The crystal cave - Mary Stewart [63]
"Do you fear it?"
"I shall be a man."
"And a man takes power where it is offered. Yes. Did you understand what you saw tonight?"
"The bull? No, my lord, only that it was something secret."
"Well, you will know some day, but not now. Listen."
Somewhere, outside, a cock crowed, shrill and silver like a trumpet. He said: "That, at any rate, puts paid to your phantoms. It's high time you were asleep. You look half dead for lack of it." He got to his feet. I slid softly from the stool and he stood for a moment looking down at me. "I was ten when I sailed for Less Britain, and I was sick all the way."
"So was I," I said.
He laughed. "Then you will be as exhausted as I was. When you have slept, we'll decide what to do with you. He touched a bell, and a slave opened the door and stood aside, waiting. "You'll sleep in my room tonight. This way.
The bedchamber was Roman, too. I was to find that by comparison with, say, Uther's, it was austere enough, but to the eyes of a boy used to the provincial and often makeshift standards of a small outlying country, it seemed luxurious, with the big bed spread with scarlet wool blankets and a fur rug, the sheepskins on the floor, and the bronze tripod as high as a man, where the triple lamps, shaped like small dragons, mouthed tongues of flame. Thick brown curtains kept out the icy night, and it was very quiet.
As I followed Ambrosius and the slave past the guards -- there were two on the door, rigid and unmoving except for their eyes which slid, carefully empty of speculation, from Ambrosius to me -- it occurred to me for the first time to wonder whether he might be, perhaps, Roman in other ways.
But he only pointed to an archway where another of the brown curtains half hid a recess with a bed in it. I suppose a slave slept there sometimes, within call.
The servant pulled the curtain aside and showed me the blankets folded across the mattress, and the good pillows stuffed with fleece, then left me and went to attend Ambrosius.
I took off my borrowed tunic and folded it carefully. The blankets were thick, new wool, and smelled of cedarwood. Ambrosius and the slave were talking, but softly, and their voices came like echoes from the far end of a deep, quiet cave. It was bliss only to be in a real bed again, to lie, warm and fed, in a place that was beyond even the sound of the sea. And safe.
I think he said "Good night," but I was already submerged in sleep, and could not drag myself to the surface to answer. The last thing I remember is the slave moving softly to put out the lamps.
6
When I awoke next morning it was late. The curtains had been drawn back, letting in a grey and wintry day, and Ambrosius' bed was empty. Outside the windows I could see a small courtyard where a colonnade framed a square of garden, at the center of which a fountain played -- in silence, I thought, till I saw that the cascade was solid ice.
The tiles of the floor were warm to my bare feet. I reached for the white tunic which I had left folded on a stool by the bed, but instead I saw that someone had put there a new one of dark green, the colour of yew trees, which fitted. There was a good leather belt to go with it, and a pair of new sandals replacing my old ones. There was even a cloak, this time of a light beech-green, with a copper brooch to fasten it. There was something embossed on the brooch; a dragon, enamelled in scarlet, the same device I had seen last night on the seal-ring he wore.
It was the first time that I remember feeling as if I looked like a prince, and I found it strange that this should happen at the moment when you would have thought I had reached the bottom of my fortunes. Here in Less Britain I had nothing, not even a bastard name to protect myself with, no kin, not even a rag of property. I had hardly spoken with any man except Ambrosius, and to him I was a servant, a dependant, something to be used,