Hawk of May (Down the Long Way 1)

by Gillian Bradshaw

  I did not know what to think or to feel. I had beaten Agravain; Agravain had repented to me for the past. I had beaten Agravain, he said that I would be a great warrior. There had been a time when that was the focus of my dreams, but I had abandoned those dreams for the Darkness, and I had never thought to see them placed within my grasp. And I wanted to turn the cart about and ride away from Camlann as fast as the horse could gallop.

  I looked at the worn leather of the reins, dark with the polish of use, and at my hands curled around the leather. I had sworn those hands to the service of the Light. What had Bedwyr said about the Light? Something about all other lights or goods being known only in it. And I had already come to see that the Light could do whatever he wanted, even among the Saxons. Surely he did not need my aid, and did not need to have given me Caledvwlch, or to have sent me to Britain. Agravain had asked me why, when I spoke of Morgawse, and I knew that he meant not only “Why does she hate?” but, “Why must she be there to hate?” And I could not see why. If the Light could protect Arthur against her strongest spells, and could save me from her, he could certainly rid the Earth of Darkness. He did not need me or anyone to run about Britain and make war. I saw with a sense of shock that I did not like the thought of war, and I saw that I believed that it was wrong to kill. I had never heard of any such idea in my life, and yet, I thought again of those three Saxons and thought that there surely should have been some other way. And if it were sometimes right to kill, as I would have killed Aldwulf, or, in a different way, as I had killed Connall—when was it right? And how could anyone be always right? The Light of its—his—own nature must be always right, if what Bedwyr had said was true, and I believed that it was. But the world of men is mixed, good and evil together, and there was no simple and clear struggle, no one decision like the one I had made at Dun Fionn.

  Yet men make choices, and must make choices. I had chosen Light at Dun Fionn. Medraut had chosen Darkness. Violently, I wished that I could have stopped him, and I remembered him standing in Morgawse’s room, looking at her in adoration. If I had dragged him from the room after me? But he had been calling me “Traitor,” the shout had echoed behind me. If I saw him again, and spoke to him, could he still change his mind? Surely, the Darkness could not completely enchain his will—and then I thought that I and the Light could not either. But who would choose Darkness, if they understood what they were choosing, understood the hunger and fear, the hatred that consumes happiness, the loss? And yet sometimes it seemed plain that we could not help but serve Darkness. And if I fought for Arthur, I would have to make choices, and it was evident that in the nature of the world I would sometimes choose wrongly. I did not want to fight in the complex world of men. It was easier to fight in the Otherworld.

  I stared up at the hills before us, and found Bedwyr looking back down the road. Our eyes met for a moment; he reined in his horse and fell back till he was level with the cart again.

  “Your thoughts seem heavy ones, Gwalchmai ap Lot,” he told me.

  “They are heavy, lord,” I replied. “Agravain says that I may be a great warrior now, and you have said as much also. And I am a hair’s breadth from turning about and returning to the Orcades, a piece of foolishness such as I have never heard of.”

  Bedwyr’s eyes glinted slightly. “And why is that?”

  “You serve the Light, I think,” I said. “Is it right to kill men and to make wars?”

  “Ach!” He stared at me. “I do not know.”

  “But you are a warrior, and when I spoke of the Light you understood it better than I did myself.”

  “I doubt that. I merely know the language of philosophy, and so could describe it better. You have touched on something, Gwalchmai ap Lot, which I have often questioned. I could only say what I know myself, from what I myself have experienced.”

  “Then tell me that, if there is time. I am sick with thinking of it.”

  “I think I understand that.” Bedwyr’s eyes glinted again with the suppressed amusement. It was very strange, I thought fleetingly, that I could speak to him so easily, and that he had so quickly taken my part against Cei. Perhaps it was that we served the same lord that created this understanding.

  With his shield-arm, the one with the missing hand, he brushed his hair back from his face. “Very well,” he began. “As Cei has mentioned several times already, I am a Breton, and my father has estates in the south-east—no, that is not to say I have a noble clan; in most of Less Britain, clans are less important than ownership of land and civic status. My father is a curialis—that is a title. Officially his rank is clarus, but he calls himself clarissimus, because he likes the sound of it.” Again came the glint of amusement. “We are near the border of Less Britain, and while I was young, not a summer went by without the Franks, or the Saxons, or the Swabians or Goths or Huns breaking into our fields and driving off our cattle, and demanding gold for the municipality. So I learned to fight early, as men also do here in Britain. I also learned to read, but I considered this of less importance. In Less Britain, as in parts of southern Gaul, the old municipal schools are still run for the children of the nobility, and I went there and was taught the elements of rhetoric from the grammaticus there; and very tedious it was. We had a textbook, though, one among the class of twelve, and it was written by a Marius Victorinus, who was a philosopher. When he wished to give an example of an exhortation, he exhorted to philosophy; of discussion, a debate about the summum bonum—that is, what is most excellent in human life. He thought it was philosophy. I thought he was a fool, for the Franks cared nothing for philosophy, and I enjoyed killing the Franks. Mind, I enjoyed it, not tolerated it, but took pleasure in showing off my skill. When I was seventeen, I enrolled some peasants from my father’s estate, and took them off, with one or two other youths from the area, to fight for the Comes Armoricae—the king of Less Britain, you would say. After a few years, the Frankish king died, and the new king was busy with the Goths, and the wars seemed over for a time. Then I heard that our king’s younger son, Bran, had made alliance with Arthur of Britain, and planned an expedition. I had never been to Britain, and had killed no Franks or Saxons for nearly a year, so I took my followers and went with Bran.

  “You know of that campaign, I think, and how Arthur, won the purple, so there is no need for me tell you of it. But for myself, I was wounded in the battle by the Seafern.” Bedwyr held up his shield-arm again. “The blow was not bad in itself, but the wound took the rot, and I, who was not afraid of the Saxons, was afraid of the doctors, and did not go to them until I was sick and had to be carried. They took the hand off, but I was in a high fever from the rot, and I thought that I would die. I lay there in the monastery where they had brought us, and now I had time to wonder about how many men I had placed in this position, and the thought did not please me as it had before. All my renown was useless to me now. And I kept remembering the exhortation to philosophy from that textbook, and thinking that glory was not, after all, the summum bonum.

  “For three days I lay between death and life. On the third, Taliesin, the chief bard of Arthur, came to the monastery—I still do not know why. When he walked past the rows of the wounded, it looked to me as though a star burned on his forehead, and I thought that I was dead. So I called out to him that I was not yet prepared.

  “He stopped and came over and knelt beside me. ‘For something you are prepared, Bedwyr ap Brendan,’ he said, ‘But not for death.’ Then he turned to the doctors and said that he thought the fever would break soon. ‘So you regret your life,’ he said turning back to me—I had never seen him before, and still I thought him the angel of death. ‘With all my heart.’ I replied. ‘You live now,’ he told me, ‘and will for many years yet. But remember your regret when you recover, and, I warn you, things will turn out otherwise than you expect. Have faith, and do not wonder at what happens.’ With that he left, and the doctors put me in a heated room with many blankets, so that the fever broke, and I began to recover.”

&
nbsp; “Who is this Taliesin?” I asked. “His last words to you were the same as Lugh’s to me.”

  He gave me a dark, serious look. “Indeed? I do not know where Taliesin comes from or who his parents were. No one does. He is a great poet, and a healer besides. There are other stories about him, some very strange, but nothing is known for certain. I know that he is not evil, and his words then were true. I recovered from my fever, but I remembered what I had felt then, when I had thought that I would die. I asked the monks who cared for the sick if they had that textbook by the philosopher Victorinus, but they had never heard of him. They had only a few books, and those gospels. So I read one of the gospels, that of Matthew, and I came to the place where the Christ was betrayed, and led off to execution; and one of his followers drew a sword to defend him, and our lord said, ‘Put your sword in its place: for those that take the sword will perish with the sword.’ Then I decided that it was wrong to kill and to make wars, and I resolved to return to Less Britain as soon as I was well enough to travel, and there enter a monastery, and contemplate the Good. I anticipated that my father would be angry, but I would not have yielded for all that. So, you see, I know what it is that troubles you.”

  “Why did you change your mind again?”

  He smiled, a quick but very warm smile, “I met Arthur. I had seen him before, but never spoken with him. He came to the monastery to visit the wounded. I was sitting in the garden: it was summer, and evening, and I was trying to read. He came up to me, calling me by name, and asked me of my wound; then asked when I would rejoin King Bran. I told him that I did not plan to continue to live as a warrior, but to enter a monastery, and he said that Bran thought highly of me, and that he did not understand.

  “I explained my reasons, and, surprisingly, he did understand. He had even heard of Victorinus—he had read of him in a book by one Aurelius Augustinus. ‘But I do not agree with your Victorinus on the highest good,’ he told me. ‘Do you think that it is glory, then?’ I asked. ‘Indeed not,’ he replied, ‘But Augustinus says evil is not a substance, but an absence, being nothing more than the denial of good. And this my own heart teaches me as well, for I can see from it that evil begins in weakness, cowardice, and stupidity, and proceeds to hatred and desolation, while good is active. So it seems to me that the highest good cannot be a thing that sits like a picture on the wall, waiting to be admired, but must be active and substantial.’ And I: ‘Victorinus says that the Good, that is, the Light, subsists in all things, for if it did not, nothing would exist. But because men do not consider it, and act blindly, they create evil.’ And he: ‘If they do nothing but sit and consider, they are bound to create evil, for they cannot create good.’ ‘But they might find it and know it,’ said I. And he stood and paced about the garden, then asked me, ‘Is justice good? It is active. Are order, peace, harmony good? Is love?—Augustinus says that love is a property of men but not of God, but I think that, if this were so, we would be superior to God, which is unthinkable; for I am certain that these things are good, love most of all.’ And I: ‘The Church says that God, that is, the Good, loved and acted once, in Christ.’ And he: ‘I say he did then and does now, in us. Tell me, is it good that the Saxons take away the land, the cattle of their neighbors, and that men and women, and children, too, are left to starve? Is it good that only a handful of nobles in Britain can read, and few of them have books? Is it good that men are reduced thus to the level of beasts, thinking of nothing but food and slaughter?’ ‘Why do you ask?’ I said, ‘There are evils, but they have come about because Rome has fallen and the Empire has gone from the West. What can we do but ourselves abstain from evil in such times?’ ‘We can restore the Empire,’ he said, and stopped pacing, standing with the moonlight in his hair—for by then the moon had risen over the abbey wall.

  “‘Before God, I will preserve civilization in this land or die defending it, because I love the Good. And I think that to fight thus is the highest good for men, and not philosophy.What would your Victorinus say to that?’ ‘Victorinus had no emperor like you to Follow,’ I said, ‘or he would have spoken differently.’ And I knelt to him, and told him, ‘I have only one hand to fight for you, but, in God’s name, take me into your service, and all I can do, I will.’ He looked at me in surprise for a moment, for he had not realized how much his words had stirred me; then he took my hand and swore the oath a liege-lord swears to his follower. And I have fought for him ever since, and will do so all my life, God willing: for I now believe that to act with a desire for good, even if we may act wrongly, is better than not to act at all. But whether in the end we are justified in the eyes of God, I cannot say.”

  I was silent for a long time. “That is hardly comforting,” I said at last.

  “Life is not comfortable,” he replied. “Nonetheless, I think there is more joy in struggling for the Light than in retreat.”

  “But the difference between us and the Saxons is not so great,” I objected. “They are men too, and much like us. And I know that you are a Roman, but still, I cannot see why the Empire has anything to do with the Light. No British king had some miserable slave tortured to death to see whether his master threw stones at a royal statue, or had three thousand people massacred at a theater because they had rioted, as did Theodosius, the High King of Rome. My mother told me of this, but still, it is true, isn’t it? And I never heard of any king in Britain or in Erin having hundreds of innocent noblemen put to death, solely because their names began with “Theod,” as Valentinianus did because of an oracle he had received, though he missed Theodosius. Moreover, the Romans took Britain by force of arms, just as the Saxons are attempting to do now, and no doubt the people here then liked the Romans as little as we now like the Saxons—why are you smiling?”

  “Because you can speak Latin and read and are probably a Christian, and still, if you do not object to my saying so, you are a barbarian. I mean no insult. It is true, the Empire caused much evil and misery. But no British lordling ever created as much of good and beauty, ever gave to the world so much knowledge, art, and splendor as did the Romans. And no British king ever founded hospitals, or endowed monasteries to care for the sick, the poor, and the orphaned; or again, relieved his domains when there was famine and restored them after fire or war, which the Christian emperors did. The Empire is worth fighting to preserve. That I could never question.”

  “Very well, I am a barbarian,” I said, beginning to laugh. “You southern British—excuse me, Bretons—always say as much about the Irish. I still do not see that your Empire has much to do with the Light; but, from what you have said, I think the Empire Arthur desires would. And I have been given a sword, which, if it is a weapon of Light, is also a weapon of war. I do not fear perishing by it if I take it up, and if your Christ threatened nothing more than that, I would have no hesitations. Only…by the Light, it is too sudden. I never expected…I never thought that I could become a warrior, and would have to make such a choice.”

  “Perhaps when you meet the Emperor Arthur it will become clear. Look, there is Camlann. We are almost home.”

  Camlann is ancient, older than the kingdom of Britain, in fact. It stood empty and decaying while the Romans ruled, but after Londinium fell to the Saxons, Ambrosius Aurelianus had it resettled. Arthur had it refortified with the great walls, which, when we rode up that day, were only half-finished. As we approached, Agravain drove up his horse to ride beside me again; and Cei fell back, watching me as though he expected me to grow wings and fly off rather than enter the fortress. So I came to Camlann, driving a heavy-laden cart pulled by a spent mare, flanked by three warriors who viewed me in vastly different lights, fastening my hopes on a High King who was absent.

  The gates had been thrown open for us before we reached them, and we drove up the steep hill, the warriors calling greetings to the guards and shouting that they had a victory. The High King was expected back, with the rest of the warband, at any moment, and Bedwyr wanted the supplies from Ynys Witrin to be unloaded bef
ore the Pendragon returned.

  “I do not wish my lord to have to trouble himself with inventories, nor to wait for his victory feast,” he told one of the servants.

  “Of course,” said the man, eyeing the carts with some eagerness—I gathered they had been short of supplies in Camlann. “Did you bring mead from Ynys Witrin?”

  “Seeing that the monks make the best mead in Dumnonia,” Cei replied, “we were hardly likely to miss it.”

  “Good. We’ve only that ale we saved from last winter, and I had no wish to give that to the Emperor after a victory.”

  The carts and horses were brought to a stable, and I cared for Sion’s mare and gave her some grain. I was finishing with her when Bedwyr entered, followed by Cei and Agravain. “The Emperor is almost here,” he told me, “if you wish to come down to the gates.”

  The Family was still riding up when I went to the gates to see them. It was a long column, coming from the North, mounted men, some driving cattle; one or two wagons, spare horses on lead reins. They covered the road into the distance, glittering with weapons in the afternoon sun. At the front a rider carried the standard, a deeper glint of gold at that distance, and behind him came a man on a white horse. Arthur.

  I thought of all that had happened to me up to that moment, of my mother and my father both, of Agravain, of Lugh, of the Saxons. The physical struggle and the spiritual struggle: they met here. My throat constricted and I stood, my eyes, like the eyes of all around me, fixed on the man who rode behind the standard.

  The vanguard of the warband broke off from the slower-moving group which drove the cattle. Horses’ manes and tails and men’s cloaks streamed in the wind of their motion, and, through the dirt of hard riding, the sun glittered off weapons and mail and jewelry. The Pendragon wore the purple, gold-embroidered cloak of the Roman High Kings over his coat of mail. He rode well, and held his tall spear as though he knew how to use it. As he passed the gates, the inhabitants of the fortress shouted a welcome with one voice, and they shouted, “Arthur!”