Authors: Rosemary Sutcliff
I looked around quickly. ‘Dies?’ Somehow, I don’t know why, I had assumed that Levin had remained at the depot to recover strength before coming up with the next supply
train.
‘Aye. I’d not be knowing myself, how he kept on his feet to get through to us at all. They were pretty well rotted off him with frostbite ... He died the same night.’
I was silent for a while, and then I said, ‘But how in God’s name did he even find the way? The thaw had not come by then.’
Druim looked up from the strip of salt meat in his hands. ‘That was simple enough; we showed it to him.’
‘You showed it to him?’
‘Yes; even we, the Little Dark People, we have our uses. A party of hunters out after wolf found him already strayed from the road. They gave him meat when they had made their own kill,
and set him on his road again, and then went home and made a smoke on the crest of Baen Baal to tell those to the south that he was coming and must be passed on to the next watcher, and then they
made the snake pattern for him about the ashes of the houseplace hearth; for they knew that he went to his death.’
‘And knowing that, they let him go?’
‘What else could any of us do?’
‘If you could send him on so, from one to another’ (I was using ‘you’ for the whole People of the Hills) ‘could you not have sent his message on in the same way?
Could you not have raised one finger to save his life?’
Druim Dhu looked at me as though puzzled at my lack of understanding, and answered also for the whole of his people. ‘It was in his face. Also, Sun Lord, you heard what the train master
said: had it been one of us who brought the cry for help, who would have hearkened to us? Besides, he would go on; he said his friend was waiting for him.’
There was a long pause, in which we heard very loudly the green trickling of the thaw. Cei broke it. ‘That must have been close on three weeks ago. Why was no word sent up to the
fort?’
‘The smoke was sited to carry its message south,’ Druim said, ‘so we in my village did not know of the thing ourselves until a few days since. When we did, I would have come,
but the Old Woman looked into sand and water, and said that the pack beasts would be here in five days at the most, and that my coming would serve no end save the lightening of your
hearts.’
‘Even that might have been worth doing,’ grumbled Cei.
‘True; and still I would have come, but the Old Woman said that there were taller crops than mouse grass and laid it upon me, upon the whole village, by the wrath of the Corn King, that we
should not come.’
‘And why would she be doing that?’ someone asked, through cracked lips.
Druim shook his head. ‘I am not the Old Woman. I do not know.’
Later, I wondered a good deal as to his meaning, but at the time I was no longer listening closely. Across the fire I met Bedwyr’s bright gaze reaching out for mine. And that night he made
a harp lament, the most winged and wildly haunting, I think, that he ever made.
That night, as before, I could not sleep. Life and the urgency of life had taken hold of me again; we were saved, and death that had been at our elbows drew away into the darkness. And for me,
the freedom was gone: Ygerna’s power was over me again, and all was as it had been before.
No, not quite all. Two months later, when the horses had come north to us once more, when the curlews were at their mating and the furze was a yellow fire above the river marshes, Guenhumara
told me that she was with child.
chapter twenty-one
T
HAT SUMMER, THE LAST AS IT PROVED THAT WE SPENT IN
the lost province of Valentia, was a time of final scouring, sharp and without ruth while it lasted,
but not lasting long, a time for a last strengthening of the ties that I had labored so long to make among the chiefs and princes; and the first frosts had scarcely set the burns running yellow
with fallen leaves, when I rode back to Maglaunus’s Dun. All summer I had been wondering as to the thing that Guenhumara had told me, scarcely daring to believe that she had not made some
mistake; and the native tracks and ridgeways after Castra Cunetium seemed endless to my wild impatience. But when I rode into the Dun and dismounted with Pharic and the rest of my small knot of
Companions before the hall threshold, and she came out to bring me the guest cup, her thickened body was enough to tell me that she was about her woman’s work.
‘So it is true,’ I said.
She looked at me, half smiling, over the tilting rim of the guest cup – and it was as though touching her would be like touching something that drew its warmth and living kindness direct
from the earth, like an apple tree.
‘Did you doubt it?’
‘All summer I have been doubting. I think I did not dare to believe.’
‘Foolish,’ she said. ‘Blanid knows about these things.’
Later, lying with my arms around her on the broad guest bed, I tried to make her see the wisdom of remaining at her father’s hearth that winter. But she would have none of it; the bairn
would not be born for two months yet, and she was perfectly well able to make the journey back to Trimontium, protesting that it must be born, when the time came, under the shelter of its
father’s sword, and that if I left her she would follow me on foot. She held me about the neck, even while I felt the child stirring and impatient in her body, and her hair fell all across my
face in the darkness. And in the end, I yielded.
God help me, I yielded; and next morning, with Guenhumara and old Blanid in a light mule cart, we started back for Trimontium.
We traveled slowly and reached Castra Cunetium without harm done. I breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that the journey was more than half over, and now at least Guenhumara could rest a few
days. But at Castra Cunetium an ill wind blew up, for on the last day of our sojourn Blanid fell down the granary steps and hurt her back. There did not seem to be much amiss, but assuredly she
could not go forward for the time being.
‘It seems that your journey ends here, at least for a while,’ I said.
But again Guenhumara put out her will against mine. ‘And yours?’
‘I ride on with the patrol tomorrow. I have been apart from the war host long enough.’
‘Then so do I also ride on with the patrol.’
‘That is foolishness,’ I said, ‘and you know it. What will you do without Blanid to care for you, if the bairn comes to be born, before she can follow after you?’
‘There are other women in the fort,’ she said tranquilly.
‘Yes, a score or more – the gay drabs of the baggage train.’
‘Firewater Chloe, who counts herself Queen among them, knows how to deliver a child, all the same.’
‘How can you know that?’ I was fighting a losing battle, and I knew it, but I fought on. ‘There has never been a child born at Trimontium in these years.’
‘You fool!’ she said, softly mocking. ‘Do you think that because you have not heard a child cry, none can have been born? Do you think that none of these women has ever
miscounted her days? There have been three bairns born in Trimontium in the winters since I first came there. They smothered them at birth like unwanted kittens, and put them out on the hillside
for the wolves. But it was Firewater Chloe who held their mothers in her knees when the birth time came upon them.’
‘Guenhumara, if you knew, could you not have done something?’
‘What?’ she said. ‘What do you think they would have had me do? A bairn clinging to the breast is a heavy burden to carry in the wake of a war host. Also it is bad for
trade ... Even I, who am the wife of the Bear and have no trade to think for, I shall not find it a light thing to carry a bairn in the wake of the Bear’s war host. I have lived in the
women’s quarters of my father’s hall. But if there were no other woman in Trimontium, I should not be the first of my kind to bring her own young to birth. I have seen too many of my
father’s hunting bitches whelp, not to know how to bring out a child and sever its life from mine.’
And again I yielded. If only I had been stronger then, and weaker the next time she set her will against mine ...
It had been a long dry summer, as though to counterbalance what had gone before, and though the birch leaves were yellowing, there had been little rain, so that from the first the dust of the
dry tracks rose in a dun cloud from under the horses’ hooves and almost blotted out the tail of our little band; and the burns ran low, and whenever we could we took to the long soft moorland
grass, tawny now as a hound’s coat, until heather drove us back again to the track. The grass made gentler traveling for Guenhumara. On the second day (the usual two days’ march must be
made into three by slowness of the mule cart) the little wind failed us so that the land was bathed in a still golden warmth that comes sometimes in early autumn, and the last of the ling blossom
was loud with bees and smelled of honey, and the sky had paled from its autumn blue to the color of curdled milk. We flung off our cloaks and strapped them to the saddlebows along with the iron
caps that clanged there already. Riada, the latest in my long line of armor-bearers, who besides being native to these hills like the rest of Pharic’s hundred, had a nose for weather that
would have rivaled a stag’s, sniffed the air and foretold thunder and more than thunder.
The horses were restless that night, when we camped beside the high water of the Tweed, and I remember that when Guenhumara let down her hair and began to comb it, sitting by the low campfire,
the sparks flew out of it as they do out of a cat’s fur when thunder is brewing. Once, in the darkest hour of the night, a little cold moaning wind blew up out of the heart of Cit Coit
Caledon, and died down again, and left the world still and heavy as before.
When we yoked the cart mules and saddled up again next morning, it seemed to me that Guenhumara was quieter than usual, or rather that her normal quiet had densified into stillness, and that her
stillness was like that of the world about us; a kind of long-drawn breath before the storm breaks. And she moved with a new heaviness when I helped her into the cart. I asked her if all was well
with her, and she said yes, that all was very well. But I was thankful in my bones that it was the last day’s journey.
It must have been close on noon when thunder began to grumble among the hills southward; scarcely more at first than a quivering in the air that one felt in the back of the neck rather than the
head; then drawing closer, a low, almost continuous muttering, then dying again to that deep distant quivering of the air. The storm was circling over the hills, but for a long time it never came
near to us; even the sky swept clear to the southern rim of the Tweed Valley. And slowly, far ahead of us, Eildon, which had been no more than a shadow on the sky haze when we broke camp, was
rising higher, gaining depth and substance, so that I could make out the three peaks marching one behind the other, and see where the hazel woods of the lower slopes gave place to the bare
grasslands and scree above.
And then the thunder spoke again, deep and menacing, a snarl this time, nearer – much nearer – than it had been before; and from behind the hills south of Eildon, the clouds came
banking up, higher and higher while we watched; a blue-black mass of cloud, teased into forward-creeping rags and ribbands at its upper edge, by a wind that we could not yet feel in the Tweed
Valley. Pale wisps of vapor drifted against the darkness of it, and the heart of the mass seemed to churn and swirl as though someone, something, were stirring it over a fire; and out of the
churning storm-heart leapt flashes of blue light, and the thunder came booming hollow toward us along the hills.
I was riding alongside the mule cart, and I looked anxiously at Guenhumara huddled behind the driver in the mouth of the tilt. She was sitting oddly braced, as though to resist every jolt of the
wheels under her, instead of giving to the movement in the ordinary way, and her face was very white, but that might be only the strange and menacing light. ‘Best get back under the
tilt,’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘It makes me sick if I cannot see where I am going. See – I will pull my cloak well over my head.’
And the anxiety in me quickened sharply, but there was nothing to be done save press forward while we could.
We were heading straight into the storm, but it seemed to me that the hideous swirling vortex at its heart was swinging to our right, and I began to hope that the worst of it might pass over the
hills south of the Tweed. The fringes of the black cloud were above us now, swallowing up the sky, and we rode in an unnatural brown twilight, while southward of us the storm trailed its path
across the hills, dragging with it out of the belly of the clouds, a black blurred curtain of rain that blotted out everything in its passing. ‘Christos! There’ll be homes washed out
and drowned cattle and women weeping among the hills tonight,’ someone said.
Presently the storm had circled away behind us, but there was no returning light ahead; and suddenly, spinning in its path as such storms do among the hills, it was coming up on our tail –
coming swiftly as a charge of cavalry! Already in the heat, the dank breath of it was parting the hair on our necks, and the long grass bowed and shivered away from the gust as though in
fear ... ‘Up the side glen yonder,’ I called to the men behind me. ‘There’ll be better shelter among the scrub.’
It was a thin shelter enough, among the half-bare birch and rowan, but better than none, and we gained it, dismounting and manhandling the cart the last part of the way, just as a second,
stronger puff of wind came over the shoulder of the glen; and a few heartbeats later the storm was upon us. Stab on jagged stab of blue-white light split the gloom, and the thunder crashed and
boomed and beat about our heads like a great hammer. We got the mules unharnessed lest they bolt, and then turned to the horses. They, poor brutes, danced and snorted in terror, and it was all we
could do to get them edged back into some kind of shelter and keep them together there. Guenhumara was crouching back under the tilt, and I bade Cabal stay with her and left them to do as best they
could for the moment, while I gave all my attention to Signus who was flinging this way and that, squealing with mingled rage and panic. And save for a confused awareness of blinding white forked
light that leapt crackling from black sky to black hillside, and the ceaseless crash and tumbling boom of the thunder that seemed as though it would pound the very hills asunder, that storm, for
me, was one long struggle-royal with the whirling white stallion.