The candle in the lantern was guttering out in a pool of wax, when at last Dog raised his head to listen; and a few moments later, Owain, listening also, heard the distant long-drawn shout for which he had been waiting so long. He scrambled stiffly to his feet, and stood swinging the lantern above his head and shouting at full pitch of his lungs. ‘Here! We’re here! This way.’ The lantern gave a last flare, and guttered out, just as the mist-blurred gleam of another lantern came bobbing between the hawthorn trees, and he heard Beornwulf hail in reply.
The sun was rising by the time Golden-eye and the foal were safely home. And a little later Owain stood beside the morning fire in the house-place, stretching the weariness out of his shoulders and smiling down at Uncle Widreth who sat with his back propped against the roof-tree exactly as though he had not moved since last night.
‘You look different, this morning,’ said Uncle Widreth, in his thin rustling voice. He was growing simple, in these days, so simple that he always said what he thought.
‘How different?’
‘As though,’ said Uncle Widreth slowly, ‘you had made something with life in it, after all.’
11
The Old King
IN the ordinary way there was little coming and going among the settlements. Forest and marsh made for bad travelling, and each village lived for itself in its own clearing in the wild, wove its own cloth and forged its own ploughshares and grew its own food—or starved when the harvest failed. But between the coastwise settlements of the Maen Wood and the Seals’ Island there was a certain amount of passing to and fro, for the business of dyking and draining, and clearing sand-choked channels; and keeping out the sea with turf and brushwood walls was a thing that concerned all the coastwise folk together. So the Beornstead folk had always seen more of their neighbours than was common among the Saxon kind. But after the birth of the silver foal they saw more of Vadir Cedricson than ever they had done before. He had always a good reason for coming, or had merely turned aside in passing, on his way to somewhere else; but Owain knew that he came to see the foal, to watch it growing to a long-legged colt, to a proud stallion, its coat paling from the dim grey of its birth until it was, as he had once said it would be, white as storm water on the Seal Rocks. He seemed drawn to the animal in some hidden way, so that looking back in after years Owain wondered whether he had already some instinct that his fate and the white stallion’s were knotted together.
They called the foal Teitri, which was a name sometimes given to men but seldom to horses, for it simply meant a foal; because from the first it seemed that an ordinary name such as other horses bore would be too personal a thing for this horse who was never to know a human rider. And in his third winter—it was always in the winter that they broke the colts—Beornwulf and his British thrall, working together as they did in so many things nowadays, began the task of breaking him, so far as he was ever to be broken. He was used to being handled, for they had begun gentling him while he still sucked his mother; he was friendly and trusting, for no one had ever betrayed his trust, and would come to Owain’s whistle, as his mother came. But when the breaking started, all that, it seemed, was lost. The touch of the headstall seemed to him betrayal; he was outraged and terrified and furious that the friends he had trusted should seek to impose their will on his in mastery, and he fought for his freedom like a wild thing roped and dragged in from the wilderness who had never felt a man’s hand on him before. The greater part of the task fell to Owain, for there had always been a special bond between him and the grey foal he had brought into the world, and even now it was as though he could reach him better than Beornwulf could do. For most of that winter his life was centred round the struggle with the white stallion; a struggle that went on and on through days of triumph when it seemed that they were making some kind of progress, and days of despair when a small mistake or a moment’s impatience undid all the work of the days that had gone before. It was a battle that was heartbreaking for both of them, and in the end it was not as though Owain mastered Teitri at all, but rather as though Teitri, coming to understand where before he had only raged and feared, at last gave freely what all the men with whips in the world could not have forced from him. After that the sessions with headstall and bit and guiding-rein were no longer battles but lessons, and he learned willingly and well; and so at last the thing was done—as well as a thing could be done that might not be carried through to completion.
That was a hard winter and a long one, and before it was over, starvation, which was never very far off at winter’s end, was nearer than usual to the settlements along the coast. The young and the strong went about with hollow faces and heads that looked too big for their bodies, and more than usual of the old and sickly died, and by the time Teitri had learned to move in a circle on the guiding-rein, Uncle Widreth’s place beside the hearth was empty, and there was no one to tell stories to the Beornstead household in the evenings, any more.
With spring, as so often happened after a lean winter, the grey fever-hag came prowling across the levels from settlement to settlement in the marsh mists, and as the winter had taken the eldest of the household, so the spring took the youngest. Little Gerd died on the night that the last of the grey geese flew north, and all that night they heard the dark rush of wings overhead. Her going made very little stir; death came so often to the settlements, and there was nothing to be gained by raising an outcry. Her sisters howled for a while, but if Athelis wept at all no one saw or heard her. They put the little one away as one might bury a bird that falls dead out of a hedge, and the life of the farm went on, through spring sowing and sheep-shearing—almost to hay harvest.
On an evening of early summer, with the midge-clouds dancing over the sunlit levels, Owain went down with the big wooden pails slopping in either hand, to water Teitri for the night.
Between the oakwoods and the reed-beds and saltings that fringed the harbour, a curved strip of rough pasture ran up towards the creek. Beornwulf had enclosed it in the year that Owain first came to Beornstead. A bleak enough spot when the gales blew in off the sea, but this evening the light lay long and golden across it, and the long pale grass of the saltings scarcely stirred in the salt-scented air.
Owain unhitched and lifted aside the hurdle that closed the gap in the fence, and went through. Behind him he could hear Helga and Lilla calling to each other as they went about the usual evening hunt for eggs—the mallards in particular always laid abroad—and the bleating of ewes and the lighter babble of half-grown lambs, where Bryni, with Horn, the Smith’s son, to help him, was folding the sheep. They always folded them for the night, even in summer, not for fear of wolves or wild men, down here in the Seals’ Island, but because of the dykes and channels that might claim them in the dark.
Just inside the gate-gap stood a stone trough; Owain set the buckets down beside it, and whistled, a long shaken shore-bird whistle, and the white horse grazing at the far end of the horn of pasture lifted his head and whinnied, then wheeled and came trotting towards him. How often, Owain thought, Teitri had come so, in answer to his whistle, breaking from a trot into a canter; but this evening, watching him the length of the pasture, he knew suddenly and with a painful awareness, that he had never seen, and never would see in all his life, anything more beautiful than a white stallion cantering between the oakwoods and the sea. Teitri kicked up his heels like a colt, and broke into a lazy gallop; he came up with mane and tail streaming, half circled about Owain, and next moment was nuzzling against his breast. ‘Greetings, brother,’ Owain said, drawing his hand again and again down the white nose from forelock to quivering nostril. ‘It is thirsty work, this hot buzzing day. Drink then, it’s cold from the pond under the trees.’ He took up the first pail and held it for the horse to drink, before he tipped the rest into the sun-warmed trough.
With his free hand he fondled the proud arched neck while Teitri sucked up the water, noticing that the horse was getting into better condition. He had been all bones at the w
inter’s end. Teitri was not a tall horse—there were dim half-legends of the great horses that Artos the Bear had brought over from Gaul to mount his cavalry, but the horses of today were seldom more than thirteen or fourteen hands—but from the pride of his crest to the sweep of his tail, he was magnificent. Nothing of his wiry, vixenish mother in him save for a flash of gold in his eyes; a creature who might have been one of the wild white horses of the sea.
Owain gave the white neck a final pat, when Teitri had drunk his fill, and stooped to pour the other pailful into the trough, while the horse slobbered wetly at the back of his neck. Dog, who had come down to the shore-pasture behind him, ducked his muzzle into the trough and lapped thirstily. Suddenly the quick pad of bare feet came over the turf, and looking round, Owain saw the two boys heading in through the gate-gap. Bryni was first, Horn just behind him—that was the usual way of it, though Horn was the elder by two years and the taller by almost a head. Bryni had been with the sheep all day, for as an outdweller Beornwulf had no rights on the common grazing land nor the shepherd who tended all the settlement’s sheep, and now that he was ten years old the task of watching them had fallen to the boy; and Horn, as happened whenever his father could spare him, had come to share it. Owain sometimes wondered if Brand the Smith ever thought that there was a stranger at the hearth when his youngest son chanced to be home for supper.
They came up, Bryni holding out his hand with a lick of greyish salt in it to the white questing muzzle that was advanced towards him, laughing at the feel of the delicately working lips in his palm, while Horn, always a little slower, hung back behind him.
‘You look as though you had been asleep in the sun all day,’ Owain said, looking down into the two flushed faces.
Bryni grinned up at him, shaking grass seed and bits of twig out of his hair. ‘No, only half the day. Anyway there are no wolves to take the sheep, and Wauleye can keep them clear of the dykes. There’s a warbler’s nest with five eggs in it still, among the reeds just beyond the long turf stack, and look—’ his hand went to his belt, ‘I’ve made an elder pipe and I can play three and a half notes on it!’
‘Can you so? Well even that’s better than trying to steal wild honey,’ Owain said gravely. The summer before, Bryni had tried to take a wild bees’ nest unaided and very nearly been stung to death.
Horn had come forward by that time, and was stroking Teitri’s neck, his square brown face serious and absorbed. ‘He is beautiful,’ he said at last. ‘He is the most beautiful horse that ever was foaled. When the wind goes through the long grass and the old men say “There runs the Wild Horse”, he’s just like the Wild Horse could be if you could see him.’ And then he turned fiery red at the sound of his own words, and became very busy disentangling a scrap of oak twig from the white mane.
‘Teitri is the King of Horses, and he is my foster brother as Haegel is my father’s,’ Bryni said, ‘and Dog—’ he ceased rubbing the stallion’s muzzle, and swift and impetuous, as all his movements were, flung himself down on the grass, nose to nose with the great hound who promptly licked his face from ear to ear—‘and Dog is the King of all the dogs in Seals’ Island, and he is my foster brother, too.’
Horn looked down at them, and said in his serious painstaking way, ‘Dog is growing old. He has got white hairs in his muzzle.’
His arms round Dog’s neck, Bryni jerked his head up, scowling. ‘He hasn’t, then! Can’t you see he’s been drinking and it’s only the wetness shining on his nose? And anyway he could still beat every dog in Seals’ Island in fair fight—even those red brutes of Vadir’s!’
Horn said something in reply, but Owain did not hear what it was. He had been already turning to pick up the pails, but he checked, and looked down at Dog also. The great hound must be about ten years old now, the same age as Bryni, strong still, milky-toothed and brave and cunning, and no hound as yet challenged his chosen place by the fire nor his king’s share at feeding time, but it had seemed to Owain lately that he was a little slower than he used to be, a little fonder of sleeping in the sun. No, it was not only the wetness shining on his muzzle …
He picked up the pails. ‘See that the gate-gap is closed after you,’ he said, and turned back towards the steading, leaving Dog to follow with the two boys when they would. The sun was below the oak trees now, and the gold was draining out of the evening, and he had suddenly the odd feeling of a shadow lying across his heart.
By the hind-gate of the steading, he met Beornwulf, frowning. ‘Where’s Bryni?’ he demanded. ‘I bade him always to come and tell me at once when the sheep were folded, not simply leave them and fly off about his own affairs.’
Owain jerked his head back the way he had come. ‘Down in the shore-pasture with Teitri, he and Horn; they took him a lick of salt.’
The master looked away in the same direction, his eyes narrowed under the golden brows, then he hunched his shoulders a little. ‘Aye well, it is not so many more licks of salt they can be taking him,’ he said in a different tone.
The thrall set the pails down carefully before he answered, and the shadow deepened across his heart. ‘He—must go, then?’
‘Aye, when the hay harvest is over.’
The last time Haegel the King had come that way, back in the windy spring weather, Owain was remembering how he had gone down with his foster brother to the shore-pasture and looked long at the white stallion. He had not asked any questions of Beornwulf afterwards; it had seemed better not to know. ‘But why?’ he burst out at last. ‘The King does not need him. They say that the God’s Horse is still in his prime and there is already a colt in Haegel’s runs, ready for the day that he begins to fail.’
‘I think that Teitri goes further afield than the royal farm at Cissa’s Caester,’ Beornwulf said slowly. ‘It is in my heart that there is a higher place waiting for him—elsewhere. We should be proud.’
Owain looked round at him quickly; but Beornwulf’s face was shut. No good to ask anything more. ‘“Proud” has a cold sound,’ he said heavily. ‘Colder than the touch of a horse’s muzzle on your shoulder when you saw him foaled.’
‘All horses die one day,’ Beornwulf said. ‘Horses and hounds and men. Can I help it if you are a fool? The evening meal was ready when I came out, and we might as well be getting back to it before the broth is burned and the women angry. The young ones will come when their bellies bid them.’ And he turned in through the gate.
Owain picked up the pails yet again and followed him, walking heavily as though all at once he was desperately tired.
Hay harvest passed, and the day came for Teitri to go to the King’s farm. They set out on a still grey morning, not long after sunrise so as to catch low tide in the creek, Owain riding first on Golden-eye with Dog loping ahead, Beornwulf following on another horse with Teitri on the leading-rein. It was an anxious out-setting, for the white stallion had never been off Beornstead land before, and they could not be sure how he would behave. But he followed Golden-eye easily enough, not because she was his mother, he had long ago forgotten that, and so had she, but because she was a mare. They got across the creek with little trouble, for he was used to being led in shallow water, and before noon they were at the King’s farm.
And within an hour, Owain was riding south again down the old half-lost road from Regnum to the Seals’ Island. He had not waited while Beornwulf finished his business with his foster brother; he had not felt that he could bear to wait, hanging about the high antler-crowned Hall, when Teitri had been handed over to the King’s Horse Thegn, and Beornwulf had given him leave to start back at once. He rode slowly, knowing that the tide would not serve him yet a while for getting Golden-eye across the creek; but even so, the tide was not yet full out, when he came out from the Maen Wood and saw the levels lying pale under the grey sweep of the tall marsh sky.
He dismounted and sat himself down on the bank beside the roadway, his arm through Golden-eye’s bridle, while Dog flung himself down contentedly at his feet. He was glad
of the delay, for despite his eagerness to get away from the King’s farm, he did not want to get back to Beornstead, not without Teitri. ‘Can I help it if you are a fool?’ Beornwulf had said. ‘All horses die one day—horses and hounds and men.’ But it was not the distant gleam of the priest’s knife that hurt him so sharply; he had accepted that for the white stallion as a man might accept it for himself; it was that Teitri had come when he whistled, had been gentle and inquisitive and had known, save for that bitter time last winter, that men were his friends and to be trusted. And now they would treat him like a god, and he would become wild and fierce and men would be his friends no more.
But the sand-bars were laid bare now, and the stones of the old ford beginning to show. He stirred Dog gently into wakefulness with his foot, got up and remounted, and headed down over the wave-rippled sand into the shallows. Dog half paddled, half swam across, and splashed ashore ahead of him, shaking himself until it seemed that his four legs were about to fly off in different directions, then turned in behind Golden-eye, dodging from heel to heel as a dog does when following close behind a horse, as they set off down the last stretch of the road.
The steading was a place of women at that hour, for the thralls would be afield, but Bryni had brought in a couple of ewes for milking, and was hanging about the gateway with a scowling face. And when Owain rode into the garth, he found Vadir the Hault lounging on the bench beside the foreporch door, with two of his red hounds beside him, and an ale horn on his knee. Were they never to be free of the man, even now that Teitri was gone?
Vadir glanced up at him with those flickering curiously pale eyes, as he drew rein, and the dogs surveyed each other, snarling a little, their hackles raised. ‘So, the God’s Horse is gone already, they tell me,’ he said.