The Shining Company (26 page)

‘Enough, for the time being. It will not harm him to starve for a while,’ Aneirin said. ‘Eat your own, now. We must saddle up and be on our way.’

So I pushed in my own few mouthfuls, and going down to the stream with the rest, drank, and dashed the cold water over my face and neck which made me feel somewhat less as though I was walking in a dream.

How we got Cynan on to the back of his sidling and snorting chestnut I have never been quite sure, save that at one point I was sitting behind the saddle myself while Conn and the bellows-boy heaved him up to me. But once in the saddle we did not after all need to tie him there. It had always been said of him and his brothers that they had been bom on horseback and suckled by a mare, and certainly I have known him sleep on horseback without coming off. And once we had him astride Anwar he stayed there, as though his body knew the way of it, though I do not think his head knew night from day. But he made no move to pick up the reins; I did that, and as we headed out from the clearing, Conn and I rode close on either side.

By full dark we had left the woods behind us and were out on to open moors, climbing steadily towards what felt like the roof of the world; a world of little
sky-reflecting tarns and great rolling hill shoulders and upland bog country in which we would have been lost save for the scout, the mealy tail of whose horse was our leading light. Once, for a while, our hooves rang hollow on the remains of a paved road, but soon we turned off it and were alone with the emptiness once more. There had begun to be a smell of rain in the wind, and the moon, when it rose, had an oily ring round it. But the wild weather that was assuredly coming was still holding off when we came down out of the emptiness again into a narrow wooded valley. The woods were hushing softly as we came down among them. We were all fairly spent by then; weary men on weary horses, and Cynan’s strange empty strength had given out, so that Conn and I rode with our shoulders braced against his on either side to keep him still in the saddle.

Aneirin sniffed the wind like a hound and said, ‘We had best be finding this refuge of yours soon, I am thinking. ‘

And the scout answered him, ‘It is not lost. Did I not say by dayspring?’

And sure enough, a mile or so further down the valley, we found the hardness of a made road under the turf again, and not long after, with the grey light growing about us, and the pale gleam of running water showing through the trees on our left, we came to ruined walls again, and pavement under docks and brambles, and the feeling we were beginning to know well, of a place where men had lived but lived no longer.

‘I am weary of ruins,’ Credne grunted.

‘They have their uses. Unless they have fallen since
I was last here, there are still a few rags of thatch on some of the outbuildings,’ the scout told him. ‘Should help to keep the rain off; and the Saxons will not come this way, as I have said.’

‘What is this place?’

‘Once it was a Roman posting station. The road crosses the stream by a ford just yonder.’

‘It seems you know the place well,’ Aneirin said, faintly questioning.

‘I was born and bred a mile or so down the valley.’

We rode in among the tangle of hazel and thorn scrub and the tumbled stone footings of walls, dropped the reins over our horses’ ears and slid heavily to the ground. We found the stable block with the skeleton of half a roof still on the far end of it, and laid Cynan there; and still moving in a kind of dream I helped Aneirin re-dress his wound while the others saw to the horses.

Afterwards we ate what was left of the wheat cakes, and scattered in search of dry wood while there was still dry wood to be found, then lay down to get a little sleep, Aneirin himself this time keeping watch. Presently we must hunt, if we wished to eat; but sleep seemed more important just then. There was no knowing if Cynan was sleeping or waking. He had taken in a little of the wheaten mush that I had made for him, and I think that when we spoke to him he heard, but he made no answer, and seemed to take no heed of what went on about him, just lay there with his one serviceable eye not quite closed.

I lay close beside him so that if he moved I should know, and tried to sleep myself. But though I could not seem to be truly awake, I could not be truly asleep
either, but skimmed along the surface like a mayfly on a stream, and every time I dipped below the surface, ugly dreams drove me up again to the awareness of Cynan beside me, and the rising wind and the hush of rain. I must have slept at last, more deeply than I knew, because when at last I woke with eyes that felt hot in my head and the half remembered wrack of evil dreams still clinging to me, there was firelight and a kind of shelter rigged up from branches with our cloaks made fast over them, and the smell of food. I suppose it was the smell of food that had roused me. The scout was cooking a fine fat trout over the fire on the point of his dagger.

‘Did I not say that I knew this stream?’ he said.

There were four trout among us; not enough, but better than nothing. I took one between Cynan and me and teased the worst of the bones out of Cynan’s half, then put it into his hand before falling to like a wolf on my own. But when I looked round at him, it was still there. I took it away again and began to put bits into his mouth, and he chewed and swallowed like an obedient child. And still I felt nothing, nothing at all through the numbness that made all things seem a long way off and not quite real.

The wind was going round to the east, driving the rain straight up the valley, roaring and booming through the trees on a new note. Then I heard it coming, sweeping towards us from far down the valley: the sound of hooves; a charging, a stampede, sweeping nearer at a speed that was beyond the speed of mortal horses even at full gallop. So must come the Wild Hunt, skeining through the stormy skies and followed by all the souls of the dead, only that yet
again it lacked the crying of hounds. I thought -1 am not sure what I thought - for those few moments as the ghost-riders came roaring up through the trees it seemed that I was hearing again the last ride of the Shining Company. The earth-shaking thunder of hooves was right upon us, filling all the space between earth and sky; there was a great screaming inside my head, a vortex of rolling manes and fire-filled nostrils, a crash of power and terror like a breaking wave that reared up and arched over us - and passed on, blending into the booming storm voice of the trees.

I saw startled faces round the wind-driven fire.

‘Only a trick of the valley’s shape,’ the scout said. ‘It makes some kind of horn to catch the wind when it blows hard from this quarter, and conjures it into the sound of galloping horses.’

‘You could, maybe, have warned us,’ Aneirin said with faint amusement.

The scout spread his hands, ‘I did not think, having known the sound all my boyhood. But you will know now why, once having heard it, the sea-wolves leave this place alone.’

I heard them quite clearly, but there were matters of my own in those few moments that concerned me more. The wild stampede had caught me up and back into the company of my sword-brethren, before sweeping on to leave me behind. And in doing so had stripped from me the merciful numbness of the past two days, and left me awake once more, and stripped naked and raw to what had happened. I had known it with my mind, the thing that had happened at Catraeth between the river and the woods; but now for the first time I was knowing it in my heart’s core.

I got to my feet, mumbling something about going to see that all was well with the horses, and blundered out into the dusk and the booming wind. (Three times more that night before the storm blew itself out, I heard the wind play that trick. But having done its work on me it remained only the wind playing at ghost-cavalry among the trees.) I went across to the place where we had picketed the horses in a sheltered angle where two walls met in a tangle of hazel scrub. Shadow swung her head towards me at sound of my coming, and snickered softly down her nose in greeting. And I put my arm over her neck and drove my face into the harsh live wetness of her mane, and cried as I had never cried before, and as I do not think that I have ever cried since; for the last ride of the Shining Company, for the death of my friends, for strength and beauty and brightness gone out of the world though we had not killed the white hart; cried I think for my own boyhood that I had thought myself grown out of years ago, but that in truth I had only lost at Catraeth two nights since; cried for Cynan of the Three Battle Horsemen of Dyn Eidin - for what was left of Cynan …

An arm came across my shoulders, and Conn’s voice under the beating of the wind said, ‘Easy now, easy, brother,’ as I have heard him speak to a nervous horse at the shoeing, its upturned hoof between his leather-aproned knees.

He did not speak again for a while, only kept his arm there; and presently the quiet pressure of it began to steady me, though my grief remained the same. Bewilderment as well as grief. ‘Why us?’ I choked out. ‘Why me and Cynan, of us all?’

‘Maybe there are others,’ Conn said.

I shook my head. There would be no others, and in his inmost heart he knew that as well as I did. He said, ‘Maybe the Fates have marked their pattern on your forehead and on Cynan’s as a while back you told me that they had marked it on mine. But among mortal men there can be no knowing why.’

I turned away from Shadow. I was in control again. ‘Has he changed - I began.

‘No, no change. With a dent on the head like that, it takes time, I am thinking.’

‘It is more than that,’ I said, thinking the thing out as I went along, as I had not been able to do before. ‘He lost both those mad brothers of his within days of each other. Cyrnan he killed himself as one puts a wounded horse out of its pain. I saw him do it - even when the Fosterling split the tribes up among different troops he never tried to split up those three. The Giant’s Seat would have cracked apart …’

‘He still needs you,’ Conn said. ‘Come - and maybe the Giant’s Seat will yet hold together.’

We were back at the far end of the stable block, firelight jinking out between the freshly rigged cloaks of our shelter; and I ducked in out of the wind and the driving rain.

We lay in that place for several days, six maybe, or seven. While the strength came back into Cynan’s body. Quite early in those days I said to Aneirin, ‘Let you ride on. It is for you to reach the King as swiftly as maybe. Leave me Conn, if you will, and take the others, and we will follow you as soon as my Lord Cynan has strength for the journey.’

But he shook his head. ‘Neither of you has even my small knowledge of the healer’s art.’

‘Tell me what must be done, and I can do it. It is for you to get the word back to Mynyddog, of how we carried out his orders, and what came of it.’

‘The King will have other messengers in these parts - a man on a fast horse to carry the tidings; and he will know it soon enough. The thing that is mine to do and can be done by no other man is to make the Great Song of the Gododdin at Catraeth, and for that there is no hurry.’ And he took his harp out of its bag and began to tune and cherish it as he did daily, though he had not woken it since that last night at Catraeth.

And I went on about my task of gathering firewood. But his words clung about the back of my mind. ‘The King will have other messengers in these parts - a man on a fast horse -’

Did Mynyddog know already? Maybe he had known while there was still time - while relief could still have reached us. There was a bitter taste in my mouth.

We hunted, during those days. There was wild pig in the forest, so our guide said, but we had not the hounds nor the spears nor the heart within us for dealing with a boar at bay. Credne had a bow and a few precious arrows, and with that and what we could improvise from our own gear, we shot and trapped through the woods about us, and tickled for char and trout in the stream and ate whatever came our way. Once it was a vixen. Fox meat makes rank eating, but it holds off hunger well enough.

The wild weather died out, though the forest was sodden and the few tracks turned to quagmires when
we rode out once more on our journey. We rode in daylight now, the need for darkness being passed, up into the high blunt hills of the Penuin that were like the roof of the world; and I mind once on that first day, turning in the saddle to look away over much of the countryside that had opened to us when we had come riding down from the high moors, nine hundred of us, with Catraeth still ahead. Mile after mile of rolling forest, greener now with occasional clearings in it showing like the rents in a shaggy cloak; and far off on the edge of the world the grey swordblade gleam of the sea. But the faint blur of hearth smoke that we had seen rising here and there among the nearer woods no longer lifted into the air. That told its own story of villages left without men of working age, and women gathering up the old and the children and heading back for the coastwise settlements, leaving cold hearths behind them. We had made our mark on the Saxon kind.

‘If we got Aethelfrith - I began, as Aneirin reined in his horse beside me, looking the same way.

‘If we got Aethelfrith. Aye,’ he said, his eyes narrowed as he also searched for hearth smoke among the low wooded hills. I mind the jagged shape that his face made, cut darkly out of the sky. ‘If the Flame Bringer is gone, then the Saxon flood is stayed, here in the north, for another fifty years, as it was for Artos after Badon.’

‘I never saw him, when we made the last charge. How if he was not there? How if he was clear, to lead them again on another day?’

Aneirin was silent for a moment, his gaze still
narrowed into a distance, ‘Two years, maybe three,’ he said at last.

‘So great a difference, hanging on one man’s life?’

‘I believe so,’ he said briefly. ‘The word will like enough have reached Dyn Eidin by now. We shall know soon enough.’ And he touched his heel to his horse’s flank and we rode on after the others.

At nightfall the scout brought us down into a stone-walled and heather-thatched settlement of our own kind. People who had been of Bernicia before the Saxons came spreading inland from the coast and drove them up into the hills. We told them what they asked, but they did not ask much, and truly I think that they were beyond greatly caring what happened in the world of men, so long as their own thatch was left unburned and their sheep to graze on the lean hill pasture. But they gave us what little food they could spare, and the warmth of their fire to sit by.