Authors: Rosemary Sutcliff
They came up, Bryni holding out his hand with a lick of greyish salt in it to the white questing muzzle that was advanced towards him, laughing at the feel of the delicately working lips in his palm, while Horn, always a little slower, hung back behind him.
‘You look as though you had been asleep in the sun all day,’ Owain said, looking down into the two flushed faces.
Bryni grinned up at him, shaking grass seed and bits of twig out of his hair. ‘No, only half the day. Anyway there are no wolves to take the sheep, and Wauleye can keep them clear of the dykes. There’s a warbler’s nest with five eggs in it still, among the reeds just beyond the long turf stack, and look—’ his hand went to his belt, ‘I’ve made an elder pipe and I can play three and a half notes on it!’
‘Can you so? Well even that’s better than trying to steal wild honey,’ Owain said gravely. The summer before, Bryni had tried to take a wild bees’ nest unaided and very nearly been stung to death.
Horn had come forward by that time, and was stroking Teitri’s neck, his square brown face serious and absorbed. ‘He is beautiful,’ he said at last. ‘He is the most beautiful horse that ever was foaled. When the wind goes through the long grass and the old men say “There runs the Wild Horse”, he’s just like the Wild Horse could be if you could see him.’ And then he turned fiery red at the sound of his own words, and became very busy disentangling a scrap of oak twig from the white mane.
‘Teitri is the King of Horses, and he is my foster brother as Haegel is my father’s,’ Bryni said, ‘and Dog—’ he ceased rubbing the stallion’s muzzle, and swift and impetuous, as all his movements were, flung himself down on the grass, nose to nose with the great hound who promptly licked his face from ear to ear—‘and Dog is the King of all the dogs in Seals’ Island, and he is my foster brother, too.’
Horn looked down at them, and said in his serious painstaking way, ‘Dog is growing old. He has got white hairs in his muzzle.’
His arms round Dog’s neck, Bryni jerked his head up, scowling. ‘He hasn’t, then! Can’t you see he’s been drinking and it’s only the wetness shining on his nose? And anyway he could still beat every dog in Seals’ Island in fair fight—even those red brutes of Vadir’s!’
Horn said something in reply, but Owain did not hear what it was. He had been already turning to pick up the pails, but he checked, and looked down at Dog also. The great hound must be about ten years old now, the same age as Bryni, strong still, milky-toothed and brave and cunning, and no hound as yet challenged his chosen place by the fire nor his king’s share at feeding time, but it had seemed to Owain lately that he was a little slower than he used to be, a little fonder of sleeping in the sun. No, it was not only the wetness shining on his muzzle …
He picked up the pails. ‘See that the gate-gap is closed after you,’ he said, and turned back towards the steading, leaving Dog to follow with the two boys when they would. The sun was below the oak trees now, and the gold was draining out of the evening, and he had suddenly the odd feeling of a shadow lying across his heart.
By the hind-gate of the steading, he met Beornwulf, frowning. ‘Where’s Bryni?’ he demanded. ‘I bade him always to come and tell me at once when the sheep were folded, not simply leave them and fly off about his own affairs.’
Owain jerked his head back the way he had come. ‘Down in the shore-pasture with Teitri, he and Horn; they took him a lick of salt.’
The master looked away in the same direction, his eyes narrowed under the golden brows, then he hunched his shoulders a little. ‘Aye well, it is not so many more licks of salt they can be taking him,’ he said in a different tone.
The thrall set the pails down carefully before he answered, and the shadow deepened across his heart. ‘He—must go, then?’
‘Aye, when the hay harvest is over.’
The last time Haegel the King had come that way, back in the windy spring weather, Owain was remembering how he had gone down with his foster brother to the shore-pasture and looked long at the white stallion. He had not asked any questions of Beornwulf afterwards; it had seemed better not to know. ‘But why?’ he burst out at last. ‘The King does not need him. They say that the God’s Horse is still in his prime and there is already a colt in Haegel’s runs, ready for the day that he begins to fail.’
‘I think that Teitri goes further afield than the royal farm at Cissa’s Caester,’ Beornwulf said slowly. ‘It is in my heart that there is a higher place waiting for him—elsewhere. We should be proud.’
Owain looked round at him quickly; but Beornwulf’s face was shut. No good to ask anything more. ‘“Proud” has a cold sound,’ he said heavily. ‘Colder than the touch of a horse’s muzzle on your shoulder when you saw him foaled.’
‘All horses die one day,’ Beornwulf said. ‘Horses and hounds and men. Can I help it if you are a fool? The evening meal was ready when I came out, and we might as well be getting back to it before the broth is burned and the women angry. The young ones will come when their bellies bid them.’ And he turned in through the gate.
Owain picked up the pails yet again and followed him, walking heavily as though all at once he was desperately tired.
Hay harvest passed, and the day came for Teitri to go to the King’s farm. They set out on a still grey morning, not long after sunrise so as to catch low tide in the creek, Owain riding first on Golden-eye with Dog loping ahead, Beornwulf following on another horse with Teitri on the leading-rein. It was an anxious out-setting, for the white stallion had never been off Beornstead land before, and they could not be sure how he would behave. But he followed Golden-eye easily enough, not because she was his mother, he had long ago forgotten that, and so had she, but because she was a mare. They got across the creek with little trouble, for he was used to being led in shallow water, and before noon they were at the King’s farm.
And within an hour, Owain was riding south again down the old half-lost road from Regnum to the Seals’ Island. He had not waited while Beornwulf finished his business with his foster brother; he had not felt that he could bear to wait, hanging about the high antler-crowned Hall, when Teitri had been handed over to the King’s Horse Thegn, and Beornwulf had given him leave to start back at once. He rode slowly, knowing that the tide would not serve him yet a while for getting Golden-eye across the creek; but even so, the tide was not yet full out, when he came out from the Maen Wood and saw the levels lying pale under the grey sweep of the tall marsh sky.
He dismounted and sat himself down on the bank beside the roadway, his arm through Golden-eye’s bridle, while Dog flung himself down contentedly at his feet. He was glad of the delay, for despite his eagerness to get away from the King’s farm, he did not want to get back to Beornstead, not without Teitri. ‘Can I help it if you are a fool?’ Beornwulf had said. ‘All horses die one day—horses and hounds and men.’ But it was not the distant gleam of the priest’s knife that hurt him so sharply; he had accepted that for the white stallion as a man might accept it for himself; it was that Teitri had come when he whistled, had been gentle and inquisitive and had known, save for that bitter time last winter, that men were his friends and to be trusted. And now they would treat him like a god, and he would become wild and fierce and men would be his friends no more.
But the sand-bars were laid bare now, and the stones of the old ford beginning to show. He stirred Dog gently into wakefulness with his foot, got up and remounted, and headed down over the wave-rippled sand into the shallows. Dog half paddled, half swam across, and splashed ashore ahead of him, shaking himself until it seemed that his four legs were about to fly off in different directions, then turned in behind Golden-eye, dodging from heel to heel as a dog does when following close behind a horse, as they set off down the last stretch of the road.
The steading was a place of women at that hour, for the thralls would be afield, but Bryni had brought in a couple of ewes for milking, and was hanging about the gateway with a scowling face. And when Owain rode into the garth, he found Vadir the Hault lounging on the bench beside the foreporch door, with two of his red hounds beside him, and an ale horn on his knee. Were they never to be free of the man, even now that Teitri was gone?
Vadir glanced up at him with those flickering curiously pale eyes, as he drew rein, and the dogs surveyed each other, snarling a little, their hackles raised. ‘So, the God’s Horse is gone already, they tell me,’ he said.
‘Aye. If you want to see him again you’ll need to ride up to the King’s farm,’ Owain returned shortly. ‘If it is Beornwulf you’re wanting, he’ll not be far behind me, or if he is, he’ll miss the tide,’ and dismounting he turned Golden-eye and led her away stable-ward to rub her down and give her a feed of beans before he turned her out to graze.
He did not notice for the moment that Dog had not followed him.
He had barely hitched the mare to the ring in the wall, as far as might be from Vadir’s roan, when with appalling suddenness it seemed that all Hell broke loose in the steading garth behind him. The hideous snarling clamour of a dog-fight, the scream of a woman, and then Bryni’s voice shrieking his name. ‘Owain!
Owain!’
But Owain had already snatched down the long-lashed whip that hung by the door, and was running—running as he had not done since an evening in the ruins of Viroconium, six springs ago. Just outside the stable door he all but crashed with Bryni, and the boy swerved, and whirled about beside him, sobbing out his story. ‘It’s Dog! They’re killing Dog! It’s Vadir’s Fang—and the rest are with him—I tried to stop them—I—’
The sobbing voice dropped behind him as he raced, cold fury and colder fear in his heart, for the end of the house-place, and the tumult beyond.
In the garth before the house-place door, Dog was fighting for his life, with not only Fang but three or four others upon him. The thing that always happened one day had happened now; the pack had turned under a young leader against the old one. He was fighting like a hero, flinging them this way and that, but the Red Killer was at his throat, and even as Owain burst into the garth, he went down and the battle closed over him.
Owain sprang in among the struggling, tearing, slavering bodies, yelling encouragement to Dog as he laid about him with a whip. What would happen if he missed his own footing, he knew well enough. Dog must have heard his Lord’s voice, for somehow he got on to his legs once more, dragging Fang up with him; but the strength was pouring out of him through a score of wounds, and before Owain could reach him he was down again.
Owain brought the whiplash writhing and licking across this body and that; he kicked one hound—it was a Beornstead dog—in the belly and sent it yelping through the air. There seemed no weight in his body, as though he were borne up on the wings of the cold rage within him. He did not know that Bryni had joined him, wading valiantly into the fight with a piece of firewood, while the women huddled screeching in the house-place doorway; he scarcely knew that somebody had thrown a pail of water over them, deluging hounds and man and boy alike. He never knew what happened or how long the struggle lasted. He only knew that at last the hounds were falling sullenly back, and he heard the crack and crack and crack of another whip beside his own, and Beornwulf’s voice, raised and cursing. He strangled Fang off Dog’s throat with his naked hands, and flung the red brute aside.
After that was a sudden stillness. Beyond the stillness, making as it were a wall about it, he heard voices and the uneasy snorting and trampling of a horse, and beyond again, a sudden crying of gulls. One of Vadir’s dogs lay still; Fang and the Beornstead hounds had slunk away to lick their wounds—they had plenty, for the old King had not gone down easily, though the odds had been five to one. Bryni was squatting beside him, whimpering a little over an ugly bite in his arm, now that it was all over; and in the midst of the stillness, Owain was kneeling beside Dog—Dog bleeding from a full score of wounds, with his throat torn to rags. The stubborn life and courage were in the old hound yet, and even now he tried once more to get up; but his legs would not answer to him, and he collapsed with a shudder, his head on Owain’s knee.
Owain was fondling the battered head, holding the beautiful amber eyes with his own, while his free hand went feeling for the knife in his belt. ‘Good Dog! It was a mighty battle—a mighty battle, brave heart—’ Dog licked the caressing hand, and raised his head a little to look at his Lord, the tip of his tail thumping behind him. ‘Good hunting, my brother,’ Owain said, and drove the knife cleanly home into the mangled throat.
Dog made a small surprised sound, and the life went out of him with a great shudder, and the thing was finished.
Squatting beside him, Bryni rubbed the back of one brown hand across his eyes. Owain remained quite still as though he were stunned, looking down at the great brindled body with all its wounds upon it.
At last he looked up, slowly. Beornwulf stood by with his whip gathered into his hand, his horse fidgeting behind him. The women and girls were still huddled in the house-place doorway, and on the bench, with Fang crouched against his knees, Vadir Cedricson still sat, leaning back against the wall and looking on as a man looks on at a show that interests and somewhat pleases him.
Owain’s mouth flinched and twisted sideways, and his throat tightened a moment. He said, ‘Could you not have stopped it?’
Vadir shrugged without troubling to lift his shoulders clear of the wall. ‘He was old and had his day; it is time there was a new lord of the dog pack, and a worthier one than a thrall’s cur.’
‘If he had been the veriest dunghill cur,’ Owain said, coldly furious, ‘he was not yours to say that his time had come to die. But he was no cur, he was one of the war-hounds of Kyndylan the Fair, until Kyndylan died by Aquae Sulis.’
‘Ah yes, I had forgotten that you both contrived to come alive, together, out of that fight.’ Vadir’s light eyes flicked him, like the careless flick of a whiplash, and came to rest on the long white spear-scar that ran out of his torn sleeve. His pale brows rose a little, and the mobile mouth lifted into a half smile. ‘I have never seen you stripped. How many scars the like to that one are there on your back?’ he asked softly. ‘Or can you perhaps fly faster than a spear?’