The Hawk's Gray Feather

by Patricia Kennealy-Morrison

  Daronwy had come up to us in time to hear my question. "Blair Catterick it is on the maps," she said. "But that is a new name, and one not fit for song. Of old it was ever known as Cadarachta."

  It was as if she had driven a spear-butt into my ribs: I doubled over, catching my breath in a gasp, reaching out blindly to Morgan as I reeled on my feet.

  "Name of Dana, Talyn, are you hit?" That was Daronwy, looking wildly around for my nonexistent attacker; finding none, she and Morgan supported me between them until I might stand again upon my own feet.

  "Are you well, cariad?" murmured Morgan.

  After a moment I managed a nod, for I dared not trust my voice—I, a bard. Cadarachta: the name I could not remember, that had haunted my dreams and tormented my Sight these many nights. And yet, now I stood here in my own waking self and not in sleep, on the spot I knew so well yet had never stood upon before, I realized that my staggerment just now had not been pain or terror or defeat, though the battle to come might well encompass all those things. That would be as it would be: But the feeling that had near buckled my knees a moment since had been a feeling of joy.

  It did not work precisely to Arthur's plan, of course. Such things seldom do, taking on instead a life of their own apart from that which their hopeful initiator has intended for them.

  For one thing, Betwyr (of all people!), as a rule the steadiest and solidest of captains, seemed to suffer a fit of momentary madness; instead of holding rocklike as Arthur had commanded, granite for Owein's left to break upon, he became hammer rather than anvil, charging down the slope with his small company, cutting down Owein's warriors like so many cabbages. Oh aye, it was a pretty thing to see, but I thought Arthur was going to throttle him.

  In the event it did no great harm, and may have helped, even, by further disordering an attack that had not been oversteady to begin with. For once we did not charge first, but let Owein advance unhindered; then as soon as he was led up far enough, his left already beginning to come apart because of the uncertain ground, Arthur swung the gate on its hinge.

  Roaring up out of the hollow where they had lain hidden all this time, our main horse, led by Grehan and Gweniver and Arthur himself, smashed into Owein's right; under the shock, the enemy line stopped, wavering, and then collapsed, shattering like a struck goblet. Indeed, in the panic of the moment, wrong orders were apparently given—or perhaps it was pure panic after all—for instead of wheeling to the charge as was customary practice, Owein's horse turned the wrong way, and began to ride down their own foot.

  We shouted to see it, for that confusion was very helpful for us: In the midst of the bloody turmoil I led my own company across to relieve the hard-pressed Kei, who was holding the right all alone after Betwyr's unsanctioned, if successful, charge. Elen Llydaw saw our move, and followed; together we came down on Owein again, scattering what remained of his left front, and Gweniver's horse coming up from behind them put them to unvarnished, and unavailing, flight. They could not flee south or east because of the fighting, could not escape west because of the water and soft ground; but west seemed the way of least peril, and many took it. To their destruction: When they were found, after the battle's end, they had not a mark of the sword upon them; they had all drowned in the streams and the deep pools.

  Give Owein the praise, though: He gathered what warriors he could in the face of our unorthodox assault—bewildering to any captain used to more conventional tactics—and held them together by sheer force of voice and will. His purpose was to call them off, collecting them for an ordered retreat, and they began to disengage then, under his order, as best they could; but in the face of a new charge they broke and ran. We chased them nearly to the skirts of Corva Wood; it was said after that one might have walked there from Agned on the bodies of the slain. An exaggeration—I recognized a bard's love for a good line when I heard one—but not so far off the truth for all that; and the losses that day were overwhelmingly Owein's.

  It reads quick enough when so set down—the Battle of Cadarachta—a thing of flow and unity, but it was scarce that for us who fought it: The battle lasted from dawn to near sunset, and though it was slaughter beyond all right reason, the slaughter was by no means a continuum. Rather it came in waves, and went again according to a rhythm of its own: You might be fighting for very life the space of an hour, or a quarter that, and then have the equal of that in respite before the tide rolled again to your part of the field.

  Perhaps five hours into the fight that tide turned for us in truth: Our forces who had engaged Ravens' Rift, sailing boldly down Glora to meet the enemy on the beaches of the inland sea, had triumphed utterly. The fighting had swirled westward, engulfing the fortress, but after a sharp and bloody encounter, the generalship of my old tutor Scathach and my old friend Tryffin, assisted by Irian, had secured the Rift for us, and the pass it guarded. Word was already being sent to the shielings that the road lay clear to Caer Dathyl.

  Or at least it would very soon, once we at Agned had put paid to the tiny detail that was Owein Rheged; though at that moment we did not dream the price should come so high…

  Through all the day's fighting I had caught glimpses only of Arthur. He seemed to be a flame flickering across the battlefield, never to be grasped at but everywhere at once, Cabal hunting beside him: Indeed, to listen to folk tell it after, he must have been in a score of different places all at once&msash;leading that first great charge to destroy Owein's flank, rallying weary warriors, chasing down foes who fled before him, cutting the Theocracy standard from its bearer's hand, even sword to sword with Owein himself, until the eddy of battle parted them.

  Others there were I was just as fretted for, and sought to see—Morgan, thank the Mother, had not been far from my side nor out of my sight all that day—but now, as the battle bloomed and spread and spent itself at last, rippling out in all directions like wind in a wheatfield, I saw enough to reassure me of the safety of those dearest friends I sought: Gweniver, flushed and triumphant at the head of her horse; Kei, untired and methodical; a chagrined but very pleased Betwyr; Tarian cool and unruffled as ever; Grehan with one arm bound across his chest; Keils and Elen Llydaw both limping, though I could see no visible hurt on either; Daronwy exhausted but otherwise hale.

  Merlynn I had never lost sight of: He had not borne sword in the fight, but he had served as warrior even so. Taking up a stance on a crag of Agned where both sides could see him, he had stood there unmoving as a dolmen-stone from dawn to dusk. More than once during the course of the battle I had looked up from my labors to see him there—no weapon could reach him, and no enemy had been brave enough to try, though I think none could have come close—and I had taken courage, as did many others, from his simple presence.

  Yet the one I sought most desperately I could not find straightway; then at last, as I skirted a shoal of the slain—few of them our own, praise gods, though in truth all of them were our own, and there was little to praise in this hateful conflict save the valor of both sides—I met Arthur coming slowly toward me on foot, Cabal at his heels looking ferocious indeed for a yearling hound. I sighed and breathed a silent prayer to see my fostem safe and relatively unscathed—he had some cuts and slashes such as we all had taken, few came unmarked from that field—and altered my course to meet him. But he had already seen me, and Cabal bounded ahead to leap joyfully upon me, thumping his huge paws down on my weary shoulders. I staggered a little under his weight, and at my soft word he dropped again to the ground; but my eyes had never left the one who came so slowly on behind him.

  "Hail master of Gwynedd!" I said when he came up to us. Then I saw his eyes, and wished I had not spoken so. "Artos? Is it well?"

  He gave a short harsh laugh. "Well enough, for one who has compassed the death of thousands of his countryfolk… Talyn, if ever I take joy in such a sight as this"—his hand traced the miles of slaughter—"you have my leave to send me to join them."

  "Arthur," I said gently, pulling all my old tricks of soothing fro
m my smoke-sore throat, "none thinks you do take joy in this; not now, not ever. It was not you did make this quarrel, though it be you who finish it."

  "Kelts killing Kelts—"

  "Aye. I know. But it must be so; it was the only way open to you, and the last way open for us all. Artos—Prince Arthur—today you have won Gwynedd for the Ard-righ Uthyr Pendreic. That is more than any man or woman in two centuries against the Theocracy has managed to do: to take back a planet, any planet, from the Marbh-draoi by force of arms."

  I saw by his eyes that he knew all this, and saw too that my words that should have comforted had not sufficed; perhaps no words could. But it seemed that I had reached him somewhat, for muttering that I should find what friends of ours I might and come later to his tent, he went away with Cabal over the bloody ground.

  I remained there awhile, on the place of my dreaming—the little rise, a shoulder of an outlier of Agned—staring out over that scene I knew so well and yet had not known until this day, this moment: It was all there, the dark clouds, the stormy sunset, the drifts of the dead, the faint shouts as the last of the fight rolled southward. I have come to battle often enough in my time, had seen war before and would again after, but that day stands alone.

  Never was field like to Cadarachta: Rivers ran red in the red light; before Agned armies groaned.

  * * *

  Chapter Thirty-three

  In the end, I did not go straightway to Arthur's tent as I had said I would, or at least as he had bidden me; if I had—well, of all self-tortures, what-ifs are the least satisfactory, being neither honest shame nor true blame.

  Coming down from my hill, I was pressed into service by Elen Llydaw to help among the healers. Bards learn a good deal of the healing lore in the course of their training, and Druids too; so that between the two disciplines I myself might have qualified for the healer's white cowl, and I turned a hand with a good will. Friend or foe, it made no differ now; all the wounded were wounded alike, no distinction remaining save that impartial assessment: Can this man, this woman, be healed of the hurts sustained?

  But though I said 'impartial' just now, it was by no means a dispassionate assessment, as any will know who has had to make it. At times it seemed there were hardly enough hands among us to heal the hurts those hands were set to. For very many had taken very many more hurts in that terrible fight: warriors, as the old chaunt has it, so sore wounded that birds might have flown through their bodies, never once tipping their feathers with blood.

  Already countless hundreds had slipped out through those bloody lattices, their spirits spreading wings of their own to soar; and no healer worth the name would have called those back if he could—not to dwell in maimed cages only for the sake of living, for that is not Kelu's way. So they went to find their freedom, and we were diminished, and they were not forgotten.

  But even remembrance was for later—remembrance and rites—for the moment we were still busy with the business of war, and just now it seemed a neverending business indeed.

  In the course of my labors I met with many I had not seen all that long and dreadful day: Tegau, my sister, who arrived at Agned with the first eyewitness account of the battle at Ravens' Rift, where she had been second in command to Scathach Aodann aboard the leading ship; Companions from Llwynarth, some of whom I knew well and others of whom I had scant acquaintance save that of face and name. Most astonishing of all, I came across that same apparently indestructible Trevelyan who had ridden his fleet white mare out of Gwaelod before the onrushing wave so many years since. Not only had he escaped Gwaelod's ruin, but he—and his mare!—had survived the destruction of Daars as well, and had lived happily all the decades after. Not to mention surviving this day's work; though his mount at Cadarachta was not that famous mare but her great-great-grandson, who must have been possessed of all his ancestress's speed and heart, for he had preserved both his hide and his rider's unblooded and whole.

  But few that day went as unscathed as the bold Trevelyan: I myself lost a sister and brother—Adaon and Rainild—whom I had scarcely known, such had been the Counterinsurgency's demands and needs; Tarian's brother Rohan, Grehan's sister Digna, Kei's beloved Samhra, all had fallen at the Rift. Of our own Companions at Agned, none had been slain though near all were wounded, some sorely, and some like to die even yet. No wonder Arthur's soul was bowed beneath the weight of it…

  And yet in all this time of evil word we had no word, neither good nor ill, of Owein Rheged. He was not among the slain, for we searched most closely for him, and not with eyes alone; nor was he among the many prisoners taken, and none could give us news of him. Oh, they would have if they could, even against their will, for those most skilled in so doing kenned them hard; but it seemed that he had vanished from the field.

  For myself I was not surprised, and supposed simply that he had ingloriously fled when the battle swung to Arthur; but Morgan was strangely troubled, and did not share my thought. When I pressed for her own thought on Owein's absence, she only shook her head, her face taking on that questing look I knew so well on her brother's.

  "He is here somewhere, Talyn," she said at last. "But when I reach for him, my othersense closes only on his absence; as if he had been there, but had just then stepped into some pocket of air, or cloaked himself with another's reality."

  "A shapeshift?" I asked, interested and alarmed both. "But any sorcerer can see through any ordinary fith-fath or glamourie, and with you and Merlynn and so many others here surely even Owein would not be bold enough to try a greater change. Remember, he is no magician; his power, howsoever great it be, is but borrowed plumes."

  But I could get no more from her, and after a few moments and a quick kiss I left her to go on to her other duties, and turned at last, after these many hours of tending to others, to tend a little to myself.

  But as I walked away from Morgan, I wondered again at Owein's absence, and after a while a darker, grimmer thought came to me: If we had had no word of Owein, still less had we had word of his master. Edeyrn had made no move, had sent no pronouncement: Yet by now he would surely have heard of Cadarachta, and its twin slaughter at Ravens' Rift; knew by now that Arthur Penarvon—Arthur Pendreic—held all Gwynedd against him. Yet he kept silence.

  And that silence out of Tara was already making me profoundly uneasy, as uneasy as I had been made by the lack of Owein. Time to come would show that both fears were well founded; but in the meantime, I could only wonder anew. Why had Edeyrn not chosen to armor his adopted heir's fist? He might have sent wave upon wave of troops, aircraft, even starships against us; might have flown all his dark magic at us like a hawk from his fist—magic of Sidhe and Druid alike, the sorcery of one who was both Ro-sai of the Pheryllt and the son of the Queen of the Sidhe; yet he had not done so—or at least not yet. He seemed to have left Owein to his own resources and to his own fate; perhaps it was a test? If so, then Owein had wretchedly failed. But what would Edeyrn do next?

  "If I were the Marbh-draoi," said Daronwy consideringly as we walked at last to the bath-tent, free finally—and most eager—to scrub away the mud and blood of Cadarachta, "I should be thinking to make Arthur work as hard as possible for anything he may gain. It is now past the point of Arthur being denied, I think, so Edeyrn will be hoping either to contain or to destroy. Preferably destroy; and if I—I the Marbh-draoi—were unable to manage this alone…"

  "If?" prompted Betwyr, who walked on my other side; Betwyr whose unsanctioned charge downslope into Owein's left had already become one of the legends of the day, though as yet he had not dared to face Arthur's wrath.

  "If I could not do so alone," continued Daronwy, "I should call in those who might help me do so."

  I looked at her, startled, and suddenly sure. "You mean from outside? You think he might call in gallain?"

  "I think it not unlikely. Many folk fight for hire these days: the Thallo, the Mederai, the Parishen; even the Fomori, come to that. Perhaps it will not be straightway; but I would be more surp
rised, Talyn, if we did not cross swords with gallain before this thing is done."

  I was soaking in the steaming bathwater—I think I have mentioned the near-mystical addiction of Kelts to hot water; even the Romans thought us excessively fond of bathing, and they were by no means an uncleanly people—luxuriating in the way it unstrung muscles too long tensed, washing away the battle grime, and perhaps other soil more ingrained than that, when the messenger came for me. And when she had delivered herself of her charge—even before the words were full spoke—I was out of the bath with a great huish of water, pulling on the clean garb I had brought without even taking time to dry myself off.

  For the news she had been sent to tell me was this: Uthyr Ard-righ had come to the leaguer, and Ygrawn the Queen with him; and I had been summoned to the King's tent to hear a thing that he would say.

  Uthyr had come to the camp upon the Saimhor heavily guarded from Llwynarth, to see for himself the victory that his nephew's arm had given him. But that was not his sole reason, nor even his chief reason for coming; and so it was that I was witness to a scene I had sooner not witnessed. I had rather faced ten battalions of Ravens, and I armed with but a table-sgian, than face what awaited me in that tent; and what came after… But the King required my presence, and so I was there.

  Nor was I there alone: Ygrawn, of course, was already there, and embraced me fiercely, all her fear and relief apparent in the strength of her clasped arms round me. Over in a corner of the tent, Merlynn sat quietly, down at last from the crag where he had watched our battle; only the gleam in his eye falling on me gave me greeting—but it was enough. And Morgan, who met me with a wink and a kiss.

  Others there were in the tent, whom I had not thought to see: a tall man I did not know by sight, but who was, as Ygrawn informed me, the new Chief Brehon, Alun Cameron; and a woman I knew well, Marigh Aberdaron, Uthyr's longtime Taoiseach.