The Shining Company Page 5

  The hounds were running strung-out and purposeful on a sight line, the hunt sweeping after, downhill - I remember now the chill of the mountain stream as we crashed through it, sending up the sheeted water as we went - then upward again on the steep further slope. The hunt had split in two, the Prince and his party drawing ahead, our own people falling somewhat behind, the laws of hospitality and good manners demanding that to the guests should go the honour of the kill. But I had no time for courtesies just then. In familiar country a man on foot who knows the short cuts and the hindrances may keep up with mounted men who are strangers to it, especially if he be desperate enough. I was desperate enough and the strange feeling of being in a dream was on me, coming between me and my torn and spent body: and I was still with the Prince’s party when at last, on the high hill shoulder where the great stones of Hound Tor broke through the frosty turf, we brought the white hart to bay.

  For a dazzled moment, a kind of lightning flash of time that went on and on, I saw everything caught and unmoving: the black crouching shapes of the rocky outcrop and the wind-shaped hawthorn bushes, rust- red with autumn berries, and against the darkness of them, the white hart standing with heaving flanks, his shining hide dark-streaked with sweat, his proud antler-crowned head flung back in terror, as the yelling hounds closed in. Then as the frozen scene splintered into movement again and the hounds sprang forward, I realized that I had been counting on the cover of the trees to slink off by myself and free my bow and those three precious arrows. Here in the open with only the sparse hillscrub and the hunt all about me, I would be discovered before I could nock my first arrow to the bow. I tried, all the same, making to fling back the hampering folds of my cloak. And that was when I knew suddenly that even if I had the chance, I could not do it. That was a thing I was quite unprepared for. I remember breaking out in a sweat, the struggle and the powerlessness within me. Whether I should have broken through and done the thing in the end, I’ve no knowing, because in that splinter of time the miracle happened.

  From out of the general tumult of men and hounds and horses, one voice rose clear. One of those trained voices that can reach across a battlefield and still make sense at the other end. ‘Off! Off, I say - the hunting is over; call off the hounds!’

  And somebody was urging his horse forward into the midst of the yelling pack, leaning low from the saddle to send his whiplash curling across their backs. Gorthyn, the Prince. Others of his company had joined him, and the horn was sounding again, not the Death but the Recall; and between the horn and the whiplash the hounds, unwilling, and bewildered by the strange turn of things, were falling back, doubling to and fro among themselves.

  And suddenly there was no white hart standing at bay among the thorn trees and the dark stones. For an instant there was a flicker of white among the bushes dropping away over the further slope beyond the crest towards Nant Ffrancon, and then that too was gone.

  Almost at that moment Gelert returned to me.

  I was looking towards the Prince on his startled and fidgeting horse, and I did not see him come, and so had no time to brace myself for his joyful onslaught, and his forepaws took me on the shoulder unawares, pitching me over backward, my cloak flying wide and the hidden bow and the arrows in my belt laid bare to view.

  I had a hand twisted in his collar and was struggling back to my feet almost in the same instant, but it was too late. One of our own huntsmen was upon me with a muttered, ‘Now what’s to do, young master?’ And I think he would have had me clear out of the way; but the boy Lleyn was upon me also, dropping from his horse with a shout. Gelert, half-strangled with my hand in his collar, had them both in check for the moment with a deep sing-song snarling far down in his throat; his hackles were up, and I knew that at any move from me he would have been at the throat of one or the other of them - which is why I stood very still.

  And with a brushing and trampling through the dead bracken and half bare thorns, Gorthyn reined in his horse almost on top of us, and sat looking down. His face was enquiring, more than anything else, his thick brows quirking upward towards the headband of fine crimson leather that bound back his hair. ‘It seems you hunt after a different manner from the rest of us, this day,’ he said.

  I went on standing still, and stared back at him.

  He flicked a finger at my bow. ‘Or - it seems a foolish question - was that for me?’ He asked it at half-breath, for the thing was not for all men’s hearing.

  I shook my head, ‘For the hart.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Better than to be pulled down by the hounds.’

  The Prince looked at me consideringly for a few moments; then he smiled. I have never known any other man with a smile quite like Gorthyn’s; it was not over broad, but it had wings to it. ‘So, Prosper, son of Gerontius, you too. And all because the creature has the magic of a milky hide. At least I am not the only moon-wit in your father’s hunting runs.’

  And I mind that as I stared up at him across his horse’s neck, something, a kind of fealty, went out from me to him that I knew would not return to me again so long as life lasted, his or mine.

  Then the thing was over. He gestured to the other two to stand back and let me be, and swung his horse to meet my father and the rest of the hunt as they came up. I bent to slip the leash through Gelert’s collar, huddling my cloak close round me once more, somehow surprised, when I looked up again, to find the world unchanged. It should have been changed, somehow, a little, because I was Prince Gorthyn’s man, but the change was only in me.

  I do not think that my father ever came to know of my planned part in that day’s hunting. Tuan, our huntsman, would never have betrayed me, nor, I knew, would Gorthyn, and Lleyn and the few others who had seen what happened were the Prince’s men. But when we reached home long after torch-lighting time with the gralloched carcasses of the two roe deer slung across the backs of the hunting ponies, and no sign at all of the white hart, word of the Prince’s strange hunting must have run from kennels to cookhouse to bower almost before the horses were unsaddled; for I had barely reached my sleeping cell where Conn rose from his waiting corner without a word, and as I flung off my cloak and handed over bow and arrow and began to strip off my hunting leathers, Luned appeared in the doorway. She was clad in her saffron gown for feasting, but with her hair hanging loose and tangled, just as she had escaped from Old Nurse.

  ‘Is it true?’ she demanded breathlessly.

  ‘Is what true?’ I asked. I knew well enough, but I needed time.

  ‘He called off the hounds?’

  ‘Yes, it is true.’

  Conn turned from stacking my bow in the corner. ‘Why would he be doing that?’ he asked in that cool dead-level voice of his.

  I shook my head. ‘I do not know. Maybe when he saw the white hart he felt the same as we did.’

  ‘That makes him not at all like most princes,’ Luned said.

  ‘You having met so many? It makes him a man who would be good to follow.’

  There was a moment’s silence, then Luned flicked away from the subject in that minnow way of hers. ‘Gwyn will not be pleased. He has made a song about the Prince’s hunting and the slaying of the white hart. He was going to sing it tonight at the feasting.’

  I pulled my best tunic with the crimson stripe over my head, and reached for my belt. ‘Gwyn will just have to change the end of the song.’

  Conn said doubtfully, ‘I do not think that you can be changing the end of a song or a story like that, as though it were quite separate from the rest. 1 think the end of a story is part of it from the beginning.’

  There were other songs sung in my father’s hall that night, but whether Gwyn the Harper agreed with Conn or not, the song of the hunting of the white hart was not one of them. What with weariness and one thing and another, that is just about the only thing that I remember about that night, at all. It is the next morning that I remember, sharp-edged as a blade. The first snow of the coming winter flurrying down from Yr Widdf
a; the horses brought trampling round from the stable court, and the Prince and his companions mounting for the homeward ride.

  I had contrived to be the one to hold Gorthyn’s stirrup for him - not that he needed a stirrup holder, being accustomed to mount by the steed leap like the rest of us; but for any parting guest, especially one of the royal house, the courtesies must be maintained. He mounted, and I was looking up at him past his bent knee as he thanked me. I mind the fine white flakes settling on his oat-coloured thatch and the huddled shoulders of his cloak, and the quick smile that gave wings to his bony face. I smiled back, and heard myself asking the thing that I had not meant to ask, not yet a-while, but which had been in my heart to ask ever since last evening.

  ‘Lord Gorthyn, let me ride with you.’

  His mouth straightened, but the smile was still there behind his eyes, ‘How old are you?’

  ‘I shall be fourteen, come lambing time,’ I said, stretching the truth a little. After all, some lambs are born late.

  ‘Too young,’ he said, gentling his fidgeting horse.

  ‘Lleyn is not so much older.’ I heard a snort of mingled indignation and laughter just behind me.

  ‘A year or two. And his father is one of my father’s household.’

  I had not known how deeply I wanted the thing until I knew that I was not going to get it; and I suppose I must have shown the urgent longing in my face, for suddenly he leaned down towards me and said, ‘Wait, and you also will be a year or two older.’

  Then Luned came with the stirrup-cup and I had to step back and yield her my place. And with that, I knew that I must be content. But I knew also that I had been given a promise, and that Prince Gorthyn would not break it.

  5

  The Summons

  Two years went by, and the half of another year; and on an evening in Mary month the four of us were together on the old fortress hill that had been the chief place of our clan before the Legions came, sprawled in the warm southern curve of the great turf rampart. From the crest of the bank, among the wind-shaped hawthorn bushes, one could look down like a wheeling falcon on the whole valley, the sprawling time- crumbled villa house and the huddle of the settlement in the loop of the stream, follow the chariot-track and the stream-bank alders down past the mill and the smithy to the monastery among its apple trees and beyond, away and away to where the forest closed in over the pasture and crop-lands, the valley spread out like the fingers of a hand, and the distances turned blue. But from where we sprawled in the sun-warmed grass at the bank foot, there was nothing to be seen but wind-feathered sky and a golden eagle circling with the evening sunlight under his wings; swinging his hunting-circles so high that it would be half of Gwynedd, not just our valley that he saw.

  I was lying flat on my back, Gelert beside me with his hairy head on my chest, and I was playing with his ears, rubbing my thumbs into the warm hollows behind them in the way he liked best in all the world. Conn, who was seldom without something to do with his hands, lay propped on one elbow, whittling a bit of hawthorn wood he had gathered on his way up into something that looked as though it might be going to be a fieldmouse; and beside him Luned sat with her hands linked round her updrawn knees, watching what he did.

  Three days ago, my brother Owain had been married, a marriage made between our father and a neighbouring chieftain for the strengthening of both clans. Owain had not been best pleased, for he scarcely knew the girl and would rather have chosen for himself. But it was the custom, and he had done no more than grumble a bit. To me the marriage seemed a matter for rejoicing, partly because I had been afraid all along that my father would marry him to Luned, and partly because turned sixteen and counting as a man, I had ridden with the bridegroom’s companions to help him fetch home the bride. The feasting had been truly noble, but the sham fight, which had not been entirely sham - I had a fading blackeye to prove it - when the time came to carry the squealing girl off from her father’s hall, had been even better.

  But looking at Luned now, the thought came to me that maybe it was not a happy thing for her, to have a new mistress come into the house - though indeed the Lady Nerys seemed such a mouse of a girl that I could not believe her coming would make much difference to anybody. And then another thought came treading on the heels of the first; that maybe she had wanted to be the new mistress, married to Owain herself. I had not known if she felt like that; we had grown up together almost all our lives, but it struck me suddenly how much I did not know of her. She had always been one who kept her secrets to herself.

  I rolled over towards her, dislodging Gelert. ‘Luned, now that she’s here, what would you be thinking of Owain’s new wife?’

  She looked up from her watching, half surprised. ‘Nerys? I dare say I shall like her well enough as time goes by. I have known her only two days.’

  ‘You did not need two days to know that you liked Conn.’ I do not know what made me say it, especially with Conn there; something in the way she had been watching his hands on the scrap of hawthorn wood, I suppose.

  She said softly, ‘But Conn is Conn. Nerys is only a girl like a feather cushion. She eats too much honey-cake and presently she will spend all her time having babies while Old Nurse runs the household as she always has done.’

  It sounded a bit as though my guess might have been right. In which case I should shut my mouth and leave the thing there. But there was something, a feel of coming change, on me that spring evening in the warm curve of the old rampart where it seemed that nothing ever changed except the wind. A feeling out of nowhere, that the thing should not be left hanging ragged, lest there be no other time …

  I plucked up a grass stem to chew, and said round it, ‘Luned, did you - have you ever thought that it might be you, married to Owain?’

  She said, ‘Yes. I did not think there was much danger, seeing that I have no dowry; but it was there, just a little fear. And, oh, the gladness is on me that now I need have no fear at all.’

  ‘Then you didn’t want at all -’ I said after a moment, stupid with relief.

  She laughed a little. ‘Have I not said? Oh, Prosper, you sound so grave and solemn and - like an elder brother!’

  For a moment I thought she was going to do one of her silvery minnow changes of the subject. But then she left the laughter behind and said quite seriously, ‘No, I did not want, I do not want, anything that breaks up the three of us being together.’

  ‘Since Father does not want you for Owain, maybe he has it in mind to marry you to me,’ I said chewing on my grass stem. ‘That would keep the three of us together.’

  Luned had returned to watching the hawthorn mouse in Conn’s hands. She said, ‘Yes, I could marry you or -’ She checked, and a wave of colour flowed up from the neck of her tunic to the roots of her hair, and ebbed away leaving her creamy pale. ‘I could marry you, and that would keep the three of us together.’

  And in the same moment Conn’s knife slipped and gashed his thumb. He snatched his hand away and sucked the ball of this thumb, while Luned said the kind and obvious things that women say at such times, ‘Oh, you have cut yourself - let me look.’

  He shook his head and held his hand out to her, ‘It was only a nick. See - no more blood.’ And the moment was over and past like the little wind siffling along the hill grasses.

  The shadow of the western rampart was creeping far across the hill top, and hunger telling us that it was time to be turning homeward for the evening meal, when Gelert suddenly lifted his head, ears pricked, listening. We listened also. At first there was nothing to hear, and then, faint and far off on the very edge of hearing, I caught the triple of a horse’s hooves on the valley track; and in the same instant the others had it too. There was nothing unusual in that; always men and horses on the track that led up-valley to my father’s hall; but it was not so often that travellers came down-valley from the drove-road that led into it from the north, and the odd sense of coming change that had been on me earlier was on me still, making me alert t
o anything that did not follow the common pattern. I rolled over and scrambled up the steep green wave-lift of turf and through the cream-clotted hawthorn scrub along its crest, just as the horse and rider came into view, ant-small on the track that was no more than an unspooled linen thread, so far off and so far below that no sound of hooves could have reached us but for the wind in the right quarter and the odd trick of the surrounding hills just there, that gathered sound and tossed it upward.

  Conn had come up beside me, and Gelert’s head was against my thigh.

  ‘Someone in a hurry,’ I said.

  The valley was brimming with shadows and, watching, we could scarce have made out the rider if it had not been for that faint triple of hoof-beats on the stony track, looping around the base of the fortress hill towards the stream, then up the last stretch between the house-places of the kindred and in through the gatehouse.

  ‘It will be a late-come guest to the wedding,’ Luned said, holding aside a hawthorn spray and peering down.

  Conn laughed. ‘Hungry as we are, and hurrying to his supper.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, suddenly in a hurry. ‘Let us be on our way.’

  As we came swooping down through the steep pasture behind the house, Tydeus my tutor came to meet us - I suppose someone had seen the way we went earlier in the day. As soon as we were within shouting distance he started shouting, thin and high like a gull, ‘Prosper - your father bids you come to him in his study.’

  I waved to show that we had heard him, and he stopped and stood waiting until we reached him. ‘What’s amiss?’ I demanded when we came together.