Then he heard a sound behind him, and turning, saw Cunorix come out through the thorns and brambles into the small open space.
‘That was a clean kill,’ said Cunorix.
‘Not so clean. I should not have had to use this.’ Alexios stooped and stabbed his knife into the turf to cleanse it.
‘Clean enough. There will be but two small rents for mending in the Commander’s wolfskin.’
And the moment of grief passed from Alexios, giving place to a swift fierce pleasure. He had his wolfskin cloak!
Cunorix kicked aside the hounds who were sniffing hungrily around the carcass. ‘Off! It is not yet your time!’ Then turned to Alexios again. ‘He is in fine condition; one that is no stranger to the sheepfolds.’
Together they flayed the dead wolf, taking especial care with the muzzle and ears, and left the red carcass to the hounds. Then they went back to where the ponies waited with their bridles over their heads – hunting ponies, like the mounts of the Frontier Wolves, were trained to stand when their bridles were pulled forward, as though they were tied to a hitching-post. Cunorix took the bannock bag from about the neck of one of them, and they knotted up the reins and turned them free to graze.
Just below where the gateway must have been, a tumble of stones brought down by a landslip of some long-past winter, and laced together now by a dense mass of blackthorn made a pocket of shelter from the wind; and there they settled down with the bannocks and a lump of garlic-flavoured curd between them. But before they began to eat, Alexios pulled the wooden stopper from the flask of raw Sabine wine that he had bought with him, and getting up, poured a few drops, red as the wolf’s blood, into the rough grass of the lost threshold. He was not sure why he did it. A sacrifice to the shades of the men who had kept the lookout and guarded the signal fire in this place? An offering to the gods – to whatever gods might be interested – for his wolf? (Once, he had seen a fine small altar in the German forests. ‘To Pan Sylvanus,’ he had read, carved in the mossy stone, ‘In gratitude for the finest boar of his life, Gneus A. Drusillus, Tribune of the Sixth Gaulish Cohort raised this.’) Something of both, maybe.
He turned and squatted down again beside Cunorix, holding out the flask. Cunorix took it and drank. ‘It was a good hunting,’ he said, and handed it back.
Eye meeting eye, with no more spoken, Alexios took it back, and swallowed a mouthful of the fiery stuff, and wedged the flask upright between them and they fell to work on the bannock and curds.
Alexios ate one-handed, keeping the other free for his wolfskin tumbled beside him. It felt harsh and curiously alive under his fingers. (To Pan Sylvanus, in gratitude for his wolf . . .)
Faint blurs of skim-milk blue had begun to show through the soft drifting grey of the sky, and echoing blurs of half sunlight were trailing them across the hills. In the lee of the blackthorn tangle the day was gentle, and when a brief wing of sunlight brushed along the flank of the little glen, Alexios felt the warmth of it on his skin. There was a flittering of small birds among the furze, though the half-thawed snow still lay puddled in hollows of the north-facing slope. The ponies had dropped further downhill, and were grazing along the burnside, snatching at the tussocky grass among the heather. Alexios watched them, listening in the clear air to the contented sound of their cropping. Earlier in the day, they had proved themselves fine, willing-hearted little beasts with a good turn of speed, and now, rested and enjoying themselves, they were a pleasant sight. Something about the roan, the one that he himself had been riding, caught at his interest, something under the shaggy winter coat and the hillbred toughness of the little beast, the slender legs and the shape of the small well-set head, something that he had seen in the full dark eye when he was knotting up the reins. The best of the army’s cavalry horses were part Arab, and it was a look that he knew.
‘Does Ferradach Dhu run Arab stallions among his mares?’ he asked suddenly.
Cunorix set the flask down again between them. It was almost empty, and they were both on their last bannock. ‘Not of the pure breed, no; but there is an Arab strain in many of the horse-runs of the Votadini.’ He swallowed a last crumbling mouthful of curd. ‘In the old days, whenever there came a fighting-time between us and the Red Crests, and the Red Crests withdrew to make a “strategic rearrangement of their frontier defences”, there would be a few good cavalry horses left in our hands.’
Alexios grinned, ‘And when in due course the Red Crests take the war trail and the frontiers are “strategically rearranged”, yet another time – by such as the Emperor Severus?’
‘There are hidden valleys of the high moors, and open places in the great forest with seemingly no track that shows the way into them. And the Tribes have always been skilled at hiding the best of their herds, whether from the Red Crests or from each other.’ He sighed, half-regretfully. ‘Ah, but all that is long past. There has been quiet between the Votadini and the Red Crests for a long while now. Soon we young men will forget how to use our spears.’
‘And so now you must buy your new blood for the horse-herds like law-abiding citizens,’ Alexios said. ‘It is a sad world!’
‘Buy or borrow, or come by as best we may.’
‘Come by as best you may?’
‘Sometimes word comes drifting on the wind, of an especially fine horse in the runs of the Damnoni, or even of the Dalriads . . .’
‘And does that wind never carry word the other way?’
‘Now and again. Often enough to keep the young men from forgetting altogether.’
‘That is the kind of thing – among others – that we are here to prevent. I said it was a sad world.’
‘If it were not so, I could show you a better sport than wolf-hunting.’ Cunorix cocked a thick russet eyebrow at his companion. ‘But let you remember this, as I think the Lords of the Red Crests remember it, that the horse-drafts for the Frontier Wolves, and for many of the Wall cavalry beside, come from out of our runs. Ask too many questions, keep too bright an eye open on the doings of the Tribes, and you will feel the loss of speed and mettle in your own horse-lines.’
Suddenly laughter caught at them both, eye meeting eye; a quiet laughter – men seldom bellow their mirth in the wild places – but quick and potent, linking them together like the handstrike in Ferradach’s Hall.
Laughing still, they scrambled to their feet and went to haul the hounds off the flayed carcass. ‘Hai mai! Leave the ravens their share!’ Cunorix said.
They whistled up the grazing ponies, and mounted, Alexios with the raw wolfskin across his pony’s withers, and set out for Castellum.
The promise of spring was past and the winter evening closing in as they came down to the paved ford. ‘It grows late, and the beasts are tired. Let you stable the ponies and eat and sleep with us tonight,’ Alexios said.
Cunorix shook his head. ‘Na, the hunting was a good hunting and the day a good day, and we will end it where it began outside the West gate. I have kindred in the town.’
And Alexios, who also knew that the day had been a good day (To Pan Sylvanus, in gratitude for his wolf – and for more than his wolf . . .), and had therefore wanted it to go on, knew that he was right.
The watering-place upstream was busy with men and horses. Heads turned as the two riders came down the bank and splashed through; the men nearest to them sketched a salute. Someone spotted what Alexios had folded across his pony’s withers, and shouted to a comrade, ‘Hi! Kuno! The Commander’s got his wolf!’
And behind him as he splashed out on the opposite bank someone shouted back, ‘So-o! Did you think he was off after squirrel, then, with those fine big borrowed spears?’
And somebody laughed. It was Bericus, the Emperor’s hard bargain. ‘Well, now we shall not be needing to blush for him if the Emperor comes to inspect us! – Back, lop-eared son of all the Furies! Will you drink the pool dry?’
He heard the voices and a ragged cheer behind him. It was all thoroughly disrespectful, but the Frontier Wolves, he had l
ong since discovered, were not strong on respect; not strong at any rate on the outward show of it.
A faint mist was beginning to rise from the ground, wreathing round the dark foot of the Lady where she stood above the ford. And scarcely noticing that he did so, as though it were something that he had done many times before, Alexios leaned sideways and touched the polished crest of the stone in passing.
6 The Stone Dancers
ALEXIOS TOOK HIS wolfskin to old Duatha in the town to be cured and dressed and mounted on his own cloak of the regulation dark green cloth. And spring woke among the shaggy woods along the estuary. The spring barley was sown in the croplands about the fort, and in the sheltered places the first short-stemmed primroses lifted their clean surprised faces; and the swallows came back to their old nests under the eaves of the granaries, just as they had done in his old home in the South Country.
Summer came, and the heather hills simmered in the heat; and Cloe’s kitten, now named Typhon for his fiend’s temper with all men save Rufus, was almost full grown, with tufts on his ears to prove his proud wildcat ancestry. In the horse-runs of Ferradach Dhu the mares had their foals at heel; and Shula of the golden eardrops began to have a belly that curved out before her like ripe fruit when she walked. The time of the great yearly gathering to Traprain Law came and passed by – the gathering when all the Clan Chieftains and great men of the Tribes came together in council, to settle disputes and make and re-make laws and listen to the voice of the King, with a Government Inspector present to see that the laws of Rome, as well as the laws of the Votadini, were served. Three boys of the Votadini came in to join the Frontier Wolves.
And all the while the life of the fort went on, becoming more and more familiar to its Commander. The patrols came and went; the eight- or ten-day patrols of summertime, each man leaning aside to touch the Lady as he passed; and more than once Alexios went with them, leaving Hilarion in charge of the fort. Eight days out with the lean rangy men who had the look of wild places and long distances about them. He had slept in his fine new wolfskin cloak among the young heather through the short northern summer nights, ridden soaked to the skin by the mizzle rain of the high moors, known the Fear-beyond-the-Firelight that came to most men the first time they camped within the crowding darkness of the Great Forest that spread like a black fleece over the inland hills of the Frontier country. He had learned from his men how to read and follow a trail; how to melt into the landscape, making use of every scrap of cover, every trick of wind and light both for himself and his pony; how to travel cross country at speed without ever getting skylined, and other useful skills, including, from Bericus, how to snare wildfowl for the pot.
He had gone hunting more than once with Cunorix alone, or with young Connla as well, or ridden out with them to visit the horses on the summer pastures or watch the two-year-olds being broken in the Makers’ Yards. Life had become unexpectedly good, without his really noticing it.
But the summer was passing by.
A day came, not long before harvest time; on the very edge of autumn, for the harvest, here in the North, Alexios realized, came much later than the harvests of his boyhood in the Down Country. But the heather was still honey-scented and murmurous with bees, and the clump of harebells among the grass at the Lady’s foot was still in fragile flower, valiant where the hooves of the patrols went by. And Alexios, with half a day to spare, and riding his own Phoenix as he did when they were not for hunting, had met Cunorix halfway and gone on up with him for a look at the brood mares on the hill run.
He had been tied to the small dark office in the Principia for the best part of a week by one of those sudden rushes of paperwork that come from time to time upon the commanding officers of small units who have no clerks of their own; and the space and sunlit emptiness of the hills seemed very good.
The mares grazed quietly in the sheltered upland valley, under the watchful eye of Finnan the herdsman, who sat with his back to a sun-warmed rock, his small sturdy pony grazing nearby. Cunorix whistled lazily, and a mare of the soft mouse-colour much prized among Tribes and Frontier Wolves alike, raised her head, then as he whistled again, came cantering gently up the slope to take the lick of salt from his out-held palm.
Alexios put out a quiet hand and drew it down her muzzle, fondling her crest, pleased that she did not fling away as she had done the first time they met, but bent her head as though in pleasure, ruckling softly down her nose.
‘Shadow – see, already we be friends, you and I.’
‘She is used to much petting. She has been my father’s favourite since the day that she was foaled,’ Cunorix said. ‘It is hard for him that he cannot ride up to the summer pastures any more.’
There was a little silence. In the few times that he had been to the rath it had seemed to Alexios that the old sick Chieftain was growing weaker; sitting yet closer to the fire even in the summer days.
‘He should not have gone to the Gathering,’ he said.
‘That we all know,’ Cunorix said harshly, ‘I could have gone for him, I who am his eldest son. But he is the stubborn one; he would go, even though it must be in a litter.’
Again there was the little silence between them, only the faint soughing of air through the long grass. Then Cunorix spoke again, more lightly, ‘Aye, well, soon the time comes for the mares to be brought down to shelter. Then she will eat from her manger at the back of the Hall again, and they will both be glad of each other’s nearness.’
Alexios looked round at him with a half smile, ‘And soon, if the gods be good, there comes something else to make him glad.’
‘Very soon now.’ Cunorix still fondled the mare’s neck, while she nuzzled against his breast with delicately working lips, ‘My son will be born before this moon is out. Maybe the gladness of that will give him strength again.’
‘And what if it is a girl child?’
‘I have made the proper sacrifices, and the old women who know about these things have told Shula that it will be a son.’
Even as he spoke, a faint rhythmic quiver of sound disturbed the upland quiet; the beat of hooves on the hard end-of-summer turf; and looking that way Alexios saw a horseman top the skyline and come plunging down into the long curve of the valley. The mares and their foals scattered, snorting in panic as he swept by; long red hair streamed behind him like the tail of a torch.
‘That’s Connla,’ Cunorix said, ‘and by more than his fiery crest. No one else would ride through the brood herd as though the Wild Hunt were after him.’
The herdsman had drawn his legs under him and risen from his dozing-rock. ‘It will be that the old Chief goes beyond the sunset.’
Alexios half expected Cunorix to be astride his own pony next moment and off to meet the wild rider. But there was no movement beside him except that Shadow flung round and went cantering off back to the scattered herd. And when he looked round, Cunorix was standing very still, with the look of a man braced to receive the shock of a breaking wave or landslip or an enemy hurling against him. But all those were things that could be run from or fought against. This was something else. ‘Finnan is right,’ he thought, ‘and Cunorix knows it.’
Connla was upon them, reining back in full gallop, his pony spattering froth from its muzzle. ‘It is our father!’ He gasped it out before his feet touched the ground.
For a moment longer the elder brother held his braced stillness. ‘He seemed stronger this morning.’
‘So much stronger that he would have out the weapon kist and check over his war-gear. And then he called for his sword, and stood up as though to test that the weight and balance were as he remembered, and began to take great sweeping strokes about him as though he stood in the midst of battle. But the sword fell from his grasp, and he fell forward into the fire –’
‘He was burned?’
‘Na. His body and that great cloak of his smothered the flames, and we hauled him clear in three heartbeats.’ Alexios noticed for the first time a long angry burn on th
e boy’s forearm. ‘But now he lies still, like one already gone out of his body; and Sinnoch the Healer says he is for the West, beyond the sunset.’
Cunorix had turned to his own horse, and was in the saddle by that time. He checked for a moment to look down at Alexios. ‘The sun and the moon on your path,’ he said, as though it would be a long time before they saw each other again, then drove his heel into the horse’s flank, and was away at full flying gallop, with Connla after him.
That night in the officers’ Mess at Castellum, Alexios in the midst of making himself a new birding bow, heard a long-drawn booming horn-call a long way off. He looked up from the work in his hands, and saw Hilarion check in the act of moving a piece on the drafts board between himself and the Quartermaster, and Lucius’s nose come out of his beloved Georgics.
The long, haunting note died away, and then as they listened, was taken up by some horn further to the south, like an answer or an echo.
‘Ferradach Dhu?’ Alexios said: but he did not really need the answer.
The Quartermaster, who had been there longer than any of them, nodded. ‘The old Chief goes beyond the sunset, and they’re passing on the news. Listen – there speaks Rath Colgrim, and there the Glen of the Alderwoods.’ Faint as the ghosts of echoes, the horns were sounding away and away over the lowland hills.
‘So now Cunorix is the Chieftain,’ Alexios said with a sense of loss that he did not care to look at too closely.
Hilarion set the drafts piece down on the board with a small sharp click. ‘Not for three days. The Tribesmen believe that for three days the spirit does not set out on its journey. And so for the three Death Days the clan lacks a chieftain. Then they hold a great feast to set the old Chief on his way and the new one in his place – but you’ll see when the time comes.’
‘I?’ Alexios said, surprised.