The Shining Company (16 page)

But next morning in the grey chill of the thaw, we were all stone-cold sober, still battered, but sober,
when we gathered again to the King’s forecourt, in answer to the summons that had called us there, Teulu and Companions alike with the shieldbearers hanging on the outskirts.

The King half sat, half lay in his great chair that had been brought out into the foreporch of the Hall, swathed in soft skin robes to his bearded chin, with the Fosterling standing at his side and the closest of his household warriors ranged about him.

The Fosterling stood with his thumbs in his sword belt and looked us over at leisure with those strange two-coloured eyes of his, while we waited, looking back. ‘God’s greeting to you, my heroes,’ he said, pleasantly, when he had looked enough. ‘Now let you tell me, why this sudden hunger for the Champion’s Portion, which no warrior has claimed in Dyn Eidin in the lifetime of a man?’

Amalgoid said. ‘It was for a jest as much as anything. Also it was for the honour of the Teulu.’

‘So. A jest that had a sharp edge to it.’ The Fosterling flicked his gaze to Tydfwlch the Tall. ‘And you? This claim is still the custom among your own hills?’

Tydfwlch shook his head. ‘Not in the lifetimes of three men.’

‘Then why now?’

‘Because Amalgoid of the Teulu made it first; and the Companions also have an honour to maintain.’

I mind the silence that followed; and in the silence, the sense of oneness that had been growing within us almost unknown for a long while, enclosing us like a rampart.

Then the Fosterling hitched at his sword belt in the
way that he had, and turned to the King, but pitching his voice for all of us to hear. ‘My Lord the King, it is true, as our forefathers told, that no man may for long handle two teams at the same time. It is in my mind that now the time has come, as we knew that it must, for you to choose a new captain for the Teulu, for the Companions have become their own thing and must have their own captain.’

‘And you are that captain?’

‘So it was agreed between us.’

‘Sa, sa, sa … Meaning that you want them all to yourself,’ said Mynydogg rather surprisingly; and the shadow of a smile on his gaunt face, echoing the smile on the Fosterling’s own, made it clearer than ever that they were father and son.

‘I do not think that anyone else can handle them,’ said our new captain. ‘But yes, I want them all to myself.’

The roar that we sent up might have lifted the roof off the King’s Hall if we had been within it.

Only the Teulu, losing their old captain, were silent.

The winter months wore on; bitter months that brought the wolves in out of the wildwood to hunt close about the living places of men, so that men must mount guard over the sheep folds by day as well as through the long nights. Day after day the wind drove snow or freezing rain across the great whale-backed mass of Eidin Ridge; and when the snow clouds cleared for a while and the iron frosts set in, there were nights when the whole sky northward was flickering with strange lights. I had seen such lights faintly from the high hills above my home valley, but never such a show as this, that sent rippling tongues and ribbons of cold fire far up the sky. I knew now why men called them ‘The Crown of the North’ and also why it was said that they foretold great happenings for good or ill, victory or pestilence, the birth of heroes or the death of kings.

But a day came when the wind went round to the south and had a new smell to it, promising a world still there after all, beyond the lowland hills, promising afar off the return of spring.

As soon as the mirey ways were in any sort fit for travelling, while the burns ran green with thaw-water from the melting snows, before even the salmon began to come up from the sea, Mynyddog’s embassies were going to and fro once more between
himself and his fellow kings of the north. On an evening of squalls and sunbursts, with the cloud shadows flying like a charge of cavalry across the moors, an embassy from Aidan of Dalriada rode into Dyn Eidin: three tall men cloaked in magnificent skins; the leader, who looked to be long past his own warrior days, the tallest of them all, with a small fierce eye and a mouth like a wolf trap.

On the day after they rode in, they were shut away in the King’s private lodging with Mynyddog himself, the Fosterling, and Cenau who was now Captain of the Teulu in his place, and Aneirin who as chief bard to the King must always be present at such meetings.

For the rest of us life went on as usual. A good part of the day was passed in practising for the great display with which we were to dazzle and impress the Lords of Dalriada on the morrow.

Towards evening Gorthyn’s big sorrel cast a shoe; and when I took him over to the shoe-smith at the far side of the Royal Farm, I heard a great bell-clashing of hammer on anvil and thought that some other horse was being shod. But when I hitched Bryth to the ring beside the doorpost and looked inside, there was no horse there, and the men sweating in the red firelight were making horseshoes to add to an orderly stack of them against the wall. That did not surprise me, for as the swordsmiths and armourers had been busy all that winter mending old weapons and war gear and making new, so the blacksmiths, in between their usual work, had been beating out horseshoes against the time that the Company would be needing them.

‘Can you spare one of those?’ I asked, flicking a
thumb at the stack. ‘My lord’s horse has cast a shoe at the practice.’

One of the smiths looked up from a half formed shoe on the nearest of the three anvils, and I saw - in the red gloom of the smithy and the smoke and the flying sparks I had not known him until I saw his face that it was Conn. And that did surprise me.

‘Conn! What brings you here? I thought it was a swordsmith you were.’

He rubbed the back of his hand across his sweating forehead, leaving a black smear. ‘Fercos’s ruling is that a smith should learn every branch of his craft on the way up, and that even a high king’s swordsmith should be able to shoe a horse or forge a ploughshare. Just now the need is for horseshoes.’

‘Then let you re-shoe Bryth, and make sure that his other shoes are secure for this fool’s frolic the King has decreed tomorrow for the impressing of Dalriada.’

He glanced towards the Master Smith who nodded without looking up from his own work, and a short while later when the shoe before him was finished, he replaced the cast shoe and tested the rest, picking up each round hoof in turn while Bryth slobbered at his shoulder. And afterwards, Conn standing with one shoulder propped against the doorpost, I with an arm over the sorrel’s neck, we lingered for a short while. It was some while since we had had the chance of a few words together.

‘Is it well?’ I asked. I always asked that, I still felt oddly responsible for Conn.

And he looked at me with that slow grave smile of his. ‘Why would it not be?’

‘It doesn’t irk you to be spending your time and skill down here?’ I knew how much I should hate it, if I were on the way to being a swordsmith, no matter what Fercos’ ruling might be.

‘Did I not say? No need of ploughshares, maybe, but any smith who goes with the field-forge must be able to shoe a horse as well as sharpen a sword or beat the dint out of a war-cap.’

Goes with the field forge … I had known, I suppose, that there must be a field-forge. No cavalry force, once away from home, could function without one, but I had not thought to wonder who its smiths would be.

‘You?’ I said. ‘Conn, that makes good hearing!’

He shook his head quickly. ‘I’d not be knowing. But Fercos is too old for such rough work, and he must send one at least of his family.’

‘And the one might be you!’

‘I shall try for it!’ he said; then turning the subject almost as Luned used to do, ‘Will you be needing Shadow’s shoes checked for tomorrow?’

‘No. It is a thing only for the Companions, praise be to Epona.’

‘Not champing at the bit to show off your own skills?’

‘I don’t see much point in it,’ I said. ‘Not for those men.’

‘They
are
Dalriada,’ Conn said.

I knew what he meant. The King’s purpose was clear, to show off to this embassy his fine new war-bands drawn from all the northern kingdoms, hoping that they would go back and persuade Aidan their king that men of different tribes could stand together,
and that in the face of a strong enemy it is better so than to stand alone. The old story of the sticks which, singly, may be snapped between the fingers of one hand, but which bound into a faggot, are beyond the breaking of the strongest man.

‘Prosper, son of Gerontius, does not believe it will work?’ Conn said after a few moments, his thoughts clearly having followed the same path as my own.

I shrugged. ‘You know what they say of Aidan of the Dalriada. He’s a warlord more than a king; and his wars are glorified cattle-raids, whether he goes against the Saxon kind or his neighbours.’

‘Still, I suppose he - Mynyddog - has to try,’ Conn said thoughtfully.

‘Oh yes, he has to try.’

Someone was shouting for Conn from within the smithy, and he turned back through the firelit doorway, while I went on my way, taking Bryth down to the horse-lines.

Next day we made a great showing for the Lords of Dalriada who stood looking on, mantled in their magnificent furs in the squally rain. All together, for a good part of the shieldbearers had been drawn in after all to play the enemy, we showed off our horse-skills, wrestled and raced and fought mock battles. And all the while our Captain, standing among the strangers with something of the look of a man who has bitten on a sloe, clearly relished it as little as we did.

Towards day’s end we were all gathered once more in the King’s outer court thinking that the show was over. But it seemed that it was not. Not quite yet …

Mynyddog himself had come out to join us, walking unaided to his great chair that had been set for him in
the fore-porch of his Hall, though God knows what the effort must have cost him. And Aneirin had settled on the bard stool at his feet. He looked at us and we looked back at him with the knowledge that we had done him credit. The day was fading, and ahead of us lay fire’s warmth and deer-meat stew and mead and harpsong that we felt was well earned.

Then Mynyddog looked up at the envoy standing beside him and said something. I could not catch the words, but it had the sound of courtesy. Something about hoping that the day’s display had pleased them, I suppose, for the tall man, his voice pitched to carry, made reply, ‘Today’s display has indeed been well worth the watching, so far as it goes. Indeed I have seldom seen it greatly bettered, save by the Teulu of my Lord Aidan.’

We bristled like a hound when it smells wolf.

The King began, ‘You find something lacking -’ his face was flushing but the red was tinged with grey, and his dry brittle cough cut him short.

The Fosterling stepped forward, saying quickly, ‘My Lord the King, let me. It was I who trained them and their honour is mine.’ And to the envoy, he said with cold courtesy, ‘You find something lacking in our childish games?’

‘Nothing in the world,’ said the Dalriada. ‘Yet what does it all prove - save training, and one may train a hound. There must be more -’

‘Let you tell me what more,’ the Fosterling said in a voice like wild honey.

‘So, I will tell. If my Lord Aidan were to call out any man from his Teulu and bid him leap from the Rock of
Black Annis, he would do it without thought. Can you say the same for these men of yours?’

The Fosterling said, ‘I do not doubt it. But I will not be squandering the life of a man by putting it to the test. And if I were to do so, what would it prove beyond obedience? The blind unthinking berserk frenzy of the Saxon kind. Other things than that are needed for the forging of a fighting brotherhood.’ The two stood facing each other with their gaze locked together while a man might count to ten. Then the Fosterling said, ‘Here among the Companions there are warriors of every tribe of the north and west, some even who are ancient enemies. Yet if I were to call out three at random, one to run blindfold towards Epona’s Leap where the rock falls sheer a score of spears’ lengths to other rocks beneath, trusting to the other two to catch him back from dashing out his brains, and all three were to do without question the thing that I asked of them - that, I am thinking, might prove something worth the proving.’

‘Such as?’ said the envoy, with mockery deep in his throat.

‘Such as - that it is possible for men of different tribes to find or forge new loyalties among themselves.’

‘So, then let you put
that
to the test,’ said the Dalriada, and as the Fosterling stiffened as though to meet a spear under his own ribs, he added musingly, ‘Yet how shall I know that you are not choosing men of the same tribe, even close kin?’

‘Choose them for yourself,’ our Captain said between shut teeth.

The thing was of no great matter, and without even
much danger to it. But it was a thing that we had not been trained to, and at the end of a hard day, when we were tired and hungry …

The envoy picked out his men at random, the runner and one of the catchers from among the shieldbearers. None of them were closely known to me, and so the choice did not set my heart jumping. We all pressed back, leaving an empty space straight across the outer court, a road ending in the nothingness of Epona’s Leap; and the chosen three walked out into it. There was a pause while something was found to bind the runner’s eyes. In the end Geraint of Dumnonia pulled off the striped silken scarf which he always wore knotted round his waist under his sword belt, and passed it through the crowd, shouting after it, ‘Have a care now. A girl gave me that, and I don’t want it fouled with blood and brains!’

It was a grim jest, but it was something to laugh at, and we laughed accordingly.

Against the weapon-stone the runner stood to be blindfolded with the vivid silk. When its knot was tied, he put his hands up to each side of his head as though to settle the folds and test how firmly they were in position, and took up the stance that runners take at the start of a race, bearing forward on to the ball of his left foot. The other two moved onto the lip of emptiness which was Epona’s Leap; I could see them speaking with their heads together a moment, then they crouched down facing each other, with only the sky and the distance of lowland hills behind them. For the first time it dawned on me that what danger there was was for them almost as much as for the runner. Then somebody gave the starting shout, and
the runner sprang forward on a line for the Leap and the tensed catchers. It was the merest sprint, not enough for a runner to find his stride; but I suppose it had slipped all our minds that a man running blind tends to pull to the right. He began to veer almost from the first step, and at the last instant the other two flinging themselves sideways, just caught him from going headlong into the right-hand fang of rock.