Seven.
It was late when I awoke the next day, past mid morning. Cerdic"s thralls were pleased when I finally woke, for I was in their way, but strangely they had been unwilling to wake me. When I was up, though, I was told to go to the well to wash and, after I had done so, the chief thrall brought me some clothes. They were worn, but clean, and they fitted well, as did the new pair of boots and the cloak. I felt slightly more human when I had put these on, and I slung Caledvwlch over my shoulder.
At this, the chief thrall frowned. "What are you doing with that?" he asked. "You"ve no right to bear weapons. You must know that."
I shrugged. "No one"s taken it from me yet, and until they do, I"ll keep it."
He shook his head. "You can be beaten for that, even killed. Are you new to thraldom?"
I nodded.
"Well then, take my word for it, you had better not keep that sword. Give it to the master."
"I think that I will keep it, nonetheless," I said quietly. "It means something to me."
The old man looked distressed, then shrugged. "Well, it is your back risking the whip, not mine. Would you like something to eat?"
"Very much."
He gave me oatcakes with honey and milk, which I devoured in a very short time. The thrall grinned at me.
"You"ve had little to eat recently, haven"t you? Those warriors the master bought you from must have travelled a fair way. Tell me..." A glint came into his eyes. "Were you with the Pendragon? How goes the war?"
With the coming of daylight and my appet.i.te, he seemed to have forgotten whatever he had felt about me the night before. I smiled, but regretfully shook my head in answer to his question. "I don"t know. I have come from over the sea. I hoped that you could tell me."
He shook his head. "They tell us nothing. We have ways of knowing: we hear from farmers, or overhear-but we"re never sure whether what we hear is true or only a rumor. Sometimes we never do know." He stood and began clearing the dishes. "My name is Llemyndd ap Llwch, from what used to be eastern Ebrauc. I am the chief thrall here, the steward of Cerdic"s house. It was my father who was captured from Ebrauc: I was born Cerdic"s thrall. And you? You said that your name is Gwalchmai, but what of your kinsmen and country?"
I was about to answer truthfully, when I felt a sudden uncertainty. This Llemyndd might be other than he seemed. "How strange," I said. "My father"s name is Llwch, too." (Which it was, if one put it into British.) "But I am from G.o.doddin." I was willing to wager that there would be no thralls from such a distant kingdom in Cerdic"s house who could give me the lie, and I had heard something of that country in Dun Fionn.
Llemyndd whistled. "That is a long way distant."
I nodded. "I came south with my elder brother three years ago, by sea. We went to Gaul to buy some of those Gaulish war-horses for breeding. My clan deals in horses, and, as you must know, the Gaulish breed is the best. All the warriors were wanting horses like those the Pendragon has, and my clan thought that there should be a fine profit in it. And there would have been, too, if our ship had not been found by a Saxon longship off the coast of East Anglia."
"Anglia? That"s a long way north. How did you come down here among the Franks and Saxons?"
"Ach, we were not bested by that pirate," I improvised quickly. "Mine is a n.o.ble clan, and we fought back. But our ship was badly damaged, and we decided to go about to Dumnonia, down the Saxon Sh.o.r.e, and travel to G.o.doddin by land. But our bad luck turned worse: a storm arose, and we foundered against the cliffs of the Cantii. My brother and I found the keel of the ship and clung to it, praying. The next morning, when the waves stilled, we managed to swim ash.o.r.e, but we were taken by a Saxon of the land thereabouts."
Llemyndd nodded wisely and drew the rest of my story from me with great care. I told him what I had told Wulf and Eduin the day before, adding details of how kind my "master" had been to us, and how I had come to like him, despite resenting the slavery, and how treacherously his enemies had killed him. It was a good story, and a few of the other thralls came in to listen while I was telling it. All were sympathetic, though all looked at me with a searching hesitancy, questioning what they had seen the night before.
My suspicions of Llemyndd proved justified. He tried to trap me, subtly, testing my story with unexpected questions. It is fortunate that he knew less of G.o.doddin than I did, or I would have been caught at once. But, finally satisfied, he went off, and I suspected that he went to tell Cerdic what I had told him. I doubted, remembering Cerdic"s sharp green eyes, that the Saxon would believe the tale.
One of the other household thralls watched Llemyndd leave with a half-concealed bitterness that confirmed what I had suspected. Llemyndd was Cerdic"s, mind, spirit, and body.
"Now the master will know everything," said the thrall.
"So that is the way of it, then," I replied.
"It is indeed."
The other thralls looked uneasy. "Hush," said one. "You talk too much, Gwawl."
Gwawl hushed. A few more questions revealed to me that the thralls hated and feared Llemyndd, though most of them did not dislike their master Cerdic, to whom Llemyndd reported, and who would punish them for speaking disloyally. "The master is fair," I was told. "Do your job and he will treat you well." I nodded and settled to trying to discover what my situation actually was.
It took time. The thralls would not talk to me freely the first day, or the second either. They might never have done so but for the music. They were sick for familiar songs. The British are the most civilized people in the West, and they love music as only civilized men can. They sing to themselves constantly, as the men of the Orcades or the Irish do, and any wandering bard is a.s.sured of a welcome among them. In Erin or the Orcades it is easy to see why bards and druids are so important, for in those lands it is the trained bards who memorize the laws and recite them to the kings, and who can chant the genealogies and histories and say when it is time for planting corn and such. But the British bards have no other job but to sing songs, while the rest of the work is done by books, and yet they are no less honored than the Irish fillidh. These thralls of Cerdic"s could sing as they worked, and a few knew harping, but proper bardic music they had missed for years. The first time I played for them they wept for joy. For a song they would tell me anything I wanted to know of their master"s secrets, and not reckon the punishment for telling.
Aldwulf"s name was familiar to them. Aldwulf Fflamddwyn, Aldwulf Flame-bearer, they called him. Somehow his private sorcerous name had become the property of all Britain. He was feared by his own men, while Cerdic was loved and admired. Because of this, beyond his own clan he had few warriors in his warband, and when he raised an army from the farmers of his kingdom, more than the ordinary number of men never showed up. Nonetheless, Aldwulf was wealthy and powerful and, allied to Cerdic, he was much to be feared. The alliance between the West Saxons and distant Bernicia, a thing surprising on the face of it, had in fact begun nearly two years before. Cerdic had been bested by Arthur in a series of engagements, and had responded by forming treaties with all the other Saxon kingdoms. It was not a proper military alliance, however, merely an agreement between the Saxon kings to lay aside private differences, and to render aid and sanctuary to any other Saxon who happened to be in difficulties with the British in their territory-"Saxon territory" being defined as more than half of Britain. A few of the Saxon kings had entered into armed alliance as well, mainly in the south. Aldwulf was not of this number, but had come south, with most of his warband, to give aid and counsel to Cerdic. He wished to prevent the British High King from coming north. He had arrived at the beginning of April and had wormed his way into Cerdic"s confidence with gifts and-so the thralls added in whispers-by magic. They were extremely unwilling to speak of the magic to me, but they were sure he was a witch, and one or two of them-including one of Cerdic"s few Saxon thralls-told me various tales about his witchcraft, some of which were certainly false. None of the thralls liked Aldwulf, and those that liked Cerdic bewailed the day their master had met the Bernician king.
Cerdic had been fighting the High King Arthur for nearly three years now, and the war had become more difficult for him with each month. He had had great success when first he invaded, but Arthur"s first move after establishing himself in power had been to outflank Cerdic"s invasion force and plunder his base, the old Saxon Sh.o.r.e fort of Anderida. Cerdic had kept most of his supplies and all his plunder there, and the loss had been great. The Saxon was forced to retreat to Anderida, and Arthur had gone on to win victories against some other Saxon kings, one on a surprise raid as far north as Deira. Cerdic had heard of the last and moved against his British enemies while he thought the High King was staying in the north, only to be caught by Arthur"s over-rapid return. It was at this point that Cerdic had arranged his treaties with the other Saxons.
Cerdic"s problem was that Arthur had no regular army. He could command the allegiance of any British kingdom, and hence was able to request the king of whatever land he wished to visit to raise the farmers and clansmen of his territory, and most of the kings would comply. Arthur"s strength lay in his warband, the largest and finest of any king in Britain. Half of this warband consisted of the infamous cavalry which had caused such grief to my father, but all of the warband owned several horses apiece and could borrow more when Arthur needed to hurry across Britain. This gave the Pendragon a kind of speed and mobility which Cerdic could not hope to equal: Cerdic had no cavalry at all, and, while he could raise a very large army, most of the men in it were clansmen and farmers, who could not fight in the harvest or sowing seasons, and who were ill-trained and ill-equipped, and worst of all, ill-disciplined. Movement of such a force took a long time. Cerdic had also his own warband, of course, those professional warriors who depended upon him alone for their support, but this alone, or even this in alliance with the warbands of several other kings, was no match for the High King Arthur.
Cerdic"s thralls had a great deal to say about Arthur. The British thralls, even those who had been born to slavery, admired the High King with great pa.s.sion and delighted in recounting the ways and occasions on which he had bested the Saxons, in spite of the fact that Cerdic had forbidden anyone to mention Arthur"s name within his house without his permission. It seemed to me as I listened that Arthur"s warband must be increasing in power, even allowing for the acc.u.mulation of legends and the exaggeration of the thralls.
It was reasonable to suppose it: if a king is victorious in battle and generous in his Hall, warriors will flock to him from over all the Western world. Even some notable Saxon warriors had joined the High King"s warband. Two and a half years after beginning his war against the Saxons, Arthur must have a band of men unequalled in the West-probably unequalled in the world. They could and regularly did, it seemed, defeat four times their number.
"But the past two years," one thrall complained to me, "there"s been little to do. The master raises the fyrd and gathers his warband, then sits here in Sorviodunum-your pardon, Searisbyrig-sending out raiding parties and spies; and the Emperor just sends raiding parties and spies back."
It was a sensible move on Cerdic"s part, I thought. A large warband, like Arthur"s, is expensive to keep. Since he had no kingdom of his own, Arthur relied on tribute from all the kings of Britain. But he had gained the purple by defeating those very kings he exacted the tribute from, and they had not forgotten it. He needed their support and their armies against the Saxons; he could not antagonize them further by demanding vast amounts of tribute. While he fought and defeated the Saxons, he could support himself from plunder and sweeten his subjects" tempers by sharing the booty, but when the Saxons retreated and sat firm in a strong fortified position, content with guarding their borders, Arthur had to rely upon his subjects. They would be the less inclined to support him when they could see no tangible tokens of victory. Cerdic was hoping to provoke the British kingdoms into another civil war, and I learned from one thrall that there were kings in Britain who were willing to overthrow "the usurping b.a.s.t.a.r.d," and that messages had been sent to and from some of these men into this fortress, Sorviodunum or Searisbyrig. Cerdic understood statecraft. Unfortunately, most of his followers did not, and many, to whom he had promised land, felt cheated and muttered angrily that Cerdic was afraid. The war had become a race between Cerdic and Arthur over who would first be forced to raise the full armies and offer a pitched battle. At the moment it seemed that Arthur might win the race, and Cerdic was desperately angry. It was probably because of this that he was willing to employ Aldwulf"s sorcery to kill Arthur. Cerdic left to himself was honorable and generous, but ambition was his ruling pa.s.sion, and honor was sacrificed to the end of obtaining a kingdom. Still, I think, it troubled him. He did not like the thought of killing me after I had served him, and because of it treated me harshly himself, while at the same time commanding his household to allow me great liberties. I think that the idea of killing Arthur by such a means troubled him still more, for he wished frequently to hear songs of the Pendragon"s battles, privately, yet grew angry after only a verse or so, and had to be left, brooding over the song and his thoughts. But he remained resolute.
For my part, I came to admire the Pendragon in those weeks. He sounded more than ever to be a lord worth following. At the same time, though, my worries increased. Arthur would have no use for unskilled warriors like myself, who would do nothing but drain his already strained resources.
On the other hand, I told myself whenever I considered this, I might die by Aldwulf"s hand at the dark of the moon, and the matter would not concern me at all. And I would throw myself into some other task so as not to think of it.
Cerdic did not set me any tasks in the house, which was fortunate, for I soon realized I did not know how to work as a thrall. I had not noticed how much I took it for granted that I was a king"s son, even a younger and despised king"s son, and that there were certain things those of a royal clan do not do. I found that I expected others to open doors, fetch things, pick things up. I had no notion of how to go about cleaning a floor or mending the thatch, and was, at first, angry when told to do some menial task. Continually I had to correct myself, and tell myself that these servants were fellow servants. I did not fool them. Coming into the stable one day I heard one of the grooms saying to a house-servant, "If he"s a thrall, I"m the Emperor Theodosius. Do you know..."-and he stopped abruptly when he saw me. No; there were few tasks for me as a thrall. But Cerdic expected me to be ready to play the harp at any time of day or night, and I had my own inquiries to make. Besides that, I was attempting to learn the basics of the Saxon tongue...and then, there was Ceincaled.
Leaving the stables on my first day as Cerdic"s thrall, I saw a crowd of men gathered in a circle on a hillside just beyond the Roman part of the town, and I went to investigate. Aldwulf had mentioned that he gave a horse to Cerdic to prove his power at sorcery, and Cerdic had accepted it as proof, although unable to break the horse. As I came through the circle and saw the stallion that reared in the center of the ring, I understood why.
No earthly mare had borne that horse. The steeds of the Sidhe, praised in a hundred songs, show their immortality in every line; and that horse was a lord among even such horses as those.
He stood three hands taller at the shoulder than the largest horse I had seen before, and that had been a giant of a plow-horse. He was lovely: pure white, splendid and powerful as a storm on the sea. The white neck curved like the sea"s waves before they break, the mane was like foam flung up from the rocks. No seagull skims the water as lightly as those hooves skimmed the earth, and no sea-eagle struck at the ground with such fierceness or such freedom. The horse"s nostrils were flared wide and red, defiant in anger, his eyes dark and savage with pride. I held my breath at the sight of him.
The Saxon who had just been thrown scrambled out of the way, and some grooms from Cerdic"s stable drove the horse back to the center of the ring with whips and flapping cloaks, cursing him.
"That beast is a man-killer," said one of the thralls, who was standing a few feet from me. "Cerdic cannot believe that he will ever tame it."
"He is beautiful, that horse," I said. The man looked at me, surprised and suspicious. He recognized me, shrugged uncomfortably.
"Of course," he said, "and strong and swift. He could outrun and out-stay any horse in Britain, that one. But what is the use of all of it, since he can"t be ridden? You are new here and wouldn"t know, but we have tried for a month now to break him, with kindness and with blows, with riding and with starving, and we are no nearer to taming him than we were when Cerdic first acquired him. I know horses, and I say that this one will die before he obeys a man. And before he dies he will probably take some of us with him...Watch out, there! Hey, you!...Cerdic won"t name him till he"s ridden him, but we of his house call the beast Ceincaled, Harsh Beauty, for that, surely, is what he is."
It took little time for me to see the truth of the man"s words. The horse tried to kill every human near him. There was no viciousness in these attempts, no hatred of humanity such as one finds in an animal which has been badly mistreated, but instead a wild, pure, elemental power which could bear no subjection. He was proud, Ceincaled, not with a pride such as men have, but as a falcon or eagle is proud. He was like the music in Lugh"s Hall: splendid, but not for men. I wondered what dark spell of Aldwulf"s had captured the stallion and brought him from the Plain of Joy to captivity and eventual death in the lands of men.
There were times during the next two weeks when I felt a strong sense of kinship with the stallion. I was not an immortal, but my problem was similar. I was trapped, and all my efforts to escape only wasted my time and brought nearer the time set down for my death.
Cerdic had all of his large warband with him in Sorviodu-num (to use the Roman name): three hundred and twelve picked warriors, who guarded the fort. He had also an army of some five thousand-as always, the exact number was uncertain. The camp was continually prepared for war, and raiding parties left or returned nearly every day, if only from short forays. I thought of trying to slip from the camp when one of these arrived, and hung about the gate and a low spot in the walls for a while, until I was warned off the guards, who, besides being exceedingly vigilant, were suspicious. I considered the forest I had walked through, and looked out over it from the hill-top center of the fortress. I thought it must be easy to disappear into the trees. Unfortunately, though, the forest only extended towards the north-east. There were miles of open plain adjoining the town on the west, where lay the nearest British kingdom. And I was watched, even if there had been some way to cross the walls and the plains. No one forbade me to roam about the town, but some thrall or some warrior always seemed to be about. Cerdic did not wish his semi-human sacrifice to escape. It disturbed me nearly as much as the fear of death and my still unresolved fears about myself. I had always wanted solitude, and to be denied it grated against my nerves.
I prayed to the Light, but he did not respond. I began to want, and want badly, simply to draw Caledvwlch and try to splash my way out of the fort. I knew that it would be certain death to do so, but at least it would be a clean death, and a warrior"s death. I was tired of being a thrall. I was trapped, and that word seemed to resound continually through my mind, all of each day. At night I dreamt of it, and I thought of it before anything else each morning when I woke. Trapped, like a hawk that had flown by mistake into a fisherman"s net, who, when he beats his wings only discovers how truly entangled he is, and exhausts his strength against the ropes.
I became aware of time with a terrifying intensity, of how the sun rising in the morning splashed the sky with colors whose softness I had never noticed so clearly before; of how the shadows shortened and lengthened as the hours pa.s.sed during the day. At night I watched the moon, sliding from full down into its fourth quarter, growing thinner with every night that pa.s.sed. The moon was my friend, my ally. While she still shone I would not die. But she was leaving the sky, and when she had gone, all would be darkness.
Sometimes I felt that the Light had withdrawn in the same way. After alerting me to Cerdic"s plan, it became as silent as the moon. Two weeks is not a long time, but those two weeks, full of the tension of waiting and the terror of the trap, seemed endless and, at the same time, seemed to be gone at once. I felt that I had been abandoned by my lord. I was left to myself, and I was afraid of myself as well. I cannot say why it so terrified me to think of myself as not human. Most men would be pleased to consider themselves apart from humanity-or they think they would be. It was not the loneliness, though that may have been a part of it, for I was accustomed to loneliness. Perhaps it was simply fear of the unknown. All fear what they do not understand, the more so when that unknown is a part of themselves.
So I watched the Saxons trying to break Ceincaled, and looked after the horse when he was stabled, to free myself from myself. The purity of the white horse seemed to defy and mock the complexity of the terrors that beset me. His battle was the one I longed for, the simple brilliance of physical struggle.
Two weeks. The moon became a sliver in the sky, a thin hair of light, and the s.p.a.ces between the stars were very black. The next night there would be no moon. The next night...it was my last day, and I had decided nothing. When evening came, if there should still be no escape, I had resolved to draw Caledvwlch and try to see whether I could kill Aldwulf and Cerdic before they killed me.
I stood again in the circle that hemmed in Ceincaled and watched Cerdic try again to ride the horse, and again be thrown. Across from me, Aldwulf was chewing his beard. He had been trying some new sorcery on the horse to please Cerdic, but his spells had failed and he was shamed and angry.
"By the worm!" said Cerdic, picking himself up. "I have been cheated."
He had. I could guess the price that Aldwulf had persuaded him to pay for the horse-a human life, the usual price in bargains with Yffern-and, while the life of some prisoner or thrall might be counted cheap for such a horse, Ceincaled was as useless to Cerdic as if he had been a lame cart-horse. Even though Ceincaled could leave behind every horse in the camp...
By the sun and the wind! Mentally I swore Agravain"s favorite oath. I had been blind, looking about in the night of my own shadow, when the sun was behind me. How, I asked myself, beginning to find it very funny, how could I have ever been so stupid?
And was my other problem so simple as this? I asked myself as I edged round to Cerdic. All my questioning of my ident.i.ty, would it too come clear in a burst of light when I looked in the right direction? My High King, lord...
"My lord King," I said to Cerdic, who had noticed my approach and was eyeing me without enthusiasm. "Could I try to ride the horse?"
Cerdic gave me a furious glare, then hit me hard enough to make me stagger for balance. "You insolent dog! You slave, do you think to succeed where a king failed? I should have you whipped!" I saw that I had misjudged the degree of his anger about the horse and bowed my head, trying to think and rubbing my jaw.
"Cerdic," Aldwulf interrupted suddenly. "You might let him try."
"What!"
"They may be from the same land. Who knows? The boy has been caring for the horse." Aldwulf"s thought was plain. I would use magic on the horse, tame it, be killed, and the king would have both my sword and the horse. Aldwulf was smiling in a very satisfied fashion. It had been a sore point with him, I think, that his fine horse was unridable.
Cerdic looked at me, remembering what Aldwulf said I was. "Very well," he said at last. "Try, then."
"Thank you, Cyning Cerdic," I said softly. "I will do my best."
Cerdic nodded to Aldwulf. I turned back towards Ceincaled.
He had been caught by the grooms again, and waited patiently while they held him, conserving his strength for his rider. I walked over, thanked the man who held him, and took the bridle. As I held it, I suddenly doubted my ability to ride him, which a minute before had seemed so clear. I had always been good with horses, and the stallion knew me now, but that might well be no use at all. He objected not so much to the Darkness in his riders as to being ridden at all. It would take a spirit equal to his own to hold him, and even then he might die rather than accept defeat. But I had to ride him, or die that evening.
I stroked the white neck, whispering to the horse. He jerked away from me, then quieted, waiting, preparing for the battle. He was more intelligent than an ordinary horse. I had watched him fight Cerdic and knew this.
I ran my hand over his back and withers, tightened the girth of the saddle, speaking in a sing-song, in Irish, no longer caring who heard. In my heart I asked the Light to rein in that proud spirit for me, and grant me the victory. Then I placed my left hand on the stallion"s shoulder and vaulted to his back.
The only way to describe what happened next is to say that he exploded. The world dissolved into a white cloud of mane, and Ceincaled fought with all his terrible strength and limitless pride. I held his mane and the reins both, gripping hard with my knees and bending down on to his neck, and barely managed to stay on.
He circled the ring, rearing and plunging, and the onlookers were a blur of flesh, bright colors, steel, and distorted shouts. I felt that I tried to ride the storm, or hold the north wind with a bridle. It was beyond the power of any human, and now that I tried my strength against an immortal I knew that I was no more than human. Ceincaled was pure, fierce, wild beyond belief. He had no master and could accept none...
And he was glorious.
I stopped caring about past and future, about thought and feeling. Aldwulf might hang me or I might fall from Ceincaled and be trampled, broken by the wildness of the power I had tried to master. But even as I saw these things they became as distant and unimportant as an abandoned game. There was a sweet taste at the back of my mouth, like mint in the middle of a rainy night. Ceincaled was leaping again, clothed in thunder, and death and life were both unreal. All that mattered was the sweet madness which possessed both the horse and me, madness which had swept on to me from within and changed the world to something I could no longer recognize, or care to. When I had drawn Caledvwlch there had been something of the sensation of light, but this was more a lightness, a blazing sweetness in my mind. I loved Ceincaled totally, and in mid-leap he felt it and returned the love, and we were no longer fighting each other but flying, dazzled with delight, filled with the same and equal fierceness.
Ceincaled reared one last time and neighed, a challenge to all the world, then dropped onto all four legs in the center of the circle and stood tensely still.
Through the battle-madness that made the world seem sharp-edged, almost frozen, I saw the onlookers staring at me in wonder, Aldwulf frowning in a sudden unease, and Cerdic, eyes alight with greed.
"Good," said the King of the West Saxons. His voice sounded far away. "Now give me my horse."
I laughed, and he started, flushing with anger. Aldwulf, realizing now what was happening, grabbed Cerdic"s arm. Cerdic began to turn to him, an angry question forming on his tongue...
I had Caledvwlch out, and its light leapt up, pure and brilliant as a star. Ceincaled rushed at Cerdic. Someone was screaming in terror.
Cerdic flung himself aside, rolled, Ceincaled"s hooves missing him by inches. Aldwulf, pressing back into the crowd, was less quick and less fortunate. He cried out before my sword touched him, blinded by its light, shrieking some curse-then screamed as the blade struck him. But Ceincaled struck the rope that bounded the make-shift ring, breaking it, and my hand was jerked back. Aldwulf was not killed, though he would miss his left eye, and I wanted to go back and finish him, for he deserved destruction; but Ceincaled was stretching into a run and I forgot Aldwulf with the taste of the wind.
The Roman streets swept past, blurred with speed, and behind us someone was shouting to stop me, kill me. A warrior on the street ran into my path, dropped to one knee, his long thrusting spear braced against me. Everything narrowed to him as I approached. I saw his face, grinning in fear and excitement, sweat gleaming on it. I saw the sun flash off the tip of his spear, and loved the leap of it, loved him as well, knew that Ceincaled was only three paces away. I touched the horse with my knee, forcing him to swerve the barest fraction, and the spear-tip, flashing forward, missed us. With my left hand I caught the shaft and with my right swung down Caledvwlch. My mind was still dazzled with madness as the sword struck, blazing, and the warrior"s neck spurted red as it was cut through. Then I was past. There were others, at the gate. I killed the nearest with the spear I had taken from the first, and cut through the spear-shaft of the second and let Ceincaled run over him. I found that I was singing, and laughed again. How could they hope to stop me? The Saxons were fleeing now. One threw a spear, but I swerved Ceincaled and it missed. My horse leaned into the race, and there were no others before me, only the open gate and the Roman road stretching into the west. We flew down it like a gull, like the hawk of my name. The Saxons were far behind. Even when they mounted a party to follow us, they were far behind. Too far to catch up again, I thought, remotely; too far ever to catch us again. We were free.
Eight.
The rest of that race is not clear in my mind. It was a sweet rhythm of flying hooves and wind, and the empty hills of the plain before and about me after we abandoned the road. I sang for pure joy, laughing, loving the world and all men in it, even Cerdic, whom I would gladly have killed had he been here. Oh, the Light was a strong lord, a great High King. Any warrior would be proud to serve him.
It was late afternoon, and Ceincaled began to tire a little. I reined him to a canter. We still had a long way before us, I reminded myself.
How long a way? I could not guess. I was totally uncertain of distances in Britain, and had no idea of how far we had come. A great distance, surely, at such a speed. Some of the blindingly bright light died down within my mind, and I looked about myself.
I was nearing the western edge of the plain. The land to either side of me looked something like the Orcades in that it was open and hilly, but these hills were wider and greener. Checking by the sun I discovered that I was going north as well as west, and realized that I must have been doing so for some time. I had a vague recollection of the Roman road following the curve of a hill and Ceincaled galloping off it on to the plain, north-west. It was good, I decided, that we had turned west on the Roman road. If we had not-and in that madness we could easily not have-Ceincaled and I would have gone tearing off east, into the heart of the Saxon kingdoms. The thought made me smile, and the rest of the ecstasy departed. I slowed Ceincaled to a trot and turned him due west again.
Westward the hills became steeper, and soon there was a dark line of forest before us. Before we reached this, however, we came upon a river. It was a small, sleepy river, still dark with spring mud, and it calmly reflected the oak trees on its further bank. I rode northwards along the bank for a way, until I found a place where the bank was low enough for Ceincaled to cross it easily.
When he approached the water, the horse snuffled interestedly. I dismounted and let him drink, talking to him softly while he did. He was thirsty and wet with sweat, but, incredibly, not hot to steaming, as any other horse would have been after anything resembling our race.
Watching the horse drink made me thirsty. As I knelt by the water, I saw that I was still holding Caledvwlch. I smiled and began to sheath the sword-then realized that there was blood on it.
I remembered, with an almost physical shock, the Saxons who had got in my way. I remembered Aldwulf falling back unconscious into the circle of Saxons, the left side of his face cut open, and the others dying, and how I had laughed. I dropped the sword on the gra.s.s and leant back on my heels, staring at it, as though the killing had been its responsibility and not mine. Then I saw that the horse was drinking too much, and stood to pull him away from the water and walk him about to cool him down. I had killed. I had just killed three men, and horribly wounded a fourth, and I had not even been aware of it until now. No, killed four men, if one counted Connall. But that had been mercy, and this was...it was war, a battle.
I let the horse go back to the water and drink some more. Lugh had given me his blessing, to carry into whatever battles lay before me. Could that madness that had possessed me be such a blessing? CuChulainn, they say, went mad in battle, and he was the son of Lugh. There are kinds of madness which are said to be divine or sacred. Mine had felt so. But it frightened me, that I could kill and not care. But could I say that I had been wrong to escape as I did?
I cleaned the sword on the gra.s.s, rubbed it on my cloak, and sheathed it again. Then I knelt and drank from the river. The water tasted like its source"s appearance: slow and rich, peaceful. It was calming, so I sat on the bank and watched. Ceincaled had finished his drink, and now waded in the stream, enjoying the feel of it. I went to him and unfastened the saddle, quickly, then rubbed him down with a handful of gra.s.s and allowed him to splash into the stream again, and again myself sat down.
I looked at my reflection, which trembled with Ceincaled"s disturbance of the water. I had changed since I last studied my face, back at the pond at Llyn Gwalch. It was a strange face now, marked by strange things. The eyes, though, floating reflected on the dark water, were the same, and just as puzzled by what they saw as before. But now there was a kind of intensity to the face, the look of a warrior and something uncanny as well. I shook my head and looked at Ceincaled again. I, a warrior. I had killed three trained Saxon warriors and wounded a Saxon king. But how could I, Gwalchmai mac Lot, the worst warrior in all the Orcades, an utter failure in arms, do such a thing as that? The warriors had been frightened and off balance because of the size and speed of Ceincaled and because of the fire which blazed in my sword. Otherwise I would have been killed at once. Certainly, it sounded like a dashing exploit such as a famous warrior might boast of in a feast hall, but I knew better.