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The chores are done; the midday meal is over; it’s the hottest part of the day, and now – after so many years of false hopes – we can, at last, afford to take an afternoon nap.
We have a truce with Cerdig.
“Arthur?”
I roll onto my side to look at Kai.
The sound of children, laughing as they play, filters in, with the shafts of sunlight, through the rush walls.
Kai persists in staring at the rafters.
“What?” I ask patiently.
“Can you hear them?”
“Who?”
“The ghosts of the children you never fathered … waiting to be born, but trapped forever in the dark.”
“Gloomy thoughts for a summer afternoon, my love.” I often wonder how Kai comes up with these strange notions: inventing problems where none exist. “I think you are the most introspective warrior I have ever known.”
“Not counting yourself.”
“Not counting myself,” I concede, with a faint smile.
“And Llud,” Kai says.
“Oh, alright! And Llud.” I give Kai’s shoulder a gentle shove. “In any case, to have a child, there must first be a woman – and there is no woman I desire.”
“But you like children. You’re good with them. You speak to them in ways they understand. And because of me, you never took a wife. Some child – perhaps more than one – has been deprived of a good father.”
I heave a sigh. “But what would I do with a child, Kai? I am the leader of my people. At any moment, I might be struck down, and leave that child fatherless.”
Kai nods. He understands. We are both orphans, lucky to have had Llud to care for us.
“As a leader I have to consider my people first. But a child needs that too – total loyalty, undivided.” I turn my gaze in the direction of the joyful squeals and shouts. “Those children playing outside – real children, not some phantoms – theirs are the only voices I can hear, and they are all my children. Every child in this village. Every child who is brought up to play rather than to fight. Every Celt’s child that lives to see its parents grow old, and every Saxon’s too, should this peace hold.”
But Kai’s brow is still furrowed. “So … these ghosts I hear –”
“Let them trouble you no more. They are not ghosts, but the voices of your doubt – of yourself, and of me. Lay them to rest.” I stroke Kai’s greying thatch of hair. I know that mine, too, is peppered with grey.
Kai bites his lip. “So you don’t regret …?”
“I would not wish to have lived my life with anyone but you.”
Kai breathes a sigh.
“Kai, my only regret is that I have not been able to give such total loyalty to you, as you deserve – what you have given to me. And I don’t know what I would do without it. Without you always by my side, or at my back.”
Kai’s face relaxes in a smirk. He climbs on top of me. “How about up here? Will this do just as well?”
~~
It will do very well indeed.
~~