15
The Hawking Glove
WHEN spring came, Aquila was in the mountains again, sent up with an escort of cavalry to bring down the women and children. Little, grim Owain, riding beside him in the rear of the long, winding cavalcade, had been angrily disgusted when Aquila chose him for his second in command of the escort. It was one thing to stand beside the Dolphin to keep Durobrivae Bridge from the Saxons, quite another to follow him away westward when the fighting was just about to start again. He had gloomed all through the lowlands, his narrow, weather-burned face shut like a trap; but the thin mountain air, the wild, free tang of spring among his own hills had lightened his mood little by little until now he was whistling to himself softly as he rode; and the whistling rose small and clear as a distant bird-call above the soft beat of hooves and creak of harness-leather, the wheel-rumble of the oxcarts and the cries of the carters.
Aquila did not whistle, and kept most of his thoughts for the business of getting the ox carts through the soft places. But in him, too, something answered to the blackthorn breaking into flower beside the way, and the plover calling. It was almost a year since he had ridden down from Dynas Ffaraon behind Ambrosius, almost a year since he had seen Ness. He was not sure what he felt about seeing her again, but he wondered a little how it had gone with her through the months between.
‘Ah-ee! There it stands against the sky, as though we had been but an hour away,’ Owain said, breaking off his whistling, and spitting with satisfaction between his horse’s ears.
And Aquila realized that he had been riding without seeing anything for the past mile.
They had sent one of their number on ahead with word of their coming, and men were waiting for them in the cattle enclosures at the foot of the fortress hill. There were hurried greetings, and leaving the tired oxen and the carts in charge of the men who had come to meet them, they set off up the steep track to the inner gateway. In a little while they were clattering between the huge, square-cut gate-timbers; weary men dropping from their saddles, suddenly the centre of a little crowd that seemed to spring out of nowhere to greet them: a crowd of women, for the most part, for there would be few men in the Dun at this hour of the day, with the sun still high in the sky; women asking for news of sons or husbands, and small, excited children who must be scooped back out of danger from the horses’ hooves; and a swarm of half-grown boys led by young Artos and his hound Cabal, who had come running from sword-and-buckler practice at sound of the escort’s arrival. But in all the crowd there was no sign of Ness. Aquila, watching the horses fed and rubbed down and picketed, glanced round for her more than once, but he was not really surprised at not finding her there. Ness had always been good at not being there when he returned from a time away, and it was not likely that she would change now.
He could not bring himself to ask any of the women for news of her, but so much could have happened in a year, and he began to feel vaguely anxious in spite of himself. ‘See to the rest of the picket lines,’ he said suddenly to Owain, and, turning, thrust out through the little throng towards the gateway and the bothies below the rampart. Some of the women looked after him, and glanced at each other smiling after he had gone. But he did not know that.
His own bothy was partly hidden from this side by an outcrop of rock, so that one could not see it clearly from a distance, but came upon it suddenly. And when he did so now, what he saw pulled him up short, with a feeling of having walked into complete unreality. Ness sat in the bothy doorway with something kicking in a nest of deerskin at her feet. She was bending down to look at the thing, and singing almost under her breath; a fainter, huskier singing than the one that Flavia had made when he found her in the Saxon camp, but with a like crooning note in it. Something seemed to catch Aquila by the throat, making it for the moment hard to breathe. But at least she was not combing her hair. She was spinning, the brown of the crotal-dyed wool on her distaff as deeply rich as the velvet of a bee’s back, and the whirling spindle singing its own small, contented song in a kind of undertone to hers.
Then, as he took another step forward and his shadow fell across her feet, she looked up. ‘I heard that you were come,’ she said, as though he had been gone a day instead of a year.
Aquila looked down at the babe in the deerskin, and then at Ness; he felt stupid, woolly headed, as though for the moment he could not properly understand. Ness had not told him before he went away; maybe she had not known herself, or—maybe she would not have told him anyway.
‘Ness—is it mine?’
She laughed, on that hard, mocking, wild bird-note of hers, and laid down spindle and distaff, and stooping, caught up the little creature still muffled in its deerskin, holding it close against her. ‘Oh, my lord, look then! Do you not see that he has your eagle’s beak for a nose, though there is no blue dolphin on his shoulder?’
Aquila looked more closely. The babe did not seem to him to have much nose at all, but he supposed that women saw these things differently. It had a little dark down on its head, like a curlew chick, and out of its small face two solemn, dark eyes frowned up at him, wandering a little, as the eyes of most very young things do before they have learned to focus.
‘He even frowns as you do!’ Ness said. She was still laughing, mocking him, but there was less harshness in her mockery than there had used to be.
Aquila put out a bent finger and brushed the baby’s cheek with his knuckle. It felt extraordinarily soft and alive. A son, he thought, and there was a queer, rather painful stirring deep down in him. This small, living creature frowning up at him out of the soft folds of deerskin was his son; what he had been to his father.
‘Have you given him a name?’
‘Nay, that is for you to do.’
There was a little silence filled with the living sounds of the Dun and the warm droning of a bee among the cushions of wild thyme that clung to a ledge of the outcrop close by. Then Aquila said, ‘I shall call him Flavian.’
‘Flavian?’ She seemed to be testing the name on her tongue. ‘Why Flavian?’
‘It was my father’s name.’
Another silence, longer than the first. ‘So. I have learned two things about my lord,’ Ness said at last. ‘My lord had a father, and his name was Flavian … Na, three things—’ Her voice had lost its mocking note; and looking up, he found her watching him with something of the air of one making a discovery. ‘My lord loved his father. I did not think that it was in my lord to love anyone.’
Before he could answer, a pad of feet and a clear whistle sounded above, and Artos came leaping down the outcrop with the great hound Cabal at his bare, brown heels, full of questions about the return journey and demands to be allowed to ride with the escort. And for a while Aquila had no more time for his own affairs.
The next morning Aquila saw his wife and son into the foremost of the ox carts, along with the other women and children going to join their men. She settled herself in the tail of the cart, drawing her cloak forward about herself and the baby in the crook of her arm; and as Aquila stowed her bundle in after her, an older woman with three children clinging about her leaned forward from the interior of the cart, to help her settle, saying as she did so, ‘The little one grows fatter now. Has he a name yet?’
‘Yes,’ Ness said, ‘he has a name. He is Flavian.’
‘Flavian.’ The other woman seemed to be testing the name as Ness herself had done. ‘What a man’s name, and he so small! Nothing but a minnow.’
Ness looked down at the little creature bundled in her cloak, pressing back the dark green folds with her free hand. ‘Minnow,’ she said, and then a surprising thing happened, for her eyes went to Aquila, sharing the little warm laughter of the moment in the way that she had never shared anything with him before. ‘Minnow, Dolphin’s son.’
Aquila touched her foot briefly in acceptance of the laughter; then turned away to mount Inganiad at the head of the escort.
He was very proud because he had a son; and for the fi
rst time in six years, as he led the long, winding convoy of horsemen and ox carts down the road to Canovium, the time ahead seemed to hold something for him.
Young Artos rode between Aquila and Owain on his own pony, with the great hound Cabal loping alongside. They had listened to his demand to be one of the escort, and he rode with his pride shining about him like a scarlet cloak, and his hand on his hunting-knife as though the familiar glens of Arfon through which the track wound were suddenly overnight swarming with Saxons.
‘I go to help Ambrosius,’ he said, not shouting it, but speaking head up into the mountain wind. ‘Soon we shall drive the Sea Wolves back into the sea!’
But it was not to be so simple as that, for despite their hopes last spring, the British were not strong enough to drive the Sea Wolves into the sea. Again and again in the next two years they hurled the Saxons back into the southeast corner of the province, only to have them come swarming out once more as soon as their own thrust was spent. And with the war bands strengthening all the while under Octa in the north, and more coming in down every Saxon wind like the wild geese in October, the menace remained as deadly as ever.
‘If we could have one great victory!’ Ambrosius cried. ‘One victory to sound like a blast of trumpets through the land! Then we should gather to our standard not merely a gallant handful here and there, but the princes of the Dumnonii and the Brigantes with their whole princedoms behind them. Then we might indeed have a Britain whole and bonded together to drive the Sea Wolves into the sea!’
Meanwhile they struggled with the age-old question of how to fight any kind of war with an army that wanted to go home in mid campaign to harvest its own fields, and when it came back, if it did come back, had mostly forgotten its training; struggled also to make one host, one heart, out of lowland Roman and mountain Celt; and so far as the Celts were concerned, it was uphill work.
With the men of Arfon it was well enough; the unbreakable tie between the Chieftain and his warriors bound them to Ambrosius, who was the very heart of the whole movement; but with those who had come in following the Young Foxes, it still seemed to Aquila that one could not be sure.
He spoke of his doubts to Eugenus the Physician, towards dusk of a winter’s day, as they walked back together from the baths.
‘Ye-es, I have long carried a somewhat uneasy mind on that score myself,’ Eugenus said, his words muffled by the folds of his cloak that he had huddled almost to his eyebrows, for in spite of his fat he felt the cold. ‘Despite all Ambrosius’s efforts, despite the friendships—and the marriages—that have sprung up between us, I believe, most sadly, that the only thing that really holds the Celts to our banner is Vortimer. One man’s life is a perilously slender thread. It’s a solemn thought, my friend.’
Aquila glanced aside at him as they walked. ‘There’s young Pascent. He’ll keep faith, I’ll swear.’
‘Aye, but he’s no leader—he’s too good a follower.’ There was a smile in the other’s voice, for, like everyone else, he liked Pascent. ‘He is the stuff that the very best household warriors are made of, brave as a boar and faithful as a hound; but it is not in him to hold the Celtic party, as Vortimer can.’
They walked on in silence, each busy with his own unquiet thoughts, through the winter dusk.
As they walked, the dusk that rose like quiet, grey water in the shabby streets of Venta was rolling in blue and faintly misty over the high northern moors that Octa and his war bands had overrun. And a woman with red-gold hair and eyes that were the shifting grey-green of shallow seas was bending over the fire in a stone-built hut where the blackened heather swept to the walls. She was holding a big leather hawking glove turned inside out, and as she bent forward the firelight darted on the short, bronze pin projecting from the stitching of the thumb. There was a wisp of sheep’s wool in her other hand, and she dipped it again and again into the few drops of some thick, greyish fluid in a bowl among the hot ashes, and painted the bright sliver of metal with infinite care, as one handling a viper’s fang. All the while she crooned softly, words in a tongue much older than the Saxons’ tongue. Many things had gone to the making of those few drops of greyish fluid, and there were charms for them all, to make them do their work more surely. Each time, she let the stuff dry, then painted it again, until the brightness of the bronze was dimmed and darkened as with a grey rust. Then, with the same infinite care, she turned the glove right side out—it was a beautiful glove of honey-pale mare’s skin, embroidered with hair-fine silver wires and silk as deeply blue as the hooded flowers from whose root the woman had distilled her chiefest poison—and laid it aside. She burned the wisp of wool, and broke the little earthen pot and dropped the pieces into the red heart of the fire.
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.’
The Lantern Bearers (book III) Page 18
