The Shining Company

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  I had just picked up Shadow’s reins again when a little puff of air came down to us through the trees, and Anwar pricked his ears, then flung up his head and whinnied as a horse does in greeting to his own kind. And from somewhere upstream on the edge of hearing, a horse whinnied in reply.

  19

  The Road Back

  When the blackness that had come rolling over me cleared away, I was lying in the long streamside grass of a woodland clearing. Staring up I could see trees arching over me, and beyond them a clear morning sky.

  I heard movement and a murmur of voices and a horse ruckling down its nose. I got to my elbow and then sat up; and the world spun round me, then settled. Cynan lay close by, with Aneirin and the scout crouching over him. Conn and his mates had taken our horses down to the little willow-fringed pool that broke the fall of the stream just there, and were washing off their legs. The other beasts were tethered on the far side of the clearing. Having made sure that everybody was there, I got my knees under me and moved in for a closer look at Cynan.

  They had got his mail coif off him, and his head had not fallen to pieces, but a horrible black and broken place led out from under the clotted hair on his temple and down to his jaw, like over-ripe fruit. Aneirin had swabbed away the worst of the blood with somebody else’s neck-cloth, sopping from the stream, and was picking splinters of bone out of the pulpy mess where it crossed his cheek-bone, while Cynan lay seeming to feel nothing of what went on, his right eye not quite shut so that a thin line of white showed under the lid, the left too lost in swelling and broken bruises to be sure that there was an eye there at all.

  ‘He has not come back to himself?’ I croaked.

  Aneirin looked up for a moment. ‘No. But it seems that you have.’

  ‘But he will come back?’

  Aneirin went steadily on with his work. ‘It is in my mind that he will come back, though something lacking in the beauty that set girls’ hearts quickening. Lucky it is for him that the heaviest part of the blow landed where it did, and not a thumb’s length further - this way, or his brains would have been like an addled egg within his skull. What was it? A club?’

  ‘A club, with iron studs in it. ‘ Vileness twisted in my belly and rushed up into my throat, and I rolled over hurriedly towards the burn, and threw up what little I had in me into the waterside bushes.

  When I turned back, Cynan had not moved, but there was a kind of wincing in his face, and as we watched, his right eye opened. For a short while he lay staring straight upward, then forced his one-eyed gaze back from his private distance to buckle on to our faces, slowly, painfully, shifting from one to another of us. The other three had brought the horses up from the stream and we were all of us round him by that time. But the faces that he wanted were not there. He gave a long shuddering sigh, and closed his eye as though it was all too much for him, and sank away from us again.

  I looked up at Aneirin in sudden fear, and Aneirin looking up also, caught the question that I could not quite speak. ‘Na, na, did I not say? He will mend in time. The strength is in him, his body will mend in time.’ He was making fast the makeshift bandage as he spoke. Then he added as though half to himself, ‘But he needs rest. Several days of rest, and I can spare him only one. We must mount and ride at dusk, even if we bind him into the saddle again as you brought him here, and be far enough from Catraeth by tomorrow’s dayspring.’

  The guide put in, ‘If we can keep him in the saddle through tonight, I can bring you by dayspring to a safe place where we can lie up for the needful days with no fear of Sea-wolves.’

  So the thing was settled. Cynan seemed to have drifted into a kind of sleep.

  ‘Sleep is what he needs, more than all else that we can give him,’ Aneirin said. ‘But not unwatched, lest he sleep too deeply and come to harm.’

  ‘I will watch him,’ I said.

  Aneirin shook his head. ‘You are in scarcely better shape than he is, and you also must sleep.’

  ‘I will take the watch,’ Conn said, close behind me.

  I crouched closer to Cynan and glared up at them. ‘No!’

  Conn told me after, long after, that I looked like a falcon mantling over its kill, and just as crazy.

  ‘You can trust me,’ he said steadily. ‘I’ll not let harm come to him ‘

  ‘No!’ I said again. ‘I am his shieldbearer. I brought him off: he’s mine!’

  One of the others, I think it was the old scout, started to try to reason with me, but Aneirin held out a hand to halt him, and said quietly, ‘Prosper takes the first watch.’

  And against Aneirin’s word there could be no protest.

  ‘Wake him if his sleep becomes too deep,’ he said to me. ‘Rouse me if there is any change in him.’

  So I took that first watch sitting beside Cynan with my arms crossed on my up-drawn knees, while the others got some sleep and the horses grazed the streamside grass. The light grew and warmed to full day and the last of the mist wisped away in the early sunlight; and it did not seem possible that only a few hours and a few miles away the whole of my world - it seemed like the whole of my world - had died in the marshes and the croplands before Catraeth. There was a waking of birdsong among the branches, and a yellow butterfly hovered across the clearing. Those few miles away the Saxons would be gathering up their slain and building their death-fires. There would be many death-fires for the Saxon kind, wolves and ravens for the Shining Company. But none of that seemed quite real, and what reality it had was going further and further away.

  I do not think I slept on my watch, but certainly I was not aware of any movement behind me, before a hand came on my shoulder, and Conn’s voice in my ear said, ‘My turn now. Sleep you.’

  We had made no outcry of joy at finding each other again, both living, but his arm catching me from a headlong fall was the last thing I remembered before the swimming darkness engulfed me on the edge of the clearing, and now, with the quiet feel of his hand on my shoulder, I toppled over beside Cynan and slept where I lay, leaving him to watch over both of us.

  Twilight was gathering under the trees when I woke again. The evening ration of wheat cake from the saddlebags was given out, and I made a sort of gruel with Cynan’s share, crushed and mixed with water on a dockleaf, and tried to spoon it in to him on the tip of my knife. He swallowed a little not really seeming aware that he did so, then turned his head away.

  ‘Enough, for the time being. It will not harm him to starve for a while,’ Aneirin said. ‘Eat your own, now. We must saddle up and be on our way.’

  So I pushed in my own few mouthfuls, and going down to the stream with the rest, drank, and dashed the cold water over my face and neck which made me feel somewhat less as though I was walking in a dream.

  How we got Cynan on to the back of his sidling and snorting chestnut I have never been quite sure, save that at one point I was sitting behind the saddle myself while Conn and the bellows-boy heaved him up to me. But once in the saddle we did not after all need to tie him there. It had always been said of him and his brothers that they had been bom on horseback and suckled by a mare, and certainly I have known him sleep on horseback without coming off. And once we had him astride Anwar he stayed there, as though his body knew the way of it, though I do not think his head knew night from day. But he made no move to pick up the reins; I did that, and as we headed out from the clearing, Conn and I rode close on either side.

  By full dark we had left the woods behind us and were out on to open moors, climbing steadily towards what felt like the roof of the world; a world of little sky-reflecting tarns and great rolling hill shoulders and upland bog country in which we would have been lost save for the scout, the mealy tail of whose horse was our leading light. Once, for a while, our hooves rang hollow on the remains of a paved road, but soon we turned off it and were alone with the emptiness once more. There had begun to be a smell of rain in the wind, and the moon, when it rose, had an oily ring round it. But the wild weather that was assuredly com
ing was still holding off when we came down out of the emptiness again into a narrow wooded valley. The woods were hushing softly as we came down among them. We were all fairly spent by then; weary men on weary horses, and Cynan’s strange empty strength had given out, so that Conn and I rode with our shoulders braced against his on either side to keep him still in the saddle.

  Aneirin sniffed the wind like a hound and said, ‘We had best be finding this refuge of yours soon, I am thinking. ‘

  And the scout answered him, ‘It is not lost. Did I not say by dayspring?’

  And sure enough, a mile or so further down the valley, we found the hardness of a made road under the turf again, and not long after, with the grey light growing about us, and the pale gleam of running water showing through the trees on our left, we came to ruined walls again, and pavement under docks and brambles, and the feeling we were beginning to know well, of a place where men had lived but lived no longer.

  ‘I am weary of ruins,’ Credne grunted.

  ‘They have their uses. Unless they have fallen since I was last here, there are still a few rags of thatch on some of the outbuildings,’ the scout told him. ‘Should help to keep the rain off; and the Saxons will not come this way, as I have said.’

  ‘What is this place?’

  ‘Once it was a Roman posting station. The road crosses the stream by a ford just yonder.’

  ‘It seems you know the place well,’ Aneirin said, faintly questioning.

  ‘I was born and bred a mile or so down the valley.’

  We rode in among the tangle of hazel and thorn scrub and the tumbled stone footings of walls, dropped the reins over our horses’ ears and slid heavily to the ground. We found the stable block with the skeleton of half a roof still on the far end of it, and laid Cynan there; and still moving in a kind of dream I helped Aneirin re-dress his wound while the others saw to the horses.

  Afterwards we ate what was left of the wheat cakes, and scattered in search of dry wood while there was still dry wood to be found, then lay down to get a little sleep, Aneirin himself this time keeping watch. Presently we must hunt, if we wished to eat; but sleep seemed more important just then. There was no knowing if Cynan was sleeping or waking. He had taken in a little of the wheaten mush that I had made for him, and I think that when we spoke to him he heard, but he made no answer, and seemed to take no heed of what went on about him, just lay there with his one serviceable eye not quite closed.

  I lay close beside him so that if he moved I should know, and tried to sleep myself. But though I could not seem to be truly awake, I could not be truly asleep either, but skimmed along the surface like a mayfly on a stream, and every time I dipped below the surface, ugly dreams drove me up again to the awareness of Cynan beside me, and the rising wind and the hush of rain. I must have slept at last, more deeply than I knew, because when at last I woke with eyes that felt hot in my head and the half remembered wrack of evil dreams still clinging to me, there was firelight and a kind of shelter rigged up from branches with our cloaks made fast over them, and the smell of food. I suppose it was the smell of food that had roused me. The scout was cooking a fine fat trout over the fire on the point of his dagger.

  ‘Did I not say that I knew this stream?’ he said.

  There were four trout among us; not enough, but better than nothing. I took one between Cynan and me and teased the worst of the bones out of Cynan’s half, then put it into his hand before falling to like a wolf on my own. But when I looked round at him, it was still there. I took it away again and began to put bits into his mouth, and he chewed and swallowed like an obedient child. And still I felt nothing, nothing at all through the numbness that made all things seem a long way off and not quite real.

  The wind was going round to the east, driving the rain straight up the valley, roaring and booming through the trees on a new note. Then I heard it coming, sweeping towards us from far down the valley: the sound of hooves; a charging, a stampede, sweeping nearer at a speed that was beyond the speed of mortal horses even at full gallop. So must come the Wild Hunt, skeining through the stormy skies and followed by all the souls of the dead, only that yet again it lacked the crying of hounds. I thought -1 am not sure what I thought - for those few moments as the ghost-riders came roaring up through the trees it seemed that I was hearing again the last ride of the Shining Company. The earth-shaking thunder of hooves was right upon us, filling all the space between earth and sky; there was a great screaming inside my head, a vortex of rolling manes and fire-filled nostrils, a crash of power and terror like a breaking wave that reared up and arched over us - and passed on, blending into the booming storm voice of the trees.

  I saw startled faces round the wind-driven fire.

  ‘Only a trick of the valley’s shape,’ the scout said. ‘It makes some kind of horn to catch the wind when it blows hard from this quarter, and conjures it into the sound of galloping horses.’

  ‘You could, maybe, have warned us,’ Aneirin said with faint amusement.

  The scout spread his hands, ‘I did not think, having known the sound all my boyhood. But you will know now why, once having heard it, the sea-wolves leave this place alone.’

  I heard them quite clearly, but there were matters of my own in those few moments that concerned me more. The wild stampede had caught me up and back into the company of my sword-brethren, before sweeping on to leave me behind. And in doing so had stripped from me the merciful numbness of the past two days, and left me awake once more, and stripped naked and raw to what had happened. I had known it with my mind, the thing that had happened at Catraeth between the river and the woods; but now for the first time I was knowing it in my heart’s core.

  I got to my feet, mumbling something about going to see that all was well with the horses, and blundered out into the dusk and the booming wind. (Three times more that night before the storm blew itself out, I heard the wind play that trick. But having done its work on me it remained only the wind playing at ghost-cavalry among the trees.) I went across to the place where we had picketed the horses in a sheltered angle where two walls met in a tangle of hazel scrub. Shadow swung her head towards me at sound of my coming, and snickered softly down her nose in greeting. And I put my arm over her neck and drove my face into the harsh live wetness of her mane, and cried as I had never cried before, and as I do not think that I have ever cried since; for the last ride of the Shining Company, for the death of my friends, for strength and beauty and brightness gone out of the world though we had not killed the white hart; cried I think for my own boyhood that I had thought myself grown out of years ago, but that in truth I had only lost at Catraeth two nights since; cried for Cynan of the Three Battle Horsemen of Dyn Eidin - for what was left of Cynan …

  An arm came across my shoulders, and Conn’s voice under the beating of the wind said, ‘Easy now, easy, brother,’ as I have heard him speak to a nervous horse at the shoeing, its upturned hoof between his leather-aproned knees.

  He did not speak again for a while, only kept his arm there; and presently the quiet pressure of it began to steady me, though my grief remained the same. Bewilderment as well as grief. ‘Why us?’ I choked out. ‘Why me and Cynan, of us all?’

  ‘Maybe there are others,’ Conn said.

  I shook my head. There would be no others, and in his inmost heart he knew that as well as I did. He said, ‘Maybe the Fates have marked their pattern on your forehead and on Cynan’s as a while back you told me that they had marked it on mine. But among mortal men there can be no knowing why.’

  I turned away from Shadow. I was in control again. ‘Has he changed - I began.

  ‘No, no change. With a dent on the head like that, it takes time, I am thinking.’

  ‘It is more than that,’ I said, thinking the thing out as I went along, as I had not been able to do before. ‘He lost both those mad brothers of his within days of each other. Cyrnan he killed himself as one puts a wounded horse out of its pain. I saw him do it - even when the Fosterling
split the tribes up among different troops he never tried to split up those three. The Giant’s Seat would have cracked apart …’

  ‘He still needs you,’ Conn said. ‘Come - and maybe the Giant’s Seat will yet hold together.’

  We were back at the far end of the stable block, firelight jinking out between the freshly rigged cloaks of our shelter; and I ducked in out of the wind and the driving rain.

  We lay in that place for several days, six maybe, or seven. While the strength came back into Cynan’s body. Quite early in those days I said to Aneirin, ‘Let you ride on. It is for you to reach the King as swiftly as maybe. Leave me Conn, if you will, and take the others, and we will follow you as soon as my Lord Cynan has strength for the journey.’

  But he shook his head. ‘Neither of you has even my small knowledge of the healer’s art.’

  ‘Tell me what must be done, and I can do it. It is for you to get the word back to Mynyddog, of how we carried out his orders, and what came of it.’

  ‘The King will have other messengers in these parts - a man on a fast horse to carry the tidings; and he will know it soon enough. The thing that is mine to do and can be done by no other man is to make the Great Song of the Gododdin at Catraeth, and for that there is no hurry.’ And he took his harp out of its bag and began to tune and cherish it as he did daily, though he had not woken it since that last night at Catraeth.

  And I went on about my task of gathering firewood. But his words clung about the back of my mind. ‘The King will have other messengers in these parts - a man on a fast horse -’