The brief flicker of hope made it all the harder to bear, and something very like a sob rose in his throat. Strength seemed running out of him like blood from a wound, and when he tried to pick her up again, he found that he could not do it. He gave up the attempt for the moment, and sat back on his heels, trying to fight down a rising sense of panic. Somehow he must get her up to the farm. It was not very far, not much more than a good bow-shot, maybe. He got his knee under her and his arms round her again. If he could have carried her over his shoulder it would have been easier, but he was afraid that that might harm her. He shifted his hold a little, set his teeth, and somehow, without much idea of how he did it, struggled to his feet. Regina’s head hung back on her thin neck, but he could not help that. He set off, stumbling and lurching, Dog padding anxiously at his heels. Out from the scrub of the woodshore and across the brown fallow towards the track. Now that he was clear of the shelter of the trees, the wind and rain swooped at him like live enemies, and the soft earth of the ploughland clogged his bare feet and tried to hold him back. He was blind and sick and dizzy, but somehow he clung to Regina and struggled on, and suddenly the ground changed, and the mire of the track was beneath his feet, and the gate-gap of the stockade close before him. He turned in through it, and reeled across the steading garth towards the gleam of a fire and the sound of voices that came from the open house-place doorway. Two guard-dogs—great red-eyed brutes—were baying the news of his coming, but they were still chained up, for though the day was drawing on, it was nowhere near yet to cow-stalling time, and Owain paid no heed to them; nor did Dog, whose only concern was to follow Owain.
A man had come striding into the doorway to see why the dogs were barking. A second came up from the outbuildings, and others, men and women and children, seemed to spring out of nowhere like the people in a dream. He was in the foreporch now, out of the wind and the rain. He let Regina slip from his arms on to the guest-bench, and stood looking at the faces about him as though they were indeed the faces of a dream, leaning against the doorpost and bent a little over his own belly, like someone who has been sick and wants to be sick again.
He heard voices coming out of the faces, speaking in a guttural tongue, and the sound of the voices was questioning. ‘She has—the lung sickness,’ he said in his own tongue, as soon as he could straighten a little and speak; and remembered even as he did so that they would not understand, and tried to gather himself together to show them. But in the same instant the woman in the russet-red gown came from the fire, a woman with eyes of faded blue in an old quiet face, and the rest made way for her so that he knew she must be the mistress of the house. He had never seen a Saxon woman before, and he noticed even in that unlikely moment that her hair was covered with a kind of napkin, instead of being bare, as the women he was used to. She looked at Regina lying small and spent as a dead bird on the bench, with the cloak fallen back from her and one arm trailing, and flung up her hands with an exclamation that had the sound of kindness in it. Then it seemed that she asked questions, too, her gaze moving from Regina to himself and back again; and while he was still battling to clear the fog about him and make himself understood, a man who looked as though his brother might have been a fierce little mountain bull, grunted something in reply, and picked Regina up as casually as though she had no more weight than a dead bird and not much more importance, and turned into the house-place with her.
Owain, lurching after the man with no clear idea in his head save to keep close to Regina and see that they did not hurt her, had a confused impression of empty stalls as though the place were a cow byre and not a house, and then space opening out beyond them and the saffron warmth of the fire that he had glimpsed through the open doorway. Then the man had set Regina down on a pile of sheepskins in the corner, and instinctively he crouched down beside her, his arm across her body as though to shield her from harm. A boy with a handsome ruddy face like a bull calf pushed out from his elders to stare. He came too close, and Owain snarled at him much as Dog might have done; save for Regina it was a long time since he had had to do with human beings. Several of the folk laughed, and the boy scowled, then turned away shrugging, and went and sat down with his back against the upright loom and pretended to take no more interest in anything. The mistress of the house was already kneeling beside the unconscious girl, and very gently, smiling into his eyes out of her faded blue ones, she pressed his protecting arm away. He resisted a moment, and then let it drop to his side.
The man who had carried Regina in was talking with another beside the hearth, both of them staring at Owain and the girl while they spoke. Then the second man leaned forward from the stool on which he sat, and said in the British tongue, though with the broad guttural accent of the Saxon kind, ‘Boy!’
Owain looked at him for the first time, and saw a fair, thickset young man with a skin tanned and wind-burned to the colour of copper, and pale straight brows almost meeting across the bridge of his nose. He was sitting with legs stretched to the fire, steaming in their loose cross-gartered breeks, and a drenched cloak was flung down beside him as though he had not long arrived out of the storm. This, he realized vaguely, must be the rider of the horse gone lame.
‘Boy,’ said the young man again, ‘what is it that you do, you and the woman-child, here in the Forest of Thorns? Is it that you run from someone?’
The sound of his own tongue, even spoken in that outlandish accent, pierced through the fog about Owain and seemed to clear his head a little. Relief swept over him at the discovery that there was someone here who could understand him. ‘We were trying to get to the coast,’ he said, and added on a note of defiance, ‘We were running from no one save the Saxon kind; we hoped to get across to Gaul.’
The man nodded. ‘That is boldly spoken, at all events.’
Owain said, speaking carefully to make sure that the foreigner understood, ‘But now she has the lung sickness, and we can go no further.’
‘So I judge,’ said the foreigner.
‘And so—’ Owain’s strained gaze went to the man like a bull, and then back to the other; he swallowed, and his mouth felt dry. ‘Will you tell him, please, the master of the house, that if he will take her in and let his women care for her and—and give her milk—until she is strong again, I will stay and work for him and be his slave.’ He knew that there were many British slaves on the Saxon farms, and always he had scorned them for having let such a thing come about when they could have died instead.
The man looked at Owain in silence for a moment, and then spoke to the bull-like one, and the bull-like one stared again at Owain, and said something, and shrugged.
But the mistress, who had pulled off most of Regina’s drenched rags and was feeling her forehead and her heart, while the younger women went scurrying for milk and clean rags and medicine-herbs, glanced up and asked a swift question, and the man translated again. ‘The mistress of the house says what is she to you? Is she your sister?’
Owain looked at Regina’s still face and up again into the man’s, and shook his head. ‘She came because I had a hare cooking, and she was hungry. But that was a long time ago—last autumn.’
This also the man told to the rest; and he and the master of the house spoke together for a few moments, while Owain sat on his haunches and watched them, trying desperately to understand. Then the fair-haired man, who had been looking fixedly at Owain even while he argued—it seemed like arguing—with his host, leaned forward and reaching out, ran his thumb nail down the scar of the old spear-wound where it showed under the rags of his sleeve. ‘That was gained in battle?’ he said, speaking for himself now, not for the others.
Owain answered him in the same way, for himself, and not for the household watching and listening about the fire. ‘By Aquae Sulis a year ago.’
‘That was a great fight, as I heard.’ The man was silent a long moment, studying Owain under his pale brows, somewhat as a man looks at a pony, for its spirit as well as its physical points. Then, as thou
gh suddenly he had made up his mind, he tossed three words, carelessly enough, over his shoulder to the bull-like master of the house. Then he spoke to Owain, returning to the British tongue. ‘The master of the house says that he does not want another thrall. But the Gods have been good to me; there is a small son in my house, and because of that, I shall add to the Intake-land when I get home from this wayfaring, and because of that there is room in my house-place for another thrall. Therefore I have told him that I will take you off his hands—you and the dog together—for a gold piece. And he will keep his side of the bargain, and care for the woman-child.’ His eyes narrowed a little, hard on Owain’s face. ‘But I say to you, and this is my bargain, that if she dies, that is the will of the Gods—and I have still paid my gold piece.’
Owain was silent a moment, looking at Regina. One of the women had brought something in a pottery bowl and the mistress had taken it and was trying to persuade her to rouse and drink. She seemed kind enough. His hand on the neck of the great hound who had crouched all this while watchful beside him, he stared into the fire again, seeing not the crackling red flare of burning furze but the little hyacinth-coloured flames that flowered from the burning olivewood, and Regina dropping the rosemary seedling into its heart, so that there should be nothing left—nothing left …
‘How shall I know whether she lives or dies?’ he said.
‘Unless she dies before we move on south tomorrow, you will not know,’ said the man. ‘My holding is many days from here.’
‘They will be kind to her?’ Owain said, putting the question simply as one man to another.
‘I do not know them. My horse cast a shoe, and I am but a one-night’s guest within the gates, but I think the mistress at least will be kind to her.’
Owain raised his eyes from the fire to the man’s face, and said, ‘I will come,’ as though there was a choice to be made. But he knew that there was no choice in the matter. He was a Saxon’s slave, bought with a gold piece. The choice had been in the woods, where he buried his father’s ring.
The women got some milk into Regina, and Dog was fed with the watch-dogs before they were released, and Owain had a bannock and a bowl of kale broth at supper, and a place in the loft to sleep. They were a kindly enough household. Their animals would be well cared for and their bond-folk not beaten for the mere joy of beating; he was glad of that for Regina’s sake, but he hated to admit it, even to himself, lying hot-eyed and wakeful while the wind and the rain hushed across the thatch and the long night wore away.
In the morning, when the early meal was eaten, and he had saddled his new master’s horse—reshod by the man like a bull, for in the wilds every farmer must be his own smith—and brought it round to the foreporch door, they let him go for one last look at Regina. She was breathing more easily, and her eyes were properly shut as though she was asleep, the black lashes making feathery shadows on the white of her face. He knew that he must not wake her to say good-bye. But he pulled the little worn strike-a-light bag from his belt and laid it beside her. They had taken his knife and his sling, and it was all he had; it seemed fitting that he should give it to her, anyway; from now on he would come with the slaves and the dogs to warm himself at a master’s fire; he would not have a fire of his own again. He looked at the mistress, anxiously, to make sure she understood that it was for Regina; and she nodded.
Then he heard his master calling from the doorway, ‘Boy!’
And he went out with Dog at his heels, and an odd feeling that was not so much grief as a sense of physical loss—as though he had pulled off some part of himself, and if he looked down he would find the place was bleeding.
9
Uncle Widreth
A WARM west wind was buffeting across the tawny levels; there was a faint taste of salt in it, and the humming of the sea. But any wind, unless it came due from the north, had the taste and sounding of the sea in it, for anywhere in the flat lands thrusting southward from Regnum to the rocks of Cymenshore one was never more than a few miles from the sea on either side. Owain, with Dog loping at his heels, came up from the harbour—Windy Harbour, they called it—where he had been with a message to the boat-strand below the settlement; for Beornwulf his master, like most of the coastwise farmers, was part fisherman too, and had a third share in a boat. He sniffed the chill tang of salt mingled with the dry warm scents of the land that had grown familiar to him in the past year, and thought that maybe there would be rain before morning, with the sea sounding so loudly across the land from the westward.
His path dived from the open levels into the shadows of a broad belt of oak scrub that bordered the common grazing ground of the settlement. The leaves of the squat wind-twisted trees that had been salt-burned since high summer were blackened and shrivelled now, and the sea sounded louder among them than it had done in the open, as though the murmur of it was tangled in the branches. He came out on the landward side, turned up beside the narrow tidal channel that ran between banks of chalk and brushwood, and saw the steading in the distance.
One could see Beornstead from a long way off, because there was nothing save a thorn windbreak here and there to cut the view; a huddle of low roofs that seemed shaped, just as the oaks and thorn trees were shaped, by the prevailing wind; the house-reek driven sideways in a pale blur against the darkness of woods beyond. No one seemed to be about, as he came nearer on the levels, where Beornwulf’s three brood-mares were grazing with their foals beside them, but as he drew towards the gateway of the thorn hedge, he saw Uncle Widreth sitting with his back against a pea stack out of the wind, with three children and a sheep-dog puppy squatting round him in attitudes of the deepest interest.
Uncle Widreth was something of an oddity, and to Owain, he was one of the things that made life bearable. He was almost as old as the farm, for his father had been a younger son who left the settlement and struck out for himself into the uncleared land, only one generation after Aelle had run his war-keels ashore and founded the South Saxon Kingdom. The household and the other thralls (there were two beside Owain) said that his mother was a British slave-woman who had left him on his father’s door-sill as soon as he was born, and run away. But Uncle Widreth said that his mother had been a seal-woman and a princess among seal-women; one of those who laid aside their furred skins to dance and sing among the dunes of the Seals’ Island on moonlight nights, and that his father had stolen her skin and so had her in his power and made her love him. But later, she had found her skin hidden in a hole in the wall, and escaped back to her own world. If he had been born after she escaped instead of before, Uncle Widreth said, he would have been a seal instead of a man. He was perhaps not quite right in the head, and certainly he was past doing a man’s work on the family lands, but he was the best cattle doctor in eight farms, and could mend any broken tool; and he earned his keep, beside, by looking after the children whenever Athelis, Beornwulf’s wife, could not do with them under her feet.
Just now, Athelis was laid by in the Bower, the women’s quarters behind the house-place, with a squalling very new daughter; so Uncle Widreth sat in the shelter of the pea stack, telling stories to the children until the bondwoman fetched them for bed.
Owain had got into the way of going to the queer old man in his spare moments, especially when his shoulders ached more than usual under the drab weight of slavery; and though he did not particularly ache at the moment, he whistled Dog to heel and turning aside, went to join the little group in the warm lea of the pea stack.
Uncle Widreth looked up at him, his faded old eyes crinkling into a smile, then returned to the work of his hands. He did not look like a seal, Owain thought, more like a grasshopper. The children did not glance up at all; Helga and Lilla, the two little girls, were sitting on either side of him, watching what he did, with their chins almost on his updrawn knees, and Bryni, who was too young to be interested in watching somebody else do something for many moments at a time, was trying with enormous concentration to poke the puppy’s eyes out. Pr
esently, in all likelihood, the puppy would bite him; he had a good many tooth marks in the soft brown skin of his arms and legs already, but neither he nor the puppy ever bore malice. The enchanting thing in Uncle Widreth’s hands was a bird that he was whittling from a scrap of driftwood.
‘But the silver bird said to the chieftain’s daughter, “I cannot spare you a feather from my wing, for I need them all to fly with, and I have a long way to go,”’ Uncle Widreth was saying. ‘And the chieftain’s daughter burst out weeping with temper, and stamped and threw her bannock on the ground.’ He always talked to the children in his mother’s tongue (even if she was a seal, it would have been her human tongue) which was why Beornwulf had been able to translate between Owain and the people of the farm in the Thorn Forest.
‘Was there honey on it?’ demanded Helga.
‘There was honey on it, and it fell honey-side down in the very middle of her father the chieftain’s best cloak, which was spread out to dry in the sun because it was the time for the summer washing,’ murmured Uncle Widreth sadly.
There was a gasp of shocked delight from his hearers.
Owain, looking on and listening with half an ear while he gentled Dog’s head against his thigh, thought suddenly that it would be good to be able to create something, even if it was only a foolish tale for children or a rather crude little bird of silvery driftwood that yet looked surprisingly as though it might be able to fly. Dully he felt that the power to create would be a kind of freedom …
The story was drawing to a close. ‘And so her father beat her with his sword-belt, and her mother beat her with her spindle, and she was very sore, my children, and so she deserved to be.’
‘But the bird? What happened to the little bird, Uncle Widreth?’