SWORD AT SUNSET

“Old Woman, I will remember the promise,” I said, “for I think that I shall need good haters and skilled hunters in the time ahead.” I did not speak of the poisoned arrows.

She settled back on her stool, planting her hands on her knees, clearly finished with one thing and turning to another. “Ah, but I grow old, and dim from walking with dreams, and forget the thing that should come first of all. You must have the Dark Drink, and the herbs to burn on the little one’s grave about your nine great Sun Horses.” She looked down at the girl who crouched, not rocking or wailing like the rest, beside the fire. “Fetch them, Itha, daughter’s daughter; and fetch also the Cup, for the Sun Lord is weary, and must drink to the promise that has been made between us, before he goes again to his own people.”

A sudden finger of chill touched me between my shoulders, as the girl Itha rose to obey. How often, in my earliest years, the woman who reared me had impressed on me the warning, “If ever you should be in the Hollow Hills, which the Lord of Life forbid, never let you touch anything to eat or drink. So long as you remember that, they cannot get you in their power, but one cup of milk or a crust of barley bread and you are theirs forever, and your own soul lost to you.” It was the thing that ail mothers and nurses told to all children; it was the thing one grew up knowing.

I went on kneeling before the Old Woman, trying not to let my hands tighten on my knees, a long time, a very long time; and then the girl was back, bearing in one hand a black pottery flask and a small leather bag, and in the other a cup of age-blackened leather, bound with bronze at the rim, and brimming with drink of some kind.

She laid the flask — which had no base to stand on — together with the bag on the filthy fern-covered floor beside my knee, and held out to me the cup. “Drink, my Lord the Bear, it will shorten the long way back.”

I took the cup slowly, and sat looking down into the faintly amber depths of it, holding off the moment. . . . The Old Woman said, “Drink; there is no harm in it. Or do you fear to sleep and wake on a bare hillside and find when you return to it, the fort empty and your spear brothers dead a hundred years ago?”

And the chill that was on me seemed to deepen, with the memory of another woman who had spoken almost those same words. I had drunk then — of all that she had to give; and wakened on my cold hillside, and though I joyed in the comradeship of my men, in the warmth of the sun and the balance of a sword and the willing power of my horse under me, something of myself had been on that cold hillside ever since.

But I knew that if I did not drink, I should have lost forever the friendship of the Little Dark People, I should have failed in the thing that brought me, and maybe gained enemies as deadly as the little poison arrow sheathed so lightly. I should quite possibly have lost Britain.

I made my stiff face smile. “No man fears to drink in the house of a friend — I drink to the Dark People and the Sun People.”

I would have stood up, but under that roof I could not stand fully erect and put my head back. So I drank on my knees, draining the cup to the dregs, and gave it back into the girl’s hands. The drink was cool and without the sweetness of heather beer, a forest drink with a flame at the heart of the coolness. I have never tasted its like again.

Then I picked up the flask and the little bag of herbs.

“Burn the herbs at sunset on the little one’s sleeping place, and scatter the Dark Drink with the ashes over all, and it will be well with her,” said the Old Woman; and then as I murmured some form of leave-taking and turned to the steep steps and the entrance hole: “Stay. My daughter’s daughter will go with you to lead you back to your own world.”

This time I think we traveled straight, for we left the valley at a different point from our entering it and without fording the stream, and the three peaks of Eildon were before us all the way; while the distance was not a quarter of that which we had covered in the darkness. We came to the foot of the fortress hill and began the upward climb. The wind had died away, and in the warm sunlight among the broom bushes the midges danced in shining clouds. How we escaped the sight of the watchers on the ramparts that time, I do not know, save that the girl Itha was with me and I suppose something of her own cloak of shadows covered us both. I know that at the time the silence from above added to my uneasiness, until vague sounds of movement and the whinny of a horse did something to ease the fear that was still chilly between my shoulder blades. We were almost under the red sandstone walls when Itha turned aside from the deer track, saying for the last time, “This way — come.”

I had followed her so far that now I followed her unquestioningly this little way farther. She brought me to a small secret hollow among hazel bushes, not half a bowshot below the walls. Something in the formation of the hillside there must have blanketed sound, for it was not until I was on the very edge of it that I caught the least voice of falling water. It was only a small sound, even then, and oddly bell-like. The girl moved down into the tiny dell, and stooping, lifted aside a mass of bramble and hart’s-tongue fern. “See,” she said, and I saw a minute upwelling of water that sprang out between two rocks and dropped into a pool the size of a cavalry buckler, and then disappeared under the rocks and fern again. A man might pass within his own length of the water and never know that it was there.

“This is a wonderful thing,” I said. “If you had not shown it to me it might have remained hidden until we came to clear the scrub.”

“That was in my mind,” she said. “At least it will save much water carrying uphill from the burn. The water is good and sweet. . . . When you have need of my people, hang a straw garland on the branch of the big alder tree that grows above the pool for watering the horses, and someone will come.”

I was on my knee beside the water, splashing the cold sweetness of it into my eyes; and I asked, “Can I be sure of this tree? How do you know where we shall water the horses?”

“There is one place that is clearly better than all others, where the burn comes down to join the open river, close above the ford. We water our cattle there when we move them from pasture to pasture. You will know the place, and the tree.”

She had been speaking quite close behind me, but when I turned, meaning to ask her some other question, she was not there. Only, a few moments later, something flickered below me on the hillside, that might have been some wild thing passing among the hazel bushes.

I got up, and turned to the postern gateway of the fort, which I could see above me, and began to climb.

An elder sapling had rooted itself in the cracked doorsill of a ruined guardroom. I had noticed it last night, as one notices small unmattering things; and as I came up toward the gate I knew one moment of icy foreboding that I should find nothing there but an age-eaten stump, and the familiar sounds of the camp made by men whose faces I did not know.

But the sapling was just as it had been last night, and suddenly the men of the watch were all about me, and there were shouts, and someone came running, running like a boy between the ruined barrack rows, and I saw that it was Bedwyr, with the Minnow and young Amlodd behind him. The last chill of the fear that had been like a thin wind between my shoulder blades fell away, so that the warmth of the sun broke through, and in the same instant weariness descended on me so that I could barely stumble forward to meet them.

“Is it well? Is it well with you?” they asked.

“All is well,” I told them. “I think that all is very well. I have what I went for.”

“Come and eat,” they said.

But I shook my head, laughing muzzily. “All I want is a place to sleep — a corner to crawl into where no one will fall over my legs.”

THERE might have been two months more of possible campaigning weather, but after taking council with Cei and Bedwyr and the rest of the chiefs and captains, I determined against dissipating our forces at the summer’s end in an attempt to round up the broken and scattered war host of Huil. Better to concentrate on making a strong winter quarters here in Trimontium and set about turning Castra Cunetium into a strong outpost while there was time for the garrison sent out there to dig themselves in before the winter closed down on them, and get the patrols going steadily to and fro along the road between.

The first thing must be to speak with the Little Dark People again, and make sure that Daglaef the Merchant had made no mistake as to the position of the old fort; make sure also whether it was open to our coming, or in enemy hands and to be fought for as we had fought for Trimontium.

So on the third morning after my return from the Hollow Hills, I bade Flavian hang a straw garland on the broken branch of the big alder tree when he took the squadron down to water the horses. The girl Itha had been right; there was one perfect watering place where the stream that we came afterward to call the Horse Burn paused in its headlong run, and broadened into an alder-fringed pool before it fanned over the piled-up wash of centuries that had formed the ford, and then plunged down its last steep stretch to join the great river. And above the pool one ancient alder tree stood out from its lesser and younger kind as a chieftain from among his sword brothers.

He came when he brought the horses back, to report the thing done, and that evening Druim Dhu, the warrior who had shown me his arrow, walked in through the narrow northern gate, saying to the men on guard there, “The Sun Lord sent for me, and I am come.”

They brought him to me beside one of the evening fires on the old parade ground — we had not got as far as any fixed quarters yet, we were merely camping in the ruins of Trimontium as we had camped on open moor — and he squatted onto his heels in the firelight with the dignity of a wild animal, seemingly oblivious of the staring crowd about him; and with no word of greeting, fixed his eyes on my face and waited for me to tell him what I wanted.

When I had done so, he said, “As to this place you speak of, it is two days’ trail along the Great Road toward the setting sun. I know, for I have followed the trail myself at the herding; and the walls are yet strong. Whether it is empty or man-held, I do not know, but give me a day, two days at most, to send the word and receive it back again, and I will come and tell you. Oh my lord, is there no more?”

“No more if the place be empty. If it be held, then bring me the number of the men who hold it, and their strength in weapons and stored food. Can that be done?”

“It can be done.” He drew his legs under him to rise.

“Eat before you go,” I said.

“I eat only by my own hearth.”

But I knew that the trust must work both ways. “Eat! I drank by yours!”

He looked at me a long doubtful moment, then sank back beside the fire and held out his hand for the hot barley bannock that someone passed him; and ate, without taking his eyes from my face. When he had eaten, he got up, speaking no word of leave-taking as he had spoken none of greeting, but with a curious deep gesture of hand to forehead, melted out of the firelight into the dusk.

The next day there was no sign of him, but on the morning after that, when the horses were brought up from watering, Flavian came and sought me out. “Sir, Druim Dhu has come in again.” He said, “I don’t see how he does it, but it gives me the prickles! We started to get the squadron back from the water, and there he was in our midst!”

I glanced past Flavian, expecting to see the little dark figure behind him, but he shook his head. “He would not come up to the fort. He just said, ‘Tell the Sun Lord that there is nought for him to drive out of the strong place we spoke of, save the hill foxes and maybe an owl or two’ — and then he was gone. Maybe he turned into an alder tree.” He laughed a little as he said it, but the laughter was not altogether easy.

“The ability to turn into an alder tree is no bad thing for a scout.”

“I suppose not. It is unchancy all the same, the way he comes and goes.” Flavian hitched impatiently at his shoulders, and looked at me with sudden gravity. “Artos, sir, are we to trust him? — Them — about Castra Cunetium, I mean? They have the name for being treacherous little beasts.”

“Nevertheless, we are going to trust them. We shall send the usual scouting party ahead lest the state of things has changed since the message was sent. But that is aE. It is in my heart that Druim Dhu and his kind will not prove treacherous to us unless we earn their treachery.”

And so a few days later, with their share of the stores, weapons and raw materials of war loaded onto their share of the baggage beasts, Bedwyr with his own squadron of fifty cavalry, a war band of spearmen, and a few slingers and light horse for scouting, took the road westward up the river gorge, to garrison Castra Cunetium.

“We shall miss his harp in the winter evenings,” said Cei, leaning beside me on the red sandstone of the west rampart to watch the little force grow smaller and smaller in the distance, until it was lost in the tawny dust cloud of the summer’s end.

But that autumn we had little leisure in Trimontium for missing anybody or anything. We cleared the bushes and scrub for two bowshots around the walls, save for a clump of hazel shading the spring that had been as it were a gift to us from the Dark People. We set about clearing and restoring one of the two wells, which looked as though it might bear water again. We made the old latrines usable after a fashion, and patched up the rampart walls as best we could; we contrived, with bracken thatched onto hurdles, to reroof several barrack rows, some to serve their old purpose, some for outhouses, storerooms and stables. We got in peat and firewood, and bracken for fodder and bedding. Most of that work fell to the foot soldiers of our auxiliaries, who grumbled incessantly, as the warrior kind generally do when they are not fighting; for there was other work in plenty for the Companions and the light horsemen. Before September was out, we were regularly patrolling the lateral road, and from the first, I used small cavalry knots for foraging among the British villages and at the same time gaining some kind of control over the countryside. The clans of central and southwestern Valentia had not been drawn into the general flare-up; they were still, for the most part, friendly, and they had assuredly no longing for the Picts and the Sea Wolves trampling through their hunting runs leaving the inevitable wake of red ruin behind them. But on the other hand, many of the petty chieftains did not see why they should submit to a war host not of their own tribe in Trimontium, let alone help to feed them with the winter coming when they would have little enough for themselves. Sometimes it came to the direct threat. “Three bullocks or we fire the thatch,” especially if Cei led the foraging party, for he could use threats with a kind of grim good humor that left few scars behind. But there was always the risk that if we pressed them too hard, the chieftains would bethink them that another way of saving their fields and cattle from the Barbarians was to make common cause with them; and so threats were not things to be used too often. And in the main we found that the coming of heavily armed cavalry, a thing that the tribes had never seen before, was at once threat and reassurance enough. For the same reason, I refused to allow any cattle raiding. Instead, we hunted. There was game enough for all in the scrubby woods around Eildon, tribesmen and war host and little dark hunters alike; especially as the wilder and younger of the war host chose to turn their hunting spears chiefly against boar or wolf, and so the better food game was left for the rest.

Late in the autumn our promised supplies came up from Corstopitum, and among the grainskins and tallow jars were the sheaves of arrows, the saddle leather and blocks of salt which I had bullied out of Eburacum’s bishop. (May God be good to his tired old soul, he was a bonny fighter against paying his just dues, but he kept his word once it was given.) And after that most of what we killed was salted down and stored for the winter.

Winter came early that year, in a flurry of sleet that turned to snow and thawed and came again, and this time did not thaw, but lay week after week among the hills, adding to the stresses and hazards of both hunting and foraging; and for long spells at a time there was no grazing for the horses, so that they must be kept stabled and forage-fed; and in the long winter nights when the icy winds yowled through Trimontium and we heard the whistle of the wild geese overhead, we missed Bedwyr’s harp, even as Cei said that we should.

In all those months we heard and saw nothing, either of the Barbarians or the Little Dark People.

But spring came suddenly and early as winter had done. There was a red flush among the alders when we went to water the horses, and the hills were loud with the crying and calling of lapwing, though the snow still lay thick on the northern slopes and the wind cut like a fleshing knife. And one evening when I brought my own squadron in from exercise — we were hard at it already getting the horses back into condition again — a shadow shook itself clear of the guardhouse door, and Druim Dhu with his little war bow in his hand was standing at my stirrup. He looked older, his eyes sunken back into his head. But then so did we all, it was the famine look, the wolf look that comes to most men at the winter’s end when the food runs low.

“My Lord Artos.” He touched my foot in the stirrup by way of greeting.

I reined aside, gesturing to the others to go on, and dismounted. “Greetings, Druim Dhu, do you bring me news?”

“The Cran Tara has gone forth,” he said.

“So.”

“To the settlements of the Sea Wolves along the land edge yonder.” Druim jerked his head eastward. “Toward the Snow” — he meant the north — “and toward the sunset to summon the tribes and the Painted People. They were scattered back to their own places, to Manann, those who could get so far, last summer’s end; and the White Shields from across the Sunset Sea wintered with them. Now the Cran Tara has gone forth, and they will be hosting again.”

“Where to?”

“Into the Great Forest yonder between the two rivers, Cit Coit Caledon that we call Melanudragil in the dark tongue.”

From that time forward, as the spring drew on, one or another of the Little Dark People appeared from time to time. Not always Druim nor even one of his brothers, but others whom I had never seen before. Once it was a little old man tough and twisted as a heather root, who materialized under the very hooves of the patrol as it came in. Once it was even a woman. It seemed that among the People of the Hills also, some kind of Cran Tara had gone out.

Each brought some word of the enemy’s hosting, of the numbers growing in Caledon even before the snow was gone from the northern corries of Eildon; of Pictish and Scottish war bands seeping in by secret ways; of the long black war boats of the Sea Wolves prowling in up the Bodotria Estuary with reinforcements for their brothers of the settlements. And for the time being there was little we could do but hold all things in readiness, and wait until the red-hot moment came. I knew that to try to deal with the inflowing war bands piecemeal would be to fritter away our own strength almost certainly to no purpose. It was no formless skirmishing of war bands all across Valentia that we needed, but one smashing victory at the heart of things, Huil Son of Caw slain and his war host broken and scattered; after that the rest, however slow, would follow.

So I turned a deaf ear to the urging of the hotheads, and remained, as Cei told me to my face, “like an old eagle molting on his perch,” in my half-ruined fort, while slowly the Barbarians gathered like thunder drawing in from the skyline.

Presently Bedwyr came in, leaving Owain in command at Castra Cunetium, and we held a council of war around the fire that burned in the entrance to the part-roofed Sacculum where I had made my own quarters. By that time it was clear from their movements, reported by the Little Dark People, that the enemy intended to cut the lateral road, and that once done, we should cease to be a system for quenching and holding down Lowland Caledonia, and become merely two isolated strongholds, each with its own perilously long and fragile communication line behind it, and no sure means of linking shields with each other.

“Added to which,” said Bedwyr, thrumming softly at the harp on his knee, “that if Druim and his kind speak truth, we are like to be outnumbered by upward of three to one when Huil has the last of his war host gathered, and you have a most noble prospect.”

“Cei has been urging me to deal with the inflow piecemeal,” I said.

“And you are not of his mind?”

“I am of the mind to wait for the right time, and break the thing with one blow — or am I growing old, Bedwyr?”

“No,” said Bedwyr. “That is Cei. It is always the old who are fiercest and most impatient.” And he made music on his harp that was like a snapping of the fingers, and grinned across the fire at Cei, who grew purple behind his russet bush of beard.

“Why you — you lop-eared nightingale —” I caught his eye and he subsided into mutterings like an old hound when it is put out.

“Peace, children, and listen to me. I have let battle be forced upon me because I have very little choice in the matter, but also because I believe that by doing so we may well gain our own choice of fighting ground.”

“How then?” Cei put aside his anger for more important matters.

“By waiting until the last possible moment, to allow the enemy down into the most southerly tongue of Caledon; by not taking our own battle stand until they are within a few miles of the road itself. The forest is more open there, and on the watershed we shall have the river marshes below on either side to narrow the pass for us.”

“For them also,” Cei said.

“Aye, but at the least it will even the length of the battle lines and keep them from spreading out to engulf us, as they could well do with their greater numbers; and I think that we can take care of their flanks in advance. Therein lies one of the few advantages of a defensive action.” I took a bit of charred stick from the fire and began to draw the pattern of fighting as I proposed it. I was not a stranger to Cit Coit Caledon, for I had hunted there, and ridden with the patrol more than once; it is no bad thing for a war leader to gain some knowledge of the lay of his campaign country.

And so on a March morning, drawn up in a somewhat unorthodox battle formation across the highest part of the watershed, we waited for the Barbarians.

The red-hot moment that we had waited for had come at last, signaled to us by the Dark People in smoke smother across the hills; and within an hour, all of us, save for a small and most evilly tempered garrison left behind in Trimontium, had been on the march. It had been almost noon when the signal came through, and it was far into the night when we reached the agreed war camp and found Owain with his slim column from Castra Cunetium there just ahead of us. Found there also Druim Dhu, standing by one of the newly kindled campfires. But I had scarcely recognized him at first, through the war patterns of clay and red ochre daubed on his face and slight naked body. Only when he came and touched my foot in the stirrup in the moment before I dismounted, I had known him for sure by the familiar gesture. His hair was bound back with thongs, and the quiver of small deadly arrows hung well-stocked from his shoulder.

“The Wolves have made camp on the shoulder of Wildcat Ridge by the Mark Stones,” he said. (To the People of the Hills, the Saxons were the Sea Wolves and the rest the Painted People; and the Tribes and the Scots raiders, when banded together, they often spoke of simply as “The Wolves.”)

“How far is that?”

But distance meant little to Druim and his kind; they reckoned by the time that it took to make the journey. “If they start at first light, they will be well into the high ground whence the two rivers spring when the shadows lie so —” He stooped, and setting the foot of his bow to the ground, drew a line where its shadow would fall about three hours before noon.

“So. How many do they muster now?”

“Between two and three times the number that follow you, my Lord Artos. But there are brothers of mine — a few — not so far from here, who have scouted for you all this time and will serve none so ill as warriors.”

And indeed a score or more of the Little Dark Warriors did come to our fire in the night, and disappeared again by morning. Whether they were the full tally, I did not ask. I had long since learned that where the Dark People were concerned, one did not ask; to try to use them as normal troops would have been like trying to forge a spear blade from the substance of a hill mist. One simply accepted what they gave.

We had snatched a few hours of sleep, and been astir at first light, with the fires fallen into ash, and after tending the horses, were gulping down our own hurried meal of hard barley bannock as we moved off into position, when the word came that the enemy were on the move — God knows how they got it through so quickly, for one could not send a beacon chain through the forest; but I thought that once just before first light I had felt rather than heard a distant rhythmic mutter of sound that might be a hollow log slapped by an open palm.

And so now, in the chosen place a few miles north of the road, our battle line was formed, and we waited for the first sign of the enemy. I was not happy, for I have always been a cavalry leader; my ways of battle are the ways of the horse, and yet save for our light riders far out of sight on the advanced flanks, the struggle ahead of us must be fought out on foot. Impossible to use heavy cavalry effectively in this scrub woodland, though it was far less dense than a few miles farther north. Waiting with my own squadron in the reserve, a little behind the center, I looked along the battle line, wondering, now that it was too late to make any change, whether I had made the best use of my strength. I had dismounted the whole of the Company, the heaviest and steadiest troops that I possessed, and set Cei and Bedwyr to captain them in the center of the battle line. On either flank the light spearmen, and beyond again, on the outer horns, the archers and slingers in isolated groups, curved forward so that the whole line formed, as well as it could in that rough country, a deep bow to bring the advancing Wolves under flank attack before ever their center could make contact with ours. Beyond again, hidden from sight, I knew where the knots of light riders waited; and I prayed to all the gods that ever gave ear to fighting men, that no pony would betray them by whinnying at the wrong moment.

We were strung across the neck of the watershed, making the best use of the natural slope of the country, with our left flank resting on a burn that ran down to join the young Cluta, and our right on the steep thorn-tangled scarp that dropped to the marshes of the Tweed. Behind me, if I looked southward, I should see the great hills of the frontier country, where half the rivers of Valentia were born, and through which, by way of Three Hills or its outpost fort, the roads ran to the Wall. Ahead of us opened a broad clearing where the young bracken was beginning to spring, and beyond, the forest rolled away and away like a dark sea washing about Manann the ancient heartland of the Pictish kingdoms; the Dark, the Forest, the ancient and savage and unknown; so that we stood as it were in the pass between two worlds, to hold it for one against the other.

It was a gray spring day, early in the year for the start of the campaigning season, and the starry white wood anemones turned their shivering backs to the wind and the scuds of rain that blew in our faces and darkened the crimson of the dragon on our standard to the color of half-dried blood. I thought how Arian’s mane should be blowing back across my bridle hand, and I missed him sorely, missed his fidgeting and quickening, the thrusting urgency of him between my knees. My mail shirt dragged at my shoulders, weighing more heavily upon me with the long standing, the tramping up and down; and I wondered again if I had done a foolish thing in keeping the Companions in full war gear while dismounting them. But it was weight I wanted in the center, weight and steadiness; mobility was for the wings.

Ahead of us the forest seemed very dark — and indeed I do not think that was fancy, for I have noticed always the same thing about Cit Coit Caledon; partly of course it is the pines, the dark slow tide of pines such as we do not know in the South, but it is the same in the thinner places where the hills and the high moorlands thrust up through the scrub of oak and birch and hazel like gaunt shoulders through the rents in a shaggy cloak; always in my mind there is this quality of darkness, of wolfish menace in the land itself. It was as though maybe it were a very old forest and crouched brooding over secrets that it would not be well for men to know.

Something stirred behind me, and a dark shadow slid between my elbow and that of my standard-bearer. I caught the whiff of fox, and again Druim Dhu was there. “They are less than eight bowshots beyond the rim of the dark trees — a great host, a very great host. We shall have good hunting by and by,” and he showed white “teeth in a flash of silent laughter — his laughter was always silent, like his sister’s. With the stripes of clay and ochre ring-straking his slight brown limbs like the early light striking through the bushes, it was hard to be sure, save for his voice, that he was there at all; and then suddenly — he was not.

But almost in the same instant, as though it were an echo or aa answer to his words, we heard the roaring of the Scottish war horns, like some huge stag belling under the trees.

I saw a ripple run through the ranks ahead of me as a cat’s-paw of wind through standing barley; and the whole center, who until now had been leaning on their spear shafts, crouched down, each man under his covering buckler, with his spear leveled in welcome to the nearing enemy.

The wind fell away, and somewhere a magpie scolded sharply; then a long gust came booming up through the woods driving a dark scud of rain into our faces, and with the wind suddenly there was a crashing among the undergrowth that rolled swiftly nearer, and a flicker of movement all along the shore of the clearing. It strengthened and gathered form and substance and became a swarming of men under the spring-flushed trees. The Wolves were here. They set up a great shout at sight of us, and came on, keeping what line they could among the bramble hummocks and the tangle of last year’s bracken, sweeping toward us at a steady, menacing wolf lope that seemed slow and yet ate up the ground with a terrible speed. I had just time to make out the barbaric horsetail standards of the Saxons in the center, the white gull-wing gleam of the Scots’ lime-washed shields on the left wing and the brave blue war paint of the yelling Picts on the right. It was a very great war host, as Druim Dhu had said, spreading out as it seemed forever, and as they swung nearer, I felt the tremor of the ground under their feet, as one feels it when a river breaks its banks after rain in the hills, and the very rocks are afraid.

Indeed I felt at that moment much as a man must feel who stands in the track of floodwater and sees the spate roaring toward him. I felt rooted in my heavy ring shirt, and knew that the same sense of nightmare was howling through every man of my heavily armed center.

The foremost of the Barbarians’ rush was level with the tips of the curved horns now; and I prayed that the archers might not loose too soon. “Mithras, slayer of the Bull, hold back their arrow hands! Lugh of the Shining Spear — Christos, let them not loose too soon!”

The Barbarians were well within the trap when first from one side, and then a heartbeat later from the other, a ragged flight of arrows leapt from the undergrowth and thrummed into their midst. Men pitched and fell in their tracks, and for an instant under the barbed hail the charge wavered and lost impetus; then with a yell, gathered itself together and stormed on, men stumbling and falling on the flanks where the arrows wrought most havoc. Before me I saw the tense backs and braced shoulders of the men crouching over their leveled spears. . . .

A volley of light throwing axes came rattling against the bull-hide buckles of our front rank, and hard after it the enemy sprang forward yelling like berserkers upon the waiting spears. Shield rank and shield rank came together with a rolling thunder; the cries of men who had found the spears, the ring and clash of weapons and the grinding clangor of shield boss on shield boss; and the breath-held tension of the moments before had gone roaring up in bloody chaos. The Saxons were striving to take our spearpoints on their oxhide shields, jamming and bearing them down into uselessness, and in the first crash of the onslaught they were succeeding as, despite the weight, our center was forced back by the sheer ferocity of the rush. Then the Companions rallied and thrust forward again; swords were out now, and through the tumult and the weapon ring I heard Cei’s bull voice roaring to his men, and all along the center the two battle lines were locked together like two wild animals struggling for a throathold. Behind me and on either side I felt the squadron taut as runners in the instant before the white scarf falls, but they were all the reserves I had, and I could not afford to fling them in too soon.

The Companions were superb. Unused to foot fighting as they were, they were holding stubbornly to the ground that they had taken, in face of the furious pressure that was being hurled against them. Once they even thrust forward again, before they were once more slowed into clogged immobility. For long moments that seemed to stretch into an aching eternity of time, the two centers strained together, so that even above the boil of battle it seemed that one could hear the gasping breath and the throb of bursting hearts. Men were falling on both sides behind the shield-walls, tangling the feet of the living, as the long death-locked battle mass heaved and swayed to and fro, with never more than a stride’s length lost or won. God alone knew how long that hideous grapple might last, draining us of men, with nothing gained, and I knew that the moment to fling in the reserves had come. I put up my hand in signal to the trumpeter beside me, and he raised the aurochs horn on its baldric and sounded the charge, clear and high above the surf-roar of battle. It was the charge for the outlying cavalry knots as well as for us, and as we burst forward I was aware of a new sound swelling the tumult; the swift drub of horses’ hooves sweeping in from the wings.

The struggling ranks ahead parted to let us through, as foot parts to let through a cavalry squadron. We had taken the blunt-ended wedge formation, and like a wedge we drove on into the battle mass of the enemy, yelling the old war cry, “Yr Widdfa! Yr Widdfa!” Chins driven down behind our shields, gray mailed wedge broadening behind the Red Dragon, we drove forward deeper and deeper into the Saxons, while at the same time — though I had no thought to spare for them now — the little bodies of horse had charged in on flank and rear, driving the Barbarians down upon our wedge. Archers and javelin men, tossing aside their now useless weapons, drew sword and closed in from either flank. The Wolves were driven in on each other, becoming so densely packed that each man’s shield hampered his comrade’s sword arm, and the dead clogged the feet of the living, and all their valiant efforts to force their way on only drove them the more deeply to our iron wedge.

Even now I am not sure how the day would have gone had the enemy been one war host, instead of four, each with their own ways of fighting, with little idea of how to combine, and nothing save courage and savagery in common between them. As it was, quite suddenly their battle mass began to waver in its forward thrust as its ranks thinned, and at last the moment came when with one supreme effort, with a slow long straining heave, we seemed to lift and upsurge and spill over them. Then, split well nigh in two by our wedge, overwhelmed and battered blind, they broke and gave back and began to stream away, trampling their own dead and wounded underfoot, trampled down in their turn by the small unshod hooves of the light cavalry.

We broke forward after them, cutting them down as they ran. Among the Saxons, only the great ones wore ring mail, while the lesser folk had no better body armor than a leather jerkin, and that only if they were lucky; the Scottish warriors, save again for their nobles, had little more, and the Picts, from the greatest to the least, had flung themselves into battle naked save for a leather loin guard. Yet some would not run but stood to face us, or retreated step by step, still fighting, and were cut down in their tracks, still proud beyond yielding. The hummocky ground among the bushes was clothed with trampled dead, and as we thrust on, I was aware of others running beside the war host; little shadows that slipped low from tree to tree. Something passed my ear with the high whine of a gnat, and the Saxon in front of me ran on a few steps with a small dark arrow no bigger than a birding bolt quivering between bis shoulders, then dropped and lay writhing. The light riders were taking over the chase from us now, and I called off the Companions as one calls off hounds; most of them could not have heard me, and I dared not use the horn to sound the Retreat, for that would have called off the others also; but one by one, finding the chase taken up from them, they were dropping out, panting in their heavy war gear, wiping reddened sword blades on handfuls of long grass, turning back to me, gathering into their squadrons again. The sounds of the pursuit were dying away, and the wind and the soft chill rain still came scudding down from the north over our hunched shoulders as we turned back to our battle line and last night’s camp beyond.

“Look there,” said Bedwyr, suddenly walking at my shoulder. “And there —” He pointed. And there was a man lying among the dead with a little dark arrow in his back; and then another man, and another. . . .

“The Old Woman said they were the viper that stings in the dark,” I said. “The pursuit is in sure hands, it seems.”

It is in my mind that that was the cruelest fight I ever fought. It cost us dearly, too, for our own battle line was marked out now with its random line of bodies, piled in places two and three deep. More than fifty of the Companions died that day, apart from the auxiliaries, and jaunty little Fulvius lay among them, taking part of my boyhood with him; and Fercos who had followed me down from Arfon in the first spring of the Brotherhood. I looked up at the faint brightness beyond the drifting cloud wrack overhead, and saw that it was not yet much past noon.

The sun was still above the western moors and the weary work that follows battle not yet completed, and I was with Cei and Gwalchmai snatching a brief respite beside one of the watch fires while the tatterdemalion gaggle of women who had followed us as usual got some kind of meal together, when a crashing and rattling came through the undergrowth as though some great beast were heading our way, and as I turned quickly toward the sound, a man rolled, or rather was thrust, into the firelight. A tall man, naked and war-patterned with the Pictish woad, with a mane of tawny hair and frowning tawny eyes, who stumbled and almost fell, then caught himself proudly erect once more. I saw that he was dripping blood from a wound in the left knee; his hands were twisted behind his back and he was surrounded by a knot of little dark warriors. In the first moment of seeing him as he stood there in their midst, I thought suddenly of some proud wild thing brought to bay by a pack of little dark hounds, save that no hounds were as silent or as deadly as those that thronged about him.

“My Lord Artos,” one of them said, and I saw that it was Druim Dhu, “we have brought you Huil, the spearhead of your enemies. Here is his sword,” and he stooped and laid it at my feet.

The man in their grip was far spent, panting like a beast that has been run hard; sweat gleamed on his forehead when he raised his head to give me look for look, flinging back the tawny hair that he had no free hand to thrust out of his eyes.

“Is that true?” I demanded.

“I am Huil, Son of Caw.” He gave me the answer in Latin little worse than my own. “And you, I know, are he that they call Artos the Bear, and I am in your power. That is all that we need to know, you and I. Now kill me and be done with it.”

I did not answer at once. The man before me was not a Great One in the way of Hengest, but he was a man whom other men follow; I am such a one myself, and I recognized the kind. He was too dangerous to let go free, for if I did so, men would gather to him again. There were three courses open to me: I could have his sword hand struck off, and let him go. None of his own would follow a maimed leader, for by their way of thinking to do so would be to run upon disaster. I could send him south to Ambrosius, safely chained like a wild beast for the arena; or I could kill him now. . . .

“Why did you do it?” I asked, and the question sounded stupid in my own ears.

“Revolt against my rightful lords and masters?” He looked at me with something of laughter even in his despair and white exhaustion. “Maybe because, like you, I would be free, but for me, freedom is a different thing.”

Others were gathering about us to look on, his name running from one to another, but he never spared them a glance; his fierce tawny gaze held unwavering to my face, as though he knew that it was the last thing he would see. “Kill me now,” he repeated, and the tone was an order. “But strike from in front; I never yet took a wound in the back, and even in death a man has his vanities. Also let you first unbind my hands.”

“There is nothing to bruise any man’s vanities in dying with his hands bound,” I said. I have wondered since whether I was wrong, but at the time I was taking no risk. I made a small gesture to Cei, who had stepped forward, his own sword drawn, to the captive’s side. Huil Son of Caw smiled a little, confronting the blow with open eyes. Under the blue war patterns I saw how white his skin was, where the brown of the strong neck ended at the collar bone; white as a peeled hazel nut — until the red fountained out over it. The blow was swift, and he made it swifter by leaning to meet it.

That was the only time I ever had to do that particular thing.

We cut his bound hands free, then, and later, when our own dead had been laid away, we gave him honorable burial, deep against the wolves, and his sword with him. Only we raised no mound or cairn to mark the spot for a place of gathering. The wind was dying away and the rain turning soft and steady, what the folk of the Cornlands call a growing rain, as Cei and I turned away from the dark plot of newly turned leaf mold.

“It is in my heart that we shall not need to fight another pitched encounter among these hills,” Cei said. “Your sword hand is something heavy.”

“There are more wolves in Caledonia than died today.”

“Truly. But I think that they will not again face the Bear as a war host in open battle. Better from now on, to look for the ambush behind the hill shoulder and the knife in the back, Artos my friend.”

CEI was right. There were no more enemy hostings, no more pitched battles among the lowland hills. Instead, from that time forth began a different kind of war, a war of raids and counter-raids, a patrol ambushed and cut to pieces in the hill mists, a village burned out in return, a stream poisoned by having dead bodies dumped into it. . . . It was more wearying than any campaign of open fighting could have been. For one thing it never quite ceased, even in winter, and so there was never a time when one could sit back and sigh and loosen the sword belt. That first summer and autumn I was striving by every means in my power to strengthen my hold over the great boss of lowland hills that was the chief barrier between the northern wilds and the rest of Britain; gaining the friendship, where I could, of the surrounding British chieftains, putting the fear of the gods into those that needed it. Presently I must follow up Cit Coit Caledon by turning on the last coast settlements to drive back the Sea Wolves, as I had done around Lindum. But first the lowland hills must be secured. And we carried fire and avenging sword and the terror of heavy cavalry that they had never known before, among the Duns and villages and the old turf-walled hill forts west and northward even into the heart of the Pict Country.

About a month after Cit Coit Caledon the supply train got through to us from Corstopitum, bringing, besides the grain and arrow sheaves, the spearheads and tallow and bandage linen in the great leather-covered pack panniers, the money (less than had been promised) to pay the men. And not many days later the supplies from Deva arrived at Castra Cunetium, together with that year’s draft of young horses, which Cei, who had taken over the outpost by that time, sent on to me. With the supply trains came our first news of the outside world in half a year. For me the news came in a long dispatch from Ambrosius. Oisc and the boy Cerdic who had escaped from Eburacum had both reappeared in Cantii Territory. The Saxons under Aelle had captured Regnum and sacked Anderida, slaying every man of the British garrison, but Ambrosius had succeeded in hemming them into the narrow coastal strip under the South Chalk though as yet he had failed to drive them from their new hills. It did not make particularly good hearing, but it all seemed oddly far away.

For Flavian also there was news, but his came up with the Deva supplies. He took the letter off by himself to a quiet corner of the camp before breaking the thread that held the two leaves of the tablet together; and later he came to me where I was looking over the new horses, the letter still in his hand. “Artos — sir —” He was almost stammering in his eagerness, filled with a kind of grave delight.

“It is from Teleri. She has got a child!” But I had known as soon as I saw the fool’s face.

I said the due things and asked, because clearly he was waiting for that: “Is it a boy — or a girl?”

“A boy,” he said. “A son.”

“Then we will wet his head in his absence, this evening when the day’s work is done.” I set my hand on his shoulder in congratulation. But God knows how I envied him.

Autumn came, and found us well strengthened in our position, with a fruitful summer’s work behind us. Winter passed and again the alders by the horses’ drinking pool flushed red with rising sap. I had had few dealings with the Dark People since Cit Coit Cale-don; they brought us news from time to time, and in return we gave them all that we could spare from the winter grain stores. That was all. But I knew always that I had only to hang a garland on the Lord of the Alder Trees, and before night, Druim Dhu or one of his brothers would come walking into the fort, and the knowledge was good.

That spring also, I had another earnest of the Dark People, for a small plant with silvery leaves and a fragile white flower sprang up in the rough grass that now covered the place where the girl lay with our nine war-horses above her. I suppose a seed must have fallen from the dried herbs that Old Woman had given me, when I burned them for the girl’s spirit, and lain fallow for a year. I never saw that flower growing anywhere else.

In the second spring, leaving Cei now in command at Trimontium, and Bedwyr harrying the East Coast Settlements, I took Amlodd my armor-bearer, Flavian and Gault and a few others, no more than would make up a hunting party, and rode far to the southwest, into Dumnonia hunting runs. To me it felt almost painfully homelike to be in that land of heather moors and little shining lochs within the sounding of the western sea; for the tribesmen were the same breed as those of Cador’s kingdom who were my own kin. But I had not come into those western moors to savor the sour-sweet of homing hunger, but in the course of my efforts to bond together the loyal tribes and draw them to the Red Dragon.

Maglaunus, one of the greatest of the clan chieftains, proved also one of the most chancy to deal with. He was not in the least hostile, merely determined, as it seemed at one time, that I should have no opportunity of speaking at all of the matter that had brought me to his Dun, and I knew, as one knows with a shying horse, that it would be useless and worse than useless to force him willy-nilly at the thing that startled him.

On the first and second of the three days that I had determined to spend on him, we hunted by day, and by night listened to the harper in his high painted timber hall, while around the lower fire his three black-browed sons and the younger of the household warriors tussled together like hound whelps or diced or tried to fly their hawks at sparrows among the house beams; and there was no chance to speak apart with the chieftain at all.

And then on the third day — it was the eve of Midsummer — he seemed to change his mind and be ready at any rate to talk; and for most of the daylight hours we walked to and fro in the little orchard below the Dun where the fisherfolk hung out their nets to dry among the apple trees, arguing.

Maglaunus had a grievance, though he put the matter temperately enough and without rancor. “Since you burst asunder Huil’s war host, the Scots raiders have returned to their usual ways; already by last summer’s end they were slave-reeving along the coast. It is no good turn that you have done us, my Lord Artos, and if I give you this help that you press for in men and weapons, I shall but have the less with which to defend my own coast.“

“Would you rather, then, have had the whole Barbarian war host sweeping through your lands?” I demanded. “You may have that yet, Maglaunus the Chieftain, if I run short of fighting men and the wherewithal to arm and feed them.”

“That is as may be,” he said, “but the Scots raiders are sure.”

And from that, reason how I would, as we paced and turned and paced again under the small wind-bent apple trees, it seemed that I could not move him.

The day had seemed much like any other at first, save that most of the men were out rounding up the cattle for the ceremonies of the night; but when the light began to fade, a change came, the change that comes over every Dun and camp and village when the light fades on the eve of Midsummer. And when Maglaunus and I turned back to the evening meal with our arguing still unfinished, the Dun within its strong turf walls was throbbing like a softly tapped drum. In the chieftain’s hall as in every lesser houseplace, men and women ate quickly and silently, as though their thoughts were turned to another place. And when the eating was done, the women quenched every hearth fire and torch flame, so that the whole Dun held its breath in a waiting darkness; and in the darkness they went out, men and women, children and dogs, every soul in the Dun whose legs would bear them, a thin trickle at first but gathering more from every houseplace as they passed, through the gateway in the strong turf wall and away toward the moors that rose a mile or so inland.

Flavian and I and the rest of us, following Maglaunus and his household warriors, joined ourselves to the dark silent ripple of passing shadows, and went with them, no more than shadows ourselves in the deepening summer dusk.

It was an evening of warm whispering airs, when even the darkness that bloomed the earth seemed no more than a transparent wash of shadow over the day, and the sky was a vast green crystal bell still echoing with light in the north. But as we climbed higher, the night grew less clear, and faint diaphanous wisps of mist began to drift about us, the chill smell of the sea seemed stronger than it had done lower down, and the earth became an older and a stranger place touched with the same dark potency as I had sensed in Melanudragil. We came to a place where the heather swept up into a little boss crowned by a circle of standing stones; nine tall stones I counted, that seemed, with their feet in the heather and the faint mist wreaths about their heads, to have checked into stillness from some mysterious movement of their own, only in the moment that our sight touched them.

On the level ground below the circle, where the heather fell back to make a dim dancing floor, a great stack of logs and brushwood waited in darkness, as the Dun was waiting, for the Need Fire, the Fire of Life, to be reborn.

So it had been among the Arfon hills in my own boyhood, and when the crowd spread into a great expectant circle, and from their midst nine young warriors stepped out to work the fire drill, I remembered like a physical thing the vibration of the bow cords under my hands, and my father’s world meant nothing to me and my mother’s world claimed me for its own.

They made the fire at last, after the usual long-drawn struggle, the curl of smoke and the sparks that fell on the waiting tinder, the sudden miracle of living flame. A great cry of joyful relief burst from the watching crowd — odd how one always has that fear: “This year the fire will not come and life will be over.” To me it was this year — this year the dark will close over our heads, this is the black wilderness and the end of all things, and the white flower will not bloom again. . . . The small licking tongue of flame, so easily to be quenched, was a promise, not of victory maybe, but of something not lost, shining on in the darkness. And I shouted with the rest, out of the sudden hot exultancy leaping in my belly. They crowded forward to kindle torches at the wisp of crackling straw and thrust them into the dark waiting fire stack. And the inert mass of logs and brushwood woke from its sleep of darkness and roared up into the heat and smoke and leaping glory of the Midsummer Fire. The dark shadows leapt into reality as the red light touched them, and became rejoicing men and women, and as the licking flames spread farther and farther into the pile, long-drawn shout on shout of joy rose from them, breaking at last into a chant of praise that seemed to beat like great wings about the hilltop.

The chanting sank and the joy changed to merrymaking, and for a while the wonder was gone from the night. The thing became a beer-drink, as it always does, as though men, having come too near to the mystery, sought now to shut it out behind a comfortable barrier of noisy and familiar things.

When the fire had sunk low, presently they brought in the cattle from the great hill corral where they had been penned in readiness, and began to drive them through the sinking flames that they might be fruitful in the year ahead. That too was from my boyhood; the wild-eyed, wide-horned heads uptossing in the firelight, the terrified mares with their foals at heel, the torrent of bobbing fleeces, embers scattered under a smother of sharp hooves, sparks caught like burrs in the horses’ manes, the tumult of neighing and lowing, the shouts of the herdsmen and the barking of the driving dogs.

Men ran to dip branches into the scattered embers behind them, capturing the Need Fire before it was lost again, whirling them aloft until they became mares’ tails of smoky flame. Some set off running back toward the Dun, the flames from their branches streaming bannerwise behind them. Others began to caper and dance, fantastic as marsh lights in the faint mist. Men and women began to be drawn into the dancing, and suddenly there was music for them to dance to — or perhaps the music came first; I have never known.

It was a thin music, a silver ripple of piping, but strong, for it drew the dancers after it as though strung on its shining strand. And as they pranced by, two by two in a chain that lengthened every moment, weaving in and out of themselves in the ancient intricate patterns of fertility, circling always sunwise about the scattered fire, I saw the woman.

She was standing somewhat aside, strangely remote from the wild scene around her; half lost in shadows save when the whirling torchlight touched her tawny unbound hair.

I knew well enough who she was; Guenhumara the chieftain’s daughter. I had seen her again and again during the past three days as she waited on us, her father’s guests, with the other women of the household. I had even received the guest cup from her hands, but beyond knowing with the surface of my mind that she was there, I had had no awareness of her. Now, it may have been the mood of the night, the piping and the mist and the tossing firebrands; it may have been only the heather beer — she entered in at my eyes as I looked at her, and I was aware of her in every fiber of my being. It was the first time in ten years that I had looked at a woman so, and even as I looked, she started and turned as though I had touched her, and saw me.

I started toward her, laughing like a conqueror: God help me, I was very drunk, but I think not with beer alone, and caught her by the wrist and swung her into the dance. Others joined on behind us, and far ahead, drawing us on and on, rose the white piping. We were flinging the circle wider now, to noose the nine stones within it, weaving in and out between them as garland makers weave the stems of flowers for a festival, casting our noose about the glowing embers of the fire, sometimes, at the will of the leader, crossing between fire and stone circle to form a vast figure of eight, twisting, looping, on and on until the mist circled with us above the heads of the stone dancers . . . and the loose hair of the woman flung the scent of vervain in my face. . . .

The spell was broken by a far-off cry, and the urgent blaring of a horn, small with distance, from below the Dun. The dancers checked and scattered apart, all eyes straining toward the coast, where, from the direction of the boat strand, fire that was certainly not the fire of Midsummer leapt up into the night.

“The Scots! The Scots are come again!”

I dropped the woman’s wrist and shouted for my Companions. “Flavian! Amlodd! Gault-here to me!”

They gathered to my summons, shaking off the fumes of heather beer and ancient magic as they came, and freeing their swords in the wolfskin sheaths. Many of Maglaunus’s warriors had come to the Midsummer Fire with no weapon save their dirks, according to the old and honorable custom; but we had learned the unwisdom of such custom, and paid away honor long ago, as part of the price for success against the Sea Wolves; and so the cry of Scots raiders found us better ready than it did many of our hosts.

Ahead even of the chieftain and his household warriors, we raced for the coast and the distant flames. We stumbled among the heather roots, hearts hammering within us, into the little sea wind that brought us the smell of burning ever more strongly as we plunged downward. There were two big skin-covered war currachs in the shallows below the boat strand, and dark figures leaping between us and the blazing bothies of the fisherfolk. Maybe they had counted on there being no watch kept when the Midsummer Fires were burning. They set up a shout, and closing together, swung around to meet us; and yelling with the little breath that was left in us we charged down upon them.

I remember little but confusion of what came after. Maybe that was the heather beer and the lingering spell of the past hour. To go into battle drunk is a glory worth experiencing, but it does not make for clear and detailed memory. Certain things I do remember, through a red mist of personal rage for the cutting short of wonder and beauty that I felt dimly might never come again, I remember how the heather ran out into soft sand, and the sand slipped and yielded beneath our feet; I remember the chill of surging water around our ankles when we had driven them from the keel strand to fight in the shallows; and the white lime dust of the Scottish shields turned golden by the flame of the burning currachs. I remember the uncouth tumble to and fro of a dead body at the water’s edge, and somebody crying out with a great and savage laughter, that here were two less crows to come to supper uninvited in another year. And the surprised discovery that some time during the fighting I had taken a spear thrust in the shoulder and my left arm was dripping red.

I turned landward, sober now that the fighting was done, with my lovely red rage sunk to ashes, and holding my shoulder, began to make my way back toward the Dun. One of the women would bind the wound for me. The dead lay scattered like storm wrack along the tide line, rolling to and fro in the shallows as the little waves came in. Dawn was not far off, and between the flare of burning fisher huts and burning currachs there was enough light to see by; and close under the turf wall of the orchard where Maglaunus and I had walked up and down arguing yesterday, I saw the dark body of a man sprawled somewhat apart from his fellow dead. Something else I saw, too, and halted abruptly in my tracks, looking, not at the dead raider, but at the living dog who stood guard over him. I had heard — who has not? — of the great Hibernian wolfhounds; now I was seeing one. Standing there, head up and alertly turned to watch me, he was magnificent; tall at the shoulder as a three-month foal, his coat brindled in shadow bars of black and amber, save where his breast shone milky silver in the flame light, just as Cabal’s had used to do. He must have belonged to the chief of the raiders; such a dog would be worth his place in any war party, and the gaping wound in his flank showed that he had not shirked the fight. I took a step toward him. He never moved, but he rumbled deep in his bull throat. I knew that if I took another, he would crouch to spring, and at the third, he would be at my throat. But I knew also, in a flash of certainty, as swiftly irrevocable as the moment of lost virginity, that this was what I had been waiting for ever since old Cabal died, the reason why I had never called another dog by his name.

Flavian and Amlodd were with me, and the chieftain’s three sons. I gestured them back. “Sir — what —” Flavian began.

“The dog,” I said. “I will have the dog.”

“My lord, you should get that arm tended before you start troubling about any dog,” young Amlodd urged.

“My arm can wait. If I lose the dog I shall not find his like again.” I knew how they were glancing at each other behind my back, telling each other with their eyes that the Bear was still battle-drunk or maybe dulled in his wits from loss of blood.

Then Pharic the second son said, “Come up to the Dun now, Lord; he’ll not leave his master, and my brothers and I will come down again and rope him.”

“You fool!” I said. “Let you drag him off his dead master on the end of a rope, and he’s ruined forever. Now go, if you don’t want to get your own throats as well as mine torn out.”

We had been speaking at half breath, and all the while the great hound made no movement, and his eyes like greenish lamps in the flame light never left my face.

I squatted on my heels against the orchard wall, careful to make no movement that might seem to him hostile, and settled into stillness. After a while I heard the steps of the other men moving reluctantly away through the long shore grass. I could feel the blood still trickling, though more slowly now, through the fingers of my right hand pressed over the wound, and wondered how long I should be able to hold out; then put the thought away from me. Still the dog did not stir. I was striving to master his gaze with my own, and because no dog can bear for more than a few heartbeats to meet the direct gaze of a man, every little while he would turn his head aside to lick at his wounded flank; but always after a few moments he would turn it back to me again. I suppose to anyone looking on, it must have seemed ridiculous that I should spend the hours after battle in trying to outstare a hound; even to me, it seems a little ridiculous now, but it was not at the time. The thing was a battle of wills between us, that went on and on. . . . Dawn had come, the fires in the fisher village were quenched, the shadows of the small wind-shaped apple trees stretched far across the rough turf toward the sand, and little by little began to shorten. Once or twice the dog dropped his head to nuzzle at his lord’s body, but always his gaze came up again to my face. His eyes that had been green lamps were amber-colored now, lucent, warm with the warmth of the sun, but lost in a great bewilderment, and I knew that behind them his love for his dead master was fighting me.

The sea wind ruffled the long grass and swung the shadows of the branches, and the gulls wheeled crying above the ripple-patterned sand that the tide had cleansed of battle. I heard a movement behind me, and someone said, quiet and urgent, “Artos, you must come — you must have that gash dressed. For God’s sake, man, don’t you see you’re kneeling in blood?”

I said, “Listen, if any man comes near me or the dog before I give him leave, I swear I’ll kill him.”

The end came not long after that, suddenly, as such things generally come. It was a little like the moment in the making of horse or hawk, when the wild thing that has been fighting ypu with all its wild nature, fighting to the point of heartbreak for both of you, suddenly accepts, and gives of its own free will the thing that it has struggled so long to withhold. (For the thing is always in the end, in the essence, a free yielding by the beast, never a forced conquest by the man. With a dog, in the normal way, the thing is different, for a dog is born into man’s world, and tries from the first to understand.) It passed between us, the acceptance, the recognition; a two-way thing as love or hate is almost always a two-way thing. For a long moment there was no outward sign. Then I made the first move, slowly holding out my hand. “Cabal — Cabal.”

He whined piteously, and licked at the dead man’s neck, then looked at me again, making a small uncertain forward movement that checked almost as soon as it was begun.

“Cabal,” I said again. “Cabal, Cabal, come.” And crouching a little, inch by inch, he came. Midway between us he checked and swung back to his dead master, and I knew now his whole shadowy soul was being torn in two; but I could afford no mercy, now. Mercy was for afterward. “Cabal, here! Cabal!” He hesitated still, his great proud head turning from one of us to the other; then with a piercing whine, he came on again, crouching almost on his belly as though he had been flogged, but with no more looking back. He crept to my outstretched hand, and I began to fondle his ears and muzzle, letting him lick the blood crusted between my fingers, and all the while calling and crooning to him by his new name, repeating it over and over again. “Cabal — you are Cabal now, Cabal, Cabal.”

Presently, talking to him still, I fumbled off my belt as best I could, and slipped it one-handed through his broad bronze-studded collar. “We are going now, you and I, we are going, Cabal.” It did not matter what I said, it was the voice and the constant repetition of the name that was forming its bond between us. I pushed off from the orchard wall, and contrived to struggle to my feet, swaying with a queer drained weakness and stiff as though I were the man lying face down in the long grass, the man whose dog I had taken from him. I turned back toward the remains of the fisher huts, and the track up to the Dun, and saw Flavian and Amlodd waiting where they must have waited all night at the turn of the orchard wall, scrambling to their feet also.

The great hound paced beside me as I began to waver toward them; yet all the while I was aware that something of him belonged still to his dead master, and that to complete what we had begun would take many careful days. . . . Suddenly between one step and the next, sea and shore were spinning around me; I saw Flavian’s face start forward, and then roaring blackness came up at me like a wave out of the ground.

When the light returned, it was not the cool light of the seashore morning, but the smoky yellow glimmer of a lamp. And as my head cleared a little, I found that I was lying on the piled sheepskins of the bed place in Maglaunus’s guest lodging, with my left arm, as I discovered by an unwise attempt to move, bound close to my side. A shadow that had been squatting beside me leaned quickly forward, saying, “Lie still, sir, or you’ll part the wound again,” and the voice, and the face as I squinted at it, trying to focus, were young Amlodd’s gruff voice and anxious freckled countenance.

“Where is the dog?” I demanded. My tongue felt as though it were made of boiled leather.

“Chained among the guard dogs in the forecourt,” said my armor-bearer. And then as I made some movement of angry protest, “Sir, we had to chain him up. He’s savage. We had to tangle him in a fishing net before we could get him at all, and even then most of us got mauled.”

I cursed feebly. God knew what harm they had done, whether I should ever win the dog to me now. “Is he unloosed with the rest at cow stalling time?”

“No sir. I tell you he’s savage; no one can get near him even at feeding time, save the Lady Guenhumara. Would one let a wolf run loose in the Dun? By and by, when you are stronger, if you still want to see the brute, a couple of us will strap his muzzle and get him along here somehow.”

I shook my head. “I wish to God you hadn’t chained him, but I can — see that you had — no choice, unless it was to kill the poor brute — outright. But since you have chained him — nobody must loose him again, excepting me.”

“No sir,” said Amlodd, with such evident relief that I laughed, and found that the laughter wracked my shoulder.

“Get Flavian for me. I must send word to Cei that — I am laid by here with a spear gash in my shoulder, but that I’ll be — back in Trimontium so soon as I can sit a horse.”

“That has all been seen to, sir,” said Amlodd.

And a woman moved forward out of the gloom beyond the lamp, and leaned over me with a bowl in her hands, and the strong tawny braid of her hair swung forward and brushed across my breast. “There has been enough of talking. Drink now, and sleep again. The more broth, and the more sleep, the sooner will you sit your horse again, my Lord Artos.”

I saw that she was Guenhumara, the chieftain’s daughter; but I was sober now, and I scarcely remembered at all how I swept her into the Long Dance with me up on the moors last night; the scent of vervain no longer clung to her hair, and the only thing that interested me was the hound, and what Amlodd had said concerning her and Cabal. “Why does he let you near him, when — he will not anyone else?” I mumbled, a little jealously, God forgive me, with the sleep that was in the broth already lapping its dark waves about me.

“How should I know? Maybe a woman spoke kindly to him and gave him warm scraps from the cooking, in his old life, and we are not terrible to him as men are, who chained him.” She took the bowl away. “But even I, he will not have to touch him.”

“There are other things than touching. Keep him alive for me if you can.”

“I will do what I may. . . . Now sleep.”

I lay in the guest place as the days went by, tended by the Lady Guenhumara, and the old woman like a hoodie crow who had been her nurse; while Flavian and the rest of the Brotherhood came and went, and Maglaunus himself would come and sit on the hide-covered stool, a hand on either widespread knee, and talk of all things under the sun, asking many questions. Some of these questions concerned my own way of life, whether or not I had a wife, or a woman to share my bed, and I told him “None,” fool that I was, and never saw where his questions were leading.

On the third day my head grew hot and confused, and the wound was angry despite the women’s herbs, and I remember little more with any clearness, for a while. The fever burned itself out after a time, and the wound began to heal. But the moon that had been young when the Scottish raiders came was young again when at last I was able to drag myself out, doddering as an hour-old calf, to sit in the sunshine before the guest place door, and watch the dunghill cock strutting among his drab hens by the midden. He was proud and possessive, that cock, the sun waking lights of beetle-green and bronze in the arched arrogance of his tail feathers. Presently, as I watched, he made a prancing spread-winged dash at a chosen hen; but she was just beyond his reach, and in the very act of leaping upon her, he was brought up short at the end of his tether, and tumbled, furious and undignified, in the dust. Three times it happened, before suddenly I had had enough of watching, and began to pull up brown flowered grass stems from around the doorpost, and twist them into a braid.

As soon as I was strong enough I made my crawling way to the forecourt. It was a hot noon of high summer, and the air danced in the forecourt that was empty of human life. The barn dogs lay asleep or snapping at the iridescent flies that buzzed about them. I looked around for the great wolfhound. It was a few moments before I saw him, for he had dragged the full length of his chain into the narrow band of shade along the foot of the peat stack, and the broken black and amber of his hide blended perfectly into his background. I stood still and called, not expecting any response. But he stirred and raised his great head from his paws, as though the name I had given him touched his memory. “Cabal,” I called, “Cabal,” and next instant he was up and straining toward me at the end of his chain, half choked, yet contriving to fling up his head and bay — a wild imploring note.

“Soft, softly now. I come!”

As soon as he saw me coming toward him he ceased his struggling and became quiet, standing with head up and grave golden eyes to watch me, his tail beginning uncertainly to swing behind him. The wound in his flank was healed, but for the rest, he was in a grievous state, his self-respect gone from him so that he was filthy with ordure, his coat staring and every rib starting through his once-beautiful hide, his neck rubbed into sores where he had dragged and dragged against his heavy collar. I learned later that he had refused to eat almost all the while. He must have come very near to breaking his heart.

I stooped and slipped free the heavy chain, and rubbed his muzzle and his ears — extraordinarily soft ears, for all the harshness of his coat — and he leaned against me with a tired sigh, so that weak on my legs as I still was, I staggered and almost went down.

When we left the forecourt he walked free beside me, with his muzzle touching my hand. I took him back to the guest place and shouted for whoever happened to be near. Flavian came running. “Go and get me some meat for this bag of bones,” I demanded, while the dog stood by me, his mane stirring under my hand. “Hell and the Furies! How did you let him get into this state?”

“Amlodd told you, sir; we couldn’t loose him. There’d have been murder done; and he would not eat, chained.”

“The Lady Guenhumara —” I began.

“If it were not for the Lady Guenhumara he would have died. But even her, he would not let touch him. She tried it once, to bathe the wound in his flank. That was when she got bitten.“

“Bitten?”

“Not badly. Did you not see the tear in her arm when she came to tend you?”

“No, I — did not notice.” I felt shamed then, but was still angry. “And could you not have told me?”

He confronted me with those grave level eyes of his. “No, sir. There was nothing that you could do; you would simply have fretted yourself into another fever.”

And it was true. After a moment I admitted that, and nodded. “As you say. Go now and make love to the woman in the cook place for the meat. Then go away and keep the others away also; I have work to do.”

And so presently with my hand still on his shoulder, and a huge bleeding mass of pig offal before him, Cabal ate his fill again at last.

A few days later, when I judged that the work was far enough advanced, and when more strength had returned to me, I slipped a strap through his collar in case of trouble with the other hounds, and took him with me into the chieftain’s hall at the time of the evening meal. I was late, for I had been trimming my beard which had grown overlong while I was sick, and the task had taken longer than I had allowed for it; and most of Maglaunus’s household warriors were already gathered. They sprang to their feet as I entered with Flavian and the rest of the Companions behind me, and gave us the salute for a chieftain, drumming with their dirk hilts on the tables before them, so that Cabal pricked his ears at the uproar and growled menacingly until I spoke to him in reassurance.

“It seems that you are a conqueror in all things,” Maglaunus said, as I came up to the high seat, with the great hound stalking beside me.

Supper flared into a feast of triumph for our victory over the raiders, and I sat with Maglaunus at the upper end of the hall, on a seat spread with a magnificent red stag’s hide, with Cabal crouched alert in the strewed fern at my feet, and ate broiled bear’s hams and fine pale barley bread and ewe’s-milk curds, while Flan the chieftain’s harper sang the song that he had made in my honor because it was I and my Companions who had played the foremost part in that matter of the Scots. It was not such a song as Bedwyr would have made, but it had a good strong lilt to it like the swing of a west coast swell and the dip of oars — it would have made a good war boat’s song to keep the rowers together.

In Maglaunus’s hall they still followed the old custom of the Tribes, and the women did not eat with the men, but apart by themselves in the women’s place. But when the eating was over, they came in to pour the drink for their menfolk, while the little dark slaves who had served throughout the meal melted away or curled up among the hounds about the fire. So this evening, when the eating was done, Guenhumara came in as usual, walking up the hall with the other women behind her. She had tended me in my sickness as often as old Blanid her nurse, and far more gently, but save for those vivid moments of awareness beside the Midsummer Fire, I had never seen her at all. Nor did I seem to see her now. And yet, looking back, I can remember very clearly what she looked like, and that is a strange thing. . . .

She wore a gown of blue and russet checkers, clasped somewhere about the shoulder with red amber and gold, and the long tawny braids of her hair had small golden apples at their ends which swung a little as she walked, so that one expected them to ring like bells. She came up the hall slowly, carrying a great cup of dark green glass between her hands, and her face was so strongly painted that while she was still far down the hall I could see the green malachite on her eyelids; and the way her brows were drawn out long and dark with stibium, like the dark, dagger-sharp wings of a swift.

She came on slowly, slowly, while the hall fell quiet behind her, and mounted the step to the dais, and gave the brimming cup into her father’s hands.

Maglaunus lurched to his feet and raised the cup, spilling a little as he did so. I saw the liquid dribble through his fingers, golden and almost as thick as run honey. He turned to look at me under his russet brows. “Shlanther to Artos the Bear. I drink to you, my Lord the Count of Britain. May the sun and the moon shine on the path of your feet, and may your sword arm never grow weaker.” And he tipped back his head and drank; and when he had done so, stood holding the cup and looking at me over it with a kindling and speculative eye. I knew that something else was coming, and with a sudden warning beating in my head, I waited for what it might be.

“I have been thinking much of those things we spoke of before the raiders came — you see that I was right in that matter — but none the less, it grows in my mind that we must indeed come to stand shield to shield, even as you have said, against the Barbarians in the time that lies ahead. Therefore it grows in my mind also that there should be made a bond between us to bind our shields together; and to the bond between us, I drink again.”

When he had more than half emptied the great cup, he held it out to me — I also had risen by that time — saying, “Drink you also.”

The light of the flames on the central hearth shining through the thick glass filled the cup with a dimly golden fire as I took it into my hands. “To what bond shall I drink?” I asked, with the small clear sense of danger still beating in my head.

He said, “Why not to the bond of kinship? That is the surest bond of all. Let you take Guenhumara my daughter from my hearth to yours. So shall we be kinsmen, knit together by the blood tie of brother to brother and father to son.”

For an instant I felt as though I had taken a blow in the root of my belly. I have never known what made Maglaunus broach the matter so publicly, risking his daughter’s humiliation before every warrior in his hall; maybe he desired to put all his rejoicings together and make of the evening one grand and glorious blaze, and never thought of my refusing what he offered. Maybe he thought to force my hand. Maybe he was a gambler — or merely wiser in the ways of men and women than he seemed. Without will of my own, my startled sight jumped to Guenhumara’s face, and I saw the tide of painful color flood up to the roots of her hair, and knew too that she had had no warning, but that unlike me, she had feared in advance; and that the heavy paint of her face had been put on as a young man takes up his armor. My mind was racing, seeking in all directions for a way out for both of us that would not make me enemies where I so sorely needed allies. Then I heard myself saying, “Maglaunus, my friend, you lay great honor upon me, but you must forgive me my answer for tonight. It is forbidden, taboo for me from my birth, even to so much as think of women, in each year between the dying of the Midsummer Fires and the kindling of the Lammas torches.”

It sounded a wildly unlikely excuse, but after all, it was no more unlikely than the taboos laid upon Conary Môr, the Scottish hero, that he should never drive right-handwise around Tara nor sleep in a house from which firelight shone at night. . . . At all events, since no man could disprove it, it might at least gain me a breathing space. . . .

There was a murmuring all down the hall, a whispering among the women; the chieftain’s brows drew together and they all but met across the bridge of his nose, and a dark flush burned beneath his eyes. Guenhumara, on the other hand, when I cast another quick glance at her, was so white that the paint stood out sharp-edged and ugly on her lids and cheekbones, though she met my look quietly and with the shadow of a smile.

Then the deep rumble of his laughter boomed into the moment’s hush. “Aye well, what is five days? We can pass the time cheerfully enough, and at the end of it you shall give me your answer. Meanwhile, drink to the bond of friendship between us, my Lord Artos the Bear!”

Five days! I had forgotten how long I had lain sick; the lateness of the summer. Well, five days’ respite was better than none. “To the bond of friendship between us,” I said, and drank off what was left of the sweet fiery stuff and gave the cup back into Guenhumara’s hands as she stood to take it from me; and felt as I did so, that her hands were shaking. She smiled, and took it with a lovely dignity that made me the more aware of her armor, and turned to rejoin the other women.

The uneasy silence in the hall was engulfed suddenly in the snarling flurry of a dog fight as Cabal, who had lain quiet at my feet all evening, only raising his hackles and snarling a warning from time to time whenever one of the other hounds, stiff-legged and hostile, drew too near, rose with a full-throated roar of fury and flung himself against three of them at the same tune. (I was to learn, when I knew him better, that he was not a fighter among his own kind, but that when he did fight, odds meant nothing to him.) Most of the other dogs flung themselves into the battle, and for a while we had hot work to separate them, even with a few firebrands and the contents of a pot of beer flung into their midst; and when finally I had succeeded in strangling Cabal off a howling adversary and most of the other dogs had been kicked outside to finish their fighting where they would, the scene that was just past seemed to be forgotten, and the beer went around faster than before.

I was as grateful to Cabal as though he had sprung into battle in defense of my life.

NEXT morning I whistled Cabal to heel, and took to the moors behind the Dun, heading for the high empty places as I had always done in time of stress since I was a boy. Also I was bent on testing my strength, for once Lammas was over, the sooner I was away from the Dun of Maglaunus the better. It was a day of hurrying storm clouds and swiftly changing lights that came and went across the great slow billows of the moor where the heather was coming into flower, so that at one moment a whole hillside would be bloomed dark as sloes, and the next, the color of thin spilled wine. And as the light came and went, changing and scurrying about the moors, so my thoughts changed and shifted, scudding about my mind as I walked. The only thing that remained constant amid the turmoil was my determination not to take Guenhumara from her father’s hearth. It was not only that I flinched from the idea of taking any woman, but quite simply that I had no place for her in my way of life, no life to give any woman. Yet I knew that that would not satisfy Maglaunus; and there was the war alliance with him to be taken into the account, the hope of men and aid that we desperately needed, the necessity of bonding the tribes together that was our only hope of throwing back the Barbarians. Last night he had said, “Drink to the bond of friendship between us.” But would that hold, after the slight that, however I tried to soften it, I must put on his daughter in four days’ time? And the woman herself? Would it be better for her (supposing that I could get the word to her) to save her pride and maybe gain her father’s anger, by herself refusing the marriage — or to be shamed by my refusal before the whole tribe and keep her father’s favor? And would it make any difference whether she refused or not? Which was worse for a woman, the shame or the danger? The danger or the shame? As to my chances now of winning Maglaunus to the Red Dragon, whichever way things went, they were not worth a brown tufted rush in the wind. Oh gods! What a tangle! I cursed, and stumbled on, not taking much notice of anything about me, until a chill scurry of rain on the back of my neck woke me to my surroundings, and to the knowledge that I had walked too far and was spent.

I sat down in the lee of a hump of thorn trees, with Cabal lying nose on paws beside me, while the rain squall blotted out the moors, and then blew over and left the world refreshed and shining. I sat on for a while after, listening with one ear to the rich contented boom of bees in the young bell heather, and when I was somewhat rested, turned westward again and set off toward the coast, at an easier pace.

Presently I was walking into the eye of a wild sunset, with gray clouds racing across a western sky of saffron and silver gilt, and the sea running translucent gold to the skyline; and found that I was heading directly toward the hill shoulder with its ring of standing stones where we had danced on Midsummer’s Eve. They stood up, shadow-bloomed, dark with ram against the tumbled brightness of the sky. The shining lances of the sunset were in my eyes, and it was not until Cabal pricked his ears at one of the standing stones, that I saw a figure standing, in the shadow of it. I whistled the hound to my side as he started forward with an uncertain sound between a snarl and a whimper, and caught him by the collar. But the figure never moved, indeed in its utter silence it might have been one of the standing stones, and it was not until I was almost within reach that I knew it for Guenhumara in a tunic of unbleached gray sheep’s wool that was one in color with the stone behind her.

“My Lady Guenhumara! What is it that you do here?”

“I was waiting for you,” she said composedly.

“But how could you know that I should come this way?”

“Maybe I called you.”

Fear touched me with a cold fingertip, and I was remembering another woman in a saffron gown, standing in a bothy doorway with that same air of stillness of having stood there since time began, saying, “I have waited for you a long time . . .”

Then Guenhumara laughed. “Na, I am no witch to comb my hair and call down the moon. I saw which way you walked, and came out after you, that is all. Here, from the Nine Sisters you can see far across the moors, and I hoped to be able to meet you on your way back. One cannot talk in the Dun without the very jackdaws crying the thing that one talked of from the rooftops next morning.”

“I can well believe it. What is the thing that you would say to me?”

She had moved a little toward me, out from the shadow of her standing stone, and the light of the stormy sunset tangled in her hair and turned it to an autumn fire. She said, “When the Lammas torches are lit, what will you say to my father the chieftain?”

I was silent, not knowing what to reply; and after a pause, she said in a low faintly mocking voice — her voice was the lowest I have ever heard in a woman, yet very clear, vibrant as a bronze bell. “Na, my Lord Artos, you need not say it; I know. I knew while you were still searching under my father’s eyes for your way out.”

“Did I show it so clearly to all the hall, then?”

“To no more than half, maybe.” Her eyes were fixed on my face, and suddenly I saw them dilate until the black swallowed all the color; and she laid the mockery aside as though it were a weapon. “I came to tell you something that it may be well for you to know, before the Lammas torches. If you take me as Maglaunus my father wishes, he will give you one hundred men with their mounts, for my dowry. That I know in truth. . . . Our horses are not so great as yours, but they are good horses, bred in the first place from some cavalry mounts of a Legion that was lost somewhere among the Lowland hills in the far-off days, and we have kept the strain pure.”

I was more startled, I think, than I had been when Maglaunus first bade me take her; and when I spoke at last, it was more harshly than I had meant. “Did Maglaunus your father send you to tell me this?”

“If so, I would have died before I came!”

“Would you? I want horses and men, but not — like that.”

I could scarcely have complained if she had spat in my. face, but she only said with a small quickly suppressed sigh, “No, I suppose that you would not,” and then, bracing herself to a yet more rigid stillness, “Artos, until now, I have counted myself a proud woman; and I am laying my pride at your feet for you to trample it into the dirt if you choose. I beg you to take me.”

“Why?”

“Because I am shamed if you do not. It means little enough that you caught me with you into the Long Dance at Midsummer, though my father sets some store by it; men will say only that you were drunk. But my father offered me to you in the hall before all men, and if you refuse his offer, do you know what the whole Dun, the whole tribe, will say? They will say that you have had me, on Midsummer Eve or later — the Great Mother knows that I have been often enough alone with you in the guest place. They will say that you have had me, and found me not to your taste. It will be hard to live with open shame, in my father’s hall.”

“Is there less shame,” I said ruthlessly, “in buying a husband for a hundred mounted men?”

“It is usual enough for a woman to be chosen for her dowry. And the shame would at least be only between you and me, not open before all men.”

“Would that make it easier to bear?”

She made a small, infinitely weary gesture. “I don’t know. For a man, maybe no; for a woman, maybe yes.”

“Listen,” I said urgently. “Listen, Guenhumara. You do not know what it is you ask for. We carry with us a few ragged whores in the baggage train; they help to care for the wounded and they keep the lads happy; but save for their kind, the life that we lead is no life for a woman. Therefore if we are fools enough to marry, we leave our wives at their father’s hearths, hoping, one day, to see them again. Flavian will tell you as much; he married a girl at Deva, and he has a son more than a year old, but he has not seen him yet, nor the girl since she had scarce begun to carry him. It may be that next year I shall be able to spare him a few weeks to be with them, it may be not.”

“You are the Count of Britain. There is no man to refuse you your woman with you, at least in winter quarters.” And I saw by her ruthlessness how desperate she was in her purpose.

“I am the Count of Britain, and therefore my woman would have the hardest life of all, for I should have left for her only the few rags of myself that Britain does not claim.” I was fighting as it were with my back to the last ditch, fighting not only her but something in myself.

“She might make do with those, in the winter nights,” Guenhumara said gently. And then she laughed, suddenly and wildly. “But you have no need to fear that I shall prove too clinging a wife — I am more like to knife you one night in your sleep!”

“Why, when I have done your will?”

She did not answer at once, and now I could not see her face against the still brightening fires of the sunset. And when she spoke again, her voice had lost its vibrant quality. “Because you will know the truth. Because pity is not much easier to bear than shame.”

I had not meant to touch her, but I caught her by the shoulders then, and turned her to the light so that I could see her face. The feel of her was good under my hands, light-boned and warm with life. She stood quite unresisting, looking up at me, waiting. And in the harsh westering light I saw her, for the first time, and not through firelight and the heady fumes of pipe music and heather beer. I saw that she was a tawny woman, tawny of skin as well as hair, and save for that hair with no especial beauty. I saw that her eyes were gray, under coppery brows that were level as the dark brows of her brothers, and the lashes tipped with gold like the hairs of a bay horse. I think it was in that moment also that I became aware of her atmosphere, the quiet that lay beneath her surface, even under the stress of the present moment. Young though she was, so much younger than Ygerna, it seemed to me that she had the essential quietness of autumn that contains both promise and fulfillment, while Ygerna had all the painful craving urgency of spring. “Listen, Guenhumara,” I said again. “I don’t love you. I don’t think it is in me to love any woman, not — now. But if I am to take you, it will not be for any reason that should give you cause to knife me in my sleep, nor even for gratitude because you tended me while I was sick, and kept the dog alive for me. I shall take you because I can have a hundred mounted men with you — did you not say yourself it is usual enough for a woman to be chosen for her dowry? And because I like the feel of you, as though you were a well-balanced spear, and I like the sound of your voice.” She made no sign, no sound, only went on looking at me; and I plowed clumsily ahead. “But you will have so much the worst of the bargain; go home now and think, and be very sure, and when you have thought enough, send me word.”

“I lay awake all night, and have had my fill of thinking,” Guenhumara said.

The first cold drops of the next rain squall were spattering about us, drawing a blurred gray veil across the last of the sunset, and I heard the gulls crying as they swept by. “You will get wet,” I said, oblivious of the fact that she was wet already from the earlier rain, and pulled her against me and flung half my cloak about her; I knew by now that she was pleasant to the touch, but even so the nearness of her body was unexpectedly sweet in the warm dark under the folds, and the sweetness of it dizzied me a little. I put my arms around her and caught her hard against me, and bent my head and kissed her. She was a tall woman, and I had not far to go to stoop as I had done sometimes before. Her lips were cold and wet with rain under my mouth, and the ram hung chill on her hair and lashes, and for a moment there seemed nothing there, no more than if I had kissed the tall gray standing stone behind her. Then the fire of life sprang up within the stone, she seemed to melt, and leap up toward me within herself, and her mouth woke under mine into swift, eager response. And almost in the same instant she was remote again as one of the Nine Sisters. She slipped from my arms and from the shelter of my cloak, and turned and ran.

I was left looking after her, by the lichened standing stone in the rain, while Cabal, who had watched the whole scene sitting on his haunches at my side, glanced up at me, his tail thumping softly behind him. I was still feeling that instant of wild response, so quickly come and lost again that now I could scarcely believe that it had existed at all. But deep within me I knew that I had not imagined it.

In a little, when I had given her time to be well away, I whistled Cabal after me and set off once more for the Dun. The rain had died out again, and the wine color of the wet heather was turning smoky in the dusk.

That night before I slept, I sent for Flavian to the guest place, and told him what must be told. None of the Companions had spoken to me of the chieftain’s offer and the taboo that I had invented on the spur of the moment, though I suppose they must have spoken of it among themselves; and Flavian did not speak now, only stood with one arm against the rooftree and stared into the flame of the little seal-oil lamp, until I had to break the pause myself.

“Well?” I said.

He brought his gaze back from the lamp. “And you are going to have her with you in winter quarters?”

“Yes.”

“Then, of course, since we are to have wives among us at Trimontium, I may send for Teleri?”

My heart sickened and sank, and it was my turn now to stare into the flame of the seal-oil lamp. “No, Flavian.”

“But how is the case different, sir?” His voice still had the levelness it had as a boy.

“Because I am the Count of Britain, the captain of you all,” I said. “Sometimes the leader may have what he denies to his followers. Because I am the leader and there is only one leader, what I do does not make a precedent, but if I give you leave to do the same, how may I refuse it to any man in Trimontium — and within a year we shall be overwhelmed with pregnant women and squalling cubs, a danger to themselves and a danger to us, clogging our sword arms and dividing our hearts!” But the words tasted evil in my mouth, for never before had I used my leaderhood to take for myself anything that was not for my men also; not so much as a mouthful of sour soup or a wound dressed out of turn.

We were silent for a while, and then he said, “Don’t do it, sir.”

“I shall have a dowry of a hundred men and horses with her.”

He looked up quickly. “And that is your whole reason?”

“It is reason enough.”

“Then marry her and leave her at her father’s hearth, as I have had to leave Teleri all this while.”

“That — is not in the bargain.”

He was silent again, a longer silence this time, filled with the soft boom of wind and the hush of storm rain across the thatch, for the night had fulfilled the promise of the sunset. The door apron flapped and bellied against its restraining pegs, and the lamp flame jumped and fluttered, sending fantastic shadows licking along the rafters. Then he said, “This is the first time you have ever done anything unjust, sir.”

And I said, “That is not such a bad record. Bear with me in my injustice, Flavian, I am only a mortal man with my sins heavy on my shoulders, not an archangel.”

“We are not the kind to know much about archangels, we of the Brotherhood; we have thought of you always as — maybe a little larger than life, that is all,” he said, and moved very slowly toward the doorway.

I let him almost get there, but I could not let him go through it. I was fiddling with my sword belt, on the point of slipping it free, for I had sent Amlodd away early; then I abandoned it. I said, “Minnow, don’t desert me.”

He turned instantly, and I saw by the jumping light of the seal-oil lamp, the suspicious brightness of his eyes. “I think I could not.” He came back quickly and dropped on one knee to free the sword belt himself. “Where does Amlodd keep the silver sand? This clasp needs burnishing. He’s not such a good armor-bearer as I was.”

But I lay awake most of the night with a bad taste in my mouth.

In the days that followed, the life of the Dun went on seemingly much as usual, but down in the dark beneath the surface of familiar things, a wild tide was rising. No outward sign told of its rising, and had I been of my father’s world, I doubt that I should have sensed anything at all; but my mother in me knew the look in men’s eyes, and heard the dark familiar singing in the blood.

Three days before Lammas, Maglaunus the chieftain was not in his accustomed place at supper in his high hall; but no man glanced at the empty seat with its great black bearskin spread over it, nor spoke of his absence, for we knew the reason for it. No man can take the godhead upon himself without time apart to make himself ready. . . . Always there must be one to wear the Horns; one to give life and fruitfulness out of his own substance, the King and the Sacrifice in one, to die for the life of the people if need be, as the Christos died. Sometimes it is a priest that becomes the Incarnate God, sometimes even a Christian priest, for in the wilds and the mountain places men do not set such rigid frontiers to their faiths as they do in cities; sometimes it is the king, the chieftain, and that is the old way, and holds within it the true meaning. Lammas fell on a Sabbath that year, and for the first part, the day was as other Sabbaths.

Early in the morning we went down from the Dun to hear mass in the small bracken-thatched church that served both the Dun and the fisher village below it. For once, Cabal was not with me, being too much taken up with the hut where Maglaunus’s favorite hunting bitch was in season; but I remember that Pharic had his hawk with him — indeed he seldom moved far without her — and carried her still, when we reached the church door and went in under the stone lintel. There was room in the church for Maglaunus’s household, and for the small band of Companions who followed me, but for few more, and so for the most part the lesser folk of both Dun and village remained outside in the forecourt like a low-walled sheepcote. It made little difference, for they could hear all that went on through the open doorway, and at the appointed time the three monks of the Holy House at Are Cluta, who lived in the humpbacked bothy beside the church, would bring out to them the Bread and Wine.

I heard little of the service, for with my eyes schooled straight in front of me, I seemed all the while, with every sense I possessed, to be watching Guenhumara with her maidens about her, in the women’s part of the church. When the time came for the Sacred Meal, I knew how she looked around for her brothers, for Pharic most of all, that they might go up together, and I knew that they had always gone up together. I went up next, and knelt at Pharic’s other side — his left side on which he carried his hawk; and it is so that I remember the small unvoiced battle of wills between priest and princeling, the one denying and the other maintaining the right to bring his hawk to the Lord’s Table. Clearly it was a long-standing struggle, and when after a few moments the priest lowered his eyes in defeat, it was a defeat that he had known many times before.

The three dark-frocked brethren must have realized the chieftain’s absence, and understood its reason. They must have known, when they carried out the Host to the kneeling warriors and fisher-folk in the forecourt, that m a few hours they would be up on the moors with the Nine Sisters, stretching eager hands to an older and deeper-rooted Lord than the Christos. But they made no sign; they were withdrawn, showed nothing in their quiet faces; and I knew that they would ask no questions.

When we came out again through the forecourt gate, with the mass of worshippers already thinning, Pharic, still carrying his hawk, was gentling the back of her neck with one finger, so that she bobbed her unhooded head, hunching her shoulders in pleasure. “It is a good hawking day,” he said suddenly, and glanced about him, at his brothers and the rest of us. “The Lord knows we may not have many more chances before the autumn molt, and I am away up to the moors. Laethrig, my Lord Artos — Sulian — Gault — who comes with me?” And swinging on his heel without pause for any answer, to shout for horses and others of his hawks to be brought down.

But indeed the plan fell in with our mood well enough, for I think all of us wanted some outlet for the unrest that was growing in us, something to fill the hours until dark. And when the horses were brought and a couple more hawks, each with its familiar glove, we mounted, and gathered up a few dogs to flush game for us, and headed for the marshy glens northward, in search of heron.

We had a good day’s hawking, but the thing that remains clearest of it in my mind came when Pharic had seemingly wearied of the sport; and lagging behind with him, while the rest moved on to try some pool farther up the glen, we came walking the horses up a long slope where the midges rose in clouds from the bracken as we brushed by, and over the crest of the ridge reined in and sat looking down into a widely shallow valley running to the marshes and the sea. Directly below us a small leaf-shaped tarn lay as in the hollow of a big quiet hand; and listening, I thought that I could catch the whistling call of sandpipers that always haunt such places. And between us and the pebbly shore lay all that time had left of an ancient steading, the ground dimpled with hollows and bush-grown mounds that must once have been bothies and byres and store pits, and showing here and there curved outbreaks of stones that had faced a turf wall, so that I was reminded of a village of the Little Dark People. But in the midst of the place, on ground a little higher than the rest, the stone drum of the old strong point, the chieftain’s tower still stood to almost twice the height of a man, and had a roof of ragged thatch.

“What happened to it?” I asked, after we had sat looking down in silence for a few moments.

“No fire nor sword; not the Scots this time. The place was too prone to flooding in the winter, and some forefather of mine with a misliking for wet feet abandoned the place to build the present Dun on higher ground.”

I had something of the story from this one and that. “It seems not quite abandoned, even now. So far as one may see from here, that thatch is sound enough, and someone has been cutting bracken fodder over yonder on the far side of the valley, not more than a week or ten days since, to judge by the clean yellow gleam of it.”

“The herdsmen use it at the spring and autumn herding, and sometimes in the summer, on passage from one grazing ground to another. They keep a roof on the tower for shelter, and fodder for the beasts and maybe a creel or two of rye meal for themselves stowed above the house beam. It’s a humble end, isn’t it, for a stronghold that’s known the clash of weapons and the music of the chieftain’s harper — but there’s times, even now, when the place comes into its own again for a while and a while.”

“And what tunes would those be?”

“When there is a marrying in the chieftain’s line. Always it has been our custom that when the sons of the chieftain’s house bring home their brides, they must pass the first night in the old Dun. That is for courtesy to the chieftains of the older time — to bring the incoming women to their hearth.”

I glanced around at him. “The daughters, too?”

“The daughters, maybe, though for them it is not greeting but farewell. When a woman marries she goes to her husband’s hearth.” He turned his head deliberately, and looked at me under black brows as level as his hawk’s wings when she rested on the upper air. “It is not forbidden to the daughters, too.”

We looked at each other, the horses shifting under us eager to be moving on, and the little breeze that could not reach down into the midge-infested glen behind us stirred the hair on our heads and brushed through the tawny late summer grass. “Guenhumara has told you, then,” I said at last.

“Something — it is a matter that concerns me, after all, since if she brings you a war band for her dowry, it must be I who lead it.”

“You especially?”

“It is for one of the chieftain’s sons to lead such a band. Laethrig is my father’s first son, and Sulian is already knotted in a girl’s long hair, while I — I am free, and have an itch to the soles of my feet that I shall not find easement for, here in my father’s hall.”

I looked at him in the clear upland light, the set of his head that matched that of the hawk on his fist, the hot red-brown eyes under the black brows; and I thought that he might be well right in that, and thought also that it would be good to have this frowning youngster among my captains.

“I can maybe find the means for easing the soles to your feet,” I said. “And if there is a like itching in the palm of your sword hand, I can find you a fine way to appease that also.”

“Then while my sister is your woman, I am your man. But I forget —” He flung up his head and laughed. He had a hard short laugh that when he grew older would be a bark like a dog-fox’s. “You may not speak of such matters until the Lammas torches are lit!”

“It is none so simple a thing, to be faced with the offer of a wife, all unwarned, in a hall full of strangers,” I said, “and with more matters than a bride-wreath hanging on the Yea or Nay.”

“Sa sa, I can well believe it, and a man might snatch at any means to gain him breathing space. Only when the breathing space is past, and he has made his choice, and struck his bargain, let him abide by it, remembering that hall full of strangers, who are not strangers to the woman, but her own people, and remember that among them she has three brothers, and among those three brothers, one in particular.”

I had liked the boy before, and I liked him the better for that clumsy threat. “I will remember,” I said. And I suppose I must have shown my liking in some way, for suddenly his dark bony face lit up as though in answer, and the moment of stress was gone like a plume of thistle seed on the small soft wind.

“And speaking of the Lammas torches,” I said, “the shadows are growing long — time, maybe, that we were away back to the Dun.”

He shook his head, looking back the way that we had come. “Ach, no need for a while yet. It is good out here; a good time of the evening, and we are none so far, across country. We can meet up with the others at the glen head, and send two or three of the young ones back with the hawks and the dogs; no need for the rest of us to be making for the Dun at all. We can ride straight over to the gathering place, and leave the horses in the little wood close by.”

So it was that dusk had deepened into the dark, and a blurred moon was rising over the high moors, when we dismounted and tethered the horses in the hazel thicket below the gathering place, and set our faces to the steep heathery slope beyond. The little soft wind of the day had quite died away, and the sky was overspread with the faintest rippled sheet of thunder haze, and even as we climbed, there was a flicker of summer lightning along the hills. The circle of the Nine Sisters stood above us on its shoulder of the moors, darkly outlined against the snail-shine of the moon, and about its feet the dark multitude was already gathering. We could hear the awed hushed murmur of tongues, the faint brush of feet in the grass. . . . As we stepped out from the heather onto the smooth turf of the dancing floor I saw that every face was turned inward to the circle of standing stones, and looking the same way, I saw — or thought I saw — that despite the luminous clearness of the night, a faint mist clung there still; no, not so much a mist as an obscurity that one could neither see nor see through. So must the magic mists have been, that the priests of the older world could raise for the cloaking of an army.

Pharic had disappeared, with his own lads about him, and young Amlodd, still panting with the speed that he had made from the Dun after his errand with the hawks, came dodging through the multitude to join the little knot of Companions. But he, too, kept his face turned all the while to the Nine Sisters. The tension of thunder was on us all, but another tension also, that rose and rose as the moments passed, until it reached almost to the limit of physical endurance; as certain prolonged notes of a horn will do. I heard Flavian gasp beside me. I was sweating in the palms of my hands, and it began to seem to me that at any moment now the whole night must crack wide open under pressure of this intensity of waiting.

The faint whisper of scuffing feet and low-pitched voices had fallen away into complete stillness, and out of the stillness came the Beginning. Not any note of horns, but the sudden overwhelming stench of animal potency, as though some great rutting beast were nearby.

A low thrilling murmur, a kind of moan, rose from the crowd, and as one man they surged inward almost to the outer surface of the standing stones, as though drawn by the thing within them, the thing that drew me with the rest, as it had drawn me when I was a boy among my own hills, but so long ago that I had forgotten. . . . The mist seemed to have gathered more thickly within the stone circle, and out of the midst of it, tangible as the musky stink of rut, was flowing a vast Power. Somewhere a pipe called silverly, small and remote as a bird over the moon-washed moors, more compelling than the war horns of an army. And as though at the command of the pipe, the mist began to lift. Somewhere at the heart of it came a blurred blink of bluish light, that strengthened into a small clear jet of flame springing from between a huge sweep of shadowy antlers.

On a throne of piled turf in the exact center of the Nine Dancers, his arms folded on his breast, sat a tall man, naked and shining, with the head of a royal stag.

At sight of him the people set up a great throbbing cry that rose and rose and seemed to beat vast wings about the hill shoulder; and then in one great surge of movement like a breaking wave, they flung themselves to the ground.

And I, I was on my knees with the rest, the old men and women, the warriors and the children, the maidens with the magic vervain and the white convolvulus braided in their hair, my face hidden in my hands, and the feel of young Amlodd’s shoulder shaking against mine.

When I looked up, the Horned One had risen and was standing with arms upstretched, showing himself to his people. The flame between the glorious crowning sweep of antlers bathed his breast and shoulders in a radiance that was like the cold blue fire that drips from the oar blades in northern seas; his flanks and thighs seemed insubstantial as woodsmoke, and the shadows engulfed his feet. And slowly, as though drawn upward by his raised arms, the crowd rose to their feet, and again the wild greeting cry was beating about the hill shoulder; and this time it did not die away, but changed by little and little into a rhythmic chanting, into the ancient intercession for the harvest and the mating time that one hears with the loins and belly rather than the head.

It was not quite as we sang it among my own hills, but though word and cadence may vary a little, the core of the mystery remains the same. The ritual slaying of the God, the dark gleam of the sacrificial knife, and the wailing of the women, and the rebirth corning after. . . . I remembered Bedwyr with his harp beside the horse-dung fire at Narbo Martius when the world was young, and the merchant in his blanket robes swaying to and fro. “So the women used to sing when I was a boy — singing the lament for Adonis, when the crimson anemones are springing from the rocks. . . .” And I remembered the bracken-thatched church in the cool light of that morning and Guenhumara kneeling at the Lord’s Table; and I saw the oneness of all things.

And then the ritual was over, and the reborn Lord had seated himself once more on his throne of turfs; and I thought that there had been other beast-headed figures among the standing stones, but could not be sure for the mist that seemed to hang there still. And people were catching up unlit torches from the fringe of the dancing floor, and crowding forward to kindle them from the blue flame burning on the very forehead of the God.

The light flared brighter moment by moment, a wheel of ragged fire-tongues circling the Nine Sisters. The fierce coppery light beat farther and farther up the weathered flanks of the standing stones, driving back the moonlight; and among the tawny smoke, now glimpsed, now lost, were surely uptossed heads, horned and winged, hound-snouted and prick-eared. . . . And in the very heart and center of the flaming circle, the stag-headed figure sat immovable, the red patterns of ritual death and ritual birth still on his breast and thighs, and the old dry scars of war and hunting such as men carry who are not gods. I had lost my sense of oneness, and I could have wept for it like a child who falls asleep at the warm hearth and wakes to find itself in the alien dark beyond a closed door; only I knew that it had been there. . . .

Something of the godhead was fading from him, as the blue light dimmed before the red flare of the torches, so that one became aware once more of the man’s head within the mask. And yet he lost nothing by returning humanity. The god was incarnate. None the less the Life of the People because we knew that he was also Maglaunus the chieftain, none the less terrible and apart.

All at once the crowd fell back a little, and there was empty torchlit space between me and the still figure on the high turf throne. The antlered head was turned toward me, and I felt the eyes behind the mask reaching out to mine across the emptiness; felt at the same time, as though it were in myself, the appalling weariness of the man, the first lonely and terrible awareness of returning self.

“My Lord Artos, Count of Britain.”

Maglaunus’s voice was scarcely recognizable, hollow under the mask. He made a small summoning gesture with one hand and was still again. And I knew that the moment had come. I walked forward across the trampled turf and stood before him. He tipped his head far back to look at me, and for an instant I caught the flicker of reflected torchlight behind the eye slits under the stag’s muzzle. “I am here,” I said.

“The Lammas torches are lit,” he said. And that was all.

AN old warrior with a headdress made from the feathers of a golden eagle — it is in my mind that he was one of the chieftain’s many uncles — came forward to stand beside the turf throne and speak with me as to my taking Guenhumara, as to the bonds of friendship, and the dowry that she would bring me. For it was not for the Horned One to speak of these things, though it would have been well enough for Maglaunus the chieftain at other times. I heard the old man talking, and the mention of a hundred armed and mounted men with the chieftain’s second son to head them; I heard my own voice making the replies that courtesy demanded. I saw the little blue veins that writhed about the old man’s forehead, and the torchlight shining through the silvery down at the base of the eagle’s feathers. But all the while my awareness was going out beyond the old man, beyond even the Stag-Headed One on the throne, to the place where the torches had moved apart, leaving a gap of smoky darkness; and in the darkness something stirred and was still, giving no more to the torchlight than a blink of gold.

I turned once more full to the still figure on the throne. “The dowry is good, for horses and armed men are of greater worth than much gold to me, and gladly I accept it with the maiden.” I made my voice ring against the standing stones, so that all the shadows lost in the farthest dark might hear it. “The Lammas torches are lit, and now that it is no longer taboo, I ask that I may take the Maiden Guenhumara from her father’s hearth to mine. So shall the bond of kinship be made complete between Maglaunus, Clan Chieftain of the Damnonii, and Artos, the Count of Britain.“

There was a long pause, and then very slowly the antlered head inclined; and the hollow voice spoke behind the mask, using the old form of words that belong to every asking: “What can you give the maiden in place of what she leaves for you?”

“My hearth for her warmth, my kill for her food,” I returned. “My shield for her shelter, my corn for her quickening, my love for her contentment, my spear for the throat of the man who offers her harm. There is no more that I have to give.”

“It is enough,” said the hollow voice.

And Guenhumara with the golden apples swaying at the ends of her hair came through the gap of darkness that they had left for her between the torches.

The thing was done, and not to be undone again. The Horned One himself had taken the flint knife and nicked first my wrist, and then Guenhumara’s where the vein showed blue under the brown skin, and let them bleed a few drops into the cup of wine. We had drunk from the cup, both at the same time, our hands linked on the rim as custom demanded, and all the while we were strangers looking at each other with stranger’s eyes, when we looked at all; as though there had never been that other moment up here beside the Nine Sisters, when I had held her under my cloak and felt the life in her leap toward mine.

But stranger or no, she was my woman now, and together we were swept into the wild merrymaking that had begun to boil up through the wonder and the awe. The central part of the mystery was accomplished, and the god had stepped down from his throne to lead the dance that whirled and spun, as the torchlight and the shadows flew, its flaming circle about the smaller circle of standing stones that seemed to join in some secret dance of their own that had nothing to do with movement. We were dancing to the rhythmic stamping of our own heels, to the music of the pipes that whirled us this way and that as a wind whirls through dry leaves and sends them skyward and spins them along the ground — until at last the ring dance burst apart of its own spinning, into groups and couples and single leaping dancers.

Guenhumara danced with me. She had moved through the rituals of her marriage as one moving perfectly, but in her sleep, through the complicated patterns of quite another kind of dance, but now she was awake and under the same spell as the rest of us. The same laughter came from her as from the others around us, the same soft cries from deep in the throat. And we danced our own dance to our own patterns, among all the swirling multitude (but indeed many were doing that, by now), the man-and-woman dance that is one with the buck tearing with his antlers at a bush and the goldfinch showing off the yellow under his wings.

The beer pots had begun to go around and men and women crowded to light more and more torches from one another, and dance with them whirled aloft in ragged mares’ tails of smoky flame, that shone on laughing or sweating faces and clinging hands and flying hair. In one place, a man in a wildcat-skin kilt had withdrawn into a world of his own, and with drawn dirk was spinning and stamping in the complicated rhythms of the war dance. Close beside me, a half-naked girl slipped from the arms of a young warrior and went down, skirling with laughter, and I saw the love-bites on her throat and shoulder before the youngster flung himself joyfully upon her.

With the drum-pulse of stamping heels throbbing in my blood and the pipe music breaking in little sharp waves against me, I do not know how long it was before the knowledge came to me, nor quite how it came at last, that unless I found a way out quickly, I was going to have to take Guenhumara then and there. It seemed only after my brain had begun to clear that the long glances cast in my direction warned me what was expected of me.

And I knew that the thing expected of me was not possible. If it had been any girl plucked at random from the women’s side, I could maybe have played the stallion without much more thought of the rest of the herd than the stallion has when he covers his mare. If I had loved her, then the rest might not have mattered to either of us. As it was . . .

In the same instant I caught the frowning red-brown gaze of Pharic, across a dozen heads between. He was half laughing, but the message was serious; and receiving it, I knew why he had shown me the ancient stronghold, why he had so arranged matters that my horse was within reach.

Scarcely knowing that I did so, I had caught Guenhumara by the wrists and swung her out of the dance. Gault and Flavian were close at hand and still looked to be in their right minds; and I called them up with a jerk of the chin. “Go and get Arian up here, as close as may be,” I muttered to the Minnow, making believe to play with the golden apples on the end of Guenhumara’s braids, while she stood panting a little, with her face in the shadows.

“The other horses, too?”

“No, just Arian. Bring him up to the edge of the torchlight, and whistle for me when you are there. Gault, go and get Amlodd and the rest. It is time to be carrying off the bride, and we shall need you to cover our retreat.”

The thing had passed over so swiftly that I think no one of the swaying, prancing throng about us knew that we had fallen out of the dancing for anything much but to fetch our breath, or maybe because we too were ready for the next thing. And as Gault and Flavian slipped away on their separate errands, I reached out and caught a beer jar from a passer-by, and held it for Guenhumara to drink. There was little enough left in it; a mouthful for each of us, but it served to cover a few moments of time, and she looked up at me over the rim, with a swift and willing understanding of what I was about, her eyes in the ragged torchlight no longer those of a stranger. I flung the empty jar aside, not caring under whose feet it fell, and it was caught by Pharic, who I had not known was still so near. I flung my thanks after it and he put up his hand in a swift odd gesture as though to catch and toss them back. “Am I not one of your captains now?” he said, and was gone again into the swirling crowd as I caught Guenhumara’s hands and swung her in the opposite direction. Then I heard beneath the tumult and the sweet fierce piping, the dull trample of a horse’s hooves on turf, and a moment later caught the moth-pale gleam of Arian’s flank on the farmost fringes of the torchlight, and the high white whistle that a boy makes with his fingers in his mouth.

I laughed, and a sudden warm drunkenness took me, and I was every man who had ever carried off his chosen woman from among her kin. “That is for us! Come, Guenhumara!” and I caught her up and ran. She began to laugh too, and flung her arm around my neck to ease her weight for me, as I headed for that white gleam on the edge of the torchlight. Only the dancers nearest to us could know what was happening, and for an instant, surprise held them from breaking the dance or making any offer to prevent us. And in that instant I reached my horse and flung Guenhumara up across the saddlebow. But as I mounted behind her, Pharic raised the shout, “See! He carries off our sister!” and instantly the tumult of half battle that ends most bride feasts broke out.

I caught the reins from Flavian as he leapt back, and driving my heel into Arian’s flank, swung him half around; my own few lads were springing in behind me for a rear guard, the young warriors, headed by Guenhumara’s three brothers, striving to break through to her rescue. Glancing over my shoulder as the startled horse plunged and snorted under me, I saw Flavian and Pharic straining together in a wrestling grip that was only half laughing. “Ride!” Flavian shouted. “We’ll hold them while we may!”

I jabbed my heel into the white flank and we were away at a full flying gallop, leaving the laughter and the shouting of battle behind us. And Guenhumara was clinging to me, laughing still, with her hair bursting loose of its braids flying like cool spray across my face and throat.

So soon as I was sure of no hunt on our heels, I slackened to an easy canter, for it is not good to ride full tilt among unknown hills by the light of a fading moon, especially with a woman to hamper your bridle arm. And as though with the wind of our going, that other wild warm wind that had swept us together for a while fell away. Guenhumara had drawn herself together, and sat light and undemanding in the crook of my arm now, so that I scarcely felt her there at all. “Where are we away to?” she asked in a little, as though nothing of the past hours was left in her at all. I spat out hair.

“To the Old Dun. Where else?”

“Do you know the way?”

“I hope so. Pharic showed me the place of it — I think in case of need.”

“You do not mind, that I told Pharic?”

“You could scarcely do otherwise,” I said, “seeing that his life also is caught into the thing.”

“Into the tangle,” she amended.

“I did not say that.”

“No, you did not say it.” She put up her hand and very gently gathered the long strands of hair that had snarled into my beard and the Medusa-head brooch at my shoulder, and took them back into her own keeping.

And we rode on, not speaking any more, for there seemed nothing more to say.

The blurred moon was still up when we came over the last wave crest of the moors, and looked down into the valley where the small upland tarn caught the glimmer of the sky. And in the soft white light, the ruins of the forsaken Dun looked more than ever like a village of the Little Dark People.

“They use the tower sometimes for a herding hut, nowadays,” Guenhumara said then, much as her brother had done, a few hours earlier. “But when there is a mating in the chieftain’s line it remembers again that once it was the chieftain’s hall.”

We rode down through the heather that had long ago engulfed the track, and in through the gap in the soft wavelike ridge of turf that showed where the gateway had once been. The heather had flowed in, washing to the very walls of the tower; and in the blurred moonlight the late harebells which drifted against the rough-piled walls of the cattle yard were shadow-white. And all the while the faint summer lightning flickered along the hills.

On a patch of open turf I dropped from the saddle and lifted Guenhumara down after me. I gave her my strike-a-light, and leaving her to gather sticks and heather snarls and get the fire going, set to unsaddling Arian and rubbing him down with a handful of grass. I took the old horse down to the tarn shore to drink, and afterward knee-haltered him and turned him free to graze where the runnels of open turf wound among the heather and bush-grown mounds, and went back to the tower.

A light as dimly and threadbare gold as fallen sycamore leaves shone out to greet me. Guenhumara had made the fire, and now she sat beside it, shaping little cakes of rye meal and honey, ready for the hearthstone when it grew hot. The round stone walls ran up out of the firelight and disappeared into the shadows overhead, so for all one could see, the ancient strong point might have been standing again to its full height; and behind her against the far wall, her shadow fell across the high-piled bracken and tumbled skins of the herdsmen’s broad bed place.

She looked up when I entered, with a faint shadow of a smile, and pointed to the black pottery jar she had set just within the doorway. “I have found their store, you see; I dare say they’ll not grudge us a wedding feast. Do you take that down to the lochan for water, and then be gathering some fresh fern for bedding.”

I took up the jar and brought the water, and then armfuls of fern to scatter over the stale stuff on the bed place, kicking aside the stinking skins. And by the time I had done, the fire was burning with a clear red heart and the honey cakes were browning on the hearthstone. I sat down on the man’s side of the hearth, my hands hanging across my knees, and sometimes looked at Guenhumara and sometimes away. And Guenhumara on the woman’s side turned her hot rye cakes and fed the fire with heather sprigs, one at a time, and never looked at me at all. And from time to time there came the faint low mutter of thunder among the hills.

It was hard and harder to believe that I had not imagined that moment of wild response in her; but I knew that I had not; it was there somewhere, waiting to be wakened again. . . . Presently the cakes were done, and we ate them, hot and sweet and crusty, washing them down with cold lochan water from the black pottery jar; and still neither of us could think of anything to say.

The uncomfortable wedding meal finished, I got up and went out to see that all was well with Arian. The night was stiller than ever, the stillness of it seeming only intensified by that faint half-heard muttering below the skyline, and the occasional summer lightning was all but lost in the milky whiteness of the moonlight. I could hear lochan water sucking at its pebbly shore, and a hunting owl cried among the bushes; that was all. And suddenly I wished that the storm would break, longing for the relief of crashing thunder and storm wind, and rain lashing down the valley.

When I ducked under the lintel stone back into the tower again, Guenhumara was already lying on the bed place where I knew that I should have carried her. She had stripped off her gown and shift, and laid them with her copper and enamel arm rings and her shoes at the foot of the bed place, and in the close warmth of the tower she lay naked on my old weather-worn cloak, with her hair unbraided and flung about her. And a little white moon-moth, drawn indoors by the fire, danced and flickered about her head. And looking at her, I saw even in the uncertain mingled light of the fire on the hearth and the low moon through the doorway, that the skin of her body was not white where the clothes had covered it, but the pale brown of clover honey. She was a tawny woman from head to heel. She turned a little, her head on her arm, to watch me as I crossed to the hearth and set down the saddle which I had brought in in case it rained later. Oddly, the strain between us had relaxed, as though we had both been holding off something, and now we had let go and opened ourselves to the inevitable.

“I left you the fire to undress by,” she said, “but I think the moon would have been light enough.” And then, as I kicked off my shoes, and freeing my sword belt began to strip, “How many scars you carry! You are fang-gashed like an old mastiff that has spent its life fighting wolves.”

And I think that she must have been seeing me for the first time in the way that I had first seen her four days ago, for she must have seen most of the scars often enough when she tended me in my sickness, and never spoken of them before.

Standing by the hearth, I looked down at the new crimson scar on my shoulder, and the white seams of old ones on my thighs and sword forearm. “I suppose that is what I am.”

“Why do they come again and again so close about the same places?”

“You can always tell a heavy cavalry man by the position of his scars. They come on the thighs below the edge of one’s war shirt — I have heard of thigh guards, but they hamper one in mounting — on the thighs and on the sword arm.”

“Why not a long sleeve?” she asked, practically. It was an odd conversation for a wedding night.

“Because it would hamper the sword swing; also because the Saxon armorers do not make their sarks that way.”

I stood by the fire, stretching, then stooped to set on the turfs that I had laid by for smooring it. As I did so, she said in the same tone of quietly detached interest, “You’re beautiful. How many women have told you so?”

I thrust the fire together and set on the sods, and the firelight died, leaving only the fading moonlight to bar the darkness. “A few,” I said, “but very long ago.”

“How long? How old are you, my Lord Artos?”

“Thirty-five. That is another reason why you should not have married me.”

“And I am twenty — almost one and twenty. We are old, you and I.”

I had not thought of her as being of any special age, but I had realized, without much thought, that she was long past the age at which most women go to a husband’s hearth; and I wondered for the first time why it was that she had not done so. As though she caught the question in my mind, as though, also, she had lowered her own defenses a little further, with the quenching of the too-probing firelight, she said, “When I was fifteen, I was betrothed to a chieftain’s son from farther south. It was arranged in the usual way, but I loved him, none the less — I thought I loved him. I am not sure now; I was only fifteen. He was killed hunting, before the time came for him to take me, and I thought that the sun and moon had fallen from the skies. His memory came between me and all things, between me and all men, and when my father would have betrothed me again, I begged and prayed — I swore that I would kill myself; and in the end — I was beside myself, and I think he feared that I had it in me to carry out my threat — he yielded partway, and promised that at least I should have five summers’ respite.”

“And this is the sixth summer,” I said.

“This is the sixth summer. But —” I heard a small bitter laugh of self-mockery. “Scarcely two summers were gone by before I knew that I had been a fool. I tried to hold his memory, but it turned thin like woodsmoke and melted through my fingers, and I had nothing left.”

“Why did you not tell your father?”

“I was too proud. If you were a girl of seventeen who had shrieked down the roof of her father’s hall, vowing to die for her dead love if she were forced into another man’s bed, could you have gone to your father and said, ‘Oh my father, I made a mistake, a simple mistake; anyone might make it. It was not love; I have forgotten what his face looked like, and the sound of his voice, and now I am ready for a living husband, after all.’ ”

I took up my sword and carried it across to the bed place and laid it to hand. Then I lay down beside Guenhumara. The moon-moth fluttered across my face, but there was no other movement in the dark beside me.

Her body was good to the touch, to explore; the skin smooth and silky despite its brownness, and I could feel the strong light bones under it; the light cage of her ribs, the long slim flanks. She was too thin for most men’s taste, but suddenly I loved the feel of her bones. I had seen, while she lay there in the firelight, that there was a rose mole on her left breast, and I searched for it by touch and pressed my finger onto it. It was soft and curiously alive, like the bud of a flower, like another smaller nipple, infinitely small and soft, and the feel of it sent a shimmer of delight through my body and into my loins. I flung my arms around her and strained her against me. She lay completely passive, neither giving nor withholding, as the furrow lies passive for the seed at sowing time. . . . And in that instant came like a black frost the memory, the very flavor, of the last time that I had lain with a woman, a mating half battle, half ecstasy, like mating with a wildcat. The cold miasma of hate seemed all about me, suffocating, chilling me to the soul, sapping all my powers. I clutched Guenhumara closer — no, rather I clung to her as one drowning — struggling to drive out the horror of my spirit, struggling to drive out the chill with her warmth, the death with her life. Her body was no longer passive under mine, and I must have hurt her, for she cried out, and I knew in that moment that she was a virgin; but even so, I hurt her more than is the nature of things, and I had no mercy. I was fighting desperately against some barrier, some denial that was not of her making. . . . It was, save for one other, the bitterest fight that ever I have known.

In the end I managed the man’s part none so ill, but it was empty and joyless, the mere husk of what had once been a living thing; and I knew that for Guenhumara also, there had been no joy to transmute the pain. I remembered my first girl, taken laughing in the warm lee of a bean stack, clumsily but with delight. That had been whole and sweet, but this was a maimed thing. And I knew to the full then what Ygerna had done to me; that in some way she had robbed me of the spearpoint of my manhood.

I released Guenhumara, and rolled away from her. I think I groaned. I know that I was sweating and shaking from head to foot like a man after a mortal struggle; and I buried my head in my arms, waiting for her to turn away from me in disgust or bitter mockery.

Instead, she said calmly, but as though something in her throat was tight, “It should not be like that, should it?”

“No,” I said. “It should not be like that.” I drove my face harder onto my arms and little clouds of colored light whirled through the darkness before my eyes. I heard my own voice, muffled in my arms. “A few days since, I was watching one of your dunghill cocks. He was tethered with his hens about him, but the one he wanted was beyond his reach, and every time he leapt on her his tether brought him up short at the last moment, and tumbled him in the dung, until his feathers were all mired and draggled. God have mercy on me, I thought at first that it was funny.”

There was a long silence; and then Guenhumara said, “Has it always been so?”

“If it had, do you think that I’d have taken you with a whole war host for your dowry? I haven’t been with a woman for ten years. I did not know.”

Another silence; the flutter of the flames had died away and outside I heard the soft whisper of falling rain; the scent of it on the warm earth breathed in at the open doorway. And beyond again, I heard the silence of the forsaken Dun.

Then Guenhumara said, “What happened? Let you tell me the once, and be done with the telling.”

And lying there with my head still buried in my arms, I told her the whole foul story that I had not told in ten years, even to Bedwyr who was nearer to me than my own heart. It was her right to know.

When the thing was told to the last word, I waited for her horror and her drawing away. She did not speak for so long, in the end I lifted my head from my arms and turned again to look at her in the dark. And as I did so, a strange thing happened, for she turned a little toward me, and felt for my face and took it between her hands; and kissed me like the mother I never had. “God help us both, my dear,” she said.

WORD of what had happened was in Castra Cunetium and the Place of Three Hills ahead of me. Maybe the word had run through the tribes, maybe it had been carried by the Little Dark People, who know everything. I saw it in men’s eyes that met mine a little too long or not quite long enough, as I rode in, but only two of my Companions spoke of the thing without waiting for me to speak first.

Gwalchmai came limping into my quarters while I was still washing off the dust and sweat of the summer tracks. He had ridden in only a few hours ahead of me, on some business of supplies, and began by giving me a report of how things were going with Bedwyr among the Saxon settlements, so that at first I thought that was all he had come for. Indeed he had actually got up to go, when he turned back to me, clearly hesitating over something more that he wished to say. He was a man who seldom found it easy to speak of the things that mattered to him. “The whole fort is throbbing with the word that you have taken a wife from the Damnonii,” he managed at last, “and that she comes here to joui you when we settle into winter quarters. Artos, is it true?”

“It is true that I have taken a wife, yes,” I said.

“And that she comes here?”

“Yes, also a hundred of her father’s best horsemen, captained by her brother.”

“The hundred will be welcome, at all events.”

“But not the one?”

He hesitated. “We are not used to the thought of the one and the thought is strange to us. You must give us a little time.” He changed the subject. “Artos, they did not send up any bandage linen or salves with the last supplies. We have had a good few wounded, as I told you, and we cannot go on tearing up our cloaks forever. I cannot go myself, I must get back to Bedwyr tomorrow, but give me leave to send Conon down to raise hell at Carbridge and get some more sent up.”

But Cei was less forbearing, later that night, before we started out to make the late rounds together. “In God’s name, if you wanted the girl why didn’t you take her — and leave her with a pretty necklace, and no harm done?”

“Maglaunus her father would perhaps not have given me a hundred well-mounted men for tumbling his daughter under a broom bush.”

“Aye, there’s no denying that it is a dowry worth the having,” Cei admitted; and then in a deep grumble between disgust and speculation: “But a woman prinking in her mirror. I suppose she’ll bring a swarm of giggling girls to serve her?”

“One woman. I told Guenhumara she might bring one henchwoman: she chose her old nurse — no teeth, Cei, one foot already in the grave and the other on a lump of tallow.”

“An asset indeed!” Cei’s speculation was swallowed up in disgust.

“Agreed, my old ram, and a foul nuisance here in the fort, but by the God’s grace, the other foot will slip one day,” I said savagely. I was angry and sickened with all the things under the sun, myself most of all.

“Love does not seem to have sweetened your temper, Artos mine.”

I was pulling on my rawhide boots, and I did not look up. “Who spoke any word of love?”

“Na, it was a hundred horsemen, wasn’t it? But great God! Man, you can’t have her here, just her and the hag in a fort full of men.”

“There are the gay girls of the baggage train,” I said, and stood up and reached for my sword which lay on the cot beside me.

“If she’s a good woman, she’d sooner die than touch little fingers with one of the sisterhood.”

“Cei, do you know much about good women?”

He laughed unwillingly, and shrugged, but looked up from the lamp flame with trouble in his fierce blue eyes. “You must have the thing your own stubborn way. But Christos! I foresee storm water ahead!” Then he shook himself as though shaking off the trouble like an old cloak, and laughed again, and flung his heavy arm around my shoulders as we went out from the lamplit room into the darkness of the hills. “Like enough I shall try seducing her myself, in the pursuit of further knowledge.”

“Thanks for the warning,” I said, tranquilly enough, and tried to ignore the black pain of jealousy that stabbed through me. In that moment I first understood that I loved Guenhumara.

In the next I fell headlong over a pig — we kept a good deal of livestock by that tune — who rose in squealing affront and lumbered off into the night, leaving me to rub a bruised elbow and curse the Fates who must need strip a man even of his dignity, making a clown of him even while they turn the knife in the wound that they have made.

Everything in Trimontium was in good shape, for despite his hot temper and his wenching, Cei was as reliable as a rock, and so next morning when Gwalchmai headed eastward again, with the reliefs who were going up to free some of the other men for rest, I rode with them. And a few evenings later, I stood with Bedwyr in the lee of a clump of wind-shaped elder scrub that marked the lower end of our picket lines. There was a smell of smoke about him, not the fresh tang of campfires, but the acrid and faintly greasy reek that comes of burning out the places where men live. Bedwyr had been busy since I saw him last.

He was saying, “It is in my mind that the world would be a sun-pier place if the God that Gwalchmai believes in had never taken a rib from Adam’s side and made a woman for him.”

“You would miss her sorely, when you came to tune your harp.”

“There are other matters for a harp song, besides women. Hunting and war, and heather beer — and the brotherhood of men.”