The Shining Company (29 page)

He was almost as good a storyteller in his way as Aneirin. He had me tasting the strange fruits and smelling the gutters of the Golden City; as to the others, I could not tell. Cynan was gazing into the heart of the brazier, but there was no knowing whether he saw the things of which the merchant told,
or other things of his own, or only the darkness within himself.

The Princess sat very still, and I think that she was listening, but her eyes kept going from the storyteller to Cynan’s face, drawn and scar-pitted in the lamplight, as though she too was wondering what he saw, what was going on within him. She had grown much older in the year and more since I had first seen her, and I knew that he would only have to whistle and she would follow - as Dara had once said - to Constantinople, or the apple islands beyond the sunset. But I also knew that he would not whistle. Something in him was hurt beyond that. It might mend one day, but not yet, not for a long time. And my heart was sore within me for the Lady Niamh, and behind the coloured skylines of the Golden City, I heard the chilly hush and whisper of summer rain across the thatched roofs of Dyn Eidin.

A day came when Cynan flung on his good cloak that I got out for him from the kist in the chamber of the King’s house where he had been moved as soon as he was well enough, and came out to share the feasting in the Mead Hall. It was Lammas, the start of harvest time, and the first sickle cut of barley had been brought into the Hall and set up on the great tie beam in the crown of the roof; and the Lammas torches had been lit and carried round the crop-lands; and when the feasting was done and the stories and the songs of lesser harpers fell silent (there had begun to be songs sung and stories told again in the King’s Hall), the men of the Teulu began to call to Aneirin for a new song; for though as a king’s bard he was, as I have
said, above the rank of those who wake their harp after supper, yet on the great feast nights of the year he would sometimes take harp in hand himself; so now they begged for a song - a new song to speed the harvest.

‘My song is not yet made perfect,’ Aneirin told them.

But we all knew what song it would be, and voices called out that he had had three moons for the making of it, and that surely there must be something of it ready to be brought forth, for they - we - had been long waiting. And in the end he sent for his harp and his singing-robe, and when they were brought, rose and pulled the mantle over his shoulders and stood with the kingfisher folds hanging to his feet and the little bog-oak harp cradled in his arms. ‘So be it. At least you shall be able to tell your grandsons that you heard, when it was still rough-hewn, some part of the Song of the Gododdin at Catraeth, and that Aneirin sang it for you.’ We knew what that meant, for when the song was made whole, and polished and perfect, the poet’s part in it would be over, and it would be for other men to sing. And Aneirin sat down on the singing stool, settling the harp between his knee and the curve of his shoulder.

So that night, sitting at the King’s feet, Aneirin sang for us, and maybe for the ghosts of those others, too. And listening, I remembered the ruined fort on the night before we rode out for the last time, and looking at Cynan in his place on the warrior benches, I saw that he was remembering, too. Aneirin tuned his harp and began to play, striking out flights of notes like sparks from a windy fire; and against their bright
background he flung up his head and in the half singing, half declaiming voice of his kind, began his song.

I have wondered since what they were like, those songs when their final burnish was upon them. They were rough-edged when we heard them, but already they shone.

‘The men rode to Catraeth, jesting by the way

After the feasting, clad now in mail
,

Strongly they went from us into the morning.

Deadly their spears, before death come to them,

Death before their hair could be touched with grey.

Of three hundred horsemen, Ochone! Ochone!

Only one rider returned from that fray.’

The harp rhythm changed as he sang of this man and that - of Gwenabwy, how he had killed a wolf with his bare hands. Of Morien and Madog and Llif from beyond Bannog, of Tydfwlch the Tall and Cynri and Peredur, and Gorthyn of the Battlecry. A score or more; the men whose fame he sang for us that night. And when he had done, and harp fell silent, there was a stillness in the King’s Hall.

And in the stillness, Cynan lifted his head and looked across the fire with eyes that were at once weary and over-bright, and asked, ‘And what of the One?’

‘The One?’ Aneirin said.

‘The one of all the three hundred, who came back. What honour song will you make for him?’

There was a stirring in the Hall like a little wind through standing barley.

‘It is already made,’ said Aneirin. ‘This is the song for the One who came back.’

And he drew his hand across the harpstrings and sang again, for the last time that night.

‘In battle-fury like a lion, Cynan the noble and most fair;

His war shout on the farthest wing, a rallying point for men.

The Sea-wolves fell like rushes before his blade
,

His spears were as the lightning-strike
,

And when they landed, no need for second blow.

Whole war hosts he burst through, with lime-white shield hacked small
,

Swift was his horse, leading in the charge.

His blade bit deep when he broke forth

Not lacking honour, with the dawn.’

The last flight of notes thrummed away and Aneirin stopped the faint humming of the strings with the flat of his hand.

And Cynan said, ‘That was a good singing, harper dear. Death denied me my place with the rest of our company, but the greatest of all bards has not denied me a place with them in the Song of the Gododdin.’

The King, who had sat listening without a move throughout, stirred inside his heavy mantle, and summoned in his harsh, broken voice, ‘Cynan, son of Clydno, come you here to me.’

And Cynan got up and made his way, stepping over the sprawling hounds, to stand before the King at the High Table.

For a long-drawn breath of time Mynyddog lay
back in his great chair looking up at him as though he were a book that he was trying to read, then he said, ‘The Gododdin will have need of all its fighting men yet living. Your old place among my warriors waits for you.’

‘But it is no longer mine,’ Cynan said. ‘My place was with another company, and without them it is not in my heart to bide here in Dyn Eidin. My Lord the King, give me leave to go.’

‘You must give me better reasons than that.’

‘I have several. Three at least,’ Cynan said, and I thought for the moment that there was a flick of laughter in his tone, but I must have been wrong.

‘So. Tell me the first,’ said the King.

And Cynan said lightly, ‘Maybe the hunger is on me to carry my sword in distant places.’

Mynyddog bowed his head. ‘And the second?’

‘I am not minded to live out my life in a place where I see it in men’s eyes that I am the One who came back living from Catraeth.’

‘Even after Aneirin’s song?’ said the King.

‘Even after Aneirin’s song.’

‘And so you will run like a hunted deer?’

I saw Cynan’s shoulder jerk, and he answered as one flicked on the raw, ‘I would not have run for that alone.’

‘There was a third reason. Let you tell it to me.’

Cynan said a little breathlessly, ‘My Lord the King, do not ask me the third reason, for it is mine to me.’

There was a long, breath-caught silence between the two of them. The King lay back among his ram-skins, looking up into Cynan’s face, waiting. He did not ask again for the third reason, but I think the
knowledge grew in him of what it was. Maybe he was remembering the first night of our return, and that terrible cry of Cynan’s when the truth pierced through to him. He could not know as I did, of Cynan in the women’s house, lying with his arm across his eyes as though to shut out something horrible, saying, ‘The King betrayed us.’

But I saw him begin to understand the accusation and I was afraid. Yet when he answered (for it was an answer, though the thing had not been spoken), it was without anger.

‘Do you think that it was an easy decision?’

‘No,’ said Cynan.

‘But still you wish to go from Dyn Eidin?’

Cynan said, ‘Yes,’ and the word stood like a rock.

‘So be it then. Go free of the Teulu, and the sun and the moon on your path. But be gone by the morn’s morning, and do not come back,’ said the King.

Cynan made him a kind of bow, then turned and strode away down the Mead Hall.

I got up from my place and went after him. Phanes of Syracuse sat on the guest bench near the door as he often did, there being more air there than at the upper end of the Hall, and Cynan checked for a moment in passing, setting a hand friendly wise on his shoulder. ‘Will you trust the dagger to me, to get it safely back to its master?’ he said, and we went out through the great foreporch into the night.

Outside in the dark and heading for our sleeping quarters I asked, ‘When do we start?’ I think I had some stupid idea that he might be about to walk out of Dyn Eidin there and then.

‘The morn’s morning, as the King said,’ he answered
me, as though it was the simplest and most ordinary of matters. ‘I need a day to gather up what I can by way of journey gold, and see to the bestowal of my horses - and my brothers’ horses. The King knows that.’

I also had matters of my own to see to. And next noon, having whistled Conn out from the smithy and told him what there was to tell, I was leaning with him on the fence of the horse-paddock, feeding Shadow with the honey-cake that I had brought for her.

‘And you must go with him?’ Conn asked.

I was still feeling winded by the speed with which a new and unthought of future had opened at my feet; but it was the first time that the question had come to me. It had seemed to me last night in the darkness outside the torchlight of the Mead Hall that my going was as a natural part of Cynan’s going. It still did. I said, thinking the thing out as I went along, ‘He is not fit yet to be setting off for the other end of the world alone; and he is my responsibility because I was the one who brought him off from Catraeth. And he barely notices I am there anyway, so he will not mind as he would if somebody else tried to go with him.’

‘Not that anybody else has,’ Conn said dryly.

‘Not so far as I know.’

‘You’re a good friend, Prosper, I should know that,’ he said, and there was a kind of ache in his tone that made something tighten in my own throat, so that I made a great thing of fondling Shadow’s forelock for a moment.

‘As I should know it of you,’ I said. ‘Therefore will you take Shadow for me?’

He looked round at me quickly. ‘You are not taking her with you?’

I shook my head. ‘I cannot be taking her to Constantinople, and I would not be selling her to strangers in Caerluil. Ride her back to the valley when the time comes.’

‘You are still harping on that tune?’

‘When you feel that you are enough of a sword- smith to satisfy Loban - and my father, if you want Luned.’

I felt him startle and then grow still beside me. ‘If I want Luned?’

‘You do, don’t you?’ I said.

‘Luned is yours.’

‘No.’ I was sorting it out as I went along. ‘Luned is nobody’s until she chooses. There is love between Luned and me - once I thought… But it is more like brother and sister. There is love between Luned and you, and that, I am thinking, is of another kind.’

‘Even if you speak truly as to that,’ Conn said slowly, ‘the chieftain your father would never give her to me. I have been a bondservant in his house.’

‘We have had this conversation before,’ I told him. ‘You are not a bondservant now. Make him a serviceable blade or a set of shoes for his favourite horse, and I think he might. She has no dowry to make her easy to marry off, and a smith is worth having in any family.’

‘Aye, still the great one for ordering other men’s lives, you are,’ Conn said, and I heard a certain wry amusement in his tone.

I pushed Shadow’s muzzle aside and turned on him. ‘Only when they need it. Take the mare and ride
beyond the sunset with her for all I care. But, Conn, along the way, go back to the valley and see that all is well with Luned and rub Gelert behind the ears in my name, before you ride on. Will you do that for me?’

‘I will do that for you,’ Conn said. ‘And if Luned will have me but your father will not, then I will take her up before me and Gelert shall run at our heels. It should not be so hard to take a horse - and a hound - and a woman - across the western water, and there would be room for another swordsmith in Eriu - even if there is none in the valley.’

Next morning Cynan and I rode down from Eidin Ridge and away westward through soft late-summer rain not heavy enough to havoc the harvest. We both rode good serviceable mounts to be sold off before we took ship; and I led a pack beast with all our goods and gear and food for the journey baled on its back. Cynan had the archangel dagger thrust into his belt beneath his worn wolfskin cloak, and some writing on tablets which Phanes had given us for showing to certain merchant houses and ship masters along the way. And we both had our swords, and light wicker bucklers slung behind our saddles.

We rode down from the town ridge and out past the Royal Farm, and nobody came to watch us go. Only a farm dog ran a little way snapping at the horses’ heels.

Where the road lifted, I looked back once, seeing the Dyn on its great boss of rock, upreared dark against a sky that was brightening over beyond the Giant’s Seat where a bar of daffodil light broke the clouds. Then I turned face-forward again, and settled into the saddle.

There was another gleam of daffodil colour in the grey morning, where Cynan had let his cloak fall loose, and I saw that he wore a wisp of yellow silk round his neck, finely worked with coloured flowers in a foreign fashion. I knew it well, for the Princess Niamh had often worn it to bind up her hair when she wished to keep the braids out of the way.