The Hawk's Gray Feather

by Patricia Kennealy-Morrison

  "Well?" I dropped down into a field-chair. "Where away now? We cannot stay here much longer, unless you fancy eating snow."

  Kei rolled up his eyes to heaven. "Tell that to your fostern," he said, clearly vexed. "We have been trying to get it into his head this half-hour past, and if Keils or Scathach were here they should have pounded it in."

  "No need of pounding," replied Arthur sharply. "It has gone in long since, Kei, so you need not think you have lost your labor.''

  "To enter a walled town—" began Kei with some heat.

  I cut him off. "A walled town! Artos, you cannot mean this? Nay, I see that you do—ah gods, surely we can come by some other plan."

  "Oh aye? What then?" That was Tarian, sounding more snappish than I had ever heard her. Surely she had cause: I could see that she had begun by opposing Arthur, and had been swayed by his eloquence to come to hold reluctantly with him in his lunatic intent. No wonder she was cross… "We have not enough power for the weapons to hold off one—one!—determined attack by even half-competent Ravens, Talyn, nor have we enough food for ourselves past tomorrow's nightmeal. And though we of the Companions have learned to fight on shorter commons than most, the levies have not, no matter their own valiant efforts. So by tomorrow's morrow we shall be starved and stiff with cold, if not cut down first. Is there aught else you care to ask?"

  I blew out an explosive sigh and ran my hands over the middle of my face. "I had not thought we were in quite so evil a case… What shall we do, then, for food and arms?"

  "We shall go and take them," said Arthur.

  The place Arthur had in mind to acquire what we needed was called Talgarth, a small walled city not unlike to Daars, perhaps forty miles away from our present camp. The town sat well down in a river plain, though there were hills not far off—as ever on Gwynedd—and for pure safety's sake we dared not venture out of sight of them.

  But otherwise Talgarth was perfect for Arthur's purposes: It was no Counterinsurgency hotbed, but neither was it a town strong for the Theocracy; merely a place, like many another, trying to steer a middle course and come through these times intact, or at the least not too badly bruised to survive.

  But it had reckoned without our need and our leader: We must have supplies, and since we could not make it back to Llwynarth without them, we should have to take them wherever they might be found. Talgarth was the only place where we might come by them, and we must take them by force for we did not dare to ask.

  It was no fight worthy of the name. After a night's march on the last of our rations, we came under the walls of Talgarth early in the dawn, and Arthur summoned the town to surrender. The place, though well walled, was not garrisoned, and the town mormaors in their flustered panic refused to admit us peaceably. But terrified, half-asleep urrads and their mates and children were no match for Arthur's hungry and hardened battle-hounds: Within the hour the walls, weak toward one quarter, were breached, and we were pouring through the streets like a stream in spate.

  Arthur had given strict orders that there was to be no slaughter, nor general sack even but only judicious pillaging, and no blow was to be struck save in self-defense. And I must say that for the first few hours he was obeyed to the letter. He took no part in the action, but stood and watched from a little hill near where we had broken the town walls; I was with him, and Tarian and Kei and some others. Most of the rest of the officers were down in the streets supervising the resupplying of our needs, and it seemed that the chief mormaor (a pragmatic woman) and the town elders had seen the advantage to them in filling those needs; or perhaps it was just that they thought the quicker they gave us what we required, all the quicker still would they be rid of us—and all the better for everyone.

  We thought so too: Though the region roundabouts had been carefully scouted beforehand, and Ravens found no where nearby, we knew that Madoc Dyffrin, one of Owein's most trusted lieutenants, had a body of horse and foot not too far off. Hence we were more nervous than we might otherwise have been, for we had been betrayed before by bad or incomplete intelligence, and Arthur was in a terror lest that be the case here, and we be taken within walls.

  He was not afeared so that any might notice and lose heart, however; only those who knew him best could read the signs. And did—

  "Artos, it is as if you look for coming disaster," said Daronwy, having watched him quarter to all airts, as a hunting dog will when seeking to start birds, for perhaps the tenth time in half as many minutes.

  "Nay," he said after the smallest of pauses. "But I do look not to be surprised if disaster comes."

  And so when one of the outpost gallopers came flying up to us with breathless word that Madoc Dyffrin was not safe across the river Saimhor as we had thought and hoped, but two miles off and coming fast, Arthur only laughed and called his officers to him.

  "You will never get them off quick enough to be away in time," said Grehan when he had heard the news. "Remember that half of them are new levies, not Companions at all. And not only that, but half of them are half ale-sodden to begin with; and the other half are busy stuffing whatever they can get their hands on, and their hands not able to get it to their mouths fast enough to suit them."

  "The Companions?" asked Arthur, flexing his fingers in his old gesture.

  "Oh, naught to fear there," said Kei at once. "They will come when you do call them. But the levies—"

  "What does my war-leader say?" Arthur seemed a little too calm to be quite true, as he turned to Tarian for her opinion.

  "Fly," came her prompt response. "Take the Companions, leave the levies to their fate, and hope for the best." To the shocked look on some faces: "I am a soldier, sirs and ladies… We can always raise more levies. We cannot easily raise more Companions, and never can we raise another Arthur. Above all else, Artos, you must save yourself, though it means the abandonment of every last one of us."

  "Nay, a charge," said some chivalrous idiot. "Death with honor and glory for us all!"

  Arthur let them dispute barely a half-minute, and indeed there were few half-minutes to waste.

  "No flight, no charge, no abandonment," he said, and he spoke in a voice to be obeyed. "We will all of us leave as we came, and the supplies with us that we came for… Tarian, do you take some of the Companions and go down into the streets. Beat the levies off their plunder with the flats of your swords if you must, but get them on their feet and get them moving out the west gate. Head round to get the Saimhor between us and Madoc's troops, and into the hills as quick as you can. I with Grehan and Talyn and Kei will cover the retreat with what horse we have." In answer to the dark doubtful glances cast his way: "Sirs and ladies," he said, with a calm he can never have been feeling, "do as I bid you. Leave the managing to me; the outcome is with dan."

  Had any told me so beforehand I had not believed it, and even after I saw it happen—myself helped to make it happen—still it seemed hardly possible. But Arthur whipped his pack off their plunder as easily as a huntsman will whip hounds off their kill: We were on our way out the west gate just as Madoc, astounded and wrathful, came in at the east. When we had leisure to reflect on it later, we laughed until we choked at what must have been Dyffrin's certain confoundment, to have had Arthur Penarvon and so many of his rabble so nearly within grasp, only to have us slope so featly off. I did not envy Madoc, who was a better soldier than that day's work showed him, the explanations he would be making to his master…

  Just then, however, none of us was laughing: As Grehan had pointed out, many of the levies were too drunk to find their feet, and only the shock of imminent extinction at Madoc's hands found those feet for them. That and the prospect of Arthur's wrath, not to mention the point of Arthur's sword to goad them on where other goads did fail.

  Whatever got us moving and kept us so, we were stumbling along the hill road in the growing dusk—it was midafternoon by now, the early winter sunset almost upon us—and fear had dispelled our weariness, at least for the moment. Yet the moment might just be en
ough: Oddly, Madoc seemed reluctant to catch us up, but was content with close pursuit—or perhaps it was the scattershot blasts and flurries of laser flains loosed anyhow to our rear that discouraged him from closing. We did not see his plan at first—well, we did not, though Arthur surely did—and though Madoc stuck to our track with grim persistence, when darkness at last closed down we were yet uncaught.

  Our road to safety was desperate, though possible: You must think of a bent bow, Madoc coming after us along the line of the string and we marching the bow's curve. Though we had started off together on the same road from Talgarth, our paths soon diverged—as I said, we did not see at once what Madoc was attempting—and if the road we took was less short than his, his was harder.

  But as I also said, Madoc was a skilled campaigner—he and Arthur had crossed lances before now, and would again before the end—and this was his ploy: He was trying now not to catch us but to get ahead of us, to cut off our one sure retreat, the westward passes into the tangled hills. So to that end he was racing ahead with his horse, his foot trudging more slowly to the rear; and by now, we reckoned, he had called up other companies from garrisons to the south of Talgarth, which would come apace, eager to be in at Arthur's downfall.

  Arthur, however, had no least intention of being brought down just yet, indeed not at all… One tactic there is that a pursuit does not generally expect its quarry to attempt—perhaps because it is a tactic reserved to the mad or the desperate, and by now we were both—and that is that a fleeing force will turn on itself and backtrack. All the pursuer's energies are geared to pursuit; it occurs very rarely to his mind that the hunted will cease to flee before him.

  Madoc had his forces now flung out beside our route to the west and north; he had as yet none directly behind, not until the reinforcements should arrive from the southern garrisons. So, at Arthur's word—and thank gods we were only a small force, it could scarce have been done with a greater—we doubled in our tracks like a fox dodging under the hounds' noses, reversing direction and staggering back the long painful way we had just come.

  By now it was pitch black, and coming on to rain. I and other sorcerers in the company did what we could to help the murk along, with such small touches as we might conjure in weary haste: strange smoky fog and odd things glimpsed through it—tall antlered figures and creatures half horse, half man stalking in the blue-litten mists, gruagachs and glaistigs padding silently in the night. Steel was one thing, and even flains; but alone out there in the rainy dark, pursuing one who was again proving to be so elusive and uncapturable as to be a phantom himself, few indeed of Madoc's forces were willing to face taish or fith-fath or whatever our conjuries might be—and for all their officers' exhortations, fewer still were willing to face Arthur.

  So, with desperation and endurance and magic here and there, somehow—to this day I know not how the thing was achieved—we slipped between Madoc and his oncoming reinforcements, and vanished away into the darkness. When our pursuers met at last, and we not caught between them, their bewilderment and rage must have been mirthsome to behold.

  But to us it was not yet a matter for mirth: We had marched forty miles to Talgarth, sacked the town, marched twenty miles more, fleeing pursuit and fighting as we did so, and now we were all but dead in our boots. It remained only for us to cover the few miles more to the hills, and at times it seemed even those few miles were more than we should manage.

  However, Arthur was resolved that we should not die on our feet, or even off them. I myself was near sleepwalking with fatigue by now—what the ale-swillers must have felt like is perhaps best left to the imagination—and the others were as weary as I. Only Arthur seemed as vital as ever, and I could not think whether I detested him just then more than I admired him. So I thought the evil names only, and chivied the levies, and myself, on as he did bid me.

  At last we came to a stretch of ground across which Madoc with his heavier cavalry could not follow, and we faded like the mist-figures I had conjured, into the relative safety of an old overgrown orchard. Even the ever-vigilant Tarian pronounced it secure enough, and here at last Arthur allowed us to collapse and sleep a while.

  Five minutes seemed scarce to have passed before he was rousting us like cross hedgepigs from our nests of leaves and moss and sodden cloaks—in truth it had been a good five hours—to press on deeper into the hills while it was yet dark. Only when we were safe again across the Brosna did we stop to pitch a proper camp and have a proper meal out of the spoils of Talgarth carried with us all this way, and a proper sleep to follow.

  But as Arthur himself pointed out, at least we now had something out of which meals could be made… "A near thing," he admitted privately to Tarian and me later, collapsed with the rest of us. "Still, it did work—but upon my soul, both you, never again do I enter a town save that I have reduced it first."

  He was right, and he was prescient, and save for one notable exception he kept to that resolve; but in later years it was this half-mad, wholly desperate, twisty retreat from Talgarth that I was often to hear preferred above his grandest set-piece battles, and was myself most often begged to tell of. The leader who could call off his warriors from sack and plunder was no common commander; the leader who could get them all safe away in the face of superior pursuit—for all that, we did not lose a single levy—was less common still.

  But that seemed to be enough of excitement for Arthur just then: We disbanded the levies—sobered and shaken, but still eager to fight; they would return gladly when we had need of them again—and lay up quietly in the hills before heading home to Llwynarth, where Keils Rathen and my Morgan commanded in our absence. Like bears ourselves, we went back to the Bear's Grove, to ride out the months of snow and storm to come, and plan anew for spring.

  * * *

  Chapter Thirty

  And spring followed spring, each one seeing Arthur in command of a little more of Gwynedd. Very soon now Owein could hold back no longer; should be forced to come against us in his own person, instead of doing as he had been doing all these years and sending his minions to face us. True, some of those had been capable enough captains—Madoc Dyffrin, for one, our perpetual nemesis, with whom we had two or three encounters a season; and latterly Sulwenna Keppoch, who was kin to our own Daronwy—but for the most part they had been poor stuff.

  Not that our victories had been cheaply won: On the contrary, we had had to fight our hearts out for every skirmish, for if we did not, who knew if we should ever get the chance to fight again? And always we were outnumbered, and more often than otherwise we were outweaponed, and ever we had to march great distances over secret ways before we could even join battle to begin with—while our adversaries had inexhaustible levies, unlimited arms, the luxury of open roads and unchallenged passage over them.

  But for all the hinderings and hamperings, we were winning, surely, slowly, steadily, and we knew it. And our enemy knew it too: For his answer came swiftly, and the measure of our triumph was seen in the kind and strength of force sent by Edeyrn to crush us. Indeed, word passed to us by the Hanes had it that the Marbh-draoi was more than faintly displeased with my old master Owein, for allowing the upstart Penarvon and his rebellious riffraff to get so out of hand.

  Oh aye, Edeyrn knew Arthur by name now; knew him for Amris's son by birth and Gorlas's by fostering. And no more were the rest of us unknown to the master of Keltia: There were prices set on all our lives now—we used to find a sort of perverse amusement in tracking our fluctuating values, fixed by Owein according to the degree of trouble each of us had caused him most recently. Arthur himself, of course, invariably commanded the highest price, but it was a matter of pride, and something of a contest, for the rest of us to come as near him as we might.

  By now Llwynarth had grown too small to hold us: We had expanded the cavern system as far as we dared, but so many of us, and so many key officers, all in one place not only endangered our effort—think of the potential disastrous loss should Ravens have learned
our location and struck in force—but overtaxed the local ecosystems as well. So Elen and Betwyr and Ferdia had gone to establish a satellite refuge farther north, while others of the Companions, and even some new conscripts who showed exceptional promise in essential disciplines, had been sent to distant shielings and to Coldgates itself.

  And, for all our crowding, some new Companions joined us—new to the Company and to the Bear's Grove, that is, not new to our struggle: my sister Tegau Goldbreast, for one, and with her our brother Cadreth. But we knew that victory was truly riding the winds above us—Malen Ruadh, the Red War-crow herself—when Merlynn Llwyd came to us in Llwynarth; and then, a month or so later, Gweniver.

  If I have not spoken overmuch of Gweniver for some pages, it is not because we did not see much of her during these years of secret war. Our meetings were brief, but fairly frequent—particularly in the years since Gwenwynbar's going.

  She would descend on Llwynarth for a sevennight, or a month, or a week's-end, and then race back to Coldgates to convey information and impressions to Uthyr. Or else Arthur—though him seldom—or Tarian or I or one of the senior Companions would journey to Coldgates in turn; we had grown bold enough and confident enough of late to use aircars, the more so since Keils had invented a concealment device for them, of the same sort that had worked so well so long on the larger starships and on Sulven itself.

  As for Arthur, he had come into his early power; though he would in years to come grow stronger still, no more was he a youth of promise but a man of full achievement, though his greatest achievements lay yet ahead by many years. And we his Companions were devoted to him; we would have moved Agned for him, emptied Glora with a spoon—as it was, we only lived and died for him, and we never doubted, for he gave us no cause to doubt, that he would do as much for us.

  But we at least could lose ourselves in our comradeship: For our leader there was no such easy escape. Never for one instant was he out of the blaze of our attention; always he was there, and always his little army was enthralled. It must have been a burden almost beyond bearing, yet he gave no sign of the strain he must surely have felt; he was there to confide in or to hearten, to guide or to command, and in all our time together never did I know him to fail at any of those tasks. Small wonder the Companions adored him, and the common folk upon whose general goodwill and active support we depended came to think of him as but one step less than a god himself.