Meghan watched until they were out of sight. After, she had no idea what to do with herself. She wasn’t used to being here alone—yesterday had been the first time, ever. The sun rose, as if declaring it was just another day. Meghan felt tingly, though, all strange. Eventually, she went back to the hut and built up the fire. She made and ate her morning pottage and then went to count the sheep. All morning, all day, she kept seeing them in her mind, those three riders, hearing what they’d said. Already it was beginning to feel too much like a dream, which she didn’t like. She felt as if she needed to … root it in herself like a tree, make it real.
Meghan mer Gower told the story all her life, only not the part about how she’d been squatting to pee when they came out of the trees. Given what followed, who the three of them had turned out to be, even Bevin had to believe her, which was very satisfying.
Half a century later, it was Gweith, her grandson—having heard his grandmother’s story all his days—who took thought one autumn morning after a fire had destroyed half the houses in the village.
After, he walked south, cap in hand, to the sanctuary at Ynant and spoke with the clerics there, asking their blessing for what he was of a mind to do. It was not the sort of thing you did without a blessing.
He received more than that. Fifteen clerics from Ynant, yellow-robed, most of them unhandy in the extreme, came walking with him back to the village.
The next morning they offered the dawn invocation and then, with all the villagers gathered to watch, in awe and wonder, the clerics began to help—after a fashion—as Gweith set about cutting down the first trees at the edge of the spirit wood. Some of the other young men joined them. They were more useful.
Gweith didn’t die, nor did anyone else. No one was stricken with palsy or dropsy or fever in the days that followed. Neither were the clerics, though many of them did complain of blistered hands and muscle pains.
Men began taking axes to the wood.
At about that same time, in the way of such things, where an idea, a notion, reaches the world in many places at once, the same forest in the Anglcyn lands was entered into by men in search of urgently needed wood.
They brought their axes to the trees west of Esferth and farther south, beyond Retherly, towards where the young king had ordered a new shipyard and burh to be built. A growing kingdom needed lumber, there was no getting around it. At a certain point, in the name of Jad, you couldn’t let old women’s tales stop you from doing what had to be done.
None of the first woodcutters on that side of the wood died either, except for those suffering the usual accidents attendant upon sharp blades and falling trees and carelessness. It began, it continued. The world does not stay the way it was, ever.
Years after all of this, a great many years, actually, an Anglcyn charcoal burner at what had become the southeastern edge of a considerably reduced forest came upon something curious. It was a hammer—an Erling battle hammer—lying in the grass by a small pond.
The odd thing was that the hammer’s head, clearly ancient, gleamed as if newly forged, unrusted, and the wood of the shaft was smooth. When the charcoal burner picked it up he swore he heard a sound, something between a note of music and a cry.
Actions ripple, in so many ways, and for so long.
CHAPTER XV
Kendra would remember the days before and during the fair that year as the most disconnected she’d known. Intensity of joy, intensity of fear.
The fyrd had been home for two nights, after riding in loud triumph through the wide-open gates of Esferth amid shouts and cheering and music playing. The city was thronged with merchants. There could not have been a better time for Aeldred to achieve such a victory over the Erlings. Slain in numbers, driven away, no losses at all for the Anglcyn.
If you didn’t count a prince, gone into the godwood.
Riding up the main street from the gates, a screaming, colourful crowd on either side, her father had waved, smiled gravely, let the people see a king calmly aware of achievement, and as calmly set on repeating it as often as necessary. Let his subjects know this, and let all who were here from abroad carry word back to their homes.
Kendra, with her mother and sister and brother (the one brother here), in front of the great hall, had looked at her father as he’d dismounted, and she’d known—right then—that he was dissembling.
Athelbert outweighed sixty Erlings killed, by so much.
There had been sea-raids for a hundred years, and they would not stop with this one. But the king of the Anglcyn had only two sons who’d survived infancy, and the older was gone now into a deadly place, and the younger (they all knew) had never wanted to be a king.
Truth be told, it was Judit, thought Kendra, beside her red-haired sister on the steps, who ought to have been a boy at birth, and now a man. Judit could have sat a throne, incisive and confident in the fierce brightness of her spirit. She could have wielded a sword (she did wield swords!), commanded the fyrd, drunk ale and wine and mead all night and walked steadily away from a trestle table at dawn when all those who had been with her lay snoring amid cups. Judit knew this, too, Kendra thought; she knew she could have done these things.
Instead, she was going off this winter, escorted by most of the court, to marry a thirteen-year-old boy and live among the people of Rheden to bind them close: for that is what young women in royal families were born to do.
Things went awry sometimes, Kendra thought, and there was no one to give her a good answer why Jad had made the world that way.
They’d feasted that night, heard music, watched jugglers and tumblers perform. The rituals of victory. Theirs were lives on display, to be seen.
More of the same at sunrise. At chapel to pray, then she and Judit (dutiful just now, more shaken than she’d want to admit by what Athelbert had done) had made a point of walking through the thronged, roped-off marketplace three separate times (to be seen), fingering fabrics and brooches. They’d made Gareth come with them the third time. He’d been quiet, extremely so. Judit bought a jewelled knife and a gelding from Al-Rassan.
Kendra bought some fabrics. She made her way through the duties of the day with difficulty, then after the evening rites she went looking for someone. She had questions that needed answering.
Ceinion of Llywerth had not been at the royal chapel for the sundown services. There were a small number of Cyngael merchants here for the fair (they’d come along the same coastal path he had, or been granted passage through the Rheden Wall). She found the cleric with his own people at a chapel on the eastern side of Esferth, leading the rites there.
He had just finished when Aeldred’s younger daughter arrived, with one of her women in attendance. They waited until the cleric was done talking with some of the merchants, and then Kendra had her woman withdraw and she sat down with the grey-haired cleric towards the front of the old chapel, near the disk. It needed polishing, she noticed. She’d tell someone tomorrow.
Ceinion’s eyes, she thought, were curiously like her father’s. Alert, and just as unsettling when you had something you wanted to hide. She wasn’t here to hide. She wouldn’t be here if she were hiding.
“Princess?” he said calmly, and waited.
“I am afraid,” she said.
He nodded. His face was kind, smooth-shaven, less lined than was usual for a man his age. He was small and trimly formed, not a laden-table, wine-cup cleric like the other one here, from Ferrieres. Her father had told them some time ago, before the first visit, that this man was one of the most learned scholars in the world, that the Patriarch in Rhodias sought his views on clashes of doctrine. In some ways it was hard to credit—the Cyngael lived so cut off from the world.
“Many of my people are greatly afraid just now,” he said. “You are generous to share it with us. Your father has been very good, sending a ship to Arberth, messengers to the Rheden Wall. We can only hope—”
“No,” she said. “That isn’t it.” She looked at him. “I knew when Alun ab
Owyn entered the wood with my brother and the Erling.”
A silence. She had shaken him, she saw. He made the sign of the disk. That was all right; she’d have done the same.
“You … you see spirits?”
He was very direct. She shook her head. “Well, once I did. One of them. A few nights ago. That isn’t what I … from the time you came across the river, the other morning? When we were lying on the grass?” She heard herself sounding like a child. This was so difficult.
He nodded.
“Well, from that time, I … I can’t explain this well, but I knew … ab Owyn. The prince. I could … read things in him? Know where he was.”
“Dear Jad,” whispered the high cleric of the Cyngael. “What is it that is coming among us?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
He was looking at her, but not with eyes that spoke denunciation or disbelief. “Strange things are happening,” he said.
“Not just … to me?” She was extremely determined not to cry.
“Not just to you, child. To him. And … others.”
“Others?”
He nodded. Hesitated, then moved a hand sideways, back and forth. He wasn’t going to say. Clerics, she thought, were good at not telling what they didn’t want to tell. But he’d already said something, and she’d needed to know it, so much. She wasn’t alone, or going mad.
He swallowed, and now she did see a hint of fear, which frightened her, in turn. She knew what he was going to ask, before he spoke.
“Do you … see him now? Where they are?”
She shook her head. “Not since they went in. I’ve been having dreams, though. I thought maybe you could help me.”
“Oh, child, I have so little help to give in this. I am … enmeshed in fears.”
“You’re the only person I can think of.”
Her father’s eyes, very nearly. “Ask me, then,” he said.
It was quiet here. Everyone had gone, except the aged cleric of the chapel, straightening candles at a side-altar near the door, and her own woman in a far row, waiting. This chapel was one of the oldest in Esferth, the wood of the benches and flooring worn smooth with years. It was dark where the lamps didn’t reach, softly lit where they did. A feeling of calm. Or there ought to have been, Kendra thought.
“What can you tell me,” she asked, “about the Volgan’s sword?”
The ambit of a woman’s life could not be said to be very wide. But how wide might it be for the majority of men alive on the god’s earth, struggling to feed themselves and their families, to be warm in winter (or sheltered from the sandstorms in the south), safe from war and disease, sea-raiders and creatures in the night?
The Book of the Sons of Jad, more and more widely used in chapels now, even here in the Cyngael lands, taught that the world belonged to the mortal children of the god, saying so in words that were incantation: eloquent and triumphant.
It was difficult for Meirion mer Ryce to believe this to be true.
If they were all the glorious children of a generous god, why did some of them end up blood-eagled, soaked in blood, ripped apart, though they had only been a girl walking back from pasture with brimming pails after milking the two cows on a morning at the end of spring?
It was wrong, thought Meirion, defiantly, remembering her sister, as she did every single time coming back from the milking in the mist before dawn. Elyn was not a person who ought to have died that way. It wasn’t what life should have held for someone like her. Meiri knew she wasn’t wise enough to understand such things, and she knew what the cleric in the village had been telling them over and again since summer began, but Cyngael women were not particularly submissive or deferential, and if Meirion had been asked by someone she trusted to describe what she really felt, she would have said she was enraged.
No one ever asked (no one was trusted so much), but the anger was there, each day, every night, listening for sounds that never came now from the empty pallet along the adjacent wall. And it was with her when she rose in darkness to dress and go past the bed where Elyn wasn’t any more, to do the milking her sister used to do.
Her mother had wanted to take the pallet apart, make more space in the small hut. Meiri hadn’t let her, though lately, as summer had turned towards harvest and autumn, a chill now some nights, she’d begun thinking she might do it herself one afternoon after work was done.
She’d choose a clear day, when flame and smoke could be seen a long way, and she’d burn the bedding on the sun-browned tor above the fields as a memorial. Not enough, no remotely adequate answer to loss and helpless fury, but what else was there?
Elyn hadn’t been a noblewoman or a princess. There was no consecrated place in the vault of a sanctuary for her bones, no carved words above or image on stone, no harp songs. She wasn’t Heledd or Arianrhod, lost and lamented. She’d been only a farmer’s daughter in the wrong place one too-dark pre-dawn hour, raped and carved open by an Erling.
And what was there that a sister could make for her remembering? A song? Meiri didn’t know music, or even how to write her own name. She was a girl, unmarried (no man to fight for her), living with her parents near the border between Llywerth and Arberth. What was she going to do? Take fierce and fell revenge? Intervene in some battle, strike a blow against Erlings?
In the event, she did do that. Sometimes, despite all the weight of likelihood, we can. It is a part of the mystery of the world and needs to be understood that way.
In an hour before sunrise at the end of that summer Meirion heard sounds, muffled in mist, to her right, as she made her way home along the worn, grassy path from the summer pasture.
The path ran parallel to the road from Llywerth, though to call it a road was somewhat to overstate. Roads weren’t much a part of the Cyngael provinces. They cost a great deal in resources and labour, and if you made a road it was easier to be attacked along it. Better, times being what they were, to live with some difficulty of travel and not smooth the way for those who meant you ill.
The rough path south of her, running past their farm and the hamlet, was one of the main routes to and from the sea, however, cutting through a gap in the Dinfawr Hills to the west and continuing east below the woods along the north bank of the Aber.
That’s why Elyn had died. People passed too near them all the time, going east and west. That’s why Meirion stopped now and carefully, quietly, set down her neck yoke with the brimming pails on either side. She left it in the grass, stood a moment, listening.
Horse hooves, harness, creak of leather. Clink of iron. There was no good reason for armed horsemen to be on this path before sunrise. Her first thought was a cattle raid: Llywerth outlaws (or noblemen) crossing into Arberth. Her village tried to stay out of these affairs; they didn’t have enough cattle (enough of anything) to be a target for raiders. Better to let them go by, both ways, know nothing or as little as possible if pursuit came after (either way) with questions asked.
She’d have gone quietly back along her own path, walking home with the morning milk, if she hadn’t heard voices. She didn’t understand the words—which was the point, of course. She would have, if these men had been from Llywerth. They weren’t. They were speaking Erling, and Meiri’s sister, fiercely loved, had been slain and defiled by one of them at the beginning of summer.
She didn’t go home. Anger can channel fear sometimes, master it. Meiri knew this land as she knew the tangles of her own brown hair. She crouched down, leaving the milk behind in the path (a fox found it later in the day, drank its fill). In the greyness she moved towards the voices and the trail. After a bit she went on her belly among the grass and scrub and wriggled closer. She didn’t know anything about how Erlings (or anyone else) arranged themselves on a march-and-ride, so it was good fortune more than anything else that no outriders were sweeping the scrub-land north of the trail. Much of what happens in a life turns on good fortune or bad, which unsettles as much as it does anything else.
What she saw,
peering through brambles, was a company of Erlings, some horsed, more of them afoot, stopped to talk, barely visible in the darkness and not-yet-lifted fog. What she heard was “Brynnfell,” twice, unmistakably, the name springing at her from snapped and snarled words that made no sense at all, over the hammering of her blood.
She knew what she needed to know. She started to wriggle backwards on knees and elbows. Heard something behind her. Froze where she was, not breathing. She didn’t pray. Ought to have, of course, but was too bone-frightened.
The lone horseman continued moving, passing just behind where she lay. She heard him cut down beyond the bushes she’d been peering through and rejoin the company on the road. Any raiding party had outriders, especially in hostile country where you weren’t sure of your way. A dog would have found her, but the Erlings had no dogs.
Meirion fought a desire to stay where she was, motionless, forever, or until they went away. She heard the riders dismount. The river was close here, just to the south. They might be stopping for water and food.
She wanted that.
Listening carefully, behind her as well now, she crawled backwards, regained her own path. Left the milk where it was and began to run. She knew where these raiders were going and what needed to be done. She wasn’t certain if the men in the fields would listen to her. She was prepared to kill someone to make them do so.
She didn’t have to. Sixteen farmers and farmhands, and ten-year-old Derwyn ap Hwyth, who never let himself be left behind, set off before the sun was fully up, running east to Brynnfell, taking the old track. That one stopped at their forest. It was a known and tamed wood, though, source of kindling and building logs, and there was a trail that would bring them out, eventually, near Brynn ap Hywll’s farm.
Meirion’s father, whose bad leg meant he couldn’t keep up, took the one horse in the village and went north to Penavy. Found twelve men working by there. Said what needed to be said. They, too, went running, straight from the harvest fields, seizing whatever came to hand that was sharp and could be carried for a day and a night at speed.