So we tossed for it, and the Gods of Castellum chose a wall.
Close before our cave were the remains of a very small enclosure, a store shed maybe. At the near corner the wall stood pretty near elbow high; at the lower end it was almost lost under rank grass. In one place a rowan tree had seeded in the rubble filling and sent its roots down into the footings, heaving the stones aside. We hacked back the docks and brambles until the whole oblong lay clear, and began building. There were plenty of loose stones lying about, and we heaved them up and stacked them one upon another, fitting them together in the manner of dry-stone walling. None of us were expert builders of walls, but we brought great care to the task. If we were going to build a wall, it should at least be a wall that we could be proud of. Also the more care we took, the more we thought about what we were doing, the less we had to think about the emptiness of our bellies, the less likely we were to fall asleep. It became very important to us, that wall. We held a deeply earnest council, I mind, as to what we should do about the rowan tree: build round it, or leave a gap. In the end we left a gap, carefully squared up. Huil, with his feelings for curves, would have had us build round it, but we were two to one against.
That was towards the end of the day, and all things were becoming just a little unreal, to me at last, but I was pleased to find that I was not at all sleepy. That was when, heaving up yet another stone, I saw something scratched on the under side of it, and rubbing off the staining lichen with the heel of my hand, saw that it was a running wolf, not properly carved but crudely scratched as though with the point of a dagger, yet with something of life in it all the same. I squatted down with it across my knee, to look at it more closely. I was still aware of the world around me, the others still busy on the wall, the crying of the gulls whirling overhead, but the wolf was blurring a little on my sight, fading and yet at the same time growing towards life. Wolf running - running among trees …
And then Huil had me by the shoulder, shaking me back to wakefulness. That night, our second without sleep, is hazy in my mind. Looking back, I have wondered more than once, why we did not come to an agreement and take turns, one to keep watch while the other two slept. None of us could have betrayed the other two without also betraying ourselves. But we did not, nor do I believe that any of the rest of us did so. We kept faith with the orders we had been given, and got through the slow dragging hours somehow, as best we could. With the fire re-kindled and the evening ration eaten, we returned at first to our storytelling. But in truth we had all lost our taste for it, and the effort to concentrate on telling a story or even on listening to it seemed suddenly more than it was worth. And as the stories began to tail away, we turned more and more to talk, to word games and riddles, getting up to stretch and stamp about every now and then when the flame light began to blur. We played dice for pebbles, we tried to play Flash the Fingers, but that must be played at lightning speed if it is to be a game worth playing at all, and our reactions were so slow that we abandoned the attempt. We talked - mostly about our elders and betters.
The first night had been Huil’s, with his chill, uncanny stories from beyond the edge of the world; but that second night was Dara’s, he being born and bred on Eidin Ridge, and having, moreover, a nose for other people’s affairs that would have done credit to some old hen-wife. From him, that night, I came to know things about the royal household and the King’s Teulu aye, and the Companions, that I had not known, or known only vaguely and piecemeal before.
I learned what lay behind the white mark of the thrall ring on the neck of Aneirin the Poet; how he had been taken captive by the Saxons when on an embassage to their King, taken under the Green Branch of peacetalk, which is against all the rules even of war, and held for ransom; and how, when his fellows returned with the word, Mynyddog, ashamed to haggle for the life and freedom of a friend (and was he not, after all, called the Wealthy?), had had the demanded gold brought from his treasury, and bidden Cenau of his Hearth Companions to take it south. Dara, who was feeding dry sprigs of last summer’s heather to the fire as he talked, looked up with an eyebrow cocked in half question; we knew the man? Huil and I nodded. We knew the man: Cenau, son of Llwyarch Hen, the grim little fighting man who most us believed would take the Fosterling’s place as Captain of the bodyguard when he left it to lead the Companions on the war-trail.
‘Go on,’ Huil said, leaning closer with his arms gripped round his knees.
And Dara went on. ‘This is a ransom that should be paid with spears,’ Cenau said. But he had his orders, and he took the ransom-gold south, with a band of warriors for an escort, and one of the merchant kind who knew something of the Saxon tongue, to act as interpreter. (I did not even wonder if the merchant was Phanes of Syracuse; I simply assumed without question that it was.) They came to the court of the Saxon king and he received them well enough in his Great Hall, but when the gold was on the High Table, he swore that the captive had escaped, and claimed that the gold was due to him all the same, for calling off the hunt and leaving him free to live or die as the Fates decreed. Then Cenau cried out, ‘Did I not say? This is a ransom that must be paid with spears!’ And he and his men snatched fire brands from the hearth and flung them up into the thatch and the roof timbers and in the tumult and confusion they fought their way out, leaving the gold and three of their own men dead behind them, and while the Saxons strove to save their king’s Hall, they set off, questing like hounds through the surrounding buildings. And Aneirin, who all this while had been chained by the neck close by in a store-shed half underground, heard the uproar, guessing the meaning of it, or maybe knowing by the inner sight of his kind, lifted up his voice and began to sing. And Cenau and his men heard the voice and the song that were Aneirin’s and made towards them. They battered their way into his prison-place and hacked his neck-chain free of the beam to which it was made fast, and bore him off to where the horses waited, and so back to Dyn Eidin.
It seemed that that was the end of the story, but we waited, hoping for more, and in a short while Dara looked up from his fire-feeding again, and went on, ‘I saw them ride in. I was but seven summers old, but I mind yet, what Aneirin looked like.’
‘Bad?’ I prodded.
‘As though he had had the Wild Hunt on his tail.’
‘Had the Saxons tortured him?’ Huil ran the tip of his tongue which was narrow and pointed over his lips.
‘I would not be knowing. I have heard it said that he was very sick for a long while, and that the King would have had him taken into the house of the Holy Brothers and tended there by the Infirmarer who is also one of his own physicians. But the Father Abbot would not accept him unless he received the faith of the White Christ, and sick or not, Aneirin had other thoughts as to that. It must have been a scene worth the watching!’ Dara let out his bubbling giggle. ‘In the end, the Queen and her women tended him. I dare say he was better off that way.’
I nodded. ‘I have heard it said that the Queen has the gift of herb healing, she and the Princess Niamh also.’
‘As to that, surely every woman passes her skills on to the chosen one among her daughters.’
‘I wonder if the Queen chose that one because she lacks the beauty that the other two have, and could do with a skill to make up for it,’ Huil said thoughtfully, then shook his head. ‘More likely because she had the skill born in her and it only needed to be trained and nurtured.’
Dara said quickly, ‘In any case, she does not lack beauty for those with eyes to see.’
‘Such as yourself? It seems you have a special interest in the Princess Niamh,’ I began, mocking a little, but it seemed that it was no mocking matter.
‘Because I am Cynan’s shieldbearer, and take proper interest in his affairs,’ Dara said stiffly. ‘And she would come running if Cynan whistled.’
I laughed. ‘As to that, every girl along Eidin Ridge would come running if Cynan whistled.’
‘This is different. An old story. She used to run at his heels like a puppy wh
enever she could escape from her nurse. Once he got tired of it and set her on the high branch of an apple tree and went away and left her there. It is different now, of course, but -’
He broke off. Huil had tensed like a hunting dog. Nose up and a faint quiver running through him. He got up and moved soundlessly, crouching a little, towards the entrance. Dara and I waited, straining our ears, ready to spring after him; and I’ll not deny that the thought of the ghost-wolves was chill for the moment in the back of my neck, though it was far more likely a spy from the party beyond the north gate. Then Huil was back, and squatting down again in his place beside the fire.
‘What was it?’ we asked him.
He shook his head. ‘Something - man - it has gone now.’
And after a while of listening for it to come back, we broke silence and began to talk again, but of different things - things which mattered little and are gone from me.
But when the darkness thinned and we went out into the first light of morning, a bright knot of rowan berries lay exactly in the midst of our newly-walled enclosure.
‘It seems that we have had visitors in the night,’ I said. ‘Maybe tonight we should return the visit.’
10
The Night of the Running Wolves
We spent the third day on our wall. But I remember little about it save that towards the day’s end one corner of it fell down, because we - one or all of us - had misjudged something in the building of it. And after a sudden flaring quarrel as to whose fault it was, as though it mattered, we set to work to repair the damage, as though that mattered either.
And when darkness came down, we kindled our fire for the last time, a very meagre fire, for dry wood was growing scarce in our part of the fort, and squatting around it we ate the last of our barley bannock, which by then was as dry as sawdust and prone to crumble.
Our throats were like lime kilns, not only from the bannock but from the endless talking for the sake of talking. We had told all the stories we knew, and in any case our weary minds flinched from the bare idea of trying to sort out the tangled skein of even the simplest tale. I mind looking at the other two and seeing that their faces looked dull and blotchy in the light of the fire, and their eyes red-rimmed. For myself, I felt as though my eyes were full of hot dust, and I seemed to see everything through a slight haze. My whole body ached to lie down and let go and slip below the dark sucking wavelets of sleep, and I began to have the feeling that I was not really there at all. And after I had more than once roused from this state to find Huil or Dara shaking me, and had myself caught Dara in the last instant before he rolled quietly forward into the fire, I knew that we were going to have to take some kind of desperate action if we were to get through that last night without sleeping.
‘Sweet Mother of Foals, will it never be morning?’ Dara groaned, rocking on his haunches.
Huil let out a long whistling breath and sat back, stretching and shaking his head as though he had a bee in his ear.
And into the foggy darkness behind my eyes came the remembered sight of the bright knot of rowan berries lying so exactly in the midst of our walled enclosure. Huil had thrown it out, and we had not spoken of it again, nor the idea that we should return the visit of those who had left it there …
I heard my own voice, thick with sleep, saying, ‘It is the last night, let us make it a night to crown the other two.’
Huil rubbed the back of his hand across his face and squinted round at me. ‘What then shall we do? Pull up the Giant’s Seat by the roots?’
‘Not such a great matter as that would be. There remains the matter of last night’s visit still to be repaid.’
‘A raid, you mean?’ Dara said with quickening interest.
‘They began it, setting foot unbidden in our enclosure. It will serve to pass the time, and like enough they’ll be glad of that as we shall.’ We looked at each other round the fire, the three of us, while the aching need for sleep drew back into the shadows. Then with no other word spoken, we got to our feet.
‘Silent hunting,’ I said. ‘It will be no sport if we do not take them by surprise.’
Huil looked up through the jagged entrance hole, smiling like a lover. ‘We have a raider’s moon for it, anyway.’
We smoored the fire with turfs and set out. The sea mist that had rolled up from the Firth and hung about most of the day had cleared, and certainly we had a raider’s moon; a harsh white moon that seemed too near for comfort, and the light and shadow of it among the ruined walls and bramble brakes made striped wild-cat patterns black and white in my head. We fell into the familiar single-file of the hunting trail, moving with as much care for silence as though the thing had been deadly earnest, not the mere whim of the moment, a half savage jest meant to pass the time and hold sleep at bay. We skirted the open space that might have been the parade ground, making use of every bush and hummock and patch of shadow, and gaiined the maze of half-lost ruins beyond. Once something rustled in a patch of broom; once a white owl swept across our path on wings padded with silence, and a few moments later, away to our left, something small and shrill cried out in its death agony.
Then we were crouching together in the breast-high ruins of a gatetower laced together by the roots of thorn trees, looking out over the remains of the old outer fort where it thrust northward into the paleness of the Firth, over traces of fallen buildings and jetties where I suppose the supply ships had come in when Castellum had been a place of living men who needed gear and feeding. And in the midst of the desolation and the grey tide of moonlight, I saw again the dim red blink of a watchfire sunk to embers; lower than we had ever let our watchfire sink in the two nights gone by.
We went forward on our bellies, that last bit of the way, expecting every instant a shout to tell us that we had been discovered. But no shout or movement came. The other three had made their lair in a place not so very different from our own, among the wreckage of what might have been the fort’s bath house. The faint fire-glow and the cold whiteness of the moon showed the still standing pillars of the hypocaust, and the dark mouth of the stoke-chamber. The fire had been made in the mouth of the stokehole, and the three who should have been wakeful round it were sleeping peacefully.
Clearly sleep had come upon them unawares and probably only a short time before. At any moment they would rouse; but for now, one lay face down with his feet almost in the fire, one had slumped back against the pile of stones and fallen floor-tiles behind him, one still sat, with his head on his knees. We checked, looking at each other. Then with no word spoken, we rose and hurled ourselves upon them, running low and howling like wolves.
Afterwards I realized what a stupid dangerous thing we did, but at the time we knew only the jest of it. They woke and rose to meet us, and within a racing heartbeat of time the battle was locked and reeling to and fro, scattering the red gleeds of the fire underfoot. In the utter confusion one of them went for the knife in his belt. I dived on him and we went down together with him underneath. He caught his head sideways on a stone, I heard the crack of it, and knocked himself witless for the moment, and I managed to twist the knife out of his grasp before his wits came back to him. ‘Don’t be a fool!’ I was shouting. ‘It’s only us!’ But he did not seem to hear me. The others were trampling to and fro, close-grappled and striking out at each other in a rough and tumble that was already half in earnest; but with him it was something else, a kind of panic, I suppose. He had begun squealing, a horrible sound like something in a trap; writhing and squealing; and lacking his dagger which I had flung a good way off, he ducked his head and tried to bite my wrist. I was lying on top of him by that time, and I mind getting my other hand under his chin and forcing his head back. My hand slipped and shot up the side of his face and into the thick hair that was almost silver in the moonlight, and clenched on a handful of it. In the same instant it was as though a wasp had stung me on the palm; and in the same instant also his squealing changed from fear to pain, and he let out a shrill yelp and arch
ed himself sideways, heaving to fling me off yet still struggling to get his teeth into my arm.
Then the other four were upon us, tearing us apart, hauling us to our feet. The battle was over, and the stillness of the moonlight came flooding back. I found myself looking at Faelinn, shieldbearer to Peredur of Caer Luil, who was among the few to answer Mynydogg’s summons from the half-lost kingdom of Rheged. They were all touchy, the Rheged men, all shadowed by the death of their own king, though it happened in their fathers’ time, not in theirs, all a little unsure, even those whose fathers had been loyal, of whether other men might be finding them guilty; all of them a little prone to pick a quarrel or nurse a grudge in consequence.
And Faelinn stood and stared back at me, with blood trickling out of his hair and down his neck. He put his left hand to the side of his head and held it there; and glancing down at my own, I saw that I was holding a long tassel of barley-pale hair, and tangled with it, the blue glass earring which he always wore. There was blood on my hand too. Some of it mine from a cut palm, some of it his, from where I had torn the ring out of his ear.
Then one of his fellows demanded thickly, dabbing at a bloody nose, ‘In the name of thunder, what game do you think you are playing?’
‘Nay, we did but seek a little harmless practice for the kind of game that we shall be playing in good earnest by and by,’ Dara told him. ‘Also we came in all courtesy to return the visit that you paid to us last night. It was no fault of ours that we found you all sleeping.’
And that was something that would have been better left unsaid.
We stood and stared at each other in silence round the scattered gleeds of the fire. They were too proud to protest that they had not been asleep, to ask our promise of silence on the matter, and at least we had enough sense left not to insult them by promising unasked. But the thing hung like a naked blade in the air between us, none the less. And for Faelinn it was worse than for the rest, because he had squealed like a stuck pig, because he had panicked and gone for his knife, and had a torn ear that would keep him from ever forgetting it. And I made matters worse by holding out the earring to him, saying, I suppose rather scornfully, ‘Here you are; hang it in your other ear and take better care of it next time.’
The Shining Company Page 10