The Hawk's Gray Feather

by Patricia Kennealy-Morrison

  But in Keltia even the gods are human; and however godlike a mortal may be held by others, in the end he or she is human still, with all a human's flaws and failings. Though he had Grehan and Tarian and me and the rest of the inner circle of Companions to shoulder some of the burden, Arthur knew better than any of us that he must lift the chief part of it himself, else all was in vain.

  In the course of our reivings we had most often managed to move too swiftly for Owein's lead-footed garrison soldiers to offer any real threat of pursuit; Ravens were swifter, but still too slow to catch us up.

  Now, however, had we picked up a grim shadow, and a vengeful one: Madoc Dyffrin, whom we had so badly embarrassed at Talgarth years before, was close on our heels, doubtless fueled by thoughts of payback to be had for the bit thumb we had shown him, and the fool he had been made to look in his master's eyes. But Arthur did not seem too much concerned, and planned to lose him, as most of those who thought to chase us were lost, deep in the trackless hills.

  But this time Madoc was not so easily shaken, and long after we expected to have brushed him from our cloak-tails, he clung there still.

  "Soon or late," said Tryffin, "we must turn and stand to him." Having delivered himself of judgment, he blushed, as if all at once aware of the impropriety of his suggesting tactics to his illustrious cousin—who gave no sign one way or another. A comrade of ours long since at Bargodion, Tryffin—son of Ygrawn's brother, Marc'h—had recently rejoined the Company after a protracted absence attending to family business on his homeworld of Kernow, and we were pleased to have him back among us.

  "Where think you this stand might be made, then?"

  That was Gweniver; she too was with us, and we were perhaps less pleased at that. But there had been no help for it: She had been at Llwynarth, and on hearing that Arthur and a small mobile force were out raiding, she had insisted she be allowed to join us. Keils Rathen, who often commanded in Llwynarth when its lord was away, had tried to persuade her against it; and knowing Keils, and his past heart-history with Gweniver, I do not doubt he considered every means short of forcible restraint, and probably even that.

  But oddly enough, Morgan and Merlynn had sided with the Princess; and at last Keils, outranked and outsworded, had capitulated, sending Gweniver after us with Kei ap Rhydir and Elen Llydaw as disapproving escort.

  Arthur, to whom Gweniver's question had really been addressed, did not answer her directly, but stepped forward to where the tent flap had been tied back, framing a wedge of gray sky and grayer mountain, and pointed.

  "There."

  It need not be said that Arthur, whose eye for ground was extraordinary and all but unerring—in all our campaigns, together and apart, I knew him to choose badly two times only; though let it also be said that those two wrong choosings were mistakes of spectacular proportion—had some place in mind to take a stand very much more definite than his churlish response to Gweniver's inquiry might suggest.

  Not that he was entirely displeased with the Tanista's presence: On the contrary, he seemed glad of a chance to show so august and judgmental an observer just how things were done by his Companions and their leader. Though their old antagonism seemed tempered somewhat by years and wisdom, and by mutual respect for each other's undeniable gifts, there remained between Arthur and Gweniver a rivalry almost like to that between two sibs very close in age, competing for some prize or toy or trinket that each desired greatly and would not willingly relinquish to the other. Which comparison was not so far off the mark: Uthyr the High King, uncle to them both, still had not declared either to be his sole and formal heir. Nor would he name one above the other, for reasons discussed at length elsewhere in these pages; but they were not to come to know that for a while yet, and so the rivalry continued.

  But Gweniver was as determined to show Arthur her own mettle as he was set to prove himself in her eyes… Already on this one foray she had led harrier parties back to jab at Madoc, and had not shirked the work herself, as could be seen by the hurts she had taken—naught grave, though bloody and dramatic enough; all were easily healed with skinfusers, a laser suturing device recently reinvented by the Fianna scientists at Coldgates and fetched down to us at Llwynarth.

  So with Madoc Dyffrin coming on unswerving in cold pursuit, Gweniver was as eager as any Companion, and had more cause than most, to meet him on the battleground of Arthur's choosing, deep in the mountains of central Arvon, in the range known as the Steppings.

  And meet him we did—or rather he met us, after first reducing to smoking ruin a little town of perhaps five hundred souls that lay between him and his quarry. It need not have happened—Madoc might have gone round to spare the village folk, as we had done, and met us all the sooner where we waited for him in a cwm, a great curving hollow among the hills—but it was an act typical of Theocracy soldiering, and it served only to put an extra edge to our blades that were sharp enough to start with.

  Despite the fact that we were outnumbered as usual, we made more than usually short work of our opponents—the terrible screams and cries we had heard rising from the burning town having much to do with our grim and redoubled zeal—and, in the grip of an anger such as even I had never seen on him before, Arthur gave the order that we should take no prisoners.

  I am not proud of what followed, being as guilty as any of punctilious obedience to—and utter agreement with—our leader's cold command. But I am not sorry for it either. Even Gweniver, less used to military necessity than the rest of us, made no protest against her cousin's edict once she beheld the slaughter in the town.

  Easy for you, or for any who did not see what we had seen, to condemn our work that day; but I say that if you had been among us, you too had done no less. Five hundred men, women, children, all slain unspeakably, their poor butchered bodies then arranged according to a perverted obscene humor; and all because Madoc Dyffrin thought the town had aided us. We had not even asked for help, knowing too well what should befall our helpers did we lose the encounter; and yet they were made to pay all the same by Madoc and his troops.

  So we took their price from him and his.

  That night, more than a little troubled, I was walking through the streets that had been a slaughtershed only that morning. After our business with Madoc was concluded, we had spent much of the remainder of the day gathering up the bodies of the townsfolk, to give them decent speeding. Even the enemy carrion had been disposed of: Though our true wish was to leave their corpses for the hill beasts to gnaw, reluctant decency had prevailed, and the bodies had been burned anyhow in a great lowe on the edge of the glen.

  Arthur—he who only that morning had been capable of saying to us, "The best of you brings me the most enemy dead"—had paced the silent streets all day, his sword laid aside, a compassionate priest giving ease to the dying, grace to the newly dead, comfort to the few survivors. He had sat for two hours holding a child whose family had been slain before her eyes, and who had escaped only by hiding among their corpses. (And to finish the tale on a happier note, Gweniver brought the little girl back with her to Coldgates, where Ygrawn fostered her to a Ban-draoi family, and later took her into her own service; the child recovered fully, and, a woman grown, is alive and happy this day.)

  As for Madoc, he ended with more honor than he merited: When he saw his troops falling beneath our hungry, angry blades, and knew there was no smallest hope of mercy—and he was so right to think it; Arthur would have cut him to pieces, very slowly, had he laid sword on him—seeing all this, Madoc fell by his own hand. Arthur sent his head to Owein, with no note.

  So now I was wandering through the dead streets—strange that we never even knew the town's name, nor the valley's where we made our stand; it has been known since that day as Glenanaar, the Valley of the Slaughter—when all at once I heard a whimpering sound coming from beneath a pile of broken, burned stone. Appalled—it sounded to my horror-tuned ear like a child too young or too injured to speak—I was on my knees and shifting bricks before
I knew I had even moved. The stones came easily away, and then I saw what had cried so piteously.

  A wolfhound puppy no more than four months old, its brindled coat floured with brickdust, ears floppy and unset, paws the size of plates, looked up at me with dark pleading hopeful eyes. I looked back, and that was the end of me…

  Yet it was not for me, nor even entirely for the puppy's sake, that I lifted the warm, wiggling creature, ecstatic to have found someone to care for it and take it from this blood-smelling, smoke-smelling, terrifyingly unpeopled place, out of its prison in the bricks; and carried it under my cloak to the tent where Arthur had gone at last, after his day's labors of bloodshed and blessing both.

  At this late hour he still sat at his field-desk, doing paperwork that could undoubtedly be left to another, or to the morrow; he was alone. When I stepped inside the tent, and opened my cloak, and he and the puppy laid eyes on one another, I knew I had won a better victory than the one over Madoc Dyffrin.

  "I shall call him Cabal," said Arthur, when at last the puppy had ceased to lick his face and fingers and, after a prodigious supper of cold pastais, had fallen asleep in his lap. "But a puppy on campaign—"

  He gave me a reproachful look, or at least a look that was meant to be so, but the old grin broke through, and my spirits soared to see it; I had been thinking that any look, any reproach, would be better than the ghastly, gaunt-faced, stone-eyed bleakness that had sat all day upon his countenance, and I would have found twenty dogs for him if that was what it took to take that look away.

  "Oh, I know how you have missed Luath all this time," I said then. "And I could hardly leave the poor thing there to starve—Any road, he will not be a puppy long, so either find an old cloak for him to sleep on or grow a bigger lap."

  I left them then, to scrape up some belated supper for myself—I had not eaten all day, and was famished; or at least my body was—and in the end it was Gweniver who took pity on me and fed me. We did not talk much during the meal, but afterwards, over ale in leathern field-methers, quietly, haltingly, we tried to put the horror into words, to lessen it by naming it. So that when I made my way back to my own tent a few hours later, I felt, not cleansed of the slaying in anger that I had done that day, but reconciled to it.

  And yet not so, not on a deeper level: It was Kelts I had killed this day, Kelts who had been trying to kill me; it had been Kelts killing Kelts, being killed by Kelts, all along. And a lord who kills his folk kills himself; a king who murders is a contradiction in terms. Kings give life, protect it, preserve it, serve it, assure it, ennoble it; they do not take it away save by law alone, and law had had no part in what had taken place here. And if I felt so who was after all only another sword-arm in this fight, a kern on the fidchell-board, how much more so must Arthur feel it, who would be in time a king?

  But when I looked in on the king that was to be, I found him sleeping the sleep of the utterly exhausted in mind and body, and the wolfhound puppy, the newly named Cabal, snuggled beside him under his cloak. I watched for no more than ten seconds, but the puppy, already protective, must have sensed my presence; suddenly he woke to full alertness with a surprisingly menacing growl. Then, as he saw and scented his rescuer, the growl changed into a small whimper of welcome and recognition; the tail thumped twice—cautiously, so as not to awaken his sleeping master—and then Cabal laid nose again on paws and slept.

  Which was more than I could manage: For it was that night, as I lay tossing on the Fian's field bedding of branches and bracken, that I had the first of the dreams that were to trouble me almost nightly for many months to come, some nights twice and thrice over. After what we had seen and done that day, no surprise that I should have the horrors and take it out in dreams; but this dream had a strangeness to it in which horror had no share. It was not a prescient dream, nor one of retrocognition; those I knew well from my Druid training, I should not have mistaken their signs. This dream, though it might well foretell, was profoundly different: It was as if someone cried me warning, from a very long way away.

  In the dream I stood on the shoulder of a hill. It was late afternoon of a stormy day, and dark clouds rolled south before a rising wind, while off to my right in the west the sky was scoured and sulphurous. It was another battleground, the air thick with aftermath. Yet somehow I knew that it was no defeat, but victory tempered with, bought at the price of, terrible, staggering loss. The loss had names in it, but I could not hear them; the only thing I did hear, and that not clearly for it reverberated like the voice of the thunder, was one word: 'Cadarachta.'

  I woke with a start and a cry, the name still booming in my confused ears; after I had reassured the Fian guard who came running to my inadvertent call that there was no danger, or at least none that she could be of any aid in fighting, I lay down again, and this time I slept sound and true and deep.

  But though the next morning I consulted maps and memory alike, and asked everyone I encountered, I could find no place that went by such a name. Perhaps I had misheard; already the name was fading from my inner hearing—Carverick, Caderannoc, Caertrachta? Yet whatever it might have been, I knew I should hear it again, and stand there soon.

  We had other business elsewhere, though thank gods none was to prove of the same terrible aspect as Glenanaar, and we did not return to Llwynarth for some months. When at last we did so, we were to find there a message from Owein of unexpected nature.

  Not in words this message, but it spoke loudly all the same: his answer to our recent work, and to Glenanaar itself, and to the rather unmistakable message Arthur had sent of Madoc Dyffrin's severed head. And the message Owein sent back was this: He was withdrawing all Theocracy forces from Arvon, Ravens and garrison conscripts alike, thus effectively ceding the province to Arthur, its new and undisputed master.

  Though the more cautious souls among us—Tarian, Kei, Betwyr—urged that same virtue on our leader, arguing that Owein but abandoned what he could no longer hold at acceptable cost, Arvon's new master did not take their counsel. The first thing Arthur did when the troops had gone—it took a month or two in all for them to leave—was to proclaim Uthyr Pendreic as Ard-righ of Keltia, in right and lawful succession from Alawn Last-king, and from the Ard-n'an Seirith, and the Ard-righ Elgan, and the Ard-n'an Darowen; and Ygrawn Tregaron as his Queen.

  The first thing I had done, on our return, was to fall into Morgan's arms, and allow her to induce in me forgetfulness of what I had seen, insensibility to all but her; and then even to her. Later she had listened with empathy and kindness as I told her of Glenanaar, and recounted it yet again to Merlynn, and to my sister Tegau. All of them were warmly sympathetic, and outraged by Madoc's conduct, but all the same they were a little puzzled that I should be so shaken by what was merely another encounter; bloodier and more savage than most, true enough, but still just one more fight in our life of fighting.

  In truth I could not blame them for their shortfall of understanding: They had not been there, and they could not know. But I was a little hurt even so; and of course the dream continued to plague me of the stormy battlefield with the name I could never recall with my waking mind.

  However, soon all such things must be set aside at last; for hard on the heels of his proclaiming Uthyr King—an open declaration of war if ever there was one—Arthur called a council of his close advisors, for now things began to move at speed.

  We stood round the table and stared down in silence at the map of Gwynedd that Arthur had spread before us. At first the various lines and scribbles and arrows conveyed but little to my mind; then my perspective shifted, and I saw the campaign for the planet laid out plain. And still no one spoke.

  It was left to Tarian Douglas to make the assessment—which was as it should be, for she was Arthur's chief war-leader—and Arthur himself waited in silent patience for her to determine.

  "By gods!" she said at last. "It is very fine on paper, Artos, but there is no such thing in the field!" She was amending the dispositions—erasing and re
drawing the scribbly lines—as she spoke. "Look now."

  We looked, and wondered. She had pulled our forces far to the west of their original positions, so that now they came round the great massif of Cruach Agned, through the low-lying water-valleys and moorlands thereabouts: Lorn Water, Bruan Moor, the Brosna, the Saimhor, the plain called Lyvennet and the river Velindre.

  Arthur was marching troops down from the shielings in his head. "Can an army pass that way? It is soft ground, Tari."

  "Ours can, and must," replied his war-leader. "Now Owein will think that when we move on Caer Dathyl, as soon we must, we shall come by way of Ravens' Rift and the South Road and bear the heavy cost of such a passage, for in the vastness of his stupidity that is what he himself would do, and he will be seeing no other road. Therefore he will march to meet us at the Rift; but we must lure him westwards before that, to meet us instead on the far side of Agned. And we must time it most carefully too, so that those forces already in the Rift garrisons are kept busy with problems of their own, and cannot break away west to his aid."

  "A two-pronged attack—"

  "And, Artos, I have a few thoughts as to how that might be managed," said Keils Rathen, his bearded face wreathed in smiles. "One last, and everlasting, game of pig-i'-the-wood for us all… Indeed, it is already in train—but let us discuss it amongst ourselves first, you and Tarian and Grehan and some other of the commanders. As for the rest of you, many tasks need doing; go now and do them."