The Shining Company (8 page)

I flung up a hand to them all in farewell and turned my mare in behind Lleyn’s as he headed for the gatehouse, Conn bringing up the rear with the pack horse. We clattered through and swung on to the track that led down-valley past the mill and the smithy and the monastery, away to join the world beyond the mountains.

Towards evening four days later, with the last of the mountains behind us, we came riding down the grass-grown track between leaning and fallen gravestones that had once been the paved military road from the west into Deva, the City of Legions.

The city gate still stood, though the city it guarded was a fallen ruin cloaked with brambles and the green tide of springtime among the sodden wreck of last year’s bracken and willow herb; here and there a tottering house patched up and lived in, women spinning in doorways, children and dogs at play. Here and there a cluster of thatched bothies sheltering within the man-high walls of a public building, the basilica, Lleyn said, or a church, or the public baths. My first glimpse of what had once been the power and glory that was Rome.

In what must have been the forum a man sat on the steps to a building that was not there any more, playing the reed-pipe to a small herd of goats. Lleyn asked for news of strangers, and he told us of a small
party of horsemen who had ridden in the day before, asking where, if anywhere, they could get food and lodging for themselves and their horses. He had sent them up into the old fortress, where his master kept an inn at the sign of the Gladiator, a most noble inn, for passing travellers; and they were still there so far as he knew.

We thanked him and rode on, leaving him to his piping behind us.

The fortress on its higher ground was less in ruins than the lower city. Our horses’ hooves rang on cobbles that the grass had not yet completely taken over, as we rode between the long straight barrack- rows. There were more people about; and many of the buildings had thatched roofs on them. Before one cluster of ragged buildings, a sign hung from a young ash tree, showing a fat pink cupid wearing an enormous gladiator’s helmet and carrying a sword and shield. From somewhere within, a horse whinnied to ours as we drew rein before it; and a young shieldbearer with his mouth full and a crust in one hand appeared in a doorway and called behind him, ‘They are here, my lord.’

And a few moments later, dismounted but with our arms still through our horses’ bridles, for the most noble inn did not seem to have anyone to take them from us, nor even a hitching post outside, we were confronting three princes of the Cymru encamped with their shieldbearers among a rickety huddle of benches and tables at one end of a long barn-like hall, their horses being stabled at the other.

‘I have brought him,’ Lleyn was announcing.

Gorthyn, who had been delving into a fat-bellied
pot on the table, looked up with a collop of meat on the end of his dagger. ‘Prosper! God’s Greeting to you! ’ he said, as though we had last met maybe a week ago. Then his gaze went over my shoulder, ‘And this who follows you?’

‘Conn, my body servant,’ I said without thinking, and inwardly cursed myself the moment the words were out. This could have been Conn’s chance to be simply a man among other men, at least for a while, and I had spoiled it. Yet there had to be some kind of reason for bringing him. I cast a hurried look of apology over my shoulder, and he received it with his slow quiet smile and the faintest shrug.

‘It seemed that it was both or neither,’ Lleyn explained to the world at large.

The thick-set formidable looking young man on Gorthyn’s left snorted into the drinking bowl. ‘Your second shieldbearer comes followed by a shieldbearer of his own. Hai Mai! Large ideas of themselves some people have!’

‘I dare say he’ll not be the only one - and like enough we shall need horseholders and the like,’ Gorthyn said.

He sounded peaceable enough, but I saw the colour flare along the harsh line of his cheekbones; and the third man, older than the other two and maybe the leader because of that, cut in, smoothly as a well-burnished blade, ‘And in any case it is not a matter to shake the earth on its foundations, on this night when the King’s hosting begins, and there are other matters to be thinking of.’

‘Such as food,’ said the thick-set man reaching for another barley bannock from the basket on the table.
People often thought that it was for his fighting powers that Gwenabwy had come to be likened to the wild pig. It was. But we who came to know him, knew also that there was another reason.

‘Such as getting the horses fed and stabled,’ said Gorthyn.

I looked doubtfully towards the other end of the barn; it seemed very full.

‘There is more space through there,’ Gorthyn flicked a finger towards a doorway that seemed to open into a courtyard of sorts. ‘The forage store, too. When you have seen to the horses, follow your noses through to the cookhouse and demand food and another jug of this foul stuff they call wine.’

A short while later, the horses rubbed down and watered, with armfuls of hay spiced with beans from their own fodder bags spread before them, we returned to the long chamber, where a couple of torches had been lit in their iron sconces, and settled down with the other shieldbearers to fill our own empty bellies from the freshly brought pot of goat stew.

When the food was all gone we played dice, squatting on our heels in the pool of light from one of the torches, while our lords talked around the table, and Conn, a little apart from the rest of us, busied himself with mending a pack strap which so far as I knew was in no need of mending.

At first, the talk around the table seemed to be about nothing in particular, just a lazy blur of voices and the occasional laugh behind the rattle and roll of the dice. But after a while the voices cleared and hardened and I caught the words, ‘war-trail’ and
began to listen. ‘You think it
is
a war-trail, then?’ Gorthyn said.

The older man, Tydfwlch the Tall, they called him, lightly thumbed an old scar on his jaw. ‘I think so, yes. This call for younger sons, and each with two supporters, the old Arrowhead fighting unit …Yes, it has the smell of a hosting for the war-trail.’

We went on throwing the dice, but the pace of the game slowed, and all heads were tipped a little, eyes brightening. If we had been hounds our ears would have pricked. We were all very young, and to us a war-trail seemed a splendid thing.

‘Why now?’ Gorthyn said, thrusting back the hair from his forehead in the way that I had already come to know. ‘Why not last year? Or next? Or the year after?’

Tydfwlch shrugged. ‘Who shall tell what passes in the minds of kings? Maybe the Saxon threat draws nearer than we have heard among our own mountains.’

Gwenabwy laughed, flinging back his head and showing a cavern of open mouth. ‘Who cares? A war-trail has always been good following for younger sons, and is not King Mynyddog called the Golden? There will be meat and mead and golden arm-rings for those who follow him!’

One of Tydfwlch’s shieldbearers was shaking my shoulder, telling me that the dice box was with me and it was my turn to throw. I gathered my wits back to me, and rattled the box and threw, watching the three cubes spill out across the earthen floor. I had thrown triple six, highest cast of all, which men call Venus and everyone was shouting and laughing and beating
me on the shoulders, taking it for a good omen for what was to come.

I shall never forget my first sight of Eidin Ridge as we came clattering up the final stretch of the old paved Legions’ road from the south. We were a sizeable band by that time, having joined and been joined by other riders as we went along; men from Strathclyde and the old lost kingdom of Rheged, all answering the same summons. It was drawing on to sunset of a wild day, with shafts of harsh westering light lancing between the drifting cloud-masses of the broken skies.

One such lance of light struck suddenly along the whole length of the great ridge that rose ahead of us out of the low rolling country that washed it round. A moment before it had been dark and menacing, curiously alive with a life of its own like a crouching boar, and having nothing to do with the life of men. But in the acid-yellow light the huddled roofs and walls of living-places sprang out on its flanks and strung along its crest under a haze of evening cooking fires; and at the western end the ridge burst upward into a jagged shield-boss of rock, crowned with the sour white of lime-washed fortress walls.

‘See,’ someone said, pointing. ‘Dyn Eidin!’

The shaft of light faded, and the sharp-edged ridge
sank back into the storm-shadowed countryside, blotted out by a travelling squall of rain. Not long after, we came to the place where an unpaved track left the road. I had thought of the Legions’ road leading us straight to the Dyn, but one of the Strathclyde men who had been that way before laughed and said, ‘The Romans did not send their engineers to build their fine straight roads from chieftain’s hall to chieftain’s hall! This is the road to one of their frontier forts - over that way; Castellum they used to call it. The trackway here is the royal road of King Mynyddog.’

So following the royal road, we came on the edge of dusk to the place where the eastern end of the ridge sank into level ground almost at the foot of another great hill-mass thrusting towards the sky. ‘That is the Giant’s Seat,’ said the Strathclyde man, showing his knowledge, as we passed beneath it. But we were weary with long riding and more interested just then in the huddle of buildings through which the track, swooping almost back on itself, seemed to lead up on to Eidin Ridge. A farm steading of some kind, though bigger than any of its kind that I had seen before, the first torches flaring ragged at the gateway, smoke rising through thatched roofs, and the general air of a place where food and shelter was to be found.

In the gateway we were checked to a trampling halt by a huge man who stepped out into the light between the torches and stood there, leaning on his spear. ‘Who comes?’

Tydfwlch, still the senior of our little band, said, ‘Younger sons in answer to the King’s summons.’

‘In a good hour are you come,’ said the giant with the spear, and stood aside to let us pass.

In the open space amid the farm buildings we dropped from our saddles, and men came running to take the horses. I was doubtful for the moment about trusting my mare Shadow to a stranger’s care, but the boy who was taking her bridle seemed to know what he was about, and surely in a king’s stable the care would be good. I gave her a parting pat on her damp neck and went after the rest of our party. There were others who seemed to be of our kind there already - it was unlikely that we would be the first comers - but on the first evening their faces were a blur in the torchlight and the spitting rain that was setting in with the dusk. There were men there, women too, whose task seemed to be to give us welcome and tend to our needs; there was a long hostel-hall, new built - I mind the scent and colour of raw new wood and green thatch - and great tubs of heated washing water that smelled of herbs. And fingering its way in from somewhere outside the fat reek of beef stew.

‘Supper smells good,’ I said hopefully to the old woman who was drying my back.

She cackled, ‘So it should, for it is myself had the seasoning of it! But it is none of yours, for each night the newcomers of that day feast in the King’s Mead Hall.’

So by and by, having pulled on the best we had by way of a change of clothing and huddled on our damp cloaks again over all, we made our way with the men of the King’s household who had come to guide us, up the mile long road that led from the Royal Farm at one end of Eidin Ridge to the Dyn itself, the Royal Stronghold at the other. People came to firelit doorways to watch us pass; some, girls mostly, called
out a greeting. The chill of the spring rain was on the back of my neck, and suddenly sweet and unexpected, I caught the wafting scent of wet hawthorn where a bush leaned out from the black rocks of the defile as the last stretch of the road reared upwards to the gate of the King’s Stronghold. And at the end, growing warm and torchlit out of the wet night, another hall, new built and raw at the lower end like the long-house back at the Farm, old and long established at the upper; a hall that had been added to, that more men might feast in it.

What with weariness and the sense of being in a strange world, the whole of that first evening lies tangled in my memory with the confusion of a dream. Firelight and harp-song and candlelight - as many candles as I have seen in the great churches of the east, making the great hall so light that in places you could have seen to read a book in it. Coloured hangings and fine weapons along the walls; and gold everywhere, cups and arm-rings and the hilts of daggers. Even the King’s favourite hounds crouched beneath the High Table had goldwork among the hunting studs on their collars. And crowding faces that shifted and came and went like the faces in a dream.

Only one thing in the dream stands out real and sharp-edged, and that was at the very beginning; the moment when the horns of feasting sounded and the dragon-worked hangings were drawn back from a doorway behind the High Seat, and the King came out to us. Mynyddog the Golden, Lord of the Gododdin. He came out between two of his household warriors, an arm on the shoulder of each. A
man, the wreckage of a man, who must once have been a giant, but had shrunk and withered into himself until his mantle seemed to hang loose on bare bones, and the golden torque and armrings of kingship looked almost too heavy to be born. His face was yellow in the candlelight, with bruise-coloured eye-sockets pushed deep into his head. At first I thought that I was making some kind of stupid mistake, that this must be some aged kinsman of the King’s; an uncle, or maybe the Queen’s father, and in another moment the King himself would come through that inner door. But the men on either side of him brought him to the High Seat and eased him into it, and the only comers through the door after him were his Bard and his Champion and a tall woman with royal goldwork on her head, who took the seat beside him.