Tydeus looked up from the Herodotus unrolled on the schoolroom table, and said, ‘Maybe, but it is a large “if”. A lesson which my own Greek states found over hard in the learning.’
And when I asked much the same question of my father’s harper as he walked under our apple trees seeking out a new song for supper, he said, ‘I am thinking that on the day that the tribes learn to stand together instead of slitting each other’s throats, the stars will fall out of the sky.’
‘It was done before,’ I said.
He drew a slow fall of notes from the little hand-harp he carried.
‘Aye, in Arthur’s time; Aidan and Gartnait and Mynyddog the Golden, they are not Arthur. Urien of Rheged tried it when your father and I were young, but Urien was slain - and that was not even the Saxons’ doing, but the work of envy and hatred among his own kind. So Urien died and after him his son, and where is Rheged now?’
It was the kind of word that merchants and wandering harpers had brought into the valley for as long as I could remember, but it had not seemed quite real before. I have wondered, since, whether the threat really darkened and drew nearer that summer, or whether it was just that I was growing older, or whether the strange and beautiful dagger, coming from far away, had somehow pricked a hole in my familiar world and let in the world outside …
But from that summer on, I began to take more seriously the hours on the training ground below the settlement, where I learned horsemanship and running and wrestling and the skills of sword and shield and spear with the other boys of the kindred, feeling more of sense and purpose in them than ever I had done before.
Life in the valley went on as it had always done. Harvest followed seed time; hunting for fresh meat in the winter, when we mounted the wolfguard over the lambing pens and every full moon brought the threat of cattle raiders. Spring when the streams ran green with melt-water from the snows of Yr Widdfa. Autumn when they ran yellow with fallen birch leaves.
And so there came an evening a year and more after the merchant with the archangel dagger.
It was harvest time and so we were set free, me from my tutor and the training ground, Luned from Old Nurse and the skills of the women’s quarters; and the three of us had been down-valley helping to get the harvest in. We came up slowly, scratching at our midge bites as we came, a mood of deep contentment on us, for it was not so easy for the three of us to be off together about our own affairs. We would have gone in by way of the stables and the stackyard, but the trampling of horses and the voices of men in the outer court drew us round that way instead, to see what was afoot.
My brother had been out hunting with a few boon companions - which might seem strange at harvest time when the rest of us were slaving in the fields, but the deer had been raiding the ripe corn. Now they were back, and with a couple of carcasses slung across the ponies’ backs, but they seemed not best pleased, for all that.
Owain was giving tongue as he swung down from his weary horse, ‘Not a sign of the brute. Well, he can be finding his own way home - or not, for all I care.’
‘Lost a hound?’ I asked one of our huntsmen, standing near.
‘Aye,’ he said.
‘Which one?’
‘Gelert.’
It would be Gelert, of course, born foolish and unfortunate.
The huntsman was turning away, but I grabbed his arm. ‘Where?’
He paused and looked round at me, frowning. I think he was not happy himself at coming home with a hound missing out of the pack. ‘If I knew that, maybe t’would have been easier to find him. We hunted down towards Coed Dhu and when the hunting was done and we came to whip in the hounds, he was not there. Maybe Gwyn ap Nudd took him to hunt the storm clouds with his own pack.’ He laughed angrily, but made the sign against ill luck as he said it, and pulled his arm free and was gone.
I stood a moment thinking. Gelert had been special to me ever since I had helped Cu the houndmaster to get him over the bear’s gash in his flank. Now, knowing him, he had probably run into trouble of some kind. I spoke over my shoulder to Conn, ‘I’m away down to Coed Dhu.’ And then, for the day had been long and it was near supper time, ‘Go you and get us something to eat from the cookhouse, and come on after me.’
‘Anyone who finds the brute can keep him,’ Owain was shouting as I slid out through the crowded gateway and turned down-valley into the thickening of the evening light.
In a little I abandoned the track and turned up the left flank of the valley. I was on the edge of the scrubby birch cover beyond the intake land when Conn caught up with me, running lop-legged with barley bread and ewe milk cheese in a napkin. And we were hardly into the denser mazes of the woods when Luned came darting among the trees to join us, with her skirts kilted to her knee.
‘Have you found him yet?’ she demanded breathlessly.
‘Does it look as though we had? We are scarcely into the woods yet,’ I said, ‘and you should not be here at all!’
‘I came to help you find him. I know the woods as well as you.’
‘But you’re a girl,’ I pointed out in exasperation. ‘If you are out in the wild all night - and we well may be - Old Nurse will be angry and go to my father, and I shall be the one that’s blamed, and I shall be the one that’s beaten!’
‘Three of us will be more like to find him than two,’ Luned said. ‘Is that not worth a beating?’
I hesitated, and she added in a swift piteous voice, ‘You are not the only one to care what happens to Gelert.’
Conn stood looking from one to the other of us in the dusk, saying nothing. But I knew whose side he was on.
‘Come then,’ I said, and the three of us went on together, sharing out the bannock and cheese and eating as we went.
Behind us in the cleared land the light still lingered, but the shadows were gathering under the branches and as we thrust deeper and ancient oak and thorn took the place of birch and bird-cherry, the darkness crouched thick among the trees.
We pushed on steadily, following the shape of the land until we came to the place where the valley divided, and the northern cwm dropped steeply downward into the dark tide of the big tree country, the wildwood that flowed up there from the depth of the lowland forests, and the stream, parting from our own water, went down through Coed Dhu, the Black Wood. We followed the stream for a while, calling and whistling as we went, pausing from time to time to listen, but there was no answering bark; no sound but of our own making, faint brushing through the undergrowth, the snap of a dead stick underfoot, once a floundering crash as Conn fell through the rotten timber of a long fallen tree trunk into an ants’ nest beneath. These, and the strange half-sounds that were the voice of the forest at night.
After a long while - it seemed a long while - with the Black Wood and the yew trees that gave it its name left behind us, we were in a part of the forest that was strange to us. Maybe in the daylight it would have been familiar enough but, now in the dark, it seemed not quite like any place where ever we had been before. We were not lost; we could have turned and found our way back easily enough, for somewhere away to our right was the whisper of falling water, which in these hills must lead back to our own young river; but none the less the wildwood had taken on a strangeness all about us, and I was glad not to be alone in it. We had been moving well spread out, though within call of each other, and the other two must have felt the same as I did, for without anything said we began to draw nearer together, and we were shoulder close once more when the wonder happened; the wonder in a way was the start of all that followed after …
The trees began to thin, and we came out on to the edge of a clearing; and in the same moment the harvest moon, which had been veiled by thunder-wrack, sailed out into a lake of clear sky. Ragged silver wings of cloud made the shores of the lake, and beyond the fringe of hazel and hawthorn that still lay between us and open ground, a milky mane of moonlight flowed over the clearing. Everything was very still; even the night-time sounds of the forest had fallen a
way, so that it was as though everything waited with held breath. For maybe three heartbeats of time the stillness endured, for we were downwind of the small herd of deer grazing on the far side. Though they must have heard us coming, there had been no high excited shouts of men on the hunting trail, no belling of hounds or echoing death-music of horns; and they lifted their heads to look in our direction seeming more curious than afraid. They had last summer’s fawns with them, and one, over bold, even took a step or two in our direction. The doe called him back instantly, and as though her coughing call acted as some kind of danger signal, the whole herd took fright.
In an instant the clearing was full of movement and flickering shapes as the deer leapt away towards the shelter of the nearest trees. They crashed into the undergrowth as into water, sending up showers of leaves like spray, and were gone.
All save one. Just clear of the woodshore a big buck paused and half-turned to look back as though the habits and fears of the herd were not for him. Beyond him the dappled and ring-straked shadows of the trees closed in, but the moonlight fell full flood upon him, and showed him pure white.
There had been no word of a white hart anywhere in our hunting runs; maybe he had come in from some distant valley, driven out by his own herd because of his colour, or fleeing from the hunt, or - for a moment the thought came upon me that he was some creature out of ancient legend, such as the harpers sang of beside the fire on winter nights. He stood with his head back, poised and proud under the arching crown of antlers, seeming not so much to shine in the moonlight as to be fashioned of the same stuff as the moonlight itself. For a long breath-held moment we looked at each other. I’ll swear we looked at each other, eyes into eyes as men look, and for that moment it was as though some enchantment held us all, humans and beast alike, within a perfect circle that had neither beginning nor end. And then the circle was broken by the desperate, mournful baying of a far-off hound. And the white hart turned and sprang away after the rest of the herd.
And now that we had the moonlight to see by, the forest grew familiar again, and we knew where we were.
‘That’s Gelert!’ Conn said, as though there had been no break in our search. ‘And something is wrong.’
‘Come you,’ I said, and next instant we were off running in the direction from which the sound had come, crashing through undergrowth that snatched at us with whippy branches and bramble-snarls, and calling as we ran.
The frantic sound, more howling than baying, came again from exactly the same quarter as before, downhill from us and still far off. Gelert was not moving, not coming to meet us. Maybe he could not move …
As the land dropped more steeply and the tree-tangle grew more dense, we could not run, but we pushed on with all the speed that we could make. I knew where we were now, but all the same I nearly pitched headlong when the land suddenly fell away from my feet. We were on the edge of one of those winter-bourns gouged deep out of the hillside by the melt-waters of Yr Widdfa; raging white-water in the winter rains or the melting snows, dry as old bones at this time of year. Hazel and hawthorn made a dragon-tangle along the lip of the sheer drop, and out of the darkness below came a frantic whining.
‘Wait here,’ I told the other two. ‘Then you can help me if I need pulling up.’
‘Let me go,’ Conn said.
‘Gelert is my dog,’ I said, not noticing what I’d said until after the thing was spoken. Anyhow, we had none of us enough breath to argue. I found a place where a tree coming down in some past storm had pulled the bank away and made the slope easier, and dropped over the edge, finding a handhold among the bared roots, another on a hawthorn sapling growing between two rocks, and scrambled on down, the smell of moss and torn earth strong and heavy in my throat.
Below me, in the darkness of the overarching stream-side tangle, something moved and gave a piteous whimper.
‘Softly now, I come,’ I called, groping for a foothold. I found the foothold, and it gave way with me, and I fell crashingly into the darkness.
The next thing I knew was a warm tongue licking my face as I hauled myself to my feet, and the living harshness of a hound’s coat under my hand; and the anxious voices of Conn and Luned demanding, ‘Is it well with you?’ and ‘Have you got him?’ from surprisingly close overhead.
I gulped back some of the air that had been knocked out of me, and called up, ‘Aye,’ which answered both questions in one, for my chief concern just then was in finding how it was with Gelert. My feet slipping among the stones of the dry stream bed, I had my hands on his neck, exploring, and found the answer quickly enough. Gelert’s broad studded collar was caught on the sharp spine of an alder root which had hooked through it, holding him captive. I mind talking to him as I set about getting him free. ‘Easy now - easy now, Gelert the bold - sweff, sweff, old hero -’
I got the collar freed, while he thrust and whined against me like a puppy. And as I re-buckled the broad strap, I felt a kind of crusted stickiness on the side of his head. Close by, a blot of moonlight spilled through the branches, and I hauled him over to it, and saw a broken swelling still oozing between his left ear and eye.
He must have gone over the edge as I had nearly done, and knocked himself witless in the fall which explained why he had made no sound while the hunt was still in that part of the woods. I called the word up to the other two, then got Gelert turned to face the almost sheer side of the bank and gave him an upward heave to start him on his way. If I could get him up to where the tree roots began it should not be too difficult.
He sprang and scrambled upward maybe the height of a man, and fell back whining, then tried again. I was scrambling up beside him, shouting to him with all the breath I had, one hand twisted in his collar, ‘Come up! Hup! Hup with you!’ while with the other I clung to branch or tree root, my feet slipping on the raw earth as I hauled him after me. Conn and Luned had each hooked themselves over one of the jagged tree snarls on the lip of the gully and were reaching down to us. Luned’s hand was suddenly beside mine on Gelert’s collar, and Conn’s was grabbing my other wrist, then the neckband of my tunic, dragging me upward. There was a space of slithering and kicking and heaving and gasping, and the four of us were sprawled side by side among the torn tree roots.
We lay there for a few moments getting our breath back. Then we got our shaking legs under us and set off for home, Gelert loping close beside me with my belt through his collar for a leash.
It was not until we were through into our own valley and up it to the edge of the cropland in the snail-shine of the sinking moon, that the earlier thing came back into our minds. It seemed that it came into all our minds at the same time, and we paused looking at each other.
‘None of us must ever tell,’ I ordered.
Conn shook his head, ‘None of us ever will.’
‘Because if we did, men would come and hunt him,’ Luned said in a small clear voice. And, I mind, I was grateful to her, because that was true and made a sound sensible daylight reason for keeping the thing secret among ourselves. But we all three knew the deeper reason; the moment’s shared and shining vision that was not for shouting from the roof-tops.
‘Glad I am that the three of us saw him together,’ she added after a little silence. And that was really all there was to say.
We started off once more, up the valley in the dusk of the sinking moon that would soon fade towards dawn. Already there was a thin fluting of waking birds among the stream-side alders.
I have wondered, since, that my father sent no searchers out after us; but Conn and I were well past thirteen, coming up towards manhood, and knew the forest as well as most of his huntsmen, and I suppose he reckoned that Luned would be safe enough with us. There seemed to be more lamplit windows, more torches at the corners of buildings than was usual in the time before dawn. A general air of wakefulness, but that was all.
The doorkeeper let us in, yawning and grumbling, and while Luned fell to the hen-wife scolding of Old Nurse, who had waited up for us, Con
n and I with the weary hound trailing at our heels, stumbled off to our own sleeping place; and for what little remained of the night Gelert stretched out with Conn across the doorway of my sleeping cell.
I woke to find the morning sunlight making a square patch of brightness quivering with leaf-shadows on the wall beside my bed, and Conn shaking me. ‘My lord your father says you are to come.’
I groaned, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. ‘In the stable court?’ My father and Owain generally started the day in the stable court.
But Conn shook his head. ‘Na. He is back in his chamber. The stable court was an hour ago. Gildas, who brought the message, said he was to let you sleep late.’
I wondered if that meant that my father was not so very angry with us after all, if it meant that I was going to escape my beating; but I had not much hope. Well, now that I was awake, best not to keep him waiting. I flung back the sheepskin rug and plunged out of bed; Gelert, who had been sitting prick-eared in the doorway, got up and shook himself and came padding across the narrow cell to thrust his muzzle under my hand. I huddled on my tunic, raked my fingers through my hair - no time to look for the comb just now - and a few moments later I was heading along the colonnade towards my father’s chamber at the far end of it. Conn would have followed, but I bade him bide where he was and keep Gelert with him.
‘If there is to be a flogging, there should be two to stand before your father,’ he said.
‘There will not be two in any case,’ I told him. ‘My father will not beat you for what was my doing.’
‘Because I am only a bondman and you are my master?’ he said in that dry rough-edged voice he had at times. ‘That is not justice.’
‘It’s an unjust world,’ I told him. ‘Hadn’t you noticed? Bide here and I’ll be back.’
He squatted down on his heels, scowling, his arm around Gelert’s neck.
My father was sitting in his great chair with the lion feet, rubbing his chin with a lump of pumice stone. By the time that I remember, most of our people had taken to letting their beards grow, but my father still went clean-shaven in the Roman way, with razor and goose grease when need be, with pumice when the traders brought any. I saw his long supple dog-whip lying across the bedfoot beside him and my heart sank.