The crystal cave - Mary Stewart [150]
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 for every 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