The Lantern Bearers (book III)

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Aquila looked up at the big, weary man on the mule’s back, and asked the question that he had been on the edge of asking many times since Uroconium. ‘Will Ambrosius ever come down from the mountains as his father did? Is it a living cause, Eugenus, or a dead one that men serve because they loved it when it was alive?’

  ‘Speaking for myself,’ Eugenus said after a moment, ‘I think that I might die for a dead cause, but I do not think, I really do not think, my young friend, that I could bring myself to ride up and down the world on anything so uncomfortable as a mule, in its service.’

  And they went on in silence, the mist thickening little by little about them. Aquila had accepted what Eugenus had said, but his uneasiness remained. He had thought of young Ambrosius as the leader of men like his father, but now he began to realize that the son of Constantine was something very much more complicated than that. Not only the leader of the Roman party, but the Lord of Arfon, a man belonging to two worlds. Was he, after all, only another Vortigern?

  Slowly the fortress hill drew nearer until it towered right above them in the mist and the lake was left behind; Aquila saw that it did not after all close the valley, but left a narrow pass through which both the track and the river ran on. A rocky path swung right-handed, rounding some stone-walled cattle enclosures, and took the steep upward slope at a bound; and as Aquila took hold of the mule’s head-gear to help the poor brute, suddenly out of the mist that was growing thicker every moment there loomed on either side of them the great, rough-hewn walls of the first defences. The path squeezed its way through, and plunged on upward. In the softer and more level places it was a slithering quagmire, at others it ran out on to bare, mist-wet rock. Other great ramparts, part man-made, part natural outcrop, loomed through the drifting whiteness as the path went leaping and looping upward; and Aquila sensed people near him, and glimpsed the crouching shapes of turf-roofed bothies among the rocks and hazel scrub, for it seemed that all up the slopes of the fortress hill, wherever there was foothold for a bothy, men had their living-places. But they met nobody until they were about half-way up. Then a young man with a couple of huge, rough-coated hounds in leash came round the next corner out of the mist, and stopped at sight of them. ‘Sa ha! Eugenus! I thought it must be you when I heard that fairy chiming of mule bells. What news of the outer world?’

  Eugenus brought his weary mule to a halt. ‘None that cannot wait until I have first seen Ambrosius. What news of the world here, Brychan?’

  The other shrugged. ‘What news is there ever, here in the mountains? You have come in a good time, though. Belarius has had his thigh laid open by a boar, and that fool Amlodd doesn’t seem able to do much about it.’

  Eugenus sighed. ‘Other men may rest at their journey’s end, but so sure as I return weary from distant parts, somebody waits for me with a fever or a gored leg! Where is he?’

  ‘In his hut.’

  ‘I’ll go round and take a look at him as soon as I reach the top—if I ever do. I swear by Æsculapius’s Rod, this track grows steeper and longer as the years go by.’

  Eugenus was already urging his mule on again; but the young man still stood directly in his path. A very tall young man in a close-fitting tunic of many-coloured plaid, with a smooth cap of darkly golden hair and a laughing, insolent face. He flicked a long finger towards Aquila. ‘Who is this that you have collected on your travels?’

  ‘A friend,’ Eugenus said. ‘Maybe he will tell you his name himself, later, if you ask him.’

  The young man looked at Aquila, and Aquila looked back. ‘So? I may ask him—some time, if I chance to remember,’ the young man said coolly.

  The frown that was always between Aquila’s brows deepened. ‘If you do, I would suggest that you ask in a more courteous manner.’

  Again they looked at each other, with a quarrel smouldering between them; and then suddenly laughter won in the young man’s face. ‘It may be that I will even do that!’ He stepped aside, flinging up his hand in greeting and farewell to Eugenus, and went on down the track.

  Aquila stood a moment, still frowning, looking after him as he merged into the twilight and the mist, then turned once more to the steep climb as Eugenus, saying blandly, ‘Shall we go on?’ shook the reins and urged his tired mule into movement again.

  The track levelled for a few yards, then swung inward and upward, cutting through the side of a sheer outcrop of black rock, and looking up Aquila saw the innermost ramparts close above him, and a tall man leaning on a spear in the gateway, with nothing but the wet, smoking mist behind him.

  A short while later he was walking over the hill crest into that mist, alone, while Eugenus, tumbling from the mule’s back like a sack of peat, went to tend his patient.

  ‘Go up to the Fire-hall,’ Eugenus had said. ‘You can see the roof ridge over the lift of the ground yonder. It must be close on supper time, and Ambrosius may be there already. If he is not, wait for me.’

  But the mist had become a dense whiteness, salt tasting on his lips, that wreathed about him like a wet smoke out of which the huts and bothies loomed and were lost in the fading light. The roof ridge of Ambrosius’s Fire-hall had dissolved into the mist, as though it had never been. Maybe he had been a fool to refuse when the man who took over the mule had offered to come with him. It had been a friendly offer, and once he would have accepted it gladly. But he turned away from all things that were friendly now. He held on in what he thought was the right direction. There was peat reek in the air, and the tang of horse-droppings and the fat smell of cooking; he heard cattle lowing in the mist, and knew that people were coming and going about their usual business, but saw no one of whom to ask his way. Suddenly the ground dipped beneath his feet, and he found himself on the edge of a little hollow with the gleam of water at the bottom of it. He halted, and as he stood there his ear caught very faintly the struck notes of a harp that seemed to rise from that gleam of water. Through the mist, he made out the crouching shapes of a cluster of huts; and from the doorway of the largest came the faint, amber gleam of firelight. At all events there must be someone down there to tell him where he was. So he turned his steps down into the little hollow.

  A few moments later he stood on the threshold of the largest hut, between the swirling mist and the firelight. The fire burned on a raised hearth in the midst of the big, round house-place, and all the place was fragrant with the smoke of peat and wild apple logs that hung in a blue haze under the crown of the roof, and the fluttering flame-light showed Aquila, at that first swift glance, the glint of weapons along the walls and hanging from the king-post, and that for the most part they were the long swords and small, round bucklers of Roman Cavalry. But if the hut was an armoury, clearly it was a living-place as well. On the creamy, spread ram-skins of the bed-place an old man sat with his harp on his knee, his head bent over it as though he slept, and his fingers plucking the shining strings so softly and wanderingly that it was as though he played in his sleep. And beside the hearth a man with a pouchy face and a general air of having run to seed, but something in the set of his shoulders that made Aquila instantly think of the parade-ground none the less, stood looking down at a third who crouched on one knee, tracing something with a charred stick on the flagged floor beside the hearthstone. A slight, dark man, this, of about Aquila’s own age, in a rough, home-spun tunic, and a sheepskin with the fleece inside belted about his waist for a mantle, but a narrow gold fillet round his head, such as Aquila had seen the Celtic nobles wear before now.

  ‘Aye, it is well enough, though the bend of the Tamesis should be somewhat sharper,’ the man with drilled shoulders was saying. ‘If you make that map many times more, I am thinking that you will be able to make it blindfold.’

  ‘There is always something new, Valarius,’ the dark young man said, speaking in Latin with an accent that was somehow just a little too pure, as though it were not quite his native tongue. ‘And I must be able to carry it in my head, so that I have but to shut my eyes to see it a
ll here on the hearth, as a Royal Eagle in the sky must see the whole of Britain spread below him.’ He looked up, and saw Aquila in the doorway, and rose, the charred stick still in his hand. ‘I greet you, stranger. Have you some message for me?’

  Aquila shook his head. ‘I seek Ambrosius, Prince of Britain, and was told that I might find him in the Fire-hall. But I have lost the Fire-hall in this fiend’s brew of a mist—and seeing your firelight and hearing your harper—’

  The young man tossed the charred stick into the flames. ‘It is early yet, and Ambrosius will not have gone to the Fire-hall. What is it that you want with him?’

  ‘If I had a sword, I should say “To lay it at his feet”.’

  For a moment they stood looking at each other in the firelight, while the old harper still fingered the shining strings, and the other man looked on with a gleam of amusement lurking in his watery blue eyes. But Aquila was not looking at him. He was looking only at the dark young man, seeing that he was darker even than he had thought at first, and slightly built in a way that went with the darkness, as though maybe the old blood, the blood of the People of the Hills, ran strong in him. But his eyes, under brows as straight as a raven’s flight-pinions, were not the eyes of the Little Dark People, that were black and unstable and full of dreams, but a pale, clear grey lit with gold that gave the effect of flame behind them.

  ‘But you have no sword,’ the dark young man said.

  ‘I had once.’

  ‘Tell me how you lost it.’

  Afterwards, Aquila never knew how it was that he neither questioned the dark man’s right to ask, nor guessed the truth about him. Maybe the mist had got into his head—mists were notoriously unchancy things. He came in from the doorway without knowing that he did so, and standing beside the hearth with the fragrant smoke of the burning apple logs fronding across his face, he gave account of himself in a few brief, harsh sentences, much as he had done to Eugenus. ‘So I came west to take my father’s service upon me if that may be,’ he ended, ‘not loving greatly either the Saxon kind or the Red Fox.’

  ‘Not loving greatly either the Saxon kind or the Red Fox,’ the dark young man echoed broodingly. ‘Yes, there are things easier to forgive than the murder of one’s father.’ He stood looking at Aquila for a few moments; a long look, a hard look. Then he turned and took down from among the weapons that hung on the king-post a long cavalry sword in a rough, wolfskin sheath. He drew it with a swift, controlled gesture—swiftness and control were in all he did—ran his eye along the brightness of the blade, and sheathing it again, held it out, hilt foremost. ‘Here is your sword.’

  Aquila’s hand moved involuntarily to close round the familiar grip. But in the act, he checked, his head up and the frown deepening between his brows; and then a sudden suspicion of the truth dawned on him. ‘Do you usually decide who Ambrosius shall take into his service?’

  The dark young man smiled—a swift flash of a smile that seemed to kindle his whole narrow face. ‘Usually—I am Ambrosius, Prince of Britain.’

  Aquila was silent a long moment. Then he said, ‘Yes, I should have known that … May I serve you as truly as my father did, my Lord Ambrosius.’ He put out his hand again, and his fingers closed round the plain, workmanlike bronze hilt.

  So Aquila took his father’s service upon him. It wasn’t as good as love; it wasn’t as good as hate; but it was something to put into the emptiness within him; better than nothing at all.

  11

  The Young Foxes

  ON a day in early spring, Aquila came up from the level valley to the south of Dynas Ffaraon, where the wild, leggy two-year-olds singled out from the horse herds were gathered for breaking. The Celts were all horse-breeders and breakers, and now it seemed that every sheltered glen in Arfon had its herds of brood mares, its long-legged, tangle-maned colts who would one day be the horses of the British Cavalry. Aquila, cavalry trained as he was, had worked with the breakers all winter. If he worked hard enough and long enough, spending mind and strength and skill in the battle with some wild and whirling young stallion, and came back to Ambrosius’s Fire-hall so tired that sleep closed over him almost before the evening meal was eaten, it was easier not to think, not to remember.

  The snows were melting on the high southern face of Yr Widdfa, and the sound of running water was everywhere, mingling with the wild, sweet, bubbling call of curlews from the high heather slopes above the valley; and the hazel scrub along the skirts of the fortress hill was dappled mealy gold with catkins. The strangeness was gone from the fortress hill, no mist hung above it now save the faint blue haze of cooking-fires, as Aquila looked up at it. It was just a place that he knew, as he knew other places, with people that he knew in it: old Finnen the Harper, and Valarius with his pouchy red face and watery blue eyes, who had been of Constantine’s body-guard in his better days; fat Eugenus, and the lean and fiery little priest Eliphias, with his prophet’s eye; Brychan with his two great hounds—the men, mostly young, who formed a kind of inner circle, a brotherhood, round Ambrosius, and whom he called his Companions.

  He headed for the winding cleft in the hillside where the trickle from the fortress spring in its little hollow came down. It was a climb for goats, but it saved going round to pick up the track on the north side of the hill. There was a thin warmth from the sun on the back of his neck as he climbed, and a flittering of tits among the still-bare blackthorn bushes that arched over the little thread of water, and the small purple flowers of the butterwort cushioned the wet, starling-coloured rocks. More than half-way up, where the cleft widened and the freshet had worn a tiny pool for itself among rocks and tree-roots, he found a small boy and a hound puppy very intent on a hole under a brown tumble of last year’s fern. He would have passed by without speaking and left them to it, but the small boy sat up and grinned at him, thrusting back a shock of hair the warm, silvery-mouse colour of a hayfield in June, and the puppy thumped its tail; there was something so irresistibly friendly about both of them that he stopped, without meaning to, pointing at the hole.

  ‘Is it a grass snake?’

  The boy nodded. ‘We have been watching for him a long while, Cabal and I. He came out yesterday. A monster!’ He hooked an arm round the puppy’s neck. ‘When he comes out again, I am going to catch him and take him up to show Ambrosius.’

  Artorius—Artos, most people called him, meaning a bear—was Ambrosius’s nephew, bastard son to his brother Utha; and when Utha died, Ambrosius had taken him. From that day, Ambrosius had become Artos’s private God.

  Suddenly he remembered something which in his concentration on the grass snake he had forgotten; Aquila saw his eyes darken with excitement in his square, brown face. ‘Did you hear the messenger come?’

  ‘No,’ Aquila said, his foot already on the next step of the climb. ‘What messenger was that, then?’

  ‘From Canovium. His horse was all in a smother. He said that Vortigern has put away his real wife and married Hengest’s daughter instead, and given Hengest a huge piece of land, that wasn’t his to give, for a bride piece!’

  Aquila brought his foot down again. ‘Since when have Ambrosius’s messengers told their news to Artos the bear cub?’

  The boy nodded, gravely vehement. ‘He didn’t tell me, of course. But it is true! All the Dun is buzzing with it.’ He sat up straighter, his eyes fixed on Aquila’s face. ‘They say she’s very beautiful—Hengest’s daughter.’

  ‘She is,’ Aquila said.

  ‘Have you seen her?’

  ‘Yes, when I was a thrall in the Jutish camp.’

  ‘What is she like?’

  ‘A golden witch in a crimson gown.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Artos, digesting this. He brushed the hair of the puppy’s neck up the wrong way, parting it between his fingers as though in search of ticks. ‘It’s sad for Vortigern’s real wife,’ he said gruffly, and then, his excitement quickening again, ‘What do you think will happen now? Something is bound to happen now!’

  ‘I
s it?’ Aquila said. He stood silent a few moments, staring at the little dark hole under the ferns, while the boy and the puppy watched him expectantly. ‘Yes, I suppose it is … Good grass-snake hunting to you.’ And he stepped over the puppy and went on up. Rowena had made her singing magic well, he thought; she had caught the Red Fox in a net of her golden hair; and what would happen now? What would the three Young Foxes do about their mother’s wrongs? So much might depend on that.

  But there was little time for wondering in the days that followed. For with spring running through the glens, Ambrosius was making ready to go down from Dynas Ffaraon to the coast.

  The grey stone fortress of Segontium, that crouched on its low hill with its seaward ramparts reflected in the narrow straits of Môn, had been abandoned by the Legions long before they marched from Britain, and the tribesmen had taken from it all of Rome that could be carried off, and left it to the mountain foxes. But now it had been pressed into service again to help defend the coast against the Scots from Erin who swarmed all along the western shores in the raiding season, its broken walls patched up, its fallen roofs replaced with bracken thatch. There was fire again on its cold hearths and horses in its stable rows. Here Ambrosius made his headquarters while spring drew on, and day by day the old grey fortress became fuller of crowding life as the young men of the little standing army that he had been gathering in the last few years came in for their summer training. And in the grain-lands of Môn across the Straits men ploughed, and sowed the barley, while the coastwise guards kept watch westward for the first dark sails of the Scots raiders.

  But the Scots were late that year, and still there had been no sign of them, and no more news of the outside world, when Ambrosius went north for a few days, with a handful of his chosen Companions, to Aber of the White Shells, at the place where the northern road from Canovium came down through the mountains to the coast.