He went under, and the hissing water closed over his head. He felt a sickening blow on one shoulder, but somehow, he never knew how, he had still his hold of the unconscious man. Then there were hands on him, hands that caught and slipped and caught again. Men were shouting in his ear, they were taking some of the strain of Beornwulf from him. The backwash was screaming out over the shingle, dragging at his body as though it were an old cloak in a gale of wind, but the human chain that had hold of him held firm. And then as the intolerable drag relaxed, he grounded, and was dragged to his knees; he found his feet under him and stumbled forward up the shelving beach as the next wave crashed behind him, pouring and creaming among the black rocks.
At the foot of the dunes, out of reach of the waves, he pitched to his knees, his burden slipping from him. He crouched there, a red darkness before his eyes, and in his ears a roaring that came even between him and the roaring of the storm, like a runner utterly spent after a great race. But as sight and hearing cleared, he saw men round him, and Beornwulf lying in a hollow of the spray-wet shingle where he had laid him down.
Beornwulf lay with the stillness of the drowned, a great broken bruise on his forehead. But he was not dead, only stunned, by the look of things. Owain drew a gasp of relief as he felt under his hands, the life fighting for itself in the man’s unconscious body. He got him over on to his face, and a little salt water came out of his mouth, but not much. He had come shoreward on the crest of a wave and had probably not taken in much water. Owain pressed on his back to drive out any more that there might be, and felt Beornwulf’s breathing waken under his hands.
He looked up at the men about him, pitching his voice above the gale. ‘We must get him home. Best fetch something to carry him on; he may have ribs broken for all I know.’
After a while a couple of men came down with a sheep-fold hurdle; they had to stand on it to keep it from flying away before they could lift Beornwulf on to it. Then Owain and Brand and two other men of the settlement took up the corners to carry him home.
There was no sign of the ship now, nothing but the dark jags of drifting wreckage, and other men shouting to each other in the shallows as the bales and spars and wine-skins came rolling in. And the wind was booming round to the south, as they set out for the two-mile-distant steading. Soon it would blow itself out.
The steading was awake and busy, the thralls already going about their early morning work, heads down and shoulders hunched against the wind. Athelis came to the house-place door when she heard the dogs bark, Lilla and Helga and the bondwoman with her. The others cried out at sight of the figure on the hurdle, but not Athelis; only she felt for the doorpost behind her, and her sharp-boned face looked for the moment like a very old woman’s, as she looked down at him. ‘Is he dead?’
Owain shook his head. They had hurried with their burden, and the wind, though not so high as it had been, was still high enough, and he had not much breath left for talking. ‘Na,’ he managed, ‘only stunned, I think.’
She let go the doorpost and stood aside for them to carry him in. ‘Set him down by the fire,’ she said; and that was all.
They did as she bade them, and stood off, panting. The three settlement men looked at each other; they had done what they could for a neighbour, and it was women’s work now, and there might still be gleanings to be got from the unexpected harvest of the sea. They grinned at each other, and one by one they slipped away.
The farm thralls had come pushing in after the rest, and Bryni was there from the sheep fold, white and silent, with his eyes fixed in a kind of scared bewilderment on his father’s face, and among the legs of the little throng, the dogs came nosing forward.
Athelis turned on them all, crying out in a high, strained voice. ‘Off! Be off, the lot of you! Gunhilda—children—stop that sniffling and squealing! Gyrth and Caedman, have you never seen a half-drowned man before that you must stare like oxen? Bryni, if you have left the sheep all abroad and they get into the kale patch your father shall beat you for it when the strength comes back to him.’
They scattered from her like scared chickens, the dogs slinking after them, and when they were gone she turned to Owain who was still standing by. ‘Now, help me to get him stripped and between blankets before he takes his death indeed.’
And so, in silence, save for the beating of the dying gale across the thatch, they set about the task of stripping Beornwulf of the few sodden rags that still clung to his body, and drying him off before they lifted him into the great box bed. ‘There was a wreck, then?—And he was on board?’ Athelis said at last. ‘It is strange that I did not feel the danger when the wind rose.’
‘We did not expect him so soon,’ Owain said, ‘and we did not know that he would have come by sea.’
‘I suppose not, though it is quicker by sea, when it does not end in drowning. Did many come ashore?’
‘Not living, I think.’ Owain flung the squelching remains of one shoe into a corner. ‘He came by me on the crest of a wave, and I was able to catch him before he went seaward again.’
She looked up, as though seeing him for the first time, beginning to wring the water from her husband’s hair while the steam wisped up from it in the warmth of the driftwood fire. ‘So? You look as near drowned as he does—Ah, and your shoulder is hurt.’
Owain glanced down at himself inquiringly. He had known, without really thinking about it, that his right arm was stiff and painful and growing difficult to use; and he saw that what remained of his kirtle was ripped completely off that side, and his shoulder was one great angry bruise. ‘The sea threw me on a rock.’
‘So?’ she said again. ‘It is maybe harder to save the life of a man than to catch wine-skins bobbing in the shallows.’
They had scarcely got Beornwulf between the soft skin rugs of the box bed, when he opened his eyes and was violently sick. He lay staring straight upward at the bed-roof overhead while they cleared up the mess, his eyes blank with the wandering blankness that one sees in the newly opened eyes of a puppy. Then slowly, bewilderment grew out of the blankness, the golden bars of his brows drew in almost to meeting point above his nose, and grunting, he began to fumble one hand up towards the broken bruise on his temple.
Athelis caught it and pressed it down again. ‘No, leave it be; you will hurt it.’
‘My head aches,’ he grumbled, and turned it a little, cautiously, on the rustling straw pillow, to look about him. ‘Where’s the ship?’
‘Smashed into firewood on the Seal Rocks,’ Owain said.
The blue eyes came round, frowning still, but less strained, to fix upon his face. ‘Yes, I remember now. Hammer of Thor! What a way to come home … You were there?’
‘A wreck is a wreck. Half the settlement was there,’ Owain said dryly.
Athelis, bringing wrung-out cloths to bathe her lord’s head, said, ‘He saved your life, my man, and I think he came near enough to losing his own in doing it.’
‘Ah!’ Beornwulf raised himself a little, wincing, and dodged the wrung-out cloth. ‘Then I have to thank him for the worst headache ever a man had without his skull flying in two—Also for the warmth of my own hearth and the light of day—’ He gave a little shiver. ‘It is better to be alive even with a splitting head, than drowned and wave-rolled to and fro among the black rocks of the Seal Strand.’
He let Athelis push him back on to the pillow and do what she would with his burst temple; but all the while, under the sponging cloth, his eyes were on Owain as he stood by with his own sodden rags drying on him in the heat of the fire. ‘I thought at the time, that I made a good bargain with my gold piece,’ he said in a while, ‘but it seems that I made a better bargain even than I thought.’ His voice was growing drowsy, and a little after, he drifted off to sleep between mouthful and mouthful of the milk that Athelis was trying to get into him.
Three men came alive out of that wreck, and the other two were cared for in the settlement and later sent on their way. Beornwulf slept for the best
part of a day and a night, and woke on the following morning quite recovered though famine-empty, and with an air of having something on his mind. He ate an enormous meal of bannock and ewe-milk cheese, hard-boiled duck eggs and smoke-dried mackerel, and calling for Golden-eye, rode off up the old road to Haegel the King in his Great Hall.
He came riding back at dusk; they heard the horse’s hooves at the gate, and the dogs barked a welcome, and Owain went out with the lantern to take Golden-eye from him. Beornwulf handed her over without a word, seemingly deep in thought, and he led the tired mare clip-clopping round to the stable, and hitched her to the accustomed ring, hanging the lantern from its hook on the low roof-beams. He slipped out the bit and gave her an armful of hay and beans to keep her happy while he off-saddled and rubbed her down. Drink she had better wait for until she had cooled off a little.
He unbuckled the belly strap, then, turning with the well worn saddle in his arms, he saw Beornwulf standing in the low entrance under the thatch, with the deepening blue of the dusk behind him.
‘I have been with the King, my foster brother,’ Beornwulf said, ‘and now that the business that took me to him is off my hands, I have time to think of my own—and yours.’ He hesitated, for he was a man who seldom found the words he wanted easily, while Owain waited, the saddle in his arms, for what was coming next. At last he said, ‘I have not forgotten my debt to you.’
‘Debt?’ Owain said.
‘Na, not debt. When a man saves your life at risk of his own, you cannot call it a debt and pay him back as simply as though for the loan of a plough-ox or a day’s threshing. It is a free gift—but you might perhaps give a free gift in return … A life for a life. Would freedom seem to you the same thing as life?’
Owain felt his breath stick in his throat, and his heart began to pound under his ribs. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Then go down to Brand at the smithy tomorrow, and bid him cut off that thrall-ring. He knows.’
There was a long, long silence. Then Owain said carefully, ‘Let me go to Brand on the day that the King’s summons comes; that for a gift. And in payment for the winter that I shall still have worn your thrall-ring, give me on the same day, a sword.’
Their eyes met, bright and coolly steady in the lantern-light. ‘Who have you been listening to?’ Beornwulf demanded at last.
‘The harper who was at the settlement two nights since.’
‘And what said the harper?’
‘That there was unrest growing in the kingdoms that border Wessex. That he had smelled the Ravens gathering before Wibbendune, and knew the smell again. That Ceawlin grows too powerful for the safety of lesser kings, and that Aethelbert of Kent, who is also powerful, had little love for him. That many small kingdoms bonded together muster more spears than one great kingdom standing alone. No more than that, he said.’
‘And you have put these things together, and made of them—a hosting in the spring?’
‘It grows too late in the year for such a hosting this autumn.’
Beornwulf was looking at him, not quite understanding, the pale bars of his brows drawn together above his nose. ‘You are not Saxon, that you should carry a sword for a Saxon king.’
‘No,’ Owain said, ‘but against one. I am British, and my father and my brother died by Aquae Sulis. I am as good a hater as Aethelbert of Kent, and I also have little love for Ceawlin of Wessex.’
For a moment longer, Beornwulf stood in the doorway watching him. Then he nodded, and brought up his hand and smote it open-palmed on the doorpost beside him. ‘Well, many a man has fought for a worse reason. So be it then, you shall have your freedom and your sword—a good sword that I had before my father died—on the day that the summer comes. Now finish with the mare.’
And turning, he strode off across the steading garth in the dusk.
Owain hung the saddle very carefully in its place, took a wisp of straw without seeing it, and started to rub Golden-eye down.
It was spring when the war-summons came: a day of wind and sun and thin shining rain, with the cloud shadows drifting across the marsh. The messenger from the King’s Hall cried it to them from the steading gate without dismounting, and then rode on towards the settlement.
Owain, hearing the beat of his horse’s hooves die into the distance, thought that it had been just such a day as this when Kyndylan’s summons had come. Then he finished what he was doing, and went across the ten foot dyke and down to the settlement himself, to Brand the Smith.
The messenger had ridden on by the time he got there, and the place was throbbing like a nest of wild bees at swarming time. Already several men were gathered about the fiery darkness of the forge mouth above the boat strand, and the ring of hammer on anvil came from inside. Most of the men who would be answering the summons had had their weapons ready all winter past, but there were always some last things to do—a rivet to be tightened, the dint in a shield rim to be beaten out—and the forge made a good place to gather and talk the thing over in short flat sentences, now that it had happened at last. Owain waited with the rest until his turn came, then went into the fire-shot gloom of the smithy.
‘I am come at last,’ he said to the big brown smith.
Brand stood and looked at him, his hands on his hips, and the curling hairs on his chest turned to a russet fleece by the forge fire. ‘Every day this winter, you could have come,’ he said in his deep soft grumble, ‘but no, you must wait and wait, and come to me at last this day of all days, when there’s work enough at my door to keep Wayland himself busy for a week.’
‘I had to wait until I had earned a sword,’ Owain told him.
‘Aye, I have heard that story. Come then, and kneel here beside the anvil.’ The smith had turned away as he spoke, and was rooting among his cold-chisels for the one he wanted, and young Horn, plying the great sheepskin bellows, looked up with a grin, as he sent the fire roaring into a fiercer blaze.
Owain knelt down with his neck pressed against the side of the anvil, so that part of the iron thrall-ring rested on it. The touch of the anvil scorched his neck, and the acrid reek of hot metal made him want to sneeze. ‘Hold still if you don’t want to go one-eared the rest of your days,’ said Brand the Smith, bending over him with the chisel in one hand and a hammer in the other.
The thing was done very quickly, though his head felt jarred loose on his shoulders, and the right ear as though it were stuffed with wool. So quickly that just for a moment he could not quite understand that he was free again, after almost eight years. He knew that it was so, but he could not feel it. He could not feel anything except a kind of quietness. He saw between the figures in the open doorway the fishing boats drawn up on the wet sand, and the hurrying cloud shadows over the marshes, and the wings of the gulls wheeling by. Then he realized that the smith was booming in his deafened ear to know if he was going to kneel there all day; and he shook his head cautiously, as though he were a little afraid that it might fall off; and got up, laughing and rubbing his neck. The men in the doorway parted to let him through, they called after him, one or two of them clapped him on the shoulder, and the sound of their voices was friendly; but he did not hear what they said, though he grinned like a fool at them.
And he headed back towards the steading to claim his sword from Beornwulf.
By evening, more detailed news, following on the heels of the bare summons, was running through the settlements like a furze fire. Ceawlin’s nephews had raised the standard of revolt, proclaiming Coel, the eldest of their numbers, as King of the West Saxons.
And Owain sat late that night beside the spitting fire, nursing his sword across his knees.
15
The Truce of the Spear
‘WODEN, Father of fighting men, hear now the oath of thy sons in the time that the Ravens gather. From this hour forth, until the last warrior comes again to his own or feeds his heart’s blood to the death-pyre, all other loves and hates laid by, one band are we, one brotherhood in victory or defeat.’
> It was the voice of Haegel the King; and the voices of the war-host roared up in response, ‘In victory or defeat, All-Father, one brotherhood are we.’
Again Haegel’s voice rose solitary. ‘On shield’s rim and sword’s blade—Swear!’
A ringing rustle of metal ran through the war-host, as every warrior’s hand went to his weapons, and again there came the deep slow thunder of voices: ‘We swear.’
‘On the dragon-prow of Aelle’s war-keel—Swear!’
And yet again, the deep-voiced response: ‘We swear.’
For days past they had been gathering from the furthest fringes of the South Saxon Lands in ones and twos, in whole war-bands under their chieftains; from almost every farm a father or a son or a younger brother, until now the host that thronged the vast forecourt of the King’s Place, shields on shoulders and faces turned all to the threshold of the High Hall, must number close on two thousand.
From before the dark threshold where the priests gathered behind the King, a long thin tendril of smoke curled upward towards the fading fires of a royal sunset arching overhead, and the sharp tang of blood and the stink of burning horse-hair wafted in the faces of the warriors. Owain, standing well back among the younger and lesser of the war-host, caught the thick reek of it, and felt the queasiness still stirring in his belly. Only a short while since, here on the sacred ground before the King’s threshold, they had given the God’s Horse to Frey for his favour in the coming war; the great white stallion who was at once the sacrifice and the god who dies for the people. ‘There is always a price to be paid for Godhead,’ Vadir had said, on the night that the silver foal was born. He could see Vadir now, well forward among the chiefs and the royal kinsmen and the household warriors, shorter than most of the men around him but clearly recognizable by the paleness of his hair and the way he stood with one shoulder a little up, taking the weight on his sound leg; for a moment the cold hate rose in Owain, driving out all hint of queasiness. The horse had been drugged beforehand, someone had told him, otherwise they could never have brought him to the place of sacrifice at all; but even so, he had reared up at the kiss of the knife, swinging the men who held the ropes clear of the ground, and screaming, as it seemed, not in fear or pain but as a stallion screams in battle. Owain shut his eyes, giving thanks to whatever gods might hear him, that Teitri had gone to the Kentish King; at least he would not know it, when the time came for Teitri.