Authors: Rosemary Sutcliff
His hatred of the Saxons rose in his throat like vomit, and for a moment it was in his mind that it might be better, after all, to let Regina die in the forest. At least she would die free, and with only himself and Dog, who were her friends—all the friends she had—beside her. But he knew even as the thought came to him, that he could not let Regina die, not while there was this one thing he could do that might save her.
There were signs of somebody having just arrived, a horse being led away. But Owain’s attention was chiefly held by the figure of a woman in a russet-red gown, who came out of one of the huts bending her head against the rain. He wondered if she was the mistress of the house, and if so, whether she was kind—remembering the kindness of Priscilla, that had met him on another threshold. Then he slithered back into the darker shadows of the woodshore, and turned to make his way upstream again.
Dog, still lying as he had left him, greeted his return with pricked ears and thumping tail, but Regina never moved; only he heard her quick, painful breathing. It was very dark among the trees, and he had to bend close before he could see her properly in the gloom. Her eyes were half open, but she did not see him at all, and her chest was quivering up and down in shallow gasps like a small animal that has run to exhaustion. He felt the pain of them tight under his own ribs. ‘We’re going now,’ he said, in case she could understand him. ‘It is all right. We are going to a fine place—where there will be milk.’
He gathered her up, awkwardly because he had never carried anyone before, but as carefully as he knew how, and staggered to his feet, wavering a little under her weight; not that there was much weight to her now. He had not known how thin she was, thinner even than when she had first come to his fire drawn by the smell of the baking hare. The sharpness of her bones came not only through her skin but through the folds of the ragged cloak in which he had bundled her. But she was heavy enough, none the less, for Owain who was only fifteen and far gone himself with hunger and exhaustion.
The second journey down the streamside was a nightmare. Again and again he had to stop to put the girl down and rest, and each time it was harder to pick her up and struggle on again. His heart felt bursting in his breast, and everything was darker even than the rain should have made it, when he came at last to the forest fringe, and stumbled to his knees. Regina slipped from his arms to the ground, and he let her lie there, crouching beside her and drawing his breath in great hoarse gasps that were painful in their way as her little panting ones, until in a while he began to feel less sick. Dog, poor Dog, stood beside them, looking from one to the other, and trying, as he spent so much of his life in trying, to understand.
A few yards back from the stream, among the hazel and crack willow of the newly cleared land, one great thorn tree stood out like a guardian over the trees behind; Owain had noticed it the first time he came down to the woodshore, but without knowing that he did so.
Now, as the world steadied and his breath came back to him, he got up and stumbled towards it. It was so old that some of its roots had pulled clear of the ground and spread about it in great arched and twisted limbs over the turf, and though it stood no more than four or five times the height of a man, its bole was thicker round than many a hundred foot forest giant, a Dwarf-King of the forest; maybe it was because of its royalty that the Saxons had let it be when they were at their wood-clearing. There, kneeling close against it, Owain pulled out his hunting knife and dug a little hole as far as he could get under one of the roots. Then he pulled the old battered signet ring from his breast, and cut the thong on which it hung. There was no light in the flawed emerald, only the surface reflection of the hawthorn branches and the pale glints of sky beyond. He wrapped it in a hanging end of cloth torn from the skirt of his ragged tunic, and thrust it down the hole, pushing it home with the point of the knife; and filled the hole in again. At least the Barbarians should not have his father’s ring.
When he turned back to Regina, he found that her eyes were fully open and she was watching him as though she knew who he was and what he was doing.
For a moment, hope leapt up in him, and he scrambled across to her without getting off his knees. ‘Are you better? Are you better, Regina?’ But even as he reached her, her eyes half closed, and she had gone again, back to wherever it was that she had been these many hours past.
The brief flicker of hope made it all the harder to bear, and something very like a sob rose in his throat. Strength seemed running out of him like blood from a wound, and when he tried to pick her up again, he found that he could not do it. He gave up the attempt for the moment, and sat back on his heels, trying to fight down a rising sense of panic. Somehow he must get her up to the farm. It was not very far, not much more than a good bow-shot, maybe. He got his knee under her and his arms round her again. If he could have carried her over his shoulder it would have been easier, but he was afraid that that might harm her. He shifted his hold a little, set his teeth, and somehow, without much idea of how he did it, struggled to his feet. Regina’s head hung back on her thin neck, but he could not help that. He set off, stumbling and lurching, Dog padding anxiously at his heels. Out from the scrub of the woodshore and across the brown fallow towards the track. Now that he was clear of the shelter of the trees, the wind and rain swooped at him like live enemies, and the soft earth of the ploughland clogged his bare feet and tried to hold him back. He was blind and sick and dizzy, but somehow he clung to Regina and struggled on, and suddenly the ground changed, and the mire of the track was beneath his feet, and the gate-gap of the stockade close before him. He turned in through it, and reeled across the steading garth towards the gleam of a fire and the sound of voices that came from the open house-place doorway. Two guard-dogs—great red-eyed brutes—were baying the news of his coming, but they were still chained up, for though the day was drawing on, it was nowhere near yet to cow-stalling time, and Owain paid no heed to them; nor did Dog, whose only concern was to follow Owain.
A man had come striding into the doorway to see why the dogs were barking. A second came up from the outbuildings, and others, men and women and children, seemed to spring out of nowhere like the people in a dream. He was in the foreporch now, out of the wind and the rain. He let Regina slip from his arms on to the guest-bench, and stood looking at the faces about him as though they were indeed the faces of a dream, leaning against the doorpost and bent a little over his own belly, like someone who has been sick and wants to be sick again.
He heard voices coming out of the faces, speaking in a guttural tongue, and the sound of the voices was questioning. ‘She has—the lung sickness,’ he said in his own tongue, as soon as he could straighten a little and speak; and remembered even as he did so that they would not understand, and tried to gather himself together to show them. But in the same instant the woman in the russet-red gown came from the fire, a woman with eyes of faded blue in an old quiet face, and the rest made way for her so that he knew she must be the mistress of the house. He had never seen a Saxon woman before, and he noticed even in that unlikely moment that her hair was covered with a kind of napkin, instead of being bare, as the women he was used to. She looked at Regina lying small and spent as a dead bird on the bench, with the cloak fallen back from her and one arm trailing, and flung up her hands with an exclamation that had the sound of kindness in it. Then it seemed that she asked questions, too, her gaze moving from Regina to himself and back again; and while he was still battling to clear the fog about him and make himself understood, a man who looked as though his brother might have been a fierce little mountain bull, grunted something in reply, and picked Regina up as casually as though she had no more weight than a dead bird and not much more importance, and turned into the house-place with her.
Owain, lurching after the man with no clear idea in his head save to keep close to Regina and see that they did not hurt her, had a confused impression of empty stalls as though the place were a cow byre and not a house, and then space opening out beyond them and the saffron warmth of the fire that he had glimpsed through the open doorway. Then the man had set Regina down on a pile of sheepskins in the corner, and instinctively he crouched down beside her, his arm across her body as though to shield her from harm. A boy with a handsome ruddy face like a bull calf pushed out from his elders to stare. He came too close, and Owain snarled at him much as Dog might have done; save for Regina it was a long time since he had had to do with human beings. Several of the folk laughed, and the boy scowled, then turned away shrugging, and went and sat down with his back against the upright loom and pretended to take no more interest in anything. The mistress of the house was already kneeling beside the unconscious girl, and very gently, smiling into his eyes out of her faded blue ones, she pressed his protecting arm away. He resisted a moment, and then let it drop to his side.
The man who had carried Regina in was talking with another beside the hearth, both of them staring at Owain and the girl while they spoke. Then the second man leaned forward from the stool on which he sat, and said in the British tongue, though with the broad guttural accent of the Saxon kind, ‘Boy!’
Owain looked at him for the first time, and saw a fair, thickset young man with a skin tanned and wind-burned to the colour of copper, and pale straight brows almost meeting across the bridge of his nose. He was sitting with legs stretched to the fire, steaming in their loose cross-gartered breeks, and a drenched cloak was flung down beside him as though he had not long arrived out of the storm. This, he realized vaguely, must be the rider of the horse gone lame.
‘Boy,’ said the young man again, ‘what is it that you do, you and the woman-child, here in the Forest of Thorns? Is it that you run from someone?’
The sound of his own tongue, even spoken in that outlandish accent, pierced through the fog about Owain and seemed to clear his head a little. Relief swept over him at the discovery that there was someone here who could understand him. ‘We were trying to get to the coast,’ he said, and added on a note of defiance, ‘We were running from no one save the Saxon kind; we hoped to get across to Gaul.’
The man nodded. ‘That is boldly spoken, at all events.’
Owain said, speaking carefully to make sure that the foreigner understood, ‘But now she has the lung sickness, and we can go no further.’
‘So I judge,’ said the foreigner.
‘And so—’ Owain’s strained gaze went to the man like a bull, and then back to the other; he swallowed, and his mouth felt dry. ‘Will you tell him, please, the master of the house, that if he will take her in and let his women care for her and—and give her milk—until she is strong again, I will stay and work for him and be his slave.’ He knew that there were many British slaves on the Saxon farms, and always he had scorned them for having let such a thing come about when they could have died instead.
The man looked at Owain in silence for a moment, and then spoke to the bull-like one, and the bull-like one stared again at Owain, and said something, and shrugged.
But the mistress, who had pulled off most of Regina’s drenched rags and was feeling her forehead and her heart, while the younger women went scurrying for milk and clean rags and medicine-herbs, glanced up and asked a swift question, and the man translated again. ‘The mistress of the house says what is she to you? Is she your sister?’
Owain looked at Regina’s still face and up again into the man’s, and shook his head. ‘She came because I had a hare cooking, and she was hungry. But that was a long time ago—last autumn.’
This also the man told to the rest; and he and the master of the house spoke together for a few moments, while Owain sat on his haunches and watched them, trying desperately to understand. Then the fair-haired man, who had been looking fixedly at Owain even while he argued—it seemed like arguing—with his host, leaned forward and reaching out, ran his thumb nail down the scar of the old spear-wound where it showed under the rags of his sleeve. ‘That was gained in battle?’ he said, speaking for himself now, not for the others.
Owain answered him in the same way, for himself, and not for the household watching and listening about the fire. ‘By Aquae Sulis a year ago.’
‘That was a great fight, as I heard.’ The man was silent a long moment, studying Owain under his pale brows, somewhat as a man looks at a pony, for its spirit as well as its physical points. Then, as though suddenly he had made up his mind, he tossed three words, carelessly enough, over his shoulder to the bull-like master of the house. Then he spoke to Owain, returning to the British tongue. ‘The master of the house says that he does not want another thrall. But the Gods have been good to me; there is a small son in my house, and because of that, I shall add to the Intake-land when I get home from this wayfaring, and because of
that
there is room in my house-place for another thrall. Therefore I have told him that I will take you off his hands—you and the dog together—for a gold piece. And he will keep his side of the bargain, and care for the woman-child.’ His eyes narrowed a little, hard on Owain’s face. ‘But I say to you, and this is
my
bargain, that if she dies, that is the will of the Gods—and I have still paid my gold piece.’
Owain was silent a moment, looking at Regina. One of the women had brought something in a pottery bowl and the mistress had taken it and was trying to persuade her to rouse and drink. She seemed kind enough. His hand on the neck of the great hound who had crouched all this while watchful beside him, he stared into the fire again, seeing not the crackling red flare of burning furze but the little hyacinth-coloured flames that flowered from the burning olivewood, and Regina dropping the rosemary seedling into its heart, so that there should be nothing left—nothing left …