived, there were… paintings on the walls, animals and dancing people. But the wind changed. The rain blew in, and they faded.”
He’d spoken calmly enough. It came as a surprise to all of them when he suddenly turned upon Art a look of scorching intensity and said, “All things disappear. I must have dreamed Viviana: how could she have survived out here? Even dreams do not last. And tomorrow, you too will be gone.”
Arthur stared at him. Lance had told him in plain terms the story of his nights on the moor, never once revealing pain or loss. Nor had he shown more than friendly regard for his guests. And Art, mindful that their visit would be short, had tried not to enjoy too much the undemanding friendship of a companion of his own age. He hadn’t expected Ector’s suggestion that Lance journey on with them, and he’d honestly believed that Lance could take him or leave him.
Perhaps it wasn’t so. He opened his mouth to ask—and then shut it again, unaccountably reluctant to speak in front of Guy. “Well,” he said awkwardly instead, “will you show me where you found this sword? Father Ector is very anxious about it—some prophecy he thinks I don’t know about, given him by the old man who brought me to his court.” As a ploy of distraction, it hadn’t worked. Lance remained still, eyes blank and miserable, as if he hadn’t heard.
Guy, look
ing on, took pity. “What, do you think I’m going to ride my clean horse into that swamp?” he demanded, dismounting and settling on the warm turf outside the cave. “Lance, take him and show him if he insists. Just for God’s sake, don’t let him drown in the lake.”
Art turned his horse’s head and followed Lance, who had already set off downhill. The track was narrow, but he edged Hengroen as close to Balana as he could. “Listen,” he began, as soon as they were out of Guy’s earshot. “As far as my being gone is concerned…”
“Forget it!” Lance said fiercely. Arthur flinched: it sounded less like irritation than an order that he actually cast the incident from his mind. “I’ve shamed myself. Please don’t speak of it again.”
Why are you angry with me because you think you’ve made a mistake? Arthur wanted to ask aloud, but it would have come out like a challenge, and in fact Lance’s anger made him smile. It was hot, honest, utterly devoid of malice, a fire that would burn swift and clean. Fewer and fewer people these days dared to be angry with Arthur, and he knew that in future there would be fewer still. “All right,” he said eventually. “I’ll get someone else to tell you, shall I?”
“Tell me what?’
“That Ector wants you to leave with us tomorrow, and join us as part of our—”
“Of your retinue?”
“No, you stiff-necked monster. As one of our household, I was going to say, although that was a stupid word too, and what he means—what I mean—is that you should come with me as my companion and friend.”
He paused. He could only see Lance in profile and a little from behind. The path wasn’t quite wide enough, despite Hengroen’s manoeuvring, and it seldom seemed to occur to the prince of Vindolanda to let the prince of Cerniw precede him anywhere. Still, Art could tell his jaw had dropped. He smiled. “You’ve the makings of a fine warrior, Ector says. And… we are recruiting, in a small way. Would you like to come?”
