SWORD AT SUNSET

“It is not many days since I found that I must ask the Minnow not to desert me,” I said. “I did not think that I should have to ask it of you, Bedwyr.”

He stood looking out over the camp, where the smoke of the cooking fires trailed sideways into the dusk, and a faint mist was creeping in over the moors from the sea. “If I were to desert you, I think that it would be for something more than a woman.”

“But this goes beyond the woman, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said. “This is more than any woman.” And then he swung around on me, his nostrils flaring, his eyes brighter and more fierce than I had ever seen them in his twisted, mocking face. “You fool, Artos! Don’t you know that if you were deservedly frying in your Christian’s Hell for every sin from broken faith to sodomy, you could count on my buckler to shield your face from the flames?”

“I believe I could,” I said. “You are almost as great a fool as I.”

And we went up past the horse lines together, through the salt-tasting mist that was thickening across the high moors.

Two days later, Gault’s squadron was ambushed and cut to pieces by a Saxon war band. They rode back into camp — what was left of them — battered and bloody, their dead left behind them, the more sorely wounded roped to their horses.

I saw them ride in, and the rest of the camp turn out with grim acceptance of the situation, and few questions asked, to rally around them, help down the wounded and take charge of the horses. I bade Gault see to his men and get a meal, and come to me with a full report afterward — he looked very white and staggered for an instant in dismounting, as though the ground had tilted under his feet; but to see one’s squadron cut to bits is enough to account for that in any man. Then I went back to finish looking through Bedwyr’s muster lists, in the half-ruined shepherd’s bothy that I had taken for my own. It is good for a commander to have some such place when he can, he is easier to find at night, and matters which are not for the camp’s ears can be spoken of in private.

I was sick at heart for the dazed and tattered remnant of my fourth squadron now gathering to the fire and the hastily brought-out food, sick for the loss of so many of my Companions, but it would serve no useful purpose to neglect the muster lists. So I crouched on the packsaddle which generally served me for a seat in camp, and returned to the work in hand. I had just reached the end when a figure loomed into the opening where the door had been, shutting out the blue dark and the flare of the campfire beyond; and looking up, I saw that it was Gault.

He moved in from the doorway, and there was no doubt that he staggered now. “I’ve come to report, sir,” he said in a strained voice that was not like Gault’s at all, and stretched out his hand to the crumbling turf wall and leaned there. I could see the sweat on his ashen face in the lantern light. “But I think I’ve — left it too late.”

I sprang up. “Gault, what is it? Are you wounded?”

“I’ve — got a Saxon arrow in me,” he said. “I broke off the shaft so that the rest shouldn’t see it, but I —” He made as though to push aside his cloak, and in the act of doing so, pitched head foremost into my arms. I laid him down and hurriedly thrust back the concealing folds of his cloak and found the short bloody stump of an arrow shaft projecting from just below the cage of his ribs. The horn scales of his war shut had been split there by a glancing axe blow some while since, and for days he had been intending to get the weak place mended. Now it was too late. He was quite unconscious, not much blood on him, but he must have been bleeding inwardly for hours. I sat for a few moments on my heels beside him, then got up and strode to the door and shouted to the man who stood outside leaning on his spear against the light of the nearest watch fire. “Justin, go and fetch Gwalchmai; no matter what he’s doing — he must have finished with the worst wounded by now. Get him here at once!”

“Sir,” he said, and I turned back to the lantern-lit bothy and the still figure crumpled on the floor. I thrust away Cabal’s inquiring muzzle, and ordered the great hound to lie down in the far corner. I felt Gault’s heart and found it still beating faintly, and straightened him into an easier position, thinking as I did so, that it was so that one straightened the crumpled dead.

Gwalchmai came very soon. I heard his uneven step outside, hurrying, and next instant he was in the doorway. “What is so urgent, Artos?”

“Gault,” I said, and moved aside to give him more space. “He’s taken an arrow under the ribs.”

Gwalchmai limped forward and knelt at Gault’s other side. “Reach down the lantern and hold it for me. I can’t see in this gloom.”

I did as he bade me, and we leaned together over the wound in the pool of yellow light. “Who broke off the shaft?” Gwalchmai demanded. He had already drawn his knife and was cutting the lacing of Gault’s war shirt.

“He did it himself, so that his men should not know.”

“So — well, I daresay it will make little difference in the long run. It would have given me a better purchase. . . .” He cut the last thong that held the battle shirt together on the right side, and lifted it back, with the blood-sodden linen tunic beneath; and was silent, looking down at the wound that was laid bare. At last he raised his eyes to mine. “Artos — what am I to do?”

“Light of the Sun, man, that’s for you to say. Get the barb out, I suppose. Why else should I have called you?”

“Not quite so simple. If I leave the barb where it is, he’ll be dead in three days — an ugly death. If I try to get it out, the chances are around a hundred to one that I shall kill him here and now.”

“But there is the hundredth chance?”

“There is the hundredth chance.”

We looked at each other across Gault’s body. “Do it now,” I said, “while he is unconscious. At the worst, death will be quicker and kinder that way.”

Gwalchmai nodded, and got to his feet, and I heard him shouting from the doorway for hot water and barley spirit and more rags. He remained there until the things were brought, then returned and knelt down, setting out the tools of his trade beside him. “Get something to put under his back — we must have him arched backward to draw the belly taut.”

I grabbed the old cloak and an armful of bracken from my bed, and made them into a firm roll, then lifted Gault while Gwalchmai arranged it under him, so that when I laid him down again his body was bent backward like a half-drawn bow, the skin drawn tight over breast and belly.

“So, that will serve. Now the lantern again.”

I knelt there for what seemed as long as a whole midwinter night, intent on holding the horn-paned lantern perfectly steady, that no tremor of light might confuse eye or hand at the crucial moment, while Gwalchmai, working with the complete absorption that shut him off from all men at such tunes, bathed away the blood so that he might see exactly the edges of the wound, and again took up his knife. I watched the sure, intent work of his hands as he began with infinite care to enlarge the wound. Later, he laid down the knife and took up a fierce little probe, then another, and later still, returned to the knife again. It seemed to grow unbearably hot in the bothy, I could feel the sweat prickling in my armpits, and beads of it shone on Gwalchmai’s forehead, and yet the night was a cool one, and I had no fire under the turf roof. From time to time, whenever Gwalchmai bade me, I felt Gault’s heart. His upturned face was frowning, the teeth bared as though in intolerable pain, but I think that in truth he did not feel anything. I hope to God that he did not. At one time I thought his heart was stronger and his breathing more steady, but maybe it was only my own desire that deceived me; or maybe it was a last flicker of life. . . . Quite suddenly, both began to grow fainter.

By that time we must have been working on him for the best part of an hour, and the thing was almost done. “Gwalchmai — can you give him a respite? His heart is fading.”

Gwalchmai gave an infinitesimal shake of the head. “Respite will not serve him now. Moisten his lips with the barley spirit.”

And only a few moments later he sat back to draw his own breath, then leaned forward once more and took hold of the short end of arrow shaft which now lay in a little oozing blood-filled hole. I shut my teeth and for an instant my eyes. When I looked again, he was laying a reeking arrowhead on the ground beside him. Blood gushed out in a red wave, and Gault drew a great choking breath that seemed to tear itself free of breast and rattling throat, while a convulsive shudder ran through his whole body — and we, kneeling alive in the lantern light, knew that the hundredth chance had been denied to us.

Gwalchmai sat back on his heels, and said with a great weariness in his voice, “Hang up the lantern again. We shall not be needing it any more.” He rubbed his hands across his face, and when he took them away, his forehead was smeared with Gault’s blood. “We know so little — so hideously little.”

“Better he should go now than in three days’ time,” I muttered, trying, I think, to comfort myself as much as him. I got up, suddenly as tired as though I had just come out of battle, with no glow of victory to sustain me, and turned to hang the lantern again where it had hung before. And even as I did so, the pad of hurrying footsteps sounded outside, and Levin was in the doorway. “Gault bade me take over and see to the men while he made his report,” he began in a rush, “and so I could not come before. I —” His gaze fell on the body on the ground, and the rush broke off short, into silence. Then he said, slowly and carefully, as though he were a little drunk, “He is dead, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I knew something was amiss, but he would not tell me. He said only to see to the men while he came up here to make his report. So I could not come before.”

He came a step nearer, and saw the bloody arrowhead and the few surgeon’s tools that Gwalchmai had begun to gather up for cleaning, and looked at Gwalchmai, his mouth flinching. “You killed him, you bloody butcher!”

“We both killed him,” I said. “Gwalchmai will tell you that if the barb was left in, he must die within three days; if it was cut out, there was one chance in a hundred of saving him. That’s long odds, Levin.”

“Yes, I —” He pressed the back of his hand across his forehead. “I am sorry, I — n-not sure what I’m saying. . . . Did he — say anything?”

“He was already out of his body,” Gwalchmai said, getting to his feet.

But the other had knelt down beside his dead, bending forward to look into the set frowning face, and I do not think he was aware of us any more. He cried out sharply and shudderingly, “Why didn’t you wait for me? — Gault, why didn’t you wait for me? I would have waited for you!” and slipped down full length with his arms around the body as a woman might have done.

Gwalchmai and I looked at each other, and went out of the bothy.

Outside the door hole, he said, “I’ll send a couple of men to carry the body away.” And then, “Best have a care, or we’ll be needing a grave dug broad enough for two.”

“Not if I can help it,” I said. I heard his footsteps die away into the darkness between the watch fires, gauging his tiredness by the slur of sound as he dragged his crippled foot after him. I stayed where I was, under the Red Dragon on its lance shaft beside the door hole, listening for any sound from within the bothy, until I heard the feet of the men Gwalchmai had sent; and then turned back into the lantern light. Levin was kneeling beside the dead man, staring down at him, and seeing them there with the lantern spilling its pool of dim yellow radiance on the two wild-barley-colored heads, I realized as I had never quite done before, how alike they were. It was as though the link between them was so potent that even in their outward seeming they could have nothing apart from each other. “The men are coming up from the camp to carry him away,” I said.

Levin raised his haggard gaze to my face. “I must help bear him.”

“Very well, but return to me here, as soon as all is done.”

He did not answer, but in the last moment before the men were at the door, he ripped his sword from its wolfskin sheath.

I sprang forward. “Levin! No!”

And he looked up again, choking with an ugly laughter. “Ah no, not yet. Time for that later,” and with a movement as swift as the other had been, he drew the blade that lay by Gault’s side, where I had put it down when we cut away his harness, and slammed it home into his own empty sheath. “You’ll be returning one sword to store, but I’ll have the one he carried,” and got to his feet as the newcomers ducked in through the doorway.

When the heavy tread of men carrying a burden had stumbled away into the night sounds of the camp, I sat down again on the packsaddle to wait, and Cabal shook himself clear of the shadows and came, a little uncertainly, as though questioning whether the reason for his banishment was yet over, and collapsed with a gusty sigh in his usual lying place at my feet. After a moment he raised his head and looked up at me, whining and uneasy, and as I reached my hand down to stroke his head I felt the harsh hairs raised a little on his neck. He was a war dog, and killing in battle he understood, but not this. The lists that I had been working on lay scattered beside me. There was blood on them now, the stains turning brown around the edges as they dried. There was blood soaked into the beaten-earth floor, and the smell of it was everywhere, and the smell of death. It is one thing to have the friend killed beside you in battle (though that strikes sore enough), but quite another to feel him die under your hands in the cold blood that comes afterward. I wondered whether Levin would come back, or whether I should have to send for him, for I was not sure that he had even heard my order.

I had waited a long time, and was on the point of sending, when he appeared once more in the doorway.

“You have been a long time, Levin.”

“The ground is hard and stony in these parts,” he said dully. “What is it that you wish with me, Artos?”

“Gault should have furnished me with a full report of what happened, but he had no time. Therefore, as his second, the duty falls to you.”

He got through it quite creditably; there was not, after all, so very much to tell, and then, when it was finished, he broke down, with his arm along the rotting roof beam and his head on his arm. I gave him a little time, and then said, “A sorry business, and has cost us dear in men and horses. But it seems that no blame clings to Gault.”

He swung around on me, his eyes wide and blazing. “No blame?”

“None whatever,” I said, pretending to misunderstand him. “And you have given your report well and clearly.”

“Thank you, sit,” he said bitterly. “Is there anything more?”

“First, have you anything to say to me?”

“Yes. I wish to ask for leave to go away from here.”

“And fall on your sword?”

“What is it to my Lord Artos what I do, when once I am no more of the Brotherhood?”

“Only this — that we are short of men as it is, and I cannot spare another for no good cause.”

“No good cause?”

“None,” I said. I got up and walked across to him. “Listen to me, Levin. For more than ten years I have counted you and Gault among the best and bravest of my Companions. That is because each of you has striven always to outdo the other in valor and endurance, not from any rivalry, but that each of you might be worthy of his friend. So it has been since you were boys; and are you going to be a shame to Gault, to break the old covenant between you, now in the first hour that he is dead?”

He stared back at me with dilated eyes. “Maybe I’m not as strong as Gault. I can’t go on — I can’t.”

I took him by the shoulders and shook him a little. “That is a weakling’s cry. There’s water in that jar in the corner; wash your face, and go down and take over command of the squadron. Choose whichever of your lads you judge most suitable for your second; that is your affair, so don’t come troubling me with it.”

“You — you’re giving me command of the squadron?”

“Assuredly. You have been Gault’s second for five years, and you have it in you to make a good leader.”

“I cannot do it,” he said pitifully. “Artos, have some mercy on me — I can’t. It is all true as you say, but I can’t go on!”

But already, though he was not yet aware of it himself, I could feel him strengthening under my hands, bracing himself to take up the intolerable burden.

“Oh yes you can. One can always go on. And as to mercy, I keep that for when and where it is needed. If Gault could break off the arrow shaft so that his men should not know and lose heart, and get the rags of you out of ambush and back to camp, with a mortal wound in him., then you can wash your face so that the rest won’t mistake you for a woman, and go and take over his squadron and keep it what he made it, one of the best squadrons of the Company.” I gripped and gripped at his shoulders, driving in my fingers until I felt the bone. “If you cannot — then you were never as he thought you were, after all.”

He stood unmoving for a long moment, though I had dropped my hands. Then his head went up very slowly, and I saw him swallow thick in his throat; and he turned and crossed to the jar of water in the corner.

Through the rest of that summer I watched him anxiously. But there was little need. He proved, as I had believed he would, to be as fine a leader as Gault had been; and under his handling, the battered remnant gathered itself up and began to be a squadron again. He was careful of his men, but utterly careless of himself — so reckless that, though there was no more talk of falling on his sword, it was clear he hoped for death. And as so often happens when a man is in that state, death passed him by as if he had a charmed life.

We campaigned late into October that year. At most times in the North, one cannot hold to the war trail much beyond the end of September, but it was a soft autumn, and the last yellow leaves were still clinging to the birches when at last we rode into Trimontium to make our winter quarters again.

There were only a few days left, and many things to be seen to in them, before I must ride for Castra Cunetium to meet Guenhumara. But in the time that I had, I did what I could to make ready for her. I furbished up the much larger chamber next to the narrow one in the half-ruined officers’ block where I had slept since we first came to Trimontium. The commandant’s dining room, I think it must have been, to judge by the crudely painted trophies and goats’ masks that still showed here and there like shadows on the shreds of plaster that still clung to one wall. I bought a thick striped native blanket and a rug of soft beaver skins from Druim Dhu and his brothers, who bought and sold all things in common, to cover the piled fern of the bed place. I pegged up a fine embroidered hanging of some saint or other, all glimmering blues and russets, kingfisher colors, to cover the crumbling red sandstone of the most ruinous wall and give some richness to the chamber. It was part of the loot that we had taken from the Sea Wolves that summer, and they, I suppose, had reaved it from some rich religious house in the gentler Lowlands. Well, the Church could count it as part of the debt they owed me, there was a certain satisfaction in the thought.

All the while I was aware of my men watching me, with a kind of suspended judgment that might turn into anything. . . . The awareness did nothing to ease the waiting days. I half longed for her coming, as those days went by, half dreaded it, sometimes wondered whether she would come at all.

She came, and we swept her into Castra Cunetium by torchlight. It was a wild night, the feast of Samhain, and I remember how the torches flared in the wind, sending their tawny smoke billowing all across the forecourt, their light beating like bright wings in the darkness upon the faces of the men who thronged around us, and clatter and jink and hoof drum of the cavalry swept in after us through the gates. Guenhumara rode between her brother Pharic and myself, with her cloak flying loose from its shoulder clasp. I had not known her in the first moments of our meeting, almost a day’s march farther westward, for with her tall slight body clad in plaid breeks for the long ride, and her hair gathered up under a soft woolen cap, she looked for all the world like a fine-boned stripling. And indeed I think that few among the crowding garrison realized who she was, for I saw them craning behind her for the commander’s woman. That was until we clattered to a halt, and I dismounted and turned to help her down; for I remember, then the roar went up.

I had not touched her until then, for we had not dismounted at our meeting. There were still grumblings of trouble in the hills, and we had ridden hard to reach Cunetium before full dark, and in the instant before she kicked free from the stirrup and slid into my arms, I knew a wild expectancy; but as it had been before, among the Nine Sisters, I felt as I caught and set her down that there was nothing there, that I might have been holding one of the cool gray standing stones; and this time there was no time for the fire and the life to kindle, for she turned from me at once, swaying with exhaustion as she was, to face the new life about her, with all her defenses like a drawn sword in her hand.

Pharic and the rest were swinging down from their horses, and Bedwyr, who was once again in command of the outpost garrison, had come out from among his squadron to bid her welcome.

I said, “Guenhumara, here is Bedwyr, my sword brother and lieutenant.”

I had wondered how it would be between Bedwyr and Guenhumara when they came together, and I was left still wondering.

I remember him making the bent knee to her that a man makes to a queen; I remember his ugly, crooked face smiling down at her, faintly mocking, his reckless eyebrow flaring like the windblown flames of the torches, saying with the drawling tenderness in his voice that I had never heard him use on a woman before, “I never thought to see a flower springing in the hard ground of this old fort — and it not even summer.”

“A hand for the harp as well as the sword.” Guenhumara’s gaze touched on the embroidered Up of the harp bag that cocked above his shoulder. “Was that grace note plucked from the last song you made?”

“Na na — but I may find it fit in well enough when I come to make the next. There is something tells me that you set little store by the minstrel kind.”

“I have known only the one harper in my father’s hall,” she said gently. “He can outplay any of his kind along the west coast, when it comes to Oran Môr, the Great Music; but I have heard over-many light lilts to the Lady Guenhumara’s shining hair — especially when he would have another arm ring or a new bull calf for his herd.”

“Be assured, at least, that I have no use for an arm ring, nor for a bull calf,” Bedwyr said, with the smile flickering around his lips. “And alas! I have not yet seen the Lady Guenhumara’s shining hair!”

Standing by, it seemed to me that I was watching two swordsmen playing for the feel of each other’s blades, but whether the foils were blunted or sharp, I could not yet be sure. I have thought since, that they were not sure themselves. I made the late rounds with Bedwyr that night, neither of us speaking any word of Guenhumara, and after he had gone back to the mess hall and the evening firelight, I lingered behind, leaning my elbows on the crumbling stone breastwork that still faced the old turf ramparts, and staring out into the blustery darkness of the hills. I meant to follow him at any moment, but I was still there when something moved below and behind me, and as I swung around, Guenhumara herself came up the rampart stair. She was close-muffled in the heavy folds of her riding cloak, but the light of a distant pine-knot torch behind her made a bright copper-dust nimbus through her unbound hair, and I knew by that, and by her way of moving, I suppose, that she had changed back into women’s gear.

“Guenhumara! You should be in your bed.”

She reached out her hand to Cabal, who had risen from his place beside my feet to welcome her better than I had done. “I am too restless for my bed. Everything is so strange; I felt caged in that little room with its face turned nowhere save into a courtyard, and all the wind and the darkness outside.” She came beside me, and set both hands on the cold age-eaten coping. “So this is a Roman fort — a Dun of the Red Crests?”

“Is it not at all as you expected?”

“I do not know. Yes, I suppose so. They say that the Romans like to have their lives boxed into squares and fenced with straight lines. . . . One was telling me, a while since, that in Roman cities the houseplaces have high square rooms to them, and that they are built all along ways so straight that they might have been ruled with a spear shaft. Would that be true?”

Memory twinged at me, and out of the dark and under the wind it seemed for a moment that another woman’s voice was in my ears, a low voice, and mocking. “They say that in Venta there are streets of houses all in straight rows, and in the houses are tall rooms with painted walls; and Ambrosius the High King wears a cloak of the imperial purple.” And I wanted to catch Guenhumara into my arms and hold her fast against all threat to take her from me, defying Ygerna, defying God Himself if need be. But I knew with a sick helplessness that I could not so much as touch her until she gave me leave.

“It is true. The better houses, and the main streets, anyway,” I said, and hoped that my voice was steady. “There are small crooked ways behind the straight ones, and they creep out farther in these days, as the grass creeps farther between the wheel ruts in the streets.”

“The grass is not Roman,” Guenhumara said with a small tired whimper of laughter. “It flows in curves when the wind blows over.”

“You will grow used to it all in time.”

“I will grow used to it in time,” she agreed, “but tonight it is all so strange — so many strange faces in the torchlight. Do you know, save for your trout-freckled armor-bearer, I have not seen in this Red Crest’s eyrie, one of those who were with you in my father’s hall.”

“They will be most of them at Trimontium,” I said. “Flavian rode this far with me, and then on south, to winter with his wife and bairn.”

She looked around quickly. “Was that his price?”

“His price?” I did not fully grasp her meaning for a moment, and could only repeat the words, stupidly. “His price?”

And I think she must have seen how it was, for suddenly she was trying to catch her words back. “Na na, that was a wicked thing to say — stupid, which is worse; I shall be less stupid when I am not so tired. You told me before, that it might be you could let him go this winter, and it might be not, and I am glad that you could let him go.” She moved a little nearer to me as she spoke, as though to make up for some hurt or failure, and I knew that I had the beginning of the leave that I had waited for, and put my arm around her as we propped side by side against the rampart wall.

“What of the one with the barley-colored hair — Gault, his name was,” she asked in a little.

“Why Gault in particular?”

“I don’t know. I thought of him at that moment — just a thought that passed by.”

“Maybe it was himself that passed, coming in to the fire,” I said, thinking of the empty places kept beside the mess hall hearth, and the food and drink set ready for men who came no more in the body to the evening meal among their comrades. But it would be at Trimontium that Gault’s place was kept for him, beside Levin, this Samhain night.

I felt Guenhumara startle and stir in the curve of my arm. “Dead?”

“Almost two months ago.”

“Was there a woman left lonely for him — or a bairn?”

“No, Guenhumara.” I put both arms around her then, and pulled her close, as though trying to shield her from something, I am not sure what. She was too weary to quicken, spent as a bird that one finds sometimes fallen on the shore after a long storm-driven journey over the sea. But she leaned against me as though there was some kind of shelter in that. And standing there in the wind and the sharp spitting darkness, I had a sudden sense of light and strength and quietness, and it seemed to me that Ygerna’s power could not last forever; that it might even be fought off and broken, and in the end I might be free, and Guenhumara with me.

“May the fire be warm for him,” Guenhumara said softly, against the breast folds of my cloak, “or may the birds of Rhiannon sing for him, if it hurts less, to forget.” (“Forget . . . Forget . . . Are you afraid to hear the singing of Rhiannon’s birds, that makes men forget?”)

And the light went out, and I knew that the Samhain wind was dreary cold, and the ram spitting down my neck, and no man may escape his doom. I kissed Guenhumara, and it was like kissing her good-bye. “Anwyl, you must go in to your bed.”

She kissed me again, with a great and lovely kindness, as she had kissed me on our wedding night. “Come soon, then, Artos the Bear, for it is lonely in this place.”

“I will come soon,” I promised.

And she drew back out of my arms, and went away down the rampart stair.

FLAVIAN returned to us early in the spring, before even the first supply carts of the year got through. I was out on old Arian, beginning the long business of getting him back into condition after the winter, and we came together with a suddenness that set the horses trampling, at the bend where the Cunetium road ran out from the shadows of the river gorge. “Artos!” he shouted, and I, “Minnow!” and laughing and exclaiming and cursing the horses, we leaned together from the saddle to strike hands, while Cabal sprang around us with his tail lashing.

“How is it with Teleri and the bairn?” I asked, when we had quieted the beasts and turned them back toward the gates of Trimontium.

“It is very well with both of them; he is a fine cub and uses his fists like a warrior already.” He spoke with the lingering tone and inward-turning smile of a man looking back on past contentment so strong that the flavor of it lingers with him still. And then in a changed note, “She came then?”

“Guenhumara? She came. But what tells you so?”

“You have a new cloak.”

I glanced down at the dark thick plaid I had flung about me against the March wind that cut like a fleshing knife. Guenhumara had not been two days in Trimontium before she asked for a loom, and when two of our craftsmen made it for her, the first thing that she wove on it had been a cloak for me. “I have a new cloak,” I agreed, “but must it be of Guenhumara’s weaving?”

“They always weave a cloak for their lord, to keep him warm,” said Flavian, with the air of one grown suddenly wise in the ways of women. “Mine wove this for me,” and he shook out and resettled the folds of a fine dark blue cloak bordered with black and flame red.

“It is a bonny cloak,” I said, “and a bonny target for Saxon arrows you’ll make wearing it. Now I have but to squat still enough in this dim plaid of mine, and the Dark People themselves will take me for a hole in the hillside.”

“Ah, you are jealous, my Lord the Bear!” And so I was, but not of his cloak with the black and scarlet border.

We rode on, exchanging the news of the camp for news of the world outside, until we came down to the ford, and splashed through; and as we set the horses to the steep rough-paved slope on the far side, Flavian said suddenly, “Fool that I am. I should have told you at first. Hunno bade me remind you that he will be sending your Signus up with the horse drafts, this spring.”

I had almost forgotten that the white foal would be three years old now. In war and in the wilderness one easily loses count of tune. I twisted in the saddle to look at my companion. “You have seen him? He has fulfilled his promise?”

“I believe you will think so. He’s a good hand taller than Arian, and more powerful, and his heart is as high as his crest. Hunno says he is the crown and the flowering of all the colts that ever came under his hands, and that the Horned One has granted it to him to make a perfect horse at the end of his days. . . . I think he forgets that the dam had anything to do with it.”

“The end of his days?” I said quickly. “Is anything amiss with Hunno?”

“Nothing but that he grows old,” Flavian said, and suddenly he sighed. “It happens — it happens to all of us.”

“You have noticed that? Sa! You are growing up, my Minnow.”

“Even Teleri was a little older than when I saw her last. Her breasts are not pointed any more, but round. Maybe by the time I see her again she will have found a white hair and pulled it out and grown seven more.”

It was the best part of a month later that Hunno sent up the yearly draft of horses. They were a good lot. Trained on for battle (that was the task that fell to the summer garrison every year), they would serve to remount some of Pharic’s contingent before the end of the campaigning season.

And among them, as promised, was Signus. The big white war-colt was certainly, I thought, walking all around him in the first moments of our reunion, everything that Hunno had claimed for him. He stood rising sixteen hands at the shoulder, strength and endurance promised though not yet fulfilled in his deep shoulders and long, finely sloping haunches, pride and fire in every line of him from high crest to sweeping, restless tail, and as he stamped and tossed his head and wheeled about to keep me in view, my soul went out to him as it had done at our last meeting, when his muzzle was still flecked with his mother’s milk. I went closer, and felt the quivering bowstring fineness of the tendons at wrist and hock, the life and the instant response shiver through him as I ran my hands over his body. He swung his head toward me in interest, his wariness forgotten, his ears pricked forward, nuzzling with delicate outthrust lip for the lick of salt that he was all at once sure I had brought him. I shook some into my palm from the small rawhide bag I usually carried with me, and gave it to him, drawing my free hand again and again down his nose from forelock to quivering nostril, while he sucked and slobbered at the gray salt. His head was broad and intelligent, his eyes like a falcon’s, dark and luminous, under the veil of white lashes. “Did I not say that we should go into battle together, you and I? Did I not tell thee?” I said, in the British tongue that he would be used to. And he ruckled softly in his nose, butting against me for more salt.

I had him saddled up, and called to Amlodd standing by to bring a spear and follow me, and took him down then and there to the practice field to try him out. We had cleared the old practice field during our first long months in whiter quarters, hauling out the elder bushes and the furze that had overrun it, and setting up the brushwood jumps and spear targets. And there I spent the better part of that evening, one of the happiest evenings, I think, that I have ever known. I tested his paces, and tried him for ease in maneuvering, bending him this way and that, reining him up short and wheeling him almost on his haunches; and found his mouth sensitive and his heart high and willing even when clearly he did not understand what I wanted of him. I took him over the jumps and ditches — it is very seldom that one needs a war-horse to jump, but when one does, one needs it as never anything in life before. In his eagerness he was prone to stretch out his neck and jump off too soon, but confidence and scorn of the obstacle ahead was in the very gathering of his lean haunches under him, and his landings were sure as a cat’s. He must be schooled against overconfidence; ah, but too much fire, too fierce a scorn of obstacles, are better than too little, in horse or man. I took him at full gallop down the curved line of practice posts, swerving him in and out with the torn sods flying back from his hooves, and fell more and more in love with him at every drumming hoofbeat. He shook his head, when I brought him to a halt at last, scattering foam on his breast, and I could sense in him as though one life flowed through both of us, the joy in his own speed and power and the hand beginning to grow familiar on his reins. This would make a war-horse indeed! Only when I took the spear from Amlodd and set him at the target, he was somewhat lacking, for he did not yet understand what was wanted of him, and the target itself, which looked like a man and yet was not a man, was a thing to be shied and snorted and trembled at, lest there be some hidden menace in it. But time and training would amend that. And in the ultimate task of a warhorse I knew that he would need scarce any training at all, for the use of his own teeth and front hooves as weapons is born into every stallion.

By the time that I had done, the sun was low and the three-peaked shadow of Eildon had engulfed the whole river valley and the old red fort on its headland and the marshes eastward. I turned Signus toward the gateway, and saw what looked like half the war host crowded there to watch the show. From deep within the gloom of the gate arch one figure moved forward and started down the length of the practice field toward me, and I saw with a small sharp stab of pleasure that it was Guenhumara. Cabal, who had gone through every trial and test with us, bounded to meet her, and mouthed the hand she held to him in his great jaws. That gentle pretense at savaging, which had in it all the loving laughter of intimacy, was a thing that he bestowed sometimes on me, very occasionally on Guenhumara, on Bedwyr and Druim Dhu, never on anyone else. I noticed that in the curve of her other arm, she carried a small deep rush basket, tenderly as though it contained something fragile and precious.

I had dropped from the saddle, with my tunic sticking to my back, for the evening was warm for April and Signus had been no armchair ride; and when she reached me with Cabal stalking beside her, she stood watching while I rewarded the big colt with another lick of salt. “Flavian told me that you were trying out the white colt, and so I came to watch. Is he all that he should be?”

“He is all that I hoped and believed he would be,” I said, fondling the muzzle that thrust against my breast.

“Believed? You have seen him before, then?”

“Three years ago — a foal still running at his mother’s heel. I marked him for mine, then, and gave him his name for a covenant between us.”

“And the name?”

“Signus. He was an autumn foal, and a white one, and I called him for the star of the Great Swan that rises at the time of the first autumn gales.”

“So — and he is swift and fierce and beautiful like the wild swans that used to fly over my home. It is a good name for him.”

Amlodd had come panting up from the far side of the practice field, and I handed the white colt over to him, and once more turned toward the fortress gates with Guenhumara.

“What will you do now, with Arian?”

“For the next year or two, God willing, I shall ride him equally with Signus. In two years the young one will have gamed experience, and I shall send Arian back to Ambrosius who first gave him to me. He will be past his best by then, poor old lad.”

“He will hate that.”

“He will remember Ambrosius. It would break his heart to hear the trumpets and know that I had gone into battle without him.”

“Poor Arian. It is sad to grow old.”

“It happens,” I said, “to men and horses, and I suppose to the stars themselves, until the time comes that they fall from the sky on a winter’s night. . . . You sound like Flavian; he says that Teleri’s breasts are not pointed any more, but round.”

“That is not age,” said Guenhumara, softly. “That is because she has borne a child and given suck.”

And a sudden silence took us as we walked, a small silence, but painful.

All through the autumn, even while I dreaded her coming, I had hoped, hoped for some kind of miracle, I don’t know what. But when she came, nothing had been changed between us. And Guenhumara, though she never spoke of it, I think had hoped for a miracle, too. If we could have spoken of the trouble, we might have drawn closer together, but we could not. And the silence made a sword-blade barrier between us more impassable than the thing itself. The fact that I could not be fully a man to her made me shy of her in other ways, and as I held back and drew away, so, by no will of her own, it seemed, must she draw away also. And yet I believe she loved me then. I know that I loved her.

“What have you in that basket that you carry as though it were eggs?” I asked at last; anything to break the silence.

And she laughed a little breathlessly and hurried to help me. “But it is eggs! Look!” And coming to a standstill, she turned to me and put back a wad of grass and moss with which the basket seemed to be filled, and showed me, lying as it were in a nest of moss, seven greenish waxen-surfaced mallard’s eggs. “Gwalchmai found them in the marshes and brought them to me to hatch.”

As she carefully re-covered them to keep their warmth in, I thought that that was like Gwalchmai, thought also that the gift showed the place that she had found for herself among us and taken with quiet certainty as her own. “I’ll have no married women to raise trouble among the men,” I had said, long ago, to Flavian. But if trouble of that kind were to come with Guenhumara, it still lay hidden in the future days. Maybe that was in part because she was mine, and I was Artos the Bear, with a bear’s blow to defend my own; maybe, a little, because they too were mine; but chiefly, I think, it was something in Guenhumara herself.

“And how is it you think you are going to hatch them? Will you make a nest and sit on them turn and turn about with Blanid?” I asked, making a foolish jest of it.

We had moved on again, and the onlookers about the gate, now that the show was over, were beginning to drift away.

“One of Caradawg’s hens has gone broody,” she said. “That was why Gwalchmai brought them to me, because he thought that there was a good chance of hatching them.”

It was more than I did. Caradawg the armorer whiled away the time when work was slack by breeding fighting cocks and trading them through the fort and with the merchants who came occasionally in the summer, and I could not see one of his fierce little red game hens sitting placidly on a clutch of mallard’s eggs. “I was going to find Caradawg when Flavian told me about the colt, and I saw the crowd gathering and came down to watch with the rest.” .Guenhumara checked, and added after a moment, “Only of course I shall not be here to see them hatch out; Caradawg must see to that for me. That was the one thing that Gwalchmai forgot.”

“Yes,” I said, “that is the one thing that Gwalchmai forgot.”

“Let me stay a while longer,” she said suddenly, “until the ducklings are safely hatched.”

I shook my head. “Mid-April is late enough for you to be making the journey. It is not even as though I could spare the time to ride all the way with you and leave you safe in your father’s hall.”

“Is not Pharic’s arm strong enough to get me there, even with an escort behind him?”

“In mid-April, yes. By mid-May, for all that we can know, it might take the whole war host.”

There was a small pause. We were out on the roadway now, and had slackened to a snail’s pace; as though without actually admitting it by stopping, neither of us wished to reach the gates. Then Guenhumara said, “Very well, if you fear an ambush for me on the journey, let me stay here all summer. I shall be safe enough within these great red walls.”

“Will you? We hold Trimontium with a garrison cut to the very bone in summer, to free every possible man for the war trail. You have a certain value as a hostage, and if word that the Bear’s wife was here with so small a force to guard her came to the ears of our enemies, broken and divided as they are, you might bring deadly peril both on yourself and Trimontium. I can’t afford to lose either of you.”

“But principally Trimontium,” said Guenhumara, and drew away from me a little as we walked. “Ah well, I promised, did I not, that you should not find me a too clinging wife.”

I made a clumsy, protesting gesture of some sort toward her, and then checked it because of the men who still lounged in the gateway. Even alone with Guenhumara I was shy of any ultimate gesture, being a hamstrung lover in all things; and before other eyes I could not touch her at all. The gate was very near now, and she spoke quickly and very quietly, with a breath of unhappy laughter. “Na na, you need not pretend, my lord; part of you will breathe a great breath of relief when I am gone.”

“And part of me will miss you as a newly blinded man misses the first light of morning,” I said in the same suppressed tone.

She looked around at me, then, and in the last few steps, drew nearer again. “God help us both!” she said, as she had said it on the first night of all. The long evening shadow of the gate towers fell across us.

By the end of that year’s war trail, I knew that I could safely leave Valentia to itself, at least for a while, and turn south at last, to redeem my four-year-old promise to Eburacum. And that following summer I did not send Guenhumara back to her father, but for the first and only time in our years together, carried her with me. It seems an odd decision now, and looking back, I am not sure how I came to make it. I suppose at the roots of the thing, because I wanted to so sorely. I knew that the small Sisterhood who had fled with the rest of Eburacum when the Sea Wolves came, had returned to what was left of their house in the city; and I could leave Guenhumara with them, and perhaps, if the chances of war fell so, see her from time to time through the summer.

So we rode south, leaving behind us the usual small garrisons in Three Hills and Castra Cunetium. Old Blanid rode with the baggage train, like a battered old rook clinging to the tail of a wagon, but Guenhumara put on again the breeks and short tunic that, with her hair hidden, still made her look like a boy, and rode ahead with the Companions.

The men of Eburacum welcomed us back as though we had been their long-lost kindred, crowding the streets to cheer us in: I looked for Helen among the throng, and did not see her until a knot of poppy-red ribbons flung from above hit Cei on the mouth as he rode beside me, and glancing up, I saw her raddled face laughing down from an upper window. She waved to both of us, and I waved back. Cei thrust the ribbons into his bosom and blew her smacking kisses through his fiery beard as though he had not loved every girl of the baggage train and a score of others besides, and wearied of them all since the last time that he lay in her arms.

They had given a good account of themselves in the past four years, the men of Eburacum and the Brigantian territory; they had held their city free of the Sea Wolves, and here and there even thrust back the Saxon settlement from along the coast and river mouths, and they carried themselves like hounds with two tails. But there still waited work enough for us to do. We made camp in the old fortress as we had done before, while the war host made itself battle-ready; and for days the bargaining that rose from the corn merchants’ stores and the sellers of dried meat and sour wine, the fletchers and the leatherworkers bade fair to drown the rasp of file and the ring of hammer on anvil from Jason the Sword-smith, and the armorers’ shops throughout all the city.

It was not until the last day before we marched out that I took Guenhumara, with Blanid still grumbling and flapping in attendance, to the House of the Holy Ladies. It was a long low building turning a blank eyeless face upon the Street of the Clothmakers that ran toward the fortress gates. The patched walls with scars of burning still upon them, the clumsy new thatch that showed the ends of charred beams here and there under the eaves, told clearly enough of the state in which the Saxons had left it. We spoke with the Mother Abbess in her little private chamber, and after Guenhumara had been made gently welcome, and led away from me by a small scurrying Sister like a sad little bird, I lingered for a last word with the woman who ruled this narrow enclosed world.

She was a tall woman, and I think had been beautiful. Her hands folded in her dark robed lap were beautiful still, and strong, though knotted with rheumatism and yellow-white as the ivory of the crucifix hanging on the lime-washed wall behind her, a big hand that I could imagine holding a sword. She would make a foe worthy of any man’s blade, I felt that instinctively, and liked her the more for it, as one good fighting man recognizes his brotherhood with another. “There was something more you wished to say to me, my Lord Count of Britain?”

“Only this.” It was a thing that must be set clear and straight between us. “That I would not have you shelter the Lady Guenhumara under any false hope of a gift for your nunnery. What money I have, whatever treasure I can gather, goes to feeding my men, in the purchase of war-horses and the retempering of sword blades. And furthermore, it has been in my mind these many years that since I fight, among other matters, to keep the roof over the Church’s head and the light unquenched on the altar and its holy ones with their throats uncut, it is the Church that owes to me, not I that owe to the Church.”

“So I have heard, these many years also,” the Abbess said gravely.

And I had another thought, and came a step nearer to the tall chair in which she sat. “One thing more, Holy Mother; I mean no disrespect in this, but I ride away tomorrow, and Guenhumara will be in your hands. I am not greatly loved by the Church of Christ, as both you and I know, and to speak truth that has not held me long from my sleep at nights; and if, when I come back, I find that my wife has not been well and kindly used in every way, then women as you are —”

“You will see whether this house of God will not burn as brightly a second time as it did the first,” said the Mother Abbess. “Do not spend your threat on me, Artos the Bear, for there is no need, I assure you.” Suddenly and most unexpectedly she smiled, a smile that was somewhat grim about the mouth, but danced behind her eyes. “As Abbess of this house of Holy Sisters, it is my duty to tell you that you are a most sinful man, a despoiler of Christ’s Garden second only to the Saxon kind, and that on the day when Almighty God in His Glory parts the sheep from the goats, you are assuredly damned. But as a mere woman, and one perhaps not overblest with meekness, it is in my heart to spoil all by telling you that if I were a man and fighting to hold back the Barbarian flood and the darkness from the land, I believe that I should feel and act much as you have done, and deserve damnation also, in the Day of Judgment.”

“Holy Mother,” I said, and did not realize until the words were spoken, how unseemly they were, “I wish I had you among my Companions.”

“Maybe I should make a better fighting man than I do a nun,” she said, and I do not think she felt the words an outrage. “Though God knows that I strive to live by His rule and be worthy of my trust. But as to the Lady Guenhumara — we are a small sisterhood, and poor; we live for the most part on the charity of the good people of this city, and on the outcome of three fields beyond the walls. We have no store of gold, no jeweled image or worked altar cloth to give you for the purchase of horses or sword blades, but we will share most willingly what we have with your wife, and strive to make her happy among us until you come for her again. Let that be our gift, some payment of our debt to you.”

“There could be none greater,” I said. I pulled off a bracelet of enameled bronze that I had worn since I was a boy, and set it on the table beside her. “That is not to destroy the gift, but that Guenhumara need not live on the charity of the good citizens of Eburacum. I thank you, Holy Mother. I am ashamed.”

I knelt for her blessing, the first time I had received a blessing from the Church since the day that I took Gwalchmai from his fenland monastery. And the small scurrying Sister, summoned by a little bronze bell that stood on the table to the Abbess’s hand, led me away and thrust me out into the fine spring rain that was scudding down the Street of Clothworkers, and I heard the heavy door rattle shut on the women’s world that I had left behind me.

That summer we rode the war trail all up the coast, northward and northward and northward, burning and harrying as we went, and gathering an ever-growing war host from the hills and moors, until we rounded the end of the Wall at Segedunum and came up with the traces of our last summer’s southernmost harryings, and knew that at least for an hour, until the next tide rose and the next wind blew from across the sea, our coasts from the Bodotria to the estuary of the Metaris were free of the Saxon scourge. But it was a long trail and a hard one, and there was no return to Eburacum in all that time, so that it was full autumn before I saw Guenhumara again.

We rode into the city on a still October evening full of wood-smoke and the smell of coming frost, with great rustling flights of starlings sweeping homeward overhead. And I do not think that there was one living soul in Eburacum who could walk or crawl or be carried, from the age-palsied beggar on two sticks to the wide-eyed baby held up against its mother’s shoulder, from the chief magistrate with his formal speech of welcome, to the very dunghill curs, who did not come swarming into the streets to see us clatter past and give us a welcome fit for heroes, as though we were newly in from some battle of gods and Titans, instead of a summer spent in burning out Saxon hornets’ nests and getting well stung for our pains. Their voices broke about us in great waves of sound, they cast branches of golden leaves and autumn berries before our horses’ feet, they crashed forward and surged about us so that at times we could barely force a way onward at all. I was riding old Arian, for it was his last campaign that we returned from, and I felt that the triumph was his due — he had always loved a triumph; he was playing to the trumpets now, tossing his head and all but dancing — and indeed it was as well that I did so, for Signus, although magnificent in a charge, was still inclined to fret and turn difficult in a crowd.

I had meant to go straight up to the fortress, get out of my filthy war gear and if possible shake off the crowd, and then go quietly down to the House of the Holy Ladies and ask Guenhumara if she would come with me now or bide where she was for the few days until we marched for Trimontium again.

But as we turned into the Street of the Clothworkers that led up from the main street to the fortress, and I saw the blind wall of the house close before me, it was as though I heard Guenhumara call, not with the ears of my body, but in some quiet place in the very midst of myself, beyond the reach of the joyous uproar all around me. She was calling me, needing me, not later when I had gone up to the fortress and shed my harness and was at leisure for other things, but now in this present moment. I told myself that I was a fool and imagining things, but I knew that I was not — I was not — and in a few moments more I should be swept past the house, with the Companions torrenting up the street behind me, and the light troops and the rattling baggage train, on and up toward the fortress gate, and Guenhumara left crying after me. . . .

“Sound me the Halt!” I cried to Prosper. He shouted back, something that had the note of a question or a protest, but I did not hear the words. “Sound me the Halt, damn you, and keep on sounding it!”

I was already swinging Arian out of the main stream, forcing him through the onlookers, who bunched and scattered squealing, to give me passage, as I heard the horn sounding its brief imperative message. “Halt! Halt! Halt!” I heard the shouts of the watchers and the turmoil break out behind me, the trampling and cursing as the cavalry obeyed the unexpected order. Bedwyr had thrust through to my side, and leaned half out of the saddle to catch Arian’s bridle from me as I dropped to the ground. I turned to the small strong door, thrusting back Cabal, who would have followed me, and beat on it with the hilt of my dirk.

The same small scurrying Sister came in answer to the summons, glancing past me into the street with a white startled face, even as she saw who I was. “My Lord Artos?”

“I have come for my wife,” I said.

In a short while I was standing again in the small lime-washed chamber with the ivory crucifix on the wall. The room was dim with the autumn evening, and empty. But almost at once a slight sound made me swing around to the door; and the Mother Abbess stood there. “This is a house of prayer and contemplation. Are you responsible for this uproar before our door?”

“I have a war host with me, and the people of Eburacum are glad to see them come again. . . . I am come for my wife, Holy Mother.”

“Would it not have been better to have gone up to the fortress first, and come for her in a gentler manner, when the welcome had died down?”

“Much. That was what I meant to do, but when we turned into the Street of the Clothworkers and I saw the nunnery wall before me I — changed my mind.”

She moved aside from the small deep-set door. “So. Go then and fetch her as swiftly as may be; I think that you will find her in our little herb garden, waiting for you. And —” The shimmer of a smile crept once more into her dry low voice. “I believe that she will give you a good enough account of us to save the nunnery roof from a second taste of fire.” She had moved to the table and picked up the little bronze bell that stood there. “Sister Honoria will show you the way.”

A nun, a stranger this time, with the soft anxious eyes and surging flanks of a cow ripe for the ball, answered the summons, and to her the Mother Abbess said, “Take my Lord Artorius into the herber, and send someone to bid Blanid bring out her mistress’s bundles. The Lady Guenhumara is leaving us.”

She turned to me for the last time. “You have been hunting Saxons into the sea all summer, they tell me. Our gratitude and our prayers together with those of all Britain must be yours for that — and I think you may need our prayers more than you do our gratitude. Do not bring Guenhumara to take her leave; Sister Ancheret our Infirmarer is sick herself, and I am very busy in her place, with the poor sick folk who come to us morning and evening. She has my blessing already.“

I thanked her, and followed the broad black back as it surged deliberately down a stone-flagged passage, through a bare hall set with trestle tables and benches, and out into a narrow courtyard with a well in the midst of it. A young nun was drawing water at the well, but never looked up as we passed. I suppose it would have been a sin. On the far side of the courtyard was an archway in a high curved crumbling wall that looked as though it might have been part of the outer wall of the theatre in the old days. And the fat nun took one hand from the loose sleeves of her habit and pointed to it, never lifting her eyes to my face. “If you go through there, you will find her. But pray be careful for our little cat. She will suckle her kittens always in the midst of the path; and striped tabby as they are, it is not easy to see them if they chance to be in the shade of the cherry tree. . . . I will go and tell Blanid about the Lady Guenhumara’s clothes. She has such pretty kirtles, blue and violet, and a checkered cloak; but she has only worn a gray one here. . . .”

I heard the flap of her clumsy sandals recrossing the court behind me, as I went on through the doorway in the wall.

Beyond was a long irregular strip of garden, high-walled on all sides, and seemingly with no way out save the one by which I had come. A place filled with the soft dusty grays and greens and silky mouse-browns of herbs and medicinal plants now run to seed, where the sinking turmoil of the street outside came only as the roar of surf on a distant shore. And at the far end, her face turned to the archway, stood Guenhumara, dim-colored as the garden, save for the brightness of her hair.

She took a hurried step forward when she saw me, then checked, and stood quite still to wait my coming. I came near to treading on the tabby cat after all, for my eyes were filled with Guenhumara, but I was aware of it just in time, where the striped shade of the cherry tree lay in the last dregs of sunlight across the path, and stepped safely over it and the guzzling kittens. Then I was with Guenhumara, taking the hands she held out to me. I wanted to fling my arms around her and bruise her body, and her mouth against mine, but she seemed so remote in the old gray gown she wore, remote and far away from me, like a nun herself, and I could not.

“Guenhumara! Guenhumara, is it well with you?”

“Well enough,” she said; and then echoing my tone in that low vibrant voice of hers: “Artos! Artos, are you really here so soon?”

“I did not mean to come until I had got rid of my war gear and the good folk of Eburacum. But I had a sudden feeling that you wanted me — it was as though you called to me, Guenhumara.”

“And so you came.”

“And so I came.” I had her by the hand and was drawing her back toward the archway. I did not know why I had the feeling that there was no time to be lost in getting her away from the place. It was certainly nothing to do with the tumult outside; it was more like a sudden sense of danger. And yet it was hard to see what could menace her in that quiet nunnery garden.

“I left the good folk of Eburacum and the whole war host giving tongue like the Wild Hunt before the door. Did you call me, Guenhumara?”

She looked up into my face with grave smoke-colored eyes under the feathered tawny brows. “Yes,” she said. “Old Marcipor who chops wood for the Sisters and helps with the heaviest part of the gardening, he brought us word this morning that the Count of Britain would ride in before dusk; and all day the city has been humming to itself, and all day I have waited. And then I heard the shouting and the trumpets and the horses’ hooves, and I knew that you were back in Eburacum and that you must pass up this street to the fortress, and I thought, Presently, when he has seen his mess safe into camp, and stripped off his sweaty harness and perhaps eaten, and found time to breathe, then he will come for me. Tonight, or maybe tomorrow morning he will come for me. And then quite suddenly I knew that I could not wait. I have waited, not too impatiently, all summer, but when I heard the horses, and the people shouting ‘Artos!’ I knew that I could not wait any longer — it was as though I were suffocating within these walls. I believe if you had passed, I should have made them open the door, and run after you to catch your stirrup.” She broke off. “No, I should not — of course I should not. I should have waited somehow, till you came.”

We had passed under the narrow arched doorway into the courtyard again. The strange sense of danger was less pressing now, and I had begun to tell myself that I was a fool. I checked beside the wellhead and turned to look at her. She seemed not so remote now, as though from her, too, the shadow was passing, as though the life were waking in her again; and I noticed for the first time that she had left off her braids and knotted up the heavy masses of her hair at the back of her head after the manner of Roman women; that was partly what had made her seem strange to me. I would have caught her into my arms and kissed her then, heedless of the eyes looking on, but she held me off with both hands on my breast, begging with a strange urgency, “No, Artos! Not here! Please, please not here!” and the moment passed, and there were the dark figures of nuns about us, and she was turning from one to another, taking her leave of them, with old Blanid clutching her bundle on the outskirts of the cluster. “God be with you, Sister Honoria, Sister Rufia — pray for me — Sister Praxedes.” But it was not a time to be lingering over farewells. I caught her up and bore her out through the fluttering black-robed throng, across the eating hall and down the passageway and the shallow steps beyond. A Sister scurried ahead to draw the bolts and bars of the door. Blanid flapped along with toothless duckings of delight in our rear. And so, much as though I were bearing off a bride by force, I carried Guenhumara out into the crowded street.

We were greeted by a roar from those near enough to see what was happening, a high, delighted squealing from the women, a crash of laughter and shouted welcome from my own Companions. Bedwyr had dismounted, and stood holding Arian’s bridle besides his own horse’s, while Cabal, sitting alert and quivering where I had left him, sprang up with wildly lashing tail. I tossed Guenhumara up onto Arian’s back and taking the reins from Bedwyr, mounted behind her and settled her into the crook of my bridle arm. Bedwyr was laughing up at me, his crooked face alight and on fire with his laughter. “Sa sa! Bravely done, old Hero! Here is matter for a harp song!”

“Make it for us after supper!” I cried, and struck my heel into the horse’s flank.

Arian broke forward, Bedwyr swung into his saddle, Pharic pressed up on my other side calling greetings to his sister, and the rest of the Company came jingling and clattering after me. Guenhumara looked back over my shoulder at the small deep-set door in the eyeless nunnery wall, and I felt her shiver. The kind of swift convulsive shudder that is supposed to mean a gray goose flying over one’s grave; and instinctively I tightened my arm about her. “What is it? Were you unhappy there? Were they not kind to you after all?” Under the roar of voices, the clatter of hooves and jinkety-jink of harness, we could speak together as privately as though we were alone on Eildon slopes with only the curlew to overhear. “Because if that is the way of it, I’ll —”

She shook her head. “They were very kind to me, the Sisters, and even the Mother Abbess whom they all fear. But it was like being in a cage. I could not breathe or stretch my wings — and no fresh wind ever blew through the bars. . . .”

“You have always hated cages, haven’t you — cages and chains.”

“Always. I think in a way I have always been afraid of them.” She gave a small shaken laugh. “When I was fourteen, the man I was to marry gave me a pair of linnets in a wicker cage. You were supposed to hang it in a tree, and the linnet would sing to you all day long. I kept them for three days because they were his gift and I loved him, and then I could not bear it any more, and I opened the little door and let them go.”

The corner of the street hid the House of the Holy Ladies from view, and she fetched a quick sigh that sounded like relief, and turned face forward again.

I HAVE never known such an autumn for berries as we had that year. Every dog-rose tangle was flame-flecked with hips, every whitethorn looked from a little distance to be the color of dried blood, bryony and honeysuckle ramped along the wood-shores scattering their red fire-jewels among the gray seed-smoke of the clematis, and old Blanid shook her head and mumbled darkly of a cruel winter on the way. But it has often seemed to me that the threat of an especially hard winter after a big berry crop is no more than a tale that the old wives tell each other; and I paid little heed. We always made ready as best we could for a hard winter, at Trimontium, and most years we got it.

On the third day after we returned to our winter quarters, word was brought to me that Druim Dhu had come into camp, seeking to speak with me. By this time the Dark People of our nearest hills had lost much of their strangeness in our eyes. Many of our lads even forgot to cross their fingers if they stepped in a Dark One’s shadow, and the Dark People on their side had lost much of their fear of us. It was no unusual thing nowadays for Druim Dhu or one of his brothers to come and set themselves down by our cooking fires, even eat if they were hungry, borrow a hammer or a cooking pot — they were great borrowers, but more scrupulous in their returning than many churched Christians are — and perhaps leave a gift of a freshly taken wild honeycomb or a couple of salmon trout behind, when they disappeared as silently as they had come.

So I found Druim now, squatting beside the master armorer in his dark cavern of a workshop, and watching with attentive interest, head a little on one side as a dog sits beside a mousehole, while he renewed some broken links in a war shirt. He got up when he saw me coming, and came to meet me with his usual palm-to-forehead salutation. “May the sun shine on my lord’s face by day and the moon guide his feet in the darkness.”

I returned the greeting, and waited for whatever it was that he had come to say to me. It was never any good trying to hurry matters with Druim Dhu, or any of his kind. One waited for them to be ready, and when they were ready, they spoke. He watched a peregrine hovering above the fort until I could have shaken him, and then said without any preamble, “Let my lord send the horses south this winter.”

I looked at him keenly. That was a course that I had always striven to avoid. “Why?” I demanded. “We have always kept them with us in winter quarters before.”

“Not through such a whiter as this one will be.”

“You believe that it is going to be a hard one?” If he talked to me of berries, I should send him to old Blanid, and they could tell each other their old wives’ tales until suppertime.

“There will be such a whiter as there has not been since I was a cub scarce done with sucking my mother. A whiter like a white beast that strives to tear your heart out.”

“How do you know?”

“Earth Mother has told the Old Woman in my house.”

There was something in the way he spoke, something in the dark wild eyes, that chilled me suddenly. This was a different thing from Blanid’s talk of berries. “What do you mean? How does Earth Mother speak to the Old Woman in your house?”

He shrugged, but his gaze never left my face. “I do not know. I am not a woman, and not old. Earth Mother does not speak to me, though I too should look for a hard winter, taking my fore-tidings from the changed ways of the deer and the wolf kind. I know only that when Earth Mother speaks to the Old Woman, what she tells is true.”

“And so in my place, you would send the horses south.”

“If I wished still to be a horse lord in the spring. There will be no grazing-out in mild spells, this year; and the Hairy Ones, the Wolf-People, will hunt to the very gates of the fortress.”

“So. I will think upon it. Go now and get something to eat. My thanks for bringing me the warning of Earth Mother.”

I did think upon it, deeply, all the rest of that day; and when the evening meal was over, I called Cei and Bedwyr and Pharic and the rest of my chiefs and captains to my own quarters. We had a little fire of peat and birch bark and wild cherry logs in a battered brazier, for already the evenings were turning cold, and when all of us were gathered about it, I told them. “Brothers, I have been thinking; and out of my thinking, I am decided this year to make a change in our usual custom, and send the horses south for the winter.”

A dozen startled faces looked back at me in the red upward glow of the brazier. Cei was the first to speak, playing in the way he had with the blue glass bracelets on his wrist. “I thought you would as lief part with your sword arm as with the horses.”

“Almost as lief,” I said.

Bedwyr, squatting on the pile of wolfskins that sometimes served me as a bed, his harp as usual on his knee, leaned forward into the light that turned his face into a copper mask. “Then why this sudden desire for amputation?”

“Because Earth Mother has told the Old Woman in Druim’s house that this will be a winter like a white beast that strives to tear men’s hearts out. There will be no grazing-out in the mild spells, and the Wolf-People will hunt to the fortress gates. So says Earth Mother.”

Pharic’s black brows drew together. “And think you that Druim’s word and the word of the Old Woman and Earth Mother are to be trusted so much?” He broke into a somewhat scornful grin. “Oh, I doubt not that they are speaking the truth as they believe it. So is old Blanid when she babbles of autumn berries. They believe so much, the Little Dark People, but need we believe also?”

“I — think so, yes. I propose to act on it as though I did, at all events; and if I am wrong, I give you leave to point the finger of laughter at me for all time.”

Within a week the horses had all gone south, save for three or four of the hardy hill ponies that we kept against possible need of a messenger. Most of our light riders were of course needed to take them, one half directly south to the Corstopitum depot and on to Eburacum, and the other by Castra Cunetium and down to Deva. And with each, I sent half a squadron of the Companions — Flavian, as it chanced, in command. I gave orders, since there seemed little help for it, that the men were to winter with the horses, and bring them up again in the spring.

We had brought up the last of the winter supplies with us from Corstopitum, and with good stocks of meal and salted carcasses in the long store barn, we settled down to make all secure and galley-shape for the winter that Druim Dhu had promised us. We mended again the cracks in the barrack-row walls, where the autumn rams had washed out the mud of our previous repairs (we were almost as great workers with mud, by that tune, as the swallows who built every spring under the eaves of the Praetorium), we got in extra peat and firewood, melted down every scrap of fat for candles, and piled up great ricks of russet bracken for bedding and the ponies’ fodder. This being our fifth winter in the Three Hills, we must push farther afield in our foraging and woodcutting, and without the aid of the wiry little pack beasts that in past winters we had relied on to carry the loads. But with no horses to tend and exercise, we had more time than usual on our hands even so; and we hunted hard, that autumn, eating fresh meat while we could.

I had thought, naturally, to see no more of the horses or the men who had gone with them, until spring, but in half a month the Eburacum part of the squadron under Corfil, who had stepped into Fercos’s place as Flavian’s second, plodded in on foot, having done the march, so they reported without undue humility, in the exact nine days laid down for the Legions in the days of good roads. And two days after Samhain, as though his arrival was the signal for the white beast to begin his prowling, Flavian himself, with his half squadron behind him, staggered in through the Praetorium Gate in a blinding snowstorm.

“I didn’t think we were going to. make it,” he said, when he came to me in my quarters.

I cursed him where he stood. “You bleeding fool! Didn’t I give the whole lot of you orders to stay south until the spring — and you with a wife and son in Deva!”

He blinked at me in the light of the lantern, the snow on his shoulders melting into dark wetness at the edges, and grinned, weary but unashamed. “It is a different matter for the auxiliaries. We are the Brotherhood, and we have always been an unruly lot. We didn’t like the order, so we took a vote on it and decided to mutiny.“

Earth Mother had spoken truth. By mid-November we were sunk so deep in whiter that we might have been in a world that had never known spring. At first the snow was not deep, save in the hollows and the northward-facing glens, for the first fall had melted, and the stuff that followed it was wet, sleet and half-frozen rain that drove and drenched across the fort before bitter gales from the northeast. Eildon must have sheltered us a little, but I think not much, and the wind howled day after day down through the hazel woods to fling itself like a living enemy upon the old red sandstone fort above the river. The woods boomed and roared like a great sea beating upon a wild coast; and indeed for days at a time, for all that we could see of Eildon and the hills beyond, we might have been perched on some headland high above a raging sea. And then after a month, the wild gales fell still, and out of the stillness came snow, and an ever-increasing cold that made the sword Wit sear the hand, and narrowed the spring under the hazel bushes that had been the gift of the Little Dark People to the merest dribbling thread of water, under a curtain of black ice. And in the long nights the strange, colored fires that Pharic’s people called the “Crown of the North” and Druim’s “The Dancers” played more brightly than ever I had seen them, across the northern sky.

But under the covering of snow, our log and brushwood piles were broad and long, and the peat stacks rose beside the living place doors, the stores were gathered in, and we had even a cartload of sour wine to help out the local heather beer at the times when men need to make merry. And with no need to trouble for the horses’ fodder (but God of gods, how we missed the stamping in the picket lines, and how the loneliness, the sense of being utterly cut off from the world, increased upon us with the horses gone!) we felt that we could outlast the whiter well enough.

That was until Midwinter’s night.

For all of us that night had some meaning. For those of us who were Christians, it had become the custom in our fathers’ fathers’ time to celebrate the birth of the Christos on that night, when the old year goes down into the dark, and out of the dark all things are born anew. To those who followed the Old Faith, it was the night of the Midwinter Fires, when one made all the light and heat one could, to help the sun grow strong again and drive out the darkness and the cold. For the few among us who bore the small telltale brand of Mithras between the brows, it was, just as to the Christians, the Saviour’s birth night. To most of us it was, I suppose, in some sort a mingling of all these things, and to all of us, when the worship was over, it was a night for as much merrymaking as could be crammed into it, and as much heather beer. In an open winter when the hunting was good, we were able to get fresh meat for the Midwinter feast; but this year there had been no hunting for upward of a month, and we should have no release from the tyranny of boiled salt beef and mutton. But there was always the beer. Each year I released three days’ supply of beer to make up for the shortage in other directions. That meant the portion of the garrison who had weaker heads than the rest, or who got more than their fair share, were drunk by midnight, and greeted the next day with aching head and bloodshot eyes and tempers. What would have happened if the fort had ever been attacked at that time, I sweat to think; but I knew the limits of my power with the wild auxiliaries; they were not the Company, and it did not extend to keeping them sober on Midwinter night. Besides, men do not remain at their best, especially cut off in the wilds, if they may not make merry to the full, now and then.

But I, I dreaded Midwinter, and was always devoutly thankful when it was over for another year and the fort not burned down about our ears.

This particular Christ’s Mass night was no worse than its forerunners had been, until one of the mule drivers having (so his mates said afterward) drunk himself into a state of deep suspicion of the world, got the idea that he was somehow being cheated of his fair share, and stealing a half-full beerskin, departed to make merry by himself in a corner of the derelict mill shed which backed onto the main store barn. What happened after that, no one can ever know. In all likelihood he kicked over the lantern he had brought with him and it opened as it fell, the guttering flame caught the dry-bracken fodder stored there, and the wind blowing through the holes in the roof did the rest.

The first that anyone knew of the danger was when one of the guard (we always kept a small and comparatively sober guard, even on Midwinter’s night) saw smoke curling up through the rents in the mill shed roof.

I was with the main uproar in the mess hall when the man came running with his news, and the Companions and most of the auxiliaries gathered there with me; but the baggage train folk had quarters of their own beyond the old parade ground, and there would be small knots making merry all over the camp, many of them half drunk by this time. I got hold of Prosper, who was still smiling somewhat owlishly into the fire while the other men stumbled cursing to their feet all about him, and shook him into awareness. “Get out of here and sound me the alarm, and keep on sounding it!” I told him, and casting a hurried glance around me, saw that most of the Companions, at least, still looked reasonably serviceable.

“They’ll think it’s an attack,” someone objected.

“What in Hell’s name does that matter, if it gets their heads out of the beer jar?” I was already running for the door, Cabal leaping ahead of me in wild excitement. I ran as though for my life across the empty parade ground and down toward the lower camp, most of the Brotherhood pelting at my heels, and behind us, clear and true and rock-steady — it is wonderful what habit will do — I heard the notes of the great aurochs horn sounding the alarm.

By the time we reached the clear space before the mill shed and workshop, there was a crowd that thickened every moment, as men tumbled out from their merrymaking in answer to the urgent summons of the horn and, as word leapt from man to man like heath fire itself, headed down toward the disaster. There could be no doubt now as to where the fire was; flame had followed the smoke; it was already bursting through the rough thatch in a score of places, leaping up into the night, and the flickering glare of it brightened over the gaping faces of the crowd. The wind that had been rising all day was blowing hard from the northeast by that time, driving dark rags of cloud across the frost-fierce stars; driving also the licking flames along the thatch toward the store barn.

They got the door open just as I arrived, and the red furnace burst of flame that leapt up behind it on the instant drove them back as though from a charge of horsemen. I forced my way through them, yelling, “Leave that, you fools! The flames are spreading to the barn roof. Get the stores out!” Pharic and I and a couple more of us, heads down behind our arms, managed to get the door shut again, while Bedwyr was already busy organizing a bucket chain from the well, with any and everything capable of holding water — we had enough men to fight a score of fires, scarce enough water to quench a candle. But there was the snow; it did not serve so well as water, but it was better than nothing. We blanketed the flames with it as best we could, while men swarming onto the roof strove to tear away the thatch and rafters in the path of the fire. The ponies in their nearby shed were shrieking in terror as the smoke reached them, but they were in no danger as yet. Others of us, the women among them, were working desperately to get out the stores. They might have saved the whole, but the door, which we had made ourselves to close the gap where the old one had rotted away, was of green wood because we had no seasoned timber, and prone to jam. It jammed now; perhaps the heat had something to do with it; and by the time it had been broken in, while several of the lads getting onto the roof and tearing up the smoldering thatch, dropped through into what might like enough have been their deathtrap, the fire was there ahead of them.

Our store of mutton tallow added to the blaze, making the whole store shed a torch. Rags of blazing thatch had begun to tear off and whirl away downwind like birds of fire, and I sent men running to watch against other outbreaks. The flames leapt higher, bending over at the crest, and the flickering light beat upon our scorching eyeballs, the thick smoke cloud choked us, and the fire seemed to be in our very lungs. In the end we got less than half the stores out, before the roof came down with a rending crash and a roar of flame, engulfing two men.

The fire was beginning to sink, the darkness creeping back over the fort, and we had kept the flames from spreading to any other building. But that was the best that could be said. I remember, as one remembers a dark dream, men bringing lanterns, now that the fire was low, to light the work of salvage, and myself standing in the trampled slush that was already freezing over again, surrounded by scorched men and half-charred carcasses of meat, and grain baskets with the coarse meal seeping out through the blackened slits in their sides. I was rank with sweat, and the sweat was turning icy on me in the bitter wind, and the palms of my hands seemed flayed and full of pulsing fire. Guenhumara was there too, with a great smear of black across her forehead. I suppose I must have asked her what she did there — I always made her go with Blanid to her own quarters, and bolt the door, when the drinking started — for she said breathlessly, “Carrying water. Was I to stay in my rooms, with the horn sounding the alarm, and men crying fire through the camp?” And then, “Artos, your eyebrows are singed off,” and then in quick concern as Cabal crouched panting against my legs, and I made to fondle his poor scorched head, “Oh my dear, your hands! Your poor hands! Come up with me and let me salve them.”

But I had other things to do just then. There would be time presently for Guenhumara’s salves, there was none now.

We had lost three men, and half the rest of us had burns and scorches to show for that night’s work. Three men not counting the mule driver. We found the charred stump of his body next day, lying in its snug corner behind the millstone with the shriveled remains of a burst beerskin beside it. He seemed never to have moved at all, so deep in drink that like enough he never even realized what was happening until the smoke suffocated him. We did not trouble to give him decent burial, but simply flung what was left of him over the ramparts at the place where the hill dropped almost sheer to the river, and left him to the wolves if they did not mind their meat somewhat overcooked.

That day after taking exact stock of the stores that were left to us, we held a hurried council to decide our course of action. But, in truth, there was little choice left to us. To try to break out and get south to Corstopitum through the drifts and the blinding blizzards would have been nothing but a deliberate marching on death, and it would be equally impossible — as well as useless — to attempt getting a message through to them. The same applied to any attempt to get word through to Castra Cunetium; the deep mountain roads were utterly impassable to anything heavier-footed than a hare, and even supposing that the word could be got to them, and the stores got back again, the garrison was so small that if they parted with enough to make any appreciable difference to us, it would result merely in their starving in our stead. There was nothing to be done but stay where we were and make the remaining food last out as long as possible. After working the matter out carefully, it appeared that if we went on half rations from that day, we could hold out until about midway through February.

“An early spring might save us,” said Gwalchmai, who, though no captain, always had his place at our councils.

And Bedwyr laughed. “The sun cannot complain that we did not make him a fine enough Midwinter blaze!”

But the weeks went by and the weeks went by, and winter seemed to have claimed the world for good. There was never a day that offered a chance of hunting, only snow and gales, and bitter black frost that bound up the land even under its white furs. The snow lay drifted in slow curves to the eaves on the northern side of every building, and every day fresh paths must be cleared to stable and well and store sheds, not that that was altogether a bad thing, for digging keeps a man warm — though it also makes him hungry. Now and then, by putting out the bones of a finished carcass in a good spot of a moonlit night, and then putting a couple of archers on the walls, we managed to get a wolf or two, but they were so famine-thin themselves, poor brutes, that there was little that the women could do with them save make broth; and already the men grew gaunt and hollow-eyed, with heads that seemed too big for their sharp shoulders.

One day Cei came to me and said, “Maybe the Dark People have food. Why do we not go foraging? You know where one village is, at all events.”

“They will have little enough for themselves; they will have none to spare for those that come asking.”

“Asking was not in my mind,” Cei said grimly.

I caught him by the shoulders to drive home what I had to say. “Listen, Cei; the Dark People are our friends. Na na, I am not being womanish, I do but use my head as it seems that you have forgotten to do. They are our friends, but they are not the kind that hold to friendship in the face of an injury. I have no wish to find the water supply fouled and our men on the walls picked off with those hellish little poisoned arrows of theirs.”

So we did not go foraging, and whatever the Dark People had, they kept. We saw nothing of them in all that winter, but then we never did, during the dark of the year. It has often been my thought that the People of the Hills burrow deep into their holes and sleep through the cold months almost as the field voles and the badgers do.

After a while we gave up sleeping in separate quarters and barrack rows, and huddled all together in the big mess hall, for though our fuel stocks had not suffered, we needed more warmth than in other winters, because our hunger let in the cold; and by the same token, a man needs less food when he is warm. So we put all the peat and firewood to one blazing fire that served both for cooking and for warming the hall, and which we could keep up even at night when need be. And there we crowded at nights, and in off-duty hours in the daytime also, from the captains to the mule drivers, the women of the baggage train, the dogs curled among us, and even the three ponies in the foreporch stamping and fidgeting through the bitter nights; drawing, all of us, I think, comfort and encouragement, even in a strange way life itself, from each other’s nearness.

The behavior of the men in all that time is a thing I scarcely understand even now, looking back on it across the gulf of more than thirty years, but at the time it seemed nothing strange. At first the usual stresses and strains of whiter quarters seemed stretched unbearably by hunger and hardship and the little hope that any of us had of seeing the spring again. Old quarrels flared up, the troublemakers stirred up whatever mischief came to hand, again and again men were rightly or wrongly accused of trying for more than their share of the day’s allowance. But as time went by and our state became more desperate, all that changed, and men drew further away from the wolf pack. It was as though we all felt death too near to waste our substance in such barren ways; as though under the shadow of the Dark Wings, there was a growing quietness, a growing gentleness among us.

Not that this quietness had any outward seeming; indeed our evenings were louder-voiced that winter than ever they had been in Trimontium before; and besides the old heroic sagas that he could declaim as well as any king’s bard, I do not think that ever harper made so many songs as Bedwyr made in that one; songs of hunting and drinking, lewd love snatches that made the women of the camp squeal and giggle; songs that called down mockery on all things under the sun, from my height, which was supposed to tempt the eagles to rest on top of my head with disastrous effect upon the shoulders of my war shirt, to the master armorer’s habit of scratching his behind when thinking out any problem of his craft, and Cei’s supposed adventures with a great many girls, each of which was more outrageous than the last. And never a lament in all those long dark months.

February came at last, and the evenings were growing lighter. But the White Beast still had his fangs locked in our throats. Sometimes there was a little thaw at noon; always it froze again an hour later, and indeed as the days lengthened, so the cold increased. We were down far below half rations now, to one small rye cake a day for each man, and every two days a lump of meat about the size of three fingers, black as coal and hard as boiled leather. When the dried meat was all gone, we began to eat the dogs, drawing lots for the next to go; they had lived so long only by killing the weaker among themselves and if we kept them longer, they would be nothing but staring hide over dry bones. Even as it was, they had no more on them than the wolves. I began to regret bitterly that we had not kept back more of the ponies, for then we could have eaten them too. As it was, we ate one, but the other two must at all costs be kept until the very last.

By mid-February not only starvation but sickness was among us. There was always scurvy in the camp by winter’s end, owing to the salt meat, but this year it was more widespread than usual. Guenhumara and old Blanid worked with the other women, tending the sick, and their days were full. Old wounds opened and refused to heal — I was having trouble myself with the old gash in my shoulder, and with my burned hands which refused to skin over properly. Men began to die, and we scraped shallow graves for them in the iron-hard ground outside the fort, and piled the frozen snow high over them and hoped that the wolves would not find their bodies.

Young Amlodd died holding to my hand, with his eyes on my face like those of a sick dog that expects you to help it when there is no help to be given. And it was after his burial that Levin said, “Who will bury the last of us? I wonder.”

“The wolves, Brother,” said Bedwyr, and glanced up at a golden eagle quartering the sky. There were always one or more of the great birds over Trimontium. “And maybe an eagle or so. Sa sa, it is an ill winter that blows nobody any good.”

The Minnow said, “And yet I could have sworn that there was a softer feel in the air this morning,” and there was a raw longing for life in his voice. None of us answered him. I too thought that the icicles were at last beginning to lengthen under the eaves; but we knew, all of us, how small our chances were, even if the thaw came tonight. In the state that we had sunk to, with scarcely the strength left to dig a comrade’s grave, we could never reach Corstopitum, even if we abandoned our sick, and as for help coming from the depot, they had no reason to suppose that we needed any. The winter had been the worst for a score of years, but so far as they knew, we were well stocked with corn and meat; the first supply wagons would come up as usual toward the end of April, and that, I reckoned, would be too late for most of us by something over a month.

“All that we need is a talking eagle such as that Tuan who told his tale to Saint Finnen. The flight south would be nothing to him,” said Pharic, and his straight mouth quirked into laughter that did not touch his eyes. “A sad thing it is that the high days of heroes and marvels are over!”

The next day Levin was missing, and so was the day’s food for his whole squadron. I remember, when the news was brought to me, feeling a little sick (but it did not take much to make one feel sick, just then). What had happened? Had he run mad, as happens sometimes when strain becomes too much for the spirit of man? Had he crept out into the white emptiness to meet death because he could not wait for it any longer? The disappearance of the food did not look like that, and I remember, also, sending in my own squadron of walking corpses to beat up a few swords, when Levin’s squadron gathered themselves to do murder on the spearmen who maintained that Levin had stolen the food and then fled away to join the Little Dark People because he dare not face his own kind. I had another thought, but I did not voice it. If there was the least chance of a man getting through before the thaw came, and the snow waters had had time to abate, I should have sent one long ago.

That night the air turned suddenly soft, and we thought, all of us, that the thaw that was too late to save us was coming at last. For two days the snow sank before our eyes, and everywhere there was the sound of running water. In three days more it might be possible to try to send a messenger out; a faint flicker of the hope that had been dead in us so long, revived. But on the third night the frost came back, with a black bitter wind swooping over the white skirts of Eildon, and then a soft air and snow that whirled in mealy clouds across the ramparts, blotting out the world, and then frost again. The White Beast had not yet loosened his grip. I forget how many days it froze, that time, but I know that they seemed as long as the whole winter over again, before the wind went booming around to the southwest with a new smell on its wings, and the slow steady thaw set in.

That must have been the best part of three weeks after Levin’s disappearance; and with the steady drip and trickle of melting snow once more in our ears, we knew that the time had come to draw lots, not for the dogs this time (we had eaten most of them by now, anyway), but for two of us to make the desperate attempt to get through to Corstopitum for help. Castra Cunetium we did not take into the account at all; apart from anything else, the mountain road would remain impassable long after the road south was open. That night I could not sleep. I knew, as we all did, that whoever drew the two longest straws tomorrow would be going out to almost certain death; and yet there was the one chance in a thousand, and it must be taken. . . . Anyway, what was the death of two men, now, when we were all for the Dark Road close after them? And yet I knew that whoever they were, those two, their deaths would lie heavy on my heart when my own time came — unless — I prayed to Mithras and the Horned One and the White Christos that I might draw one of those two straws. I even began to wonder if there was any means by which I could tamper with the draw. But the choice belonged to Fate, not to me. And still I could not sleep. We no longer kept any watch at night; nothing could come at us, and in our cold and weakened state, the two hours’ guard duty would have been too likely to kill the man who stood it on the walls. But I had grown into the way of getting up some time in the midst of the night, and taking a look around the fort to make sure that all was well. What I thought to find, I do not know; the thing had become a habit. That night, too restless to lie still any longer, I got up rather earlier than usual, quietly, so as not to wake Guenhumara. We had done our best to keep her a little privacy, by giving her the place at the farthest and darkest end of the mess hall, with only one sleeping space beyond her; that, the cold place against the wall, was taken in turn by myself and Bedwyr and her brother Pharic, the other two sleeping between her and the rest of the war host. Looking down at her now, as I stood stretching, I thought how, on the first night, Bedwyr had drawn his sword and laid it between them, laughing, and said, “No man shall say that I was not as nicely nurtured as Pwyl, Prince of Dyfed.” But it is not good to lay sword between one and another when the need is to huddle close for warmth, and his sword remained in its sheath now.

There was nothing save for a glint of distant firelight on her tumbled hair to show that a woman lay there, for the slim leg from which the muffling folds of her cloak had fallen back showed cross-gartered breeks. She had taken to her boy’s riding dress long ago, for the great warmth. Her cheek was cuddled against Pharic’s shoulder, and there was a certain likeness between them that was not there when both were awake.

I stretched until the muscles cracked behind my shoulders, trying to draw a little strength into myself. My belly felt weak, and my head swam so that it was as though the whole mess hall lifted and fell gently under my feet like a galley in a quiet sea. I doddered down the hall, picking my way among the sleepers, but in the light of the fire that threw enormous shadows under their sunken cheekbones and pinched noses and brows, they had the gaunt set jaws and sunken eye sockets of those already dead. The famished shadow that had been Cabal stalked at my heels. So far he had escaped the death draw, but his turn must come soon. . . . I opened the door, and thrusting it gently to behind me, went out past the two wretched ponies into the night.

After the crowded mess hall (not so crowded as it had been, though) that stank like a fox’s earth, the smell of the thaw struck at me keen and chill as the blade of a knife; there were no stars, and despite the snow it was very dark, with the kind of breathy darkness that makes one aware of the world as a living thing.

In places, where our feet passed most often, the snow had become black slush, but it still lay unblemished over the shallow mound where the woman of the Dark People lay beneath the bones of nine war-horses. She had protected us well from the Saxon kind, I thought, but even she was powerless against the White Beast. I made my usual round longer than usual, but when it was finished I knew that I still could not go back and lie down again beside Guenhumara.

On an impulse, I turned in through the entrance to the Praetorium, and crossed the narrow courtyard to the quarters that I had shared with her, and went into the small chamber that had been my sleeping cell before she came and was now my armory and office. I felt for the lantern on the roof beam, took it down, and opening it, felt inside. There was about half the candle left, and when that was burned out, there would be no more. We had eaten the small amount of tallow that was saved from the fire. Well, soon enough now, we should have no more need of candles. I struck flint and iron and got a light, and then, with the lantern, wandered through into the bigger chamber that was Guenhumara’s, and set it on the wicker chest against the wall; then stood looking about me, wondering why I had come, and what I should do now that I was here.

The chamber had a lived-in look that spoke vividly of Guenhumara, who still came here sometimes during the day. The soft beaver-skin rug on the piled rushes and bracken of the bed place still softly hollowed where her body had pressed it, a gold eardrop hanging half out of a painted wooden casket; even the faint scent of her seemed to hang on the cold air as though she had only that moment passed out through the door and left something of herself behind. I stooped and pulled a handful of rushes from the bed place. Somebody must cut the lengths for tomorrow’s draw; it made a good enough reason to myself for being there. I rummaged in the box of painted wood — there was a running deer on the lid — and found Guenhumara’s silver scissors among a tangle of small gear and woman’s things, huddled my cloak about me and settled down on the inevitable packsaddle to cut lengths of brown rush stem into my iron cap fetched from next door. Cabal crouched down beside me, his great gaunt head on my knee, and broke into the deep snoring throat-song that in him meant contentment in my company; and I broke off to pull his ears in the way that he loved, wondering what I should do with him if I drew the long straw tomorrow; then returned idly to my clipping.

The light of the lantern was beginning to sink, and the shadows gathered in the comers of the room; the dim blue and gold and russet saint in the embroidered hanging seemed to waver on the edge of living movement. I did not hear footsteps coming nearer through the thawing snow, but suddenly the door latch lifted, and as I looked up quickly, the door opened, and Guenhumara stood on the threshold.

I sprang up. “Guenhumara! What are you doing abroad in the dark of the night?”

“I came to look for you; you were gone so long, and I was afraid.” She came in and snibbed the door behind her, and stood with her back to it. All her bones stood out in the sinking lantern light, and the tendons in her neck stood out like cords, and her lips were chapped and flaked and bleeding, and my heart flew out to her like a bird out of the cage of my breast.

“I did not think you knew when I went out. I hoped you were asleep,” I said.

“I always know when you go out. What is it that you do here in the dark of the night?”

I looked at the work of my hands. “Ruin your scissors by cutting up lengths of rush with them.”

She came forward from the door, and looked into my battered helmet and then at me, and held her hand to Cabal. “More dogs tomorrow?”

I shook my head. “Na, tomorrow we draw lots of another kind.”

“What kind, then?” She sat down rigidly on the chest top.

And when I told her, she said, still looking into my helmet, “A straw for a life. . . . Every life in the garrison?”

“Not so many. A straw for each of the Companions, and only for such of the Companions as are within reason free of scurvy.”

“Has the gash in your shoulder healed up again since yesterday?” she asked after a moment, and I knew what she meant.

I said, “Within reason free. If we keep to those who have no taint at all, it is in my mind that there will be none to draw the straws, at all.”

“And so you also will draw?”

“I do not lay this kind of hazard before Bedwyr and Pharic and the rest, and then step aside from it myself. It is stupid, isn’t it, to give so much weight to that when, long straw or no, we are all going to die so soon?”

She was silent for a while, and then for the first time she looked up. “You have no hope, then, of their getting through?”

“None,” I said, and we were silent again. Then I laid aside helmet and scissors, and knelt down beside her and put my arms around her under the rough thickness of her cloak. “Try not to be afraid, Guenhumara.”

“I don’t think I am,” she said, wonderingly. “I don’t want to die, but I don’t think I am afraid — not very afraid.” And then a swift change of mood came on her; her eyes in her famished face were suddenly shining and enormous in the last guttering light of the lantern, and her voice had a low vibrant quality like the musical throb of a swan’s wings in flight. “I am so glad that the thaw has come. I should have hated to die while the world was still dead; it would have seemed so — so hopeless. But tonight the world is stirring into life again, it is breathing in the darkness. There’s something in the wind — can’t you smell it? Almost like the scent of wet moss.”

“I know,” I said. “Yes, I can smell it, too.”

“It is so sad that it is too late for us. One day there will be moss soft and damp under the trees again, and wood anemones, and they will light the Beltane Fires — and somewhere a vixen will mate and have cubs . . .”

“Don’t, Guenhumara. Don’t, Heart-of-my-heart.” I tightened my arms around her and felt how she was shivering from more than the cold. And scarce knowing it until the thing was done, I caught her up and, lurching to my feet, carried her across to the bed place and — for my strength was so far gone from me — collapsed headlong beside her. I dragged the beaver-skin robe over us both, and under its soft darkness, held her close. I could feel the light bones that had so delighted, me, sharp and brittle through the thick stuff of her tunic, and the icy shuddering that wracked her, and dragged her against me as though I would have drawn her inside my own body and warmed her there. I kissed her face, the sunken eyes and poor cracked mouth and the corded column of her throat, trying to comfort her for the spring and the summer and the harvesttime that she would not see; until at last her shuddering ceased, and she lay quiet with her arms around my neck as mine were around her body. And lying so, gradually, I knew that Ygerna had no more power over me, because in a few days, a week or two at most, I should be dead.

I do not know, I have never been able to remember, whether it was she or I who unclasped the strap about her waist; I only know that it was accomplished as something inevitable. There was a great sense of peace in me, peace so strong that it formed a refuge, and the old foul fly-cloud of hate could not break in to smother and drive me back as it had always done before. I was aware of the present moment as something with the light shining through it, a gift, a revelation, a flower growing on the edge of an abyss, with nothing beyond it; but it was the flower that mattered and not the abyss. And I loved Guenhumara then as I had so longed to love her. I came free and untrammeled into her deepest sanctuaries, and she sprang to meet me and make me welcome, and give me what I had never known that she or any other woman had to give. For a little while we were healed of the loneliness, the amputation of being separate people, and fused into one, so that the circle became perfect.

Next morning when the lots were drawn, the longest straws fell to Alun Dryfed, and to Prosper, my trumpeter. Food from the little that still remained to us had been made ready in advance for whoever were Fate’s chosen, and the two thickest cloaks in the fort, and whatever else might be of use to them. The two remaining ponies stood ready loaded, and there was nothing to wait for. We thronged the old red ramparts to cheer them and watch them plowing away down the road to the south, or rather, down the line of the hidden road that still lay deep under the thawing snow. Presently, when the loads were lightened and by God’s grace the snow grew thinner, the men would ride — if they lived so long — but now, at the outset, they led the ponies, and it was four figures that we watched, four shapes of darkness dwindling into the distance, floundering up the steepening slopes into the hazel woods. They looked very small in the white immensity of the hills, and I seemed to see beyond them all the long hopeless road to Corstopitum stretching into eternity. When the shoulder of the valley had taken the last dark laboring speck from our sight, we dragged ourselves off about whatever there was to do with the rest of the day. Gwalchmai had of course taken no part in the draw, but held the helmet for us; if he had not been lame, we still could not have spared him with so many sick in the camp; but I shall not forget his face.

It was not long past noon of that same day when a hoarse incredulous shouting from the southern walls brought half the fort crawling and stumbling (few of us could run) toward the Praetorium Gate. The man on watch there came staggering to meet us, his eyes wild in his head, crying and jibbering out something about four men, four riders on the road. We thought that his wits were gone, but in a few moments more, others had swarmed up onto the crumbling rampart walk and out through the gateway, and then they too were shouting and pointing. I scrambled up the rampart steps, thrusting through the men who were there ahead of me, and stared south, shielding my eyes with one hand against the dazzle of snow in the sun that had that instant burst through the drifting rain clouds.

Far off on the edge of the hazel woods, four horsemen were struggling toward Trimontium, and as they drew nearer, I saw that two of the riders were Prosper and Alun Dryfed. The third was a stranger, or at least no one whom I knew well enough to recognize at that distance. The fourth, I could have sworn, was Druim Dhu or one of his brothers! Nearer they drew, and nearer yet. We lined the walk and thronged the gateway, more and more of us every moment, waiting for them, straining our aching eyes in their direction. But I do not think that we made any sound now. We did not dare to hope. . . .

Level with the far end of the practice field, the horsemen urged their ponies into a floundering canter, throwing up the snow behind them like spray. They were waving to us, then we heard them shouting, but we could not catch the words. They came up the slope, the grossly overladen ponies stumbling and rocking, and were in through the gate. Men surged forward to surround them as the ponies staggered to a floundering halt; and suddenly word was spreading back from those nearest, to the outermost fringes of the throng. “It’s the supply train! The supply train’s coming! God’s mercy. They are almost through to us!”

Garrison of walking corpses that we were, we set up a hoarse aching roar that might surely have been heard in Corstopitum itself. I thrust through to the core of the crowd, just as the four men dropped wearily from their mounts, and demanded dazedly of the stranger, “Man, is it true?”

He was dirty gray with exhaustion, leaning on his foundering pony for support. “Surely, my Lord Artos. They’ll be here by tomorrow night. We were sent ahead to bring you word.” He indicated with a jerk of the head the small dark man beside him, and I saw that it was indeed Druim Dhu.

“But how in God’s name did you know our need?”

“The first man you sent got through to us,” he said.

The supply train arrived at dusk next day, a ragged stumbling file of mules and pack ponies led and driven by panting and straining men, almost as spent as we were, though less gaunt. And among them were some of our own auxiliaries, and also of the Little Dark People.

The train was not a large one, and the leather-covered pack panniers were only lightly loaded, for with the normal loads the beasts would never have got through at all. But the food that they brought would tide us over until the next lot could get through. We helped as best we could, to get the pack teams unloaded, and later — much later it seemed — we sat down all together in the mess hall to our first full meal in three moons.

“I’ll not deny,” the small red-bearded train master was saying, “that it has been a desperate business, even with the help of the Dark Folk over the last lap; and I’ll not deny that if this Levin you sent us had lived to argue, like enough we’d have argued too, and hung back a bit for the thaw. But when a man dies to bring you a call for help, why then that’s a better argument than any that you’re like to be able to put up against him.”

I looked around quickly. “Dies?” Somehow, I don’t know why, I had assumed that Levin had remained at the depot to recover strength before coming up with the next supply train.

“Aye. I’d not be knowing myself, how he kept on his feet to get through to us at all. They were pretty well rotted off him with frostbite. . . . He died the same night.”

I was silent for a while, and then I said, “But how in God’s name did he even find the way? The thaw had not come by then.”

Druim looked up from the strip of salt meat in his hands. “That was simple enough; we showed it to him.”

“You showed it to him?”

“Yes; even we, the Little Dark People, we have our uses. A party of hunters out after wolf found him already strayed from the road. They gave him meat when they had made their own kill, and set him on his road again, and then went home and made a smoke on the crest of Baen Baal to tell those to the south that he was coming and must be passed on to the next watcher, and then they made the snake pattern for him about the ashes of the houseplace hearth; for they knew that he went to his death.”

“And knowing that, they let him go?”

“What else could any of us do?”

“If you could send him on so, from one to another” (I was using “you” for the whole People of the Hills) “could you not have sent his message on in the same way? Could you not have raised one finger to save his life?”

Druim Dhu looked at me as though puzzled at my lack of understanding, and answered also for the whole of his people. “It was in his face. Also, Sun Lord, you heard what the train master said: had it been one of us who brought the cry for help, who would have hearkened to us? Besides, he would go on; he said his friend was waiting for him.”

There was a long pause, in which we heard very loudly the green trickling of the thaw. Cei broke it. “That must have been close on three weeks ago. Why was no word sent up to the fort?”

“The smoke was sited to carry its message south,” Druim said, “so we in my village did not know of the thing ourselves until a few days since. When we did, I would have come, but the Old Woman looked into sand and water, and said that the pack beasts would be here in five days at the most, and that my coming would serve no end save the lightening of your hearts.”

“Even that might have been worth doing,” grumbled Cei.

“True; and still I would have come, but the Old Woman said that there were taller crops than mouse grass and laid it upon me, upon the whole village, by the wrath of the Corn King, that we should not come.”

“And why would she be doing that?” someone asked, through cracked lips.

Druim shook his head. “I am not the Old Woman. I do not know.”

Later, I wondered a good deal as to his meaning, but at the time I was no longer listening closely. Across the fire I met Bedwyr’s bright gaze reaching out for mine. And that night he made a harp lament, the most winged and wildly haunting, I think, that he ever made.

That night, as before, I could not sleep. Life and the urgency of life had taken hold of me again; we were saved, and death that had been at our elbows drew away into the darkness. And for me, the freedom was gone: Ygerna’s power was over me again, and all was as it had been before.

No, not quite all. Two months later, when the horses had come north to us once more, when the curlews were at their mating and the furze was a yellow fire above the river marshes, Guenhumara told me that she was with child.

THAT summer, the last as it proved that we spent in the lost province of Valentia, was a time of final scouring, sharp and without ruth while it lasted, but not lasting long, a time for a last strengthening of the ties that I had labored so long to make among the chiefs and princes; and the first frosts had scarcely set the burns running yellow with fallen leaves, when I rode back to Maglaunus’s Dun. All summer I had been wondering as to the thing that Guenhumara had told me, scarcely daring to believe that she had not made some mistake; and the native tracks and ridge-ways after Castra Cunetium seemed endless to my wild impatience. But when I rode into the Dun and dismounted with Pharic and the rest of my small knot of Companions before the hall threshold, and she came out to bring me the guest cup, her thickened body was enough to tell me that she was about her woman’s work.

“So it is true,” I said.

She looked at me, half smiling, over the tilting rim of the guest cup — and it was as though touching her would be like touching something that drew its warmth and living kindness direct from the earth, like an apple tree.

“Did you doubt it?”

“All summer I have been doubting. I think I did not dare to believe.”

“Foolish,” she said. “Blanid knows about these things.”

Later, lying with my arms around her on the broad guest bed, I tried to make her see the wisdom of remaining at her father’s hearth that winter. But she would have none of it; the bairn would not be born for two months yet, and she was perfectly well able to make the journey back to Trimontium, protesting that it must be born, when the time came, under the shelter of its father’s sword, and that if I left her she would follow me on foot. She held me about the neck, even while I felt the child stirring and impatient in her body, and her hair fell all across my face in the darkness. And in the end, I yielded.

God help me, I yielded; and next morning, with Guenhumara and old Blanid in a light mule cart, we started back for Trimontium.

We traveled slowly and reached Castra Cunetium without harm done. I breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that the journey was more than half over, and now at least Guenhumara could rest a few days. But at Castra Cunetium an ill wind blew up, for on the last day of our sojourn Blanid fell down the granary steps and hurt her back. There did not seem to be much amiss, but assuredly she could not go forward for the time being.

“It seems that your journey ends here, at least for a while,” I said.

But again Guenhumara put out her will against mine. “And yours?”

“I ride on with the patrol tomorrow. I have been apart from the war host long enough.”

“Then so do I also ride on with the patrol.”

“That is foolishness,” I said, “and you know it. What will you do without Blanid to care for you, if the bairn comes to be born, before she can follow after you?”

“There are other women in the fort,” she said tranquilly.

“Yes, a score or more — the gay drabs of the baggage train.”

“Firewater Chloe, who counts herself Queen among them, knows how to deliver a child, all the same.”

“How can you know that?” I was fighting a losing battle, and I knew it, but I fought on. “There has never been a child born at Trimontium in these years.”

“You fool!” she said, softly mocking. “Do you think that because you have not heard a child cry, none can have been born? Do you think that none of these women has ever miscounted her days? There have been three bairns born in Trimontium in the winters since I first came there. They smothered them at birth like unwanted kittens, and put them out on the hillside for the wolves. But it was Firewater Chloe who held their mothers in her knees when the birth time came upon them.“

“Guenhumara, if you knew, could you not have done something?”

“What?” she said. “What do you think they would have had me do? A bairn clinging to the breast is a heavy burden to carry in the wake of a war host. Also it is bad for trade. . . . Even I, who am the wife of the Bear and have no trade to think for, I shall not find it a light thing to carry a bairn in the wake of the Bear’s war host. I have lived in the women’s quarters of my father’s hall. But if there were no other woman in Trimontium, I should not be the first of my kind to bring her own young to birth. I have seen too many of my father’s hunting bitches whelp, not to know how to bring out a child and sever its life from mine.”

And again I yielded. If only I had been stronger then, and weaker the next time she set her will against mine. . . .

It had been a long dry summer, as though to counterbalance what had gone before, and though the birch leaves were yellowing, there had been little rain, so that from the first the dust of the dry tracks rose m a dun cloud from under the horses’ hooves and almost blotted out the tail of our little band; and the burns ran low, and whenever we could we took to the long soft moorland grass, tawny now as a hound’s coat, until heather drove us back again to the track. The grass made gentler traveling for Guenhumara. On the second day (the usual two days’ march must be made into three by slowness of the mule cart) the little wind failed us so that the land was bathed in a still golden warmth that comes sometimes in early autumn, and the last of the ling blossom was loud with bees and smelled of honey, and the sky had paled from its autumn blue to the color of curdled milk. We flung off our cloaks and strapped them to the saddlebows along with the iron caps that clanged there already. Riada, the latest in my long line of armorbearers, who besides being native to these hills like the rest of Pharic’s hundred, had a nose for weather that would have rivaled a stag’s, sniffed the air and foretold thunder and more than thunder.

The horses were restless that night, when we camped beside the high water of the Tweed, and I remember that when Guenhumara let down her hair and began to comb it, sitting by the low campfire, the sparks flew out of it as they do out of a cat’s fur when thunder is brewing. Once, in the darkest hour of the night, a little cold moaning wind blew up out of the heart of Cit Coit Caledon, and died down again, and left the world still and heavy as before.

When we yoked the cart mules and saddled up again next morning, it seemed to me that Guenhumara was quieter than usual, or rather that her normal quiet had densified into stillness, and that her stillness was like that of the world about us; a kind of long-drawn breath before the storm breaks. And she moved with a new heaviness when I helped her into the cart. I asked her if all was well with her, and she said yes, that all was very well. But I was thankful in my bones that it was the last day’s journey.

It must have been close on noon when thunder began to grumble among the hills southward; scarcely more at first than a quivering in the air that one felt in the back of the neck rather than the head; then drawing closer, a low, almost continuous muttering, then dying again to that deep distant quivering of the air. The storm was circling over the hills, but for a long time it never came near to us; even the sky swept clear to the southern rim of the Tweed Valley. And slowly, far ahead of us, Eildon, which had been no more than a shadow on the sky haze when we broke camp, was rising higher, gaming depth and substance, so that I could make out the three peaks marching one behind the other, and see where the hazel woods of the lower slopes gave place to the bare grasslands and scree above.

And then the thunder spoke again, deep and menacing, a snarl this time, nearer — much nearer — than it had been before; and from behind the hills south of Eildon, the clouds came banking up, higher and higher while we watched; a blue-black mass of cloud, teased into forward-creeping rags and ribbands at its upper edge, by a wind that we could not yet feel in the Tweed Valley. Pale wisps of vapor drifted against the darkness of it, and the heart of the mass seemed to churn and swirl as though someone, something, were stirring it over a fire; and out of the churning storm-heart leapt flashes of blue light, and the thunder came booming hollow toward us along the hills.

I was riding alongside the mule cart, and I looked anxiously at Guenhumara huddled behind the driver in the mouth of the tilt. She was sitting oddly braced, as though to resist every jolt of the wheels under her, instead of giving to the movement in the ordinary way, and her face was very white, but that might be only the strange and menacing light. “Best get back under the tilt,” I said.

She shook her head. “It makes me sick if I cannot see where I am going. See — I will pull my cloak well over my head.”

And the anxiety in me quickened sharply, but there was nothing to be done save press forward while we could.

We were heading straight into the storm, but it seemed to me that the hideous swirling vortex at its heart was swinging to our right, and I began to hope that the worst of it might pass over the hills south of the Tweed. The fringes of the black cloud were above us now, swallowing up the sky, and we rode in an unnatural brown twilight, while southward of us the storm trailed its path across the hills, dragging with it out of the belly of the clouds, a black blurred curtain of rain that blotted out everything in its passing. “Christos! There’ll be homes washed out and drowned cattle and women weeping among the hills tonight,” someone said.

Presently the storm had circled away behind us, but there was no returning light ahead; and suddenly, spinning in its path as such storms do among the hills, it was coming up on our tail — coming swiftly as a charge of cavalry! Already in the heat, the dank breath of it was parting the hair on our necks, and the long grass bowed and shivered away from the gust as though in fear. . . . “Up the side glen yonder,” I called to the men behind me. “There’ll be better shelter among the scrub.”

It was a thin shelter enough, among the half-bare birch and rowan, but better than none, and we gained it, dismounting and manhandling the cart the last part of the way, just as a second, stronger puff of wind came over the shoulder of the glen; and a few heartbeats later the storm was upon us. Stab on jagged stab of blue-white light split the gloom, and the thunder crashed and boomed and beat about our heads like a great hammer. We got the mules unharnessed lest they bolt, and then turned to the horses. They, poor brutes, danced and snorted in terror, and it was all we could do to get them edged back into some kind of shelter and keep them together there. Guenhumara was crouching back under the tilt, and I bade Cabal stay with her and left them to do as best they could for the moment, while I gave all my attention to Signus who was flinging this way and that, squealing with mingled rage and panic. And save for a confused awareness of blinding white forked light that leapt crackling from black sky to black hillside, and the ceaseless crash and tumbling boom of the thunder that seemed as though it would pound the very hills asunder, that storm, for me, was one long struggle-royal with the whirling white stallion.

At last the lightning became less incessant, and the thunder trod less swift upon its heels, the whiplash crack of it that had all but split the eardrums dulled to the rolling of great drums that throbbed and reverberated among the dark glens. And I knew that for the tune, at least, the crown of the storm was past — so far, that is, as the thunder was concerned; for after the thunder came the wind and rain. We got the horses quieted at last; wind and rain they understood, whereas thunder is a thing that no horse ever understands — nor any man either, which I suppose is why we have always given it to our highest and most angry gods.

Presently the tilt went, ripped away like a torn sail. I got Guenhumara under the cart, and in a while, with Signus’s bridle pitched over an alder branch nearby, I was crouching beside her, my arm around Cabal’s strong rain-cold neck, trying to shelter her with our bodies from the in-driving lances of rain; while the wind roared up the valley and the wet drove by in solid sheets, in gray trailing curtains that blotted even the far side of the narrow glen into nothingness, and beat and drenched through the thin moaning woods.

And as we crouched there, in the space of a hundred heartbeats, every summer-dry runnel in the heather became a rushing ale-colored water course that leapt over the stones and sprang out among the heather roots and went swirling down to join the little burn that was already swelling into spate; and under the chill of the storm, the smell of wet refreshed earth rose all about us, aromatic as the rising incense of bog myrtle in the sun, and was drowned by the gray deluge and washed back into the ground. It was well on toward evening when the rain began to slacken and the light to return, but we still had six or seven miles to go, and with the warning of the swollen burn in my ears I dared not wait any longer.

Guenhumara was whiter and more pinched than ever, her eyes enormous and nearly black, so that they seemed to shadow all her face. And when the driver had yoked up the mules, I had to all but lift her to her feet. “Guenhumara, is there anything amiss?”

She shook her head. “I hate thunder, I’ve always hated thunder. It is no more than that.”

Pharic, who was standing near with his arm across his horse’s neck, turned quickly to look at her, the straight black brows almost meeting above the bridge of his nose. “That is the first I’ve ever heard of it, then. You must have changed since the days when you used to stand on the bull shed roof to be nearer to the storm, while Blanid shrilled at you like a black hen from underneath.”

“Yes, I’ve changed,” Guenhumara said. “It is because I am growing old.” She turned to me, gathering her drenched garments into bunched folds as though suddenly aware of how they clung to her swollen belly. “Artos, take me up before you on Signus. Not — not the cart any more.”

So I took her up before me, with a drenched sheepskin saddle rug flung across Signus’s withies to give her softer riding, and felt how tensely rigid she was in the hollow of my bridle arm. I gave the mule driver orders to follow after us, left two of the patrol with him, and again we rode on.

Below our left, the Tweed was roaring like a herd of bulls. The sky was clearing as the storm rolled away into the dark heart of Manann, and the evening blue was beginning to show through the rags of the fraying storm clouds, when we came around the flank of the high ground and dropped through hazel woods toward the burn that came down there from the high moors to join the river. But the roaring of the burn warned us what we should find, even before we came in sight of it. Farther south, the storm must have broken with a wilder fury even than we had suffered, and the burn was coming down in a roaring spate of white water. It was far out over the banks on either side, clutching at the roots of the hazels and swirling in yeasty turmoil about the red earth of the lower hillside, tearing away great lumps of turf and boulders. The ford was completely lost; it might even be carried away; bushes, tree roots and clods of earth were sweeping past, and even as we checked in consternation at the water’s edge, the body of a half-grown roe deer went by, rolled and tossed like a wineskin in the surf.

Pharic was the first to make a move, and as usual with him, it was a reckless one. “Well, it’s a cheerless prospect, biding here all night,” he said, and urged his horse straight forward into the rush of water above the submerged bank.

I yelled him back. “Don’t be a fool, man. It’s death!”

And the horse neighed in sudden terror as the spate caught at its legs and all but swept it down into the full flood. There were a few hideous moments of struggle and then with a heavy crash of hoof-flailed water, and a slipping scramble, he was on solid ground again. I had opened my mouth to tell my marriage-brother a thing, but in that instant Guenhumara gave a tiny gasp, almost a moan, but checked before it broke surface, and I felt her make a convulsive movement as though she would have drawn up her knees against her belly as one does in cramp. And looking down, I saw her whole face clenched and twisted together, small in the shadow of her sodden cloak hood. Fear shot through me. “What is it? — Guenhumara. Is it the baby?”

Slowly and with care she unclenched her face as one unclenches a fist, and opened her eyes with a long sigh. “Yes, the baby. It is better now, until the next time. I am sorry, Artos.”

“Oh God,” I said, “what do we do now?” And I know that I could have howled like a dog against the sense of utter helplessness that overwhelmed me. It might be many hours before the spate ran down; if we tried making any kind of footbridge by uprooting the hazel saplings and laying them across, that too would take time; and even when it was accomplished, our own Horse Burn would be in a like state, between us and Trimontium. And meanwhile, Guenhumara’s child was on the way.

“How long do you think it will be?” I asked her. The others, dismounted for the most part, were probing about the banks.

“I do not know, I have never borne a child before — I think it may sot be for a long while — oh, but it hurts me sore already, Artos — I didn’t know it hurt as much as this.” She broke off in a little gasp, and again I felt that bracing of her body, the cramped convulsive drawing up of her knees, and held her close while the pang lasted. When it was over she began to speak again, hurriedly. “Artos, find me a sheltered spot — a hollow of some kind among the bushes, and spread me the driest saddle rug you can find, that the child does not lie like a lamb dropped into the wet —”

“No,” I began stupidly.

“No, listen, for we have no choice. I have told you that I know what to do. Give me your knife to sever the child’s life from mine, and I shall do well enough, if you keep guard that nothing comes out of the woods upon me while I am — busy.”

But suddenly I also knew what to do, and while she was still speaking, I wheeled Signus toward the half-lost herding path that led up from the ford into the hills. “I’ve a better way than that. Hold out for a small while, Angharad, and you shall have surer shelter than a wet hollow in the ground, and another woman to help you.”

“Artos, I can’t — I can’t bear the horse much longer.”

“Only a short while,” I said. “Bear it for a short while, Guenhumara.” And I called to Pharic and the captain of the patrol. “Pharic, come, I am taking Guenhumara up to Druim Dhu’s village. Two of you come with me, and the rest of you bide here and pick up the cart when it arrives, and get across when the spate goes down. Keep Cabal with you.”

“But you’ve never been there.” Pharic urged his horse up beside mine on the verge of the drowned droveway.

“I have once — six or seven years ago. I’ve been close to it since, on the hunting trail.”

“And you can find it again?”

“Please God, I can find it again,” I said.

In the last wild light of the fading day, with the cloud flitters flying low above the hills and the low shining of a sodden yellow sunset in my eyes, and Guenhumara hanging a dead weight on my bridle arm, I came over the last heather ridge, and checked for an instant, with an almost sick relief, looking down into the shallow upland valley that I had seen once before.

But the valley of Druim Dhu’s homestead was not the peaceful place that it had seemed that other time. Here also, the little burn that had come down shallow over its bed of trout-freckled stones had run mad and become a roaring torrent, bursting out of its old course to cut a new one for itself that deepened and broadened even as I urged Signus into the downhill track, rending away great chunks of the bank and spreading itself all abroad in a swirl and tumult of white water that swept perilously near to the little huddle of turf bothies within their hawthorn hedge. All across the shallow cup of the valley, men were struggling to get the lowing, terrified cattle up to higher ground, while others, women too, were struggling waist-deep in the water to shift the dam of torn-down bushes and debris that had built up across the true course of the burn. Above the roar of water their shouts and the barking of the cattle dogs came up to us, small and sharp and desperate, even reaching Guenhumara, so that she turned her head to look down into the valley ahead of us. “What — is this place?” she demanded, and then with a sudden thrill of fear in her voice, “Artos, what is this place? Those little green howes? Artos, you’ll not be taking me into the Fairy Hills?”

“The Fairy Hills, or Druim’s village. It is all the same.”

“It is a bad place!” she cried. “They are all bad places, the Fairy Hills!”

“Not to me and mine,” I said. “Listen, Guenhumara, I have been inside this place. It is only a living place, as your father’s hall. I have drunk heather beer in there, and no harm came to me. Druim Dhu and his kin are our friends.”

She made no more protest, but I do not think the fear left her; it was only swallowed up in the urgent needs of her body.

Thank God, the village was on the near side of the water; I rode down toward it, Pharic and Conn just behind me. A small dark man dragging a sheep hurdle staggered past us, with dazed eyes that seemed not to see us until he was almost past. Then he turned about, not knowing me even then, and demanded fiercely, “What do you here, big man on a big horse? This is our place; go home to yours!”

“Great God, man, I had better welcome last time I came here,” I said, and as though his eyes cleared, I saw the recognition come into them.

“Artos — my Lord Artos!”

“As. to what I do here — the way into the Place of Three Hills is cut off by the burns in spate, and my woman is far gone in labor, therefore I have brought her to Itha. Is she in the houseplace?”

He shook his head, then jerked it in the direction of the straining figures about the dam.

“The water’ll be in the houseplace soon, if we can’t turn it.”

“Meanwhile I take my woman there. Send Itha to me — I’ll come back and take her place as soon as may be.” I had dismounted by that time, Guenhumara scarcely conscious in my arms, and called to the other two, as the little man staggered on toward the desperate struggle that was being fought out around the dividing of the burn. “Tie up the horses and then go down and help with that dam. I’ll be with you in a while.”

I found the houseplace by the feather of smoke rising from the crest of its bush-grown roof, and the smell which came from it, and ducking low under the lintel, carried Guenhumara down the four turf steps into the smoky darkness. In the first moment I thought no one was there but the Old Woman on her stool, looking as though she had never risen from it, and a handful of children huddled about her, staring at me under their brows like little wild things. And then from behind her came a small fretful wailing, and I saw another woman crouched against the far wall and bending over a child in her lap.

At sight of me, Old Woman cackled with laughter that set her enormous belly heaving. “Artos the Bear! So you come back, Sun Lord. Maybe those that drink in the Fairy Hills must always come back.” And she nodded at Guenhumara in my arms. “No need to ask what ails that one.”

“No,” I said. “Her time is on her two moons early, and the burns in spate, even as yours, between us and the gate of the Place of Three Hills. Where may I lay her down?”

“Over there.” She jerked her head toward a pile of skins against the wall, and I carried Guenhumara over and laid her on it. I had scarcely done so when, with no sound of her coming, the girl Itha was at the foot of the steps, standing there like something drowned, to wring the water from her long black hair. Not that she was a girl now, but worn and weather-lined. They are beautiful young, but they age quickly, the women of the Ancient People. Some of the children ran to her, clinging to her drenched skirts, but she paid no heed to them. “Istoreth told me that you were here, and your woman needing my help.”

“As you see,” I said. “I am going now, Itha. Your menfolk need help too, with the burn.”

“You trust me?” she said, looking up from where she already knelt by Guenhumara. “I that am a woman of the Hollow Hills?”

“The water of the little well was good and sweet, and the faces in the fort were still the faces I knew, when I got back to them. I trust you.”

And I went out into the wild evening, down to join the men by the parting of the burn. The sun was set by now and some of the women had brought out torches, and in their flaring light the rush of water was fired with gold over swirling depths of immeasurable darkness, and the alder trees stood up gaunt and black against the last bright rags of the stormy afterglow. Pharic and Conn had joined those who were fighting to clear the dam of uptorn bushes, and I joined another band, who, waist-deep in the racing water, were striving with hurdles and sods and uprooted furze bushes to guide the threatening flood away from the village and turn it back into its true course. Again and again we saw our work torn away and the water pouring through the breach; again and again we restarted the desperate struggle to make good the damage. Most of that night, by the windy torch flare, I worked thigh-deep in the racing flood, one with the Little Dark Men about me, as I had not been even at Cit Coit Caledon. I lost all count of time, all my world was the white fury of water that must be fought like a killer horse, and the strength of my own body pitted against it; and Guenhumara in the turf house, fighting as I was fighting.

At last I became aware of a slackening in the rush of water, and shouted to the others that the spate was passing. And later still, I was standing only knee-deep in the flood, steadying myself by an alder branch and drawing in great gulps of air that I seemed to have no time for before, and looking about me. It was not yet dawn, but through the rents in the still tattered sky I could see the morning star that we call the Cock’s Lantern; and the world was spent and quiet all about me, and the level of the flood was going down, down; our dams and brushwood walls had held at last, and the water, its fury spent, was turned back into its old course.

There would be a heartbreaking deal of damage to make good, but the village was safe. I left the rest to finish the work, and crawled back, blind weary, to the turf house within the hawthorn hedge.

Itha met me in the entrance that looked, in the first light, to be no more than a dark burrow mouth in the side of the bush-grown mound. “It was in my mind that the voice of the burn was sulking, and soon you would come.”

“Itha, is the babe born? How is it with them?”

A bleating cry like that of a newborn lamb came out of the gloom behind her, to answer my question before she spoke.

“The babe is born,” she said, “and it is well with them both.” She drew wider the heavy skin apron behind her, and the dim flicker of burning peat came to meet me, and the usual smell of such places, mingled with another, sharper smell that I had met with in stables when one of my mares had foaled.

I ducked under the lintel and stumbled down the steps. The place was more crowded than it had been last night, for some of the women were back, and through the throat-catching peat reek I could just make out Guenhumara lying on the pile of skins where I had laid her down last night. I would have gone to her at once, but Old Woman sat on her stool across my path and looked up at me through the fronding smoke of the hearth, and I stopped as though she had caught me by the hair, and waited for whatever it was she had to say to me, suddenly afraid.

I remembered the woman I had seen before, still crouched against the far wall, nursing the child in her lap. And I heard the child cry, not the young bleating that had reached me on the threshold, but the dim tired wailing of something sick.