The Dog and the Wolf

by Poul Anderson

  “I will speak openly, lord.” Eochaid said at last. “You know what misfortune has made me homeless.”

  Aryagalatis looked hard through the firelight at the marred, once beautiful face. “I do,” he answered carefully. “Your deed will keep you from your motherland forever.”

  Eochaid held his voice steady. “Injustice and mistreatment drove me mad. It is not the first time such has happened to a hero. Myself and these loyal men have proven on the Romans that we keep the goodwill of the Gods.”

  “I think that may be true. But say on.”

  “We are weary of wandering. Thin is the comfort in a camp on an islet or with a woman wrenched from her home. We have homes of our own to make, wives to wed, sons to beget and rear. It is land we ask of you and troth we will give you, Aryagalatis.”

  The king nodded. “Sure and that comes as no surprise. Well, Alba has land aplenty, once the Cruthini are cleared from it. And since they do often come back, we have always need of fighting men. Let us talk more about this during the winter, Eochaid maqq Éndae.”

  A sigh as of a wave went through the house.

  The exile doubled a fist on his thigh. “You may well also want all the spears you can find,” he said, “when Niall of the Nine Hostages attacks your folk across the water. He may not stop there—though surely you will be crossing over to give help and take revenge.”

  Aryagalatis frowned. “This we will not talk of. That could be bad luck. I know he is your enemy; but while you bide among us, you and your men, you will not be provoking his wrath. Do you understand?”

  “I do.” Eochaid forced sullenness from his voice. “You will find me grateful, lord. Then, if ever the time does come—But now we want only to wish for your good fortune. May you feed fat the ravens of the Mórrigu!”

  XI

  1

  Midwinter’s early darkness had fallen before Gratillonius got his horse properly stabled. Under a thick overcast, Confluentes was a still deeper huddle of black. Though he knew every house, street, lane, almost every rut, he stumbled often enough to make him swear at himself for not bringing along a groom with a lantern. There was too much night within him as well as without.

  At last he found his own door and passed through into light of a sort. Tallow candles in wooden holders burned around the main room. They mingled their reek with the closeness that a couple of charcoal braziers laid in the air. Nonetheless a tinge of dank chill persisted. Summer felt ages agone.

  His manservant took cloak and coat from him and said the maid, who was actually a middle-aged widow, would set forth a meal as soon as might be. Not knowing when to expect his return, she had perforce let preparation wait. “Bring me a stoup of wine,” Gratillonius said. “Nay, mead.” If wine was worth drinking, it had gotten sufficiently scarce in these parts and at this season—what with piracy, banditry, and the fear of them cutting away at commerce—that he’d rather save it for happier occasions.

  Runa entered from the inner house. She wore a shapeless dress of brown wool, thick socks beneath sandals, and a wimple, under which he knew her hair was coiled in tight braids. “Well, you’ve come,” she said. They had taken to speaking Latin in the presence of his servants, who were Ysan countryfolk with scant grasp of the language. Neither of them liked having words of theirs bandied about. “Where were you?”

  “I went riding.”

  Her arched brows lifted higher still. “Indeed? All day, when you’ve been telling me you haven’t half the hours you need for guiding your people?”

  He checked an angry retort. That was not what he had declared, and well she knew it. Crises, most of them petty but important to those concerned, had a way of springing up in bunches, like weeds. Otherwise he had undertakings to supervise, military instruction and drill to maintain, dickerings with Osismii and Aquilonians to carry out. But much of his time he spent standing by, passing it with wood and leather in his little workshop.

  “A day is very short, these months,” he said. “I needed to get out by myself.”—use his muscles, gallop along empty roads, range afoot into leafless woods.

  “You might have had the goodness to stop at the basilica and tell me you’d be late.” She spent her own days in the former manor house. Sometimes she visited the homes of settlers, gathering their memories of Ys and its history, but oftenest she summoned them to her. The habit of deference to a priestess remained in them.

  His patience ruptured. “Damnation, must I always be spoke to your hub?”

  The manservant brought his goblet. He raised it and swallowed. The mead was well brewed, dry, flavored with woodruff, a pungency recalling meadow margins where cornel bloomed. His mood mildened. This was no easy life for her either. “Well, I should have told you,” he admitted, “but the news I’d gotten—Apuleius had the letter passed on to me at sunrise—that drove everything else out of my head.” It flitted through him that formerly Apuleius would have come in person, or invited him to Aquilo, and they would have talked.

  “Oh.” She also gentled. Somehow that made him aware of her pallor, even in this dull light. She had been ill for several days of late, keeping to herself in the manor house as if too proud to let him see her thus. Recovery advanced, but as yet she didn’t quite have her full strength back. “Bad. From the South?”

  He nodded. She came to him, took his elbow, guided him to a bench built against the wall. They sat down together. Straw ticking rustled beneath them.

  He gestured an order that the servant bring drink for her, and stared into his as he dragged forth: “The Visigoths broke down every defense. They’re looting and burning all through northern Italy.”

  It was a minor wonder, perhaps, that couriers had brought the word this far, this soon. Only last month had King Alaric invaded. The war was not much older than that, it had broken out with such stunning swiftness and ferocity. Before, Emperors Arcadius in the East and Honorius in the West—rather, their ministers—seemed to have made peace with those warriors. Alaric had become Master of Soldiers in eastern Illyricum. The thought was like poison in Gratillonius, that quite possibly Constantinople had then secretly persuaded him to fall on Rome.

  Be that as it may, “The Imperium has to call in reinforcements,” he said. “The letter mentioned troops on their way from the Rhenus. Come sailing weather, if the war is still going on, I wouldn’t be surprised but what they’re hailed out of Britannia too. And then what about the barbarians along those frontiers?”

  “Horrible.” Runa’s tone stayed level and she did not reach for his hand as Tambilis, say, would have. “But what can we do except continue in those tasks God has set us?”

  He grimaced. “Mine is to hurry up the reconstruction of our defenses. If only those sh—those donkeys in Turonum would so much as answer my letters about it!”

  “Don’t start pacing again. You know how I dislike that. In a year’s time, ten years, a hundred, this will be past.”

  “Like Ys,” he said bitterly.

  “Well, Ys had its woes too, century after century. Just the same, what I am writing will be glorious as long as the world endures.”

  The man brought her mead. She sipped as she talked on about her book. It could not simply be written from beginning to end. Her education came back to her in pieces; suddenly she would remember something that happened generations ago, and record it before she forgot again. The other survivors had minds less orderly. “And you must be more forthcoming yourself, Gratillonius. I really must insist you tell me things, tell me in full. I know it hurts you, but you should have the manhood to do it, considering what this means. Oh, and if you’d only trouble yourself to make notes, how much toil you’d spare me, instead of puttering at your bench like a common carpenter.”

  He refrained from remarks about duties—promises, at least—owed on her part. When Apuleius and Corentinus agreed to jointly sponsor her history, it had been with the understanding that she would continue copying books as well, but thus far she had not again touched that task. When Gratillonius
once brought the matter up, she flared that the work was fit for any slave who had had a year’s schooling.

  Tribune and bishop abstained from reproaches. Indeed, the latter had said little to her and nothing to Gratillonius about their unblessed union. She was just a catechumen, her man an unbeliever. Yet he hated to suppose Corentinus and Apuleius had dismissed them from their hearts. He hoped they hoped the pair would repent and reform. However that was, he rarely saw the churchman these days.

  “—scrawling on wretched wooden slabs. When will you get me a proper supply of papyrus? Or parchment. You said you would.”

  “It’s not that easy,” Gratillonius told her. How many times already had he done so? “Traffic from the South goes by fits and starts. Skins have more urgent uses. Besides, scraping them and the rest of the preparation, that’s long labor.”

  “You can find idle hands aplenty to train. Let your hunters bring in deer to replace the sheepskins. Talk to Apuleius. He can arrange such things. Hell scarcely give me a civil word.”

  No, thought Gratillonius, that family had likewise drifted apart from him. Not that there was a breach, anything like that. He and the senator continued to meet, confer, work as a team. Sometimes when they had been at it till late he stayed for supper. But the conversations didn’t range around as they used to, and he didn’t get invitations simply for pleasure, and he seldom encountered Rovinda or the children.

  Had he given offense? That wasn’t reasonable. They had taken him for what he was before, the nine times wedded King of Ys. He did nothing now that they wouldn’t expect of such a man, or of many a Christian. Now and then he thought he glimpsed sorrow in the eyes of Apuleius or Corentinus. Of course, in those eyes he was debauching Runa, the convert. … Whatever the cause, a constraint had come upon them, and begotten its like in him. Not knowing what to say or do, he kept as withdrawn as possible.

  “—if we moved to a city, a real city, Treverorum or Lugdunum or Burdigala, someplace with intelligent people, books, supplies.”

  “I have my duty here,” he snapped. And no wish whatsoever to become one more drop in a bucket.

  “A decent house, at the absolute least!”

  That had ignited their first quarrel, and others afterward. She refused to leave the manorial one. True, she could far better work in its well-lighted and hypocaust-heated rooms. But for his part, he would not move in with her. He declared that his proper station was inside Confluentes, readily accessible to his people, quickly able to reach any trouble. His private self knew it would feel wrong, like some sly betrayal. They settled on her spending her days there, most of her nights here; but she hated these rough quarters and kept trying to change his mind.

  “My lord and lady, your meal awaits you.” The servant came as a deliverer, Gratillonius thought wryly.

  His mood grew mellower as he went in with Runa, sat across from her—in the other place they would have reclined side by side, Roman style—and shared food and drink. She too seemed glad to have escaped a fight and anxious to let the newest scratches heal. They could converse interestingly, as he could with few men. This evening she asked him to tell her what he knew about the Goths.

  That was not a great deal. Their tribes were divided between a western and an eastern branch. Wandering down from Germanic lands, they had settled in regions north of the Danuvius and the Euxinus. Later the thrust of a wholly wild and terrible breed, the Huns, caused them to seek refuge among the Romans. They proved to be formidable soldiers, especially as cavalrymen, but untrustworthy subjects, apt to rebel. Most became Christian, though of the Arian persuasion. … This led on to Gratillonius’s experiences with other barbarians, Scoti and Picti, in Britannia, and thus to recollections of his boyhood.

  Aye, he thought in Ysan, I ought to stand grateful for the good she does. ’Twas not only loosing me from the dread of the King’s ancient captivity. However, that was wonder enough, and—She’s fair to behold, like a dark-eyed ivory hawk; and if she lacks such ardor as certain of the Queens gave me, still, she is a woman.

  At the end, he smiled and asked, “Shall we to our rest? The hour is indeed late, and I’d liefest not be overwearied.”

  She looked away. “I’m sorry,” she replied in Latin. “The moon forbids.”

  He sat straight up on his bench. “No, wait. That was—a dozen days ago, I think.”

  “You know what I mean,” she said.

  He did. She wanted no child to weigh her down, endanger her life, and burden her for years afterward. So she had told him, one night during which his anger grew flame-hot and hers snow-cold.

  Resentment lifted afresh. “Go back to the manor, then. I’ll send Udach along with a light for you.”

  She met his look almost calmly. “Not that either,” she murmured.

  We draw too near the edge, too often, Gratillonius thought, and accompanied her to their bedroom.

  She set down the candle she had borne from the dining table and turned around toward him. Has she decided otherwise? he wondered. Gladness came to a glow. He stepped closer. “Earlier I talked of being spoke to your hub,” he laughed. “Suddenly I see how right that was.”

  She raised a palm. “No. Not thus.” The thin lips curved. “But I do want you to be happy.”

  He could have forced her. That would doubtless have been the end of their association. Ysan women were seldom submissive. He stopped and let her approach him.

  What followed slaked the flesh but left him feeling unfulfilled. He slept lightly, several times waking from dreams where someone kept calling him.

  —The slightest wan glimmer showed through a crack in a shutter. He knew he would sleep no further. Runa did, and for a little while he lay by the warmth of her, but restlessness drove him to his feet. Fumbling in murk, he found his tunic on its peg and slipped it over his head against the chill. Knee-length, it would serve. He wanted fresh air.

  Beyond the door he saw houses nearly formless among shadows. The east had barely lightened. No sunrise could break through such cloud cover. It was the Birthday of Mithras. Gratillonius rarely saw a calendar, but everybody knew when solstice happened, and from that he could reckon this day.

  How leaden it was. Not that that mattered. He had forsaken Mithras as Mithras had forsaken him. Yet his mind flew off across years, to a young man on the Wall, and another who hailed the same dawn and met him at sunset for prayers. O Parnesius, comrade of the heather, it’s been so long. Where are you now? Are you now, any more?

  2

  Spring cast green over the low land around Deva. Trees budded and bloomed, sudden amazing whiteness, as if bits of the clouds that wandered overhead had drifted to earth. Birdflocks were returning. Showers left rainbows, sparkles, and clean new smells.

  On a small and sparsely wooded hill, men fought. Shouts, yells, footfalls, blasts on horns, rattle and clash of metal, hiss of arrows, thud of slingstones frightened robins and finches from their nests. Carrion crows flapped watchful. A mile away, the city walls mirrored their rose hue in the river gliding past them. Round about, smoke stained heaven where villages lately sacked and torched still smoldered.

  Far outnumbered, the Romans made the hill a strongpoint whence they cast back wave after Scotic wave. They made the trees their fellows in the shield-rank, as if they had grown roots of their own. When a man sank, one behind dragged him dead or alive inside the square and took his place. Mail-clad bodies nonetheless sprawled or, hideously, moved and moaned on the torn sod farther down. Most of the fallen wore much less, coat and breeches or only the kilt, some among them naked. Blood seemed twice red on their lily skins. Sweat and death bestank the air.

  Again Niall shouted to his warriors and led them in a rush. Bones broke under his feet. Once a loop of gut from an opened belly wrapped about his ankle. He kicked it off without slowing. Helmets gleamed ahead. His blade leaped up, down, right, left. A hostile point struck into his targe. Before the hand behind could pull it free, that hand dangled from a wrist cut halfway through. Niall drove the scr
eaming creature before him, onto its back. He was into the Roman line. A banner on a pole hung before his eyes. He would hew his way there and cast it down.

  Shields pressed against him. Swords reached from around them. The sheer weight forced him off. The line closed anew. Breath quick and harsh in his throat, he backed down the slope. The men of Ériu washed past him.

  They rallied as before in the swale below, killed accessible enemy wounded, did what they could for their own, clustered around their tuathal chiefs. A certain quiet fell. Their will and courage stayed high, but again they had taken hurts and losses without victory, and needed a rest. They sat or lay widespread on the damp ground. Waterskins went among them.

  “I got a look this time,” said Uail maqq Carbri. “They haven’t much left to call on. A few more charges, and we’ll open gaps they can’t fill.”

  “Those will be costly, darling,” Niall warned, “and may take us past nightfall.” He scowled at the westering sun. No moon would rise until a sliver did shortly before daybreak. He would be unwise if he made any assault in the dark. It would give the Romans, who worked together like arms and legs on a single man, too much advantage. Moreover, the bravest among his lads was prone to terror at night, when anything might stalk abroad. Let fear take hold of the host, and at best they would stumble over each other as they fled wailing back to camp. At worst they would scatter blindly and morning would find most of them alone, ready prey for the Britons.

  Was it mere bad luck that had brought that troop here? The word from his spies had seemed a promise from the Gods. The legion that, time out of mind, had lived in yonder city was to leave. As soon as the season allowed, it would march out, across Britannia to a southern seaport, and embark for war across the Channel. Already depleted, the two that stayed behind could hardly garrison Deva too. Until the Romans got together a new force, if they were able, that whole rich countryside, hitherto almost untouched because of the legion, lay like a virgin defenseless. Niall would be the first man there.