‘Ah now, the silver bird spread his wings, and flew home to his own mistress across the sea, who had been waiting for him all that time,’ said Uncle Widreth, and dropped the scrap of carved driftwood into the small eager hands stretched out for it. And leaving the two little girls to huddle enchanted over their new treasure, he looked up at Owain leaning against the pea stack beside him. ‘What are you thinking, way up there? Are you thinking: What a very foolish old man; surely he has lived so long that he has gone round in a circle and become a child again?’
‘I was thinking,’ Owain said, ‘that I wish I could make things. Oh, I don’t mean just things to use—I’m good with my hands; I can make or mend any farm tool well enough—but things that have life in them. I think I should not mind this thrall-ring round my neck quite so much, if I could make things.’
Uncle Widreth’s beaky old face was touched suddenly with a gentleness greater than the gentleness he kept for the children. ‘It comes hard, when one is young … I remember when I did not like to be only poor silly Widreth, midway between the farm folk and my brothers—knowing that I was my father’s eldest son.’
And looking down at him, Owain wondered for the first time whether Uncle Widreth really believed in the seal-woman mother, or whether she was just a young man’s pitiful attempt to save his pride. All at once he saw himself grown old too, and clinging to some self-made heroic story of how he had been taken in battle after killing thirty men with his own sword. And for a moment he could have howled like a dog, both for Uncle Widreth and for himself.
‘When you are my age,’ the old man was saying, ‘when you are my age, you will have learned how little all things matter. Life is fierce with the young, and maybe more gentle with the old. Only, while one is young, there is always the hope that one day something will happen; that one day a little wind will rise …’
Even as the old quiet voice droned away into silence, Owain felt Dog’s ears prick under his caressing hand, and the great hound raised his head to listen. For a few moments the sound was too distant for human hearing, and then Owain caught it too, the faint tripple of a horse’s hooves on the old paved road from Regnum.
He moved a long stride to the end of the pea stack, and looked out in the direction from which it came. A man on a red colt had appeared from the long shadows of the oakwoods and was heading towards the farm at a lazy hand-canter. It was not often that one saw a horse on that stretch of the road, for not much more than a mile northward the long curving sea-arm that made the Seals’ Island almost an island in truth as well as name, cut across it, and travellers had to rouse up old Munna who had his bothy and his boat there, to ferry them over. But at low tide the creek ran almost dry, revealing here and there the sunken stones of an old paved ford, and it was possible for a man who knew the land and the tides and the drift of the sandbanks to get across on horse-back.
Such a man was Haegel the King.
Three times before, since Owain had followed his new master south, Haegel had come, unheralded and alone, as a man may drop in to sit by a friend’s hearth and drink his ale and re-fight old battles or discuss the harvest prospects. Owain had thought it strange, the first time, but that was before he knew that Haegel, put out to foster after the way of the Saxon nobles, had been bred up here on the farm, so that he and Beornwulf were foster brothers. He knew that now, and that Beornwulf had been one of the young King’s hearth-companions in his high Hall close to Regnum. (Regnum was like Viroconium now, and they called it Cissa’s Caester, which sounded more like a sneeze than the name of a city; Cissa’s Stronghold, after one of Aelle’s fierce sons.) That had been before Beornwulf’s father had died and the time had come for him to take over the farm and marry and settle down; but still the old friendship held, and Beornwulf continued to serve his foster brother not merely as a land holder with a spear serves his King, but in other, nearer and more private ways. Owain had a suspicion that it had been some mission for Haegel that had carried him up into the Thorn Forest, a year ago last spring. And still Haegel the King came to sit by Beornwulf’s hearth with an ale horn on his knee and to laugh at ancient jests with him.
‘It is the King,’ he said over his shoulder to Uncle Widreth. ‘I must go,’ and strode off round the pea stack and in at the steading gate.
Beornwulf liked him to be there when a guest came, to take his horse if he had one, and when Athelis the mistress could not come, to pour the guest-cup for him. The bondwoman was a clumsy creature, and did little honour to a guest, but Owain had been well trained by his father, and carried himself even now like a ten point stag, which is to say like a king; and Beornwulf, had he known it, was proud of his Roman-British thrall. But Owain did not know it; he only knew that because the King had come he might not be free all evening.
A few moments later, Haegel swung in through the gate-gap, and he stepped forward to take the red colt from him as he drew rein. The King was darker than his foster brother, very dark for a Saxon, with level eyes set deep under his brows, and a thinker’s mouth. The evening sunlight that turned the colt’s hide to burnished copper glinted on the necklace of coral and gold beads under his beard, and the wind ruffled the colt’s mane and the breast feathers of the hooded falcon on his fist.
Beornwulf’s hounds, who knew him, ceased baying and came with Dog sniffing round the colt’s fetlocks, and Haegel swung his leg over and dropped into their midst, laughing as he turned to his foster brother who had come out to greet him. ‘Ah, it is good to be home! Some part of my heart still cries out “Home again!” whenever I cross into the Seals’ Island.’
‘And all of mine cries out “My brother is home to his own place,” for I knew it was you as soon as I heard the dogs bay,’ Beornwulf said. ‘How went the hawking?’
‘Well enough. We have been flying at the wild fowl between the Haven Marshes and Bremma’s Dyke. Now I have sent the others home with the hounds, and come to drink the bairn’s health. Son or daughter? I have heard that there is a new bairn, but no more.’
‘Another daughter,’ said Beornwulf, and pulled a wry face.
‘So? Ah well, we have each one son to carry our shields after us.’
Haegel turned towards the house-place, his arm flung across his foster brother’s shoulders.
Owain took the horse round to the stable and handed him over to Caedman his fellow thrall, then went round to the store-room behind the house-place, to fetch Beornwulf’s own drinking horn and a jar of their best ale.
When he returned to the two men they had not gone in, but were sitting on the bench by the foreporch door, their feet stretched before them, talking quietly in the way of men both tired at the day’s end. Haegel the King was making much of his falcon, drawing his finger again and again down her back so that she bobbed her hooded head and hunched her wings in pleasure. They were not talking of family matters now, and nor were they laughing at ancient jests.
‘I still think the day is not far off when we may have to defend our own,’ Beornwulf was saying. ‘It is as I told you; the West Saxon Kingdom grows over strong for safety—our safety—since Ceawlin broke the last of the British, two years and more ago.’
Owain checked an instant in his movements, then bent and set the great horn, with its copper and silver mounting, into the hand that Haegel held for it, and filled it to the brim.
‘Wass heil!’ Haegel said, and drank, and gave it back. ‘Good fortune on the house and on the newest flower of the house!’ And then, returning to the thing that they were really talking of, ‘I wonder—oh, I think with you that the day will come for calling out the warriors again; but I do not read the signs quite as you read them, for all that.’
Beornwulf took the ale horn in his turn. ‘How do you read them, Haegel the King?’ he said, and flung back his head and drank.
And Haegel put out his hand for the horn again, but when he had it, only sat with it on his knee, staring into the amber depths, while Owain, standing by with the ale jar, to pour for them again as soon as the h
orn was drained, felt his heart quicken with an odd expectancy, as though what passed between them had some personal meaning for himself.
‘I read them—I think—in this way,’ the King of the South Saxons said at last. ‘Ceawlin is a great war-leader; one of those whose shadow stretches far like the shadow of a man at sunrise, but it is in my mind that he abides too much by his own strength, and does not understand the hearts of men, nor even see the need to understand them … See now, his own sons and his brother’s sons alike carried their shields for him in the Great Fight, when he broke the last power of the Princes; and to Coel and Coelwulf, his brother’s sons, he has given maybe half of the new-won lands to rule between them; and to Cuthgils, the Chiltern uplands to hold. And for his own sons he has kept all else, from Londinium to the Sabrina’s Sea, and from the Mid-lands to the coast.’
‘They are his sons,’ Beornwulf said.
‘Yet his brother’s sons will surely say, “We also fought for the Kingdom, and now Wessex is great. Why then is our share so small?” and so may come trouble on Ceawlin’s threshold later. And that, I think, will be the chance of those who do not love Ceawlin—notably Aethelbert of Kent.’
‘Aethelbert?’ Beornwulf sounded surprised. ‘Why the King of Kent, more than another one?’
‘For the memory of Wibbendune.’
‘That must be five and twenty years ago. Would he still carry hatred for a worsting in battle before his beard was grown, think you?”
‘Quite easily. You know him only as a name, one of the mighty line of the Oiscings, great grandson of Hengest himself. But I am King of Sussex, and he is the High King and in some sort my Overlord, and I have sat at his table. He is not like the rest of his line, not a warrior at heart; he has the kind of cold merchant nature that hates well and hates long …’ He took up the ale horn and drained it, then handed it to Owain to be refilled, and fell to caressing his falcon again.
Owain wondered if they had forgotten that after a year and more among them he could speak their tongue; then he understood. It was because he was a thrall that they spoke so freely in front of him; a thrall who was of no account in the pattern of things, and whose word would carry less weight than a blade of grass.
‘Also he is rich with the gold that his Frankish Princess brought him, rich enough maybe, to buy his revenge one day and set himself and his Kingdom above the West Saxons once and for all—and clever enough to know when and how to make the purchase. But if ever that day comes, the gold and the skill and the cunning will flow underground, like the seven secret rivers that flow through our South Saxon Land; and above ground there will be fighting, and it is we that shall be doing it, even as you say, my brother.’
He shook his head as Beornwulf offered him the horn again. ‘Na na, I must be away before the tide drowns the ford. The red colt takes some handling, moreover; nor am I Vadir Cedricson to ride as well drunk as sober.’
Beornwulf laughed. ‘Aye well, by your reading as well as by mine, it seems that the old fiery days are back. Now that there are no more British to fight, we fight each other.’ He shook out the last few drops of ale in a dark spatter on the ground, which was instantly licked up by the dogs, and gave the horn to his British thrall, bidding him take it away.
And Owain, carrying horn and ale jar back to their places, heard the voices of the two men murmuring on, but could think of no excuse to come near enough to hear anything more that passed between them. He did not fully understand all that he had heard, for he had no knowledge of the way in which gold and the power of gold might be used in roundabout ways, to undermine loyalties or sow the seeds of distrust in men’s minds, but he knew from bitter experience that one could not feed and arm a war-host without it. And echoing in the back of his mind, as he went to see that the red colt was ready when Haegel called for him, was something that Uncle Widreth had said a little earlier: ‘Only while one is young, there is always the hope that one day something will happen; that one day a little wind will rise …’
Yet it did not seem likely that a Saxon war would raise much wind in the fortunes of a British thrall.
10
The Silver Foal
BUT two years went by, and no more word of Ceawlin’s nephews came down through the Maen Wood, the Common Wood that lay shaggy between Regnum and the Seals’ Island. No wind arose, only men and hounds grew older.
A spring evening came, when all across the marsh the hawthorn was in flower, the scent of it coming and going on the soft damp air, breathing in at the open house-place doorway to mingle with the tang of wood smoke and the all-pervading fish-reek of the eels smoking over the hearth.
Owain, sitting at the lower end with Gyrth and Caedman, the two half-bred farm thralls, looked up from the flail whose leather hinge he was renewing, and glanced about him in the light of the seal-oil lamp on the roof-beam. The whole household were gathered about the hearth after the evening food, the master of the house and his thralls alike busy with the making and mending of harness and farm gear, Athelis the mistress sitting with her stool turned to catch the best light, finishing off the hanging ends of the piece of blue and brown striped cloth that she had cut from the loom that morning, while a little behind her the bondwoman, sleeves rolled to her shoulders, ground the next day’s barley-meal in the stone quern. Uncle Widreth had been telling them a story, but it had got slower and drowsier as it went along, and now he slept, his back propped against the roof-tree, his thin grasshopper shanks drawn up almost to his chin, and his breath making little puffs in the grey hairs of his beard. The children too were asleep, like puppies tumbled with the dogs around the fire, Helga and Lilla and little Gerd, round and sweet as three brown barley-loaves warm from the bakestone, blue-eyed—when their eyes were open—and barley-haired. Bryni had abandoned his family to sleep by himself at the lower end of the fire, with his head on Dog’s brindled flank—a freedom which Dog, lying sprawled in the best place beside the fire which he had won for himself by right of conquest from Beornwulf’s hounds, would not have allowed to any other of the children. Bryni bore no resemblance whatever to a barley-loaf. The hair tumbling across his forehead was gold with a rust of red in it. It was his mother’s hair, but the devilish green glint in his eyes was all his own. Now, however, with his eyes shut and the flush of the fire on his cheek, it was hard to believe what Bryni was like when he was awake, hard to believe that only today, having been slapped for stealing honey cakes, he and Horn the Smith’s youngest son had met halfway to the settlement and decided to run away together. Luckily for them, it had been Owain who found them.
The rhythmic grinding and grating of the quern was loud in the silence left by Uncle Widreth’s half-finished story. No other sound save the small secret flutter of the flames and the cry of a marsh-bird far off, broke the quiet, until Athelis straightened from her work and shook out the cloth, folding it across and across with a snapping, capable gesture of finish. ‘There! That is done, and I might as well smoor the fire for the night. Half the household is asleep already, by the look of it, and the Old One will be nodding himself into the flames if he sits there much longer.’
She rose, and laid the gay striped cloth away in the kist with the carved worm-knots, against the gable wall; then caught up Gerd, still half asleep, under one arm, and turned towards the inner room, the Bower. The bondwoman was scooping the coarse barley-meal into its bag, and at the lower end of the fire the thralls, following Beornwulf, laid aside their work and stretched. Gyrth and Caedman grunted their good-nights, and stumbled away up the ladder to the half-loft in the crown of the roof where they slept close under the thatch. But Beornwulf himself took down one of the steading’s two lanterns that hung beside the foreporch door, and opening the horn pane, stooped to light the candle at the fire. ‘I think I will go and take a look at Golden-eye before I sleep.’
‘I’ll go,’ Owain said.
Beornwulf looked at him consideringly as he closed the lantern. Then he nodded. ‘Go then. But come and tell me at once if she’
s uneasy.’
It was a measure of the place that Owain had won with him; for Golden-eye was his favourite mare, and due to foal in a few days, and most assuredly he would not have trusted Gyrth or Caedman in the matter.
Owain took the lantern from him and went out with Dog at his heels. Faint wraiths of mist lay across the levels, the thorn trees rising knee-deep out of them, but overhead the sky was clear, and the young moon floated like a curved feather above the woods, as he made his way round to the back of the steading. They had moved Golden-eye out of the usual grazing ground that morning, for it was her first foal and the other mares were inclined to bother her, and put her by herself in the little close between the steading and the curve of the main windbreak.
Among the apple trees behind the steading buildings, the mist rags drifted into his face like cool cobwebs, touched with gold by the light of the swinging lantern. He came to the narrow gap of the hind-gate, and pulled away the dead thorn branches that closed it. He stood in the gate-gap, whistled, and waited. Usually the little vixenish mare with the gleam of gold in her eyes would come to that call, but tonight there was no answering whinny, and no dark shape came trotting out of the mist. He whistled again, and then, as there was still no reply, strode out into the close, with the lantern held high.
It was only a slip of pasture between windbreak and steading, and even in the mist and darkness, a quick look round was enough to show him that Golden-eye was not there; and a torn-down place in the hedge told all too clearly the way she had gone. Owain stood for a moment, thinking. Curse the little beast; wilful and unsettled in the way of foaling mares, she had probably broken out to get back to the others. He ducked through the hole in the hedge, and headed for the grazing ground, whistling as he went. The other two mares were there safe enough, already lain down to sleep; but of Golden-eye, no sign.
Owain went back to the steading at a run, and burst in just as Athelis, having bedded the children down, was smooring the fire, while Beornwulf, who usually did most of his dressing and undressing in the house-place, sat on his stool beside her, unbinding the leather cross-garters below the knees of his breeks.