That was quite a distance for a short winter day. It would be nearly dark by the time we reached the town. We had done some twenty miles already, by my reckoning. I remembered all the songs I had heard of Arthur’s campaigns sweeping from one end of Britain to the other. Hard on the horses, Gwalchmai had said. Very hard, I thought, and hard on the warriors as well.
“Lord, my horse is unused to so much travel. He has not been ridden this winter since the snows began.”
Gwalchmai stopped, dismounted, and looked at Llwyd. He checked the gelding’s legs and hooves, then straightened, chafing his hands together. “He needs the exercise, that is true,” he commented. “But he will not go lame or be overworked—though he may consider himself such. He has a strain of the pony in him, hasn’t he?”
I admitted it, and Gwalchmai nodded and remounted his war stallion. Ceincaled seemed as rested as he had been that morning. We rode on, and I felt as thoroughly outclassed by the warrior as Llwyd was by his mount. I had always considered myself a good horseman.
Caer Gloeu was more twelve miles distant than ten, and the sun was setting when we reached it, a dim copper disc half-smothered by clouds. It was still snowing, in fits. I was chilled through and ached all over. Llwyd plodded with his head drooping, not caring where he was. I cared: I still wanted the hot ale.
Caer Gloeu was slightly larger than Caer Ceri, but equally deserted. It might almost have been the same flock of sheep milling in the market square. Gwalchmai stopped Ceincaled in a street opening to one side of that square and sat motionless, as though waiting. I huddled my shoulders and felt wretched and angry, too tired to care whether we were standing about for some purpose or just looking at another road.
After a few minutes, however, the door of one of the old houses opened, and a man came out, carrying a spear and pulling a threadbare cloak around his shoulders. He stood on his door step and gave us a steady, hostile stare. This, apparently, was what Gwalchmai had expected, for he dismounted and walked over near the man, keeping both hands up at shoulder height in plain view.
“I need a place to stay the night, for myself, my servant, and our horses.” His voice was quiet, but clear enough to carry across the square. The townsman continued to stare, holding his spear ready to thrust. He was a tall, pudgy man with thin brown hair and no beard. He glanced towards me with narrow eyes.
“Your servant?” he said to Gwalchmai. I suddenly realized that it should have been my task to ask for hospitality. Too late. I already looked a dolt, and Gwalchmai was going on.
“My servant and our horses; the horses will need grain. I can pay, man.”
At this, the man spat, but he lowered the spear and nodded. “For the one night?”
“For this one night only.” The man nodded again, and Gwalchmai walked back to the horses and caught Ceincaled’s bridle. The townsman gestured for us to follow, and we went back down the street, through an alley, and back up a smaller street to what I supposed was the back door of his own house. There we were led into a ramshackle stable, very draughty and dirty, with a small donkey and a cow, a few chickens and a pig occupying what space was not filled with wood and rubble. Gwalchmai looked about it and asked the man to move the cow, so as to make room in the stall for the horses. Our host argued a bit, swore some, and complied. Then Gwalchmai silently began to clean out the stall while the townsman stood about watching him suspiciously. I was furious. Any decent man would bring his guests inside by the fire and give them some hot ale, not make them clean his own filthy stable.
Deciding that I had better behave like a servant, I dismounted, stiffly. My legs shook when they touched the ground and I had to steady myself against Llwyd’s shoulder before going to a corner of the stable to get fresh straw and the grain. Our host tried to give us less grain than the horses needed, and I had to argue with him. He claimed that we were being extortionate and trusting in our strength of arms to get away with it. “But this is a town,” he told me. “We have a civic government, a Roman government, and we enforce the laws. You can’t rob citizens here.” I supposed his Roman government consisted of the levy of all the able-bodied citizens, ready to perform whatever extortion they could agree on. I felt revolted by the man, and then thought to wonder if he would have acted in the same way if I had come as a farmer, and not as the servant of a warrior.
We settled the horses and left them hungrily chomping the grain. Llwyd rarely got such food at home, but if he was to do more traveling he would need it.
Our host’s house was nearly as dirty as his stable, and, besides wife and numerous children, it also contained chickens. No householder that I knew would have tolerated such a place, but things are different in the towns. Few people live in them any more, since only the very rich and the craftsmen can afford it. Our host’s house was filled with drying pottery and wet clay, so plainly he was a potter. I picked up one of the plates and examined it. He was not a very skilled potter. Nonetheless, he snarled at me and told me to leave his valuable ware alone. Well, it was probably valuable enough. Potters can usually make a living.
The potter’s wife had apparently begun to make porridge as soon as her husband had agreed to let us stay the night, and she now set this before us. It was lumpy, badly cooked, and had neither meat nor eggs in it. I put down the bowl after my first spoonful. This was too much for my temper.
“Since we’re paying you might give us some meat,” I suggested to the potter’s wife, quietly. She looked as surprised to find me speaking to her as she would if one of her chickens addressed her. “Or an egg,” I added.
Gwalchmai looked up from his porridge, also in surprise. He had apparently been willing to eat the lumpy porridge without a word. But I was in no mood to let anyone cheat me of a much-desired meal. “Bring us some bread, with butter, mind you, and some cheese!” I ordered, slamming my bowl down. “And if you have some ham, bring that. And ale. Hot ale. My lord and I have been riding all day, and if you think we’ll settle for poor porridge at the end of it, you are much mistaken.”
The woman glanced nervously at her husband. One of her children snickered. Gwalchmai coughed behind his hand, not looking at me, and the potter became red in the face. “I’ve no need to offer you hospitality!” snarled our host, “Any mongrel warrior thinks he rules the earth. Well, you don’t, and you’re no warrior even, servant. I take no talk from servants. I…”
“My lord, though, is a warrior, and no mongrel about it,” I said, and was going to tell the man that this was Gwalchmai ap Lot, the Pendragon’s nephew, son of the king of the Ynysoedd Erch and so on, when I noticed Gwalchmai’s look of alarm, and recollected that he had not mentioned any names at all to the potter. He knew more about it than I, and I would do well to tread carefully. But I was not going to give up my hot ale and ham. “My lord happens to be a very good warrior, as you may hope you will not discover,” I finished. It seemed so easy to threaten the man.
“We’re a town here! We have a government here!” said the potter. But he looked uneasy.
“Of course. And you are our host, even if you’re paid for it,” I replied. “And since you’re a civilized man, and a host, you might give us some civilized food.”
The woman suddenly ran off and fetched the food, good wheat bread, butter, cheese, and ham, and began to heat the ale. Her husband swore at us for a while, then grumbled into silence. Gwalchmai gave me a look I could not read—irony? annoyance? amusement? But the food was delicious and worth the effort, and I didn’t care who was offended.
When he had finished his bread and ham, Gwalchmai began asking whether the potter and his family had lived in Caer Gloeu long. Yes, the man admitted sullenly, he had. Had he been there eight years before?
“I’ve been in Caer Gloeu all my life,” said the potter. “What of it?”
“Only this: some time in mid-autumn, eight years ago, a woman may have come this way, a thin, fair woman, probably
riding a brown horse and perhaps wearing blue. She had two servants, one an old man with half an ear missing.”
The potter listened attentively, then shook his head. “Never seen any such woman. What kind of a whore was she, traveling like that? Must have been good.”
“She is not a whore.” Gwalchmai’s voice was still quiet, but there was a chilling edge to it. The potter looked at him, and suddenly crossed himself. The dark warrior looked dangerous and completely uncanny, though he sat very quietly with his emptied plate on his knee. “She is a lady of high family.”
“Well, I never seen her. Never heard anyone tell of her, either.”
“Neither here in town, nor on the road north, nor from the west, across the Saefern?”
“If she went by there, I never heard of her.”
Gwalchmai looked at him a moment steadily, then sighed. The whole journey suddenly made sense to me. Caer Gloeu stands between Powys, Dumnonia, and the southern wilds of Elmet. Anyone who traveled to any of these lands was likely to stop for the night at Caer Gloeu, and a woman traveling alone, with only a few servants, would probably have been remembered. Our host did not seem to be lying, so it was plain that Elidan had not come to Caer Gloeu, and we could turn back to Camlann in the morning. I was relieved; Gwalchmai was plainly disappointed. He took another drink of his hot ale, then set the mug down.
“I thank you.” He actually did say it, and I was amazed. So was the potter, who blinked at us as though he had heard a ghost. Gwalchmai continued matter-of-factly, “My servant and I will sleep in the stable, by our horses. Have you any extra blankets?”
“You can sleep in here by the hearth,” said the potter. “Won’t need many blankets. A good fire, there.”
The warrior glanced at the smoky fire and said, “We will sleep in the stables.”
I wanted vehemently to protest. The thought of going out into that draughty and filthy building, just when I was beginning to get warm, made me want to hit someone. But I couldn’t, so I worked on getting good blankets from the potter. In the end I managed to make him give us a rug, though he wasn’t happy about it.
When Gwalchmai had said we would sleep by our horses, he had meant it, and we settled for the night in the very stall, near the manger. It wasn’t too cold, after all. Gwalchmai began to unfasten his baldric, so as to set the sword where he could reach it in the night.
“Why couldn’t we stay in the house?” I asked.
“I do not trust them.” He said it simply. He frowned, loosening the fastenings of his chain mail, but not taking it off. “This way we can guard ourselves and the horses at once.”
It made sense, if one could conceive of the potter slipping a knife into his guests for the sake of two horses and some valuable weapons. But who would do that? Or would he? If he thought we might leave without paying him, since he hated us so much as it was? The thought frightened me, not even so much for the danger, as for the appalling amount of suspicion and mistrust it demanded. But the potter…just might.
“Should I have said those things?” I asked, suddenly aware that it might have been an activity of questionable worth.
The warrior laughed. “You know better than I.” We lay down and drew our cloaks and the rug over us. “I would not have said such things,” my companion added after a moment. “But the ale was very good on a night like this. Sleep well.” The straw rustled as he felt for his sword, and a horse shifted its weight in the dark above us. I knew that Gwalchmai would wake instantly if anyone came into the stable. It was safe here. Not comfortable, though: the floor was hard and cold even through the straw, and I ached quite enough as it was. Probably, I thought, I will sleep badly…and fell asleep on the thought. I slept the whole night without so much as a dream. Too much riding in bad weather will do that.
When I woke the next morning, dim sunlight was filtering through a crack in the roof, making a patch on the straw near my head. I lay awake for a while trying to determine what I was doing in a barn, then remembered that I had left home and sat bolt upright. My head cracked against the manger above me, and the two horses paused a moment and looked down at me, then began to munch their grain again.
I sat up again, more cautiously, and straightened my cloak and tunic. Gwalchmai was not there. I picked up the rag and blanket and began folding them to take them back to our host. Just as I stood up, Gwalchmai came out of the back door of the house.
“Good morning,” he said, smiling. “You are a sound sleeper, Rhys. Our hostess has made breakfast, and it is inside.”
I was ready for breakfast. My bones ached from the damp and chill of the stable and from the previous day’s riding, and warm food by a fire seemed a provision from Heaven. “I am glad of that,” I said feelingly. I picked up the rug and draped it over my arm.
Gwalchmai was fidgeting with his cloak. “Have you a spare brooch?” he asked.
I had one, at the bottom of my pack, a plain bronze clasp identical to the one that fastened my own cloak. I went and dug it out. The warrior thanked me and pinned his cloak with it. He seemed to have lost his own brooch, and I wondered at it: I’d noticed the clasp, and it was a valuable one if I was any judge of the thing. It seemed hard that he needed mine, which wasn’t worth a tenth of the other, but was valuable enough to me. But he was doing me a great favor, I reminded myself, in taking me to Camlann, and I ought to be generous with my possessions.
Morning apparently improved our potter’s temper, for he was almost pleasant, and his wife had produced bread with egg and sausage for breakfast. Gwalchmai had eaten already, and stayed in the stable to tend to his horse, so I settled down to my eggs alone, but with enthusiasm nonetheless. The potter leaned against the wall opposite, actually humming, and turning something in his hand. I was nearly done with my meal before I realized that what he held was Gwalchmai’s brooch.
I knew the potter could not have taken the brooch. That meant that Gwalchmai had given it to him as payment, but it was a vast over-payment, especially given the potter’s sullenness. No wonder the man was cheerful now. He’d made a very fine bargain indeed. But I didn’t like the thought of a pudgy-faced townsman profiting from his extortion. I finished my eggs thoughtfully and put the plate down. “I see my lord gave you his brooch.”
The potter smirked.
“You can give me the change from the payment,” I said. He eyed me, pretending not to understand what I meant. “Well, you don’t think my lord meant you to grow fat off what he won on the field of battle against the Saxons, do you?”
“He gave it to me.” But there was a defensive whine in the man’s tone. He didn’t believe for an instant that Gwalchmai had meant him to keep the brooch.
“Of course. He gave it to you, and you can give me more goods to make up the value of it. Or, if you prefer, you can give me the brooch back and I’ll give you the value of your hospitality—or rather, the value of a night’s hospitality, since I wouldn’t give a sick chicken for yours.”
“But this is a small brooch. It’s not worth a hen.”
“Not worth a hen!” I wondered if the man thought me an imbecile. “Man, you could buy an ox with that, and easily. Irish gold work! And those are garnets, not your Gaulish enamel.”
“Well, there was grain for the horses. That warhorse is a waster of grain, my expensive grain.”
“Not that expensive. All that you gave us and the horses together is worth no more than a scrawny capon.”
“It’s worth a pig at the least!”
“Well, the brooch is worth an ox, and you yourself admit that your goods are not worth that. Give it to me.”
A crafty look came into his pale eyes. “Stealing it from your lord?”
I tried to look unconcerned, though the man turned my stomach with his suppositions. “If you think that, I’ll call him and you can tell him that.”
The gleam faded from his
eyes, and reluctantly he set the brooch down on the table. “What’ll you give me, then?”
I hadn’t thought of it. I looked down at the clasp for a moment, then unfastened my own bronze brooch and set it down beside the other. “That.”
“That? I wouldn’t give a dozen eggs for it.”
We bargained for a while, and eventually the man accepted my bronze pin and a bronze ring, and gave me the brooch and a flask of his ale. I collected my gains, and fastened my cloak with Gwalchmai’s brooch.
“May you prosper,” I said to the potter, standing up.
“Vale,” he returned, speaking, like a true townsman, in Latin. Then he added, “You’re a farmer, aren’t you?”
I paused at the door. “I was that.”
“I knew it. Only farmers, and of them only householding clansmen, drive a bargain like that. God deliver Britain from such!”
I grinned and went out into the stable. The potter knew he’d got the worst of the bargain.
Gwalchmai had already saddled both horses and was waiting, and we mounted and were moving out of the town in short order. The sun was still low, and it glittered off the new snowfall with a jeweled brilliance. There were more clouds in the west, however, and I judged we’d have more snow before long. I ached with every step Llwyd took, but I felt cheerful despite it all. I waited for Gwalchmai to notice the fruits of my bargain.
He did, before too long. Soon after we had reached the road to Caer Ceri, just beyond the walls of Caer Gloeu, he suddenly frowned and reined in his horse. His eyes were fixed on the brooch.
I grinned inwardly, but put a serious look on my face. “Would you like your brooch back, Lord? I found it for you this morning.”
“Where did you…I gave that to the potter.”
“That I know. I’m wondering why. He could have bought an ox with it, and he deserved a thrashing.”
Gwalchmai rubbed his chin. “Could he? I didn’t know it was worth so much. Oh, I know I overpaid him, but what else? I am the Pendragon’s servant, and it is honorable to be free of what I own, and I haven’t any more gold, except what’s on my Ceincaled.”
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