The Shining Company (2 page)

The old track led up between the thatched house-places of the kindred straight to the timber gate that was broad enough to let in piled grain carts and driven cattle at tribute time, and the gate stood open as always in time of peace. But I turned aside into our own orchard, heading for the rear of the house. For at this time of day, and now that the weather had cleared, Old Nurse would have brought out her sewing or whatever tasks were to hand, to sit on the colonnade steps in the sunshine, where she could keep her eye on all that passed in the outer court.

Old Nurse was so old that her memories went back far enough to join with men whose own memories touched the time when the Legions had scarcely left Britain, and she had spoken in her youth with men who had spoken with Arthur Pendragon, him that among his own hills was still called Artos the Bear. At least, that was Old Nurse’s story. She was almost as good a storyteller as my father’s harper. But she was as curious as a squirrel, and though I knew that I would have to tell her every detail of Conn and his injured knee and Brother Pebwyr’s leeching of it, tomorrow, I was in no mood for it just now. So I made for the little postern gate behind the bath house, meaning to take a short cut across the herb garden to my own sleeping quarters, and so found myself having to tell most of it to Luned instead.

Luned, my kinswoman, had been brought up under our roof since her parents had died of the fever that comes sometimes in the spring after a mild wet winter, and neither of us could remember a time when we had not been together, so that it was almost as though we were brother and sister. She was squatting on her heels where the wood-violets grew thick under the thorn hedge, searching among the heart-shaped leaves when we came in through the postern. I whistled, and she looked round and saw us, then got to her feet and came running, thrusting the dark wings of hair back from her face as she came.

‘There is fresh salmon out of the weir for supper,’ she said. At winter’s end after the months of dried and salted stuff that made good hearing, but her eyes were going over my shoulder. ‘That is the new servant? Old Nurse was telling me -’

‘Old Nurse talks too much!’ I said.

‘Why? It is not a secret, is it? Everybody knows that Uncle has bought a boy from the traders to be your body servant.’ She looked him up and down with interest - it was not every day that one saw a new face, even a servant’s face, in the valley - and her gaze found Brother Pebwyr’s bandage. ‘He has a hurt knee.’

‘He was kicked on it by a mule three months ago, and the place hasn’t healed properly. That’s why Father got him cheap.’

‘Poor boy,’ she said, and her voice softened. We had been talking about him as though he were a horse or an arm-ring, as though he were not there at all, but now she spoke to him direct, ‘Have you a name, boy?’

He nodded.

‘Then what is it?’

‘Conn. They used to call me Conn.’

‘That’s not a name of our people. Where are you from?’

‘From Eriu, before the man-traders came.’ He spoke steadily, but his voice had a raw edge to it, and I turned to look at him. That was two things I had learned about my new body servant, and neither of them I had found out for myself. For a moment that gave me an odd twinge of something uncomfortable, shame, I suppose, but it was gone again almost, though not quite, before I was aware of it.

Luned changed the subject in the quick glancing way she had, like a minnow in shallow water. ‘I hoped there would be violets after the rain, but I can’t find any.’

And Conn answered her, ‘There will be violets soon, now that the fine weather has come, little mistress.’ It was the first time I had heard him speak, except in answer to a question.

The three of us went on towards the inner court together, walking like hunters in single file - for the path between the rosemary bushes was too narrow for two to walk abreast - with Luned in the middle and Conn walking stiff-legged in his new tight bandage, bringing up the rear.

The next morning I took Conn in search of Old Nurse. Probably he could have found her on his own, by that time, but I knew Old Nurse. If you wanted her to do anything for you, it was best to go yourself and ask, with courtesy and humility. We found her at last in one of the storerooms, checking the cloth of the last
year’s clip and scolding one of the maids for a fault that she had found in the weaving. I explained all things to her, and she abandoned the wool and the weeping maid and, grumbling under her breath about never being able to finish one job before the next needed doing, she led us off to the little room, close to the herb garden, where she kept her own remedies and dealt with all the ills of the household that were not bad enough for Brother Pebwyr.

She clucked like a hen at sight of Conn’s knee when she had the bandages off, and set to work on it with her sleeves thrust up. The old abscess looked much as it had yesterday, though it was certainly not in quite such a mess. My stomach cringed again, and I would have taken myself off and left them to it. But something held me there. She was not rough, but she was in a hurry, and her hands had not the calm sureness of Brother Pebwyr’s, also she seemed in an unaccountably ill temper, and I had an odd feeling that to leave my servant alone in her hands would be too much like abandoning him. So, grudgingly, I remained standing by and watching the work go forward.

‘Well, don’t be standing there like a salmon with the gapes,’ she said at last, knotting off the fresh bandage, when all was done. ‘Take him away until tomorrow, I’ve enough work waiting to be done: too much for a body that’s head aches as sore as mine does.’ And she sneezed and rubbed her nose with the back of her hand.

On the green edge of daylight next morning, I woke to find Conn, come up from the old slaves’ quarters
where he slept, standing in the doorway waiting for me to open my eyes.

‘The old nurse said I am to bring you the clean tunic that she washed for you,’ he said, when he saw that I was awake.

I flung back the warm sheepskin rugs and struggled up, yawning. The morning still had a chill to it, and I grabbed the tunic he held out to me and pulled on the warm folds of saffron wool, and demanded my belt. He looked about him in the light of the sinking night-lamp and picked up the broad strap with its bronze buckle from where it lay on the clothes chest. As he turned with it, the skirt of his tunic swung out, and I glimpsed the paleness of bandage linen under it.

‘Did she seem to be in a sweeter temper this morning?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘I’d not be knowing, master. She’s taken to her bed with the head cold that was brewing yesterday. One of the women gave me your tunic and the message.’

And that left the problem of who was going to dress Conn’s knee. Not that there was any problem really: plenty of other servants could do it. Only - Conn was a stranger. The bondfolk of the villa were not overwelcoming to strangers and newcomers … I could send him back to Brother Pebwyr, of course, but that seemed somehow a poor-spirited thing to do. I hankered after the Infirmarer’s good opinion, I suppose, and had a feeling, without knowing quite why, that if I did that, he would think the less of me. Maybe it would not matter leaving it for one day? Or, of course, I could do it myself. I had helped Cu my father’s hound-master doctor a sick or injured hound
before now: there had been the time last year when Gelert, who was young and foolish, had got his flank laid open by a boar’s tusk, and Cu and I had saved him when everybody else was saying that a knife across his throat was the most sensible thing. But that had been different; a hound I knew and loved, a new clean wound … At the thought of the pulpy mass under Conn’s knee my belly still turned a little - and anyhow I had other and better things to do with the first days of spring. Conn was still standing in front of me, holding out my belt. I took it from him and put it on. ‘Go back and get the things she used yesterday from Old Nurse.’

He looked at me, questioningly, and I realized that we had not in fact mentioned his knee that morning, and he had no idea what I was talking about. ‘Your knee. Someone’s got to do it. Best be me.’

‘I am thinking I can do it myself,’ he said.

I dragged the strap tight through its bronze buckle. ‘Don’t be stupid, nobody can do that kind of thing properly themselves. Get the stuff from Old Nurse, and don’t forget some warm water, and take it down to the bath house. That will be the best place to do it.’

And when he had departed on his errand, I went out into the growing light and headed for the bath house myself.

There would be no one there at that hour of the morning, though I could hear voices and sounds of movement from kitchen quarters and stable court, the whole villa waking to life and the new day all around me. It was really only Luned and the women of the household and very occasionally my father who used the bath house now, and then only the plunge-bath,
for the hypocausts that had heated the sweating chamber in the high and far off days had long since fallen into ill repair. When the bath house was in use pails of hot water would be carried in, and thick linen towels, and there would be a great coming and going. The rest of the time it mouldered quietly, my brother and I and men of the household much preferring to do our bathing in the stream. But the bath house would, as I had said, be a good place to deal with Conn’s knee; plenty of space and nothing to get fouled and less likelihood of onlookers. If I was going to do the thing, I had no wish for people coming to see what I was doing or telling me that I was doing it wrong.

I pushed the door open and went in. The cool damp smell of the place met me, and the faint whisper of moving water leaking in at one end of the plunge-bath and out at the other, and the flutter of bird wings overhead when the first house martins had returned to their nests in the roof. I sat down on the stone bench and waited, fidgeting, until I heard Conn’s uneven footsteps on the cobbles outside. It seemed a long time and I told him so.

He set down the things he carried on the end of the bench. ‘It took a while to get the things from Old Nurse. She was threatening to get out of her bed, too. ’

‘Well, now that you
are
here, pull that stool into the doorway where there’s light to see by, and sit down,’ I told him. The water he had brought with him in a covered bowl was still too hot. I took it over to the carved lion-mask whose trickle fed the plunge-bath, and poured cold water into it till I judged it cool enough, collected the big bronze rinsing basin from the corner, and came back to the doorway where
Conn was sitting rigid, staring out into the early sunshine, just as he had sat in Brother Pebwyr’s doorway two days ago.

I squatted on to my heels beside him and set to work trying to remember exactly what Old Nurse had done the day before. The wad of linen was stuck again, but not so badly as before. I eased it away with care and concentration. If I must do the thing at all I would do it to the best that was in me. I bathed the place and poured in a few drops of barley spirit, Conn drawing in his breath at the bite of it but making no other sound. I spread the salve with its strong smell of yarrow and feverfew on to a fresh wad and bound it in place. The bandage looked a bit clumsy when I knotted it off, but I thought that it would hold. I sat there for a few moments looking at it, aware suddenly of the shadows of the house martins darting to and fro. I remember that clearly. The odd thing is that I do not remember feeling sick at all.

‘I am thinking that it will hold well enough,’ said Conn, bending his knee a little, in much the same tone in which he had told Luned that there would be violets soon.

I looked up to tell him that I did not need
him
to tell me if my work would pass, and found his quiet brown gaze steady on my face. For a few moments we looked at each other, really looked, I suppose, eye to eye, for the first time. And oddly, it was not the look of one who had had a thing done to him and one who had done it, but of two who had done something, shared something, between them. And suddenly we were grinning at each other.

I gathered up the salves and spare bandage linen,
and flung the stained dressing into a corner for someone to clean up later, while Conn poured the dirty water into the drainage channel. And together we went out into the morning, leaving the doorway open to the darting house martins behind us.

That night Conn spread his rug across the doorway of my sleeping cell, and slept there according to the custom for a body slave or an armour bearer, or as a favourite hound for that matter.

It was young summer, dapple-shade in the valley woods and the hawthorn flowers already fading before we paid the clearing visit to Brother Pebwyr.

‘So. It is finished and well finished,’ he said, looking at the purplish scar below Conn’s knee where the old abscess had been. ‘Away with both of you and trouble me no more.’

I never did tell him that for three days it had been I and not Old Nurse who had tended the place. It seemed a long time ago and not very important any more. But I mind the sense of holiday that was now on me, I think on both of us, as we made our way down through the monastery apple trees.

Maybe it was because of that sense of holiday that we turned aside from the homeward track and the schoolroom where Tydeus would be waiting for me, and went instead to watch Loban at work in his smithy. Maybe it was because the Fates who weave the lives of mortal men were already setting up their loom for us …

Loban was an old man, beginning to be hunched by the long years at his work; all shoulders and no legs, but he must always have been small and meagre, and I had often wondered how he had managed to swing the great sledgehammer in his young days when he was learning his trade. He was a Master Smith now,
with men under him to call him lord, and seldom set his own hand to a horseshoe or even a plough-share, keeping his skills for fine weapons and the like; his tool was the light hand-hammer that rang like a bell all up and down the valley.

But when we came towards the low-browed smithy that sprawled like a sleeping hound under the alder trees, the hand-hammer was silent and Loban himself was sitting on the bench before the door, working on something small laid across his knee, and deep in talk with the travelling merchant who had claimed guest-right for himself and his men in our hall the night before. Phanes of Syracuse, he called himself.