Page 35 of The Bear's Heart
He gave a shrug. “I believe in me.”
*
But with thespring came more than Beltane– with the spring came the Saxons.
Not to us, safe in the south-west, but to others who were less lucky.
With my knowledge of Arthurian Britain, gleaned from a life in the shadow of a father who’d been obsessed with all its aspects, I knew the Saxons were most troublesome along Britain’s East coast, Rome’s old Saxon Shore. The Saxons had been raiding there since before the legions sailed back to Gaul in AD 410, leaving the British to fend for themselves. So when the news came that Linnuis, a kingdom with a shore on the vulnerable North Sea coast, was in dire need of help, it was no surprise.
Arthur, after a winter spent training his warriors, couldn’t hide his excitement. It hadn’t taken me long to discover he was a man for whom the love of a woman wasn’t enough. He needed more than me. Not other women– no, he’d been faithful to me despite the ever-present temptation of Tangwyn. But he needed war, as was evidenced by his fanatical devotion to his men’s training. Nothing fired him up the way war did.
I saw it in his face when the rider from Linnuis arrived, weary and travel-stained, bearing the message from King Manogan asking for the help of the Dux Britanniarum. He came hard on the heels of the feast of Beltane, riding through the gates in the gathering darkness of evening. He urged his tired horse up the cobbled road toward where the twin Beltane fires still burnt, after the cattle had done their dash between them. Some of the people were already departing with lit torches to relight their own previously extinguished hearth fires from the sacred flame.
Outside the great hall, Arthur and I still sat in the two ornate thrones from where we’d presided over the celebrations. Dampness hung in the air, but it wasn’t cold, and the day had been a great success. The fortress had filled to bursting with people from the farms, who’d climbed the steep road from the hill’s foot to join us in our celebrations. Tables clustered all around the great hall, and in freshly dug fire pits servants had roasted the last of the year’s overwintered beef. Bakers had spent the day before laboring red-faced at their ovens, and Arthur had ordered barrels of home-brewed beer broken out, and cider from last autumn’s delivery from the Ynys Witrin monks. Beer and cider for the people, and amphorae of Mediterranean wine for his warriors.
Through all of this the gaunt rider on his exhausted horse, as welcome a sight to me as Banquo’s ghost at Macbeth’s feast, threaded his way with purpose toward Dumnonia’s young king.
Arthur got to his feet, his food and wine forgotten. I sensed the tension quiver through his body as though he knew without being told what this solitary rider foreshadowed.
The man dismounted amongst the crowded tables and let his horse’s reins drop. The beast hung its head almost to the ground as the rider approached us on unsteady feet.
“My lord king.” He dropped to one knee, his head bowed, whether from respect or from his own exhaustion, I couldn’t tell.
Arthur stepped forward. “Rise.”
As though every bone in his body ached, the man rose to his feet. He was young, but the fatigue etched on his drawn face added years and made his long nose jut from between his angled cheekbones. He was as tall as Arthur, auburn-haired and bearded, with dark shadows beneath his hazel eyes.
“I come from my father, King Manogan. I am Beli, now his eldest born.”
Arthur inclined his head. It was obvious the arrival of Prince Beli with such urgency had lit in my husband a hunger. His face betrayed his feelings as clearly as if they’d been written on the pages of a book. At one of the nearby tables, Merlin turned his head to watch, his dark eyes alight with curiosity.
“What is it I can do for King Manogan’s son?” Arthur’s voice was quiet in the hubbub but it carried through the cool evening air. Silence fell about him, rippling out in concentric circles like a stone thrown into a pond.
Beli drew himself up straighter with an effort.
“My father was at the Council of Kings,” he began, with dignity. “He was there with my late brother. He voted for your election as Dux Britanniarum. We have six young men training in our city of Caer Lind Colun, near ready to join you this spring– my younger brother, Anwas, amongst them.” He paused for breath, and a tremor passed through his body. “But now we have need of your help, before ever our young men have joined you. My father sent me south after the Saxons defeated our army in battle not ten miles from our city.” He faltered, his heavy brows furrowing with emotion. “We were three brothers– sons of our father, the king. Now we are but two, for my brother Farrell fell against the Saxon horde, defending the Roman road from the south.”
It had come. The first request from one of the many kingdoms that made up Britain in the fifth century. The request I’d been dreading. The request that would take Arthur away from me and into terrible danger. He had to go. I knew his destiny better than any, even Merlin. And yet, inside I couldn’t help the irrational fear that my presence here, a living chronoclasm, might have already changed things irrevocably and be the thing that would lead to his premature death.
I had the list of Arthur’s battles off by heart. Nennius, a monk of the early ninth century, had passed them down from antiquity, and since I’d married Arthur, I’d gone over the list so many times the names were graven on my soul. Right at the start sat the battles of the River Glein and River Dubglas– in Linnuis. To anyone else that would have been meaningless, but with my knowledge, combined with Merlin’s lessons on contemporary politics and history, I knew Linnuis was modern Lincolnshire and Caer Lind Colun, its capital, was Lincoln.
The cogs of fate were whirring, and at their end lay the one battle I dreaded above all– Camlann. The battle in which Arthur would fall. The knowledge of it lying ahead of us weighed heavy in my heart, as certain as any piece of information I possessed about the fifth century. Reinforced by the fact that I now believed Eigr had seen it in her scrying glass. It lurked in the shadows, an ever present threat that could be coming in one year or five or twenty, but coming it undoubtedly was, and this first envoy asking for his help heralded its inexorable approach.
Arthur nodded. “Help will come to you,” he said, raising his voice so that more heads turned. “Your brother will not have died in vain. Your father will sleep easy in his bed once more. I swore at the Council, before all the kings, that I would ride to the help of any who called upon me. You have the honor of being the first.” With a flourish of his hand, he encompassed his watching warriors seated at the trestle tables. “Tomorrow we ride north to Linnuis.”
Beli bowed his head as a murmur of approval ran through the listening people. Warriors thumped the tables in enthusiasm, clapping one another on the shoulders excitedly. They too had spent a winter of frustration, itching for the good weather to come so they had an excuse to get out their swords for a real fight instead of their interminable practicing. I’d felt their restlessness rising to a boil as the days had lengthened and Beltane approached. Now, it seemed that restlessness had been released, a coiled spring unbound.
Cold fear wrapped my entrails in bands of steel.
Despite the prospect of marching north with his army in the morning, Arthur was late to bed that night. I lay awake, sleep eluding me, until I heard him come through the door from the great hall into the gloom that was our bedchamber.
I lay silent while he undressed, just a silhouette against the faint light of a single clay oil lamp and the dim glow of the brazier which stood in the center of the room. The bed creaked as his weight came onto it, and he lifted the heavy covers and slid in beside me, naked.
I waited a moment, but he didn’t turn toward me as he usually did, wrapping his long limbs about my body and holding me close. His breathing was quick and light in the quiet of the night. I waited a moment longer but nothing happened. So instead, I rolled onto my side and put my arm across his flat belly.
He turned his head. “You’re awake.” He sounded surprised. Did he think I could have slept with the thought of his departure in the morning in my head? Did he know me so little?
The cold of the spring night had chilled his body. I slid my feet down to his cold ones. “I couldn’t sleep.”
