Kingdom of Summer

by Gillian Bradshaw

  I stood against the wall a moment, looking at him. “We can go home to my clan,” I had told Eivlin. And if I left him to ride out his own grief, we could. He had managed without me before, and doubtless he could manage without me again.

  But to walk away from suffering is the act of a coward, and a selfish coward, and it is following Darkness instead of Light. I could not close the door behind me. I had only one choice to make, and I had already made that one.

  I crossed the room, dropped to my knees beside him and caught his arm. “My lord.”

  He looked up, mouth set with pain, eyes dark and exhausted.

  “My lord,” I repeated, holding his shoulder. He caught my wrist, looking away, and began to weep with quiet, hopeless, tearing sobs, half-choked off, as though he feared to tear up his own heart. I held his shoulder. There was nothing at all to say.

  In the end I could not do much except convince him to drink some of the mead and go to sleep. He could not talk the pain out, or cry loudly or shed numerous tears. I knew that the next day would find him courteous, rather remote, attentive to Agravain, ready to fence eloquently with Maelgwn about the journey back to Camlann or the tribute due to the Emperor.

  When he was asleep I took the mead and went out to look for Eivlin.

  She was still waiting down the hill, though Rhuawn was gone. She sat with her knees pulled up, looking at the moon. I came up behind her, then stopped, looking at the moonlight in her hair.

  “Eivlin?” I said.

  She turned, the light gliding over her face and shining on her eyes, and her smile made her wondrously beautiful. “Rhys.” She patted the grass beside her, and I came and sat down.

  “Isn’t the moonlight lovely on the mountains?” she asked. “Though on the sea it is even more beautiful. At Dun Fionn you can look out from the cliffs and see the crests of the waves all silver and traced with foam, and the hollows of the waves all black and shifting.” She stared up at the moon itself, a waxing moon in a deeply blue sky. “How far away the moon is, the gem of the night. I wonder if she can see us.”

  I shook my head. “Would you like some mead?”

  She smiled, tossed her head. “Ach, everyone else has been having some. Yes.”

  I poured it, and we drank it together, looking at the moon. “Eivlin,” I said, when the cups were empty.

  She looked at me, her lips half parted, eyes gentle. “You are going to say that you cannot go back to your family and your farm,” she stated calmly.

  I blinked. “No. I can’t now.”

  “Because you love him?”

  “That too. But because he needs me now.” I pulled a blade of grass and studied it by the moonlight. I could see the crease down its center, and all the delicate little lines of its growth. “You see, he never used to have a servant, until I came and asked him to take me to Camlann. He has a damnably proud humility which makes him always be at someone’s service—Arthur’s, Agravain’s, Elidan’s, whoever’s. He could always be depended on, but depended on no one. So I began to do things for him without waiting for him to ask me, and because he is courteous and gentle he made room for me, until now he has come to depend on me. And, now, he needs me. Now especially. Dear God, he’s suffered enough to break any man. I can’t go. I’ve committed myself to him, and to what’s happening at Camlann, too far to pull back. Rightly or wrongly, the only thing I can do now is to live for the Light, and pray God that Camlann survives Medraut and the things ahead. But whether or not we succeed, whether or not we actually keep the Light burning, the only choice I have now is to stay with it.” I let the blade of grass drop, thinking of what I was tying myself to and thinking of Morgawse’s words.

  Eivlin reached over and took my hand, cradling it in both of hers. “If that is the only choice, my heart, at least it is a good one. And he’s a good lord.”

  I caught her hands in turn, with both of mine, turning to her. This was the thing that made it hard. “But I still want you to come. Perhaps it’s no world to marry into, to raise children in, but if you could…”

  “‘If I could!’ Listen to the man! Do you think I am so easily put off, Rhys? Let your clan farm all the land on both sides of the Mor Hafren and let them root in it: I am coming with you. Always. Without asking me, you said you would marry me; and now, without being asked, I say I will. For ever.” She paused, then added briskly, “But you must be sure we get our own house in Camlann, and be sure it is a good one. Your lord should be able to manage that, at the very least. And I will be the mistress of my own house, and it will be a very fine thing.”

  “Yes,” I told her, grinning at her. “Yes. A very fine thing indeed.”

  Read on for a preview of the next book in the trilogy by Gillian Bradshaw

  In Winter’s Shadow

  ONE

  “To Gwynhwyfar daughter of Ogyrfan, Augusta, Empress of Britain,” the letter began, “from Menw son of Cynan, lord of the noble clan of the sons of Maxentius, many greetings. Well, cousin, by now you have heard that your father is dead, and you know that I am his successor to the lordship of our clan. You must not expect that I will, as he did, humor you and let our own fortunes take whatever course they will. I mean to better them, as you, for all your protestations of love and virtue, never have.

  “When last we spoke, you told me that I spoke like a beggar, and commanded me not to mention this subject to you again. But I am a chieftain now, and lord of your own flesh and blood, and, though you have married above us, now I can demand this of you, and need no longer beg. Those lands I spoke of would be the easiest thing in the world for you to win for us. Your husband the Emperor dotes on you—or so they say—and you have only to get him to mention the matter to our king for Ergyriad to give us all that we ask, were it lives instead of lands.

  “If you refuse us this service, do not trouble to write again. I will know that you have chosen to be no part of your clan, and, if I have any power here, I will see to it that you are treated accordingly. You are no better than us, however high you may have risen in the world, and you have no right to keep to yourself riches and honors which ought to be shared with your family. Accept that you are one of us, do what I ask, and I will forget the past. But if you prefer the imperial purple to your own blood, you must suffer for it.”

  I set the letter down on the table and stared at it, then pressed the palms of my hands against my eyes, as if that would ease the dull burning there. If I could sit still, if I could not think or feel, even for a little while, perhaps the rage and grief would not crush against my heart so closely.

  I remembered the time I had told my cousin Menw that he spoke like a beggar. Three years before, I had accompanied my husband on a visit to the northern kings, and had stopped at my clan’s holding, meaning to stay for a week or so. It was the first time I had been home since I married Arthur and went south to hold his fortress for him; my father had ridden out miles to meet me, and treated me like the blessed mother of God the whole time I was there. He had always enjoyed spoiling me—I was his only child, and my mother had died giving birth to me, so he had no one else to spoil. Menw was right when he said that. And yet, it was not to the point. He should be able to see that.

  When I had been home two days, Menw had offered to escort me to the house of an old friend whom I wished to visit. I might have taken some of Arthur’s warriors instead, but I was touched that my cousin offered, and agreed at once. He had been something of a bully when we were little, and I thought he wished to make amends. But no sooner had we ridden from our holding than he began to speak pointedly of the power I must have as wife of the Emperor, and I grew uneasy. I had heard that tale from too many petitioners, as preface to too many pleas for justice, money, or revenge, not to recognize it immediately. And sure enough, on the way back, Menw reined in his horse on a hill and looked out over the land in a calculating fashion.

  “Pretty!”
he observed.

  I nodded. The dusk lay purple across the hills, and the soft summer stars were coming out eastward over the holding. To the north, the Roman Wall leapt into the sunset behind us, scaling the boundaries of the old Empire.

  “That land there,” Menw went on, pointing southeast, “is the only part not ours.” His tone gave particular significance to the words “not ours,” and when I looked at him sharply I saw that he had a sly, insinuating smile. Menw was a big man, with thick, dark hair and heavy eyebrows, and the smile suited him very badly.

  “Is there something you would say?” I asked, hoping that my coldness would discourage him.

  But he seemed pleased, and frankly proposed a scheme for obtaining his neighbors’ lands by official fraud and deceit. “No one would be surprised,” he told me, “Through you we are not only noble and Roman-descended, but the Emperor’s kin as well. The sons of Hueil are scarcely more than peasants, and rebellious ones at that—you know they fought in Bran’s rebellion? And they are dishonest, and give short measure when they trade, and are of no use to anyone. We have more right to the land than such as they.”

  “But what have they done that is criminal enough to deprive them of their fathers’ lands?”

  He looked startled. “What do you mean, what have they done? It is what they are, and what we are, that matters.”

  “The laws are clear, Menw. I cannot help you.”

  He began to glower. “You mean you do not wish to help us.”

  I shook my head. But it was no use trying to pretend I had misunderstood him and thought he wanted legal advice. He knew I understood, and began angrily to claim that I was indifferent to my family’s welfare. It was no use to tell him of the ties of justice and the laws: he did not wish to understand anything more than the tie that binds each to his own clan. Eventually I simply turned my mare and rode on towards the holding, but he refused to leave the subject and rode after me, shouting that we needed the land. It was then that I told him that he spoke like a beggar. At that he forced his horse against mine and seized my arm, his face dark with anger, and I had to stop my mare for fear of being pulled from her back.

  “You selfish vixen! What do you want with all those riches and honors? Great lady you may be, but you’ve no children to pass them on to. If I were your husband I would divorce you and marry any slut that could give me an heir. I’d divorce you at once, do you hear? And if he divorces you, you’ll need your kin. Better think who you call a beggar, ‘noble lady’!”

  I struck him across the face, jerked my arm free, then, not trusting myself or him to say anything more, spurred my horse to a gallop. He galloped after me, shouting, but my horse was faster than his, and he arrived at the holding several minutes after I pulled my mare to a halt in the yard. I waited for him to dismount, then dismounted myself. I tossed him the mare’s reins as though he were a groom, said, “Never mention this subject to me again,” and left him holding the sweating horse, glaring at me, his eyes bright with a powerless hatred.

  And now my father was dead and Menw was chieftain of our clan. Father, I thought, still trying to understand it. I had only heard of his death the week before, and I still did not really believe in it. It is hard to believe that someone is dead when they have lived far away. They form no part of the pattern of one’s life, and are not missed in the common things. It seemed as though, if I could only go home, he would be waiting there, as young and strong as in my earliest memories, and not even bent and feeble as he had been on that disastrous last visit. Only my father was not, never again would, be waiting for me at home. And now, after this, I could not go home at all.

  I took my hands from my eyes and stared at the letter. Home. That was a strange name to give that remote holding in the North which I had left eleven—no, twelve—years before to come to this fortress of Camlann. I tried to remember it. The house had been built by my great-grandfather’s grandfather, who had received his lands from the Emperor Theodosius, the last of the Roman emperors to die with the Empire still whole. That ancestor—the Maxentius we named ourselves after—had been a military official of the British province of Valentia. He had fought bravely for Theodosius the first time the province had nearly been overrun by the Saxons, and our lands had been his reward. He had built the house of gray fieldstone, partly in the Roman, partly in the British fashion. His Roman atrium had been thatched over by my great-grandfather to make a central hall, and that same grandfather had also dug up the mosaic floor of the atrium and built a firepit instead. The firepit still had a rim of patterned tiles: I could remember playing on them when I was small, while the older members of the clan sat by the fire and talked. My father once told me that the mosaic had been of a man driving a fiery chariot through the stars, and I used to try to imagine that picture. The idea stirred me. I was not sure what a chariot looked like—sometimes I pictured it as a cart, at other times as a kind of wheelbarrow—but I could always imagine it riding in fire across the wide sky and along the winds of heaven, brushing the stars. I played at driving the chariot when I rode my pony out into the hills, or when we took a cart from our holding south to fetch grain.

  The land around our house was wild, if beautiful, and sparsely settled. The nearest holding was three miles away, and the nearest town—Caer Lugualid on the coast—a full day’s ride. Once there had been other towns closer to us. The Roman Wall passed about a mile from our holding, and at intervals along it were the ruins of towns and garrisons, all long abandoned. From the time I was old enough to ride any distance I used to go out with some of my cousins and look for treasure in the ruins, crawling under the fallen roofs and walking through the grass-grown streets. For a long time I accepted the ruins as simply as I accepted the hills, and only wondered over what I found in them—a broken glass bottle iridescent with age; a copper coin with the head of an ancient emperor; a tiny bronze statue of a god. But when I grew a little older I began to wonder what it had been like when those towns were full of people, how they could have lived in a land where so few lived now, and where they had all gone. One day I asked my father.

  “They were protecting the Empire, my own darling,” he told me. “They were soldiers like our father Maxentius, stationed on the Wall to defend Britain from the Saxons. As for how they lived, why, the Emperor had grain shipped to them from the south. Hundreds of ships brought it up the coast to Caer Ebrauc, where our king Caradoc lives now, and from there it was taken to all the people living on the Wall. And the ships didn’t bring only grain, my girl, but those treasures you are always seeking. Glass, and gold, and silk and fine dyes, and spices from the East, carried all the way from Constantinople where the Emperor reigns.”

  “But Uther Pendragon is the Emperor,” I pointed out, “and he doesn’t live at Con—at where you said, but at Camlann, in the South country.”

  “Uther Pendragon is the Emperor of the provinces of Britain, true. He is king over the other kings of Britain, and to him chiefly falls the task of defending Britain against the Saxons. But once there was an Empire over the whole world, and all the provinces of Britain together were only its farthest western boundary. And the eastern part of the Empire is strong yet, and is ruled from Constantinople, which is so far away that a ship might sail from now to Michaelmas, and not reach it.”

  “Why doesn’t that Emperor still rule Britain, then? And what happened to all the people on the Wall?”

  “He never used to rule from Constantinople; he ruled from Rome. The people on the Wall, Gwynhwyfar, left it and Britain and went to defend Rome, but they failed. And because they failed there is no emperor at Rome, only the one in Constantinople and the one in Camlann.” And my father explained to me carefully about the fall of Rome. I was young: I had never heard that tale. But my father was a learned man, and owned books of history and philosophy, from which he knew something of the stretch of time and space beyond the small present we inhabited. It awed me. I had learned to r
ead, along with my cousins, because we were noble and Roman-descended, and my father insisted that we ought to learn to read, but until then my knowledge of letters had been confined to crude messages and to accounts, with some stammering over a gospel imposed between the two. The idea of Rome struck me like a vision. I could not look at the Wall, or the tiles round the firepit, or my collection of bits from the ruins, without that vast Empire leaping up before my mind like the world revealed by a lightning-bolt. With my father’s help I began to struggle through the cramped pages of his books till my eyes ached.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Gillian Bradshaw was born in Falls Church, Virginia, and graduated from the University of Michigan, where she won the Hopwood Award for Hawk of May. She is the author of twenty-five other novels.