The Shining Company Read online

  ‘He’ll take you; you heard what he said. There’s not a smith in Dyn Eidin or along the Town Ridge who isn’t in need of all the help he can get, since the King’s hosting.’

  Conn’s gaze was very level. ‘If it is forbidden for a bondman to learn the smith’s craft, then it must be forbidden for a smith to teach him. If I ask him, I must tell him what I am.’

  ‘No!’ I told him. ‘That’s why I had to stop you spewing it out, back there in the smithy.’

  He said stubbornly, ‘To go to him and ask him to take and train me without telling him would be a thing without honour.’

  I was so exasperated I could have taken him by the shoulders and shaken him until his back teeth fell out, if we had not been sitting on the edge of Epona’s Leap; but the thing needed more careful handling than that. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘If you tell him and keep your precious honour bright and shining, he will do one of two things; either he will turn you away, and every smith of Eidin Ridge will do the like, or he will take you all the same, and may bring trouble on his head by doing it.’

  ‘He may have heard it anyway, from someone else. Lleyn knows.’

  ‘Neither Lleyn nor anyone else is likely to have been interested enough to tell him. If anyone does, he can always deny having heard it - so long as neither you nor I have told him. That way, if trouble comes, it will fall where it belongs, on my head.’

  ‘On mine also.’

  ‘No, for being a bondman you have no choice but to do as I bid you,’ I told him ruthlessly.

  Conn said, ‘If I may not share the trouble, I will not share the lie.’ And I saw that there would be no shifting him.

  ‘So be it,’ I said. ‘If the trouble comes, I will throw you to the wolves to save my own hide. That makes you happy?’

  The horns of feasting were sounding from the Hall; and we scrambled to our feet and back from the edge.

  ‘That makes me happy, O my brother and my lord,’ he said with a sudden warmth like laughter in the back of his throat.

  I spun him round and gave him a push between the shoulders. ‘Then go you and ask him and God speed you in your asking.’

  I watched him walk away, back towards Fercos’ smithy, then turned and headed for the Hall.

  I no longer had a body servant. I had never wanted one, come to think of it. I remembered my annoyance on the day my father had handed him over to me. I only had a friend. Much simpler than trying to combine the two; I have always liked things to be plain and uncomplicated.

  9

  Ordeal by Wakefulness

  Summer went by, and in the crop-lands below the Dyn the barley was tall and turning pale, and the birdsong beginning already to fall silent in deep-layered valley woods. Our first weeks of weapon training were over and we were beginning to work with the horses, learning the lessons of cavalry, to function together as wings and squadrons under our own troop leaders, though the leaders still changed from day to day until with time the natural leaders began to emerge. (Among the Companions no man held command because he was his father’s son, but only because he was the best fitted for it, and the son of a one-valley chieftain might have the command over the sons of the great kingdoms such as Strathclyde. The Fosterling, as yet handling us in double harness with the King’s bodyguard, saw to that.)

  So, on the moors and the low heather hills around Eidin Ridge we were being tempered from the rough-riders we had mostly been among our own hills into ordered and disciplined cavalry such as Artos might not have disowned. With javelins and blunt-tipped lances we learned the opening moves of combat; we learned how to draw an enemy after us until it was too far from its own lines; how to deal with the spears of an enemy on foot; and, under the guidance of men old in the ways of horse-warfare before most of us were born, we taught to our horses the lessons that they also had to learn, training them to stand steady in the face of a hostile crowd and brandished weapons, to use their own fore feet as weapons (that comes easy to any stallion and even the geldings, but the mares had to be taught) to charge through banks of burning brushwood, listening to their rider more than their natural fear of fire … And much of this training we took all together, Companions and shieldbearers alike, so that when the time came, no matter how the fighting went, we should each be able to bear whatever part was needful.

  We learned and practised, together of course, the use of the three-man arrowhead, the warriors riding ahead as though into battle while the rest of us remained mounted and ready in the rear; the moves by which, if our warrior’s horse was slain, one of us took up his own horse to replace it, returning on foot; if the warrior was slain, one went up to take his place, the other still remaining in reserve; and if the warrior was sore wounded, both of us went up, one to bring him off, the other to take his place. It sounds a simple enough matter, but it is less simple than it sounds. To come up always on the right side to have one’s sword- arm free, to get a frightened and angry horse under control or a wounded man across one’s saddle bow in the midst of a whirlpool of men and horses, takes a good deal of practice. (Gorthyn played the part whole-heartedly, I mind, and so did those, sometimes it was the Teulu, who played the enemy.) But we got into the way of it after a while.

  I saw very little of Conn in those days. Fercos had taken him into his smithy, to work the goatskin bellows when need arose, but also to learn the craft, and the smith was a hard taskmaster. But at the odd times when we could snatch a few words together, Conn had the look of a man who has found his own path to follow. I tried to be glad of that and not to miss his quiet company.

  Ah, well, I was forming other bonds, as I have said. And I had other things to think about. Towards the time of the Lammas fires, Ceredig the Fosterling devised a new kind of ordeal for us; and from then on, far into the autumn, groups of the Companions would draw lots from an age-eaten Roman helmet, three white pebbles and the rest black, and each time, those who drew the white pebbles were issued with three days hard ration of oat or barley cake, and sent out from the Ridge with orders to go where they would, hold together and keep themselves and each other from sleeping for three days and three nights. Again, it seemed a simple matter, but those of us who had ever trained a hawk and been through the three nights and days of keeping it awake which is the final point of the training had some idea of what was entailed.

  It was into early autumn by the time it came to the turn of our troop; and night after night the draw was made, until Gorthyn and Cynan and Llif the Piet drew the white pebbles. They divided up their shieldbearers according to their own whim, as had become the custom. I had hoped to be with Lleyn, who had become a friend by that time, but our Lords thought otherwise, and I found myself cast with Dara and with one of Llif’s shieldbearers, Huil by name, who I scarcely knew.

  The lots were drawn overnight, and afterwards we ate all that our bellies would hold, and slept like hogs; and at dawn we scattered in threes into the wilderness.

  Dara and Huil and I joined the old paved road that headed north-westward towards the long-forsaken Legionary fort on the shores of the Firth. Castellum, I had heard it called. The place had an unchancy reputation, for it was said that it had been garrisoned, not by Red Crests, but by men who called themselves Frontier Wolves and had some sort of kinship with the four-footed kind, and whose ghosts still came back in wolf shape to run through the ruins at full moon. That would have seemed a good enough reason for keeping well clear of the place, especially as the moon was near to full. So why we chose to spend our three nights vigil there, I am not sure. Maybe it gave the whole exercise a heightened smell of adventure. Maybe we thought it would be something that we could crow about afterwards to less valiant souls. Also I think we played quite deliberately with the idea that the whiff of fear might help us to keep awake.

  From the place where the Eidin Ridge track turned off from it, the road was almost lost, for few people travelled it any more, and the tide of heather and bramble and rough grass had come flowing in. Sometimes, for a short distance, our feet sens
ed the hardness of stone under the grass, but at other times it was as though no one had ever passed that way before. The little thin wind blowing up from the Firth began to have the smell of salt in it, and the crying and calling of shorebirds was the voice of a great loneliness as we came down the last stretch to the old lost frontier fort. It was not the first time that we had come that way; by that time there were few places within half a day of Dyn Eidin that were not known to us; but I had not been so aware of the loneliness, the emptiness of the place before. There were birch and rowan in the ditch, and the past summer’s willowherb turned to grey seed-silk massing in the gap where the gateway must have been; and midway between the fallen stone stumps of the gatehouse towers, a path had been trampled through the willowherb. Not so empty of human life, after all.

  The sight pulled us up in our tracks. And Huil said, ‘We are not the first-comers, by the look of it.’

  ‘Like enough it is an animal - fox or wolf,’ I said.

  But Dara thought otherwise. ‘Never saw anything but wild pig leave a trampled track like that - wild pig or man - not ghost-wolf, anyway.’ And he giggled. Dara was a stout good natured callant with pale eyelashes and a giggle that came out of him like water out of a bottle. But having made his jest he glanced about him uneasily. It was not quite the place to be jesting about ghost-wolves.

  Huil, who like all his kind had a nose like a hunting dog, dropped to his knees and crouched forward, sniffing at the trampled stems.

  ‘It is man.’

  He got up, and the three of us stood for a moment looking at each other, wondering whether we should go elsewhere. But it seemed a poor spirited sort of thing to do, to turn away as though someone else had a better right than we had. I said, ‘The place is big enough for two lots of us.’ And we prowled in, swaggering a little for the benefit of any eye that might be watching.

  We had taken our time on the way, and it was a while past noon: and it seemed to us, especially with others beside ourselves loose in the old fort, that the first thing to do was to find our quarters for the days and nights to come: somewhere that would give shelter from possible wild weather and which could be defended in case of need. We scattered to the search, but not widely, keeping within call or sight-signal of each other all the while, and cast around among the turf hummocks of fallen briar-grown walls like hounds on a thin scent. In the gate gap between breast-high banks, that gave out into what seemed to be some kind of outer part of the camp where it ran into the grey waters of the Firth, Huil picked up the scent of the first-comers again, and after a careful testing of the grass and bushes (he was a tracker to equal the Little Dark People, was Huil) told us, squatting on his haunches, ‘They have not come back. Not this way, anyway.’

  ‘So. Then we bide clear of beyond the gate,’ Dara said. ‘That gives us the high ground at all events.’ And we turned back into the ruins of the main fort.

  We found our shelter after a while; a kind of undercroft, a storage place perhaps. The front half of whatever had been above it had fallen in, half blocking the ragged entrance gap, but further in it seemed sound enough, the earth above it held up by arched stonework and the roots of trees. Shelter from night and weather and wolf.

  We built a hearth of fallen stones close to the mouth of the cave - more like a cave than a building it seemed - and gathered dead wood for a fire when night came, but no bracken or the like, as we would normally have done, to pile over the root-broken stones of the floor - the more we made ourselves comfortable, the harder we would find it to keep from sleep. We went down to the burn that ran through its steep gorge below the western rampart and drank and filled the leather bottle we had brought with us, for the evening’s stirabout, where the water ran clear and deep above the remains of a paved ford. There was an upright stone, I mind, marking the place where an old track from the fort must have entered the water, heading westward; a black stone, dappled with grey and golden lichen. I set my hand on its rounded poll, and got the odd uncanny feel that it was used to the touch of men’s hands in passing. But that must have been long and long ago …

  We came back to the cave, and built and lit our fire, with Dara’s strike-a-light to kindle the spark. The sparks fell on to the dry fir fronds and the dead twigs caught, and Huil stooped and blew between his hands on to the licking tongues of flame; and as we fed it with longer and longer sticks and branches, the fire on our hearth caught and flared up, casting its light a little way into the cave as the daylight outside faded, picking out stones and dragon-coiled tree roots, and the faces of the three of us gathered about it. We undid the oatmeal bag and took out the dinted iron pot, tipped in a third of the meal and the water we had brought up from the ford and set about making the evening stirabout.

  With neither salt nor a knob of honeycomb it was dull eating, but it stayed our hunger. We finished up every crumb and smear from the inside of the pot, and put the bag safely aside for tomorrow night and the night after; then sat and looked at each other, listening to the wind that had begun to rise outside.

  That first night went easily enough. All of us were well used to missing a night’s sleep now and then for one reason or another - hunting or a mead drink or a turn of wolf-guard over the lambing pens. We told stories that first night, feeding our small fire sparingly to make the wood store last, each of us bringing out tales from among our own hills.

  I told of Branwen who was wedded to a King of Eriu and carried back to his kingdom across the western waters and misused and abandoned, and how at last she won back to her own land, and of her vengeance that followed after. I told of Gwyn ap Nudd and the Wild Hunt, tales with which Old Nurse had used to frighten Luned and me on windy autumn nights when we lay in our beds listening to the hound-babble of the grey geese flying over.

  Dara told of a Queen of Strathclyde, Languareth by name; how she gave a ring that the King had given her to her warrior lover. The King saw the ring on his hand (he cannot have had much sense between his ears that warrior lover!) and with drugged wine caused him to fall into a deep sleep, and while he slept took the ring from his finger and threw it in the river. Then he asked the Queen why she no longer wore it; and when she made an excuse, saying that it was too big for her hand and she feared to lose it, flew into a passion, accused her of having given it to another man (which after all was the truth) and threatened her with death if she did not instantly bring it to him. Making some desperate excuse, she managed to gain a breathing space until next morning, and as soon as the King had left her, she ran to the holy man who lived nearby and begged him to help her. The holy man took pity on her - or maybe he was thinking that a queen would make a useful friend - and bade her send a fisherman down to the river, with orders to bring her the first fish that took his line. The fisherman went down to the river and cast his line, and a fish came up and took the bait. He carried the fish to the Queen and when she and her maidens opened it, there inside, gleaming in the first light of morning, was the King’s golden ring.

  It was a good story and Dara, who enjoyed anything that savoured of gossip, put much rich and colourful detail into it. But myself, I liked better the strange unchancy tales that Huil told that night. They were not easy to follow, for being of the Pictish people his native tongue was not ours, and though he spoke our tongue none so ill, he pronounced some of the words strangely; and beside that the stories themselves were as many-stranded and interwoven as the tendrils of the white bindweed or the patterns tattooed on his own breast and shoulders. Stories from a world that still counted wealth in cattle and bondwomen; an older world than mine or Dara’s, a shadow world in which even the ghosts and water-horses and battling heroes seemed stranger than our own.

  It was after one of Huil’s stories that I needed to go outside and make water. I did not much care for the idea, for he had peopled the dark beyond the fire-glow with too many strange and hair-lifting things, and I would have gone only just beyond the cave entrance. But not wishing to admit myself scared by a bairn’s ghost story, I made myself g
o further, half across the old fort. It was so, through the thin spitting rain, that I glimpsed a blink of firelight away beyond the northern gate. So I knew where the other three had made their lair, and I wondered, on the way back, whether they had seen the blink of our fire also, in the damp and windy dark. I wondered also who they were, those other three. Maybe Lleyn and his two fellows, maybe our own three warriors, but there had been more than one set of white pebbles drawn last night. It might be something to pass the time with later, to find out …

  At first light, we went down to the burn again; and drank and doused our heads to wash the night fuzziness out of them in the cold swift-running water. Then we returned to the cave and the question of what we should do with the daylight hours until we could eat again.

  We could have spent some of the time in setting makeshift traps in the hope of catching something to sweeten the evening bannock, but there was a sense of ritual on us; the oat and barley meal that had been issued to us was proper food for the vigil. Also I think we wanted to use the time to do something, make something, that would leave the mark of our having been there.

  ‘We could rebuild a wall,’ I said, standing in the cave mouth and looking about the traces of old footings breaking like outcrops through the grass. The rain had stopped and the early light was waking starling colours in the fallen stone.

  ‘Which one?’ Huil asked. ‘I am thinking there are enough and more than enough to choose from.’

  ‘Any one,’ I said. ‘It makes no odds.’

  Dara let out his bubbling laugh. ‘We could build a cairn and stick the bannock-cloth on top of it for a banner.’

  ‘Too showy,’ I said.

  And thankfully, Huil agreed with me. ‘A wall would be more use.’

  ‘Use for what, in the name of light?’ Dara grinned at us. ‘To keep the ghosts out?’

  ‘To keep us from going to sleep,’ I said. ‘Either will serve for that - let’s toss for it and let the Gods of Castellum choose,’ and I fished in my pouch for the only coin I had on me.