The Lantern Bearers (book III)

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘No,’ Aquila said, ‘I imagine that you did not. However, that does not particularly matter. Your future plans are for the future; at the present moment you should be with Brother Eliphias, learning to read words of more than one syllable. You are over-fond of playing truant.’

  His tone was more blighting than he had meant it to be. He saw the Minnow’s face suddenly white and forlorn, with the pride about it that he wore like a garment when he wanted to cry. He saw Artos make a sudden movement as though to lean down and touch the boy’s shoulder, and then check himself. Suddenly he knew that whatever happened, he must make amends. He forced a smile, and said quickly, ‘Nay then, we’ll forget that part of it. Since you are here, you can make yourself useful and ride Inganiad back for me. I want to try Falcon’s paces on the way home.’

  He knew that for a long while past Flavian had been desperately eager to ride Inganiad, and so he looked for a quick flare of joyful excitement. For a moment, delight did leap in the boy’s face, but only for a moment, then it was gone again, and Flavian said, ‘Yes, Father. Thank you, Father.’ But it sounded more dutiful than anything else. Aquila, pretending not to notice as he dismounted and called to one of his men to bring up Falcon, his spare mount, wondered what the trouble was now. He swung the small boy up into the saddle with a ‘There you are. Hold tight,’ which sounded falsely hearty in his own ears, and set to shortening the stirrup ropes. And as he did so, he understood what was wrong. For so long Flavian had longed for the day when he would be deemed worthy to ride Inganiad; it should have been a great occasion, a time of trumpets. But he had made it only a lump of honeycomb after a smacking. (It is never the things that you do, but the way you do them. It was not that you laughed at Rhyanidd about the pig …) Would he never learn? He could have groaned. Well, too late to do anything about it now. Still keeping a firm hold on Inganiad’s reins, he mounted Falcon, and wheeled both horses towards the distant walls of Venta, with the rest of the group who were already moving off.

  Flavian looked very small on the tall, flame-coloured mare as his father glanced aside at him. He was sitting very upright, his eyes shining; he was a man riding among men. Maybe it hadn’t been such a very bad mistake after all. Aquila saw and understood the appeal on the boy’s face. Flavian wanted him to let go the reins. He hesitated, but Inganiad was quiet after her day’s work; she had known and loved Flavian all his life and was used to his climbing about her back in stable. She would be gentle with him. Aquila took his hand off the reins.

  A very short while later, if there had been any time for cursing, he would have been cursing himself by every name under heaven that he had done so. The thing happened so quickly, that it was over almost before it was begun. A white owl, early on the hunting trail, flew out of the alder brake on silent, ghost-soft wings almost under Inganiad’s nose; and the mare, startled, and missing her lord’s strong and familiar hand on the bridle, shied violently and went up in a rearing half-turn. Aquila had an instant’s sight of the Minnow’s white, terrified face that stayed with him afterwards as though it were bitten into his mind. He shouted to the boy to hold on, even as he flung himself sideways in his own saddle to catch the reins, but he was too late. The next thing he knew was that Flavian was on the ground and he was kneeling over him.

  The boy lay unmoving, with blood trickling from the great broken place in his head where it had struck a sharp alder root. With a cold sickness rising in him, Aquila set his hand over the Minnow’s heart. It was beating, though very faintly, and he drew a long, shuddering gasp of relief. Artos was kneeling beside him, and he heard quick, concerned voices all around, but he didn’t hear what they said. He was feeling the Minnow all over with desperate urgency. Nothing seemed broken; there was only that terrible blow on the head. With infinite care he gathered him into his arms, and stood up; the child felt very light, as though his bones were hollow like a bird’s. Someone must have caught the horses, and someone brought him Inganiad, still trembling and wild of eye. He shook his head; to ride back he would have to let Flavian out of his arms while he mounted. ‘I’ll walk,’ he muttered.

  He walked back to Venta, carrying the small, unconscious body; and Artos walked with him, leading his own horse. What had happened to the rest, he neither knew nor cared. Once inside the city gates he said to Artos, ‘Go ahead and warn Ness.’ And when Artos had mounted and gone clattering away on his errand, he walked on alone.

  He carried Flavian up the street and in at the door where Artos’s horse was tied to the hitching-post, and across the courtyard where the stone dolphin still gaped senselessly in its broken fountain. Ness met him as he reached the inner courtyard, Artos behind her. She was as white as the boy, and held out her arms without a word to take him, but Aquila shook his head. ‘Better not to change him over. I’ll put him on his bed … I let him ride Inganiad and a white owl startled her.’ He forgot that Artos would have told her that already. The door of Flavian’s sleeping cell stood open and he carried him in and laid him down on the narrow cot; then, as Ness slipped to her knees beside it, he turned to Artos, big and anxious in the doorway. ‘Go across to Eugenus’s quarters and get him quickly.’

  The daylight was going fast, draining out of the little lime-washed room as it might so easily be that the life was draining out of Flavian’s small, still body. ‘If the boy dies,’ Aquila said, ‘I’ve killed him.’

  Ness looked up from the work of her hands as she pressed back Flavian’s dark, feathery hair and laid a piece of soft linen against his temple to staunch the slowly trickling blood.

  ‘Get the lamps lit so that Eugenus has light to work by,’ she said. ‘Then go and bid one of the slaves to bring hot water.’

  There was an agonizing delay before Eugenus came, for he had just gone out to a supper party, and it was some time before Artos could find him, but he came hurrying at last, still wearing his banquet wreath of early white violets and bringing with him a faint scent of wine. He felt Flavian all over much as Aquila had done, examined and bathed and bound his head, felt his heart and listened to his breathing, and pulled up his closed lids to look into his eyes.

  ‘A bad blow, a cruel blow, but I think that the skull is not cracked,’ he said. ‘I will come again in the morning. Meanwhile keep him warm and do not move him. On no account try to bring him back to his body before he is ready to come. That may take several days.’

  ‘But he—will come back?’ Ness said, still kneeling by the bed with the child’s head between her hands.

  Eugenus looked from her to Aquila standing at the bed-foot and back again; and his dark, bulging eyes were extraordinarily kind under the ridiculous banquet wreath. ‘I hope and pray so,’ he said.

  In the next three days Aquila went about his duties as usual, but training ground and council chambers alike seemed quite unreal. Only the nights were real, when he kept watch by Flavian while Ness got a few hours’ sleep. The other wives in the big house would have helped her gladly, though she had made close friends with none of them, but she would not leave the boy for more than a few moments to anybody but Aquila. He would bring work with him—horse lists that needed checking, some problem of transport to be worked out—but he made small progress with them. Sometimes he dozed a little, for he was very tired, but never deeply enough to lose consciousness of the narrow cell, the glow of the shielded lamp thrown upward on the lime-washed wall, and Flavian’s small, still face on the pillow, so like Flavia’s, so incredibly like. It was odd that he had never realized before how like to Flavia the boy was.

  For three nights there was no change, and then, halfway through the fourth night, Flavian stirred. He had stirred before, flung his arms about and muttered: but it had been a kind of blind stirring, as though it were not Flavian himself, but only his body showing that it was ill at ease. This time it was different; Aquila knew that it was different, even as he laid aside the tablets he had been working on and strained forward to look into the boy’s face. Flavian stirred again, a little shiver ran through him
, and he was still once more. But his breathing was growing quicker, he shifted his bandaged head from side to side on the pillow; his mouth was half open and his eyelids fluttered. He looked like someone trying to wake from a sleep that is too heavy for him.

  ‘Flavian,’ Aquila said quietly. ‘Minnow.’

  Eugenus had said that they must not try to bring him back into his body until he was ready to come; but now he was ready, he was trying to come, needing help. He didn’t know if Flavian heard him, but he made a kind of whimpering, and a little groping movement of one hand on the coverlid. Aquila put his own hand over it. ‘It is all right. It is all right, Minnow. I’m here.’

  Flavian drew a long, fluttering breath, and then another; and then he opened his eyes and lay frowning up at his father.

  ‘It is all right,’ Aquila said again. ‘Nothing to worry about. Lie still.’

  Flavian’s gaze wandered off unsteadily to blink at the lamp, and returned to his father’s face. ‘Have I—been ill?’

  ‘No,’ Aquila said. ‘You hurt your head, but it is better now.’

  There was a moment’s silence, and then Flavian turned his hand over to cling to Aquila’s. ‘I fell off Inganiad—didn’t I?’ he mumbled. ‘I’m sorry, Father.’

  ‘Inganiad threw you,’ Aquila said. ‘A white owl startled her and she threw you. If I had been on her back, she would like enough have thrown me.’

  Flavian smiled. It was a very sleepy smile, and Aquila smiled back; and just for the moment they were very near together, with the wall that had grown up between them dwindled quite away. But Flavian was a little anxious; there was something else his father must understand. ‘It wasn’t Inganiad’s fault, Father—really it wasn’t. It was the white owl.’

  ‘It was the white owl,’ Aquila said. ‘Go to sleep again, Minnow.’

  Flavian scarcely needed telling, for his eyes were already drooping shut; and in a little while he was sleeping quietly, his hand still holding Aquila’s. Aquila sat for a time, watching him, then he dropped his own head on to his fore-arm on the edge of the cot. He had not prayed for Flavian’s life, he hadn’t prayed for anything or about anything, since the day that he lay under the oak tree after his parting with Flavia, and decided that it was a waste of time. But there was a deep rush of gratitude in him, now.

  He did not go to rouse Ness; she was asleep and needed the sleep desperately. And besides, the Minnow still had him by the hand.

  When Flavian woke up again in the morning, he drank some broth and managed a shaky grin for his family. But the old barrier was up again between him and his father—though maybe not quite so high as it had been before.

  Having begun to mend, he mended at a gallop, and not so many days later Aquila, with an hour to spare in the morning, wrapped him in a striped native rug and carried him out to sit on the bench in the inner courtyard. There was beginning to be some strength in the sun, and the old wall at their backs was faintly warm as they sat side by side. It was just the two of them, and Argos, who had been a fat, brindled puppy when Ness chose between Aquila and her own people, lying outstretched at their feet, dignified as a stone lion. The violets that grew against the wall were not out yet, but there was a faint scent of them from their leaves, and a cock chaffinch was flirting to and fro in the branches of the damson tree. Aquila had a feeling of ‘home’ on him. You couldn’t really call this great, decaying house that they shared with so many other families ‘home’, but it was the place where he lived when he was in Venta with Ness and the Minnow; it had been for nearly nine years, and every stone of it was familiar. To Flavian, he supposed, it must be home; it would be the first place that he remembered. No orchard below the mountains, no downland valley for Flavian.

  He looked round at the boy beside him. The Minnow was sitting gathered in on himself like a ball, with his feet drawn up inside the striped rug and only his head sticking out. He had been allowed to leave the bandage off for the first time, and his thin, eager face was more than ever like Flavia’s.

  ‘Let’s look at your head,’ Aquila said, and then, as the boy scuffled round on the bench, cocking it obediently to one side and screwing up his eyes, ‘Yes, it’s mending … I’ll tell you a thing, Minnow; you’re going to have a scar on your forehead to spoil your beauty, exactly like the one I have on mine.’

  Flavian’s eyes flew open. ‘Truly?’ he said, as though it were something to be much desired.

  ‘Very truly,’ Aquila said, and there was a sudden warmth of laughter in him, because he had not thought of it like that. They looked at each other for a moment in silence, and in the silence it was as though, very hesitantly, they reached out a little towards each other.

  ‘Minnow—’ Aquila began, without any clear idea of what he was going to say. But in the same instant he realized that the Minnow was not listening. He had craned round to listen to quick footsteps that were coming across the court of the Governor’s Palace towards the little postern door under the damson tree. He saw the pin lift, the door opened, and Brychan came striding through. And the moment was lost.

  Aquila got up quickly to meet the new-comer. ‘Brychan, what is it, then?’ But he thought he knew. They had been waiting for the final order, almost on the edge of marching for days now.

  Brychan had halted at sight of them; he was bright with the special flame that always woke in him at the approach of fighting. ‘The scouts have just come in. Hengest himself is encamped this side of Pontes and we march at noon in advance of the rest. I came through this way on my way down to the horse lines, to bring you the word.’

  They looked at each other for a moment, both on the edge of going their separate ways, both aware that what was coming was something different from the harrying of the past summers.

  ‘I have almost forgotten the smell of full battle,’ Brychan said.

  Aquila said abruptly, almost as though some grey shadow of the future had reached out to touch him, ‘Have we left it too long?—We had something once, something that wins battles. Have we got it still?’

  ‘Too much wine last night?’ Brychan drawled. ‘Or just an encouraging thought on the eve of battle?’

  ‘Just a thought,’ Aquila said. He was hitching already at his sword-belt.

  For a moment Brychan’s face had neither its usual insolence nor its usual laughter. ‘We have got Artos,’ he said, almost gravely.

  ‘Yes, we’ve got Artos.’ Aquila looked up from his sword-belt. ‘I only have to pick up my saddle bag and say good-bye to Ness. I’ll be down at the horse lines close behind you.’

  Brychan nodded, and in the act of turning away, flicked a long finger towards Flavian, round-eyed with excitement on the bench. ‘How is the boy?’

  Flavian answered for himself. ‘I am almost mended, and I shall have a scar on my head like my father’s!’

  ‘Sa, sa! my young fighting cock!’ Brychan stood looking down at him an instant, laughing again, his darkly golden head seeming very far up among the twisted branches of the damson tree. ‘What it is to be a son, and what it is to have one!’ and he swung on his heel and went with his long, lazy stride across the court and disappeared into the shadows of the colonnade.

  Aquila looked down at his son. If only they could have had a little longer, he thought, they might have begun to know each other. Now maybe there wouldn’t be another chance. Even if he came back, it would probably be too late, and the time would have gone by. He saw suddenly how the buds were swelling on the damson tree, and it came to him that he had never seen the damson tree in flower. The Saxons came before the buds broke.

  ‘Back to bed with you,’ he said, and picked up his son, very silent now, and carried him back into his sleeping cell and set him down on the bed.

  ‘What did you begin to say, before Brychan came?’ Flavian asked.

  ‘Did I begin to say anything? I have forgotten.’ Aquila gave him a hurried and awkward hug, and strode out, shouting to one of the stable slaves to bring round Inganiad; then went to pick up his saddle bag
and find Ness.

  18

  The Hostage

  A FEW days later, on the fringe of the Tamesis Valley, the British and Saxon war hosts met in battle; and five days later still, terribly, shamefully, unbelievably, the leaders of both sides met in the Basilica at Calleva, to discuss an agreed peace.

  The Basilica at Calleva had been burned down, like most of the town, in the troubles that ended the reign of Emperor Allectus a hundred and fifty years ago, and, like the rest of the town, rebuilt on its own blackened rubble. Standing with the other British leaders at the council table that had been set up on the tribunal dais, Aquila could see by the clumsier workmanship where the new walls joined on to the old ones; even the stain of the burning, reddish as a stain of almost washed-out blood, showed up in the dusty sunlight that fell through the high clerestory windows of the vast hall. Odd how one noticed things like that—things that didn’t matter, when the Lord God knew that there were things enough that did, to think about …

  What had happened five days ago? How had it come about, this grey state of things between defeat and victory? The slackening of an army’s fibre through too many years of waiting? ‘Have we waited too long?’ he had said to Brychan when the order came to march. ‘We had something once—something that wins battles. Have we got it still?’ And Brychan had said, ‘We have got Artos.’ That had been a true word; they had got Artos, whose crashing cavalry charges had wrenched a drawn battle out of what would otherwise have been a British defeat. He glanced aside, and saw the tall, mouse-fair head upraised above the heads of the other men round Ambrosius’s chair. Ambrosius was one whom men followed for love, into the dark if need be, but Artos was already one whom men would feel that they were following into the light; a great burst of light that had somehow the warmth of laughter in it as well as the sound of trumpets. But not even Artos had been able to drag victory out of that battle five days ago. Aquila’s eye went for an instant in search of Brychan, before he remembered that Brychan was dead, like Inganiad. Not for the red mare the old age in quiet meadows that he had planned for her … Strange, the tricks that your mind could play, so that you forgot for a moment, as though it were a light thing, that your sword brother was dead.