The Shining Company (7 page)

‘Lleyn is not so much older.’ I heard a snort of mingled indignation and laughter just behind me.

‘A year or two. And his father is one of my father’s household.’

I had not known how deeply I wanted the thing until I knew that I was not going to get it; and I suppose I must have shown the urgent longing in my face, for suddenly he leaned down towards me and said, ‘Wait, and you also will be a year or two older.’

Then Luned came with the stirrup-cup and I had to step back and yield her my place. And with that, I knew that I must be content. But I knew also that I had been given a promise, and that Prince Gorthyn would not break it.

Two years went by, and the half of another year; and on an evening in Mary month the four of us were together on the old fortress hill that had been the chief place of our clan before the Legions came, sprawled in the warm southern curve of the great turf rampart. From the crest of the bank, among the wind-shaped hawthorn bushes, one could look down like a wheeling falcon on the whole valley, the sprawling time- crumbled villa house and the huddle of the settlement in the loop of the stream, follow the chariot-track and the stream-bank alders down past the mill and the smithy to the monastery among its apple trees and beyond, away and away to where the forest closed in over the pasture and crop-lands, the valley spread out like the fingers of a hand, and the distances turned blue. But from where we sprawled in the sun-warmed grass at the bank foot, there was nothing to be seen but wind-feathered sky and a golden eagle circling with the evening sunlight under his wings; swinging his hunting-circles so high that it would be half of Gwynedd, not just our valley that he saw.

I was lying flat on my back, Gelert beside me with his hairy head on my chest, and I was playing with his ears, rubbing my thumbs into the warm hollows behind them in the way he liked best in all the world. Conn, who was seldom without something to do with
his hands, lay propped on one elbow, whittling a bit of hawthorn wood he had gathered on his way up into something that looked as though it might be going to be a fieldmouse; and beside him Luned sat with her hands linked round her updrawn knees, watching what he did.

Three days ago, my brother Owain had been married, a marriage made between our father and a neighbouring chieftain for the strengthening of both clans. Owain had not been best pleased, for he scarcely knew the girl and would rather have chosen for himself. But it was the custom, and he had done no more than grumble a bit. To me the marriage seemed a matter for rejoicing, partly because I had been afraid all along that my father would marry him to Luned, and partly because turned sixteen and counting as a man, I had ridden with the bridegroom’s companions to help him fetch home the bride. The feasting had been truly noble, but the sham fight, which had not been entirely sham - I had a fading blackeye to prove it - when the time came to carry the squealing girl off from her father’s hall, had been even better.

But looking at Luned now, the thought came to me that maybe it was not a happy thing for her, to have a new mistress come into the house - though indeed the Lady Nerys seemed such a mouse of a girl that I could not believe her coming would make much difference to anybody. And then another thought came treading on the heels of the first; that maybe she had wanted to be the new mistress, married to Owain herself. I had not known if she felt like that; we had grown up together almost all our lives, but it struck me suddenly
how much I did not know of her. She had always been one who kept her secrets to herself.

I rolled over towards her, dislodging Gelert. ‘Luned, now that she’s here, what would you be thinking of Owain’s new wife?’

She looked up from her watching, half surprised. ‘Nerys? I dare say I shall like her well enough as time goes by. I have known her only two days.’

‘You did not need two days to know that you liked Conn.’ I do not know what made me say it, especially with Conn there; something in the way she had been watching his hands on the scrap of hawthorn wood, I suppose.

She said softly, ‘But Conn is Conn. Nerys is only a girl like a feather cushion. She eats too much honey-cake and presently she will spend all her time having babies while Old Nurse runs the household as she always has done.’

It sounded a bit as though my guess might have been right. In which case I should shut my mouth and leave the thing there. But there was something, a feel of coming change, on me that spring evening in the warm curve of the old rampart where it seemed that nothing ever changed except the wind. A feeling out of nowhere, that the thing should not be left hanging ragged, lest there be no other time …

I plucked up a grass stem to chew, and said round it, ‘Luned, did you - have you ever thought that it might be you, married to Owain?’

She said, ‘Yes. I did not think there was much danger, seeing that I have no dowry; but it was there, just a little fear. And, oh, the gladness is on me that now I need have no fear at all.’

‘Then you didn’t want at all -’ I said after a moment, stupid with relief.

She laughed a little. ‘Have I not said? Oh, Prosper, you sound so grave and solemn and - like an elder brother!’

For a moment I thought she was going to do one of her silvery minnow changes of the subject. But then she left the laughter behind and said quite seriously, ‘No, I did not want, I do not want, anything that breaks up the three of us being together.’

‘Since Father does not want you for Owain, maybe he has it in mind to marry you to me,’ I said chewing on my grass stem. ‘That would keep the three of us together.’

Luned had returned to watching the hawthorn mouse in Conn’s hands. She said, ‘Yes, I could marry you or -’ She checked, and a wave of colour flowed up from the neck of her tunic to the roots of her hair, and ebbed away leaving her creamy pale. ‘I could marry you, and that would keep the three of us together.’

And in the same moment Conn’s knife slipped and gashed his thumb. He snatched his hand away and sucked the ball of this thumb, while Luned said the kind and obvious things that women say at such times, ‘Oh, you have cut yourself - let me look.’

He shook his head and held his hand out to her, ‘It was only a nick. See - no more blood.’ And the moment was over and past like the little wind siffling along the hill grasses.

The shadow of the western rampart was creeping far across the hill top, and hunger telling us that it was time to be turning homeward for the evening meal, when Gelert suddenly lifted his head, ears pricked,
listening. We listened also. At first there was nothing to hear, and then, faint and far off on the very edge of hearing, I caught the triple of a horse’s hooves on the valley track; and in the same instant the others had it too. There was nothing unusual in that; always men and horses on the track that led up-valley to my father’s hall; but it was not so often that travellers came down-valley from the drove-road that led into it from the north, and the odd sense of coming change that had been on me earlier was on me still, making me alert to anything that did not follow the common pattern. I rolled over and scrambled up the steep green wave-lift of turf and through the cream-clotted hawthorn scrub along its crest, just as the horse and rider came into view, ant-small on the track that was no more than an unspooled linen thread, so far off and so far below that no sound of hooves could have reached us but for the wind in the right quarter and the odd trick of the surrounding hills just there, that gathered sound and tossed it upward.

Conn had come up beside me, and Gelert’s head was against my thigh.

‘Someone in a hurry,’ I said.

The valley was brimming with shadows and, watching, we could scarce have made out the rider if it had not been for that faint triple of hoof-beats on the stony track, looping around the base of the fortress hill towards the stream, then up the last stretch between the house-places of the kindred and in through the gatehouse.

‘It will be a late-come guest to the wedding,’ Luned said, holding aside a hawthorn spray and peering down.

Conn laughed. ‘Hungry as
we
are, and hurrying to his supper.’

‘Maybe,’ I said, suddenly in a hurry. ‘Let us be on our way.’

As we came swooping down through the steep pasture behind the house, Tydeus my tutor came to meet us - I suppose someone had seen the way we went earlier in the day. As soon as we were within shouting distance he started shouting, thin and high like a gull, ‘Prosper - your father bids you come to him in his study.’

I waved to show that we had heard him, and he stopped and stood waiting until we reached him. ‘What’s amiss?’ I demanded when we came together.

‘A messenger - nay, I know no more than that, but seemingly it concerns you.’

I reached my father’s study - he always called it that, though it was as much an armoury and as much an estate office, with a sword chest and spears racked against one wall, and farm records stacked along the shelves where once the scrolls of a fine library had lain long before our time. My father was seated sideways to his writing table, and a man in a dusty cloak was standing by the window. He turned when I came in, and I saw that it was Lleyn.

For a moment I was angry with Tydeus for not having told me who it was; but then I realized that even if he had noticed the Prince’s armourbearer he had probably not remembered him at all. I remembered, but that was another matter.

His weary freckled face broke into a grin. ‘Prosper!’

‘Lleyn!’ I returned. ‘What brings you into these parts? Is the Prince coming?’

‘No. But I come as his messenger.’ He held out a pair of tablets. I took them, seeing the crimson thread unbroken and the seal still in place; but glancing from one face to the other, I saw that he knew what was in them, and had told my father.

‘I have your leave?’ I said, and almost before my father gave it, snapped the thread and opened out the tablets, and turning to catch the light of the newly-kindled lamp, read the few words scratched on the wax.

‘Prosper, son of Gerontius, the year or two are passed. If you are still of the same mind, ride with Lleyn, the bearer of this. He will bring you to me at Deva,’ and underneath, the deeply scored signature, ‘Gorthyn.’

My heart was beating hard and high in the base of my throat when I looked up. ‘Do we ride tonight?’

Before Lleyn could answer, my father cut in, ‘Not so fast! Lleyn, do you tell him what you have told me as to the purpose of this summons.’

Lleyn said, ‘Mynyddog the Golden, King of the Gododdin, has summoned my Lord Gorthyn to attend upon him in his High Hall in Dyn Eidin, and not Gorthyn alone, it seems, but others, many others, from the kingdoms of the North and West.’

‘And all, I think you told me, younger sons,’ my father said.

‘So it is said. Each of them attended by two mounted shieldbearers.’

‘And for what purpose?’

‘To attend upon Mynyddog at Dyn Eidin,’ Lleyn repeated himself.

Clearly he knew nothing beyond that. But his eyes
brightened as we looked at each other, and I make no doubt that the brightness was echoed in my own. The summons for younger sons, also for two shieldbearers to each warrior called to mind the Arrowhead, the old Celtic fighting unit, and surely could have only one meaning.

‘In other words, you will be riding blind into whatever plans the Golden King may have for you,’ my father said, and then as I did not answer - there did not seem to be anything, really, that needed saying - ‘So be it. You have my leave to go on this trail.’

I looked round at him in surprise. It had not, until that moment, occurred to me that I needed his leave. I had simply known from the moment that I opened out the tablets, that I was going, in the natural order of things, as day follows night, as night follows day.

Next morning in the outer court, with the horses already brought round from the stables, I knelt to receive my father’s blessing before mounting to ride away. It was a morning of broken skies, a little thin wind and a fine spitting rain.

I had already taken my leave of Luned more privately in the orchard where the first white petals were drifting down. Conn and I both. How it came about that Conn was coming with me, I have never been sure; there did not seem to have been any argument or discussion, it seemed to be as much the natural way of things as it was that I should follow the Prince. Even my father had raised no objection, and Lleyn when he saw the two of us in the courtyard, and
the extra horse, had only shrugged and said, ‘Well, I dare say he will not be the only one.’

Luned had made no protest either, back there among the apple trees. Her eyes had looked huge and very dark, but they would have looked like that if I had been riding alone. I had given Gelert into her keeping. ‘Keep Gelert for me, let him hunt with the pack but don’t let him be housed in the kennels or he’ll forget all his manners before I come back.’

‘He shall sleep in my chamber,’ she said, and took the leash from my hand. He was quite used to that, but when I went to rub his head, he whimpered and licked my thumb, looking up at me with puzzled eyes as though he knew that something strange was in the wind.

I had kissed Luned, then; the first time ever I had kissed her, like a brother, yet not altogether like a brother, with Conn standing by. I do not know whether he kissed her too; I turned away to the gate leaving them for the moment behind me. But I do know that he had had yesterday’s hawthorn mouse in his hand, and I never saw it again.

There was quite a gathering on the colonnade steps to see us ride away; my father and Owain, and the plump little bride in tears - tears would always come easy to that one - Old Nurse, also, and others of the household, and Tydeus with a drip on the end of his long nose. I had asked Tydeus once what he should do when his days of tutoring me were over, and he had said, ‘Rejoice! And go down to the monastery and ask the Father Abbot to shave the front of my head, and have peace and a modicum of intelligent conversation with Brother Pebwyr in my old age.’ But I suppose he
had a certain fondness for me, after all. I looked once towards the dark gape of the house door behind, half hoping to see Luned and Gelert one more time, but she must have taken him to her chamber and bided with him knowing that left alone he would have howled.