Each day the troop changed places, but always the Fosterling our Captain rode with the third of the line, and always that blink of crimson told us where he was, and always Aneirin who was to sing our Triumph Song rode beside him, hooded and muffled in his weather-stained cloak.
The first night we were still in Gododdin territory, and the people of the local chieftain came out to us with what grain and cattle they could spare from their lean end of winter store. No, more than they could spare, for the Cran-Tara had passed that way, and they were getting together weapons and journey food on their own account.
That day, and the one that followed, we did not hunt, nor send out foraging parties. But before evening of the second day we were into the old lost territory of Rheged; a land almost empty of men, where the farms as well as the forts were hearth-cold and forsaken. And from then on we kept to the proper order of march in grim earnest, and lay up in the old forts at night with a strong guard on the picketed horses. From there also we began to hunt and forage as we went.
Three days brought us to the Wall, and we made a loop eastward, crossing by way of the bramble-grown wreckage of the nearest wall-fort to avoid passing through Caer Luil that the Romans called Luguvallium; for a living town full of merchants and travelling folk might have links with the Saxon kind, and nine hundred horsemen would not pass through unnoticed. The fort where we made our crossing was empty as though it had never known the footprints of men. Wolves, maybe - there was an animal smell among the roofless barrack rows, but wolves would not carry word of our passing to their two-legged kin.
We pushed on south, and next morning rejoined our road. The land was still Rheged - or what had been Rheged - lowland country at first, though with hills rising afar off on either side; and must have been rich cattle country in its day, though there was little enough cattle-grazing now; gently wooded country, too, with the hazel and alder thickets already hazed with green. But before the day’s end we were heading up into the high valley of the Eddain, and the oaks of the low country behind us were giving place to rowan and birch and wind-shaped hawthorn following the course of the brown streams off the moors. Curlew country now, and the great blunt hills of Penuin beginning to rise on either hand. And the rush of falling water was never out of our ears save when for a little while the road ran clear of engulfing grass and heather and the stream sounds were lost in the clatter of hooves on the old paved way.
Towards evening of the second day from Caer Luil we came to another forsaken fort with heather washing to its walls, and the road running straight through, in at one gate-gap and out the other. We had been five days on the march, and made good time, and the Fosterling deemed that we should lie up there for one day to rest the horses before the last two days’ push that should bring us down upon Catraeth.
Rest for the horses, but not for us, for he set us to fighting practice among the roofless buildings and the narrow ways between, as though he feared that our battle-readiness might grow dull and our hands forget their killer cunning if we sat quiet for a few hours and watched the grass grow. All save the hunting parties, that is, and Conn and his fellows who set up the field-forge where the remains of what seemed to have been the cookhouse gave them a hearth to work on, and saw to loose horseshoes and the honing of weapons already sharp enough to draw blood from the wind; and Aneirin who spent the time perched in the stump that remained of the signal tower, looking southeastward with a fold of his cloak pulled over his head.
But towards evening, with the meat brought in by the hunters beginning to scent the cooking smoke with sweetness, with the horses that had been grazing under guard watered and oat-fed and tethered for the night, and the light beginning to fade over the high moors, at last there was time to draw breath.
Conn and I drifted down through the horse-lines in search of a short spell of peace and quiet, and came upon an upright stone standing man-high beside the way. Not a milestone, we were used to those, but something else, that made me think of the stone beside the ford at Castellum. It was dappled with moon-coloured lichen and all about it there clung the odd magic that belongs to boundaries and threshold places.
‘Boundary stone?’ said Conn, only half questioning.
I nodded. ‘Like enough; Rheged on this side of it, Deira on the other.’
We found a hawthorn-fringed hollow below the road on the Rheged side where there was a pocket of shelter from the small thin wind, and squatted down into it side by side, looking back towards the sunset.
It was a while and a while since we had had the chance to be quiet in each other’s company, but that evening it seemed to have come about of its own accord, and in the little space of time that was like a gift, we turned from newer friendships, newer bonds, back to the old one that belonged to our old world; knowing, both of us, that we might never have the chance to be quiet in each other’s company again.
Neither of us said anything as to that, of course; one does not speak such things even to one’s nearest friend. Especially to one’s nearest friend.
The sunset brightened moment by moment, the bars of faint brightness under the grey cloud-roof strengthening to saffron and silver; and the evening was full of the spiralling springtime call of the curlews that had come in from the coast to nest on the high moors; and in the silences between the hushing of the wind through the hill grass we could hear faintly the voice of the young river below in the valley. We could hear too, behind us, the shifting of the tethered horses, men’s voices from the fort, and a snatch of song and the sudden baying of a hound. But none of that seemed for the moment to be any affair of ours.
We did not talk much. There was not much that needed to be said, and we had never been given to talking for the sake of talking. But after a while, the quiet and the distant calling of the river that I had had no time to hear all day returned into my mind the memory of the dream that I had woken with that morning and forgotten almost before my eyes were fully open.
‘I had a dream last night. I dreamed that I was walking up the valley, past Loban’s smithy. You and Luned and Gelert were there too - somewhere - but I could not see you.’
‘And?’ Conn said, after waiting for me to go on.
‘That’s all. Silly sort of dream - not worth having, really.’
‘Maybe there was more that you do not remember,’ Conn said, his arms across his updrawn knees, eyes narrowed into the fading brightness of the sunset.
And indeed there was something more, taking shape in my mind as I went back over the dream memory. ‘Phanes was sitting on the door-bench; and someone with him - I didn’t see properly - shining and silver, with wings …’I shook my head, wishing I had not remembered that bit, ‘Probably just the light through the alder leaves.’
‘More likely the silver hilt of that dagger of his, grown to proper archangel size. It had magic for you, that dagger hilt, didn’t it?’
And I saw with relief that that was what the figure was. I did not want Phanes of Syracuse to be dead; certainly not the Holy Brothers’ kind of dead, with shining angels. He had been still alive in the care of the monastery’s Infirmarer when we left Dyn Eidin; and I wanted him to be alive when we got back - if we ever got back.
‘As the blade did for you,’ I said.
‘But I did not dream of it,’ said Conn, and then after a while, ‘I wish I had had that dream too.’
But I do not think it was the archangel dagger so much as the track up the valley that he was thinking of.
And only the next moment, a voice just behind us demanded, ‘How if I had been a Saxon?’
And we wrenched around and scrambled to our feet to find Cynan standing among the hawthorn bushes within arm’s reach of us.
With my heart hammering in the base of my throat, I said, ‘Then, my Lord Cynan, I am thinking you might very well have been a dead Saxon. There are two of us to the one of you.’
‘Save that if I had been a Saxon indeed, I would not have given you warning by speaking before I used by seax,’ he retorted.
‘Keep a better look-out behind you when you sit out beyond the camp fires in strange territory. How long were you thinking to take your ease out here by the enemy mark-stone with the dusk coming down, if I had not come out to take a look at the horse-lines and chanced to see you?’
‘Not long - with the smell of supper in the air,’ I told him. We were not short on respect for our betters in and around the Company, but speech was free among us, even between a shieldbearer and his troop leader.
‘And I have been too long from my forge, I am thinking,’ Conn said, scrambling up from the little hollow with a hand on a hawthorn root for aid, and shook himself and started back towards the fort.
Cynan looked after him. ‘Your friend is saddle-sore?’
‘No. It is an old hurt to his knee,’ I said. ‘He drags that leg when he is tired or when -’ I broke off. To go on would have been a kind of betrayal.
But Cynan seemed to understand something of what I had left unsaid. ‘I am sorry I broke in. There is little enough chance for a few quiet words with a friend on this kind of trail.’ He shook his shoulders as though to rid himself of something. ‘I am thinking that we had best be getting back, or they will have eaten all the meat and there will be only bannock left for us.’
We turned back towards the horse-lines together, and I mind - such a boy I still was - that there was a bright hard knot of pride in me because I was walking with Cynan Mac Clydno.
The wind had died into a long trough of quiet, but as we walked, suddenly there was a faint stirring in the heart of the tangle of thorn and bracken maybe less than a spear-throw ahead. It might have been only an eddy of the wind, but all around was completely still.
I glanced aside at Cynan and saw him looking the same way. He made a quick sign to me for silence, and slipped his dagger from its sheath. I followed at his heels as he moved forward, crouching a little. The wind had come back, and the stirring in the hawthorn tangle was lost among the rest; but in the fading light we could see where it had been, and see also when, at the last moment something - a man clad in rough sheepskins - broke cover and ran for the denser scrub of the valley floor.
He should not have left it so late. But I suppose he had hoped that if he froze, we might pass him by. Only that one unwary movement had betrayed him.
I heard a flurry of shouting as the men on horseguard woke to what was happening; but Cynan and I were upon our quarry and, even winged by fear, he was not the runner that we were after our months of training, and in a couple of bowshots we brought him down. I twisted the long knife out of his hand and sent it spinning, while Cynan slammed his own dagger home into its sheath to have both hands free for manhandling.
The man fought like a wolf, and cried out sobbingly, something in a strange tongue, as we twisted his arms behind him and hauled him round towards the fort. ‘Here’s your Saxon!’ Cynan said, and it was true, from the look of him and his tongue and his smell - the Saxons have a different smell from us, some say because they eat wheat instead of the oats and barley that are proper for a man. We began to haul him back the way we had come, into the midst of the men who had come running from the picket lines.
‘What have you there?’ someone asked.
‘Wolf hiding in a thorn-brake,’ Cynan told him. ‘Some of you go and see if there are any more - you’ll find his knife out there somewhere.’
We brought him before the Captain where he sat beside the High Fire with Aneirin and the other troop leaders about him, eating singed deer meat and slab-thick stirabout.
‘We found this,’ Cynan said.
The Fosterling looked up at the man through a blue waft of smoke. ‘What was he doing?’
‘Hiding in a hawthorn thicket.’
‘Armed?’
‘He drew a knife on us. It is back there in the bracken somewhere. The usual kind.’
‘A Saxon?’
‘Aye.’
The Captain turned to speak to the man directly. ‘What purpose had you? To spy upon us?’
The Saxon, who had stood panting but with no word, broke into a stream of guttural speech. It had in it the sound of desperate protest, but we could not understand a word of his barbarous tongue, as clearly he could not understand a word of ours. I could feel the twitching tension of his whole body, but from where I stood, holding his left arm twisted behind his back, I could not see his face, and I was glad of that, having a fairly clear idea of how the thing must end.
Aneirin licked the fat from his fingers and looked up. ‘Maybe I can be of help in this.’
The Fosterling nodded. ‘Ask him what he was doing here. Did he come to spy on us?’
Aneirin put the question into the Saxon tongue and turned the answering string of protests back into ours. ‘He said he is no spy but only a man seeking for a lost sheep.’
‘In the midst of a war-camp?’ the Captain asked, and again Aneirin turned the thing to and fro between tongues
‘He says he did not know that the Red Crests’ palace, which is a place of trolls and evil spirits, had become a war-camp. Sheep may stray far, and he has found them before now, harbouring in this place.’
‘And why the hiding and the running?’
‘He says when he found horses and armed men here, he was afraid, and thought to wait till dark to get away unseen.’ And then after another stumbling flood of words, ‘He says he means no harm. He begs you to let him live and go back to his sheep.’
‘Sheep? In this high moorland country?’ the Captain said. And then, ‘I dare not.’
There was a small sharp silence, and then someone cried, ‘How if it is true?’
And someone else, his mouth full of deer meat, said, ‘He is still a Saxon.’
‘And if he is a scout for his own people, he will have means of sending on word, a man on a fast horse could reach Catraeth many hours ahead of us; and there are other means - pre-arranged smoke signals. Explain to him, Aneirin; tell him the sorrow is upon us, I dare not risk it.’
Aneirin told the man his words, and I felt the muscles of his arm and back shudder and strain. He began to cry out and plead and rave. It was horrible. And then, seeing no giving in the faces around him, he gathered himself together and spat across the fire on the Captain’s feet. The spittle fell short and in the silence I heard it hiss on the hot stones. And the Saxon, as though in acceptance of what was coming, stood suddenly still.
The Captain made a small signal to Cynan, and I sensed, for I could not see, the quick movement as he slipped the dagger from his belt, and almost in the same instant, the shock of the blow driven home.
The Saxon gave a convulsing jerk in my hold, and with a kind of grunt, sagged to the ground.
‘I never had to do quite that thing before,’ Ceredig the Fosterling said levelly. ‘I hope I never have to do it again.’
The man had rolled over in falling, and lay face up in the light of the fire, and for the first time I saw his face. Not a face of the blue-eyed savages we thought of the Saxons as being; blue-eyed, certainly, but just a man’s face, weather-beaten, square cut, neither young nor old, the kind of face one might have thought of as dependable.
So, that was my first experience of war. Despite the last year’s patrol skirmishes, despite all that was to come so soon after. And it has remained, as my first experience of war, in my memory ever since.
There was a cold sickness in my belly, and for a moment I was horribly afraid that I was going to throw up there and then before the Captain and the troop leaders.
Then Cynan’s hand was on my shoulder, spinning me round. ‘Behave!’ said his voice in my ear. ‘Go to Prince Gorthyn, he will be wondering what has become of his shieldbearer - and send my two to me here. You and I have done our part in this, they can haul him away.’
15
Night Attack
The next day’s march was a long one, over the high crest of Penuin, watershed country where the rivers of east and west have their beginnings, a great emptiness with no sound but the wind and running water
and curlews crying, save for the sound of our own passing. Another night passed in another half-lost fort so like the last that we began to feel as though we were travelling in a circle, save that there was no frontier stone and no dead Saxon lying beside the hearth. But by evening of the next day the highest of the great hills were behind us and we were coming down the head-valley of the Tees. We saw below us forests still bare and dappled like a thrush’s breast rolling away and away into the blue distance, with afar off, on the edge of everything, a grey streak that might be the sea.
And so, with the forest reaching up towards us, we came to the remains of yet one more fort in that land of lost forts, and made our last night’s camp. It was not much of a fort, maybe only a permanent marching camp in its time, and being on the edge of forest country the wild had taken it back more completely than those of the high moors. The cleared space that must once have surrounded it was submerged in scrub, hazel and alder and crack-willow, even a few oaks creeping back from the dark tide of the forest, and little remained of the buildings but turf hummocks and bramble domes.
That night, when the evening bannock had been eaten and the horses fed and watered, and there had been a few hours of rest for men and beasts, Ceredig Fosterling sent out the three best scouts among us, on spare horses that had not been ridden that day, to see what was to be seen, and bring back word. The rest of us slept in watches with our blades loose in the sheath, and kept a strong guard on the picket lines, for now we were deep into enemy territory, and no knowing how close there might be Saxon settlements in the forest. And when we rode on next day in the clean green dawn, the Captain had tightened the pattern of march, so we rode in close formation, two troops centred on the road and a light scouting screen ahead, the rest in wings into the country on either side.