The Shining Company (12 page)

From the place where the Eidin Ridge track turned off from it, the road was almost lost, for few people travelled it any more, and the tide of heather and bramble and rough grass had come flowing in. Sometimes, for a short distance, our feet sensed the hardness of stone under the grass, but at other times it was as though no one had ever passed that way before. The little thin wind blowing up from the Firth began to have the smell of salt in it, and the crying and calling of shorebirds was the voice of a great loneliness as we came down the last stretch to the old lost
frontier fort. It was not the first time that we had come that way; by that time there were few places within half a day of Dyn Eidin that were not known to us; but I had not been so aware of the loneliness, the emptiness of the place before. There were birch and rowan in the ditch, and the past summer’s willowherb turned to grey seed-silk massing in the gap where the gateway must have been; and midway between the fallen stone stumps of the gatehouse towers, a path had been trampled through the willowherb. Not so empty of human life, after all.

The sight pulled us up in our tracks. And Huil said, ‘We are not the first-comers, by the look of it.’

‘Like enough it is an animal - fox or wolf,’ I said.

But Dara thought otherwise. ‘Never saw anything but wild pig leave a trampled track like that - wild pig or man - not ghost-wolf, anyway.’ And he giggled. Dara was a stout good natured callant with pale eyelashes and a giggle that came out of him like water out of a bottle. But having made his jest he glanced about him uneasily. It was not quite the place to be jesting about ghost-wolves.

Huil, who like all his kind had a nose like a hunting dog, dropped to his knees and crouched forward, sniffing at the trampled stems.

‘It is man.’

He got up, and the three of us stood for a moment looking at each other, wondering whether we should go elsewhere. But it seemed a poor spirited sort of thing to do, to turn away as though someone else had a better right than we had. I said, ‘The place is big enough for two lots of us.’ And we prowled in, swaggering a little for the benefit of any eye that might be watching.

We had taken our time on the way, and it was a while past noon: and it seemed to us, especially with others beside ourselves loose in the old fort, that the first thing to do was to find our quarters for the days and nights to come: somewhere that would give shelter from possible wild weather and which could be defended in case of need. We scattered to the search, but not widely, keeping within call or sight-signal of each other all the while, and cast around among the turf hummocks of fallen briar-grown walls like hounds on a thin scent. In the gate gap between breast-high banks, that gave out into what seemed to be some kind of outer part of the camp where it ran into the grey waters of the Firth, Huil picked up the scent of the first-comers again, and after a careful testing of the grass and bushes (he was a tracker to equal the Little Dark People, was Huil) told us, squatting on his haunches, ‘They have not come back. Not this way, anyway.’

‘So. Then we bide clear of beyond the gate,’ Dara said. ‘That gives us the high ground at all events.’ And we turned back into the ruins of the main fort.

We found our shelter after a while; a kind of undercroft, a storage place perhaps. The front half of whatever had been above it had fallen in, half blocking the ragged entrance gap, but further in it seemed sound enough, the earth above it held up by arched stonework and the roots of trees. Shelter from night and weather and wolf.

We built a hearth of fallen stones close to the mouth of the cave - more like a cave than a building it seemed - and gathered dead wood for a fire when night came, but no bracken or the like, as we would
normally have done, to pile over the root-broken stones of the floor - the more we made ourselves comfortable, the harder we would find it to keep from sleep. We went down to the burn that ran through its steep gorge below the western rampart and drank and filled the leather bottle we had brought with us, for the evening’s stirabout, where the water ran clear and deep above the remains of a paved ford. There was an upright stone, I mind, marking the place where an old track from the fort must have entered the water, heading westward; a black stone, dappled with grey and golden lichen. I set my hand on its rounded poll, and got the odd uncanny feel that it was used to the touch of men’s hands in passing. But that must have been long and long ago …

We came back to the cave, and built and lit our fire, with Dara’s strike-a-light to kindle the spark. The sparks fell on to the dry fir fronds and the dead twigs caught, and Huil stooped and blew between his hands on to the licking tongues of flame; and as we fed it with longer and longer sticks and branches, the fire on our hearth caught and flared up, casting its light a little way into the cave as the daylight outside faded, picking out stones and dragon-coiled tree roots, and the faces of the three of us gathered about it. We undid the oatmeal bag and took out the dinted iron pot, tipped in a third of the meal and the water we had brought up from the ford and set about making the evening stirabout.

With neither salt nor a knob of honeycomb it was dull eating, but it stayed our hunger. We finished up every crumb and smear from the inside of the pot, and put the bag safely aside for tomorrow night and the
night after; then sat and looked at each other, listening to the wind that had begun to rise outside.

That first night went easily enough. All of us were well used to missing a night’s sleep now and then for one reason or another - hunting or a mead drink or a turn of wolf-guard over the lambing pens. We told stories that first night, feeding our small fire sparingly to make the wood store last, each of us bringing out tales from among our own hills.

I told of Branwen who was wedded to a King of Eriu and carried back to his kingdom across the western waters and misused and abandoned, and how at last she won back to her own land, and of her vengeance that followed after. I told of Gwyn ap Nudd and the Wild Hunt, tales with which Old Nurse had used to frighten Luned and me on windy autumn nights when we lay in our beds listening to the hound-babble of the grey geese flying over.

Dara told of a Queen of Strathclyde, Languareth by name; how she gave a ring that the King had given her to her warrior lover. The King saw the ring on his hand (he cannot have had much sense between his ears that warrior lover!) and with drugged wine caused him to fall into a deep sleep, and while he slept took the ring from his finger and threw it in the river. Then he asked the Queen why she no longer wore it; and when she made an excuse, saying that it was too big for her hand and she feared to lose it, flew into a passion, accused her of having given it to another man (which after all was the truth) and threatened her with death if she did not instantly bring it to him. Making some desperate excuse, she managed to gain a breathing space until next morning, and as soon as the
King had left her, she ran to the holy man who lived nearby and begged him to help her. The holy man took pity on her - or maybe he was thinking that a queen would make a useful friend - and bade her send a fisherman down to the river, with orders to bring her the first fish that took his line. The fisherman went down to the river and cast his line, and a fish came up and took the bait. He carried the fish to the Queen and when she and her maidens opened it, there inside, gleaming in the first light of morning, was the King’s golden ring.

It was a good story and Dara, who enjoyed anything that savoured of gossip, put much rich and colourful detail into it. But myself, I liked better the strange unchancy tales that Huil told that night. They were not easy to follow, for being of the Pictish people his native tongue was not ours, and though he spoke our tongue none so ill, he pronounced some of the words strangely; and beside that the stories themselves were as many-stranded and interwoven as the tendrils of the white bindweed or the patterns tattooed on his own breast and shoulders. Stories from a world that still counted wealth in cattle and bondwomen; an older world than mine or Dara’s, a shadow world in which even the ghosts and water-horses and battling heroes seemed stranger than our own.

It was after one of Huil’s stories that I needed to go outside and make water. I did not much care for the idea, for he had peopled the dark beyond the fire-glow with too many strange and hair-lifting things, and I would have gone only just beyond the cave entrance. But not wishing to admit myself scared by a
bairn’s ghost story, I made myself go further, half across the old fort. It was so, through the thin spitting rain, that I glimpsed a blink of firelight away beyond the northern gate. So I knew where the other three had made their lair, and I wondered, on the way back, whether they had seen the blink of our fire also, in the damp and windy dark. I wondered also who they were, those other three. Maybe Lleyn and his two fellows, maybe our own three warriors, but there had been more than one set of white pebbles drawn last night. It might be something to pass the time with later, to find out …

At first light, we went down to the burn again; and drank and doused our heads to wash the night fuzziness out of them in the cold swift-running water. Then we returned to the cave and the question of what we should do with the daylight hours until we could eat again.

We could have spent some of the time in setting makeshift traps in the hope of catching something to sweeten the evening bannock, but there was a sense of ritual on us; the oat and barley meal that had been issued to us was proper food for the vigil. Also I think we wanted to use the time to do something, make something, that would leave the mark of our having been there.

‘We could rebuild a wall,’ I said, standing in the cave mouth and looking about the traces of old footings breaking like outcrops through the grass. The rain had stopped and the early light was waking starling colours in the fallen stone.

‘Which one?’ Huil asked. ‘I am thinking there are enough and more than enough to choose from.’

‘Any one,’ I said. ‘It makes no odds.’

Dara let out his bubbling laugh. ‘We could build a cairn and stick the bannock-cloth on top of it for a banner.’

‘Too showy,’ I said.

And thankfully, Huil agreed with me. ‘A wall would be more use.’

‘Use for what, in the name of light?’ Dara grinned at us. ‘To keep the ghosts out?’

‘To keep us from going to sleep,’ I said. ‘Either will serve for that - let’s toss for it and let the Gods of Castellum choose,’ and I fished in my pouch for the only coin I had on me.

So we tossed for it, and the Gods of Castellum chose a wall.

Close before our cave were the remains of a very small enclosure, a store shed maybe. At the near corner the wall stood pretty near elbow high; at the lower end it was almost lost under rank grass. In one place a rowan tree had seeded in the rubble filling and sent its roots down into the footings, heaving the stones aside. We hacked back the docks and brambles until the whole oblong lay clear, and began building. There were plenty of loose stones lying about, and we heaved them up and stacked them one upon another, fitting them together in the manner of dry-stone walling. None of us were expert builders of walls, but we brought great care to the task. If we were going to build a wall, it should at least be a wall that we could be proud of. Also the more care we took, the more we thought about what we were doing, the less we had to think about the emptiness of our bellies, the less likely we were to fall asleep. It became very important to us,
that wall. We held a deeply earnest council, I mind, as to what we should do about the rowan tree: build round it, or leave a gap. In the end we left a gap, carefully squared up. Huil, with his feelings for curves, would have had us build round it, but we were two to one against.

That was towards the end of the day, and all things were becoming just a little unreal, to me at last, but I was pleased to find that I was not at all sleepy. That was when, heaving up yet another stone, I saw something scratched on the under side of it, and rubbing off the staining lichen with the heel of my hand, saw that it was a running wolf, not properly carved but crudely scratched as though with the point of a dagger, yet with something of life in it all the same. I squatted down with it across my knee, to look at it more closely. I was still aware of the world around me, the others still busy on the wall, the crying of the gulls whirling overhead, but the wolf was blurring a little on my sight, fading and yet at the same time growing towards life. Wolf running - running among trees …

And then Huil had me by the shoulder, shaking me back to wakefulness. That night, our second without sleep, is hazy in my mind. Looking back, I have wondered more than once, why we did not come to an agreement and take turns, one to keep watch while the other two slept. None of us could have betrayed the other two without also betraying ourselves. But we did not, nor do I believe that any of the rest of us did so. We kept faith with the orders we had been given, and got through the slow dragging hours somehow, as best we could. With the fire re-kindled
and the evening ration eaten, we returned at first to our storytelling. But in truth we had all lost our taste for it, and the effort to concentrate on telling a story or even on listening to it seemed suddenly more than it was worth. And as the stories began to tail away, we turned more and more to talk, to word games and riddles, getting up to stretch and stamp about every now and then when the flame light began to blur. We played dice for pebbles, we tried to play Flash the Fingers, but that must be played at lightning speed if it is to be a game worth playing at all, and our reactions were so slow that we abandoned the attempt. We talked - mostly about our elders and betters.

The first night had been Huil’s, with his chill, uncanny stories from beyond the edge of the world; but that second night was Dara’s, he being born and bred on Eidin Ridge, and having, moreover, a nose for other people’s affairs that would have done credit to some old hen-wife. From him, that night, I came to know things about the royal household and the King’s Teulu aye, and the Companions, that I had not known, or known only vaguely and piecemeal before.