The Shining Company (24 page)

The boy looked up first and saw me in the doorway, and said something over his shoulder to Conn whose back was towards me. And Conn turned, flinging a ruined sword blade on to the pile in the corner.

‘One less for the Sea-wolves’ taking,’ he said.

I held Gorthyn’s sword out to him. ‘Has the whetstone gone the same way yet? I have been cutting rowan branches -’

He took it from me and crossed into the furthest part of the smithy, and I heard the ‘whet-whet-whet’ of the sharpening stone. In a little he came back,
feeling the edge with his thumb. ‘That should serve its purpose well enough.’

I took it and slid it home into the wolfskin sheath.

Neither of us knew what to say to each other. But standing there in the smoke-blackened mouth of the smithy we put our arms round each other’s shoulders and strained close. ‘It is but five springs since my father gave us to each other,’ I said after a few moments, ‘yet it seems as though we came into life together.’

‘And the grief is on me that we may not go out of it together also.’

I forced a kind of laugh, not a very good one for it cracked in my throat. ‘Somebody has to get Aneirin back to the King, and it will take the four of you at least, for his heart is not in it.’

And he laughed also, and stepped back so that only the tips of our fingers rested on each other’s shoulders.

‘When you get back to Dyn Eidin-’ I began.

‘If I get back to Dyn Eidin.’

‘You will.’ I knew that, because suddenly I saw the pattern that was forming for Conn; and when the Fates set their pattern on your forehead it does not melt away. ‘When you get back to Dyn Eidin, go you to Fercos - glad he will be to have you back - and work for him until you may call yourself a sword- smith; then go back to the valley.’

‘No bondman may become a smith.’

‘And you are a smith, and therefore no longer a bondman. If you are a swordsmith, then you will be able to take Loban’s place when he is past swinging a hammer - which cannot be long now - seeing that he
has no son to follow him. Meanwhile, carry my love back to Luned and-Old Nurse, and anyone else who you think may care to have it, and rub Gelert behind the ears for me.’

‘You were always one to make patterns of other people’s lives for them,’ Conn said.

‘Can you think of any better pattern for the following?’

He shook his head. ‘Not really, no - unless it be to ride with you an hour after moonrise.’

So we parted, and I went to find Cynan.

The light was beginning to thicken, and as I passed the foot of the old signal tower, a waft of wood smoke came trailing downward from its ragged crest, and I thought I caught the sound of singing. So faint that I was not really sure that I heard it at all; faint as the sea in a shell, but oddly potent. A high sweet singing, that had nothing human in it - and that seemed to be made by more than one voice.

And the hair lifted a little on the back of my neck.

We ate meat that evening as men should do before battle, for there were a few more horses than there were men to ride them, and we ate with our war-harness - dead men’s harness for the shieldbearers - already on, and dead men’s weapons lying beside us. The other horses had already been watered and fed - with a mere handful of fodder each, the last scraping of the Saxon forage store. If any man had asked me a few days since if I could chew my way through half raw horseflesh and enjoy it, knowing that within an hour I should almost certainly be dead, I should have thought them mad; but a fierce lightness of heart was upon us, and we shared the half raw meat among us, aye, and the laughter, too, and only wished that we might have had harpsong for our feasting. But Aneirin had matters of his own to see to, and still the faint waft of burning rowan wood drifted across the fort from the crest of the old signal tower.

As we ate, beyond our firelight the dusk came down and deepened into the dark and the dark began to lighten as the cloud-swept eastern sky took on a faint silver wash. And suddenly the rim of the moon slid up over the black edge of the world beyond the woods and the Saxon watchfires. There began to be a silent coming and going as men left the firelight and slipped away towards the barrack-row where our wounded
lay. It was time that those too sorely hurt to ride were sent on their way; for they could not be left to fall into the hands of the Sea-wolves. The last mercy, among fighting men, performed by brother for brother, friend for friend. I was thankful in the depths of my belly, even as I swallowed my last red rag of meat and turned to the mail coif that lay beside me, that both Gorthyn and Lleyn were beyond the need of that mercy from me.

I mind now the slippery fish-scale chill of the ring mail even through the woollen cap as I pulled it on; the unaccustomed weight on the crown of my head, the way it flattened my ears inward, and the way sound came through it well enough but with the edges slightly blurred. The fine unlined mask I left hanging open for the moment, but I put on my own iron rimmed war-cap and buckled the strap under my chin, as men were doing all round the fires. So we flung on the hairy wolfskin cloaks and broached them at the shoulder, hitched at swordbelts and gathered up bucklers and lances. The men who had been in the barrack-rows came back to gather their own war gear, no man remarking on their return as no man had remarked on their going. Madog, who was now our standardbearer, brought the standard out from the little still-roofed inner room where we had lodged it, carrying the lance somewhat at the slant, to let the folds hang free, there being as yet no wind under that shining sky to set them flowing. The torches struck the blood-red colour of the dragon-coils, the only colour in a world that was becoming striped frost-grey and ink-pool black like a badger’s mask as the moon rose higher.

‘Time to saddle up,’ said the Captain’s voice with an oddly hollow note to it, and as he stepped out from the shadows into the torchlight beside the standard, an uncanny figure, half a head taller than his usual seeming, we saw that he had pulled on Aethelfrith’s great wolf helmet with the gilded comb in place of his own war-cap that he had given to one of his shieldbearers.

Speaking for myself, it was in that moment that I noticed the mist. Scarcely more than a faint thickening and gilding of the air round the torches, but mist all the same.

It was thicker down at the picket lines, thin scarves of it lying along the ground, reaching halfway up the horses’ legs and making the ruins at the far side seem to have no standing on firm ground, though if one looked upward all was clear as a crystal ball overhead.

Such mists are common enough after dark in low country. But they seldom carry, even as faintly as this one did, the scent of burning rowan wood.

We saddled up and slipped in the bits. I mind Shadow playing with hers delicately in the way she had, as I have seen a girl playing with a flower. I took a final look at her shoes, tested her girth again though I had but that moment buckled it, and swung into the saddle, men to the right and left, before and behind me, doing the same thing.

Last moment orders were passed back down the picket lines from where Ceredig Fosterling who was a king’s son sat his horse under the dragon standard; no shouted commands that might reach to Saxon ears: speed was everything; we must be across the river before the sea-wolves had time to gather against us.
(We saw the wisdom of this having no wish to meet a storm of spears and throwing axes as we scrambled up the further bank.) There would be no sounding the charge, no sounds of horn before we reached the further side, but we should ride full gallop from the moment that we were clear of the gates. We should kill - and kill - and kill.

‘Kill, and kill, and kill! A red harvest before we ourselves go down,’ said a hollow voice in the great wolf helmet.

I pulled the mail mask across my face and made it fast. I pulled out my dirk and leaning forward, cut Shadow’s tether only a splinter of time behind Cynan; almost the instant Faelinn did the same, and the rest on beyond him, pulling clear as the picket line fell loose and lax.

The Captain wheeled his tall bay and headed for the gates and troop after troop we followed, heeling the horses into a canter as we went. Down the broad straight track that gashed like a blade through the midst of the fort; and out through the north facing gateway where the thorn-work had been pulled aside and rotten timbers and fallen stones heaved back to give us wide passage.

Outside, the mist that had been only a faint scarfing along the ground as we came down from the horse-lines, thickened and rose to meet us; a mist that smoked up from the marshy ground, lying in broad swathes and wafts of ghost-paleness that marked the course of the river, and glimmering in the light of the rising moon. But overhead the sky was still clear, and from the high ground at the gate we could still see the Saxon fires, before we dropped lower, and lost sight
of them as the mist took us. Aneirin’s mist that could cover an army …

Clear of the gates we quickened, troop after troop, from a canter into a gallop, heading down to the ford, past the dark shape of Gorthyn’s horse still lying where it had fallen. The standard lifted and streamed out on the wind of our going, and my ears were full of the rolling thunder of hooves over the rough ground. I snatched one glance behind me. I do not know why; it is a stupid thing to do when riding full gallop among a smother of horsemen. Maybe it was something to do with knowing that Conn would be just about mounting with Aneirin’s small band at the west gate.

So - I turned in the saddle and looked back. And I saw the Companions on their last ride. I have never forgotten that sight, nor, I am thinking, will any of the Saxon kind who saw them coming and lived beyond that night. I saw the Wild Hunt. I saw riders with black eyesockets in glimmering mail where their faces should have been, grey wolfskins catching a bloom of light from the mist and the moon; a shining company indeed, not quite mortal-seeming, but made of another kind that might dissolve at any moment into the mist that smoked about them. Only for that bright breath of time I saw them by the white levin-light of the moon, as something in which I had no part at all. Then I faced forward and settled down to ride; a part of them once more, in a oneness that was more potent than the oneness we had come to know on Dyn Eidin training grounds. The bloom of light was on my own wolfskin, and my own mailed face, faceless with the rest.

Faelinn was beside me, and Cynan’s crouched
shoulders loomed ahead; and up beyond, the great wolf helmet, scarfed as though with smoke, showed where Ceredig the Captain rode under the wind-lifted standard.

We took the river at the ford. The raids of earlier days had taught us where the shallows ran for a couple of spears’ lengths on either side of the paved way, and we took to the water on a broad front, sending up sheets of spray and churning the shallows till they seemed to boil.

We reached the far side and plunged ashore with a slipping scramble that turned the bank into a quagmire before half of us were over, and among the ruins on the north bank swung left-hand on to the remains of the north road and went straight down it like a flight of arrows.

Our horn was sounding now, not the charge, but the hunting call that sicks on the hounds when the quarry is in view. Ahead of us in the mist was a sudden urgent springing into life and movement; men snatching up their weapons and running for the stockades, and from the midst of the camp the hollow bull-bellowing of the Saxon war-horn burst out, answered and slung back by the clear yelping of our own hunting horn.
‘Tran ta ta ran tran tra
…’

If only we had the hounds with us, I thought, but the last of the mingled pack of war and hunting dogs that had feather-heeled out from Dyn Eidin with us were dead days ago. And then suddenly we were giving tongue ourselves, like a pack of hounds in full cry as we swept down upon the stockade.

Then happened a strange thing, a few moments of wavering, a loss of purpose, at the rough defences, as
the men behind them seemed gripped by something that was almost like the beginning of panic. I have learned since that the Saxons also have their Wild Hunt, though for them it is Woden himself who hunts his demon pack through the stormy skies. Maybe it was that, something of that, that they saw coming for them. A few moments more, and they had rallied and came roaring against us, armed with their long knives and the terrible swinging war-axes. But in those few moments we were through and over the breastwork and into the Saxon camp.

We charged through them to the farmost side, and turned and charged back, leaving a red wake behind us. ‘Not to break through, but to kill Saxons,’ the Fosterling had said. ‘Not to break through, but to kill and, ah yes, we killed, that night, killed and killed, while our own numbers also bled away.

They were coming in on us from all sides in yelling waves out of the mist, men from the further reaches of the siege-ring, crossing the river by the ford, and the shallows above the broken water, swarming in to answer the bellowing summons of the war-horn. Faelinn and I were still together at Cynan’s back, thrusting after the standard and the hunting horns; until the standard went down, until the horn fell silent in mid call.

We were no longer one fighting force, but splitting into smaller and smaller knots of desperate struggling men. Faelinn was gone. I do not know how or when for I never saw him go; and I was no longer at Cynan’s back, but stirrup to stirrup with him, as we plunged through the red embers of a scattered fire, towards the upreared horsetail standard that marked the heart
of the Saxon swarm. I do not know how many or how few we were by then, but the dull thunder of hooves on soft ground was still behind us as we crashed into the shield-mass, tearing great gaps in it, hurling it aside. But it seemed that fresh men sprang out of the ground like dragon’s teeth, two where every one had fallen. A heavy throw-spear homed in on my shield, and stuck there, making it useless so that I flung it aside. My sword hilt was slippery with blood, but the blood was not mine. A man came running low with his axe angled for Shadow’s belly. I managed to wrench her aside at the last instant, and cut him down and trampled him into the ground. She reared up with a scream of fury, her forehooves lashing, and a man with a beard the colour of hot coals went down to join him with his forehead smashed in. The last charge of the Companions had become an ugly swirling soup of fire and mist and moonlight and snarling faces, the cries of men and the screams of stricken horses, the smell of blood and filth.