The Shining Company Page 4

  He looked up when I came in, then went back to work on his long chin. I mind the harsh sound that the pumice made.

  I said hopefully, after a while, ‘I have brought Gelert back.’

  ‘So it has been told me,’ my father said. ‘Also that Luned was out in the forest the main part of the night.’ He felt his chin with two fingers, then laid aside the pumice and got up, reaching for the dog-lash. He stood watching me and drawing it through his hands - dark and supple with use - while I freed the bronze neck-pin and pulled my tunic back from my shoulders.

  I had my beating. Seven stinging cuts of the dog-whip. It was always seven, never more, never less; that was one of the things that made it frightening to be flogged by my father, that it was always done in cool blood. He never lost control of the situation, he never lost count … When he had finished, my shoulders felt as though they had been criss-crossed with hot brands, and it took me a few moments to get back my breath, which seemed to have been driven out of my body. Then I began to pull up my tunic, keeping my head down because I felt tears humiliatingly near. When I was a child I had yelled sometimes under the lash both because it hurt and because I hoped it might soften my father’s heart; but I knew him better now, and it had long ago become a matter of honour to make no sound.

  I was just fastening the neck-pin of my tunic when footsteps came along the colonnade and Owain appeared in the doorway.

  ‘My father, I have done as you bade me about the red colt,’ he began, but truly I think the red colt was an excuse. He stopped, seeing me there and pinning the neck of my tunic, and the whip still in our father’s hands; and hitched his shoulder in mock sympathy. ‘If I come in a bad time … ‘

  ‘Nay, the thing is over,’ my father said, and tossed the whip aside.

  Owain turned his attention to me. ‘It has been told me that you have found my hound and brought him in.’

  ‘He was out beyond Coed Dhu.’ My voice was under control by that time. ‘He had gone over into the winter-gully and knocked himself silly, and his collar was caught up on an alder snag.’

  ‘So, and where is he now?’

  ‘In my sleeping cell, with Conn.’

  ‘Then go you and fetch him - if our father is done with you.’

  No word of thanks, just claiming his own.

  I heard myself saying, ‘Did you not mean what you said yestere’en, about anyone who found him being welcome to him?’

  I had not known that it mattered so much; but suddenly, as I waited for the answer, my mouth felt dry.

  Owain began to fidget with the long bronze tag on the end of his belt as he always did when he wanted to get out of something. He laughed a little. ‘Why, as to that, a man may say something in passing moment -’

  I have said that my father had little love for me, and that is true, but it is true also that I always had justice from him. He said to no one in particular, ‘And regret it in the cool at next morning and seek to forget his promise? But of such a time it is always as well to remember who else heard the promise made, and may remember afterward.’

  ‘I only said -’ Owain began.

  ‘In the outer court, with half the household and most of your own companions standing by,’ mused my father, watching a yellow-speckled fly that had hovered in through the open door.

  For a long moment, silence settled on us, broken only by the high wing-whine of the fly. My mouth grew drier yet.

  Then Owain shrugged, ‘Keep him then. He’s little enough use for the hunting, anyway.’

  ‘Now as to the red colt -’ my father said, and I knew myself dismissed.

  When I got back to my sleeping cell, Conn was still squatting in the doorway with his arm round Gelert’s neck. They both looked up as I came along the colonnade, walking, I suppose, somewhat stiffly - it is surprising how stiff one’s whole back gets after a flogging, even though the lash has fallen only across one’s shoulders. ‘You had your beating, then,’ Conn said, recognizing the signs.

  I nodded, and squatted down with them and took Gelert’s battered head between my hands. He thrust towards me, his tail thumping on the floor behind him. ‘I had my beating but I have Gelert too - my father made Owain hold to his promise!’ I began to rub my thumbs into the soft warm hollows behind his ears, and the joyful triumph rose within me, and the pride that comes to every boy with the ownership of his first dog. ‘Mine is the hound to me! Mine, mine! -’

  ‘Meanwhile,’ said Conn, leaning sideways to look between my shoulders, ‘there is blood on your tunic. Come down to the stream and I’ll wash your back for you.’

  There was mist scarfing the stream banks, under the alder trees, and the sunlight lancing through it, and I mind now the blissful coldness of the water as Conn palmed it over the burning soreness of my back, while I bathed Gelert’s wounded head at the same time; and the gladness upon us that was all one with the morning and the white hart in last night’s moon-shot forest.

  4

  The Prince’s Hunting

  None of us ever spoke of what we had seen in the forest that night; but of course other people, a hunter, a charcoal burner, glimpsed the white hart, and the story got out all the same.

  In due time it reached the Royal Hall of Urfai the King and my father’s overlord, in Rhyfunnog, and came to the ear of Gorthyn the King’s son, who it seemed cared for few things in life as he did for hunting. And so on an evening far into the autumn, a rider came to my father’s gate, bringing word that the Prince Gorthyn and his companions would be following in three days, to hunt the white hart which had been seen in my father’s valleys.

  I was out in the horse runs when the messenger came, and got back to find the whole village ringing with the news. Feeling much as though someone had jabbed me in the belly, I gathered up Conn and Luned - the messenger was still in the house but there was no time to waste on him - and a short while later, leaving Gelert on guard at the foot of the ladder to warn us of any comers, the three of us were crouching together in the loft over the old chariot shed, facing each other in the half dark among store chests and ancient horse-gear stacked there.

  ‘But can the Prince Gorthyn come hunting in your father’s runs like this, unbidden?’ Conn asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘he can, because his father is the King, and our overlord.’

  ‘Maybe the hounds will not find him - our white hart,’ Luned suggested.

  ‘Maybe not.’ Oh, but the sense of Fate was on me, and I knew that they would.

  ‘Then maybe he will go away.’ She answered my silence as though I had spoken. ‘Back to wherever he came from.’

  ‘Why should he, when he has not, all this autumn?’

  ‘I do not know, but he might.’

  Conn said, ‘Could we drive him off?’

  ‘I wouldn’t wager much on our chances of finding him, just like that,’ I said. ‘And from tomorrow’s dawn the woods will be full of my father’s foresters.’

  Luned began to cry with soft desolation; and she was not much given to tears. ‘We cannot just let him be killed - we can’t.’

  ‘Stop that!’ I told her. ‘I am trying to think, and it doesn’t help.’

  We were all trying to think, desperately searching to and fro for some way to save the white hart, laying hold of wilder and wilder ideas which, when brought out and looked at, turned out to be each more impossible than the last. And all the while I was trying to thrust away the hideous picture that kept forming in my head and getting in the way of my thinking; the picture of the proud and beautiful creature who was in some way ours, hunted and terrified, pulled down by the pack, his milky hide torn and bloodstained, the hounds at his throat… and all the while in my mind the terrible knowledge was growing steadily, that there was one thing, and only one thing, that I might be able to do. I flinched away from the knowledge, but I had to force myself back to it, as one forces a scared horse back to barriers it is afraid to jump.

  ‘If all else fails,’ I said at last, ‘I can - I will - try to ki
ll him myself. My new hunting bow is strong enough. If I go with the rest, keeping it hidden under my cloak -’ I could not go on for the moment. There was a feeling of shock shared among the three of us; but I knew that the others had been seeing the same thing inside their heads. At least that would mean a quick, clean death for our white hart, save him from the last terror, and the tearing of the hounds.

  Then Conn said, ‘You will have to be with the Prince’s party, and that will make it hard to get the chance. Lend me your bow, and I will do the thing.’

  ‘You are not so skilled with the bow as I am,’ I told him. It was true. I had tried to pass on my own skills to him, but bondmen do not get the weapon practice, whether for war or the hunting trail, that freemen get.

  ‘The best thing of all,’ Luned said in a small cold voice that had no trace of tears left in it, ‘could be if we could hunt the Prince himself.’

  ‘You little she-wolf!’ I said, and we laughed, and left the seriousness behind us, and gathering ourselves together, scrambled down the loft ladder and went in search of supper.

  When the King’s son rode in with his hunting companions three evenings later, I stood with the armourbearers and the younger sons in the outer court to take charge of their horses, while my father and Owain waited on the steps to give him formal welcome. I looked up at the Prince as I went to his horse’s head, and saw a rather ugly young man with a bony laughing face under a thatch of hair that shone the colour of oat straw in the ragged torchlight, and found myself wanting to like him, like him enormously, which was something I had not bargained for. I looked away quickly, giving my whole attention to the horse, as he dropped from the saddle.

  That night our Great Hall seemed fuller than I had ever known it before. Full not only of men, but of life, voices and firelight and harpsong, and the rich heavy smell of mountain mutton baked in the cookhouse and borne in on great chargers for the feeding of my father’s guests. The high roofed hall had originally been the atrium of the villa-house, built further and further out at the back as the years went by to make a feasting place for the chieftain and his kindred; but Old Nurse was the only person who used the Roman name for it now. To everyone else it was the Hall, the Fire Hall, the Mead Hall, the Great Hall; and there, guests and household and kindred gathered on feast days and at times of rejoicing.

  During the earlier part of that evening, while the main business of eating was going forward, I was too busy among the armourbearers and younger sons, carrying food and drink to the warriors at the tables down the sides of the hall, to look about me or think of anything much else. But by and by, when the nobles and the warriors had eaten their fill, I found myself among the rest of my kind, feasting on our own account at the lower end of the great chamber. I was sharing a bowl of savoury left-overs with one of the Prince’s party, a boy not more than a couple of years older than myself, square-built and freckled, with two front teeth missing; and him too, I could have liked well enough if he had not been Gorthyn’s armourbearer. As it was, I took as little notice as one can take of someone sharing the same bowl, and stuffing myself with ragged lumps of dried salmon and honey-baked badger meat, I stared up the long hall, to where my father and brother and the Prince sat together at the high table, and Luned and the maidens of the kindred moved to and fro with the Greek wine jars only brought out for the most splendid occasions, and the harper sat with his crot on his knee, making it ready to sing.

  The boy beside me fished a lump of meat from the bowl with his forefinger. ‘That is good,’ he said, licking the finger afterward; and then, turning to look at me, ‘But it is not good to eat out of one bowl with a stranger, not knowing his name. That way you could find yourself eating with one of the Lordly People out of the Hollow Hills. I am Lleyn. What name do they call you by?’

  ‘Prosper,’ I said. ‘Not one of the Lordly People.’

  ‘Then heart-up, Prosper; we shall have a fine hunting tomorrow.’

  I reached for a stray crust of bread and did not answer, but he pushed on, like a friendly puppy. ‘What’s amiss? Are you not of the hunting party?’

  ‘Oh yes. I am of the hunting party,’ I said, and became very busy with my crust in the food bowl, mopping up juices to avoid having to talk any more. But I was still very aware of Lleyn beside me, and a few moments later his sudden stillness made me look up to see the reason for it.

  He was looking up at somebody standing quite close by, his cheek still bulging with food he had forgotten to swallow. And when I followed the line of his gaze, I saw that Luned had come down the hall with a wine-jar for the younger warriors gathered at the lower end of the hearth-row.

  ‘What maiden is that?’ Lleyn mumbled.

  ‘That is Luned,’ I told him. ‘My kinswoman.’

  He swallowed his bulging mouthful and said more clearly, ‘Beautiful, she is.’

  Something in the way he said it made me look at her again, and for the first time I saw that she was. It was not only her best saffron tunic and the little flowershaped gold drops in her ears - I had never seen her with gold drops in her ears before - not even the flamelight making tawny feathers in the dark heavy braids of her hair. It was that she always had been, only I had not noticed it before.

  ‘My father the chieftain will be marrying her to Owain, my brother, in a year or two,’ I heard myself saying - chiefly to warn the other boy off - but as soon as the thing was spoken, I found that the thought made a bad taste in my mouth, and I abandoned the mazer bowl to Lleyn with what was left of the badger juices still in it.

  Late that night in my sleeping cell, I made sure that my three best arrows were to hand, and checked yet again that I could carry my strung bow unseen under my cloak. I had shot up in the past few months, and stood almost as tall as I do now, so that if I wore my cloak with one corner trailing a little there was distance enough between shoulder and hem for the short hunting bow to lie safely concealed - so long as I did my hunting on foot; horseback would betray it instantly. Luckily, it was not at all uncommon for the younglings among the kindred to follow the hounds on foot.

  Striding up and down and swirling the heavy folds about me, I passed on the evening’s discovery to Conn. ‘Did you see Luned in the Fire Hall after supper? She is beautiful.’

  I mind Conn paused in folding away my best tunic with the crimson stripe, and said, ‘Have you only just noticed that?’ in a rather odd tone of voice, then put the folded tunic in the clothes chest, and lowered the lid, very softly.

  Next morning at first light we set out on our hunting. It was a cold dawn without colour as we headed down-valley under a sky as clear and colourless as crystal, the plover calling and wheeling over the bare crop-lands. The grey hoar frost flew like spray from the bushes and brambles of the woodshore as the horses brushed through, and the hunting horns made echoes from the steep hillside above us.

  I had joined the huntsmen and foot-followers according to plan, and was loping along among the hounds, I and Gelert together; but even so, I found myself after a while not far from the Prince on his raking sorrel mare, for in the early stretches of the morning, horse and foot and leashed hounds were mingled all together. And I was achingly aware all the time of what I had hidden under my cloak, not only because I was afraid every moment that the heel of the bow or the thrust of the three arrows in my belt would betray me, but also because of the thing that I might be going to do with them. I had taken great pains with the arrows, choosing my three best, making sure that their feathers lay perfectly, that the iron heads were sharp and polished, deadly and beautiful, the balance perfect, worthy of the great white hart; but oh, my belly was sick within me at the thought of using them.

  Presently the hounds picked up a scent. They were unleashed, Gelert with the rest, and for a short while criss-crossed to and fro, questing through the thickets. Then they streaked away, adding the wild sweetness of their own music to the notes of the hunting horns on an uphill line to the ridge above Nant Ffrancon; and after them men and horses skeining out li
ke wild geese, myself among them, running with the rest, and torn between excitement and dread.

  We killed twice that day, but caught neither sight nor scent of the white hart, and as the day wore on and the autumn sun came slanting further from the west, I began to hope that despite the forester’s report, the beast had left our hunting runs.

  But then, with the shadows already lengthening, though sunset was as yet far away, Cabel, one of the oldest and wisest of our hounds, flung up his head and gave tongue. The pack were unleashed again, and after a short time of casting about, were off on the new scent; and again the hunt was up and away after them like wild geese through the autumn skies. A few moments before, I had known that I was leg-weary and that carrying a strung bow under my cloak all day had chafed my forearm almost raw, and that if the hounds found again there was quite simply nothing more that I could do about it. But now, with the hound-music in my ears and the horns crying through the autumn woods, I forgot all that. I was running with the rest, panting along well up among the hounds, my heart banging high in my throat, and somewhere deep within me the certainty that this time it was the white hart that led us.

  Ever since, I have remembered that hunting like something out of a wild dream.

  I was running, running as it seemed the heart out of my breast, and hampered by the bow under my cloak, branches snatching at me, roots clawing at my feet, and always ahead of me the music of the hounds. By and by the land began to lift under us, and the trees thinned and fell back, the crowding damp-oaks giving place to birch as we drew up towards the open surge of the great hills; and the sky opened to us, turning wide and shining, the grey paleness of it barred with silver in the west.

  We were labouring uphill towards the blunt crest of the near ridge when the music of the hounds strung out over the skyline ahead of us changed note to the eager baying that meant the quarry was in view. The horns were sounding along the ridge, mingled with the shouts of men urging their weary horses to a fresh burst of speed. Then as we swept over the crest, I saw him across the shadow-filled cwm below us, shining against the dun dead bracken of the hillside as he headed desperately for the next ridge; the white hart that we had come to kill.