Page 64 of Warrior Queen
His chest rose as he drew in another deep breath. “He’d have done the same to me if Merlin hadn’t snatched me away. I don’t know to this day how he did it, but one moment I was facing Cerdic, and the next I was somewhere else.” He paused. “But we’d abandoned Geraint to his fate.”
He shuddered. “It takes a long time to die from a wound like that. It’s why they do it. They want to inflict as much suffering as they can, and put an enemy out of action, and maybe the man who goes to help. They’re barbarians.”
“They are.” No wonder he hated Cerdic with a vengeance. No wonder it had been so hard to face him at the Council of Kings.
He moved his head, his mouth close to mine and our breath shared. “I dreamed I was on the battlefield at Llongborth, with Geraint, fighting Cerdic and his men.” His breath smelled stale, of the wine he’d drunk, but I didn’t care. My fingers were in his hair.
He touched my face. “Then, when I looked, it wasn’t Geraint lying gutted in the mud. It was Rhiwallon, staring up at me out of terrified eyes. Eyes that knew his death was come upon him.” He hesitated. “And just as with Geraint, there was nothing I could do to save him. My brother’s son. But then Merlin whipped me away, before I could help Rhiwallon. I didn’t want him to, but he did. I had to leave the boy there, trying to shove his guts back inside his belly.”
I kissed his salty lips, cupping his face between my hands. “It wasn’t your fault. None of this is your fault. At least you were with Rhiwallon to do what you did. That will be of some comfort to Cei and Coventina. I know it will.”
He kissed me back, his lips soft and gentle. “I love you, Gwen. I’m sorry I behaved so badly when I was drunk. I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that.”
I kissed him again, my own tears mingling with his. “Don’t worry. I understand. I love you, too. I couldn’t bear it if anything were to happen to you.” I kissed him a third time. “I love you so much, Arthur Pendragon.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Arthur was alreadypulling on his mail shirt when I woke. As I sat up in bed, memories of last night flooded back.
He picked up his sword belt from the floor and buckled it around his waist. Only then did he look in my direction. “You’re awake. Good. No time to lose. We march south today. You’d better get up and eat something. I’m going down to join my men, so I’ll see you in the stables shortly.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but he was out of the door and gone, as though the night had never happened. Maybe he was choosing to forget it, to hide his vulnerability beneath a veneer of practicality. Abandoning my pseudo-psychology, I swung my legs out of bed.
Yuck. Even I thought my clothes smelled, and I’d got used by now to not having clean things to wear every day. But with an army on the march, I was lucky to get clean things every week. I pulled them on, regardless of the stink. No one would notice as we all smelled the same.
As I emerged into the small courtyard, so, too, did Merlin. And Cei. My step faltered as my gaze fixed on my big bear of a brother-in-law. Dark circles ringed his red-rimmed eyes, as though sleep hadn’t come since the battle, and a haggard, haunted look clung to him. But as he saw me, his face lit up, and he held out his arms. “Gwen.”
I didn’t hesitate but stepped into his embrace, wrapping my arms around his solid body, holding him tight against my own. “Cei. I’m so sorry,” I mumbled into his mail-clad chest. A platitude, but what else could I have said? He was such a kind and gentle man, my heart ached for him with a pain as deep as a sword thrust. Underneath his usually bluff exterior beat a heart of solid gold. It hurt me afresh that this suffering had fallen on his shoulders, broad as they were.
He buried his face in my neck, having to stoop to do so, his body shaking for a moment before he had it under control. “He was just a boy,” he whispered, mouth near my ear. “Just a boy.” Blinking back my own tears, I stroked his back with one hand, the links of the mail rough under my touch, much as I’d have done with Amhar if he’d been hurt.
He made no effort to free himself, so I stood there holding him, offering the only comfort in my power, as time ticked by. Eventually, though, his grip on me loosened, and he stepped back, tears pearling on his ginger lashes. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “He died in battle, as every warrior should. A son to be proud of.” Was he trying to justify his son’s death? Could anything ever justify the death of so young a boy?
I nodded, unable to speak. If he said anything else my resolve would break, and I’d be sobbing. Again.
Merlin put a hand on each of us. “Come. We need food, and then we’ll get our horses. Arthur’s orders were to hurry.”
His words snapped us both out of whatever it was we were in. I nodded, swallowed the lump in my throat, and the three of us set off in search of food in Coel’s hall. I wouldn’t think about Rhiwallon.
I wouldn’t.
*
Alezan, having beenconfined to her stable since we arrived at Ebrauc, danced on her toes like a skittish two-year-old as we rode down the Via Praetoria. At the gates we joined the army, mounted men filling every street from wall to wall.
As if the battle were just a forgotten nightmare already, the townspeople hung out of upper floor windows to wave us off, cheers rising every so often along with shouts of encouragement and ribald remarks. The mood was no longer somber. The dead were buried. The living would continue. We’d remember the casualties of war, but that was all they’d be– memories.
I should have been shocked. In my old world, when death comes, it’s not expected as inevitable before people reach their eighties. When someone dies, especially someone young, there’s great sadness, and that sadness isn’t swept away with stoicism. Mourning continues, people reflect on their loss, they spend time at graves, show sympathy. It’s a long time before bereft families recover– if they ever do.
Here, with death so constant a companion, I’d seen before how life was expected to go on, unchanged, after the burials. People died. Women in childbirth, children before they left babyhood behind, from diseases that in my old world would have been remedied with antibiotics, warriors in battle, farmers from accidents. If you reached old age and died in your bed, you were lucky.
A funeral marked the end of mourning, not the start. The dead were honored, buried, gone. Never forgotten, but not dwelled upon. In this life there was no time for that.
The double gates swung open, and the army moved off, Cei, Merlin, and I bringing up the rear. Alezan swished her tail and pranced, eager to get going, and I had to put both hands on the reins to keep her under control. Cei and Merlin wisely hung back, aware that in this mood she might well kick out at their horses– or them. We were the last out through the gates and heard them thud shut behind us.
I didn’t look back. I couldn’t. Instead, my gaze was drawn to the still smoking, and still stinking, funeral pyre to my left, not far from the bare mound that covered our dead. What was that poem from World War One about a corner of a foreign field being forever England? True here as well. Our warriors were far from their homes, sleeping beside Coel’s men, and poor Coventina would never lay her eyes on her son again, nor even her son’s grave. Just like the mothers of all those eager young men who’d died in Northern France and Belgium.
My eyes slid sideways to find Cei. He was staring at the mound where his son lay buried, his mouth a thin compressed line, and his whole body stiff with what I could only suppose was the effort required not to succumb to his grief.
