The Eagle and the Raven (40 page)

Emrys came to stand beside Caradoc. “Your wife’s shield-bearer did not come with you,” he observed, and Caradoc answered curtly, “Eurgain has no shield-bearer in her train.” He thought of adding that Eurgain had no shield either but he wanted no conversation just then and he went to the warm earth, squatting with Cinnamus and Caelte as the two women shed their cloaks.

Bran stood apart, with his arms folded and his eyes on the slowly reddening sky. Like Caradoc, he knew that if Eurgain was defeated the door to western unity would close, politely but firmly. He was anxious for Eurgain but his thoughts were fixed on the larger concern, while Caradoc could think only of his calm, terse wife lying bloody under the sword of this strange, ferocious woman. Cinnamus watched Eurgain with a professional eye. She was glancing over the terrain, and he was pleased she had noticed a slight slope and how the setting sun sent its light angling over it. Sine gestured and her shield-bearer ran forward, the enormous bronze weight in his hands. Like her mask, it was figured into the shape of a wolf’s head, but its eyes were two chunks of yellow crystal. She took it, wriggling the leather thongs onto her arm, as Eurgain stood, feet apart, both hands resting on her sword’s hilt.

“What is this, Wolf Lady?” Eurgain called. “Do the Ordovice women always hide behind their shields?”

Cinnamus chuckled. “She is wily, Lord,” he whispered to Caradoc. She and Gladys had never used shields, and without hers the Ordovice lady would be thrown off balance.

Sine paused, her eyes flicking across at Eurgain, as Eurgain steadily stared back, only her fingers betraying any tension. I wish you would take off your mask, she thought. I wish that I could read your face, know whether the lack of a shield will slow you down. Sine shrugged and pulled her arm from the thongs, handing the shield to her chief. “It is all the same to me,” she shouted back, but Eurgain heard a tremor in the words.

“If you wish, you may fight with the sun at your back,” she offered. “I do not mind.” Now move, Lady, she thought. If you put the sun behind you, you will be standing on the slope. The rise in the ground will keep the light from my eyes and you will have to slash at me uphill.

“How confident you are!” Sine sneered, taking three steps so that the sun struck her green shoulders. “Would you like to hand me your sword also?”

Eurgain did not reply but lifted her weapon to her husband and then to Sine, confident she had taken every advantage to herself. She was tired and in a strange place, and would have to work quickly to stay alive, but when her opponent saluted her she realized she was happy.

The watching chiefs stopped chattering and silence fell. The two women closed, Eurgain with both hands grasping her hilt, her sword high, Sine visibly unsure of what to do with her naked and weightless left arm, her mask sparkling gold and red as she moved. Eurgain did not wait for her to decide. The blade left her shoulder, came whistling in an arc, but it was a testing stroke, a slow feeler, and Sine easily stepped to avoid it. Eurgain followed with a back-handed swing, strong enough to bring her to the brink of unbalance. And then Sine struck. Those watching saw her left arm move out and her sword glide in. Her knees flexed with a slow elegance that bespoke rigid control, and as her body eased forward she seemed to fall gracefully into the reach of Eurgain’s sword. Eurgain lunged for the long neck but the sword was in its place and speeding to her shoulder, a hawk falling from the sky to its prey. Eurgain let go one hand, brought her sword upright, and sent it crashing sideways. To draw back would have been to lose her arm. The blades screamed along the length of each other and Sine’s body bent like a bow as she fought to keep the sword in her grip. Eurgain backed away and poised for another sweep, expecting Sine to straighten, but Sine, still bent, her left arm high, seemed to ripple in under Eurgain’s high stroke and Eurgain once more had to deflect a slash that would have cut her in two. Sine’s body seemed to move in a slow, elegant dance, without music or formal steps, one lithe stance blending with the next as she adapted effortlessly to the fortunes of the encounter. She seemed disconnected from her sword as it wove its own clean, rapid pattern of death, a pattern Eurgain began to see. It did no good to focus her attention on the body; it was the other, faster dance that counted. She began to see something else, also: without her shield, Sine’s balance was upset, her movements too swift, almost uncontrollably so, her blade arriving at its appointed place before its point of contact. The slope of the land further aggravated Sine’s tenuous balance, and Eurgain began to time her own strokes to fall more slowly, with less force but more direction. Her wrist and legs began to ache under the strain, but she heard Sine’s ragged breath and knew that she too must soon fight at a standstill. Sweat ran into Eurgain’s eyes but she dared not blink it away. Sine was upon her again—cut up, slash down, parry, and disengage, as the minutes went by. Sine’s new offensives lacked power, the sound of blade striking blade became a sullen slither of metal on metal. The sun slipped to the horizon as their feet slowed and their movements disintegrated to drunken staggers. Sine stumbled suddenly, and, unthinking, she covered her breast with her left arm as she went down on one knee. Eurgain summoned up the last of her strength and leaped but she was met by an arm that swung desperately for her ankle. She aimed a blow, but, weary, her arm played her false and the blade swung wild. Pain flamed up her leg. A sigh rippled fast around the circle of watching chiefs as Eurgain sank to her knees, gripped her hilt in both shaking hands, and raised her sword high. In the second before it fell, Sine rolled away and rose up, her own sword held out, but neither woman had the strength to make another blow. Blade smashed against blade, lowered, and dropped in the grass. The combatants knelt facing one another, panting and trembling, sweat pouring from them.

“Take back your words,” Eurgain croaked.

Sine swallowed. “No.” Eurgain fell forward, her hands grasping for Sine’s throat, but Sine toppled sideways, her fingers entwined in Eurgain’s fair hair. Neither woman moved. They lay weakly in the grass while the onlookers waited breathlessly.

Eurgain released her hold on Sine’s neck and Sine, still fighting for breath, tore off the mask and cast it onto the ground beside her. Eurgain stared at the sharp, cleanly contoured face, dominated by a pointed chin and two black eyes. It had a wild, animal beauty—a brown complexion like still water, a thin, delicate nose—but there was no softness in its keen curves or in the hard glitter of the big eyes.

“Perhaps we will fight again, Eurgain,” she said, wiping her forehead on her tunic, “but let it be side by side next time. I think that I am a better warrior, but you make up for your physical lack in a devious and lethal mind.” Eurgain struggled up and looked into the newly exposed face of her opponent. “We will be friends?” Sine asked, accepting Eurgain’s examination. “Yes,” Eurgain replied, still searching the other’s eyes. “We will.”

They both stood, swaying, and then together turned to stagger through the chiefs and into the Council hut.

In the ensuing days Caradoc found yet another dimension to this reality. The Ordovices were a silent, thinking people. They smiled often, slowly and reflectively, but they seldom laughed. They settled their quarrels by the sword and always to the death. At their feasts there was little talk. The men and women would sit eating and drinking, watching the bard as he played and sang with eyes that held a thousand spells and a thousand mysteries. They listened to music that was hauntingly, frighteningly beautiful, a wild, undisciplined cascade of abandonment that did not thrill the senses but incited the soul to a ferment of longing. Caelte spent hours in the company of the bard, perpetually excited, jolted from his warm, sunny security by a new truth. And the whole valley was possessed by magic, as though reality flowed perilously close to another world and sometimes mingled with it, like the terrible, wonderful patterns and faces on the chiefs’ jewels, savage or trancelike, expressing the duality of waking dream and sleeping life that was the pure core of the men of the west.

Eurgain blended immediately, as Gladys would have done. She and Sine, Emrys’s wife, soon took to eating and spending the days together, clambering up the steep hillsides, hunting boar, and crossing swords on the practice ground, while Llyn repeated the story of his blooding over and over again for the admiring sons of the tribe, and Caradoc, Bran, and the others sat in Council.

Here, at the last, Caradoc was forced to call upon all his skill. In spite of their labyrinthian introspection the Ordovician chieftains and freemen were obstinate, clever men. Caradoc found that he did not want to accuse them of cowardice as he had Madoc and the Silures. The charge would have been preposterous. He could speak only of the forts and posting stations creeping closer year by year, of the once-free men who now wore slave chains and labored on roads and in fields they had once owned, and of the ships full of the flower of the tribes, young men who would never ride free in the forests again. The chiefs rose politely, spoke quietly, listened attentively, but Caradoc felt the barrier between them grow higher. They simply did not need him. They were isolated in more than body. They were isolated in spirit.

Then, one night, after six days of fruitless talk, out of sheer desperation, he told them bluntly that if they did not accept his advice, if they did not join with the other men of the west, their goddess and the Dagda would desert them and their tuath would become a place of disease and death. They sat up immediately, their eyes going to Bran and Emrys, and the latter looked at Caradoc with wonder, rising. “Bran, is this true?” he asked. “Speak now, and either refute this man or give us truth. What do your brethren on Mona say?”

Bran rose and Caradoc sat down, sweat beading on his forehead and trickling past his temples. I think I have done it, he thought breathlessly. But how? Where did that idea come from?

“Freemen!” Bran said. “You all know the old law by which you live. ‘Worship the gods, do no evil, maintain your honor.’ You have heard from the mouths of refugees who flee to the holy island through your country how the Romans seek to destroy our gods and enslave us, and how they have sworn to kill every Druid. Can any of you doubt that Rome must not be allowed to remain in Albion? And who is left to drive them out but you? Can the gods be made to serve a people who can only worship them in slavery? It would be an affront and the Dagda would flee from you. How can you maintain your honor with slave chains around your necks? Go to your seer, your invoker, your goddess as your brothers have done, and learn that my brethren order war to preserve the service of the gods. You know me, freemen! You trust me. I know you, and your fears. Caradoc is not a ricon without a tuath, seeking to take power from your chief. He comes to offer himself as arviragus for a while, leading free people until the oppressors are cast out. Then he returns to his own people, as is the custom. But you must decide for yourselves in open Council, and let me warn you. Refuse Caradoc aid, and shut your eyes and ears at your peril. The Romans will come here, to this valley, and kill the chiefs and take the women and children for slaves, and the Dagda and the goddess will fold their arms and look the other way.” He stopped speaking and sat down and a deep silence fell, full of bewilderment and suspicion.

Then Emrys rose, his calm, stern face resigned. “We know in our hearts,” he said slowly, “that Bran’s words are true, yet we will ask of the Dagda and the goddess. And while we ask, Caradoc may journey in our country, as he has done among the Silures and the Demetae, for I am lord of a scattered people. Then we will hold a greater Council, calling all chiefs from the hidden valleys, and make our decision. Does any freeman disagree?” Heads were shaken, but dubiously, then Gervase spoke for them all.

“If the Catuvellaunian can conquer the mountains then he can lead us,” he said. “For we are the mountains.”

When Caradoc would look back to the days that followed, the memories would be clouded, obscure, as though his mind had compartmentalized them and then shut the door, and the only remembering came with thoughts that escaped from under its protecting rim. He was a haunted, driven man, he and Eurgain, Bran, and his chiefs clambering among a desolation of cruel rock, wandering lost for days beside cold streams that ran through deep, sun-starved gorges as silent as death, and they were often hungry, always weary. The Ordovices had refused him a guide.

“If you cannot best the mountains you are not one of us,” Emrys had said, not unkindly, and so Caradoc and his little band had set off alone into the wilderness, leaving Llyn as a hostage. “Pardon us,” Emrys had explained firmly but politely. “He must stay. It is the custom, as you know.” They knew, but Caradoc, worn down to the bare bones of his reason, had to shoulder this new anxiety. He missed Llyn, his cheerfulness, his comfort, his company, and felt that his luck was slowly deserting him. Eurgain would have shielded him from the hardships both within and without himself, but the wall of misunderstandings and resentments had been growing between them and he wordlessly resisted her attempts to help him. He knew that he was alone, his future hanging by a thread, and Eurgain withdrew into herself, all her energies spiraling inward as she faced the test of the mountains. She heard their challenge, she believed that his journey was a part of the testing of her own honor, and at night she lay in her blanket, taut with fascinated fear and a strange, warm thrill, as she listened to the siren voices of winds soughing in the rocky funnels and hidden crags around her. She was happy in spite of everything, muscles and mind stretched gloriously to the limits of their endurance, and she proudly put away thoughts of her failing marriage.

They stumbled across many farmsteads tucked into the folds of grassy slopes where the teaks swooped down before rising afresh, stone huts ringed by stone walls enclosing granaries and workshops. They were inhabited by silent, tall chiefs and their peasants and families, who welcomed them with the words of hospitality and fed them, and who listened to him gravely, without comment. When their nights were spent in the shelter of these chiefs Caradoc always set Cinnamus or Caelte to guard, for he knew that in spite of the immunity Bran brought them, some Ordovician chieftain might decide to slay them all and take their weapons, and Emrys would conclude that they had perished in the trackless wastes of his country. When he left them they would give him directions to the next farmstead, tell him to go in safety, walk in peace, all with the magnificent aloofness of their mountains. Then Caradoc would set off down their valleys, among their shaggy cattle and indifferent, staring sheep, still not knowing whether his words had even been digested.