In places, where our feet passed most often, the snow had become black slush, but it still lay unblemished over the shallow mound where the woman of the Dark People lay beneath the bones of nine war-horses. She had protected us well from the Saxon kind, I thought, but even she was powerless against the White Beast. I made my usual round longer than usual, but when it was finished I knew that I still could not go back and lie down again beside Guenhumara.
On an impulse, I turned in through the entrance to the Praetorium, and crossed the narrow courtyard to the quarters that I had shared with her, and went into the small chamber that had been my sleeping cell before she came and was now my armory and office. I felt for the lantern on the roof beam, took it down, and opening it, felt inside. There was about half the candle left, and when that was burned out, there would be no more. We had eaten the small amount of tallow that was saved from the fire. Well, soon enough now, we should have no more need of candles. I struck flint and iron and got a light, and then, with the lantern, wandered through into the bigger chamber that was Guenhumara’s, and set it on the wicker chest against the wall; then stood looking about me, wondering why I had come, and what I should do now that I was here.
The chamber had a lived-in look that spoke vividly of Guenhumara, who still came here sometimes during the day. The soft beaver-skin rug on the piled rushes and bracken of the bed place still softly hollowed where her body had pressed it, a gold eardrop hanging half out of a painted wooden casket; even the faint scent of her seemed to hang on the cold air as though she had only that moment passed out through the door and left something of herself behind. I stooped and pulled a handful of rushes from the bed place. Somebody must cut the lengths for tomorrow’s draw; it made a good enough reason to myself for being there. I rummaged in the box of painted wood – there was a running deer on the lid – and found Guenhumara’s silver scissors among a tangle of small gear and woman’s things, huddled my cloak about me and settled down on the inevitable packsaddle to cut lengths of brown rush stem into my iron cap fetched from next door. Cabal crouched down beside me, his great gaunt head on my knee, and broke into the deep snoring throat-song that in him meant contentment in my company; and I broke off to pull his ears in the way that he loved, wondering what I should do with him if I drew the long straw tomorrow; then returned idly to my clipping.
The light of the lantern was beginning to sink, and the shadows gathered in the corners of the room; the dim blue and gold and russet saint in the embroidered hanging seemed to waver on the edge of living movement. I did not hear footsteps coming nearer through the thawing snow, but suddenly the door latch lifted, and as I looked up quickly, the door opened, and Guenhumara stood on the threshold.
I sprang up. ‘Guenhumara! What are you doing abroad in the dark of the night?’
‘I came to look for you; you were gone so long, and I was afraid.’ She came in and snibbed the door behind her, and stood with her back to it. All her bones stood out in the sinking lantern light, and the tendons in her neck stood out like cords, and her lips were chapped and flaked and bleeding, and my heart flew out to her like a bird out of the cage of my breast.
‘I did not think you knew when I went out. I hoped you were asleep,’ I said.
‘I always know when you go out. What is it that you do here in the dark of the night?’
I looked at the work of my hands. ‘Ruin your scissors by cutting up lengths of rush with them.’
She came forward from the door, and looked into my battered helmet and then at me, and held her hand to Cabal. ‘More dogs tomorrow?’
I shook my head. ‘Na, tomorrow we draw lots of another kind.’
‘What kind, then?’ She sat down rigidly on the chest top.
And when I told her, she said, still looking into my helmet, ‘A straw for a life ... Every life in the garrison?’
‘Not so many. A straw for each of the Companions, and only for such of the Companions as are within reason free of scurvy.’
‘Has the gash in your shoulder healed up again since yesterday?’ she asked after a moment, and I knew what she meant.
I said, ‘Within reason free. If we keep to those who have no taint at all, it is in my mind that there will be none to draw the straws, at all.’
‘And so you also will draw?’
‘I do not lay this kind of hazard before Bedwyr and Pharic and the rest, and then step aside from it myself. It is stupid, isn’t it, to give so much weight to that when, long straw or no, we are all going to die so soon?’
She was silent for a while, and then for the first time she looked up. ‘You have no hope, then, of their getting through?’
‘None,’ I said, and we were silent again. Then I laid aside helmet and scissors, and knelt down beside her and put my arms around her under the rough thickness of her cloak. ‘Try not to be afraid, Guenhumara.’
‘I don’t think I am,’ she said, wonderingly. ‘I don’t want to die, but I don’t think I am afraid – not very afraid.’ And then a swift change of mood came on her; her eyes in her famished face were suddenly shining and enormous in the last guttering light of the lantern, and her voice had a low vibrant quality like the musical throb of a swan’s wings in flight. ‘I am so glad that the thaw has come. I should have hated to die while the world was still dead; it would have seemed so – so hopeless. But tonight the world is stirring into life again, it is breathing in the darkness. There’s something in the wind – can’t you smell it? Almost like the scent of wet moss.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Yes, I can smell it, too.’
‘It is so sad that it is too late for us. One day there will be moss soft and damp under the trees again, and wood anemones, and they will light the Beltane Fires – and somewhere a vixen will mate and have cubs ... ’
‘Don’t, Guenhumara. Don’t, Heart-of-my-heart.’ I tightened my arms around her and felt how she was shivering from more than the cold. And scarce knowing it until the thing was done, I caught her up and, lurching to my feet, carried her across to the bed place and – for my strength was so far gone from me – collapsed headlong beside her. I dragged the beaver-skin robe over us both, and under its soft darkness, held her close. I could feel the light bones that had so delighted me, sharp and brittle through the thick stuff of her tunic, and the icy shuddering that wracked her, and dragged her against me as though I would have drawn her inside my own body and warmed her there. I kissed her face, the sunken eyes and poor cracked mouth and the corded column of her throat, trying to comfort her for the spring and the summer and the harvesttime that she would not see; until at last her shuddering ceased, and she lay quiet with her arms around my neck as mine were around her body. And lying so, gradually, I knew that Ygerna had no more power over me, because in a few days, a week or two at most, I should be dead.
I do not know, I have never been able to remember, whether it was she or I who unclasped the strap about her waist; I only know that it was accomplished as something inevitable. There was a great sense of peace in me, peace so strong that it formed a refuge, and the old foul fly-cloud of hate could not break in to smother and drive me back as it had always done before. I was aware of the present moment as something with the light shining through it, a gift, a revelation, a flower growing on the edge of an abyss, with nothing beyond it; but it was the flower that mattered and not the abyss. And I loved Guenhumara then as I had so longed to love her. I came free and untrammeled into her deepest sanctuaries, and she sprang to meet me and make me welcome, and give me what I had never known that she or any other woman had to give. For a little while we were healed of the loneliness, the amputation of being separate people, and fused into one, so that the circle became perfect.
Next morning when the lots were drawn, the longest straws fell to Alun Dryfed, and to Prosper, my trumpeter. Food from the little that still remained to us had been made ready in advance for whoever were Fate’s chosen, and the two thickest cloaks in the fort, and whatever else might be of use to them. The two rem
aining ponies stood ready loaded, and there was nothing to wait for. We thronged the old red ramparts to cheer them and watch them plowing away down the road to the south, or rather, down the line of the hidden road that still lay deep under the thawing snow. Presently, when the loads were lightened and by God’s grace the snow grew thinner, the men would ride – if they lived so long – but now, at the outset, they led the ponies, and it was four figures that we watched, four shapes of darkness dwindling into the distance, floundering up the steepening slopes into the hazel woods. They looked very small in the white immensity of the hills, and I seemed to see beyond them all the long hopeless road to Corstopitum stretching into eternity. When the shoulder of the valley had taken the last dark laboring speck from our sight, we dragged ourselves off about whatever there was to do with the rest of the day. Gwalchmai had of course taken no part in the draw, but held the helmet for us; if he had not been lame, we still could not have spared him with so many sick in the camp; but I shall not forget his face.
It was not long past noon of that same day when a hoarse incredulous shouting from the southern walls brought half the fort crawling and stumbling (few of us could run) toward the Praetorium Gate. The man on watch there came staggering to meet us, his eyes wild in his head, crying and jibbering out something about four men, four riders on the road. We thought that his wits were gone, but in a few moments more, others had swarmed up onto the crumbling rampart walk and out through the gateway, and then they too were shouting and pointing. I scrambled up the rampart steps, thrusting through the men who were there ahead of me, and stared south, shielding my eyes with one hand against the dazzle of snow in the sun that had that instant burst through the drifting rain clouds.
Far off on the edge of the hazel woods, four horsemen were struggling toward Trimontium, and as they drew nearer, I saw that two of the riders were Prosper and Alun Dryfed. The third was a stranger, or at least no one whom I knew well enough to recognize at that distance. The fourth, I could have sworn, was Druim Dhu or one of his brothers! Nearer they drew, and nearer yet. We lined the walk and thronged the gateway, more and more of us every moment, waiting for them, straining our aching eyes in their direction. But I do not think that we made any sound now. We did not dare to hope ...
Level with the far end of the practice field, the horsemen urged their ponies into a floundering canter, throwing up the snow behind them like spray. They were waving to us, then we heard them shouting, but we could not catch the words. They came up the slope, the grossly overladen ponies stumbling and rocking, and were in through the gate. Men surged forward to surround them as the ponies staggered to a floundering halt; and suddenly word was spreading back from those nearest, to the outermost fringes of the throng. ‘It’s the supply train! The supply train’s coming! God’s mercy. They are almost through to us!’
Garrison of walking corpses that we were, we set up a hoarse aching roar that might surely have been heard in Corstopitum itself. I thrust through to the core of the crowd, just as the four men dropped wearily from their mounts, and demanded dazedly of the stranger, ‘Man, is it true?’
He was dirty gray with exhaustion, leaning on his foundering pony for support. ‘Surely, my Lord Artos. They’ll be here by tomorrow night. We were sent ahead to bring you word.’ He indicated with a jerk of the head the small dark man beside him, and I saw that it was indeed Druim Dhu.
‘But how in God’s name did you know our need?’
‘The first man you sent got through to us,’ he said.
The supply train arrived at dusk next day, a ragged stumbling file of mules and pack ponies led and driven by panting and straining men, almost as spent as we were, though less gaunt. And among them were some of our own auxiliaries, and also of the Little Dark People.
The train was not a large one, and the leather-covered pack panniers were only lightly loaded, for with the normal loads the beasts would never have got through at all. But the food that they brought would tide us over until the next lot could get through. We helped as best we could, to get the pack teams unloaded, and later – much later it seemed – we sat down all together in the mess hall to our first full meal in three moons.
‘I’ll not deny,’ the small red-bearded train master was saying, ‘that it has been a desperate business, even with the help of the Dark Folk over the last lap; and I’ll not deny that if this Levin you sent us had lived to argue, like enough we’d have argued too, and hung back a bit for the thaw. But when a man dies to bring you a call for help, why then that’s a better argument than any that you’re like to be able to put up against him.’
I looked around quickly. ‘Dies?’ Somehow, I don’t know why, I had assumed that Levin had remained at the depot to recover strength before coming up with the next supply train.
‘Aye. I’d not be knowing myself, how he kept on his feet to get through to us at all. They were pretty well rotted off him with frostbite ... He died the same night.’
I was silent for a while, and then I said, ‘But how in God’s name did he even find the way? The thaw had not come by then.’
Druim looked up from the strip of salt meat in his hands. ‘That was simple enough; we showed it to him.’
‘You showed it to him?’
‘Yes; even we, the Little Dark People, we have our uses. A party of hunters out after wolf found him already strayed from the road. They gave him meat when they had made their own kill, and set him on his road again, and then went home and made a smoke on the crest of Baen Baal to tell those to the south that he was coming and must be passed on to the next watcher, and then they made the snake pattern for him about the ashes of the houseplace hearth; for they knew that he went to his death.’
‘And knowing that, they let him go?’
‘What else could any of us do?’
‘If you could send him on so, from one to another’ (I was using ‘you’ for the whole People of the Hills) ‘could you not have sent his message on in the same way? Could you not have raised one finger to save his life?’
Druim Dhu looked at me as though puzzled at my lack of understanding, and answered also for the whole of his people. ‘It was in his face. Also, Sun Lord, you heard what the train master said: had it been one of us who brought the cry for help, who would have hearkened to us? Besides, he would go on; he said his friend was waiting for him.’
There was a long pause, in which we heard very loudly the green trickling of the thaw. Cei broke it. ‘That must have been close on three weeks ago. Why was no word sent up to the fort?’
‘The smoke was sited to carry its message south,’ Druim said, ‘so we in my village did not know of the thing ourselves until a few days since. When we did, I would have come, but the Old Woman looked into sand and water, and said that the pack beasts would be here in five days at the most, and that my coming would serve no end save the lightening of your hearts.’
‘Even that might have been worth doing,’ grumbled Cei.
‘True; and still I would have come, but the Old Woman said that there were taller crops than mouse grass and laid it upon me, upon the whole village, by the wrath of the Corn King, that we should not come.’
‘And why would she be doing that?’ someone asked, through cracked lips.
Druim shook his head. ‘I am not the Old Woman. I do not know.’
Later, I wondered a good deal as to his meaning, but at the time I was no longer listening closely. Across the fire I met Bedwyr’s bright gaze reaching out for mine. And that night he made a harp lament, the most winged and wildly haunting, I think, that he ever made.
That night, as before, I could not sleep. Life and the urgency of life had taken hold of me again; we were saved, and death that had been at our elbows drew away into the darkness. And for me, the freedom was gone: Ygerna’s power was over me again, and all was as it had been before.
No, not quite all. Two months later, when the horses had come north to us once more, when the curlews were at their mating and the furze was a yellow fire
above the river marshes, Guenhumara told me that she was with child.
chapter twenty-one
Earth Mother
THAT SUMMER, THE LAST AS IT PROVED THAT WE SPENT IN the lost province of Valentia, was a time of final scouring, sharp and without ruth while it lasted, but not lasting long, a time for a last strengthening of the ties that I had labored so long to make among the chiefs and princes; and the first frosts had scarcely set the burns running yellow with fallen leaves, when I rode back to Maglaunus’s Dun. All summer I had been wondering as to the thing that Guenhumara had told me, scarcely daring to believe that she had not made some mistake; and the native tracks and ridgeways after Castra Cunetium seemed endless to my wild impatience. But when I rode into the Dun and dismounted with Pharic and the rest of my small knot of Companions before the hall threshold, and she came out to bring me the guest cup, her thickened body was enough to tell me that she was about her woman’s work.
‘So it is true,’ I said.
She looked at me, half smiling, over the tilting rim of the guest cup – and it was as though touching her would be like touching something that drew its warmth and living kindness direct from the earth, like an apple tree.
‘Did you doubt it?’
‘All summer I have been doubting. I think I did not dare to believe.’
‘Foolish,’ she said. ‘Blanid knows about these things.’
Later, lying with my arms around her on the broad guest bed, I tried to make her see the wisdom of remaining at her father’s hearth that winter. But she would have none of it; the bairn would not be born for two months yet, and she was perfectly well able to make the journey back to Trimontium, protesting that it must be born, when the time came, under the shelter of its father’s sword, and that if I left her she would follow me on foot. She held me about the neck, even while I felt the child stirring and impatient in her body, and her hair fell all across my face in the darkness. And in the end, I yielded.