Sword at Sunset (15 page)

‘It is a useful title. It gives me some kind of authority among the princes. But Artos the Bear has a more friendly sound.’

Around me the Companions with the grooms and drivers were already hard at work. A starved-looking young priest had appeared from somewhere to help Gwalchmai with the wounded, and the weary
horses were being led away. Amlodd, the cheerful freckle-faced lad who had taken Flavian’s place as my armor-bearer, came to take Arian from me, and I would have turned away about my own
work, but the old man stayed me with a brief touch on my arm, his gaze following two of the Companions who stumbled past at that moment, supporting a third into the shelter of the nearest doorway.
‘You have been fighting and have come sorely out of the battle, and you will have other things to do tonight than tell the story; but remember, when you have the leisure, that we should be
glad to know what has befallen – that is a matter which concerns us with the rest of Britain.’

I said, ‘There is not much to tell – a drawn battle, south of Eburacum. But you can sleep tonight without fear of Saxon fire in the thatch. There’s no wolf pack on our
heels ... Meanwhile there’s one thing more I need; one of your young men to saddle up and ride to the Dun of the Alderwoods with word for the Prince Kinmarcus that we are in his city and I
would come to speak with him as soon as may be.’

But I did not ride to the Dun after all, for three days later Kinmarcus himself rode in with a small band of hearth companions.

We had been getting the best-recovered of the horses out to pasture, to ease the strain on the fodder situation, and I returned to the fortress to see him dismounting from a dancing wild-eyed
pony mare on the parade ground before what had once been the officers’ block, while his men stood by with the carcasses of two red deer slung across the backs of a couple of ponies in their
midst.

He roared like a gale of wind when he saw me (a great voice he had for so small a man), and came to fling his arm around my shoulders as far up as he could reach. ‘Sa sa sa, my Bear Cub!
It is sun and moon to my eyes to see you after this long while!’

‘And trumpets in my heart to hear you again, Kinmarcus my Lord!’

He boomed with laughter. ‘The youngster brought me your word, that you were here in Deva and would come to speak with me; but I was for hunting in this direction, and so I but carried the
trail a little farther, and here I am – with the fruits of my hunting for a guest-gift.’

‘A fine gift! We shall feast like heroes tonight!’

He stood with his little legs straddled, and stared about him at my men and his own as they hauled away the carcasses for jointing, his bright masterful gaze disposing of them all in one sweep.
‘And meantime, while the feast is cooking, is there somewhere in this buzzing hornets’ nest where a man can talk with a chance of hearing his own voice without everyone else hearing it
too?’

‘Come up onto the ramparts. We keep a lookout over each of the gates, but no pacing sentries between. We can talk in peace up there.’

But when we had climbed the steps to the southwest corner of the rampart walk, he did not at once begin to talk of whatever it was that had brought him (for I was sure that, friends as we were,
this was no mere friendly visit), but leaned beside me on the coping, looking away toward the mountains. The storms of the last few days had rained and blown themselves out; it was a day of broken
light and drifting cloud shadow; and Yr Widdfa and his bodyguard of lesser heights stood clear, dark-bloomed with drifting shadows against the tumbled sky. It seemed to me, looking in the same
direction, that the light wind that siffled across the ramparts brought with it the smell of the high snows, and the chill heart-catching scent of leaf mold the mossy north sides of trees that was
the breath of the woods below Dynas Pharaon where I was bred. And then, as so often happened when I turned toward my own mountains, it seemed that the whisper of peat smoke was on the same wind,
and the aromatic sweetness of a woman’s hair. I wondered whether I had a son among those blue-shadowed glens and hidden valleys; a son seven years old, and trained in hate since first he
sucked in the venom with his mother’s milk ... No, I did not wonder; I knew. One can feel hate at a distance, as one can feel love ... I caught back the scent of the woods below Dynas Pharaon,
and clung to it in spirit as a man clings to a talisman in a dark place.

I suppose I shivered, for Kinmarcus beside me laughed and said, ‘What is it? A gray goose flying over your grave?’

‘Only a cloud over the sun.’

He glanced at me aside; it was a stupid thing to have said, for there was no cloud over the sun just then; but he did not press the thing further. ‘And now, let you tell me what has passed
this autumn.’

So it was to be my turn first. I told him. There was little enough to tell and the story was soon done.

‘And so you are come back here to Deva, to lick your wounds, and make your winter quarters.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘And what as to supplies?’

‘That was among my chief reasons for choosing Deva; the grazing ground for the horses, the Môn barley for us. I sent Bedwyr my lieutenant with the baggage carts and a small escort
off to Arfon this morning, to get what he can. I’d have given them a few days’ longer rest, but with winter upon us, I daren’t. We can only pray to God, as it is, that they will
get the grain through in time – and that the harvest has been good in Môn.’

‘And meanwhile?’

‘Meanwhile, we “live on the country.” I’ve paid your folk what I can. I can’t pay the fair price for our keep, there’s not enough in the war kist, there never
is; and
what
there is goes mostly to the horse dealers and the armorers.’

‘And to Arfon for corn?’

I shook my head. ‘That counts as tribute from my people. Some will come actually from my own estates. I am of the breed of the Lords of Arfon, as your chieftain here put it. They will let
me have the corn ... For the rest, there’s always the hunting – the stored grain in the granary and the boar in the woods; that is the way the outposts used to live in the old days,
isn’t it?’

Silence fell between us for a while, and then at last Kinmarcus said, ‘What thing was it that you would have come to the Dun to speak with me about?’

I turned a little, leaning one-elbowed on the coping, to look at him. ‘I want men.’

He smiled, that swift fierce smile that leapt into his face and out again, leaving it grave. ‘It is in my heart that you can gather men to you with little help from any princeling, my
friend.’

‘Given a free hand, yes.’

‘In Lindum, the hand was not free?’

‘Free enough, while the men were needed only to clear the Sea Wolves from within their own frontiers. I must have men to follow me out of the Deva hunting runs without let or hindrance
from their Prince, and across the mountains to Eburacum in the spring.’

‘Your hand is free,’ he said. ‘Set up your standard, and the young men will come like June bugs to a lantern. Only leave a few to defend our own women and our own hearth
places.’

‘The Scots raiders?’

‘The Scots raiders, and others. Maybe the Saxon wind blows across the mountains.’ He shifted abruptly, before I could ask his meaning, head up into the wind that lifted back his
fallow-streaked mane of hair. ‘What after Eburacum?’

‘It is not only Eburacum, though Eburacum is the heart of it. It is the whole eastern end of the Brigantes country. After that we go wherever the sorest need calls us; southeast into the
Iceni territory in all likelihood. The Saxons call all that part for their own Northfolk and Southfolk, already.’

Kinmarcus said abruptly, ‘And yet I believe that if you are wise, you will take the way north, beyond the Wall, and that without overmuch delay.’

I looked at him quietly, aware that this at last was what he had come to say. ‘What is the reading of that riddle, my Lord Kinmarcus?’

And he returned my look, eye into eye. ‘I also have a thing to speak of and a tale to tell,’ he said. ‘It is so that I did not wait your coming, but hunted toward Deva. If the
signs and portents do not lie, by next midsummer the heather will be ablaze through half the lowlands of Caledonia; by harvest, the fire will have leapt the Wall.’

‘Another riddle to answer the first. What does it mean?’

‘There has been unrest in southern Caledonia for a year and more. We have felt it stirring, we who hold the princedoms of the North. Even so far down from the Wall as this, we have felt
it, but the thing was formless, like a little wind on a summer’s day that blows all ways at once through the long grass. Now the thing has taken form and we know from whence the wind blows.
The Saxons have called in the Painted People to their aid, promising them a share of the fat pickings when Britain goes down; and the Painted People have sent out the Cran Tara, even overseas into
Hibernia, summoning the Scots, and made common cause with certain of the British chieftains who think they see the chance to break free of all bonds and stand proud and alone – the fools,
hastening to set their necks under the Saxon’s heel.’

‘Earl Hengest’s heel?’ There was a small shock of cold in me.

‘I think not. Possibly Octa has a hand in it, but it is more likely in my mind that the thing lies with the true Saxons of the north coast. Oh aye, with us the one name serves for all, but
Hengest is a Jute, remember, and the Sea Wolves have not yet learned to combine.’ His voice dropped to a brooding note. ‘If they learn before we do, then that is the end of
Britain.’

‘How do you know all this?’ I said, after a pause.

‘By a mere trick of chance, or as some might say, by the Grace of God. Not many days since, a currach bound for the Caledonian coast was driven off course by a northwesterly wind and came
ashore on ours. The men on board were an embassy of some kind, for they carried no weapons save their dirks, though they were of the warrior kind, and among the wreckage there were green branches
such as men carry on an embassy for a sign of peace, and nowhere any sign of the whitened war shields. Only one man came alive out of the wreckage, and he had been broken senseless across the
rocks. The men who drew him to land would have finished him then and there, as one finishes a wounded viper, but he cried out something about the Painted People and the Saxon kind. That was enough
to make the man with the dagger hold his hand. They carried him up to the fisher huts in the hope that there might be more to be got from him – and sent word to me.’

‘Torture?’ I said. I am not squeamish where the Scots or the Saxons are concerned, but I have never liked the business, needful though it be at times, of roasting a man over a slow
fire or slipping a dagger point under his fingernails to come at the thing he has to tell. It is not pity, but merely that I feel too sharply the skin parch and blister, the dagger point shrieking
under my own nails.

‘In the state he was in, if we had tried torture then, he would have found his escape by dying under our hands; so we let him bide for a few days, in hope that he might regain strength a
little, and in the end there was no need. The fever took him. It was a talking fever, and he talked for a day and a night before he died.’

‘You are sure that his story was not the mere raving of delirium?’

‘I have seen many men die in my time; I know the difference between the raving of delirium and a man crying out in fever the secrets on his heart ... Besides, when one comes to think of it,
the story is a likely one, isn’t it?’

‘Horribly likely. If it be true, pray God they cannot get the fire blazing before we have had time to deal with Hengest in Eburacum. That must come first – it is in my mind that next
year is likely to be something of a race against time.’

That night we did indeed feast like heroes, and afterward made merry, though we missed Bedwyr and his harp. And next morning after we had made certain plans and exchanged certain promises
between us, Kinmarcus rode off with his companions, the little wild-eyed mare dancing under him like a bean on a bake stone.

The day that followed was a good day; one of those days that do not greatly matter in the pattern of things, but linger, comely-shaped and clear-colored in the memory when the days of splendor
and disaster have become confused. I had had no time until then to spare for anything farther afield than the in-pastures where some of our mounts were already out at grass. But that morning, after
Kinmarcus was away, I sent for Arian, who was rested by that time, and with Cei and Flavian and young Amlodd, rode out to look at the horse runs.

Winter, which had seemed almost upon us, had drawn back a little, and the day had the softness of early autumn; a light west wind soughing across the gently undulating levels, the sun veiled by
a silver haze, and the shriveled brown leaves drifting from the long belts of oak coppice shaped askew by the Atlantic gales, that crested many of the faint lifts of land. Here and there, little
dark cattle turned to stare at us with slowly moving jaws as we rode by – fewer than there would have been last month, before the autumn slaughtering – or a knot of ponies would scatter
and canter a bowshot away, then turn to stare also, tossing their rough heads and snorting. Near the villages men were at the late autumn plowing followed by a wheeling and crying cloud of gulls,
and the smell of moist freshly turned earth was a thing to shake the heart. A few miles from Deva we came to the huddle of turf bothies among hay and bracken and bean stacks, where the herdsmen
lived; and were told by a small man with a squint to make one cross one’s fingers and the bowlegs of one born on horseback, that Hunno was out with the herd. So we headed for the long shallow
valley of our own training runs.

In Arfon our breeding runs were enclosed for the most part with dry-stone walling, for loose stone is plentiful among the hills; here, too, there was some stone, but it was less easily come by,
and in some places, taking advantage of scrub and coppice there already, the dry-stone gave place to hedges of roughly steeped thorn, while at the lower end, which was marshy, the valley was closed
by a dike and turf wall.