THEY made slow travelling, for they had to stop to hunt as they went. Several times they were halted by stream or river and had to turn aside many miles out of their way before they could find a place to cross, and from time to time, despite Owain’s sense of direction, they lost their way in the maze of marsh and forest and open moor, for even when they found a road leading in the right direction they dared not use it. Once Owain fell into an ant’s nest under a rotten tree-trunk and wrenched his ankle so that they had to lie up for a few days, and once they passed too close to a Saxon farm without realizing it, and set all the dogs barking. But the wolves had drawn off into the deeper wilds, and for a long while they ran into no serious trouble.
It was almost summer already, though the distance they had covered would have been only six or seven days’ march to a legion with a good metalled road underfoot and food at the transit camps at each day’s end. But even so, Owain reckoned that they must be about half-way, when the bad thing happened.
It did not seem so very bad at the time. Just a sudden break in the weather, that was all; and in the high upland heather country that they were traversing, there was no shelter to be had from the wild summer storm; their rags were drenched through, and though they kept on walking because that seemed the best thing to do, they were chilled to the bone by the icy rain-swaithes, gale-driven across the heather. It would not have mattered much, for they were used to wild weather, but the rain went on and on, and that night, though they had left the uplands for the thin woods in the valley, they could find no sheltered place to sleep in, nor any dry wood to make a fire; and they had little in their stomachs to keep out the cold, for the barley was gone long since, and Owain had had bad hunting the day before.
They spent the night in the lea of a hazel thicket that gave them a little shelter though not much, huddled together with Regina in the middle and Owain’s sodden cloak spread as far as might be over the three of them; and by morning the chill of the wet ground seemed to have soaked into their very bones. But by morning also, the storm had blown and rained itself out, and the world was quiet and spent, with even a pale gleam of sunshine to set the mist rising; and Owain, going down to the nearby stream to drink, met a hedgehog grunting back from a night’s beetle-hunting, and hit it on the nose. At least they were sure of something to eat that night, though not overmuch between two of them—not three, for in the lean times the understanding was that Dog foraged for himself. Maybe by dark, if the rain held off, they would even be able to make a fire and cook it.
Regina came down after him to drink at the stream, looking white as bleached bone in the misty whiteness of the morning. He showed her the hedgehog, but she was shivering too much to be interested in anything else. ‘Never mind; it’s time we started out,’ he told her. ‘You’ll feel warmer after we’ve been walking for a while, and the sun will come through again, too, when the mist has done rising.’
So once again they set out. And by and by the sun did come through, and their sodden rags dried on them as they walked, and the world seemed a kinder place than it had done last night. Owain found a hare’s form with four leverets in it, and took two of them, quite ruthlessly; and that night they were lucky, for just at dusk they stumbled on the ruins of a shepherd’s bothy in the fold of the hills, with part of its rough thatch of furze branches still on, so that there was shelter inside it, and they managed to make a fire with the branches of a dead thorn bush that had dried up in the day’s sunshine, and scorch the hedgehog a bit. The leverets they cooked too, and pushed into the old grain bag and hung up out of Dog’s reach, for next day. There was not much on them once they were skinned, but they would be better than nothing.
Next day there was no sun, and a little wet wind soughed through the moorland grass and heather. The whole lie of the land had been rising under them for days, and now it seemed that they were on the roof-ridge of the world; and as they came wearily plodding up and over the blunt skyline, far off southward, so far that save for the unnatural clearness of the air he would not have been able to pick it out from the sky, Owain saw for the first time in his life what he knew must be the sea.
His heart seemed to press upward in his chest. ‘Look, Regina, there on the edge of the world—there’s the sea!’
Dog swung his tail in response; on the slopes below them a green plover cried; otherwise there was no sound save the wet wind through the last year’s heather. ‘Look!’ he said again, and pointed. ‘Have you lost your eyes? It’s the sea, Regina!’
‘The sea,’ said Regina, answering at last, but not as though the word meant anything. He reached out impatiently to give her a shake—and felt, despite the unexpected heat of her hand, that she was shivering.
He looked round quickly. ‘What is the matter? Are you still cold?’
‘No, I—I don’t think I’m cold. My head feels hot.’
He saw for the first time that her face was queerly flushed, and the eyes she turned on him were very bright. She put up one thin hand and rubbed the back of it across her forehead in a confused way. ‘It aches, too.’
A swift fear touched Owain like a chilly finger. He had dried off all right from that drenching, why should she take any harm from it? But supposing she had? Regina gave a little sigh, and sat down on her haunches. ‘Tired,’ she mumbled.
Owain stooped instantly and caught her hot hand and pulled her ruthlessly to her feet again. ‘You can’t stay here, Regina, there’s no shelter, and the rain is coming back. Look, it’s downhill now, and once we get into the woods we’ll find a sheltered place and make a fire and you can rest until your head stops hurting—as long as ever you like. We’ll take it easy for a day or two, and just hunt and live fat—’ He heard his own voice, quick and urgent. He was not sure what he said, but he knew that he must get Regina down from this bleak upland into some kind of shelter before the next storm broke. He had forgotten about the sea; the dark shelter of the woods below them was all that mattered now.
Regina rubbed the back of her free hand across her forehead again. ‘Everything was queer for a moment,’ she said. ‘It’s better now,’ and set off downhill beside him.
They reached the fringes of the forest ahead of the rain, and found a dry place, almost a cave, among the roots of a thicket of ancient yews, with plenty of dead wood lying about for their fire.
But Regina’s head was still hot and the rest of her shivering, and she did not want her share of the leverets, so that it was hard to get her to eat, even when he picked the meat off the little bones and fed her as though she were a fledgling. She laughed about that, and then caught her breath and said that laughing hurt her. He ate the rest himself since there was nothing to be gained by wasting food, but he didn’t taste much of it. Then he made her lie down on the floor of brown needles right at the back of their shelter as far under the branches as she could get, and spread the cloak over her. He sat up for a while with Dog propped against him, scratching the old scar on his arm and staring sometimes into the fire and sometimes at Regina. She had coughed a little when she first lay down, and now that she was asleep she still made little painful sounds in her breathing, and kept pushing the cloak down as though she was too hot, so that he had to be constantly on the watch to pull it up again. He wondered whether she was wrapped round in the same bright fog that blurred all his memories of the road north from Aquae Sulis when the wound in his arm was new. And he wondered very much, his head on his knees, what he should do if she was going to be really ill.
In the morning she seemed better, though she coughed again, and still said it hurt her to breathe; and they pushed on again, very slowly, getting what shelter they could from the rain squalls, and following the forest down-valley. It seemed a very old forest, this that they had come to; a spiny forest of ancient hawthorn trees for the most part, mingled with black thickets of yew and holly, such a forest as might have come into being if a mighty host of twisted dwarf magicians of some elder race had been overcome and turned by a greater magician into trees. And O
wain tried to think that it was only the strange dark atmosphere of the place, and Regina’s own fear of a world beyond city walls, when she said in a small fretful voice, ‘I don’t like the trees; they’re pulling faces at me!’ But he knew in his inmost heart, that it was not.
Soon after that she stumbled and would have fallen, and he put his arm round her to help her along, but she went on stumbling, more and more often, as though her feet did not belong to her at all. And when they came to a place where the bank of a forest stream had been torn away in the rains of some past winter, making a kind of dell among the thorn roots, he seized on it thankfully as a place to camp, though the day was not yet much past noon. He made Regina lie down as far under the cover as she could get, and wrapped the cloak round her. She heard the stream and said, ‘Thirsty,’ and he managed to get her some water in a big dock leaf, going back again and again. He gathered wood for the fire, but he did not go hunting. It was clear that whatever he killed, Regina could not eat it, and he had no heart to hunt for himself. Besides, he did not want to leave her. If only he could get some milk … He almost laughed at the ludicrous idea of milk in the forest, seeing himself trapping a roe-doe and milking her while her fawn stood bleating by.
If only he could get some milk—if only he could do something to ease that little dry cough. Honey was good for a cough, but there didn’t seem to be a bees’ nest handy at the moment, any more than there was a roe-doe. Then his head went up, his eyes brightening with an idea, but it was not an idea so much as a memory, something that belonged to his very young days, perhaps even to the time before his mother died, for it seemed to be connected with a woman’s voice, young and laughing, saying, ‘Suck! There, can you taste the honey?’ Just above their refuge, where the forest opened out a little, he had noticed a young hazel smothered in trailing honeysuckle just breaking into flower. He went and tore away great ropes of it, and brought it back with him; and squatting beside Regina while she watched with eyes that were at once bright and clouded, plucked off one of the pink-tipped creamy horns and held the narrow end of it to her dry mouth. ‘Suck,’ he ordered.
‘Why?’
‘Suck, and you will see why.’
Regina obeyed in a half-hearted way. ‘It’s sweet.’
‘Why else do you suppose they call it honeysuckle? Here’s another. Suck again.’
So squatting beside their little fire as the day faded into twilight, and the twilight deepened to dark, he fed Regina whenever she was awake, on the drops of sweetness at the base of the honeysuckle horns. But often he was not sure whether she was awake or not, for she moaned and muttered and tossed about with her eyes half open and half closed, and once when Dog nosed at her in bewilderment, she cried out in terror and beat at him with her hands, thinking that he was a wolf.
Once in the night, when the rain had stopped for a while, and there was a dark breathing quietness, Owain thought he heard a dog bark somewhere a long way off. Dog heard it too, and raised his head and listened. But there was nothing more to hear.
Morning came again, and he knew that Regina could go no further. She was not threshing about now, but it did not seem to him that that was a good sign, for it was as though the quiet came from weakness rather than any slackening of the fever. The wind had shifted its direction, too, and the rain which had not stopped all night (surely it must stop soon—they had had four days of it off and on) had begun to beat into their shelter. Owain sat for a long time shielding Regina as best he could. Then she began to cough again. It was a harsh tearing cough with not enough breath in it, and it hurt him to hear it; and though she was fully awake now, he did not think she knew him. He sat her up and held her tightly against him while she fought for breath, and when the fit passed, and he laid her down again, he knew, remembering the dog he had heard in the night, what he was going to do.
He pulled the old wet cloak round her, tucking it in as tightly as he could in the hope that she would not be able to push it down again, and whistling up Dog, who was rooting in the undergrowth, made him lie down close against her, between her and the stream. ‘Stay,’ he said. ‘Keep. On guard, brother,’ and got slowly to his feet, with the quietness of desperation on him.
Before he was more than a couple of spear-lengths down the streamside, he heard Dog whining piteously, and when he checked in his tracks and looked back, the hound was sitting up and staring after him as though making up his mind to disobey the order and follow. ‘Stay!’ Owain repeated fiercely; and Dog lay down again.
Owain scrambled on downstream in the direction in which he had heard the dog barking in the night. He was prepared for a long walk, for sound carries far at night when there is rain about, especially up or down a valley; but it seemed even longer than it was, for he was weak with emptiness himself, and stumbled and fell more than once in the rough ground. But at last his nose caught the whisper of wood smoke and stalled oxen, that does not belong to the forest unless man also is there. And as he halted, sniffing, he heard small but unmistakably the sound of a horse walking lame on a track, and again, quite near now, the baying of watch-dogs.
He pushed on with fresh heart, and in a little, the stream ran out into open air, not gradually as into a natural clearing, but with the abruptness that means felled timber.
Crouched among the tangle of the woodshore, Owain looked out over the clearing. He saw three fields, the sheen of young barley, the denser green of a bean patch, the brown of spring-ploughed fallow, and beyond a strip of scrubby pasture, the darkness of the forest closing in once more. And close beside a rough track, the bracken-thatched huddle of wattle-and-daub where the Barbarians had made their home. It all looked very settled. Here, deep in the Saxon lands, it had been like this for a hundred years.
His hatred of the Saxons rose in his throat like vomit, and for a moment it was in his mind that it might be better, after all, to let Regina die in the forest. At least she would die free, and with only himself and Dog, who were her friends—all the friends she had—beside her. But he knew even as the thought came to him, that he could not let Regina die, not while there was this one thing he could do that might save her.
There were signs of somebody having just arrived, a horse being led away. But Owain’s attention was chiefly held by the figure of a woman in a russet-red gown, who came out of one of the huts bending her head against the rain. He wondered if she was the mistress of the house, and if so, whether she was kind—remembering the kindness of Priscilla, that had met him on another threshold. Then he slithered back into the darker shadows of the woodshore, and turned to make his way upstream again.
Dog, still lying as he had left him, greeted his return with pricked ears and thumping tail, but Regina never moved; only he heard her quick, painful breathing. It was very dark among the trees, and he had to bend close before he could see her properly in the gloom. Her eyes were half open, but she did not see him at all, and her chest was quivering up and down in shallow gasps like a small animal that has run to exhaustion. He felt the pain of them tight under his own ribs. ‘We’re going now,’ he said, in case she could understand him. ‘It is all right. We are going to a fine place—where there will be milk.’
He gathered her up, awkwardly because he had never carried anyone before, but as carefully as he knew how, and staggered to his feet, wavering a little under her weight; not that there was much weight to her now. He had not known how thin she was, thinner even than when she had first come to his fire drawn by the smell of the baking hare. The sharpness of her bones came not only through her skin but through the folds of the ragged cloak in which he had bundled her. But she was heavy enough, none the less, for Owain who was only fifteen and far gone himself with hunger and exhaustion.
The second journey down the streamside was a nightmare. Again and again he had to stop to put the girl down and rest, and each time it was harder to pick her up and struggle on again. His heart felt bursting in his breast, and everything was darker even than the rain should have made it, when he came at las
t to the forest fringe, and stumbled to his knees. Regina slipped from his arms to the ground, and he let her lie there, crouching beside her and drawing his breath in great hoarse gasps that were painful in their way as her little panting ones, until in a while he began to feel less sick. Dog, poor Dog, stood beside them, looking from one to the other, and trying, as he spent so much of his life in trying, to understand.
A few yards back from the stream, among the hazel and crack willow of the newly cleared land, one great thorn tree stood out like a guardian over the trees behind; Owain had noticed it the first time he came down to the woodshore, but without knowing that he did so.
Now, as the world steadied and his breath came back to him, he got up and stumbled towards it. It was so old that some of its roots had pulled clear of the ground and spread about it in great arched and twisted limbs over the turf, and though it stood no more than four or five times the height of a man, its bole was thicker round than many a hundred foot forest giant, a Dwarf-King of the forest; maybe it was because of its royalty that the Saxons had let it be when they were at their wood-clearing. There, kneeling close against it, Owain pulled out his hunting knife and dug a little hole as far as he could get under one of the roots. Then he pulled the old battered signet ring from his breast, and cut the thong on which it hung. There was no light in the flawed emerald, only the surface reflection of the hawthorn branches and the pale glints of sky beyond. He wrapped it in a hanging end of cloth torn from the skirt of his ragged tunic, and thrust it down the hole, pushing it home with the point of the knife; and filled the hole in again. At least the Barbarians should not have his father’s ring.
When he turned back to Regina, he found that her eyes were fully open and she was watching him as though she knew who he was and what he was doing.
For a moment, hope leapt up in him, and he scrambled across to her without getting off his knees. ‘Are you better? Are you better, Regina?’ But even as he reached her, her eyes half closed, and she had gone again, back to wherever it was that she had been these many hours past.