Authors: Rosemary Sutcliff
We had lost three men, and half the rest of us had burns and scorches to show for that night’s work. Three men not counting the mule driver. We found the charred stump of his body next
day, lying in its snug corner behind the millstone with the shriveled remains of a burst beerskin beside it. He seemed never to have moved at all, so deep in drink that like enough he never even
realized what was happening until the smoke suffocated him. We did not trouble to give him decent burial, but simply flung what was left of him over the ramparts at the place where the hill dropped
almost sheer to the river, and left him to the wolves if they did not mind their meat somewhat overcooked.
That day after taking exact stock of the stores that were left to us, we held a hurried council to decide our course of action. But, in truth, there was little choice left to us. To try to break
out and get south to Corstopitum through the drifts and the blinding blizzards would have been nothing but a deliberate marching on death, and it would be equally impossible – as well as
useless – to attempt getting a message through to them. The same applied to any attempt to get word through to Castra Cunetium; the deep mountain roads were utterly impassable to anything
heavier-footed than a hare, and even supposing that the word could be got to them, and the stores got back again, the garrison was so small that if they parted with enough to make any appreciable
difference to us, it would result merely in their starving in our stead. There was nothing to be done but stay where we were and make the remaining food last out as long as possible. After working
the matter out carefully, it appeared that if we went on half rations from that day, we could hold out until about midway through February.
‘An early spring might save us,’ said Gwalchmai, who, though no captain, always had his place at our councils.
And Bedwyr laughed. ‘The sun cannot complain that we did not make him a fine enough Midwinter blaze!’
But the weeks went by and the weeks went by, and winter seemed to have claimed the world for good. There was never a day that offered a chance of hunting, only snow and gales, and bitter black
frost that bound up the land even under its white furs. The snow lay drifted in slow curves to the eaves on the northern side of every building, and every day fresh paths must be cleared to stable
and well and store sheds, not that that was altogether a bad thing, for digging keeps a man warm – though it also makes him hungry. Now and then, by putting out the bones of a finished
carcass in a good spot of a moonlit night, and then putting a couple of archers on the walls, we managed to get a wolf or two, but they were so famine-thin themselves, poor brutes, that there was
little that the women could do with them save make broth; and already the men grew gaunt and hollow-eyed, with heads that seemed too big for their sharp shoulders.
One day Cei came to me and said, ‘Maybe the Dark People have food. Why do we not go foraging?
You
know where one village is, at all events.’
‘They will have little enough for themselves; they will have none to spare for those that come asking.’
‘
Asking
was not in my mind,’ Cei said grimly.
I caught him by the shoulders to drive home what I had to say. ‘Listen, Cei; the Dark People are our friends. Na na, I am not being womanish, I do but use my head as it seems that you have
forgotten to do. They are our friends, but they are not the kind that hold to friendship in the face of an injury. I have no wish to find the water supply fouled and our men on the walls picked off
with those hellish little poisoned arrows of theirs.’
So we did not go foraging, and whatever the Dark People had, they kept. We saw nothing of them in all that winter, but then we never did, during the dark of the year. It has often been my
thought that the People of the Hills burrow deep into their holes and sleep through the cold months almost as the field voles and the badgers do.
After a while we gave up sleeping in separate quarters and barrack rows, and huddled all together in the big mess hall, for though our fuel stocks had not suffered, we needed more warmth than in
other winters, because our hunger let in the cold; and by the same token, a man needs less food when he is warm. So we put all the peat and firewood to one blazing fire that served both for cooking
and for warming the hall, and which we could keep up even at night when need be. And there we crowded at nights, and in off-duty hours in the daytime also, from the captains to the mule drivers,
the women of the baggage train, the dogs curled among us, and even the three ponies in the foreporch stamping and fidgeting through the bitter nights; drawing, all of us, I think, comfort and
encouragement, even in a strange way life itself, from each other’s nearness.
The behavior of the men in all that time is a thing I scarcely understand even now, looking back on it across the gulf of more than thirty years, but at the time it seemed nothing strange. At
first the usual stresses and strains of winter quarters seemed stretched unbearably by hunger and hardship and the little hope that any of us had of seeing the spring again. Old quarrels flared up,
the troublemakers stirred up whatever mischief came to hand, again and again men were rightly or wrongly accused of trying for more than their share of the day’s allowance. But as time went
by and our state became more desperate, all that changed, and men drew further away from the wolf pack. It was as though we all felt death too near to waste our substance in such barren ways; as
though under the shadow of the Dark Wings, there was a growing quietness, a growing gentleness among us.
Not that this quietness had any outward seeming; indeed our evenings were louder-voiced that winter than ever they had been in Trimontium before; and besides the old heroic sagas that he could
declaim as well as any king’s bard, I do not think that ever harper made so many songs as Bedwyr made in that one; songs of hunting and drinking, lewd love snatches that made the women of the
camp squeal and giggle; songs that called down mockery on all things under the sun, from my height, which was supposed to tempt the eagles to rest on top of my head with disastrous effect upon the
shoulders of my war shirt, to the master armorer’s habit of scratching his behind when thinking out any problem of his craft, and Cei’s supposed adventures with a great many girls, each
of which was more outrageous than the last. And never a lament in all those long dark months.
February came at last, and the evenings were growing lighter. But the White Beast still had his fangs locked in our throats. Sometimes there was a little thaw at noon; always it froze again an
hour later, and indeed as the days lengthened, so the cold increased. We were down far below half rations now, to one small rye cake a day for each man, and every two days a lump of meat about the
size of three fingers, black as coal and hard as boiled leather. When the dried meat was all gone, we began to eat the dogs, drawing lots for the next to go; they had lived so long only by killing
the weaker among themselves and if we kept them longer, they would be nothing but staring hide over dry bones. Even as it was, they had no more on them than the wolves. I began to regret bitterly
that we had not kept back more of the ponies, for then we could have eaten them too. As it was, we ate one, but the other two must at all costs be kept until the very last.
By mid-February not only starvation but sickness was among us. There was always scurvy in the camp by winter’s end, owing to the salt meat, but this year it was more widespread than usual.
Guenhumara and old Blanid worked with the other women, tending the sick, and their days were full. Old wounds opened and refused to heal – I was having trouble myself with the old gash in my
shoulder, and with my burned hands which refused to skin over properly. Men began to die, and we scraped shallow graves for them in the iron-hard ground outside the fort, and piled the frozen snow
high over them and hoped that the wolves would not find their bodies.
Young Amlodd died holding to my hand, with his eyes on my face like those of a sick dog that expects you to help it when there is no help to be given. And it was after his burial that Levin
said, ‘Who will bury the last of us? I wonder.’
‘The wolves, Brother,’ said Bedwyr, and glanced up at a golden eagle quartering the sky. There were always one or more of the great birds over Trimontium. ‘And maybe an eagle
or so. Sa sa, it is an ill winter that blows nobody any good.’
The Minnow said, ‘And yet I could have sworn that there was a softer feel in the air this morning,’ and there was a raw longing for life in his voice. None of us answered him. I too
thought that the icicles were at last beginning to lengthen under the eaves; but we knew, all of us, how small our chances were, even if the thaw came tonight. In the state that we had sunk to,
with scarcely the strength left to dig a comrade’s grave, we could never reach Corstopitum, even if we abandoned our sick, and as for help coming from the depot, they had no reason to suppose
that we needed any. The winter had been the worst for a score of years, but so far as they knew, we were well stocked with corn and meat; the first supply wagons would come up as usual toward the
end of April, and that, I reckoned, would be too late for most of us by something over a month.
‘All that we need is a talking eagle such as that Tuan who told his tale to Saint Finnen. The flight south would be nothing to him,’ said Pharic, and his straight mouth quirked into
laughter that did not touch his eyes. ‘A sad thing it is that the high days of heroes and marvels are over!’
The next day Levin was missing, and so was the day’s food for his whole squadron. I remember, when the news was brought to me, feeling a little sick (but it did not take much to make one
feel sick, just then). What had happened? Had he run mad, as happens sometimes when strain becomes too much for the spirit of man? Had he crept out into the white emptiness to meet death because he
could not wait for it any longer? The disappearance of the food did not look like that, and I remember, also, sending in my own squadron of walking corpses to beat up a few swords, when
Levin’s squadron gathered themselves to do murder on the spearmen who maintained that Levin had stolen the food and then fled away to join the Little Dark People because he dare not face his
own kind.
I
had another thought, but I did not voice it. If there was the least chance of a man getting through before the thaw came, and the snow waters had had time to abate, I should have
sent one long ago.
That night the air turned suddenly soft, and we thought, all of us, that the thaw that was too late to save us was coming at last. For two days the snow sank before our eyes, and everywhere
there was the sound of running water. In three days more it might be possible to try to send a messenger out; a faint flicker of the hope that had been dead in us so long, revived. But on the third
night the frost came back, with a black bitter wind swooping over the white skirts of Eildon, and then a soft air and snow that whirled in mealy clouds across the ramparts, blotting out the world,
and then frost again. The White Beast had not yet loosened his grip. I forget how many days it froze, that time, but I know that they seemed as long as the whole winter over again, before the wind
went booming around to the southwest with a new smell on its wings, and the slow steady thaw set in.
That must have been the best part of three weeks after Levin’s disappearance; and with the steady drip and trickle of melting snow once more in our ears, we knew that the time had come to
draw lots, not for the dogs this time (we had eaten most of them by now, anyway), but for two of us to make the desperate attempt to get through to Corstopitum for help. Castra Cunetium we did not
take into the account at all; apart from anything else, the mountain road would remain impassable long after the road south was open. That night I could not sleep. I knew, as we all did, that
whoever drew the two longest straws tomorrow would be going out to almost certain death; and yet there was the one chance in a thousand, and it must be taken ... Anyway, what was the death of two
men, now, when we were all for the Dark Road close after them? And yet I knew that whoever they were, those two, their deaths would lie heavy on my heart when my own time came – unless
– I prayed to Mithras and the Horned One and the White Christos that I might draw one of those two straws. I even began to wonder if there was any means by which I could tamper with the draw.
But the choice belonged to Fate, not to me. And still I could not sleep. We no longer kept any watch at night; nothing could come at us, and in our cold and weakened state, the two hours’
guard duty would have been too likely to kill the man who stood it on the walls. But I had grown into the way of getting up some time in the midst of the night, and taking a look around the fort to
make sure that all was well. What I thought to find, I do not know; the thing had become a habit. That night, too restless to lie still any longer, I got up rather earlier than usual, quietly, so
as not to wake Guenhumara. We had done our best to keep her a little privacy, by giving her the place at the farthest and darkest end of the mess hall, with only one sleeping space beyond her;
that, the cold place against the wall, was taken in turn by myself and Bedwyr and her brother Pharic, the other two sleeping between her and the rest of the war host. Looking down at her now, as I
stood stretching, I thought how, on the first night, Bedwyr had drawn his sword and laid it between them, laughing, and said, ‘No man shall say that I was not as nicely nurtured as Pwyl,
Prince of Dyfed.’ But it is not good to lay sword between one and another when the need is to huddle close for warmth, and his sword remained in its sheath now.
There was nothing save for a glint of distant firelight on her tumbled hair to show that a woman lay there, for the slim leg from which the muffing folds of her cloak had fallen back showed
cross-gartered breeks. She had taken to her boy’s riding dress long ago, for the great warmth. Her cheek was cuddled against Pharic’s shoulder, and there was a certain likeness between
them that was not there when both were awake.