The Shining Company

  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.

  The warriors in the long hall rose to him with a shout as men greet the comings of their High Chief - Gorthyn and the rest of us maybe half a breath behind the others - and I knew that there was no mistake; the splendid wreck of a man at the High Table was the King. So was this not to be a war-trail after all? Or if it was, who was to lead us on it?

  A little later, when the great food-chargers had been brought in, I went up to fetch Gorthyn’s portion and bore it to him where he sat among the princes of Cymru, and looked questioningly into his face as I set it down, hoping that he had some idea of the answers. But he looked up and met my gaze, and shook his head very slightly. ‘We shall know all things in due time,’ he murmured, and reached for an oaten bannock from the red Samian bowl between himself and his neighbour.

  *

  And indeed, over the next few days, those of us who were strangers to Dyn Eidin did come in one way or another to know most of what was there for the knowing. For myself, I gained the answer to many questions and the making clear of much that seemed strange to me in a most unexpected way the very next morning.

  I had gone into the stable court to make sure that all was well with my mare, Shadow, and there I came upon a merchant overseeing his men as they loaded up his pack ponies for the road. He was standing with his back to me, his shape lost in the muffling folds of his cloak, his head covered by a Phrygian cap of crimson leather; and it was not until he turned round that I knew him for Phanes of Syracuse.

  If he had supped in the King’s Hall last night we had missed each other; a thing not surprising, for I had been in no state to recognize faces on the guest bench, and it was clear that my face meant nothing to him at all. In the life of a travelling merchant there must be many faces that come and go and are forgotten, and I had been four years younger when we last met.

  ‘God’s greeting to you, young stranger,’ he said, and would have turned away.

  ‘God’s greeting to you, Phanes of Syracuse,’ I said. And he checked, looking at me more closely with those long dark eyes that had the look of distant places in them. ‘In Gwynedd - Loban’s smithy. He was mending a dagger for you,’ I added, seeing him trying to remember. ‘A silver hilt like an archangel, it had. That would be four years ago.’

  He remembered then, and his face creased into a smile. ‘Prosper, son of Gerontius! There was another boy with you, who - I think - was more interested in the blade.’

  ‘Conn. He is with me still,’ I said. ‘Oh, but this is most wonderful to find you here!’

  He laughed. ‘Why, as to that, you should never be surprised to find one of my kind anywhere. But here is maybe the most likely place of all, for the King has a taste for the wares that I bring, and the wealth to pay for them; fine enamels, silk and sandalwood.’ We had settled ourselves on the edge of the horse trough to talk more comfortably, and after a few moments he went on. ‘Besides, there is old friendship between Mynyddog and me; I came here first when I was a boy, with my uncle, and Mynyddog was a boy also. ‘ He put up a hand to push the crimson leather cap further back from his forehead, and I saw a thin silvery scar on the olive skin of his wrist; a very old scar left by the sort of nick that boys make when they swear the blood-brotherhood. He turned towards me. ‘So - fair exchange in all things; what is it that you do here?’

  ‘I follow the Prince Gorthyn, who comes from Gwynedd to answer the King’s summons. We thought it was for a warhosting.’

  ‘Something has made you change your mind?’

  I was silent a little, tracing invisible lines with one finger in the water of the trough. I did not know quite how to put it. ‘I saw the King in the Mead Hall last night.’

  ‘Yes?’ he said guardedly.

  ‘He was very sick.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said again.

  ‘What ails him?’

  ‘An arrow between the ribs, from the cattle wars, three years past.’

  I shook the chill bright water droplets from my fingers and asked the next thing. ‘Then if the gathering is for war, will he mend in time to lead us?’

  Phanes looked full back at me. ‘Nobody mends from that kind of sickness. If he had been left to his own physicians he would have been dead long since; it was only the skills of the Queen that saved him, and even she cannot make him a whole man again.’

  We were talking at half-breath, the life of the stable court flowing on around us. I would have liked to know more about the Queen’s skills. Was she just herb-wise like Old Nurse, like most women who are the mistress of their household. Or was she more? Did she have the Wise-Craft? But that was only idle curiosity: for now, there were things that I needed more urgently to know. ‘If it is a war-trail, and the King cannot lead us on it, then who?’

  He spread his hands, ‘Who shall say? If it were some matter of the Blues and Greens I would lay my gold on the Fosterling.’

  That found a faint echo in my mind from last night. I groped after it. ‘That would be the Captain of the Teulu, the King’s bodyguard?’

  ‘Aye, Ceredig, his foster-son.’

  ‘Has he no son of his own, then?’ I asked. ‘None of his own blood to lead us?’

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ Phanes said, but with a hint of a smile in his tone. ‘As to his own blood - the King is much changed by his sickness; but let you look in the Fosterling’s face, and see if there is not even now a likeness. Above all, look at the eyes. The King has odd eyes, one green, one grey - it does not show from even a little distance - and the Fosterling has them too.’

  That started me thinking of matters that I had not thought of before. ‘That must be hard, to be a King and called the Golden, and not be able to buy a strong sword-arm, or a true-born son to follow him. What will he do when his time comes to go beyond the sunset?’

  ‘For a son to take his place? Look to a daughter’s husband, I suppose: after all, that has always been the way with the Pictish people beyond the Northern Wall. As to the strong sword-arm, at least his gold will buy him a band of younger sons with their shield-bearers behind them to unleash, when the time comes, against the Saxon hordes.’

  ‘How large a band, I wonder?’ I said. ‘Would you be knowing? It seems that most things are known to you.’

  ‘The word is for three hundred. Men such as your mountain princeling, others drawn from his own bodyguard.’

  The rain had cleared in the night, but great clouds were coming up again from the south-east, spilling across the dark mass of the Giant’s Seat like an advancing warhost. The Saxon threat seemed much closer here than among my own hills. ‘Three hundred seems not over many,’ I said at last.

  There was a silence beside me and when I looked round Phanes also was watching those advancing clouds. ‘With three hundred Companions Alexander won himself an empire,’ he said. ‘The Spartans held Thermopylae with three hundred. And with his three hundred your Arthur turned back the Saxon tide for fifty years, if the harpers’ t
ales be true. There would seem to be a certain potency in the number.’

  I said, trying to make it sound light, ‘Then we should be three times potent, nine hundred, counting the shieldbearers - or will that seem greedy and spoil the magic?’

  Phanes shook his head, ‘I make no doubt that Arthur and the Spartans had their supporters and shieldbearers also. But it is only the three hundred, always only the three hundred, of whom the harpers sing.’

  After a short while more, one of Phanes’ men came to stand before him and report that the pack beasts were laden and ready for the road, and he got up, stretching under his cloak and I, getting up also, remembered that I had come into the stable court to see that all was well with Shadow.

  At the last moment I remembered something else. ‘The archangel dagger, have you taken it back to its master yet?’

  ‘Not yet,’ he said, turning to where his horse waited. ‘I have had matters to keep me here in Britain this past few years. The Golden City must wait a while.’

  When he had mounted and gone clattering and jingling out on to the track with his men and pack-train behind him, I wondered what the matters might be. Later, I came to know.

  7

  The Gathering Feast

  Phanes of Syracuse was right; by the end of the month, when the last comers had arrived, the King’s war-band numbered three hundred.

  And when the tally was complete, the King held a great Gathering Feast. There was not room for all the warriors, let alone their attendant shieldbearers, in the great Mead Hall with its smell of raw new wood; and so the long trestles were set up in the outer court, with fires and torches in between, so that it seemed Dyn Eidin was crowned with fire.

  When we were all gathered, the feast horns sounded, and light moved and flared beyond the broad doorway of the King’s Hall, and the King came out, leaning on the shoulders of his companions, to the High Seat, which had been carried out and set for him between the painted timber columns of the foreporch.

  The horns sounded again, and the food was borne round from the kitchens and cooking pits behind the Hall; roast sucking pigs and huge joints of deer and cattle meat, swans with their feathers yet upon them and their wings half spread over the buckler-broad dishes on which they rested. We feasted then as I for one had never feasted before. Leastwise, the Three Hundred and the men of the Teulu feasted at the long tables, while we, their shieldbearers, served them according to custom; and when they could eat no more we had our turn, with plenty left for all, and the hounds chewing the bones under the benches, while the harpers told of past heroes, their battles and their loves. The torch smoke drifted across the darkened sky, and the strong yellow mead, sweet with its bitter after-taste, gave to all things a golden glow.

  When the main part of the feasting was done, Mynyddog set his hands on the carved foreposts of his chair and thrust himself slowly to his feet. The horns sounded for a third time, and I saw him straighten himself, head up like an old war-horse at the smell of battle. Then, in the sudden silence, he began to speak to us.

  ‘God’s greeting to you all who come in answer to this summons; to you who come as strangers from all the kingdoms of the north and west; to you who come only across the fires from the ranks of the Teulu, my own household warriors, answering the same call. Let you listen to me this night, for I, Mynyddog of the Gododdin, must speak to you now at the outset of the thing that lies before us.’ He must have had a great voice in his day; a voice for battle, like Prince Gorthyn’s. But then he began to cough, and must needs let himself be eased back into his seat behind him; and one of those who had followed him from the Hall came quickly to his side and stooped close for a word with him, then turned to face the crowded court. By that time I knew him, a lean, dark-skinned man with yellow eyes and yellow teeth and a beak like a bird of prey under a grey-striped shag of rusty hair. Aneirin, the King’s bard. Clearly he knew all that the King would say, and the thing had been prepared between them, that he might speak for Mynyddog if need be.

  ‘The King speaks through my raouth,’ he said. ‘Hearken now to the words of Mynyddog the King.’ He had a harper’s voice, a trained storyteller’s voice; no voice for a battlefield, but without seeming to raise it he could make it carry clear across the feasting court, and we listened to him with the silence that we would have given to the King. ‘All of you who have ever listened to the harpers in your fathers’ halls, you will know well enough of Arthur Pendragon and his Companions, of his twelve great battles, and how he thrust back the Saxon kind so that they came no more for the lifetime of a man. But all that is long ago, and now the Saxon flood comes thrusting in again.’ He checked for an instant, I think for us to remember, though he did not speak of it, that he had been a captive of the Sea-wolves and suffered evil things at their hands. I had seen for myself the thickened white scar on his neck that marked the gall of a Saxon thrallring. ‘Since Arthur’s day Bernicia has been naught but an off-shoot of Deira, a few scattered settlements along our coast. But Bernicia has a king, Aethelfrith who men call the Flame-bringer; of him also, ye may have heard; and in the hollow of his swordhand Bernicia grows daily greater. Soon it will join with Deira into one great war-kingdom. And so now the time comes when, lacking the Pendragon - unless indeed he rise again to lead us - we must set in force the lessons that he taught to our forefathers in a desperate time. We must raise, as he did, three hundred light horsemen to unleash at any time and at whatever point the need is greatest, against the barbarians who would over-run our land. This, then, is the meaning of the summons that brings you here together. For as long as need be, you shall bide here, training in all matters of warfare, learning above all to become a brotherhood which thinks and feels and acts as one; and when the time comes indeed, I shall unleash you like hounds upon the quarry, knowing that as you have feasted at my table, so you will earn your mead.

  ‘I am a sick man and my days for the war-trail are behind me, therefore I give you for your leader, when the time comes, Ceredig my son, who men call the Fosterling.’

  I looked at the Captain of the Teulu standing by, and saw an odd look on his face - surprise, and a sort of bitter inward-turning laughter - and guessed that although the thing was indeed common knowledge, it was maybe the first time that the King had formally acknowledged his briar-bush son before all men.

  But Aneirin was still speaking, and still in the King’s words. ‘One last thing I have to say. On a certain day, the hero Cuchulain’ (he seemed obsessed by ancient legends and past heroes) ‘learned from the Druid kind, that any boy who chose to take honour and gain his manhood on that day would come to be such a one as the harpers sing of round the fires for a thousand years but that he would not live to see the first white hair in his beard. Cuchulain chose to take honour on that day … If you take honour from my hands here and now, you also will each become such a one as the harpers sing of, but it may be that you also will not count your first white hairs. It is only right that you should know this, before you make your choice. This evening we have feasted all together, and with the feasting done, any who wish it, shall ride away. There shall be no shame; I shall choose out others to fill the empty places, that is all.

  ‘But if you make the choice to become my men in this, then here and now you shall take the Great Oath to keep faith with me and with each other. And after that there can be no turning back with honour.’

  Aneirin’s voice fell silent, and he looked towards the King, and the King nodded and made a small gesture of finis with one gaunt hand.

  No one moved. No one slipped away into the shadows. Only a dog snarled softly over a bone, and a knot in one of the pine torches spat sharply into the silence and far off along the Town Ridge a child began to cry.

  We took the Oath then, sitting at the tables and around the fires. Warriors and shieldbearers alike, although I think that in truth it was meant only for the binding of the Three Hundred. The Great Oath which is the same through all the kingdoms, among all tribes and clans of Britain for it is old
er than clans and kingdoms.

  ‘If we break faith with you, may the green earth gape and swallow us, may the grey seas roll in and overwhelm us, may the sky of stars fall upon us and crush us out of life for ever.’

  ‘It is done, and it is well done. So do I count you all henceforth as sons of mine,’ said Mynyddog, speaking for himself. His voice was dry and grinding in his chest, but the words came clear enough to all of us.

  Then came the next thing.

  He made a sign to the men of his household standing by, and the trestle boards of the High Table were drawn away, and great kists of carved and painted wood were brought from the Hall and set before him; and at his word they were opened and the swords which they contained were lifted out and freed of their wrappings of oiled linen. Great swords, some of them new from the smith’s hands, some ancient and curiously wrought, hilts with goldwork, blades of fine blue-watered steel.

  The giving of such weapons by a king to his followers in honour or reward or for the binding together of a brotherhood is a thing that all who have ever heard the harpers singing the high and ancient tales around the fires at night must know well enough, but I had never thought to see such a sword-giving in the world of my own day. It was like watching part of some half-lost hero tale, something that belonged to an older and darker and more shining world than mine.

  There were no fine swords for the shieldbearers, of course, nor did we expect it. But I have not even now forgotten how the fierce splendour laid hold upon us all, in Mynyddog’s flame-lit forecourt that night of early summer. And the faces of the young men crowding about the King for their gift-weapons, their eyes bright in the flare of the torches come easy to my mind.