Hawk of May

by Gillian Bradshaw

  Leaving the stables on my first day as Cerdic’s thrall, I saw a crowd of men gathered in a circle on a hillside just beyond the Roman part of the town, and I went to investigate. Aldwulf had mentioned that he gave a horse to Cerdic to prove his power at sorcery, and Cerdic had accepted it as proof, although unable to break the horse. As I came through the circle and saw the stallion that reared in the center of the ring, I understood why.

  No earthly mare had borne that horse. The steeds of the Sidhe, praised in a hundred songs, show their immortality in every line; and that horse was a lord among even such horses as those.

  He stood three hands taller at the shoulder than the largest horse I had seen before, and that had been a giant of a plow-horse. He was lovely: pure white, splendid and powerful as a storm on the sea. The white neck curved like the sea’s waves before they break, the mane was like foam flung up from the rocks. No seagull skims the water as lightly as those hooves skimmed the earth, and no sea-eagle struck at the ground with such fierceness or such freedom. The horse’s nostrils were flared wide and red, defiant in anger, his eyes dark and savage with pride. I held my breath at the sight of him.

  The Saxon who had just been thrown scrambled out of the way, and some grooms from Cerdic’s stable drove the horse back to the center of the ring with whips and flapping cloaks, cursing him.

  “That beast is a man-killer,” said one of the thralls, who was standing a few feet from me. “Cerdic cannot believe that he will ever tame it.”

  “He is beautiful, that horse,” I said. The man looked at me, surprised and suspicious. He recognized me, shrugged uncomfortably.

  “Of course,” he said, “and strong and swift. He could outrun and out-stay any horse in Britain, that one. But what is the use of all of it, since he can’t be ridden? You are new here and wouldn’t know, but we have tried for a month now to break him, with kindness and with blows, with riding and with starving, and we are no nearer to taming him than we were when Cerdic first acquired him. I know horses, and I say that this one will die before he obeys a man. And before he dies he will probably take some of us with him…Watch out, there! Hey, you!…Cerdic won’t name him till he’s ridden him, but we of his house call the beast Ceincaled, Harsh Beauty, for that, surely, is what he is.”

  It took little time for me to see the truth of the man’s words. The horse tried to kill every human near him. There was no viciousness in these attempts, no hatred of humanity such as one finds in an animal which has been badly mistreated, but instead a wild, pure, elemental power which could bear no subjection. He was proud, Ceincaled, not with a pride such as men have, but as a falcon or eagle is proud. He was like the music in Lugh’s Hall: splendid, but not for men. I wondered what dark spell of Aldwulf’s had captured the stallion and brought him from the Plain of Joy to captivity and eventual death in the lands of men.

  There were times during the next two weeks when I felt a strong sense of kinship with the stallion. I was not an immortal, but my problem was similar. I was trapped, and all my efforts to escape only wasted my time and brought nearer the time set down for my death.

  Cerdic had all of his large warband with him in Sorviodu-num (to use the Roman name): three hundred and twelve picked warriors, who guarded the fort. He had also an army of some five thousand—as always, the exact number was uncertain. The camp was continually prepared for war, and raiding parties left or returned nearly every day, if only from short forays. I thought of trying to slip from the camp when one of these arrived, and hung about the gate and a low spot in the walls for a while, until I was warned off the guards, who, besides being exceedingly vigilant, were suspicious. I considered the forest I had walked through, and looked out over it from the hill-top center of the fortress. I thought it must be easy to disappear into the trees. Unfortunately, though, the forest only extended towards the north-east. There were miles of open plain adjoining the town on the west, where lay the nearest British kingdom. And I was watched, even if there had been some way to cross the walls and the plains. No one forbade me to roam about the town, but some thrall or some warrior always seemed to be about. Cerdic did not wish his semi-human sacrifice to escape. It disturbed me nearly as much as the fear of death and my still unresolved fears about myself. I had always wanted solitude, and to be denied it grated against my nerves.

  I prayed to the Light, but he did not respond. I began to want, and want badly, simply to draw Caledvwlch and try to splash my way out of the fort. I knew that it would be certain death to do so, but at least it would be a clean death, and a warrior’s death. I was tired of being a thrall. I was trapped, and that word seemed to resound continually through my mind, all of each day. At night I dreamt of it, and I thought of it before anything else each morning when I woke. Trapped, like a hawk that had flown by mistake into a fisherman’s net, who, when he beats his wings only discovers how truly entangled he is, and exhausts his strength against the ropes.

  I became aware of time with a terrifying intensity, of how the sun rising in the morning splashed the sky with colors whose softness I had never noticed so clearly before; of how the shadows shortened and lengthened as the hours passed during the day. At night I watched the moon, sliding from full down into its fourth quarter, growing thinner with every night that passed. The moon was my friend, my ally. While she still shone I would not die. But she was leaving the sky, and when she had gone, all would be darkness.

  Sometimes I felt that the Light had withdrawn in the same way. After alerting me to Cerdic’s plan, it became as silent as the moon. Two weeks is not a long time, but those two weeks, full of the tension of waiting and the terror of the trap, seemed endless and, at the same time, seemed to be gone at once. I felt that I had been abandoned by my lord. I was left to myself, and I was afraid of myself as well. I cannot say why it so terrified me to think of myself as not human. Most men would be pleased to consider themselves apart from humanity—or they think they would be. It was not the loneliness, though that may have been a part of it, for I was accustomed to loneliness. Perhaps it was simply fear of the unknown. All fear what they do not understand, the more so when that unknown is a part of themselves.

  So I watched the Saxons trying to break Ceincaled, and looked after the horse when he was stabled, to free myself from myself. The purity of the white horse seemed to defy and mock the complexity of the terrors that beset me. His battle was the one I longed for, the simple brilliance of physical struggle.

  Two weeks. The moon became a sliver in the sky, a thin hair of light, and the spaces between the stars were very black. The next night there would be no moon. The next night…it was my last day, and I had decided nothing. When evening came, if there should still be no escape, I had resolved to draw Caledvwlch and try to see whether I could kill Aldwulf and Cerdic before they killed me.

  I stood again in the circle that hemmed in Ceincaled and watched Cerdic try again to ride the horse, and again be thrown. Across from me, Aldwulf was chewing his beard. He had been trying some new sorcery on the horse to please Cerdic, but his spells had failed and he was shamed and angry.

  “By the worm!” said Cerdic, picking himself up. “I have been cheated.”

  He had. I could guess the price that Aldwulf had persuaded him to pay for the horse—a human life, the usual price in bargains with Yffern—and, while the life of some prisoner or thrall might be counted cheap for such a horse, Ceincaled was as useless to Cerdic as if he had been a lame cart-horse. Even though Ceincaled could leave behind every horse in the camp…

  By the sun and the wind! Mentally I swore Agravain’s favorite oath. I had been blind, looking about in the night of my own shadow, when the sun was behind me. How, I asked myself, beginning to find it very funny, how could I have ever been so stupid?

  And was my other problem so simple as this? I asked myself as I edged round to Cerdic. All my questioning of my identity, would it too come clear in a burst of light when I looked in the right
direction? My High King, lord…

  “My lord King,” I said to Cerdic, who had noticed my approach and was eyeing me without enthusiasm. “Could I try to ride the horse?”

  Cerdic gave me a furious glare, then hit me hard enough to make me stagger for balance. “You insolent dog! You slave, do you think to succeed where a king failed? I should have you whipped!” I saw that I had misjudged the degree of his anger about the horse and bowed my head, trying to think and rubbing my jaw.

  “Cerdic,” Aldwulf interrupted suddenly. “You might let him try.”

  “What!”

  “They may be from the same land. Who knows? The boy has been caring for the horse.” Aldwulf’s thought was plain. I would use magic on the horse, tame it, be killed, and the king would have both my sword and the horse. Aldwulf was smiling in a very satisfied fashion. It had been a sore point with him, I think, that his fine horse was unridable.

  Cerdic looked at me, remembering what Aldwulf said I was. “Very well,” he said at last. “Try, then.”

  “Thank you, Cyning Cerdic,” I said softly. “I will do my best.”

  Cerdic nodded to Aldwulf. I turned back towards Ceincaled.

  He had been caught by the grooms again, and waited patiently while they held him, conserving his strength for his rider. I walked over, thanked the man who held him, and took the bridle. As I held it, I suddenly doubted my ability to ride him, which a minute before had seemed so clear. I had always been good with horses, and the stallion knew me now, but that might well be no use at all. He objected not so much to the Darkness in his riders as to being ridden at all. It would take a spirit equal to his own to hold him, and even then he might die rather than accept defeat. But I had to ride him, or die that evening.

  I stroked the white neck, whispering to the horse. He jerked away from me, then quieted, waiting, preparing for the battle. He was more intelligent than an ordinary horse. I had watched him fight Cerdic and knew this.

  I ran my hand over his back and withers, tightened the girth of the saddle, speaking in a sing-song, in Irish, no longer caring who heard. In my heart I asked the Light to rein in that proud spirit for me, and grant me the victory. Then I placed my left hand on the stallion’s shoulder and vaulted to his back.

  The only way to describe what happened next is to say that he exploded. The world dissolved into a white cloud of mane, and Ceincaled fought with all his terrible strength and limitless pride. I held his mane and the reins both, gripping hard with my knees and bending down on to his neck, and barely managed to stay on.

  He circled the ring, rearing and plunging, and the onlookers were a blur of flesh, bright colors, steel, and distorted shouts. I felt that I tried to ride the storm, or hold the north wind with a bridle. It was beyond the power of any human, and now that I tried my strength against an immortal I knew that I was no more than human. Ceincaled was pure, fierce, wild beyond belief. He had no master and could accept none…

  And he was glorious.

  I stopped caring about past and future, about thought and feeling. Aldwulf might hang me or I might fall from Ceincaled and be trampled, broken by the wildness of the power I had tried to master. But even as I saw these things they became as distant and unimportant as an abandoned game. There was a sweet taste at the back of my mouth, like mint in the middle of a rainy night. Ceincaled was leaping again, clothed in thunder, and death and life were both unreal. All that mattered was the sweet madness which possessed both the horse and me, madness which had swept on to me from within and changed the world to something I could no longer recognize, or care to. When I had drawn Caledvwlch there had been something of the sensation of light, but this was more a lightness, a blazing sweetness in my mind. I loved Ceincaled totally, and in mid-leap he felt it and returned the love, and we were no longer fighting each other but flying, dazzled with delight, filled with the same and equal fierceness.

  Ceincaled reared one last time and neighed, a challenge to all the world, then dropped onto all four legs in the center of the circle and stood tensely still.

  Through the battle-madness that made the world seem sharp-edged, almost frozen, I saw the onlookers staring at me in wonder, Aldwulf frowning in a sudden unease, and Cerdic, eyes alight with greed.

  “Good,” said the King of the West Saxons. His voice sounded far away. “Now give me my horse.”

  I laughed, and he started, flushing with anger. Aldwulf, realizing now what was happening, grabbed Cerdic’s arm. Cerdic began to turn to him, an angry question forming on his tongue…

  I had Caledvwlch out, and its light leapt up, pure and brilliant as a star. Ceincaled rushed at Cerdic. Someone was screaming in terror.

  Cerdic flung himself aside, rolled, Ceincaled’s hooves missing him by inches. Aldwulf, pressing back into the crowd, was less quick and less fortunate. He cried out before my sword touched him, blinded by its light, shrieking some curse—then screamed as the blade struck him. But Ceincaled struck the rope that bounded the make-shift ring, breaking it, and my hand was jerked back. Aldwulf was not killed, though he would miss his left eye, and I wanted to go back and finish him, for he deserved destruction; but Ceincaled was stretching into a run and I forgot Aldwulf with the taste of the wind.

  The Roman streets swept past, blurred with speed, and behind us someone was shouting to stop me, kill me. A warrior on the street ran into my path, dropped to one knee, his long thrusting spear braced against me. Everything narrowed to him as I approached. I saw his face, grinning in fear and excitement, sweat gleaming on it. I saw the sun flash off the tip of his spear, and loved the leap of it, loved him as well, knew that Ceincaled was only three paces away. I touched the horse with my knee, forcing him to swerve the barest fraction, and the spear-tip, flashing forward, missed us. With my left hand I caught the shaft and with my right swung down Caledvwlch. My mind was still dazzled with madness as the sword struck, blazing, and the warrior’s neck spurted red as it was cut through. Then I was past. There were others, at the gate. I killed the nearest with the spear I had taken from the first, and cut through the spear-shaft of the second and let Ceincaled run over him. I found that I was singing, and laughed again. How could they hope to stop me? The Saxons were fleeing now. One threw a spear, but I swerved Ceincaled and it missed. My horse leaned into the race, and there were no others before me, only the open gate and the Roman road stretching into the west. We flew down it like a gull, like the hawk of my name. The Saxons were far behind. Even when they mounted a party to follow us, they were far behind. Too far to catch up again, I thought, remotely; too far ever to catch us again. We were free.

  Eight

  The rest of that race is not clear in my mind. It was a sweet rhythm of flying hooves and wind, and the empty hills of the plain before and about me after we abandoned the road. I sang for pure joy, laughing, loving the world and all men in it, even Cerdic, whom I would gladly have killed had he been here. Oh, the Light was a strong lord, a great High King. Any warrior would be proud to serve him.

  It was late afternoon, and Ceincaled began to tire a little. I reined him to a canter. We still had a long way before us, I reminded myself.

  How long a way? I could not guess. I was totally uncertain of distances in Britain, and had no idea of how far we had come. A great distance, surely, at such a speed. Some of the blindingly bright light died down within my mind, and I looked about myself.

  I was nearing the western edge of the plain. The land to either side of me looked something like the Orcades in that it was open and hilly, but these hills were wider and greener. Checking by the sun I discovered that I was going north as well as west, and realized that I must have been doing so for some time. I had a vague recollection of the Roman road following the curve of a hill and Ceincaled galloping off it on to the plain, north-west. It was good, I decided, that we had turned west on the Roman road. If we had not—and in that madness we could easily not have—Ceincaled and I woul
d have gone tearing off east, into the heart of the Saxon kingdoms. The thought made me smile, and the rest of the ecstasy departed. I slowed Ceincaled to a trot and turned him due west again.

  Westward the hills became steeper, and soon there was a dark line of forest before us. Before we reached this, however, we came upon a river. It was a small, sleepy river, still dark with spring mud, and it calmly reflected the oak trees on its further bank. I rode northwards along the bank for a way, until I found a place where the bank was low enough for Ceincaled to cross it easily.

  When he approached the water, the horse snuffled interestedly. I dismounted and let him drink, talking to him softly while he did. He was thirsty and wet with sweat, but, incredibly, not hot to steaming, as any other horse would have been after anything resembling our race.

  Watching the horse drink made me thirsty. As I knelt by the water, I saw that I was still holding Caledvwlch. I smiled and began to sheath the sword—then realized that there was blood on it.

  I remembered, with an almost physical shock, the Saxons who had got in my way. I remembered Aldwulf falling back unconscious into the circle of Saxons, the left side of his face cut open, and the others dying, and how I had laughed. I dropped the sword on the grass and leant back on my heels, staring at it, as though the killing had been its responsibility and not mine. Then I saw that the horse was drinking too much, and stood to pull him away from the water and walk him about to cool him down. I had killed. I had just killed three men, and horribly wounded a fourth, and I had not even been aware of it until now. No, killed four men, if one counted Connall. But that had been mercy, and this was…it was war, a battle.

  I let the horse go back to the water and drink some more. Lugh had given me his blessing, to carry into whatever battles lay before me. Could that madness that had possessed me be such a blessing? CuChulainn, they say, went mad in battle, and he was the son of Lugh. There are kinds of madness which are said to be divine or sacred. Mine had felt so. But it frightened me, that I could kill and not care. But could I say that I had been wrong to escape as I did?