The Lantern Bearers (book III)

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  It was not far from dawn, and the night full of a soft, wet, woody-scented hush after the storm, when he came fully back to himself, and realized that life was moving again in the bothy behind him. He lurched to his feet, stood a few moments looking about him, and turning, ducked into the firelit hut again. Flavia’s son was awake, and strained up on to an elbow at his coming, flinging back the wild black hair from his eyes, as he glared up at him. ‘My sword! Where is my sword?’

  ‘In the stream yonder,’ Aquila said, ‘with the alder roots to hold it under.’

  ‘So! You have taken pains that I should have no weapon against you!’

  ‘You fool, do you really think that I felt it needful to disarm you in the state you are in at present?’ Aquila said wearily. ‘It isn’t healthy to be found with a Saxon sword in these parts.’

  Mull began to laugh, taunting, furious, weak laughter that seemed to buffet him as though it were a wind outside himself. ‘I do not doubt that you have a vast care for my health! Ah, but of course, fool that I am! It is your own skin that you look to!’

  ‘Easy, my son,’ Brother Ninnias said from the farther shadows. ‘It so chances that he cared enough for your skin to carry you here last night and doubtless reopen a gash in his own skin doing it. And you have him to thank you were not later dragged out of this hut like a badger out of its hole, and knifed on the threshold by a pack of wine-lit British soldiers in search of more wine or Saxons.’

  Mull’s rage fell still, and his laughter with it. For a long moment he lay looking at Aquila, catching his lower lip between his teeth, as Flavia had done when she was puzzled.

  ‘I do not understand. Why did you do that?’ he said at last.

  ‘For your mother’s sake.’

  ‘My mother? What can my mother be to you?’

  ‘My sister,’ Aquila said levelly.

  ‘Your—sister.’ Mull spoke as though he were testing the words. His frowning gaze moved over Aquila, over the fine workmanship of his sword-belt and the long Roman cavalry sword, and the bronze-and-silver brooch that held his weather-worn cloak, and returned to his dark, harsh, hawk-nosed face, taking in something that had gathered to him during twenty years of commanding men. ‘A great man among your own people,’ he said slowly. ‘A bitter thing it must be for you to have a kinsman among Hengest’s war host.’

  ‘It is,’ Aquila said. ‘God knows that it is. But not quite as you mean it.’ He straightened his shoulders, turning to the more practical side of things. ‘We shall be riding south in a few hours, and there should be little enough risk for you now, while you lie up here.’ He never questioned whether Brother Ninnias would accept the charge and the risk that there was; he had too sure a faith in the little brown man for that. He turned to him now. ‘Nevertheless, the sooner he is away, the better. When should he be able to travel?’

  ‘Not for two or three weeks.’ Brother Ninnias looked up from the bowl in which he was preparing barley stirrabout. ‘Two or three weeks for me to take joy in another guest that the Lord has sent me. But for his own sake he shall go in the first hour that I judge him strong enough.’

  Aquila was thinking quickly: ‘How long a march from here to the nearest point on the border? Ah, but there isn’t a fixed border any longer. How far to the nearest of his own kind, I wonder?’

  ‘That is a thing that there is no means of knowing,’ Brother Ninnias said. ‘But I know the forest northward of this for a good way, and can set him far on his road.’

  Aquila nodded, settling down on to one heel. He pulled his purse from the breast of his stained leather tunic, and tossed it down on to the bracken, where it fell with a faint clink. ‘There’s a little money—all I have by me. It’s not much, but it will help. Get him a tunic, Ninnias, one that doesn’t shout “Saxon” by its cut and long sleeves.’ Then he took out his tablet and stylus, and while the other two watched him, hurriedly scratched a few words on the wax. He looked for a moment at what he had written, then returned his stylus to his folded girdle, and put the tablet down softly and precisely beside his purse. ‘You will pass well enough for British, until you open your mouth. Therefore you must pretend to be dumb. If you run up against anyone, show them this pass. Signed by the Commander of Ambrosius’s Second Cavalry Wing, it should get you out of any trouble. Understand?’

  ‘I—understand,’ Mull said after a moment. He swallowed. ‘There seems nothing more, but—that I should thank you.’

  ‘One thing more.’ Aquila pulled the battered signet ring from his finger. ‘This was my father’s ring. When you come to the fringes of your own people, you must find means to send it back to Brother Ninnias here. Brother Ninnias will find means to get it back to me: and I shall know that you are safe away.’

  ‘Safe like a beaten cur that runs with its tail between its legs,’ Mull said with a sudden furious bitterness.

  Aquila looked at his drawn face, proud and bitter and sullenly ashamed. The boy’s eyes were much too bright. Probably he had some fever from the wound. Well, Ninnias would see to that. ‘Hengest did not die when the shield burg went; he is safe away with the rags of his host,’ he said abruptly. ‘You’re not deserting a dead leader, you’re following back a living one. There’s no shame in that.’

  ‘A gentle enemy!’ Mull said jibingly.

  ‘No, I am not a gentle enemy. I loved your mother, my sister; that is all.’

  They looked at each other in silence for a moment; and then—it was as though he laid down his weapons—Mull reached out and took the ring from Aquila. ‘Even after she—even after that happened.’

  ‘I once wagered her a pair of crimson slippers that she could not run faster than I,’ Aquila said with careful lightness. ‘She won, and I—never had the chance to pay my debt. You must tell her that I send her son back to her, in place of a pair of crimson slippers.’

  ‘If I—when I see her again, is there any other word that you would have me say to her?’ Mull asked.

  Aquila was staring into the fire, his arm across his knees. What was there to say to Flavia, after their last meeting, and the years between? And then he knew. He put up his hand and freed the shoulder-buckle of his leather tunic, and pulled it back; he dragged up the loose woollen sleeve beneath, to bare his shoulder, and leaned toward Mull in the firelight. ‘Look.’

  Mull strained up higher on his sound arm, and looked. ‘It is a dolphin,’ he said.

  ‘A friend did it for me when I was a boy.’ He let his sleeve fall and began to refasten the buckle. ‘Ask her if she remembers the terrace steps under the damson tree at home. Ask her if she remembers the talk that we had there once, about Odysseus coming home. Say to her—as though it were I who spoke through you, “Look. I’ve a dolphin on my shoulder. I’m your long-lost brother.”’

  ‘The terrace steps under the damson tree. Odysseus coming home. “Look, I’ve a dolphin on my shoulder. I’m your long-lost brother”,’ Mull repeated. ‘Will she understand?’

  ‘If she remembers the steps under the damson tree, she will understand,’ Aquila said. He got up, and turned to the dark doorway. He looked back once, at Mull still propped on one elbow and staring after him, then ducked out into the first paling of the dawn.

  Brother Ninnias came with him to the end of the bean-rows, and there they turned towards each other in parting. Aquila had half expected that the monk would say something about what had happened, about the part of the old story that he had not known before. But, tipping up his head to look about him with a wide, quiet, all-embracing gladness, he said only, ‘The storm is over, and it is going to be a glorious day.’

  And Aquila, looking about him also, saw that the moon was down; but the dark had paled to grey, and the grey was growing luminous. The eastern sky was awash with silver light, and somewhere down by the stream a willow wren was singing, and the whole world seemed poised on the edge of revelation, about to spread its wings …

  ‘Do you believe in blind chance?’ he asked, as he had asked it once of Eugenus the Physi
cian, long ago. ‘No, I remember that you believe in a pattern of things.’

  ‘I also believe in God, and in the Grace of God,’ Brother Ninnias said.

  Aquila stood quite still, his face lifted to the light above the wooded valley that was setting the east singing like the willow wren. At last he stirred. ‘I must be away to my men. Give me your blessing before I go.’

  A few moments later he was striding down the stream side towards the camp and his men and the long, long battle for Britain. He knew that he would not see Brother Ninnias again.

  22

  The Blossoming Tree

  SLEET whispered against the high windows of the old house in Venta, and in the living-room of Aquila’s quarters the little mean wind of early winter made icy draughts along the floor and teased the flames of the candles in the bronze lamp-holder. The last of the daylight was fading, and the light of the candles was taking over. Aquila stood in the glow of warmth from the brazier where apple logs were burning on the charcoal, buckling his bronze-bossed crimson belt over a fresh tunic, while his cast-off daytime garments lay at his feet. It was so cold in the sleeping-cells that he had snatched up his festival clothes spread ready for him, and brought them in here to change beside the fire.

  Earlier that day, Ambrosius Aurelianus had been crowned High King of Britain; crowned with the same slim, golden circlet that he had worn for so many years, with his Companions and the leaders of his fighting men there to see the thing done, before he went out to show himself to his people from the Basilica steps where once he had confronted Guitolinus and the Celtic party. The roar of their acclamation was a thing that Aquila thought he should never forget. And this evening, in the banqueting chamber of the old Governor’s Palace, he was feasting with the men who had seen him crowned. Aquila reached for his best cloak, where it lay in a tumble, dark as spilled wine, across the foot of the low couch, and flung it round him, hastily settling the shoulder-folds. He was late, for there had been some trouble down at the horse-lines over the new Cymric steeds that he must see to, and the feast would have begun by now; this crowning feast for a new High King who was the hope of Britain. He stabbed home the pin of the great bronze-and-silver shoulder brooch, and when he looked up again, there seemed to be all at once more warmth in the room, and more colour; for Ness stood in the inner doorway in a gown of thick, soft wool the colour of the apple flames. Roman in so many things nowadays, she had never taken to the pale colours that the Roman ladies wore, and suddenly he was glad of that.

  ‘I feel as though I could warm my hands at you, in that gown,’ he said.

  She laughed; something of the old mockery in her laughter still, but the sting gone from it. ‘My lord learns to say pretty things in his old age!’ She came forward into the inner circle of warmth and light about the brazier. ‘A man has just left this for you,’ and he saw that she was holding out something that looked like a little ivory ball.

  He took it from her, and realized that it was a ball of white honey-wax, and instantly knew the sender, though no word was scratched on the smooth, creamy surface. ‘Is the messenger still here?’

  Ness shook her head. ‘He was a merchant of some sort and wanted to get on to his trading in the town. He said that the man who gave it to him said there was no answer to wait for. Should he have waited?’

  ‘No,’ Aquila said. ‘It was just that I thought for a moment it might be somebody that I knew.’ The wax was brittle with cold. He broke it open between his hands, and spilled his father’s ring into his palm.

  For a little time he stood quite still, seeing it lying there among the creamy flakes and fragments of broken wax; watching the green spark wake and vanish in the heart of the flawed emerald as the firelight flickered. So the boy was safe among his own people again. He tossed the wax into the red heart of the brazier and slipped the ring on to his bare signet finger. It was good to feel it there again. Good to know that he was free now to take what he had done to Ambrosius and abide by the consequences. With long thinking about it, he had reached the stage of not knowing how right or wrong the thing was that he had done. He only knew that it had been inevitable, and that now Mull’s safety no longer hung on his silence, he must lay it bare to Ambrosius. Maybe tonight, after the banquet …

  Ness’s voice broke in on him. ‘But it is your ring! Your ring that was lost! I do not understand—’

  Presently he would tell Ness too. But Ambrosius first. ‘You shall, by and by,’ he said. ‘Not now. I am late enough as it is.’ He half turned towards the colonnade doorway, then back again, realizing that he would probably not see Ness again until after he had told Ambrosius. ‘You look so pretty in that gown. I wish this wasn’t an all-male banquet.’

  She let the question of the ring go by. ‘I am sure that the Princes of the Dumnonii and the Lords of Glevum and the Cymru would be outraged if they found themselves expected to follow the Roman fashion and sit down to feast in the same hall with women, on such a state occasion as this!’

  ‘Your people,’ Aquila said, and was struck by a sudden thought. ‘Ness, do you see that it has come full circle? The Princes of the Cymru feast with their High King. Tonight Ambrosius will confirm Pascent as lord of his father’s lands and his father’s people. Tonight your people and mine are come together again!’

  ‘Yes, I do see,’ Ness said. ‘After twelve, nearly thirteen years.’

  Aquila felt that he had been stupid in pointing that out to her as though it were a thing that she might not have noticed, when it must be so much nearer to her than it was to him. He wondered whether she had regretted the choice that she had made, almost thirteen years ago, but could not find the words to ask her.

  And then Ness came and put her thin brown hands on his shoulders and said, as though she knew what he was thinking, ‘Have you regretted it?’

  ‘Why should I regret it?’ Aquila said, and put his hands over hers.

  ‘I’m not beautiful like Rhyanidd—’

  ‘You never were, but it was you I chose, in my rather odd way.’

  ‘And maybe I’ve grown dull. Contented women do grow dull; I’ve seen it happen.’ She began to laugh again, and this time with no mockery at all. ‘But at least I haven’t grown fat, as some contented women do.’ She gave him a little push, and dropped her hands. ‘Go now to this splendid all-male banquet of yours, before you are later than you are already.’

  He went across the inner court, huddling his chin into his cloak against the thin, icy wind and the sleet that was turning to snow, opened the postern door under the damson tree, and passed through, letting it swing to behind him. In the wide court of the Governor’s Palace a lantern swayed in the wind, setting the shadows running all along the colonnades, and there was a great coming and going in the early winter dusk; young men gathered in knots by lighted doorways, cooks and servants and younger sons hurried to and fro; a man passed him with a couple of great wolfhounds in leash, making him think of Brychan in the early days. He turned into the north colonnade, weaving his way through the shifting, noisy throng, until he came at last to the ante-room where men stood on guard, leaning on their spears; and then he stood on the threshold of the banqueting chamber itself.

  In the daylight the banqueting hall of the old palace was as shabby, crumbling and faded as the rest of Venta Belgarum. But in the warm light of many candles, the dim colours of the painted garlands on the walls glowed with an echo of the colours of living flowers, and cracked marble and blackened gilding lost their starkness behind the twined and twisted ropes of ivy, bay and rosemary whose aromatic scent mingled with the faint waft of wood-smoke from the braziers—for here, too, braziers were burning, though the chief warmth of the place rose from the hypocausts under the floor.

  The hall was thronged with men seated at the long tables that seemed to swim in honey-thick light; men with clipped hair in the loose, formal tunics of Rome; men with tunics plaid and chequered in the deeper and more barbaric colours of an older Britain, with flowing hair, and river-washed ye
llow gold about their necks.

  The first course of hard-boiled duck eggs and strong cured fish and little cups of watered wine was already being brought in, and Aquila, casting a quick glance among the boys and young warriors bearing in the great chargers, saw Flavian moving through the throng with an air of serious concentration as he tried to avoid spilling any drop from his wine-cups. In these days of shortage of slaves and servants, they had begun to use their sons and younger brothers as servers and cup-bearers, much as the Tribes had always done. Passing over his son, Aquila’s gaze went up to seek the High Table, where Ambrosius sat, with the faithful Pascent beside him, and big, clumsy Artos, whose wild-wind cavalry charge had done more than all else to gain them this first great victory; and the Princes of the Dumnonii and the Lords of Glevum and the Cymru, who had held back all these years, come in at last to swear their fealty to the High King. And suddenly he was remembering the first sight that he had had of the dark young Prince of Britain, by the hearth in a mountain fortress, with the salt mist wreathing beyond the door, and the same narrow gleam of gold round his head. They had ridden a long road since then, and the gold fillet was become the High King’s crown; and he saw with a sense of shock that Ambrosius’s hair looked as though grey wood ash had been rubbed into it at the temples.

  Somebody brushed against him with a wine-jar, bringing him back to himself, and he walked forward between the long, crowding tables, up the hall. Ambrosius, who had been sitting half-turned to listen to a long-nosed princeling beside him, glanced up and saw him, and his dark, narrow face kindled as it always did at a friend’s coming. ‘Ah! Here he is at last! Why, man, you’re late; and tonight of all nights, when I must have my brothers about me!’

  Aquila halted before the low step of the dais, putting up his hand in salute. ‘Let you forgive me, Ambrosius the King. There was some trouble down at the horse-lines, and it is so that I am late.’