Dawn Wind (28 page)

Bryni strode out in front of the rest, still whistling through his teeth. It was his first boar hunt, and it was natural that he should be in wild spirits—being Bryni who was never troubled by a cold stomach—but Owain had a feeling that he was up to some devilry, and wondered whether he should have tried to make him go with the beaters after all. But the boy was a fine hunter, strong and skilled, and one of those who seem able to think with the mind of a wild animal, knowing by instinct what the quarry will do. And anyway he would have been as like to do something mad with the beaters as he was with the spears. The only thing for Owain to do was to keep an eye on him as well as he could. At all events Vadir the Hault would not have come to join the King’s hunting—war was one thing, but to track the wild boar on foot through miles of wood and waste was quite another, for a man with a club foot—and that was one danger the less. Owain drew a long breath, his heart lifting to the prospect of the day’s desperate sport, and settled down to the rhythm of the long loping tramp that carried them towards the King’s meeting place.

It had snowed a couple of days since, half thawed, and then frozen again, and pools of whiteness lay under the trees and in the hollows and along the dykes that bordered the roadway. The feel of frost and the feel of thaw was still mingled underfoot, but the smell of the night was the cold green smell of coming thaw. The men sniffed at it, and told each other that scent should lie none so badly on such a morning.

A low dawn was kindling bars of cold yellow light across the east when they came to the appointed gathering place. The earliest comers had made a fire against the cold, and Owain, with Bryni and the others, joined the men clustered about the warmth; there were a good number of them already, and more arriving all the while; it seemed that half the farms of the Maen Wood as well as a few from the Seals’ Island, had sent a man to join the King’s hunting. They pressed about the fire, talking and laughing, men who had not seen each other in months, greeting each other and exchanging news, and feeling the edges of their knives and boar spears.

Slowly the light grew in the sky, and high against it, Owain looking up, could see the long lines of the wild duck in their morning flight; and soon after the first wild duck came a muffled smother of hoof-beats and a voice asking questions and a quick deep laugh told them that the King was here.

The horses were led away to the nearby farmstead, and Haegel with his hearth-companions came forward into the light of the roadside fire. He was in leather hunting dress, worn and weather-stained and dark-spattered with the marks of more than one kill; his dogs thrust about him, and he carried his own spears. He looked about him at the men round the fire; quickly and appraisingly, as though to see what manner of hunting party had gathered to his call. ‘The greetings of the morning to you, friends and neighbours,’ he said. ‘I think we shall have good hunting today,’ and he turned to speak to the leaders who had stepped up round him, inquiring as to the placing of beaters, and discussing the plans for the day, putting swift questions to the man who had brought in news of the boar’s whereabouts last night. ‘Over by the Black Wood, say you? So, then, if he be there yet we may bring him to bay somewhere between the neck of the forest and Bremma’s Dyke.’

And so the King’s hunting began, as hounds and men streamed away eastward in a slow-moving pack, heading for the Black Wood where it ran down to the sea marshes above Pagga’s Ham.

The Black Wood stood like an island in the sea of marshes, black as its name even now in the light of the winter’s morning; and within sight of it they checked to set on the hounds. Even as they did so a boy came running, glancing back as he ran, and shouting his story even before he reached them. ‘He’s still there! He would not have taken to the marshes, and the birds have been quiet all the while in the neck of the woods, so he can’t have gone that way!’

There was a long wait, while the King’s hunters with the great hounds still in leash went questing to and fro. And then, far over towards the neck of scrub that joined the Black Wood to the forest, a hound gave tongue. ‘Sa! Garm has him,’ said the King. ‘I’d know that bell note of his anywhere.’

And now the other hounds had taken up the cry, and the notes of the hunting horn were blowing thin through the tangled wildwood and scaring up the plover from the marshes. The pace of the hunt had quickened from the steady lope that it had been before, and suddenly they were all running.

They were among the trees now; the low-hanging branches lashed at their faces and tangled the spears, snags of rotten wood tripped them up, and brambles clawed at them like living enemies wherever the trees fell back a little—and always the belling of the hounds and the thin song of the hunting horn sounded through the woods ahead of them. Now the beaters were drawing close; Owain could hear their shouting, a great circle of uproar, beginning to narrow in on itself, as he ran, head down, behind the slight racing figure of Bryni.

And then, as it seemed between one gasping breath and the next, the whole pattern had changed, and they had come to the very heart of the day’s work. They were on the edge of a clearing where a great yew tree had come down in the winter gales and brought others with it in its fall; and on the far side of the open space, backed against the mass of the fallen bole, stood as though waiting for them, a gigantic black boar.

He scarcely looked a thing of flesh and blood at all, but as though he belonged to the dark earth of the wood itself, and the dark elemental spirit of the wood. He stood with lowered head swinging a little from side to side; his eyes were red like the sullen gleeds of a burnt out fire, and the great curved tushes gleamed against the blackness of his narrow wicked face. Yellowish froth dripped from his jaws, and where it fell on the snow, it steamed.

The hounds, yelling in rage and hate, sprang forward as they were slipped from the leash; from the darkness of the woods beyond, the yelling and crashing of the beaters was still closing in, and all round the clearing the hunters crouched, each man with the butt of his spear braced under his instep. Owain was just behind Bryni in the second line, his spear braced like the rest, in case the boar should break through, but having made sure that his knife was loose in his belt, for the more likely task of a man in the second line would be to help dispatch the beast if the man in front—in this case Bryni—ran into trouble.

The hounds were all about the boar now, yelling into his black devil’s mask as he swung his head from side to side. Across Bryni’s braced shoulder Owain saw the coarse black bristles along his back and the redness of his wicked little eyes, and caught the sharp stink of him on the wintry air. He trundled forward a few steps, then Garm, the greatest of the King’s boarhounds, leapt raving at his throat, and instantly the whole scene burst into roaring chaos. The hounds were all on to their quarry now, baying and belling as they sprang for a hold and were shaken off and sprang again. They were no longer hunting-dogs around a boar, but one confused mass of boar and hounds that rolled slowly forward across the clearing.

But the boar was shaking free of the hounds as he came. Garm lost his grip, and springing in once more, missed the throat-hold, hung for a moment tearing at the huge black shoulder, and was flung off again; a big brindled hound lay kicking his life out in a patch of reddening snow, and the demon of the woods, scattering the enemies that clung to him and dragged him back, was quickening into a grotesque trundling charge that seemed to the waiting spearmen as elemental as a landslip roaring towards them. He was heading for the centre of the great curve of men, where the King and his closest hearth-companions waited, crouching on their spears. But he never reached them, for as the dogs scattered, young Bryni straightened a little behind his braced spear, flung up his arm with a whooping yell
‘Hi-ya-ya-aiee!’
and flourished it above his head, like a boy trying to attract the attention of a friend three fields away.

Among all that uproar, the shout might have had little effect, but the sudden movement caught the great brute’s eye, and his anger, which until that moment had been for the whole hunt, gathered itself and centred upon it. He swerved in his charge and came straight for Bryni.

Owain felt for one instant as though an icy hand had clenched itself on his stomach, and the next, the great brute was on to Bryni’s spear-point. It drove on, carried by the weight of its own charge, until brought up by the cross-guard at the neck of the spear; but it seemed that the deep-driven blade had not found the life; not yet, at any rate. For one sharp splinter of time, Owain saw the boy’s shoulder brace and twist and strain, as he fought to keep the spear-butt under his instep; then it was wrenched free, and still clinging to the shaft he was being shaken and battered to and fro as a dog shakes a rat.

‘Hold on, Bryni!’ Owain shouted. ‘For God’s sake
hold on!’
He was springing forward, expecting even in that instant to see the boy’s hold broken and the black devil upon him. He dived in low among the raving hounds, his spear shortened to stab; other men were with him, other blades caught the wintry light, as he heaved aside the body of a hound and drove in his spear. Now he too was being shaken to and fro, the shaft twisting like a live thing in his hands; the breath was battered from his body, and the stink of the boar and its hot blood were thick in his throat, choking him as the world spun and rocked before his eyes. And then suddenly it was over. Whether it was his own blade or that of one of the other men that had found the life, he never knew, or whether at the last Bryni’s spear had taken effect after all; the great brute shuddered, gathered itself together for one last convulsive moment of hate, and crashed down on to its side, seeming to shake the whole forest with its fall.

Owain struggled slowly to his feet, and stood panting, his spear still beside Bryni’s in the boar’s breast.

Two hounds lay dead; others were dripping blood from their gashed flanks. Bryni also got to his feet, ashen-white under the brown of his skin, but smiling and with shining eyes. Without a word he set his foot on the boar’s shoulder and stooped to drag out his spear.

There were men crowding all round them; they whipped off the hounds, and the baying died, but just for the moment nobody spoke. Owain himself drew a deep sobbing breath that ached under his bruised ribs, but what he had to say to young Bryni, he would not say in front of the other men.

Then the crowd fell apart to let someone through, and there stood Haegel the King. He looked from the white-faced boy to the grizzly body of the huge black boar at his feet, and back again. ‘You young
fool
!’ His eyes were bleak, and his voice rough in his throat with anger. ‘Hammer of the Gods! If you were son of mine I’d flog the skin off your back to make shoe-thongs, for that piece of foolhardiness! Who taught you to think that a child such as you are could hold the King’s boar on your spear?’

Bryni turned from white to fiery scarlet under his brown, but still he smiled. ‘No one, Haegel the King. I thought it for myself. I am sorry if the King is angry that I have killed his boar.’

Haegel looked down at the second spear still fast in the black carcass, and the stab-wounds of other men’s knives, and for an instant his eye caught Owain’s and there was a twitch of laughter on his bearded lips. But the boy had been First Spear at the killing, after all. ‘As to that, the King has had other boars, and can spare one,’ he said, with the harsh note of anger gone from his voice; and then with an abrupt change of tone, ‘Who are you?’

‘I am Bryni, son of Beornwulf the King’s foster brother,’ Bryni said. And suddenly Owain knew that it was for this, to bring himself to the King’s notice in a way that he felt worthy, not merely in the wildness of the moment, that he had drawn the boar to himself.

Haegel’s head jerked up a little, and for a long moment his eyes narrowed into the wide bright eyes of the young hunter. ‘So,’ he said softly. ‘You are not very like your father, and I have not seen you in four summers.’

‘How should you?’ Bryni said, daringly. ‘The King has been good; he sent meal in the lean time, and an ox; but his shadow has not fallen across our door-sill since my father died at Wodensbeorg.’

One of the other men broke in angrily, but the King silenced him with a quick movement of one hand. He stood pulling at his beard, and his eyes held the hint of a smile. ‘So you will tackle the King as well as the King’s boar? If daring and audacity go for aught, you will make a warrior, should ever the Ravens gather again … How old are you, Bryni son of Beornwulf?’

‘Fourteen, my Lord King,’ Bryni said, and added quickly, ‘but I shall be fifteen before the blackthorn is well out.’

‘That is well. I may send for you before the blackthorn fruit is set. Oh, not for war, not this time. There are other occasions than battle for which a King may need his household warriors about him.’ His deep-set gaze lifted a little and caught Owain’s with cool deliberation. ‘And you, I remember you, the British spear among my Saxon shield-warriors. Can you still speak your mother tongue?’

‘I have not forgotten the way of it,’ Owain said, thinking it an odd question.

‘Good.’ Haegel looked at him a long moment as though storing him in his memory against some future need. Then he turned his attention back to Bryni, and putting out a foot, toed the huge black carcass. ‘But we are forgetting the proper business of the day. This thing is waiting to be gralloched, and after—it is your kill, what are you going to do with it?’

‘Make a gift of it to the King,’ said Bryni unblushingly.

Haegel laughed. ‘A truly noble gift. But keep the tushes and hide to furnish you your war-helmet.’

And he turned, stretching, and strolled across to where he had left his spears.