Legacy: Arthurian Saga (81 page)

When my father had held command in
Brittany under King Budec, his troops had kept order even in the
forest, as far as the river where King Budec's land ended and King
Gorlan's began. They had cut the trees well back to either side of
the road, and opened up some of the subsidiary tracks, but this had
been neglected, and now the saplings and the bushes had crowded in.
The paved surface of the road had long since been broken by winter,
and here and there it crumbled off into patches of ironhard mud
that in soft weather would be a morass.

We set out on a grey, cold day, with
the wind tasting faintly of salt. But though the wind blew damp
from the sea it brought no rain with it, and the going was fair
enough. The huge trees stood on either hand like pillars of metal,
holding a weight of low, grey sky. We rode in silence, and after a
few miles the thickly encroaching growth of the underwood forced
us, even on this road, to ride in single file. I was in the lead,
with Branwen behind me, and Ralf in the rear leading the packmule.
I had been conscious for the first hour or so of Ralf's tension,
the way his head turned from side to side as he watched and
listened; but we saw and heard nothing except the quiet winter life
of the forest; a fox, a pair of roe deer, and once a shadowy shape
that might have been a wolf slipping away among the trees. Nothing
else; no sound of horses, no sign of men.

Branwen showed no hint of fear. When I
glanced back I saw her always serene, sitting the neat-footed mule
stolidly, with an unmoved calm that held no trace of uneasiness. I
have said little about Branwen, because I have to confess that I
remember very little about her. Thinking back now over the span of
years, I see only a brown head bent over the baby she carried, a
rounded cheek and downcast eyes and a shy voice. She was a quiet
girl who -- though she talked easily enough to Ralf -- rarely
addressed me of her own will, being painfully in awe of me both as
prince and enchanter. She seemed to have no inkling of any risk or
danger in our journey, nor did she seem stirred -- as most girls
would have been -- by the excitement of traveling abroad to a new
country. Her imperturbable calm was not due to confidence in myself
or Ralf; I came to see that she was meek and biddable to the point
of stupidity, and her devotion to the baby was such as to blind her
to all else. She was the kind of woman whose only life is in the
bearing and rearing of children, and without Arthur she would, I am
sure, have suffered bitterly over the loss of her own baby. As it
was, she seemed to have forgotten this, and spent the hours in a
kind of dreamy contentment that was exactly what Arthur needed to
make the discomforts of the journey tolerable.

Towards noon we were deep in the
forest. The branches laced thick overhead, and in summer would have
shut out the sky like a pitched shield, but above the bare boughs
of winter we could see a pale and shrouded point of light where the
sun struggled to be through. I watched for a sheltered place where
we could leave the road without showing too many traces, and
presently, just as the baby woke and began to fret, saw a break in
the undergrowth and turned my horse aside.

There was a path, narrow and winding,
but in the sparse growth of winter it was passable. It led into the
forest for a hundred paces or so before it divided, one path
leading on deeper among the trees, the other no more than a
deertrod -- winding steeply up to skirt the base of a rocky spur.
We followed the deertrod. This picked its way through fallen
boulders tufted with dead and rusty fern, then led upwards round a
stand of pines, and faded into the bleached grass of a tiny
clearing above the rock. Here, in a hollow, the sun came with a
faint warmth. We dismounted, and I spread a saddlecloth in the most
sheltered spot for the girl, while Ralf tethered the horses below
the pines and threw down feed from the hay nets. Then we sat
ourselves down to eat. I sat at the lip of the hollow, with my back
against a tree, a post from which I could see the main path running
below the rock. Ralf stayed with Branwen. It had been a long time
since we had broken our fast, and we were all hungry. The baby,
indeed, had begun to yell lustily as the mule scrambled up the
steep path. Now he found his cries stifled against the girl's
nipple, and fell silent, sucking busily.

The forest was very quiet. Most wild
creatures lie still at noon. The only thing moving was a carrion
crow, which flapped heavily down onto a pine above us, and began to
caw. The horses finished their feed and dozed, hip-shotten, heads
low. The baby still fed, but more slowly, drowsing into milky
sleep. I leaned back against the stem of the tree. I could hear
Branwen murmuring to Ralf. He said something, and I heard her
laugh, then through the murmur of the two young voices I caught
another, distant, sound. Horses, at the trot.

At my word the boy and girl fell
abruptly silent. Ralf was on his feet in the blink of an eye, and
kneeling beside me to watch the path below. I signed Branwen to
stay where she was. I need not have troubled; she had turned a
wondering look on us, then the baby hiccupped, and she held him to
her shoulder, patting him, all her attention on him again. Ralf and
I knelt at the edge of the clearing, watching the path
below.

The horses -- there were two of them
by the sound of it -- could not be wood-cutters' beasts nor the
slow train of the charcoal-burners. Trotting horses, in the
Perilous Forest, meant only one thing, trouble. And travelers who
carried, as we did, gold for the baby's keep were quarry for any
outlaws and disaffected men. Hampered as we were by Branwen and
Arthur, both fighting and flight were impossible. Nor was it easy,
with the baby, to keep silent and let danger pass by so closely. I
had made it clear to Ralf that whatever happened he was to stay
with the girl and, at the least hint of danger, leave it to me to
devise some way of drawing the danger away. Ralf had protested,
mutinied, then finally seen the sense of it and sworn to
obey.

So now when I whispered, "Only two, I
think. If they don't come up this way, they'll not see us. Get to
the horses. And for God's sake tell the girl to keep the baby
quiet," he merely nodded, melting back from my side. He stooped to
whisper to Branwen, and I saw her nod placidly, shifting the child
to her other breast. Ralf slipped like a shadow among the pines
where the horses stood. I waited, watching the path.

The riders were approaching. There was
no other sound except the crow, still cawing high in the pine tree.
Then I saw them. Two horses, trotting single file; poor beasts,
heavy bred and none too well fed by the look of them, careless how
they put their feet, and having to be hauled up by their cursing
riders at every hole or root across the path. It was a fair enough
guess that the men were outlaws. They were as unkempt as their
beasts, and looked half savage, and dangerous. They were dressed in
what looked like old uniforms, and on the arm of one of them was a
dirty badge, half torn away. It looked like Gorlan's. The fellow in
the rear rode carelessly, lolling in the saddle as if half drunken,
but the man in front pricked at the alert, as such men learn to do,
his head moving from side to side like that of a questing dog. He
held a bow at the ready. Through the rotten leather of the sheath
at his thigh I saw the long knife, burnished to a killing
point.

They were almost below me. They were
passing. There had been no sound from the baby, nor from our
horses, hidden among the pines. Only the carrion crow, balancing
high in the sunshine, scolded noisily.

I saw the fellow with the bow lift his
head. He said something over his shoulder, in a thick accent I
could not catch. He grinned, showing a row of rotten teeth, then
lifted his bow, notched it, and sent an arrow whizzing into the
pine. It hit. The crow shot upwards off the bough with a yell, then
fell, transfixed. It landed within two paces of Branwen and the
child, flapped for a second or two, then lay still.

As I dodged back and ran for the pines
I heard both men laughing. Now the marksman would come to retrieve
his arrow. Already I could hear him forcing his beast through the
underbrush. I picked up the arrow, crow and all, and flung it out
over the edge of the hollow. It landed down among the boulders.
From the path the man could not have seen where the bird fell; it
was a chance that he might believe it had fluttered there, and
would ride no farther. I saw Branwen's eyes, startled and
wondering, as I ran past her. But she did not stir, and the baby
slept at her breast. I gave her a sign which was meant to convey
reassurance, approval, and warning all in one, and ran for my
horse.

Ralf was holding the beasts quiet,
heads together, muffling eyes and nostrils with his cloak. I paused
beside him, listening. The outlaws were coming on. They must not
have seen the crow; they came on without pausing, making for the
pines.

I seized my sorrel's bridle from Ralf,
and turned it to mount. The horse circled, treading the dry stalks
and snapping twigs. I heard the sudden clatter and tramp as the
outlaws dragged their beasts to a standstill. One of them said,
"Listen!" in Breton, and there was the rasp of metal as weapons
came hissing out. I was in the saddle. My own sword was out. I
pulled the sorrel's head round, and had opened my mouth to shout
when I heard another cry from the path, then the same voice yelling
"Look! Look there!" and my horse reared sharply back on its
haunches as something broke out of the bushes beside me and went by
so close that it almost brushed my leg.

It was a hind, white against the
winter forest. She scudded through the pines like a ghost, bounded
along the top of the hollow where we had lain, stood poised for a
moment in view at the edge, then vanished down the steep,
boulder-strewn slope, straight into the path of the two outlaws. I
heard shouts of triumph from below, the crack of a whip, the sudden
thud and flurry of hoofs as the men wrenched their horses back to
the path and lashed them to a gallop. They were giving hunting
calls. I jumped from the saddle, threw the sorrel's reins to Ralf,
and ran back to my place above the rock. I reached it in time to
see the two of them going back full tilt the way they had come.
Ahead of them, dimly seen for a moment, like a scud of mist through
the bare trees, fled the white hind. Then the laughter, the hunting
cries, the hammer of hard-driven horses, echoed plunging back
through the forest, and was gone.

14

The river which marks the boundary of
Hoel's kingdom flows right through the heart of the forest. In
places it cuts a deep gorge between overhanging banks of trees, and
everywhere in the central part of the forest the land is seamed by
small, wild valleys where tributary streams wind or tumble into the
main. But there is a place, almost in the center of the forest,
where the river valley is wider and more gentle, forming a green
basin where men have tilled the fields, and over the years have cut
back the forest to make grazing land round the small settlement
called Coll, which in Breton means the Hidden Place. Here there had
been, in past times, a Roman transit camp on the road from Kerrec
to Lanascol. All that remained of this now was the squared outline
where the original ditch had been dug beside the tributary. Here
lay the village. On two sides of it the stream made a natural
defense or moat; for the rest, the Roman ditch had been cleared and
widened, and filled with water. Inside this were steep defensive
earthworks, crowned with palisades. The bridge had been a stone one
in Roman times; the piles still stood and were spanned now with
planking. Though the village lay near Gorlan's border, it was
accessible from it only through the narrow pass cut by the river,
and there the road had crumbled almost back to the original rocky
path that wolves and wild men had used before the Romans ever came.
Coll was well named.

Brand's tavern lay just inside the
gate. The main street of the village was little more than a dirty
alley floored unevenly with cobbles. The inn stood a little way
back from this, on the right. It was a low building, roughly built
of stone, with mortar slapped haphazardly into the gaps. The
outbuildings round the yard were no more than wattle huts, daubed
with mud. The roof was newly thatched, with good close work of
reeds held down by a net of rope weighted with heavy stones. The
door was open, as the door of an inn should be, with a heavy
curtain of skins hung across the opening to keep the weather out.
Through the chimney hole at one end rose a sluggish column of smoke
that smelled of peat.

We arrived at dusk when the gates were
closing. Everywhere mingled with the peat smoke came the smells of
supper cooking. There were few people about; the children had been
called in long since, and the men were home at their supper. Only a
few hungry-looking dogs skulked here and there; an old woman
hurried past with a shawl held over her face and a fowl squawking
under her other arm; a man led a yoke of weary oxen along the
street. I could hear the clink of a smith's anvil not far away, and
smell the sharp fume of burned hoofs.

Ralf eyed the inn dubiously. "It
looked better in October, on a sunny day. It's not much of a place,
is it?"

"All the better," I said. "No one will
come looking in a place like this for the son of the King of
Britain. Go in now and play your part, while I hold the
horses."

He pushed aside the curtain and went
in. I helped Branwen dismount, and settled her on one of the
benches beside the door. The baby woke, and began to whimper, but
almost immediately Ralf came out again, followed by a big, burly
man and a boy. The man must be Brand himself; he had been a
fighting man and still bore himself like one, and I saw the
puckered seam of an old wound across the back of one
hand.