Paths of Exile

by Carla Nayland

  “Do you think he was right? That the Emperors will come back one day?”

  She shook her head. “No, if the Emperor was coming he would have come by now, surely. It was just something to learn. Anything would have done. You understand that, I think?”

  He nodded, recognising the thirst of a questing intelligence for knowledge, on any subject. It was the same imperative that had driven his own eclectic if haphazard education – Ysgafnell’s monastery, Heledd and her bards, the sailors on the quays, anyone, really, who could open a window onto another world. But he had had a whole city to explore, full of interesting things and people, and she had had only one old man.

  “You must miss him greatly.”

  She smiled sadly. “Yes. It’s silly really – he died over five years ago, before I was married, and yet still I find myself thinking Oh, Grandfather would be interested in that, I must ask him about it. He seems almost more real than the living.” She paused, turning another cheese out of the mould. “I think – I think it may be because there’s no-one else I am close to. Blodwen and Gwen and Luned are nice enough, and I like them, but if I say anything out of the ordinary they look at me as if I was mad – or magical, which is worse. Do you know what I mean?”

  Eadwine smiled, thinking of the usual reaction from spearmen when they first found out his liking for Brittonic poetry. “Oh, yes.”

  “I thought you might.”

  “But in the winter when you’re back in the village, with your husband –”

  “My husband is gone.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. How did he die?”

  “I didn’t say he died. I said he was gone.” She leaned on the edge of the table, gazing into the middle distance. “He went away on a journey, four years ago this coming winter. It was a week before my sixteenth birthday. I remember waving him off from Derwent Bridge. It was a cold, frosty morning, and the hills were all dusted white with the first snow of the winter. I wanted to walk a little way with him, maybe to Derwent Stone, but he wouldn’t have it. I was four months pregnant at the time. He kissed me, and his breath froze in my hair. We laughed about it, and he said he would be back by the spring and mind I had a baby son for him to play with. I watched him stride away up the army-path and into the woods above Combe village. That was the last I saw of him.” She looked directly at him. “But he will come back to me. I know he will.”

  “Yes,” he said. What else could he say? “Of course he will.”

  “So in the meantime his brother is acting as village headman, and as I am still the headman’s wife, I run the hafod in the summer. And I wait.”

  “What of your child?”

  “Miscarriage. Twins.” She glanced up with a brittle smile. “It’s all right, I can talk about it now. I was lucky there was a good midwife in the village. Blodwen’s mother-in-law. She moved in with me to make the nursing easier, and never had cause to move out. I learned a lot from her, and I more or less took over from her when she died.” She patted the last lump of cheese into shape. “Excuse me, I must get some dock leaves to wrap these in.”

  Eadwine suspected she actually wanted some privacy to cry, so he did not follow. What a lonely position she was in, neither wife nor widow, bereft but yet not free, bound to the ruins of an old life and unable to start again. There was, he thought grimly, something to be said for losing everything. Then he thought of Eadric, and his grief for his beloved brother came swirling back in a great wave. He too was bound to the ruins of an old life, for he owed it to his father and brother to avenge them – and to Aethelind. What was happening to her? Was she already dead? Or was she still alive, waiting for him to return as Severa was waiting for her husband? The images from his delirium came back sharp and clear, Aethelind beaten, Aethelind enslaved to some brute, Aethelind screaming in pain and terror, and the last words she had spoken to him, now transmuted into a wailing cry, Don’t fail me! Rumour said the Bernicians did unimaginable things to captured women. Unfortunately, Eadwine had a very good imagination.

  A pain in his shoulder recalled him to reality, and he realised that both fists were tightly clenched and he was shaking. No, thinking and remembering was definitely not a good idea. It was all right if he could keep his mind occupied, or if he was exhausted enough to sleep, but otherwise he felt he was drowning in grief and shame.

  Severa still had not come back, so he got up gingerly, supported himself against the wall until the floor stopped pitching, and went outside.

  Severa was leaning against the fence, the dock leaves apparently forgotten in her hands. In the doorway of the house, Blodwen was standing with eyes and mouth agape. Both women looked transfixed, and the reason was not hard to fathom.

  Drust was splitting a log. He was driving wedges into the trunk, and pounding them home with a heavy mallet. He had taken his tunic off, and with each mighty blow the great muscles of his shoulders and back flexed and rippled under the gleaming skin. Blodwen’s head nodded up and down in time with the rhythm, as if on a string. The log split with a tearing sound, and Drust bent over to retrieve the wedges. Blodwen put her hand to her breast and emitted a faint breathless squeak.

  Eadwine grinned, a little wistfully, and made a discreet withdrawal. Drust tended to have that effect on women. Eadric and Cynewulf, his two half-brothers, had the same magnetism, and Ashhere too, to some extent. It was something to do with being possessed of a fifty-inch hairy chest, magnificent musculature and a firm belief that tongues were not intended for talking.

  He was not surprised when Ashhere came back down from the moors with a faintly dazed expression and a long curly dark hair caught in his beard, nor that they were invited to eat in the house that evening, where it seemed impossible to find anywhere to look without accidentally intercepting a smouldering glance. Nor was he surprised that neither Ashhere nor Drust came back to the hut that night, although that was distinctly less amusing.

  Two yawning and bleary-eyed figures crept back to the hut in the half-light before dawn, shushing each other noisily, and tripping over the pig-trough on the way. This was going to be more fun than they had thought –

  “I don’t want to know what you’ve been doing,” remarked an icy voice as they fell in through the door. “Nor do I greatly mind doing double-duty on watch, although in future I should prefer to have warning. But would you care to explain why you saw fit to desert your posts?”

  They shuffled miserably. Eadwine could wound with words more effectively than many men could with fists.

  “And kindly don’t try to dig your way out through the floor. Well?”

  “Er,” began Ashhere, feeling about half an inch high. “Er – sorry, lord –”

  Even Drust sounded shamefaced. “Er – it willna happen again –”

  “I asked you for an explanation, not an apology.”

  “Er – well – the girls –”

  “It wasna rape, if that’s what ye think –”

  “I am not interested in your personal lives, as you should know very well by now. You can tumble every woman in Britannia for all I care, provided you don’t expect me to get you out of trouble for it. But you do not shirk your duty and you do not leave your comrades unguarded. This is not a holiday. Do I make myself quite clear?”

  “Yes, lord,” they said, squirming.

  He was half-expecting Severa to be furious and possibly even to demand compensation, to which as head of the household she would have been entitled under Anglian law, but instead she seemed to consider it a great joke.

  “I owe Luned a new hair-ribbon,” she informed him, righting the pig-trough and pouring whey into it. “We wagered on which one would get Drust, and it was Blodwen. By a short head.” She jumped back out of the torrent of rushing pigs, laughing up at him. “Dear me, Steeleye, have I shocked you? You think they’d sit and virtuously spin with four new men – well, three and a half – to engage their attentions? You might as well expect water to flow uphill. If Blodwen can find some comfort with a passing stranger – or two – who
am I to begrudge it? And Gwen – well, is Gwen. Where is the harm? They both know the precautions, and if they forget themselves, it’s only a month until Samhain and I can always claim it’s premature – there are some advantages to being the midwife.” She shrugged. “You saved all our lives, remember. Why should we not show our – gratitude? And you must admit, your friends are easy on the eye. You will not be here long. After Samhain you will leave and we will never see or hear of you again. Why not make those few weeks sweet? There is little enough joy in this world, and such pleasures as come our way should not be spurned. To be faithful in the heart is what truly counts, I think. The other – well, it is natural, like eating and breathing.”

  Eadwine felt a sudden, inexplicable pang of jealousy, wondering if she applied the same philosophy to herself, and if so whether she and Ashhere – or Drust –

  Severa quirked an eyebrow. “Do you know, Steeleye, you have a very expressive face? If it makes you feel better – well, shall we say that neither of them was a very severe test of my virtue?”

  The hafod soon settled into a very pleasant pattern of life, now with eight people – well, seven and a half – to share the work, not forgetting the dog. Two people, almost invariably Lilla and Luned, drove the swine into the woods, and two more plus the dog took the sheep up to the moors each day, generally Gwen or Blodwen with either Ashhere or Drust. The other three and a half, which always included Severa, stayed on the hafod. With so much more labour available than usual the hafod improved noticeably. The gate was replaced, the drystone wall repaired, the roofs mended, the dairy cat-proofed – as far as possible – and the vegetable patch dug and weeded as never before. Severa found she had time to do tasks that she never normally got around to, like dyeing wool, and even set up her loom in the wool shed and began weaving a large brightly coloured chequered cloth. Around sunset, they all gathered in the house for the meal and then sat on into the lengthening evenings, enjoying one another’s company. Lilla was painstakingly fashioning a fishing hook out of some scraps of bent metal he had found, and Ashhere was helping Drust repair the shield. None of the women spoke any Anglian, but Lilla was quickly picking up Brittonic, Drust found that the dialect had many words in common with Pictish, and Ashhere was getting used to the local accent, so they mostly spoke Brittonic when the women were present and Eadwine had less and less need to translate, unless someone wanted to say something complex. The women all spent the evenings spinning wool, and the endless twirling of the drop spindles as they fell was hypnotic –

  Eadwine jolted out of a doze and found Lilla poking him in the ribs.

  “Wake up and do something useful for once,” Lilla said, grinning. “The lasses want us to tell them a tale, and you’re the one who knows all the poetry.”

  Eadwine had no objection. Anything that would delay the moment when he had to return to the hut and try to sleep was welcome, and he had learned a large repertoire of Brittonic poetry from Heledd, her court bard, and the many itinerant bards she patronised.

  He began in the traditional way. It was usually a safe bet. “Attend! The High King Arthur held court at Camulodunum –”

  “Oh,” Blodwen protested, in a disappointed tone, “must it be about Arthur? All the tales are about Arthur. Can’t you tell us something we haven’t heard before?”

  “And it was all so far away and long ago,” Luned said shyly. “Nothing to do with the likes of us.”

  “Unless Queen Gwenhwyfar’s in it,” Gwen suggested. “She sounds interesting.”

  Eadwine hesitated. He knew there was a rich seam of vernacular legend about Arthur’s fiery Queen, but he was not very familiar with it. Heledd, his main source for Brittonic legend and history, had disapproved of Gwenhwyfar (‘Not the conduct of a good Christian queen!’, although the one thing nobody had ever accused Gwenhwyfar of was being a good Christian), and the itinerant bards earned their livings at royal courts, where tales of a queen who rebelled against a king were undiplomatic to say the least and therefore not worth knowing. In the battle-poetry Eadwine knew best, Gwenhwyfar’s role was confined to waving the warriors off to war in the first verse and welcoming them home again in the last, which was unlikely to satisfy Gwen. Did one of the others know something that would do?

  A few minutes conferring with his friends, reverting to Anglian as they always did between themselves, confirmed that between them they knew quite a lot of battle-poetry, mostly odd verses relating to the deeds of supposed ancestors, a few nursery rhymes, some sailing songs that seemed absurdly out of place in these landlocked moors, and a startling number of disreputable drinking songs.

  “No,” Eadwine warned, seeing Drust clear his throat. “Not Attacotti Nell. We’re all sober.”

  “Och, I willna do all fifteen verses.”

  “Half of them are impossible anyway,” Ashhere muttered.

  “How much will ye bet?”

  “Drust, if you give offence you’ll get us all thrown out –”

  “Ye dinna have tae translate.”

  “If you put in your usual performance, what worries me is that I won’t need to.” He turned back to the women, who were regarding him expectantly. “Er – I’m sorry I don’t know any tales about Gwenhwyfar, and you may not like this, but it’s not about Arthur and I can guarantee you haven’t heard it before.” He took a swallow of water, and began again.

  “Attend! In the fair land of the Summer Country, where the great oaks grow about a sparkling river, and purple-hued moors rise to the sky –”

  Luned nudged Gwen and whispered, “Where’s that? It sounds a bit like here.”

  “Ssssh!”

  “– dwelt a kind and simple man and four fair maidens. They were not rich, but they were fair of face, and skilled in all manner of crafts, and their merry voices would silence the skylarks for shame. But in the wilds, grim and greedy, cruel men stalked the fells –”

  Eadwine saw they were listening and went on, warming to his theme. He was a born storyteller, and the idea had been running in his head on and off for days. He told of the attack on the hafod, and how the bandits had paid with their lives. Borrowing the triad motif so common in Brittonic poetry, he lauded the exploits in battle of the Three Fighting Tramps of the Island of Britannia, with a whole verse each devoted to Ashhere Steel-Arm, Lilla Swift-Handed and Drust Mighty-Grasp. His friends seemed mightily pleased, for although they had listened to a lot of praise-poetry for long-dead kings and heroes, they had never before featured in any. Then he went on to pay tribute to the dauntless Lady Severa, Daughter of the Romans, and the Three Valiant Dairymaids of the Island of Britannia, these being Luned the Gentle, Gwen the Fair and Blodwen the – here he floundered for a moment – the Magnificent. Even the dog got an honourable mention.

  Then his tone changed and became slower and sorrowful.

  “– But alas, though they triumphed, great was their loss also. For on that day fell Gruffuyd, son of Blodwen, bravely defending his home against the foe –”

  The twirling of the drop spindles had long since been stilled, and the fire was burning low. There was no sound but his voice, now low and sonorous as he spoke a eulogy for Gruffuyd, making of a rather pitiful and pointless death something fine and heroic.

  “– evergreen shall his memory be, the best and bravest of shepherds, the kindest of men.”

  He ended. There was utter silence, broken only by the soft hiss and crackle of the flames.

  Blodwen sniffed, gulped, and began to cry quietly. “Thank you,” she whispered, “thank you for Gruffuyd –”

  “Bravo!” Severa smiled, her eyes green and glowing in the firelight. “Forget being a dairymaid, you could earn an honest crust as a bard. But you forgot to mention Steeleye.”

  Eadwine laughed, pleased and more than a little relieved that his performance had gone down so well. “Oh, the bard never features in his own poetry. It isn’t done.”

  “Blodwen the Magnificent!” scoffed Gwen, tossing her hair and shooting him an inviting over-the-should
er look across the dying fire, before glancing at his sling and catching first Drust’s eye, then Ashhere’s and then Lilla’s.

  “Just make sure you turn up for your watch,” Eadwine warned them, trying not to laugh and wondering if they got any sleep at all. He hoped fervently that Treowin had struck just as lucky in Lundencaster.

  Aethelferth prodded Treowin’s unconscious body with the butt-end of a spear. “Is he dead?”

  “Not yet, Lord King.”

  “He’s a stubborn bastard,” the Brittonic captain said, not without admiration. Not many men refused to answer Aethelferth the Twister’s questions, certainly not for this long.

  Aethelferth fixed him with a baleful glare. “Did you catch any others with him?”

  “One survived, Lord King.”

  “Fetch him.”

  Treowin’s retainer fell on hands and knees, beside what he took to be the dead body of his lord. A foot took him under the chin and flicked him over onto his back. A large, powerful man with a scar running from his right eye down into his bristling beard was glaring down at him, leaning on a spear.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  The retainer had only seen him on the battlefield, in full armour, but it was not hard to guess that he was looking at Aethelferth the Twister.

  “Y-y-yes,” he managed to say, quivering with terror. He tried not to look at Treowin’s limp form, crusted with blood and bruises.

  “I am a merciful man,” Aethelferth said, in what was no doubt meant to be a pleasant voice.