In an hour he had sold almost all of it, except for one pack, set to the side. These were his best wares, reserved for the king and the king’s house to buy from first. Such as were not sold would then be offered to the lesser folk.
When the crowd had begun to thin, a stout woman in a gown of good cloth came down from the top court and stood waiting until a gray-haired man had paid for a pot of eye ointment.
“The king sends to say that you are welcome in his hall, Rhys,” she said.
Correus nodded and began to roll up his packs. Much of his business was in kind, bartered for goods a trader could sell elsewhere, and he packed away an assortment of unworked gold and finely carved bone and cured skins with a purse full of coins.
In the Great Hall, Bendigeid was lounging by the remains of the morning cooking fire. His shirt and breeches were elegant enough for a king with not much on his mind but a new arm ring, but there were thin lines around the corners of his eyes and dark smudges on the skin that hadn’t been there two years ago. There was a Druid with him whom Correus recognized and saluted warily – Teyrnon, high priest of that outlawed priesthood – and another gray-bearded man who was probably a council lord.
Correus bowed to Bendigeid and gave the councillor a polite nod. “I had hoped to find the king in Dinas Tomen,” he said. “I am remembering you had a liking for Tyrian dyes, and so I have bought some from a trader out of there.”
Bendigeid raised an eyebrow. “I have little leisure to peacock about in a purple shirt these days, Rhys. But I shall buy anyway – to impress the gods. They have a liking for that sort of gesture.”
Teyrnon snorted, and Correus unrolled his last pack. Why was the king in Dinas Tomen, he wondered, as he rummaged the little silk packet out of the folds. He hoped violently that it was because Bendigeid wouldn’t chance being killed while he left Ygerna alive behind him, maybe to rule after him. If so, the king would mastermind his war band’s raids from Dinas Tomen and wait his chance. Mithras god, let me be right about that. Correus had seen no sign of Ygerna anywhere, and fear was beginning to make him sick to his stomach.
“I must charge dear for the dye,” Correus said, producing it. “It was none too easy to come by.” Tyrian purple, the deep shade that came from shellfish, was the most costly dye in the world. “But this is a hearth gift,” He laid out a silver brooch of ancient and beautiful work, almost as valuable as the dye. A hearth gift for a chieftain was customary; for a king, practically imperative.
Bendigeid examined the brooch admiringly. “You have an eye for beauty, Rhys. My thanks, and I will pay your price for the dye. What else have you brought?”
The formalities over, Correus spread out his goods before the king – the best of the silks and jewelry and a few fine pieces of Gaulish silver. There was a small statue in gold of a leaping stag with a sun disc caught in his antlers, and a glass pitcher shaped like a cluster of grapes, with the vine tendrils for the handle. The last pack had cost nine-tenths of the money Correus had spent acquiring a stock from the merchants who docked along Sabrina Mouth bound for Aquae Sulis. He lifted the arm ring with the flower clasp, hoping that his face was not as green as he felt.
“I have heard that the royal woman has come back to her tribe. If she would take this for a good wish, I would be honored.”
Bendigeid nodded and flicked an eye at the stout woman who was poking at the fire, banking the coals for the evening. Correus clenched his hands under the folds of the pack until he was sure that they weren’t going to shake. The woman took the arm ring and went off with it.
The king smiled. “A pleasant gesture, Rhys. Are you hoping to sell your silks?”
Correus was sitting cross-legged beside his goods. He laughed. “Of course, King. Being that you’ve never thought to take a wife…”
“You will get the attention of the women of my house in some fashion,” the king said. “You will be a rich man before you are an old one, I’m thinking. You should take a wife yourself.”
“When I am a rich man, I expect I will. It improves the choices some.”
“How did you know the royal woman had come back to us?” Bendigeid said.
“Oh, from a Roman before I came here. They were in a fine temper over it.”
“You run tame in the Roman camps, do you, Rhys?”
“They let me go where I will, mostly,” Correus said carefully. “My kind stays out of wars. It spoils the business.”
“You took my message to Cadal,” Bendigeid said thoughtfully.
“I was going that way. And I spent the next season in Brigante country, as I said I would. But I didn’t say I’d stay away forever. That would not be business.”
“You were in the Roman zone this spring?”
“Aye. My goods come from the coastal merchants mostly.”
“And what are the Romans doing?”
“Building forts. Building roads. Building Lugh-knows-what. Building, King. They are building.”
“Rhys—”
“Look, you, King – I am not a tribesman, but this is my land, too. The Romans are not fools, and they do not tell me secrets. They build. That is all I know. They build very close to your doorstep,” he added.
“Llywarch, I need your map.”
The old councillor had been staring at Correus with thoughtful eyes. Now he rose and strode away, presumably to his own chambers. Correus watched him go, trying to think why the name touched a bell in his mind. Llywarch… the envoy who had taken Ygerna to marry Gruffyd’s son. That was it. Ygerna had mentioned the name. And now for some reason Llywarch seemed to find Correus’s face a puzzlement to him. Correus couldn’t think why – Llywarch and Ygerna had both been in Moridunum the last time Rhys the trader had come through Silure lands. Could Ygerna have described him to Llywarch? Surely Ygerna wasn’t such a fool. And surely Correus’s face was not so remarkable that Llywarch would know it from a description. He abandoned the puzzle as Llywarch came back with a softened piece of deer’s hide that had a rough map inked on it.
Llywarch spread it out on the hearth, and Bendigeid got out of his chair and knelt beside it. Teyrnon Chief-Druid sat and looked stately behind his beard, but his eyes were on the map, too.
“We have marked all the Roman roads and camps we know of,” Bendigeid said. He looked at Correus. “Are there more?”
Correus scooted forward and looked. They had most of them. He took a cold cinder from the edge of the fire and made two more marks along the Wye, and another stretch of road beside the Isca – two halves of a circle north and south of Dinas Tomen. He might as well be truthful, he thought. If Bendigeid would give the battle up as hopeless, there were men on both sides who would be alive by fall. “There may be more.” He put the cinder down and dusted his hands. “But those I have seen.”
Bendigeid sat for a long time looking silently at the map. He had sent one more plea to Cadal now that Ygerna, who had been part of the bargain, was again his to give. But he didn’t really expect an answer. And it hadn’t changed his intentions toward Ygerna. If Ygerna died, the Goddess would go to another woman and make her the royal woman, and then Cadal could have her. But Cadal wouldn’t answer. That was plain now. Bendigeid watched as the ink and cinder marks seemed to move of their own accord, ringing closer about Dinas Tomen.
Correus, in turn, watched the fire and not the king, in case his thoughts were too plain on his face. There was a light patter of footsteps, and he caught his breath and made a face of polite interest before he looked up.
“My thanks to the trader for the good wish,” Ygerna said.
Correus touched his palm to his forehead, formal recognition of the Goddess on Earth. “If the Lady is pleased, then I am pleased.” He looked her in the eye and gave a shallow sigh of relief when no sign of recognition crossed her face. “Perhaps I might have other things to interest the princess?” he suggested.
The stout woman drew up a chair to the hearth for her, and Ygerna sat. “I will look,” she decided. The king was talking in
a low voice now to Teyrnon and Llywarch, and other people were beginning to drift into the hall. Correus spread his goods out for Ygerna’s inspection while the stout woman went back to poking at the fire. Ygerna ran her hands over the silk and held a few folds up to see how the light fell on it. If she were going to betray him and scream “Roman!” to her uncle, she would have done it by now, Correus decided and relaxed a little more.
She was dressed like a princess and a woman now, with a heavy gold torque around her slim neck and fine green shoes on her feet. Her hair was still unbound and there was a fillet around her forehead with the silver crescent of the moon on the front. Silver and gold and purple threads made a pattern like waves along the green hem of her gown. It was hot in the hall, and the short sleeves of the linen gown were pinned up at the shoulders to shorten them further. The arm ring he had sent was clasped about one white arm above the elbow. She was extraordinarily beautiful, Correus thought, and really not a child any more. Or maybe it was only the performance she was giving. It would have done credit to an actor.
She inspected everything twice, haggled determinedly with him about the price, and went away with the stout woman trailing behind her, and a length of blue silk under one arm.
He saw her again that evening, her face still cool and remote as the crescent moon on her head. The Great Hall of Dinas Tomen was decked with all the trappings of a feast, and if the food was scarce and the feasters mainly women, it was a bright evening all the same. Owen Harper had ridden in that afternoon from wherever it was that his warriors were harassing the Romans, with Fand across his back, and as soon as he had eaten, he unstrapped the harp bag and began to tune her. The bronze strings caught the torchlight like little wires of fire, and the music, to Correus, possessed an unearthly quality that could make a man forget hunger and thirst.
Owen sang first of the beautiful silver witch Arianrhod, maker of trouble and mother of gods; and then of Rhiannon the Good, for whom the magic birds sang, and who gave up immortality for love of a human king. The harp notes became a bird song as Owen spun out the tale of Rhiannon. It was one of the three hundred tales that any bard had to learn by heart at his training, but Owen was a master at it. His voice rose higher with the harp notes, and he seemed to waver in the firelight until Correus could almost have sworn that it was a golden goddess with a bright-feathered songbird on her arm who sat by the hearth, and not at all a black-haired man with a harp.
He looked down the table from his seat, where the king had given him the guest’s place, to Ygerna at the other end. She was sitting with her elbow beside her empty bowl and her chin in her hand, lost in the harp song. The black hair stood out around her face like smoke. Under the silver moon she had a wild beauty that hadn’t seemed to touch her in the Roman camps. They are her kind, he thought. She was born to them. And she was old enough now to stand up to her uncle, as much as any human could ever stand up to the king of the Silures. He wondered sadly if he had come on a fool’s errand, to take her away from something she wished to keep, if the only reason she hadn’t named him for a spy was a lingering fondness for him, and not a wish to go back with him. She must know why he was there, but what if she didn’t want it? Correus took a drink of the watery beer that was almost the last of the king’s stores and dismissed that thought from his mind. It didn’t matter what Ygerna wanted. She was coming with him anyway. Correus’s eyes slid around to the king’s dark, masked, unreadable face. There was something of Bendigeid in Ygerna, he thought, but not enough to win. Not in the long run.
Owen put down his harp, and the hall woke and shouted and cheered and called out to him for more, but he shook his head. He took a long drink from his beer horn and began to make a dance music. The women got up from the benches and began to whirl across the rushes on the floor, arms linked and long braids flying. The unwed girls wore their hair loose, and it spun out behind them like a curtain. After a moment Ygerna slipped from her seat and joined them. They circled the hall once more, weaving between the tables. Like bright birds, he thought, fluttering in the rushes. And then he saw that they had knives in their hands, point uppermost, that caught the torchlight on the blades. It was a war dance, a Spear Dance of the Women, and he knew that they, too, would fight to the death if it came to it, and then there would be nothing left of the Silures at all.
They gave him a place to sleep in the guest chambers; piled rushes with a deer hide that was almost as soft as his woolen cloak on the top. It was a matter of pride to give a guest the best. There was a fire laid on the hearth, and the ashes under it smelled interestingly of burned herbs.
Correus wrapped himself in his cloak and lay down on the deer hide with his packs for a pillow. He could see the bright, fine points of stars through the smoke hole above him, and he watched them while he tried first to think of a way to talk to Ygerna alone, and then to go to sleep. Neither proved very successful and when he finally did sleep, the problem of Ygerna chased itself around and around in his dream; the kind of dream that has no beginning and no end, and the dreamer does the same task over and over and never finishes and wakes exhausted; and the few solutions which present themselves in dreaming are always strange and unmanageable by morning light.
He woke with a crick in his neck from sleeping on a pack with a copper pot in it, and a vile taste in his mouth from having been too preoccupied to brush his teeth at night. It was hardly light, no more than the faint graying of predawn, and he felt as if he had only just begun to sleep soundly after the dreams had gone away. He blinked, trying to decide why he was awake at all when he realized that there was someone in the room with him. He sat up fast with his hand on his knife, and Ygerna’s voice hissed at him to be still.
She was kneeling beside him, and her face was barely visible in the pale gray light that came down through the smoke hole.
“How did you get away?” he whispered. A royal woman was always hemmed in by other women, and slaves, and protocol.
“I told them I was going to pee,” she said frankly. “They don’t insist on watching me do that.” She put out a hand to his face, and in another second she was in his arms, shivering against his shoulder. “Correus, get me out of here! Take me home!”
“That’s what I’m here for.” He stroked her hair. “Home? Are you sure? I was afraid I was going to have to kidnap you, too.”
“No. This isn’t home, not any more. I tried, but it isn’t, and I don’t belong any more, and I’m scared to death.” Her teeth were chattering. She sat back and wrapped her cloak around her and tried to speak clearly. “He’s going to kill me. He’s afraid your governor will make me the queen. There will be poison in my food one day, if nothing else.”
“Thank the gods. I was afraid you wouldn’t know that, and not be careful.”
“I am not a fool,” Ygerna whispered. “But why did they send you alone? You can’t have brought any men with you, not into these hills. Not without my uncle spotting them.”
“I brought… something,” Correus said. “And they didn’t send me, I came. You may not be a fool, and neither is the governor, but he doesn’t think your uncle will risk a curse to get rid of you.”
Ygerna sighed. “Or I’m just not worth it to him. The governor is almost as practical as my uncle.”
Correus looked uncomfortable, but he didn’t bother denying it. “A little of both maybe. So it will be just you and me.”
“But you came.” She took his hand in both of hers, and held it tight for a moment.
“And we will have some help on the trail,” he said, “but we’re going to need a head start. Can you get free of your servants at night?”
Ygerna thought. “I will manage. I haven’t tried to before, because having them around makes it harder for my uncle. But I will manage something.” She smiled, a faint little wolf-smile that he could barely see. “They are beginning to be a little afraid of me.”
* * *
When it was fully light, Correus took his ponies down the chariot track to the low ground
around Ty Isaf on the pretext of cutting fresh grass for them. Most of the grass had already been cut to feed what was left of the herd animals in Dinas Tomen, and he turned them out to graze on the short new growth instead, and sat down on a rock to watch them. His rock was on the edge of a low clump of trees, and he wasn’t overly surprised when Nighthawk curled himself up on the ground beside him, on the far side of the rock, out of the line of sight of anyone in Dinas Tomen.
“Tonight,” Correus said. “There’s a gate in the north wall that’s less conspicuous. It’s not meant for horses, and there’s only one guard.”
Nighthawk nodded. “You cannot take the horses anyway.”
“Will your people – the Ty Isaf people – help?”
“I have told them,” Nighthawk said. “It is their doing, so they must undo it. The Old One didn’t like it, but she drank the holy drink and talked to my Old One, and they will do it. Does the woman come freely?”
“Yes.”
Nighthawk looked relieved. “Good. Otherwise it would be her Fate, the Old One says, and then they wouldn’t help.”
“Two hours after midnight,” Correus said, watching the ponies instead of Nighthawk in case anyone was watching him. He felt as if he were dealing with some unmanageable cloud of spirits and not with humans at all. Maybe he was. When he turned around again as naturally as he could manage, the sidhe-man was gone.
When the ponies had grazed their fill, Correus took them back to Dinas Tomen. Llywarch was standing in the gateway as he passed. He gave Correus a greeting and another curious look, until Correus wondered if his face looked as guilty as it felt. There was a skull in the wall over his head.
* * *
Correus fidgeted around Dinas Tomen until nightfall, and then fidgeted his way through the evening meal. Owen Harper had made his report to the king and gone back to his men, and the evening had a tight, strained feel to it – merriment made for the sake of a stranger, with other, greater concerns, not to be talked of, lying just beneath the laughter. Ygerna paid him very little attention, and even Llywarch seemed to have given up on his puzzle and turned his mind to his dinner. Without Owen’s harp song, it was only soup and bread and withered apples, undisguised.
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