Legacy: Arthurian Saga (47 page)

Ambrosius' first occupation of a town
was always to follow the same pattern. First of all the
establishment of order: he would never allow the British
auxiliaries into the town; his own troops from Less Britain, with
no local loyalties, were the ones that established and held order.
The streets were cleaned, the fortifications temporarily repaired,
and plans drawn up for the future work and put into the hands of a
small group of skilled engineers who were to call on local labor.
Then a meeting of the city's leaders, a discussion on future
policy, an oath of loyalty to Ambrosius, and arrangements made for
the garrisoning of the city when the army departed. Finally a
religious ceremony of thanksgiving with a feast and a public
holiday.

In York, the first great city invested
by Ambrosius, the ceremony was held in the church, on a blazing day
near the end of June, and in the presence of the whole army, and a
vast crowd of people.

I had already attended a private
ceremony elsewhere.

It was not to be expected that there
was still a temple of Mithras in York. The worship was forbidden,
and in any case would have vanished when the last legion left the
Saxon Shore almost a century ago, but in the day of the legions the
temple at York had been one of the finest in the country. Since
there was no natural cave nearby, it had originally been built
below the house of the Roman commander, in a large cellar, and
because of this the Christians had not been able to desecrate and
destroy it, as was their wont with the sacred places of other men.
But time and damp had done their work, and the sanctuary had
crumbled into disrepair. Once, under a Christian governor, there
had been an attempt to turn the place into a chapel-crypt, but the
next governor had been outspokenly, not to say violently, opposed
to this. He was a Christian himself, but he saw no reason why the
perfectly good cellar under his house should not be used for what
(to him) was the real purpose of a cellar, namely, to store wine.
And a wine store it had remained, till the day Uther sent a working
party down to clean and repair it for the meeting, which was to be
held on the god's own feast day, the sixteenth day of June. This
time the meeting was secret, not from fear, but from policy, since
the official thanksgiving would be Christian, and Ambrosius would
be there to offer thanks in the presence of the bishops and all the
people. I myself had not seen the sanctuary, having been employed
during my first days in York on the restoring of the Christian
church in time for the public ceremony. But on the feast of Mithras
I was to present myself at the underground temple with others of my
own grade. Most of these were men I did not know, or could not
identify by the voice behind the mask; but Uther was always
recognizable, and my father would of course be there, in his office
as Courier of the Sun.

The door of the temple was closed. We
of the lowest grade waited our turn in the antechamber.

This was a smallish, square room, lit
only by the two torches held in the hands of the statues one to
either side of the temple door. Above the doorway was the old stone
mask of a lion, worn and fretted, part of the wall. To either side,
as worn and chipped, and with noses and members broken and hacked
away, the two stone torch-bearers still looked ancient and
dignified. The anteroom was chill, in spite of the torches, and
smelled of smoke. I felt the cold at work on my body; it struck up
from the stone floor into my bare feet, and under the long robe of
white wool I was naked. But just as the first shiver ran up my
skin, the temple door opened, and in an instant all was light and
color and fire.

Even now, after all these years, and
knowing all that I have learned in a lifetime, I cannot find it in
me to break the vow I made of silence and secrecy. Nor, so far as I
know, has any man done so. Men say that what you are taught when
young can never be fully expunged from your mind, and I know that
I, myself, have never escaped the spell of the secret god who led
me to Brittany and threw me at my father's feet. Indeed, whether
because of the curb on the spirit of which I have already written,
or whether by intervention of the god himself, I find that my
memory of his worship has gone into a blur, as if it was a dream.
And a dream it may be, not of this time alone, but made up of all
the other times, from the first vision of the midnight field, to
this night's ceremony, which was the last.

A few things I remember. More
torch-bearers of stone. The long benches to either side of the
center aisle where men reclined in their bright robes, the masks
turned to us, eyes watchful. The steps at the far end, and the
great apse with the arch like a cave-mouth opening on the cave
within, where, under the star-studded roof, was the old relief in
stone of Mithras at the bull-slaying. It must have been somehow
protected from the hammers of the god-breakers, for it was still
strongly carved and dramatic. There he was, in the light of the
torches, the young man of the standing stone, the fellow in the
cap, kneeling on the fallen bull and, with his head turned away in
sorrow, striking the sword into its throat. At the foot of the
steps stood the fire-altars, one to each side. Beside one of them a
man robed and masked as a Lion, with a rod in his hand. Beside the
other the Heliodromos, the Courier of the Sun. And at the head of
the steps, in the center of the apse, the Father waiting to receive
us.

My Raven mask had poor eyeholes, and I
could only see straight forward. It would not have been seemly to
look from side to side with that pointed bird-mask, so I stood
listening to the voices, and wondering how many friends were here,
how many men I knew. The only one I could be sure of was the
Courier, tall and quiet there by the altar fire, and one of the
Lions, either him by the archway, or one of the grade who watched
from somewhere along the makeshift benches.

This was the frame of the ceremony,
and all that I can remember, except the end. The officiating Lion
was not Uther, after all. He was a shorter man, of thick build, and
seemingly older than Uther, and the blow he struck me was no more
than the ritual tap, without the sting that Uther usually managed
to put into it. Nor was Ambrosius the Courier. As the latter handed
me the token meal of bread and wine, I saw the ring on the little
finger of his left hand, made of gold, enclosing a stone of red
jasper with a dragon crest carved small. But when he lifted the cup
to my mouth, and the scarlet robe slipped back from his arm, I saw
a familiar scar white on the brown flesh, and looked up to meet the
blue eyes behind the mask, alight with a spark of amusement that
quickened to laughter as I started, and spilled the wine. Uther had
stepped up two grades, it seemed, in the time since I had last
attended the mysteries. And since there was no other Courier
present, there was only one place for Ambrosius...

I turned from the Courier to kneel at
the Father's feet. But the hands which took my own between them for
the vow were the hands of an old man, and when I looked up, the
eyes behind the mask were the eyes of a stranger.

Eight days later was the official
ceremony of thanksgiving. Ambrosius was there, with all his
officers, even Uther, "for," said my father to me afterwards when
we were alone, "as you will find, all gods who are born of the
light are brothers, and in this land, if Mithras who gives us
victory is to bear the face of Christ, why, then, we worship
Christ." We never spoke of it again.

The capitulation of York marked the
end of the first stage of Ambrosius' campaign. After York we went
to London in easy stages, and with no more fighting, unless you
count a few skirmishes by the way. What the King had to undertake
now was the enormous work of reconstruction and the consolidation
of his kingdom. In every town and strongpoint he left garrisons of
tried men under trusted officers, and appointed his own engineers
to help organize the work of rebuilding and repairing towns, roads
and fortresses. Everywhere the picture was the same; once-fine
buildings ruined or damaged almost beyond repair; roads half
obliterated through neglect; villages destroyed and people hiding
fearfully in caves and forests; places of worship pulled down or
polluted. It was as if the stupidity and lawless greed of the Saxon
hordes had cast a blight over the whole land. Everything that had
given light -- art, song, learning, worship, the ceremonial
meetings of the people, the feasts at Easter or Hallowmass or
midwinter, even the arts of husbandry, all these had vanished under
the dark clouds on which rode the northern gods of war and thunder.
And they had been invited here by Vortigern, a British king. This,
now, was all that people remembered. They forgot that Vortigern had
reigned well enough for ten years, and adequately for a few more,
before he found that the war-spirit he had unleashed on his country
had outgrown his control. They remembered only that he had gained
his throne by bloodshed and treachery and the murder of a kinsman
-- and that the kinsman had been the true king. So they came
flocking now to Ambrosius, calling on him the blessings of their
different gods, hailing him with joy as King, the first "King of
all Britain," the first shining chance for the country to be
one.

Other men have told the story of
Ambrosius' crowning and his first work as King of Britain; it has
even been written down, so here I will only say that I was with him
for the first two years as I have told, but then, in the spring of
my twentieth year, I left him. I had had enough of councils and
marching, and long legal discussions where Ambrosius tried to
reimpose the laws that had fallen into disuse, and the everlasting
meetings with elders and bishops droning like bees, days and weeks
forevery drop of honey. I was even tired of building and designing;
this was the only work I had done for him in all the long months I
served with the army. I knew at last that I must leave him, get out
of the press of affairs that surrounded him; the god does not speak
to those who have no time to listen. The mind must seek out what it
needs to feed on, and it came to me at last that what work I had to
do, I must do among the quiet of my own hills. So in spring, when
we came to Winchester, I sent a message to Cadal, then sought
Ambrosius out to tell him I must go.

He listened half absently; cares
pressed heavily on him these days, and the years which had sat
lightly on him before now seemed to weigh him down. I have noticed
that this is often the way with men who set their lives towards the
distant glow of one high beacon; when the hilltop is reached and
there is nowhere further to climb, and all that is left is to pile
more on the flame and keep the beacon burning, why, then, they sit
down beside it and grow old. Where their leaping blood warmed them
before, now the beacon fire must do it from without. So it was with
Ambrosius. The King who sat in his great chair at Winchester and
listened to me was not the young commander whom I had faced across
the map-strewn table in Less Britain, or even the Courier of
Mithras who had ridden to me across the frostbound
field.

"I cannot hold you," he said. "You are
not an officer of mine, you are only my son. You will go where you
wish."

"I serve you. You know that. But I
know now how best I can serve you. You spoke the other day of
sending a troop towards Caerleon. Who's going?"

He looked down at a paper. A year ago
he would have known without looking. "Priscus, Valens. Probably
Sidonius. They go in two days' time."

"Then I'll go with them."

He looked at me. Suddenly it was the
old Ambrosius back again.

"An arrow out of the dark?"

"You might say so. I know I must
go."

"Then go safely. And someday, come
back to me."

Someone interrupted us then. When I
left him he was already going, word by word, through some laborious
draft of the new statutes for the city.

7

The road from Winchester to Caerleon
is a good one, and the weather was fine and dry, so we did not halt
in Sarum, but held on northwards while the light lasted, straight
across the Great Plain.

A short way beyond Sarum lies the
place where Ambrosius was born. I cannot even call to mind now what
name it had gone by in the past, but already it was being called by
his name, Amberesburg, or Amesbury. I had never been that way, and
had a mind to see it, so we pressed on, and arrived just before
sunset. I, together with the officers, was given comfortable
lodging with the head man of the town -- it was little more than a
village, but very conscious now of its standing as the King's
birthplace. Not far away was the spot where, many years ago, some
hundred or more British nobles had been treacherously massacred by
the Saxons and buried in a common grave. This place lay some way
west of Amesbury, beyond the stone circle that men call the Giants'
Dance, or the Dance of the Hanging Stones.

I had long heard about the Dance and
had been curious to see it, so when the troop reached Amesbury, and
were preparing to settle in for the night, I made my excuses to my
host, and rode out westwards alone over the open plain. Here, for
mile on mile, the long plain stretches without hill or valley,
unbroken save for clumps of thorn-trees and gorse, and here and
there a solitary oak stripped by the winds. The sun sets late, and
this evening as I rode my tired horse slowly westwards the sky
ahead of me was still tinged with the last rays, while behind me in
the east the clouds of evening piled slate-blue, and one early star
came out.