The Hedge of Mist

by Patricia Kennealy-Morrison

  And now we were ordered to a raid on Fomor, despite our current state of battle-readiness—which was to say not ready at all… Was it any great wonder we sat sullen and silent here, why folk muttered behind Arthur’s back all through Prydwen?

  Well, there was no joy here, and no light cast on any of this either; so after another long and most discomfortable silence I quitted the common-room and went to my chamber. Halfway there I changed my mind, and turned instead to a cabin not far from my own. Inside, my two grandsons, Anghaud the elder and Sgilti his twin, sat as silent as any of the Companions; but the difference here was their silence sprang from fear, and I for all my bardery and all my mastery and all my years with Arthur could not allay it.

  Anghaud looked up at me out of Morgan’s eyes, and suddenly I saw behind that longtime-seen resemblance another, more distant one…

  "You look like your great-grandmother, lad," I heard myself saying, to my own surprise.

  And his also, it seemed. "The Rian-dhuair Ygrawn?" he asked with a tentative tone to his voice—and even in that moment I could not fail the professional assessment: baritone with some tenor reach, good resonance…

  "Nay," I said, collecting myself, "your other great-granddam. The Lady Cathelin."

  Sgilti gave me a sharp look—they both knew very well I had never seen my mother in remembering life—but said no word. He was the print of Gerrans his father; for all the two lads were twins, they shared little outward resemblance, though it was very much otherwise with their inner selves. Sgilti was taller and blither like his father, while Anghaud was, save for his eyes, the picture of his mother Cristant, and had her vivid nature as well. They were staunch and charming young men, courteous and principled, and not too biddable—a goodly mix, I found myself thinking privately, Gerrans and Cristant have done well by them…

  "Is it true what we have heard, syra-wyn?" asked Sgilti presently. "That the Ard-righ has ordered the ship to Fomor?"

  "True enough." I sank down into a chair and ran my hand over my face. How to get into, or indeed out of, this next… "There are many of our own folk held prisoner there, taken by the Fomori when they raided Clero, and the King would rescue them if we can."

  "And can we?" said Anghaud quietly. "We were on the bridge during the fight with the Marro, we saw the damage—if we take on three times as many as this ship was built to carry, will not that end what chance we might have to get safe home again?"

  I looked him straight in the eyes, then Sgilti likewise. "Aye, most like it will. But still there is the chance that it may not; would you leave them there to their fate, if they might be saved?"

  Both youths flushed, and Anghaud shook his head. "Nay—of course I would not, and would hope that someone would do as much for us were we in such case. But after that?" His voice shook a little, and my heart bled.

  I reached out and took his hand in mine, and Sgilti came to sit beside me, so that I put an arm round him, much as I had done with them when they were little lads and needed comforting.

  "True it is that we will likely not return home," I said gently. "We must face that, as dan. You have been training as Fians, and I know your preceptors have instructed you in how this must be dealt with."

  "Oh aye—" began Sgilti, then fell silent.

  "But it is never easy, the waiting," I said. "There has been much of that, and will ever be more, where there is battle." I had one arm now round each of them, and tightened my hold for a moment. "You will do well. And if not, remember that I am here with you, and your great-uncle the High King, and your grandaunt Tegau, and many others who love you, and we are doing as well, or as ill, as you two are."

  They laughed at that, as I had intended, and when I left them a while later seemed to be of better cheer, or at least better set now to hide what they were feeling. I headed for my cabin, where I had been going before I looked in on the lads, and flung myself down upon my couch. After a while I rolled over and pulled Frame of Harmony out of its nest among pillows on the floor beside the wall, and not bothering to tune it began to pick out little vague songlets of no known provenance or fame.

  I had spoken to my grandsons as best I might, to hearten them against the ghastly probability, the all but certainty, that this sailing should see the end of us. For those of the Companions, it made little differ: This was a thing we had been prepared for since first we went out against Edeyrn, back on Gwynedd, for the Counterinsurgency and for Artos. We had had long and happy lives since then, had seen our cause triumph, had crowned Arthur and Gweniver, had restored Keltia and won back the Graal; for us it was no great tragedy to perish on this rade.

  It was different for the young ones, the ones of an age with Anghaud and Sgilti, or a little their elder; though they were doubtless as brave to face their fates as we ourselves had been at their age, still it was all but impossible, I knew, for them to believe. At their age, I too had found it impossible to believe, that I myself might die; we are all immortal when we are young, or so we think. It is only when we are older that we know we are immortal, though in rather a different way than we might have earlier believed.

  I rippled my fingers down the strings, and Frame of Harmony responded with a shiver of silver sound, a minor-key shower like rain with a sundog behind. My lads would do well whatever they came to; and, as I had said, I and Artos and Tegau the other Companions would be with them, to help them thole whatever might come upon us. My thoughts now were far behind Prydwen’s course across the stars: back in Keltia, with Morgan and Ygrawn and Gerrans and Cristant and all the others we had left there. But most of all my thoughts were with Gweniver, and with the child she carried: Arwenna, who most like would never know her father save by what she was told of him. It now seemed probable that I myself would never live to make songs which might help this coming niece to know her royal father; but I began to line out a chaunt or two all the same.

  I woke with a start: Frame of Harmony had fallen and hit me on the chin, and it had fallen because Prydwen had changed course sharply. I paused briefly to stow the harp securely and then ran for the bridge, for a course change could mean one thing only: We were at Fomor, and we were under attack.

  "Ah, Talyn," said Arthur without turning as I lunged for my post. "I was about to call you here. As you see—"

  He waved a hand, and I saw only too well. We were coming in to Fomor, right enough, and we were by no means alone in the space between the planet and her moons. I watched for a moment, then made some calculations on my screens, and frowned.

  "There are not—"

  "Nay," said Arthur serenely. "There are not as many enemy craft to come against us as we might have expected."

  "And that would be because—" I prompted.

  "Because most of them were destroyed at Camlann," said Eknna, overhearing our discourse. "And those that survived were not undamaged, and are limping home full slowly. We got here before them."

  "And a good thing." I was watching as we made our way closer in to the planet, past the darting craft launched from the surface who sought to bar our progress. "Have we a plan, Artos?" I asked presently. "Or do we but invent as we do go?"

  Arthur grinned. "That would be no new thing for us. But aye, Talynno, there is a plan… We know where the prisoners from Clero are being kept, and we will go straight in to get them."

  "Will not the Fomori be expecting just that?"

  "Oh aye," said Elen, "but with so few ships they cannot prevent it. Though—" She hesitated.

  "Aye? ‘Though—’?"

  "Though they may yet wound us too badly to come safe away."

  "Oh, if that is all." I turned away, strangely comforted and confident, back to my screens and patterned trajectories. "Old dogs to hard roads."

  Well, not quite; but close enough as to make little differ.

  We landed on Fomor unhindered, though we sustained more damage to Prydwen’s hull than Arthur liked to see there, and lost no time getting the prisoners from Clero out of their durance and into the ship. Most were wo
unded, and all were very weak—the Fomori do not always abide by the humane code Ganaster sets strictly out for the treatment of prisoners of war—but we managed to take them all aboard in swift time. Arthur himself set Anghaud and Sgilti to oversee the arrangements, to see that the rescued were cared for and made comfortable, or as much so as could be given the circumstances.

  Once the liberated prisoners were safe on Prydwen, Arthur gave the order to head out as speedily as we might in the direction where lay least danger and fewest Fomori ships. We had done some damage of our own in the rescue, both to the harrying craft and to the planet itself—buildings and folk too, my sorrow to say. I comforted myself with remembering how Melwas, Fomor’s king, had reived away Donayah, and thought his folk were lucky to come off so unscathed.

  We were heading out to space again when it happened. To this day I do not recall seeing the moment, but there it was: Out of the ard-na-speire, or merely out from the blind side of one of the many little Fomorian moons, came a ship that could have matched the Marro, and we were not ready for her.

  She was a dreadnought, a giant ship of war, perhaps the last one left behind from the venture against Keltia to defend Fomor itself; we never learned her name, not then nor after. Then we were too busy, and after—well, you shall hear, but after we had not the heart to ask.

  She came, I say, out of nowhere. There was no room to turn and not time enough to run, and we took her fire square on. I have sailed in Prydwen many star-miles, and I tell you that never did that ship of Arthur’s building, that ship he loved as it might be his horse or his hound or his hawk, never did she take such a pounding as she did in that moment. So hard were we struck that Prydwen rolled full over, like a sun-shark at play or a piast lanced by a muirgha. It was bad enough on the bridge, but what it did down below was unimaginable, and I tried to keep my mind off it as Arthur and Elenna and the rest of us fought desperately to right the ship and get her the hells out of there.

  It cannot have been longer than a quarter-hour, but it felt like centuries, and we under fire all the time from the Fomorian, who did to us what not even the whole Coranian fleet had managed to do; but we flashed beneath her and behind one of the smaller moons and got free of the gravity well long enough to leap blind into the ard-na-speire. And never was I so glad and grateful to be there: But the cost was fearful.

  Once safe in the overheaven where the Fomorian could not follow us, we allowed ourselves to breathe; a moment or two only, and then we fell to as desperately as we had just now fought, to heal Prydwen’s hurts and those of the folk who sailed in her. The toll, we quickly found, was worst among the rescued of Clero; but the Companions were by no means unscathed, my great sorrow to tell. And gravest of all, Prydwen was losing air and power steadily, from a great wound bleeding away her substance all along her cithog side. Arthur said no word, but his very silence said more than we wished to hear.

  But later, alone with me in his cabin, he delivered himself of his fears and his hopes alike, and the first were many and the second all but gone, and I perceived why he did not wish to confide this just yet to the rest.

  "In all the years we have fought together," he began, "this, or some end like to this, could have come upon us at any time. Yet it did not; and the farther we went down that road of triumphs the more I came to think it never would. This—this was what we did to others, to our enemies. I never truly thought it could ever be what they might one day do to us."

  "And that is just precisely why it did not come upon us until now," I said, with a lightness I was far from feeling. "Soon or late, King of Kelts, it must come to us all. We had a fine hunt of it, the best and longest day’s run of any, and now it is our turn for the blosc-bais to be sounded, the mort to be blown for us. We are all but quarry for Arawn’s Hunt in the end."

  Arthur unexpectedly roared with laughter. "Thou hast comforted me marvellous much," he said at last in the High Gaeloch, still grinning. "What a cheerful soul you are, and how dull of me not to have noticed until now."

  "Ah well," I said, "better late than never at all. But, Artos—"

  "Only one ‘But, Artos’ will I allow, Talynno." He ran a hand over his beard in the old gesture, and it went to my heart to see it. So many times in the past, in so many moments such as this one…

  "It is well enough for the Companions," I said after a while. "But for my grandsons’ sake, can we not make it as swift as we might? For the hunt is up, not so?"

  Arthur’s eyes had gone bronze-dark, and he was silent for a long time before he spoke.

  "Perhaps not just yet," he said then. "There is a thing we yet might try."

  The thing Arthur had in mind to try was a planet called Kholco, and when first we heard the details of his plan, and what like was this planet and those who dwelled there, many there were who were all for opening Prydwen up to space right there.

  "And give ourselves an ending that is even one with that of Jaun-Zuria and the Marro," said Roric. "Not so bad a way to take."

  "If we try Artos’s plan we might not have to think of ending at all," I said, and glanced round at the faces of the Companions who crowded the common-room, trying to read their thought.

  But truth to tell, I was not all so sure how I myself did feel about Artos’s plan. Kholco was a populated planet not too far off from our present position; with care we should be able to limp there even in our grievous state. And, as Arthur had vigorously pointed out, Kholco had a history of trade with the pre-Theocracy Keltia—rare earths and metals, mostly, which would with luck meet our desperate need, and could be used to patch Prydwen’s hide to sufficient strength to get us home. Or so Arthur said…

  "Provided the folk of Kholco will remember the old trade-bond," said Daronwy. "Provided they are even willing to trade. Provided—"

  "Oh, well, if we go into it so!" snapped Arthur back at her. "Is it not worth the trying? If we get no joy of them on Kholco we can take the way you would have us take now, and only a few days will have been wasted. But at least, Ronwynna, we shall have tried."

  "What like are these Kholcans, Artos?" asked Betwyr. "And for that matter, what like is this world itself?"

  For the first time I saw Arthur look just the tiniest bit distant, and that suddenly. But distance was not the whole of it: Evasion was there, and a kind of defiance, and a concealing cunning that all at once made me wonder just what it was he was trying to hide from us. But when he answered, he was so frank and open that I thought I must have mistaken him…

  "It is a fire-world," he said. "A planet largely volcanic, and actively so; hence the metals and earths they have in good supply for trade."

  "If it is so fierce a place," asked Alannagh Ruthven, "what folk can live there, as Betwyr asked?"

  Again Arthur paused. "They are the Salamandri," he said then. "They are ophidians, saurinoids, evolved from lizards and other reptilian races. It is said that they can live in the flames of the firemounts, and come to no harm with it."

  The room thought about that for a silent moment or so; and as they thought, I had the distinct feeling, caught as if by chance out of the air, that this whole scene was a thing rehearsed between Artos and the others. Not all the others—Daronwy and a few more seemed to share my ignorance—but there was something afoot, or so I sensed… And then it was gone again, and the Companions were discussing aloud what like these Salamandri might be.

  "I know little more," Arthur was saying, "save that our trade with them was begun long since, under Raighne Ard-rian, and continued until the days of Alawn Last-king. Beyond, even; but Edeyrn treated them as badly as he treated everyone else, and for that reason alone they may be glad to help us now. We can but try."

  In the end, of course, he had his way, he always did; but I have wondered ever after if just this once, getting his own way was not in Arthur Penarvon’s best interest after all.

  We were in grave straits indeed by the time we made it to Kholco’s system, where a fierce yellow-white sun and a huge dim red-giant star reigned over f
ive most inhospitable planets. Many of our folk, both the rescued and the rescuers alike, were dead and dying, and few were without hurt of some sort. Even the hope of repair to ship and folk alike, as Arthur continued to hold out to us, was not enough to rally our spirits, but we went along with him out of custom and under that vivid infusing force of his we knew so well.

  And as we drew near to Kholco, I myself even began to think that, perhaps, just maybe, it might be possible, and Arthur might yet pull this off; like the evasion after Talgarth, and the snow-march along the Loom, and so many other unexpected and unexpectedly successful feats. Hope began to bloom in me again as I watched Kholco grow larger in the screens; and that alone should have warned me, as it had not in the past…

  Kholco was as Arthur had described it, an amazing-looking world, dull red for the most part—no green thing grew there, only a few hardy scrub plants that clung to meager soil in the lava cracks. We could see, from orbit, how the firemounts ruled this world: hundreds, thousands of active volcanoes; even from space we could see the black low land laced with ribbons of fire-gold, the rafts of dark clinkered rock sailing on pools of what looked like gold water or yellow rippling silk and was instead pure melted rock, heart’s blood of the planet. The ground shook ever; and all along the fault lines that radiated out from the great craters were towering veils of sulphur curtains, punctuated by flung fire-festoons and fountains, and slow tongues of moving lava sending up hissing billows where they met the tiny remnant seas.

  Yet there were settlements in the more stable cliff’s, and some of them sizable ones. There was no weaponry on this world—the Salamandri prided themselves on their neutrality and peaceability—and very little technology, save that needed to extract, as cleanly and correctly as possible, the ores and earths and gases which the Salamandri sold for trade goods to worlds who had insufficient resources of their own.