The Lantern Bearers (book III)

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  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.’

  16

  White Thorn and Yellow Iris

  ‘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.’

  Her face never lost its waiting stillness. ‘I know. All Venta hums with that news.’

  ‘I—spoke with Cradoc your father a while since. He said that because I once turned the blow that was meant for him, he would leave you free to choose for yourself, Ness.’

  ‘And you? Do you also leave me free to choose for myself?’

  ‘If you choose your own people, I will not hold you,’ Aquila said.

  She rose from the bench and stood facing him, her eyes full of the old challenge. ‘And the child?’

  Aquila did not answer at once. The words seemed to stick in his throat and choke him. He looked at the small boy and the hound puppy. ‘Take the Minnow too,’ he said at last, and his voice was hoarse and strained. ‘He is so little, he needs you more than me. Only—let him come back to me when he is of age to bear his shield.’ He pulled himself up. ‘No, you cannot promise that; it might be to send him to fight against his own kind. Take him and keep him, Ness.’

  ‘A strange man you are, my lord,’ Ness said. ‘Three autumns ago you took me from my father’s hearth as though I were a mere piece of household gear that you did not much want. And now you will let me go—you will let the child go—because, I think you would fain have us stay.’

  Aquila nodded, wordlessly. He knew so little of Ness, scarcely anything at all; certainly not enough to guess what was going on behind her thin, brown face.

  She stared at him a long moment, then flung up her head and began to laugh, on the old clear, wild bird-note, waking the Minnow so that he sat up blinking, puzzled at finding his father suddenly there and startled by his mother’s wild laughter; he clutched the puppy against him for comfort. But her laughter broke in the middle, and she bent her face into her hands. ‘I used to dream night after night of being free; free to go back to my people—my own people … But it is too late. I belong to you now, I and the child.’

  It seemed to Aquila that there was suddenly a great quietness all about him. ‘They will say that you betrayed your own people to stay with me,’ he said.

  She lifted her face from her hands, with the look of accepting something. ‘I am betraying my own people—my own world—to stay with you.’

  And suddenly out of the quietness he seemed to hear Flavia’s voice sounding behind Ness’s; Flavia’s pretty voice made hoarse and toneless by grief. ‘Our Lord help me! He is my man.’

  It was not the same thing. He was not the enemy, as the Saxons were the enemy; he was not one of a band that had killed Ness’s father. Yet he knew that deep down at the heart of things Ness’s choosing and Flavia’s choosing sprang from the same kind of seed. He had a sudden longing, which wasn’t a bit like him now, though it was like the person he had been before the Saxons burned his home, to give Ness things; to bring them and heap them into her lap. New songs and the three stars of Orion’s belt, and honey-in-the-comb, and branches of white flowering thorn at mid-winter; not only for her sake, but for Flavia’s sake as well.

  He heard himself giving her the only thing that he had to give in that way; his own voice, hoarse and a little stumbling, begging her to understand and accept what he gave. ‘I had a sister once, Ness. She was carried off by the Saxons when they burned our home. I thought—I prayed—that she was dead, until I found her again years later in the Saxon camp. I would have taken her away with me, but for her also it—was too late, by then. Her name was Flavia.’

  It was the first time that he had spoken of his sister in all those years.

  Ness made a small gesture with her cupped hands, as though she received a gift into them. ‘Poor Aquila—and poor Flavia—and poor Ness.’

  Then a party of horsemen passed cantering up the street beyond the house, and she dropped her hands; and the world outside was back with them again.

  Aquila hitched at his sword-belt, thrusting his own affairs into the background. ‘I must be away and see to sending up some of our men to take over the outposts that Vortimer’s people were to have manned.’

  He said ‘Vortimer’s people’ not ‘your people’ now, and did not even notice that it was so. Ness noticed, and there was a faint smile on her mouth, bitter and sweet together, like the juice of the crab apple, as she watched him go striding back to his man’s world. Then she turned herself to comfort the Minnow, who, thoroughly upset by all this, had burst into tears.

  Somehow Aquila had felt that the desertion of Vortimer’s troops must bring the long struggle to a head, and the future down on them like a tide when the sea-wall goes; and he strode out past the dozing porter into the street again with his hands instinctively making sure that his sword was loose in its sheath, as though he expected already to hear the Saxon war cry rise beyond the walls of Venta, and the clash of weapons at the gates.

  Instead, all that summer there was a long, uneasy hush, while the weakened British host waited under arms, to guard their borders from an attack that somehow never came. In the nerve-racking hush, as summer dragged by, news filtered through to them now and again from the rest of Britain. With his followers returned to him after his son’s death, Vortigern was striving to make a stronger stand than he had done of old, striving to make firmer treaties with the Saxons.

  ‘The fool! The fool!’ Ambrosius said. ‘Of what use to make bargains in the Fire-hall with the Wolf that you have welcomed in over the threshold.’ And he set himself and his Companions with yet grimmer urgency to the task of making an army, and hammering the territories of Calleva and Venta, Aquae Sulis and Sorviodunum into one, after the years of being left to their own devices that had broken them down into separate states and turned their Magistrates, whose forbears had been petty princes, back into petty princes again.

  They heard that there was to be a great gathering of the Saxon and Celtic leaders at Durnovaria to make a treaty that would fix for ever the Saxon frontiers in Britain; and they laughed with a small, grim laughter around their watch fires. ‘When the last Sea Wolf is dead, then the Saxon frontiers in Britain will be fixed for all time, and not before.’

  At summer’s end, they heard how that gathering had ended.

  It had a name by then; the name of ‘The Treachery of the Long Knives’ by which it was to be known for generations to come. In accordance with the usual custom that no man should carry weapons to the council circle, Vortigern and his men had gone unarmed to the gathering. But Hengest’s house carls sitting with them on the same benches at the feasting which followed the council, a Saxon and a Celt alternately, had had each his dirk concealed inside his sleeve (‘Well may the Saxons wear long sleeves’ and ‘Never trust a man with long sleeves,’ said the British for a thousand years). At a given signal each man had ripped out his dagger and stabbed the man on his left. More than a hundred of the Celtic nobles died at that council, but not Vortigern himself. Vortigern, who styled himself High King, had been kept to pay head ransom for his life; and Vortigern had paid it, with the last rags of his pride torn from him, with a dagger at his throat under the thin red beard, and a scribe to write the whole thing down in fair Latin that it might not be denied afterwards; paid it in huge grants of land in the Great Forest and the Down Country and up the Tamesis almost to Londinium.

  After that a few of the Celtic party returned to Ambrosius like beaten hounds with their tails between their legs, but for the most part they simply melted away back to their own mountains. Lacking more support—even having to send back some of the troops he had left to help strengthen the western coasts against the Scots pirates—all that Ambrosius could d
o was to hold his father’s old territory as a kind of island, a fortress within its own frontiers. So almost another year went by, and it was full summer again.

  The brown floor of the woods dropped gently away before Inganiad’s hooves; the trunks of the ash trees rose straight and pale on either hand, and the light under the high canopy of leaves was palely green, so that Aquila seemed to be moving under water as one does in an ash wood. He heard the faint jingle of the patrol coming down behind him; no sound of voices, for they were men used to riding quietly in the woods. Young Artos, riding at his side, with Cabal loping along before, cocked up his head suddenly, caught into swift delight.

  ‘Look, Dolphin—squirrel! There on that branch—Ah, look, there he goes.’

  Aquila followed the direction of the boy’s gaze, and saw a streak of reddish fur flicker out along the limb of a tree a little to their right. It clung an instant in the crotch where two branches met, chittering at them angrily, then darted on, out on to the slender, swaying, tipmost spray and, scarcely seeming to spring, was in the next tree, floating and lilting through the branches as though it had no more weight than a wind-blown flame. Then it was gone, only they heard it still chittering in the distance. Artos chittered back, then, laughing, took up the alarm call of a jay.

  Silence fell on them again, as they rode on, the reins slack on the horses’ necks, through the woodland ways.

  Presently Aquila glanced again at the boy riding beside him. Young Artos was fourteen, with still a year to wait before Ambrosius judged him ready for battle (if it ever came to open battle again), but he had been like a restive colt all that spring, so that Ambrosius had finally sent him up to Aquila, keeping watch on the northern borders, to get the smell of the camp into his nose and begin to be a man. Artos the Bear. In some ways the name suited him, Aquila thought, for already his body under the leather tunic showed signs of great physical strength, and he had something of the clumsiness of a bear cub in his movements, though not when he was on horseback. Artos on horseback was beautiful with the beauty that comes of a thing’s absolute fitness for the purpose for which it was created: a longship at sea, a bird in flight, Artos on horseback.