The Shining Company (19 page)

So they passed, and when they were gone by, the long skein of them, stringing out along the foot of the ridge, we spilled forward after them, with the baggage beasts in our midst and the field-forge with its team of weapon-smiths and farriers. So we made for the old half-lost road that struck south-westward through the Long Moss. Men and women and children followed us for a while in flying column along our flank, and then fell back.

To take the direct way by three peaked Eildon and on down the great upland road through the heart of Gododdin territory would have seemed most likely, but once past the hosting place at Habitancum it would bring us overnear to the empty land - empty for the good reason that in the past years it had suffered too many raids from Bernicia - and our left flank would be dangerously exposed. It would be no good thing to come in contact too soon with the Saxons, and waste time and lives, and like enough have word of our coming carried ahead of us. So we followed the western road, three days longer than the other, but well clear of the Saxons’ reach almost all the way; and for most of the way through a still-living land, a thing to be considered when a war-band has to live for the most part on the country it passes through.

At noon, over beyond the Long Moss, we halted to rest the horses, and when we went on again, by the Captain’s orders we took up the proper order of march. Now, each pair of shieldbearers rode with
their warrior, to guard his back and each other; not that there would be need of that until many miles further on our way, but it was well to get into the way of it. It was good to find ourselves back in the familiar arrowhead again. The advance guard, one troop, rode ahead in small scouting groups, making a long line abreast that was maybe a mile from wing-tip to wing-tip; and the rest followed after, troop by troop, widely spaced, with the Captain and his standard bearer in the third. Our troop, that day, was the last of all, rearguard behind the baggage horses; and we rode seeing the standard far ahead, a lick of crimson in the changeful light.

Each day the troop changed places, but always the Fosterling our Captain rode with the third of the line, and always that blink of crimson told us where he was, and always Aneirin who was to sing our Triumph Song rode beside him, hooded and muffled in his weather-stained cloak.

The first night we were still in Gododdin territory, and the people of the local chieftain came out to us with what grain and cattle they could spare from their lean end of winter store. No, more than they could spare, for the Cran-Tara had passed that way, and they were getting together weapons and journey food on their own account.

That day, and the one that followed, we did not hunt, nor send out foraging parties. But before evening of the second day we were into the old lost territory of Rheged; a land almost empty of men, where the farms as well as the forts were hearth-cold and forsaken. And from then on we kept to the proper order of march in grim earnest, and lay up in
the old forts at night with a strong guard on the picketed horses. From there also we began to hunt and forage as we went.

Three days brought us to the Wall, and we made a loop eastward, crossing by way of the bramble-grown wreckage of the nearest wall-fort to avoid passing through Caer Luil that the Romans called Luguvallium; for a living town full of merchants and travelling folk might have links with the Saxon kind, and nine hundred horsemen would not pass through unnoticed. The fort where we made our crossing was empty as though it had never known the footprints of men. Wolves, maybe - there was an animal smell among the roofless barrack rows, but wolves would not carry word of our passing to their two-legged kin.

We pushed on south, and next morning rejoined our road. The land was still Rheged - or what had been Rheged - lowland country at first, though with hills rising afar off on either side; and must have been rich cattle country in its day, though there was little enough cattle-grazing now; gently wooded country, too, with the hazel and alder thickets already hazed with green. But before the day’s end we were heading up into the high valley of the Eddain, and the oaks of the low country behind us were giving place to rowan and birch and wind-shaped hawthorn following the course of the brown streams off the moors. Curlew country now, and the great blunt hills of Penuin beginning to rise on either hand. And the rush of falling water was never out of our ears save when for a little while the road ran clear of engulfing grass and heather and the stream sounds were lost in the clatter of hooves on the old paved way.

Towards evening of the second day from Caer Luil we came to another forsaken fort with heather washing to its walls, and the road running straight through, in at one gate-gap and out the other. We had been five days on the march, and made good time, and the Fosterling deemed that we should lie up there for one day to rest the horses before the last two days’ push that should bring us down upon Catraeth.

Rest for the horses, but not for us, for he set us to fighting practice among the roofless buildings and the narrow ways between, as though he feared that our battle-readiness might grow dull and our hands forget their killer cunning if we sat quiet for a few hours and watched the grass grow. All save the hunting parties, that is, and Conn and his fellows who set up the field-forge where the remains of what seemed to have been the cookhouse gave them a hearth to work on, and saw to loose horseshoes and the honing of weapons already sharp enough to draw blood from the wind; and Aneirin who spent the time perched in the stump that remained of the signal tower, looking southeastward with a fold of his cloak pulled over his head.

But towards evening, with the meat brought in by the hunters beginning to scent the cooking smoke with sweetness, with the horses that had been grazing under guard watered and oat-fed and tethered for the night, and the light beginning to fade over the high moors, at last there was time to draw breath.

Conn and I drifted down through the horse-lines in search of a short spell of peace and quiet, and came upon an upright stone standing man-high beside the way. Not a milestone, we were used to those, but something else, that made me think of the stone
beside the ford at Castellum. It was dappled with moon-coloured lichen and all about it there clung the odd magic that belongs to boundaries and threshold places.

‘Boundary stone?’ said Conn, only half questioning.

I nodded. ‘Like enough; Rheged on this side of it, Deira on the other.’

We found a hawthorn-fringed hollow below the road on the Rheged side where there was a pocket of shelter from the small thin wind, and squatted down into it side by side, looking back towards the sunset.

It was a while and a while since we had had the chance to be quiet in each other’s company, but that evening it seemed to have come about of its own accord, and in the little space of time that was like a gift, we turned from newer friendships, newer bonds, back to the old one that belonged to our old world; knowing, both of us, that we might never have the chance to be quiet in each other’s company again.

Neither of us said anything as to that, of course; one does not speak such things even to one’s nearest friend. Especially to one’s nearest friend.

The sunset brightened moment by moment, the bars of faint brightness under the grey cloud-roof strengthening to saffron and silver; and the evening was full of the spiralling springtime call of the curlews that had come in from the coast to nest on the high moors; and in the silences between the hushing of the wind through the hill grass we could hear faintly the voice of the young river below in the valley. We could hear too, behind us, the shifting of the tethered horses, men’s voices from the fort, and a snatch of
song and the sudden baying of a hound. But none of that seemed for the moment to be any affair of ours.

We did not talk much. There was not much that needed to be said, and we had never been given to talking for the sake of talking. But after a while, the quiet and the distant calling of the river that I had had no time to hear all day returned into my mind the memory of the dream that I had woken with that morning and forgotten almost before my eyes were fully open.

‘I had a dream last night. I dreamed that I was walking up the valley, past Loban’s smithy. You and Luned and Gelert were there too - somewhere - but I could not see you.’

‘And?’ Conn said, after waiting for me to go on.

‘That’s all. Silly sort of dream - not worth having, really.’

‘Maybe there was more that you do not remember,’ Conn said, his arms across his updrawn knees, eyes narrowed into the fading brightness of the sunset.

And indeed there was something more, taking shape in my mind as I went back over the dream memory. ‘Phanes was sitting on the door-bench; and someone with him - I didn’t see properly - shining and silver, with wings …’I shook my head, wishing I had not remembered that bit, ‘Probably just the light through the alder leaves.’

‘More likely the silver hilt of that dagger of his, grown to proper archangel size. It had magic for you, that dagger hilt, didn’t it?’

And I saw with relief that that was what the figure was. I did not want Phanes of Syracuse to be dead;
certainly not the Holy Brothers’ kind of dead, with shining angels. He had been still alive in the care of the monastery’s Infirmarer when we left Dyn Eidin; and I wanted him to be alive when we got back - if we ever got back.

‘As the blade did for you,’ I said.

‘But I did not dream of it,’ said Conn, and then after a while, ‘I wish I had had that dream too.’

But I do not think it was the archangel dagger so much as the track up the valley that he was thinking of.

And only the next moment, a voice just behind us demanded, ‘How if I had been a Saxon?’

And we wrenched around and scrambled to our feet to find Cynan standing among the hawthorn bushes within arm’s reach of us.

With my heart hammering in the base of my throat, I said, ‘Then, my Lord Cynan, I am thinking you might very well have been a dead Saxon. There are two of us to the one of you.’

‘Save that if I had been a Saxon indeed, I would not have given you warning by speaking before I used by seax,’ he retorted. ‘Keep a better look-out behind you when you sit out beyond the camp fires in strange territory. How long were you thinking to take your ease out here by the enemy mark-stone with the dusk coming down, if I had not come out to take a look at the horse-lines and chanced to see you?’

‘Not long - with the smell of supper in the air,’ I told him. We were not short on respect for our betters in and around the Company, but speech was free among us, even between a shieldbearer and his troop leader.

‘And I have been too long from my forge, I am
thinking,’ Conn said, scrambling up from the little hollow with a hand on a hawthorn root for aid, and shook himself and started back towards the fort.

Cynan looked after him. ‘Your friend is saddle-sore?’

‘No. It is an old hurt to his knee,’ I said. ‘He drags that leg when he is tired or when -’ I broke off. To go on would have been a kind of betrayal.

But Cynan seemed to understand something of what I had left unsaid. ‘I am sorry I broke in. There is little enough chance for a few quiet words with a friend on this kind of trail.’ He shook his shoulders as though to rid himself of something. ‘I am thinking that we had best be getting back, or they will have eaten all the meat and there will be only bannock left for us.’

We turned back towards the horse-lines together, and I mind - such a boy I still was - that there was a bright hard knot of pride in me because I was walking with Cynan Mac Clydno.

The wind had died into a long trough of quiet, but as we walked, suddenly there was a faint stirring in the heart of the tangle of thorn and bracken maybe less than a spear-throw ahead. It might have been only an eddy of the wind, but all around was completely still.

I glanced aside at Cynan and saw him looking the same way. He made a quick sign to me for silence, and slipped his dagger from its sheath. I followed at his heels as he moved forward, crouching a little. The wind had come back, and the stirring in the hawthorn tangle was lost among the rest; but in the fading light we could see where it had been, and see also when, at the last moment something - a man clad in rough
sheepskins - broke cover and ran for the denser scrub of the valley floor.

He should not have left it so late. But I suppose he had hoped that if he froze, we might pass him by. Only that one unwary movement had betrayed him.

I heard a flurry of shouting as the men on horseguard woke to what was happening; but Cynan and I were upon our quarry and, even winged by fear, he was not the runner that we were after our months of training, and in a couple of bowshots we brought him down. I twisted the long knife out of his hand and sent it spinning, while Cynan slammed his own dagger home into its sheath to have both hands free for manhandling.

The man fought like a wolf, and cried out sobbingly, something in a strange tongue, as we twisted his arms behind him and hauled him round towards the fort. ‘Here’s your Saxon!’ Cynan said, and it was true, from the look of him and his tongue and his smell - the Saxons have a different smell from us, some say because they eat wheat instead of the oats and barley that are proper for a man. We began to haul him back the way we had come, into the midst of the men who had come running from the picket lines.

‘What have you there?’ someone asked.

‘Wolf hiding in a thorn-brake,’ Cynan told him. ‘Some of you go and see if there are any more - you’ll find his knife out there somewhere.’

We brought him before the Captain where he sat beside the High Fire with Aneirin and the other troop leaders about him, eating singed deer meat and slab-thick stirabout.

‘We found this,’ Cynan said.

The Fosterling looked up at the man through a blue waft of smoke. ‘What was he doing?’

‘Hiding in a hawthorn thicket.’

‘Armed?’

‘He drew a knife on us. It is back there in the bracken somewhere. The usual kind.’

‘A Saxon?’

‘Aye.’

The Captain turned to speak to the man directly. ‘What purpose had you? To spy upon us?’