The Shining Company Read online

  He looked at me, questioningly, and I realized that we had not in fact mentioned his knee that morning, and he had no idea what I was talking about. ‘Your knee. Someone’s got to do it. Best be me.’

  ‘I am thinking I can do it myself,’ he said.

  I dragged the strap tight through its bronze buckle. ‘Don’t be stupid, nobody can do that kind of thing properly themselves. Get the stuff from Old Nurse, and don’t forget some warm water, and take it down to the bath house. That will be the best place to do it.’

  And when he had departed on his errand, I went out into the growing light and headed for the bath house myself.

  There would be no one there at that hour of the morning, though I could hear voices and sounds of movement from kitchen quarters and stable court, the whole villa waking to life and the new day all around me. It was really only Luned and the women of the household and very occasionally my father who used the bath house now, and then only the plunge-bath, for the hypocausts that had heated the sweating chamber in the high and far off days had long since fallen into ill repair. When the bath house was in use pails of hot water would be carried in, and thick linen towels, and there would be a great coming and going. The rest of the time it mouldered quietly, my brother and I and men of the household much preferring to do our bathing in the stream. But the bath house would, as I had said, be a good place to deal with Conn’s knee; plenty of space and nothing to get fouled and less likelihood of onlookers. If I was going to do the thing, I had no wish for people coming to see what I was doing or telling me that I was doing it wrong.

  I pushed the door open and went in. The cool damp smell of the place met me, and the faint whisper of moving water leaking in at one end of the plunge-bath and out at the other, and the flutter of bird wings overhead when the first house martins had returned to their nests in the roof. I sat down on the stone bench and waited, fidgeting, until I heard Conn’s uneven footsteps on the cobbles outside. It seemed a long time and I told him so.

  He set down the things he carried on the end of the bench. ‘It took a while to get the things from Old Nurse. She was threatening to get out of her bed, too. ’

  ‘Well, now that you are here, pull that stool into the doorway where there’s light to see by, and sit down,’ I told him. The water he had brought with him in a covered bowl was still too hot. I took it over to the carved lion-mask whose trickle fed the plunge-bath, and poured cold water into it till I judged it cool enough, collected the big bronze rinsing basin from the corner, and came back to the doorway where Conn was sitting rigid, staring out into the early sunshine, just as he had sat in Brother Pebwyr’s doorway two days ago.

  I squatted on to my heels beside him and set to work trying to remember exactly what Old Nurse had done the day before. The wad of linen was stuck again, but not so badly as before. I eased it away with care and concentration. If I must do the thing at all I would do it to the best that was in me. I bathed the place and poured in a few drops of barley spirit, Conn drawing in his breath at the bite of it but making no other sound. I spread the salve with its strong smell of yarrow and feverfew on to a fresh wad and bound it in place. The bandage looked a bit clumsy when I knotted it off, but I thought that it would hold. I sat there for a few moments looking at it, aware suddenly of the shadows of the house martins darting to and fro. I remember that clearly. The odd thing is that I do not remember feeling sick at all.

  ‘I am thinking that it will hold well enough,’ said Conn, bending his knee a little, in much the same tone in which he had told Luned that there would be violets soon.

  I looked up to tell him that I did not need him to tell me if my work would pass, and found his quiet brown gaze steady on my face. For a few moments we looked at each other, really looked, I suppose, eye to eye, for the first time. And oddly, it was not the look of one who had had a thing done to him and one who had done it, but of two who had done something, shared something, between them. And suddenly we were grinning at each other.

  I gathered up the salves and spare bandage linen, and flung the stained dressing into a corner for someone to clean up later, while Conn poured the dirty water into the drainage channel. And together we went out into the morning, leaving the doorway open to the darting house martins behind us.

  That night Conn spread his rug across the doorway of my sleeping cell, and slept there according to the custom for a body slave or an armour bearer, or as a favourite hound for that matter.

  2

  The Archangel Dagger

  It was young summer, dapple-shade in the valley woods and the hawthorn flowers already fading before we paid the clearing visit to Brother Pebwyr.

  ‘So. It is finished and well finished,’ he said, looking at the purplish scar below Conn’s knee where the old abscess had been. ‘Away with both of you and trouble me no more.’

  I never did tell him that for three days it had been I and not Old Nurse who had tended the place. It seemed a long time ago and not very important any more. But I mind the sense of holiday that was now on me, I think on both of us, as we made our way down through the monastery apple trees.

  Maybe it was because of that sense of holiday that we turned aside from the homeward track and the schoolroom where Tydeus would be waiting for me, and went instead to watch Loban at work in his smithy. Maybe it was because the Fates who weave the lives of mortal men were already setting up their loom for us …

  Loban was an old man, beginning to be hunched by the long years at his work; all shoulders and no legs, but he must always have been small and meagre, and I had often wondered how he had managed to swing the great sledgehammer in his young days when he was learning his trade. He was a Master Smith now, with men under him to call him lord, and seldom set his own hand to a horseshoe or even a plough-share, keeping his skills for fine weapons and the like; his tool was the light hand-hammer that rang like a bell all up and down the valley.

  But when we came towards the low-browed smithy that sprawled like a sleeping hound under the alder trees, the hand-hammer was silent and Loban himself was sitting on the bench before the door, working on something small laid across his knee, and deep in talk with the travelling merchant who had claimed guest-right for himself and his men in our hall the night before. Phanes of Syracuse, he called himself.

  The Master Smith turned the thing on his leather-aproned knee, and I saw that it was a dagger, and guessed that the merchant must have brought it down to have something done to it. Normally Loban would have left that kind of small repair job to one of his underlings; it must be that the merchant was an old friend, or the dagger had something special about it to make it worthy of his attention.

  I drew nearer to look, Conn just behind me as usual, and saw that indeed the dagger was not like any that ever I had seen before. The slim bluish blade on which the light through the alder leaves played like water, the like of that I had seen before among Loban’s finest blades; but the hilt was strange to me. The hilt was a wonder. Of chiselled silver, the grip shaped like a human figure - no, not human, not mortal, that is, a fierce and austere male archangel clad in its own close-folded wings, the head with its gilded halo forming the pommel, the feet strong planted on the cross-piece.

  Loban looked up as my shadow fell across his work, and said, ‘If you are minded to watch, then sit you and watch, but do not you be standing there stealing my daylight from me.’

  I muttered an apology and squatted down on to my heels. Looking up at the owner of the dagger I found him watching me with a glint of amusement in his eyes. Strange eyes, bee-brown, with somehow a look of dry winds and sunshine and far places behind them. ‘This is not such a dagger ever I have seen before,’ I said. ‘Where does it come from?’

  ‘From Constantinople.’ His tongue had a twang to it that I knew was Greek because Tydeus my tutor had it also. ‘I bought it from a friend of mine in the Emperor’s bodyguard who was … somewhat light in his purse at the time, having wagered too heavily on the Greens at the races on a day w
hen the Blues had all the luck.’

  Something, a sort of fellow-feeling I suppose, stirred within me for the man of the Emperor’s bodyguard who had found himself so short of money that he had had to sell this dagger which must surely have been his most treasured possession.

  ‘If he was a friend,’ I asked (I had not meant it to sound quite so accusing) ‘could you not have bought something else from him?’

  Phanes of Syracuse shook his head. ‘Nothing of sufficient value. Nothing that would teach him such a useful lesson. Don’t take it to heart - coming and going as I do along the roads and seaways of the world, there’s a good chance that I shall come sailing up the Golden Horn once more on a day when the luck of the race-course has been with the Greens.’

  I only half understood, but the words had magic in them, the sound of incantation and harpsong, and I understood clearly enough that I wanted to hear more. ‘Tell about Constantinople,’ I demanded, and settled more comfortably on to my haunches as one does when listening to a story.

  The merchant’s brown wind-burned face creased into a deeper smile. I suppose he had met boys eager for travellers’ tales often enough before.

  ‘So. I tell you about Constantinople, the Golden City,’ he said, and sitting forward, elbows on knees, he began.

  I listened, sometimes watching the archangel dagger as Loban turned it to and fro on his knees renewing the worn silver wires that bound the crossguard, sometimes watching the merchant’s face, where it seemed almost that I could see the distance and the far off places, behind his eyes. Something of Constantinople I knew already from other travelling merchants. I knew that it was a city at the far end of the world, and had its name from the Emperor Constantine who had set up his capital there when the old world-striding Roman Empire was split in two; and that it was still the capital of the eastern half, the one remaining half since Rome herself had long ago fallen to the barbarians. But this was different. Maybe the man was a master-storyteller; maybe it was to do with the dagger itself, fiercely beautiful and so alien to my own world, that had come from the other end of the earth and like enough would one day be going back to the far country that it came from; maybe it was the two things coming together and gaining potency from each other … some kind of magic was weaving itself within me; an awakening magic, so that for the first time I knew, really knew, not just with my head but in my heart’s core, that there was another world beyond the mountains; not the world of legend and faery of which the harpers sang, but a real world of living people, in which one of the Emperor’s bodyguard was at that moment lacking his best dagger because he had wagered more than he could afford on a horse race, just as I lacked my enamelled belt-buckle because I had wagered Colwen of the kindred that I would reach the top of the oak tree by the ford before he did.

  When the repair work was finished and the voice of the merchant fell silent, I woke up, as though I had been dreaming, and found my own world not quite the same as it had been before.

  Beside me, Conn squatted on one heel, his left leg stuck out in front of him because it still hurt to bend it right under. He was leaning forward, his gaze fixed almost hungrily on the dagger. And somehow I knew that he had been sitting like that all the while.

  ‘There it is, as good as though it came fresh from the hand of its maker-smith,’ Loban said, handing it back to its present owner.

  Conn’s gaze moved with it. ‘What makes it like that?’

  The merchant thought that he meant the hilt, and answered patiently - it must have seemed a foolish question - ‘The craftsman made it so, out of silver and his own skill.’

  Conn shook his head like a horse beset by gadflies. ‘Na, na, the blade. What makes the blade so that the light slips on it like the stripes in a river current?’

  Loban took up the question. ‘See now, for a good blade, one that will not betray its man in battle, rods of hard and soft iron must be heated and braided together. Then is the blade folded over and hammered flat again, and maybe yet again, many times for the very finest blades.’ He had taken the dagger back into his own hand and was showing the way of it. ‘So the hard and soft iron are mingled without blending, before the blade is hammered up to its finished form and tempered, and ground to an edge that shall draw blood from the wind. So comes the pattern, like oil and water that mingle but do not mix. Yet it is the strength of the blade for without the hard iron the blade would bend in battle, and without soft iron it would break.’ The tip of one horny finger traced out the streaks of the metal as he spoke, ‘It’s the strength of the blade, which is the aim of all this, the beauty is by the way. The beauty is by the grace of God.’

  Conn put out a finger also, and touched the blade, following the wave pattern very gently, as though he were exploring a mystery.

  ‘And you - you also have fashioned blades like this?’ he said.

  And still faintly dream-bound as I was, I realized that something was happening which was not a good idea.

  ‘We must be on our way,’ I said, pulling my legs under me. ‘I promised Luned I would take her to see Maia’s new foal. She is not allowed in the stable court on her own.’ I got to my feet, Conn following with the slowness of regret. ‘It has been a good hour,’ I added by way of thanks to the two men still sitting companionably on the bench. And set off home, with Conn like a loyal but unwilling hound at my heels.

  We passed the mill and came to the place where the track crossed the stream, and paused as we often did to watch the flickering minnows in the clear mead-coloured depth below the ford. And watching the minnows, under the ripple pattern of the water surface, Conn said carefully, ‘If I were to go down to the smithy, just while you were at your lessons with Tydeus - if I were to ask him, would you be thinking that Loban might teach me to be a smith?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  There was a silence filled with the suck and ripple of the water over the stones, and somewhere away down the stream, a cuckoo calling. Then, ‘Why not?’ Conn asked. ‘I would work for him in payment.’

  ‘Don’t you know?’ I felt for the moment that I wanted to hit him for making me say it. ‘My father would never allow it. No bondman may learn to be a smith, or a clerk, or a bard, because all these must be free men, and so if a bondman comes by any of those skills -’

  The words stuck in my throat, and the calling of the down-valley cuckoo took on a note of mockery.

  Conn went slowly white under the brown of his skin. ‘He would become free,’ he said. ‘I am sorry. I did not understand.’

  ‘It was not me that made the law,’ I told him angrily, miserably.

  Conn went on watching the minnows a few moments longer. Then he looked up with his slow, grave smile. ‘That I know,’ he said, almost consolingly.

  I tried to answer the smile, but my face felt tight. I managed a crack of laughter instead. ‘We could always run for it, one night, and join the Emperor’s bodyguard. Phanes said that there are men in it from all across the world; any man who can call himself a swordsman, Phanes said.’

  ‘The trouble is that neither of us can call himself a swordsman.’ The trouble with Conn was that he never, well hardly ever, winged off on any kind of flight of fancy.

  ‘Not yet.’ It was a good flight, and I hung to it. ‘But we could not go for a few years yet, anyway.’

  And, ‘That would give us time to learn,’ Conn agreed. ‘Meanwhile we must be moving, or the little mistress will be thinking that you have forgotten your promise.’

  We went on our homeward way. But as we left the ford behind us, he was dragging his left leg a little as he still did when he was tired, or sore at heart.

  3

  The White Hart

  Other word from the outside world came trickling into the valley through the months of that summer. Not from jewelled cities at the far ends of the Earth, but from beyond the mountains, all the same … Word of the northern kings and their kingdoms, Aidan of Dalriada, Gartnait, Lord of Caledonia, word out of Strathclyde and little Elmet; word of
Mynyddog of the Gododdin, foremost of them all, who men called Mynyddog the Wealthy, Lord of Dyneidin of the Many Goldsmiths; all looking with anxious eyes towards the east, where the new Saxon kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia had begun to loom like gathering storm clouds.

  For almost the lifetime of a man Bernicia had been only an offshoot of much stronger Deira, only a scatter of settlements along the coast. But in the first few years under their new king and warleader, Aethelfrith, they had been spreading and gaining strength. One day they would be as great as Deira - greater - one day the two might join warhosts; and when that day came, the storm clouds would spill over and come sweeping across the land.

  ‘But if we - the kingdoms of Britain - also joined warhosts, couldn’t we fling them back into the sea?’ I remember asking Tydeus my tutor.