Artos did not move. He said in deadly quiet: “You will return to your room.”
The following week was the blackest period of my life. I could not walk for several days, and I had sufficient leisure to imagine a half dozen ways I might have avoided so great a disaster; I sat at my desk for hours with my face in my hands and could think of nothing else. Artos allowed me to join the sad and bleak little funeral service held at the mines. But most of the week I was confined to my room, alone.
As I began to accept that for all its horror the ordeal was over, and irreversible, I tried to think of other things. I distilled oils for Ginevra, exotic but harmless essences such as cinnamon and vanilla; and I read. I read over again almost all the books I own, and some others I found in my father’s study, abandoning myself especially to those that are not true: Irish legends, Roman poetry, the few Greek plays that I have in Latin translation. One evening in November Artos discovered me over one of these, weeping in still and stricken silence. At first I did not even notice he was there, standing behind me, until he laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. Startled, I could only stare at him in inarticulate shame that he should find me in tears over a fiction.
But he read aloud over my shoulder, “‘I weep for you as well, though I can’t see you, imagining your bitter life to come.’”
I turned the pages over and wiped my eyes. “I beg your pardon, sir.”
“I also have shed tears for the king of Thebes,” Artos said. “My marksman: I have a task for you that I think you will enjoy.”
I could feel my hands tensing with relief. I was wretched with the enforced idleness of the last month.
Artos said, “I want you to teach Lleu to hunt.”
We took five hounds and rode south. The Mercian plain was at this time o kt tu tof year gray and brown, with clouds resting and tearing on the distant peaks that rimmed the horizon. There had been one or two light, insignificant snowfalls, and patches of snow lay unmelted here and there beneath the trees. The lake where the fisheries are was covered with a thin scale of ice, and our horses’ hooves sent a few pebbles skidding across the barely solid sheet as we rode by. The gravel made a surprisingly loud noise as it hit the ice, echoing and squealing like metal on stone. Lleu, who had scarcely spoken to me since our session with Artos, started at the unearthly sound like a nervous cat.
“You’ve nothing to fear, Bright One,” I said lightly. “I’m not going to touch my bow today.”
“You’re not shooting at all?”
“No. You are.”
I thought: You are going to kill, my brother; you are going to take the life of another living being, and forever you will be accountable for that life. As I am for many lives lost, animal and man.
I added aloud, “For after all, it’s no little thing to feed yourself, my lord Prince.”
Lleu threw me a resentful look and did not answer. He knew the purpose of our hunting together.
Before long we came upon a stag, full-grown but young. We could not get close to it at first, and soon we had lost both deer and hounds. We slowed our pace and halted. I sounded a long horn call and we heard the far-off yell of the dogs in answer, but Lleu made no move to follow. “Do you come?” I said impatiently. “Give chase!”
I reached out and pulled at his reins, then tore after him as his horse started suddenly away. We rode through a tangle of dripping trees, then burst into a cloudy brown clearing, silvered over with mist, to see the rusty deer bright bounding through the winter bracken. “Your bow!” I cried. “Now!”
Lleu obediently sent an arrow streaking just between the graceful antlers, harmless.
I pulled alongside him and reached out to snatch his reins again, bringing him abruptly to a halt. “You do it on purpose,” I hissed. “That is the trouble, is it not? In practice you can hit a moving target at twice that distance. I told your father I would teach you to hunt, and if we must spend the rest of the night riding you are not returning to be petted and praised by the high king till you have killed. You have the skill.” Lleu’s face was ashen. I added with cool menace, “I swear by the Wild Hunt if you do not bring down that stag at the next opportunity, I will make you eat its entrails when you do.” The deer and dogs had already disappeared into the trees at the opposite side of the clearing. I struck Lleu lightly across the face with his own reins. “Now, follow!”
He tore away from me, riding blindly and furiously. I caught up with him among the trees, and we rode together in silence except for the horses’ hooves thundering hollow on damp turf. Ahead of us, the young buck was tiring visibly. “Now, Bright One,” I said. “Strike.”
Lleu bent his bow with reluctant hands. Despite his hesitation he took the creature with an arrow in its throat.
“Ha!” I drew my horse to a halt. “Beautiful!”
But he had not killed it. The lean, quick hounds leaped for it like gray flames. “No!” Lleu cried. He slid from his horse and threw himself among the dogs, snatching at the collar of his own. “Here, sir! Back!” Clinging to his strain kto . He sing hound, he shouted wrathfully, “Call off your horrible dogs!”
I called the dogs and dismounted. “Better that you finish than that they do,” I said, and gave Lleu my hunting knife.
“Oh, I can’t!” he gasped. He knelt next to the fallen deer with one hand lightly resting on a short, proud antler, and his hound and Goewin’s whining at his shoulders.
“Would you have it die slowly, then?” I said.
He held on to the antler and moved the heavy head to stretch out the animal’s throat; its steaming breath was strangled and uneven. I began to say, “If you don’t—”
But he drove the blade to cut deep across the stag’s throat. And just as he looked up at me, another deer came through the trees toward us: not chased and so not running, a dark doe, almost black. Goewin’s hound darted after it.