The hounds were all about the boar now, yelling into his black devil’s mask as he swung his head from side to side. Across Bryni’s braced shoulder Owain saw the coarse black bristles along his back and the redness of his wicked little eyes, and caught the sharp stink of him on the wintry air. He trundled forward a few steps, then Garm, the greatest of the King’s boarhounds, leapt raving at his throat, and instantly the whole scene burst into roaring chaos. The hounds were all on to their quarry now, baying and belling as they sprang for a hold and were shaken off and sprang again. They were no longer hunting-dogs around a boar, but one confused mass of boar and hounds that rolled slowly forward across the clearing.
But the boar was shaking free of the hounds as he came. Garm lost his grip, and springing in once more, missed the throat-hold, hung for a moment tearing at the huge black shoulder, and was flung off again; a big brindled hound lay kicking his life out in a patch of reddening snow, and the demon of the woods, scattering the enemies that clung to him and dragged him back, was quickening into a grotesque trundling charge that seemed to the waiting spearmen as elemental as a landslip roaring towards them. He was heading for the centre of the great curve of men, where the King and his closest hearth-companions waited, crouching on their spears. But he never reached them, for as the dogs scattered, young Bryni straightened a little behind his braced spear, flung up his arm with a whooping yell ‘Hi-ya-ya-aiee!’ and flourished it above his head, like a boy trying to attract the attention of a friend three fields away.
Among all that uproar, the shout might have had little effect, but the sudden movement caught the great brute’s eye, and his anger, which until that moment had been for the whole hunt, gathered itself and centred upon it. He swerved in his charge and came straight for Bryni.
Owain felt for one instant as though an icy hand had clenched itself on his stomach, and the next, the great brute was on to Bryni’s spear-point. It drove on, carried by the weight of its own charge, until brought up by the cross-guard at the neck of the spear; but it seemed that the deep-driven blade had not found the life; not yet, at any rate. For one sharp splinter of time, Owain saw the boy’s shoulder brace and twist and strain, as he fought to keep the spear-butt under his instep; then it was wrenched free, and still clinging to the shaft he was being shaken and battered to and fro as a dog shakes a rat.
‘Hold on, Bryni!’ Owain shouted. ‘For God’s sake hold on!’ He was springing forward, expecting even in that instant to see the boy’s hold broken and the black devil upon him. He dived in low among the raving hounds, his spear shortened to stab; other men were with him, other blades caught the wintry light, as he heaved aside the body of a hound and drove in his spear. Now he too was being shaken to and fro, the shaft twisting like a live thing in his hands; the breath was battered from his body, and the stink of the boar and its hot blood were thick in his throat, choking him as the world spun and rocked before his eyes. And then suddenly it was over. Whether it was his own blade or that of one of the other men that had found the life, he never knew, or whether at the last Bryni’s spear had taken effect after all; the great brute shuddered, gathered itself together for one last convulsive moment of hate, and crashed down on to its side, seeming to shake the whole forest with its fall.
Owain struggled slowly to his feet, and stood panting, his spear still beside Bryni’s in the boar’s breast.
Two hounds lay dead; others were dripping blood from their gashed flanks. Bryni also got to his feet, ashen-white under the brown of his skin, but smiling and with shining eyes. Without a word he set his foot on the boar’s shoulder and stooped to drag out his spear.
There were men crowding all round them; they whipped off the hounds, and the baying died, but just for the moment nobody spoke. Owain himself drew a deep sobbing breath that ached under his bruised ribs, but what he had to say to young Bryni, he would not say in front of the other men.
Then the crowd fell apart to let someone through, and there stood Haegel the King. He looked from the white-faced boy to the grizzly body of the huge black boar at his feet, and back again. ‘You young fool!’ His eyes were bleak, and his voice rough in his throat with anger. ‘Hammer of the Gods! If you were son of mine I’d flog the skin off your back to make shoe-thongs, for that piece of foolhardiness! Who taught you to think that a child such as you are could hold the King’s boar on your spear?’
Bryni turned from white to fiery scarlet under his brown, but still he smiled. ‘No one, Haegel the King. I thought it for myself. I am sorry if the King is angry that I have killed his boar.’
Haegel looked down at the second spear still fast in the black carcass, and the stab-wounds of other men’s knives, and for an instant his eye caught Owain’s and there was a twitch of laughter on his bearded lips. But the boy had been First Spear at the killing, after all. ‘As to that, the King has had other boars, and can spare one,’ he said, with the harsh note of anger gone from his voice; and then with an abrupt change of tone, ‘Who are you?’
‘I am Bryni, son of Beornwulf the King’s foster brother,’ Bryni said. And suddenly Owain knew that it was for this, to bring himself to the King’s notice in a way that he felt worthy, not merely in the wildness of the moment, that he had drawn the boar to himself.
Haegel’s head jerked up a little, and for a long moment his eyes narrowed into the wide bright eyes of the young hunter. ‘So,’ he said softly. ‘You are not very like your father, and I have not seen you in four summers.’
‘How should you?’ Bryni said, daringly. ‘The King has been good; he sent meal in the lean time, and an ox; but his shadow has not fallen across our door-sill since my father died at Wodensbeorg.’
One of the other men broke in angrily, but the King silenced him with a quick movement of one hand. He stood pulling at his beard, and his eyes held the hint of a smile. ‘So you will tackle the King as well as the King’s boar? If daring and audacity go for aught, you will make a warrior, should ever the Ravens gather again … How old are you, Bryni son of Beornwulf?’
‘Fourteen, my Lord King,’ Bryni said, and added quickly, ‘but I shall be fifteen before the blackthorn is well out.’
‘That is well. I may send for you before the blackthorn fruit is set. Oh, not for war, not this time. There are other occasions than battle for which a King may need his household warriors about him.’ His deep-set gaze lifted a little and caught Owain’s with cool deliberation. ‘And you, I remember you, the British spear among my Saxon shield-warriors. Can you still speak your mother tongue?’
‘I have not forgotten the way of it,’ Owain said, thinking it an odd question.
‘Good.’ Haegel looked at him a long moment as though storing him in his memory against some future need. Then he turned his attention back to Bryni, and putting out a foot, toed the huge black carcass. ‘But we are forgetting the proper business of the day. This thing is waiting to be gralloched, and after—it is your kill, what are you going to do with it?’
‘Make a gift of it to the King,’ said Bryni unblushingly.
Haegel laughed. ‘A truly noble gift. But keep the tushes and hide to furnish you your war-helmet.’
And he turned, stretching, and strolled across to where he had left his spears.
20
The Quiet Place
AFTER the silent and forsaken cities of Viroconium and even Regnum that the Saxons called Cissa’s Caester but left deserted to its ghosts, Aethelbert’s capital had taken Owain completely by surprise. Maybe it was the unwarrior-like merchant side of this King of Kent that had led him to make his chief place in the old capital city of the Cantii, instead of in some royal farm among the Wealden forests. As it was, he seemed to have brought the farm with him and superimposed it on what was there already. The general effect, Owain thought, drifting up one street and down another on his way back from the West Gate, was of a colony of jackdaws’ nests built along the ledges of some once stately colonnade. The streets and many of the walls were the streets and walls of Ro
man Durnovaria; the reed- and bracken-thatched roofs and the middens that blocked the streets were the roofs and middens of Cantiisburg. Pigs rooted in the streets. Oxen lowed, and the smells were many and varied but mostly they were the earthy and animal smells of the farm-yard.
Standing on the corner of two streets, because he had for the moment nothing else to do, and watching the folk of Aethelbert’s capital pass about their daily affairs, Owain’s mind went back over the past few weeks, to the day that the King’s summons had come. It was better to think about that than about what had happened this morning.
The strange thing—at least it had seemed strange at the time—was that the summons had been for himself as well as Bryni. ‘For the British spear among my shield-warriors, seeing that he has not forgotten his mother tongue,’ the messenger had said, quoting the King’s words that he had got off by heart. Owain had puzzled over that, especially as they had been bidden to bring no weapon but their swords, and it did not seem that the gathering could be for war. Beside, the King had said that it was not for war, ‘not for war this time. There are other occasions than battle for which a King may need his household warriors about him.’
The reason for his summons had been simple enough, after all, when it was told to him three days later in the King’s Hall. Haegel himself had received a summons from Aethelbert of Kent—he must have known that it was coming, as far back as the boar hunt at winter’s end. The High King had sent out bidding the lesser Kings, who owned him as Overlord, to a Council at Cantiisburg at midsummer. Some question of law-giving, it seemed; tribal frontiers to be settled; Owain was not at all clear about it, even now, and nor, he gathered, was anybody else. The Princes of the Allied British Kingdom would be there too, though they owned no man for their Overlord; and since Haegel of the South Saxons had a Briton among his warriors who could tell him what they said and maybe help him to understand their ways of thinking, he might as well make use of him.
So when Haegel took ship for Kent with three of his councillors and a small bodyguard of his kinsmen and household warriors including Vadir, and Bryni carrying himself already with the stiff-legged swagger of the hero of a score of battles, Owain also had been one of them. That seemed a long time ago, for they had run into squally weather and between their sailing and the time when they had landed under the ruined Roman pharos at Dubris, his memory had hung a greenish veil of seasickness. There had been horses waiting for them, and after a night’s rest, during which the floor of the shed in which Owain lay had continued to heave up and down with a steep ocean swell, they had set out along the remains of the great double-track legions’ road that led straight as a spear-shaft through the Great Forest to Cantiisburg. Two days they had been on that last stretch of the journey, for the roads were not what they had been when the Legions marched them; but yesterday towards sunset they had ridden into Aethelbert’s capital.
Coel of Wessex and Coelwulf his brother were there already with their chiefs and champions about them, and Redwald of the East Angles had ridden in late that night, bringing his own harper in his train. All Cantiisburg was thrumming with their gathering, and the thrum would deepen and strengthen until the gathering was complete. Then, Owain thought, strolling on again, the Council would begin, and if Haegel really needed him, there would be something for him to do. He was not used to finding his hands empty of work, and felt lost because of their emptiness.
It was because he had nothing to do that he had wandered out to look at the King’s horse farm just beyond the West Gate. At least he had told himself that that was his only reason, because if he admitted to himself that he was going hoping for a glimpse of Teitri, he would have known that it was a stupid thing to do. Teitri was gone: let him go.
Well, he had had his glimpse, of a white stallion running among his mares, so far off that it might have been any white stallion—if he had not known by his heart rather than his eyes that it was Teitri. He wondered, if he sent the old shore-bird whistle down the horse-pasture, whether Teitri would remember anything at all; and knew that he must not put it to the test.
‘I’ve had the care of three God’s Horses in my time,’ said the horsemaster leaning on the fence-timbers beside him; a red-faced man whose voice grated on the ear, ‘but never one the like to that. If he doesn’t kill his man before he goes back to Frey, I don’t know the look in a horse’s eye. He came to us out of the South Saxon Lands.’
‘I know,’ Owain said, almost under his breath. ‘I’ve seen him before.’
He felt, rather than saw, a shadow beside him, and there was Vadir the Hault, his gaze also going down the long horse-pasture, following the flying shape like a white wind-blown point of flame. So he too, had not forgotten …
Then Vadir looked round. His cold bright eyes met Owain’s for an instant, then passed him by, and he said to the horsemaster in that silken voice of his, ‘Our friend has not told you it all. It was he who brought the God’s Horse into the world and he who gave him the training that is permitted. Before he came to his greatness and his terror, the God’s Horse would come to his whistle—like a little dog. Doubtless he has been wondering whether the old whistle would call him yet—if it were not sacrilege to whistle to a God.’
Owain had felt as though something precious and infinitely private to himself had been torn free of its covering and held up naked to a jeering mob. Vadir had meant that he should feel like that. Curse him! He had turned from both men without a word, not trusting himself to speak, and come away.
Still raging and miserable he rounded a street corner, dodged aside to avoid a half-grown pig that ran squealing across his path, and all but blundered into a man going the opposite way. For the moment, as he dodged him again, he saw no more than that he was a small old man and that his hair was grey. ‘Your pardon, Old Father,’ he said, and would have gone on. But in the next instant a hand gripped his shoulder with unexpected strength and swung him round, and he found himself looking down into one brilliant amber eye that blazed up at him past a great beaked nose. ‘It seems that my memory is better than yours,’ said the old man, ‘for I have not forgotten my British armour-bearer in the Saxon Camp!’
Owain stood looking down at him with an incredulous delight and an odd sense of being rescued, as the face of the stranger changed before his eyes into the face of Einon Hen. He brought up his hand to cover the old man’s on his shoulder. ‘Einon Hen, by all the winds of heaven! I did not expect to find you in Cantiisburg, and I was thinking of something else.’
‘It must have been a thought to hold you very deeply,’ said Einon Hen, ‘for I’ve a face not so easy to forget as most men’s.’
‘I was thinking of a foal I saw born a long time ago,’ Owain said. ‘Are the Princes of the Cymru already here, then?’
‘Not yet. Nor is the time yet come for me to seek my own hills again. Since the treaty it is well that our people should have an ambassador among the Saxon kind. Almost three years I have served the Cymru here in this place—and it is good to hear a British voice again.’
‘For me also,’ Owain said. ‘For me also, Einon Hen.’ The passers-by were jostling against them, two dogs had started a fight, and a child on a door-sill, bowled over by the pig as it wandered indoors, was howling dismally. He raised his voice above the tumult: ‘Is there some quiet place where we might talk? May I come with you?’
The old Envoy looked at him a moment, silent in the uproar of the narrow street. ‘There is a quiet place—one quiet place in all Cantiisburg.’ His face quickened into a smile. ‘I was on my way there now, and I should be most glad that you come with me.’
They went up one street and down another, Einon Hen leading the way and Owain following behind. Close beside the old Governor’s Palace, where Aethelbert had made his Hall, they came through a crumbling gateway from the street into a little courtyard full of the dappled shade of a mulberry tree. A door stood open in the far wall, between the broken columns of a small portico, and quiet seemed to lie on the place, as tangible
as the shadows of the mulberry leaves.
‘What place is this?’ Owain asked, glancing about him.
‘The Church of Saint Martin. Come.’ The old man spoke as though it was so natural, that for the moment the younger one, following him across to the doorway, accepted it as natural too, that there should be a Christian church here in the midst of Jutish Cantiisburg—a Christian church that was not a ruin but still in use; for as they entered, the whisper of incense came to meet them, mingled with the smell of age and of shadows, and at the far end, beneath the glimmer of candles, the figures of three women were kneeling before a priest.
Einon Hen hesitated, as though he had not expected to see them there. ‘My Lady prays late, or the day is still younger than I thought,’ he murmured. ‘Let us wait here.’ And going quietly down the two steep steps he turned aside into the shadows just within the door, drawing Owain after him.
Standing aside, with the old man, Owain looked about him. The church was a very small one, and bare as a little white barn, save that on one wall someone long ago had painted Saint Martin giving half his cloak to the Christ-beggar. The colours had faded into the cracked plaster, but the soft buff pink of the Saint’s cloak that had once been the true warrior scarlet still seemed to glow with an inner fire. The murmur of prayers in the Latin tongue reached him in the quiet. It was the first time that he had known a Christian place of worship since the summer when his world had fallen to ruins. He remembered all at once the grey stone preaching cross in the hills, and behind all the silence of the service the deep contented drone of bees in the bell heather; he remembered, as he had not remembered them for years, Priscus and Priscilla, who would have shared their cloak with him … Slowly the sore hot places of his heart grew quiet within him.