There were few shadows on those years at Tair Rhamant. It seems forever summer as I look back, and near forever as well; but it was five years only, and then all was changed, never to be the same again.
But while my paradise lasted, I rode, and swam in summer in the shallow blue waters of the great bay, and began to learn bardery from my father's house ollave, Benesek, a dour black-browed Kernishman who brightened like the sunrise whenever he settled his harp in his lap to play.
Of my father, Gwyddno, the lord of Cantred Gwaelod, I saw but little; he was unceasingly busy with the governing of the province. Or perhaps it was that he busied himself deliberately, so that he might not have to busy himself growing close to me, who was not only his last child at home but perhaps an unbearably vivid reminder of his dead wife—for I have been told by many who knew her that I have such a look of my mother as to seem Medeni ferch Elain returned in man's guise. If my father took that likeness as salt in his wounds, I took it as her gift to me, and hugged that poor shred of comfort to me often in the dark nights, trying to remember her, what she had been like—she herself, for of course I knew her face and voice well from the holograph messages and portrait-prisms she had left her children as legacy. But it troubled me deeply that I had no real memory of my mother, her arms and love and comfort, and that none spoke of her to me; and doubtless I troubled my father, for whom I see now I must have been a living memory, too deeply for his peace—or my own.
There was one other at Tair Rhamant who was there from my earliest years, one of the first faces in my memory; and it dishonors no one to say now that he was more my father than Gwyddno ever was or could be. He was known as Ailithir in that time, which is to say 'wanderer' in the Vallican dialect that we use in our part of Arvon. If his true-name was known to any in Gwaelod, it was never spoken, or even thought on for all I knew, and it was not until many years later, and far from Tair Rhamant, that I came to know it for myself.
But however he may have been called, he was a Druid, of course, though this knowledge too was kept secret for long, and therefore I shall call him so in these pages; and if I thought of him as any one particular thing it was as a mere sorcerer—Druids, true Druids, were not thick on the ground then, but sorcerers were ever among us. A man in late years, full in power and the wisdom of his hidden order, he was no native of Arvon, or even Gwynedd, and his parentage, like his name, was knowledge I did not come by for long. But I have ever thought of him as having sprung from the earth itself, or the sea, or the stars, or the sacred stones: It seemed presumption to suppose a mundane father and mother for such a one as he, and he for his own part never spoke of any kindred—a rare sort of omission indeed for a Kelt, for to us kindred is all.
My father may have known the truth of Ailithir—I think, now, that he must have done—but if he did he told no other. It was commonly supposed by the castle folk that Ailithir's family had perished at the hands of Edeyrn, and that this added to all the other evils had sufficed to turn him against his onetime Archdruid and the rest of his order (or at least against the spoiled ones); and, thinking so, they treated him with gentleness as well as with fearing respect. But none knew for certain, and to the best of my own knowing, few know now.
Looking back, I marvel that the five-year-old Taliesin was not frightened out of his wits by this forceful, majestic presence; for power was palpable where Ailithir walked, going before and behind him like that carpet of snowflowers which sprang up where Olwen White-track stepped, in the old tales Benesek was beginning to teach me. But I was never afraid, and when he began to teach me magic—child's magic only to begin with, to conjure the tinna-galach or shape the clouds for play—I was afraid still less.
Which was well for me: alone, shy, loving only Benesek and the harp, and Ailithir and the magic, and my dashing brothers and sisters when they came home on their swift, secret visits. I knew nothing in those days, nor for long thereafter, of my father's steadfast refusal to bow the knee to Edeyrn, as my grandmother and great-grandsirs had done before him. Now of course I know that far from distancing himself from me out of pain and bitterness, he did so out of love, and out of hope that I might be saved in the end. And so I was, but not by his sad, noble, ultimately vain sacrifice.
It was a calm bright summer, that year that I was five. A promise of fine harvest in the fields of the cantred; rumor of a visit from my brothers, who had been fighting far in the east, in the cantred of Sarre that lay near Gwynedd's royal capital of Caer Dathyl; new learning from Ailithir and Benesek. Then one night in late summer I was shaken awake by my nurse, Halwynna, Benesek's wife…
"Master Talyn, your lord father would see you."
And indeed Gwyddno stood there beside my bed, turning something over and over in his hands, then thrusting it unseen into the pocket of his tunic. There was a note of fear in my nurse's voice plain even to my sleepy senses; it spoke of concealment also, the sort that a grown person will put on for a child when there is troublous change afoot. A noble attempt, but foolish, for the child will ever see through it with a child's cold clear sharp little eyes, and I did so then.
"What is wrong, Wynna?"
"Naught wrong; but let your father tell you how all is well." With a gentle push she landed me in my father's arms, for one of the first times I could remember; and then he was telling me, with such a gravity as he would have used to a retainer lord, that he must go to Tara, to the Throneworld itself, there to speak face to face with Edeyrn the Marbh-draoi.
"The Lord Edeyrn summons me to Turusachan, Tal-bach; or rather, to Ratherne, his tower in the valley of Nandruidion. It is but to speak of matters of state; there is naught for any of us to fear."
But there for the first time did he lie to me; for I could sense his fear, sensed it in the arms which held me now so tightly; fear for me, fear for the folk he left behind, but not one fearful thought for himself.
"Tasyk—"
"Nay, cariadol; you will be lord here in my absence, you must learn to carry yourself like one. Ailithir will guide you"—or had he said 'guard'? Even now I cannot say for sure—"until my return. I have sent word to your brothers to delay their visit a while yet, and that their sisters should not come either. I do not want to miss seeing them after so long a time apart."
I could sense that that too was fear speaking, that he wished my sisters and brothers to stay far from Tair Rhamant just now; and his fear, and the love I sensed behind it, bade me as no command of his could have done, to hold my tongue and question him no more.
He held me close awhile in silence, then drew back a little and took something from within his tunic breast: the thing he had had in his hands when first I woke to see him.
"Your mother"—my eyes shot to his face—"gave me this on the day she told me she carried you beneath her heart; she had found it, she said, walking in the Canterfells up behind our castle. It had fallen out of the sky right at her feet, and she took it up from where it lay. Do you know what it is?"
"It is a hawk's feather," I said, proud of my knowledge. "Coll the huntmaster has been teaching me."
"Aye so; and does Benesek teach you, too, what the hawk's gray feather may mean?"
When I was silent, he smiled, and taking my hand he laid the slim silver plume across my palm, and closed my fingers gently over it.
"In the bardic speech it signifies courage, and far seeing, and swift striking, and high soaring beyond the flight of common wings. This is what your mother Saw for you, cariadol, and she gave me the feather to give to you when you were of an age to understand. I do not know if you have reached that age and that understanding, and now perhaps I never shall, but I think it well for you to have this, now. Do you know what I say to you, Talyn?"
I made no answer to my father, only smoothed the feather's tiny barbs with my fingers, over and over again. This had been in my mother's hands; my mother had found this and had known it was for me, had found a meaning in it that reached back and forward as far as Sight might See. She had taken the omen where it
was offered and had made from it a gift for me, perhaps knowing even then that she would not live to give it me from her own hand—as it seemed my father knew something now. But still it was her gift, and his through her: And as I touched the feather it seemed that I had sudden wings to fly with, and wind under them, and was hovering as the hawks did high above Tair Rhamant, riding the pillars of air that rose where the hills called Canterfells ran down to the sea. All at once my father, and this chamber, and even my own body, seemed very far away.
"Taliesin?"
I came all at once back to earth, looking up into my father's face, seeing the love and the sadness, and the resolve; and even then I think I understood that I should not see him again.
"Aye, tasyk," I said, and threw myself into his arms, speaking muffled against his neck. "Aye, I know."
He dropped a kiss on my hair, and then he was gone. I sat back in the bed, drawing the feather through my fingers, pressing it to my lips. A tall shadow stirred beside the door: Ailithir, who had come in with my father and had been silent witness to our farewell.
He came forward now, and in my sudden passion of fear and pain and uncertainty that was certainty in itself—my first adult emotion—I held out my arms to him sobbing. With a tenderness I had never before seen in him—and was to see in him but seldom after—he held me and soothed my sobs and tucked me back again among the quilts and pillows. That done, he sat on the edge of the bed as my father had done, looking soberly down upon me, it seemed as from the same strange distance as that from which I had looked down upon my father. After a few moments of this steady regard, he reached out a hand to touch my forehead.
"Sleep, Taliesin."
I heard the sleep-magic in his voice—the suantraf, we bards call it when we set it in song—and knew it was useless to fight it. It came to me then that of all those closest to me, he alone never called me by aught but my full and proper name.
"My father—"
The crags of Ailithir's face seemed to sharpen. "Your father the Lord Gwyddno spoke to you as to one of his counselors, young master; therefore shall I do no less." He made no move of the body, but all at once the sleepiness fell away from me, and I sat up in the bed again, hugging my knees, as if listening rapt to one of Benesek's night-tales.
"Your father has been lord of Cantred Gwaelod since the death of your grandmother who ruled it before him. In the ordinary way, your sister Tegau, as firstborn, would come to rule it in her turn."
"Tasyk has explained this to me," I said, not understanding why he chose to speak now of the succession to the provincial lordship.
"Well, as you know, Tegau and the rest of your brothers and sisters are away fighting against the Marbh-draoi Edeyrn; and your father too fights against him. This is why he has been summoned to Tara: He has held Gwaelod free of the armies of Owein—free even of the presence of Ravens, those minions who work Edeyrn's evil will upon us all—and he has kept the folk free of demands that other folk in Keltia have had to suffer. So far, he has done all this and yet remained within the law, or such law as Edeyrn still deigns to obey."
"And now?" I was not understanding much of this, save that my father had apparently done something for which he might be punished.
And indeed, Ailithir's next words confirmed this: "And now Edeyrn has called him to give account of himself, for what is seen to be his—disobedience. You understand that, Taliesin?"
"When I am disobedient, I am punished," I muttered; resentfully, for I was beginning to feel sleep lap round the corners of my consciousness once more, and guessed that my teacher was sending me into the safety of its remove. But I managed one more question. "Will tasyk be punished too, do you think, athro? I should not want him to be punished."
But Ailithir said only, "You too, Taliesin, must fight against the Marbh-draoi, in your way; and in your time."
The last thing I remember of that night was the feel of his hand upon my head, set there briefly and gently, in blessing or in binding I could not tell, and sleep claimed me before I could puzzle it out to my satisfaction.
Yet when I awoke early in the dawn, my father gone from Tair Rhamant, the hawk's feather lay beneath my pillow.
* * *
Chapter Two
Though logic tells me now that there must surely have been a span of days, perhaps many days, between then and the searing memory that follows so hard upon it, it seems to me no time at all, that scarce had I fallen asleep when again there came an awakening in darkness.
This time a tall figure stood beside the bed, holding a shielded lanthorn. I knuckled the sleep out of my eyes to see that it was Ailithir, and that he looked a touch grimmer even than usual.
"Make no sound, lad, and no delay. Dress yourself for travel, and take with you what small things you would."
Unquestioningly obedient—what cause had I to doubt him?—I swung my feet to the cold floor. A pair of leather trews pulled on—my feet pushed into the boots that Ailithir held for me—the points fastened; then a thick warm gwlan leinna and overtunic and laced leather doublet: It was summer no longer at Tair Rhamant but full autumn, as it comes betimes to that part of Arvon, and the fields lay already under frost of a morning.
When it came to choosing remembrances, there was not so much of real value to choose from; our house was not one of the great wealthy kindreds of Keltia such as Clann Douglas or the Chyvellans of Kernow or the Aoibhells of Thomond. But there were things I would not leave behind, for something in my teacher's manner told me more, and graver, than his few words.
So I took from their wooden case the paired cloak-brooches of wrought silver that had belonged to my great-grandfather, given to me by my own father on my last birthday; two rings left me by my mother, a heavy gold ring with a topaz and a sapphire set in findruinna; the little book with a clasped cover that Benesek had made for me, to write down such things as I was beginning to wish to—and to need to; the hawk's feather that had rested so short a time among these treasures. And of course my harp; 'Frame of Harmony,' I had rather grandiloquently called it. It too had been a birthday gift, from Tegau; gods knew how she had managed to send it, or had remembered—had even known—that it was what I had been pining for all that year past. But it was a proper harp, the telyn of our Gwynedd mountains, and a handsome one, with devices of our house carved along its flange and forepost, and my name done in runes of gold upon the harmonic curve.
As I lifted it, still in its soft leather wrappings, I looked up at Ailithir in sudden fear, that perhaps he might think it too large or awkward or frivolous a burden on our flight—for flight I now knew it must be—but he shook his head as if he knew my fearing thought, and himself hoisted the pack to his shoulders.
When we emerged from the castle, by a postern gate that gave onto the screes leading up onto the Canterfells, I was surprised to see that it was still dark, though far in the east, behind the greater mountains that fenced Arvon like a triple wall, I could see the faintest touch of gray light.
That light had long broadened and brightened by the time we came over the crest of the fells. We had passed some hours since out of sight of Tair Rhamant—I had turned to bid it farewell with a wave and a word, though Ailithir had kept his face forward and his back to the castle—and now, safe among the high crags, we paused to rest a little. Ailithir set me down in the concealment of a granite overhang; though he had borne me in his arms for the last stiff upward pull of our long slow ascent, he showed no sign of weariness.
I saw now, as I had not noticed before, that he was dressed as I had never before seen him, in the dark supple leathers of a warrior; and though his great ashwood staff was bound across his back, there was a shortsword in the boot-sheath and a glaive at his belt. For the first time I began to wonder what had in truth befallen, and what of my father, and where were we bound; but looking at Ailithir's face I knew it would not be good just now to ask.
But he seemed to hear my questions all the same, for after a moment he turned to me and smiled.
"
All is by command of your father, bach. He will be delayed a while on Tara, and has bidden me take you from Gwaelod. Time it is you began your fostering—you are near a year past the age—and it is to your new home that we are bound."
A sense that he himself had awakened in me caught at what lay behind his words. "Why then do we go alone, athro? At least Benesek should come too? And Fannir and Conn, they were set to look after me?" I caught at his cloak. "Where do we go, who are to be my foster-parents?"
Ailithir had been looking back along the way we had come, the first time that day I had seen him give a backward glance; as he turned again to me his face was cheerful, but I had the feeling that that was not how he had looked a moment since.
"Well, your father may not have spoken of them to you, but he did so often enough to me… They are the Lord and Lady of Daars, Gorlas Penarvon and Ygrawn Tregaron his wife. They were your mother's dear friends, and later your father too came to know and love them. So that when the matter of your fostering was considered, they were the ones your mother would have, and she had her way."
I mouthed the names to myself: Gorlas and Ygrawn. Though like every other Keltic child I had always known I must be fostered from my fifth birthday, I had not given it much thought, and could not recall any mention of who my foster-kin might be.
"And it is to Daars that we are going now?"
Some of my apprehension must have showed, in spite of my best efforts, for Ailithir ruffled my hair and laughed. "It is, young sir. On foot it shall take us rather longer than it tmight have done in another time, but on foot it must be."
And in spite of the laughter in his voice I did not dare question him as to why it must be so.
We had been perhaps a fortnight on our way when the weather changed, and my guide changed with it. Cautious he had ever been as we crept slowly southward, keeping always to the high hills and the trackless uplands, giving a wide pass to such few townlands as there were in that rough country. Yet now, as the sky grew strange above us and clouds streamed from west to east on a wind of portent, Ailithir seemed to snuff that wind what way a hound will scent of danger; but whatever he read in the sky he kept to himself.
The Hawk's Gray Feather Page 2