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 in 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 smelt 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.

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SIX