The crystal cave - Mary Stewart [151]
"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 some day, 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.
I think I had been expecting the Dance to be much less impressive than the ranked armies of stones I had grown accustomed to in Brittany, something, perhaps, on the scale of the circle on the druids' island. But these stones were enormous, bigger than any I had ever seen; and their very isolation, standing as they did in the center of that vast and empty plain, struck the heart with awe.
I rode some of the way round, slowly, staring, then dismounted and, leaving my horse to graze, walked forward between two standing stones of the outer circle. My shadow, thrown ahead of me between their shadows, was tiny, a pygmy thing. I paused involuntarily, as if the giants had linked hands to stop me.
Ambrosius had asked me if this had been "an arrow out of the dark." I had told him yes, and this was true, but I had yet to find out why I had been brought here. All I knew was that, now I was here, I wished myself away. I had felt something of the same thing in Brittany as I first passed among the avenues of stone; a breathing on the back of the neck as if something older than time were looking over one's shoulder; but this was not quite the same. It was as if the ground, the stones that I touched, though still warm from the spring sunlight, were breathing cold from somewhere deep below.
Half reluctantly, I walked forward. The light was going rapidly, and to pick one's way into the center needed care. Time and storm -- and perhaps the gods of war -- had done their work, and many of the stones were cast down to lie haphazard, but the pattern could still be discerned. It was a circle, but like nothing I had seen in Brittany, like nothing I had even imagined. There had been, originally, an outer circle of the huge stones, and where a crescent of these still