At last the shadows began to lengthen through the crowded rath. Much wine and beer and fermented mares’ milk had been drunk, and men’s eyes were growing brighter and their tongues looser. There began to be wild bursts of laughter, and here and there the swift snarling flare-up of a quarrel as men grew fierce and merry with the drink within them. The main business of eating was over for a while, though the drinking would go on through the night; and there began to be a general breaking up and shifting between the groups round the fires.
And suddenly Connla who had disappeared for a while, was back and calling, ‘Commander! Oh Commander of Castellum!’ And looking round, Alexios saw him standing there, eyes narrowed and laughing into the last of the sunlight, and holding up a calf’s head with the hide still on it that must have been left over from the slaughtering for the feast.
He got to his feet, feeling for the moment rather sick. And Connla cried, ‘Tain Bo! Cattle Raid!’ as though in some kind of challenge, and still laughing, flung the calf’s head on the ground between them.
There was a sudden crowding in of young warriors all about them. Whatever the thing was, clearly it was to their liking. ‘Cattle Raid! Cattle Raid! Let’s get the ponies and set up the gate posts!’
‘Not so fast!’ Connla said. ‘The Commander has not yet taken up the challenge.’
They all looked at Alexios expectantly.
‘Tell me what it is, this challenge,’ he said, slowly, ‘and then I will choose whether to take it up or leave it lying.’
Connla stood rocking on his heels and grinning. ‘Never look so on your guard! We have no thought to take you moon-riding into Dumnonian territory! See now; it is no more than this, that we set a pair of hazel saplings for a gateway at either end of the level ground by the burn, and you call out your team and I mine, each man with his horse and spear; and whichever team is first to carry the “bull”,’ he stirred the calf’s head with his foot, ‘seven times through its own gateway has the winning of the game, and can claim from the Chief –’
‘A jar of fine Greek wine to wash off the blood,’ said Cunorix who had left his skin-spread stool and come to join the throng.
‘Nay now, my brother the Chieftain, what blood – unless it be the calf’s? Here is a game so simple that a bairn could play it –’
‘Or a Roman?’ said Alexios, his eye brightening to the challenge. And there was a burst of laughter from the men around him.
‘Even a Red-Crest Roman, oh Commander of Castellum.’ Connla stirred the calf’s head with his foot again.
Alexios felt a sudden movement, a pressure of men behind him, and looked round quickly, to find his escort optio close at his shoulder, and the rest of the Frontier Wolves pushing in through the crowd. From the look on their faces, he judged that it wouldn’t be the first time most of them had played this game.
He turned back to Connla, ‘How many for a team?’
The other shrugged. ‘Any number that seems good.’
‘I can call out ten,’ said Alexios.
And so a short while later, the valley floor already in shade though the last run-honey sunlight of the late summer evening still lay across the hills, Alexios with a borrowed spear in his hand was astride Phoenix and facing Connla across a rough circle made up of the two teams. At either end of the level ground the hazel saplings had been set up, with coloured rags tied to the tops of them. Midges danced in the heavy air among the rowans and alders of the burnside, and the ponies stamped and fidgeted, swishing their tails against the stinging clouds. Then somebody flung the calf’s head into the centre of the circle, and the teams plunged forward, becoming a dense struggling ruck of men and ponies, from which one of Connla’s warriors broke free with the calf’s head on the point of his spear and made for the home gateway with the rest yelling at his heels. And the game was on.
If you could call it a game.
Looking back on it afterwards, Alexios had only the haziest memories of something more like a savagely joyful running fight that streamed to and fro between the pairs of gateposts; a free-for-all in which it seemed that nothing was barred except the deliberate and obvious use of the spear-point on a horse or rider of the opposing team.
To and fro, now clotting into a struggle, now skeining out into a chase. At first it seemed that Connla’s team would have a shamingly easy win, as they got the ‘bull’ back through their own gateway three times in quick succession; but the Frontier Wolves were getting the feel of the thing, and little by little their score crept up and the game began to go their way. At least, Alexios thought it did. He was not quite sure. He was not quite sure of anything. It was enough to struggle for each capture of the ‘bull’, to try to head off the enemy, to guard against the bumping and boring of other riders, one eye always on the home gateway. He thought both teams were running level now. Still not sure; but anyway there were plenty of onlookers to keep the count . . .
The light was suddenly different; a red fierce light with smoky shadows that made it harder still to know what was happening or see where the ‘bull’ had got to; and he realized that the sun had gone long since, and men had come charging down from the rath in the gathering dusk, with torches to light the play. The calf’s head was almost stripped of skin and flesh now, battered and hideous, and becoming almost impossible to pick up on the spear-point. A joyful cry went up from the crowd; another gateway for the tribesmen; another, and then another for the Frontier Wolves. It seemed to Alexios that the torchlight was in his own head, and the drum of hooves and the shouting all became a part of himself – or he became a part of it. The optio went past him in a smother of spun clods, the ragged and bloody skull on the end of his spear, and shouted as he went past, ‘Seventh gateway, Sir!’ Then he was lost in a milling knot of horsemen. But next instant, out of the midst of the ruck his spear went up and flung the ‘bull’ free, arcing over the heads of men and horses in the direction of the Wolves’ gateway.
Alexios swooped upon it, flinging off his nearest adversary with Phoenix’s shoulder, and managed to get his spear-point through the empty eye-socket. The gateway seemed a long way off, and there were a lot of enemy horsemen between him and it. He drove his heels into his pony’s flanks and headed for them, travelling like a bolt from a catapult. The first man swung to block him and he leaned sideways, controlling Phoenix with his knees, the flat of his hand finding the other’s face, tipping him backwards over his pony’s crupper, and he was past; three others scattering before him and wrenching their ponies round to crowd him from either side. Close behind him he heard the yell of the Frontier Wolves. But Connla, the foremost of his opponents racing beside him, was half out of his saddle, arms flung round his body to drag him from his mount. Alexios fought him off as best he could with only one hand to spare. They were so close as they struggled, that the other’s red hair, bright and ragged as the torches massed about the gateway, whipped across his face and got into his mouth until he spat it out. Behind them there seemed to be a running battle going on, ahead, rushing towards them, the gateposts with their bright crests of coloured rags and the crowding torches. He crouched forward onto Phoenix’s neck, urging the game little horse on with voice and heel and gripping knees, but he seemed to be dragging forward with him the whole weight of Connla and Connla’s pony like a swimmer battling against some kind of merciless undertow. And he was slipping – slipping – at the last instant he managed to bring up his spear and fling the ragged skull free from the end of it. Then his last grip gave, and as the gory thing spun up and over towards the massed torches of the gateway, he went down among the horses’ hooves, with Connla sprawling on top of him.
There were a few moments of utter chaos; torchlight and darkness spinning over each other, and trampling hooves, and a great roaring like a forest gale. And then the world shook itself and settled the right way up. Groaning a little, for most of the wind had been knocked out of him, Alexios drew his knees under his belly and slowly got up. The ‘bull’ lay fair and square within the Wolves
’ gateway, and the forest roaring had become the cheerful voice of the crowd, who by that time cared little enough who won the game, so long as it was a good fierce one with a little blood to show for it. Connla also was getting to his feet, panting and shaking the fiery hair out of his eyes. They looked at each other and grinned, cherishing their bruises.
‘Did I not say that a child could play it, or a Red-Crest Roman?’ said Connla.
Someone had caught their ponies, and they remounted and rode up from the level ground beside the burn with their arms across each other’s shoulders, and the mingled teams following on behind, both loudly singing their own praises; and the onlookers with their torches streaming after them and on either side.
They did not return to the Chief’s fire, but when Alexios had claimed the victor’s jar of wine, bore it off in triumph to one of the lesser fires, to which they made their claim by propping up the unlovely remains of the calf’s head now decked with coloured rags and ribbons from the Wolves’ gatepost on a spear beside it.
It seemed to be the custom, at least according to Connla, that victors and vanquished in a game of Cattle Raid should share the prize between them. That seemed to Alexios a very good arrangement, for the slender necked Greek amphora was a good size and would not be their first drinking of the day, though the fast and furious game had helped to get rid of some of what had gone before. And he had no wish that the Commander of Castellum and his escort should return to the fort tomorrow morning lying across their ponies’ backs like a string of leaking wineskins.
They knocked the head off the amphora as the quickest and simplest way of getting at the wine inside. Some of them had gathered up whatever they could find to drink from: a bowl of sycamore wood, a black pottery cup, a magnificent bull’s horn bound with silver which somebody would be raising a tempest for when they found it gone – others drank from the amphora itself, until their friends took it away from them. Overhead, the smoke of the fire wafted across a sky of stars as soft as honeysuckle; the dancing flames seemed to Alexios the brightest that he had ever seen, fringed and feathered and quite extraordinarily beautiful, and slightly out of focus.
But still it seemed that Connla found something lacking. He rose and disappeared into the darkness full of moving shadows that lay between the fires, and almost before they realized that he had gone, was back, thrusting before him a shambling figure. ‘What is wine without harp-song to spread the wings of the spirit? See, I have captured us a harper.’
There was a ragged outcry of approval all round the fire. Shouts of ‘A song! A song!’ as men tossed up their wine-cups in greeting. And the harper stood swaying a little on his heels, and looked down at them; a small hairy man with unexpectedly the eyes of a dreamer in his narrow fox face.
‘But first, a drink,’ said Connla, pushing the small man down into the space between himself and Alexios, who held out to him his own re-filled cup.
The harper took it, and held it up to the remains of the calf’s head propped drunkenly on its spear beside the fire. ‘I drink to the Lord of the Feast!’ He took a long gulping drink, then gave it back. ‘It is not every day that a man may taste such wine as that!’
‘Then let the song be all the better for it!’ someone shouted, and was echoed all round the fire. ‘The song! Give us the song, then!’
The harper had slipped the embroidered harp-bag from his shoulder, and taken out the small finely shaped instrument of black bog-oak strung with horsehair. Sitting with his head bent over it as a woman bends her head over the child in her arms, he began to tune the five strings, paying no heed to the voices baying all about him. Only when the thing was done to his complete satisfaction, he looked up. ‘So. Shall I sing of war? Or love? Or hunting?’
‘We have heard over many songs of love and war and hunting. Old songs, old tales that all men know before the telling. Make us a new song!’ Connla demanded.
But someone on the far side of the fire laughed. ‘Surely, let him make us a new song, if his wits are not too drowned in mares’ milk!’
The harper looked round at them with immense dignity. ‘There are those who sing most sweetly when the drink is in them. I will not be singing you a new song, not because I cannot, I Nuada the Weaver of Tales, but because I do not choose. Yet I will give you a song that is new to you, as it was new to me when first I heard it, not half a moon since, in a High King’s Hall.’
And settling his harp into the hollow of his shoulder, he began, drawing his hand over the strings, lightly at first and almost hesitantly, as a little wandering wind, then more and more strongly until one expected to see sparks fly from beneath his fingers as from a weapon on a sharpening-stone, then dying to a haunting throb that was like the sound of a swan’s wings in flight. And as the voice of the harp changed, so the voice of the harper changed, passing from singing to story-telling and back again, after the way of his kind.
Certainly, Alexios thought, sitting with the half-empty cup on his knee, the small foxy man was among those who sang most sweetly when the drink was in them. The drink was in himself, a little, too, and he heard vaguely, through a pleasant haze. Then after a while raised his head, suddenly alert, to listen.
This was a song that he knew. Half knew, anyway. One of the tales that his nurse had told him when he was small, among all those other songs and tales of her own land. The story of how Cuchlain came by the Black Seinglind and the Grey of Macha, the two horses of his chariot team. He had not recognized it at once, because he had known only the simple childish version told by a woman to a bairn, while this, though confused in places, with incidents left out or misremembered, was the true bard-telling, rich and fierce and darkly splendid; a telling for warriors in a High King’s Hall.
And as he listened, something began to stir at the back of Alexios’s mind, not a warning, not yet strong enough for that, but a sense of something vaguely out of place and needing to be inquired into. A story new-come out of Hibernia in these days when the possibility of raids from across the Western Sea was one of the dangers that he and his kind were here to guard against . . . He was being a fool, he told himself, making an armed man out of a shadow. Harpers picked up songs wherever they went; and if the man were a spy of the Attacotti the last thing he would do, however much the drink was in him, would be to make the songs of his own people here among the Votadini. Nevertheless, when the song was finished, and the men round the fire had done shouting its praises and tossing gifts to the harper, and the talk had turned to other things, Alexios felt within his tunic and brought out a gold half-solidus which he could ill-afford, and dropped it into the empty cup which he still held, and gave it to Nuada the Weaver of Tales.
‘That was a noble song, my friend, and worthy of gifts of hunting-dogs and golden arm-rings. Let you take this, since I have neither dog nor arm-ring about me.’
‘It was indeed a noble song,’ agreed the harper, and received the coin gravely, stowing it in his folded crimson waist-cloth.
‘And this High King’s Hall in which you heard it – I am thinking that would be the Hall of the High King of Erin himself?’ Alexios gave the land its native name.
‘Nay, but another as great. Not half a moon since, I was in the chief place of King Bruide, Lord of the Caledones, the Painted People.’
Something tightened in Alexios’s belly, then he let his caught breath go quietly, and made a great show of sprawling into an easier position, as one ready to listen to another story.
‘Great doings there were, at the court of King Bruide,’ said the harper reflectively, ‘and many strangers there; men from over the Western Sea, carrying the Green Branch and come to talk of a princess’s marriage.’
Again Alexios felt that small cold tightening of the belly. Men from over the Western Sea, carrying the Green Branch. An embassy from the Attacotti to the Painted People. A marriage alliance – or might that be just a cover for something else . . .?
‘Great lords, they were, and brought their own harper with them.’
&
nbsp; ‘And it was he who taught you the song of Cuchlain’s chariot horses?’ Alexios said, with seemingly only half-interest. That was odd, too, for surely such an embassy would not want to send out word of their coming on the four winds.
The small foxy man laughed. He had a hard head and was not very drunk; no harper could afford that until after the harp-song was done, lest his skill became entangled, but he was drunk enough to be reckless. ‘A harper’s songs are his treasures and his stock-in-trade that he does not share with all comers. Many a one will not so much as take his harp from its bag when another of the brotherhood is by.’
‘But this one was more generous?’ Alexios said idly.
‘As to that, I did not put his generosity to the test. Na, na, being minded to gather anything that might be there for the gathering, I made pretence to be very drunk; sleepy-drunk beyond remembering anything that I heard, and lay snoring and twitching almost at the man’s feet. And so – behold, I have a new song for the singing!’ He leaned closer, ‘Aye, and there were other things I learned, beside the song . . .’
Alexios glanced at the man’s sly vainglorious face. Almost he said, ‘And what things were they; these other things beside the song?’ But the midst of a feasting crowd was not the time or place to be asking such a question. That would have to wait. He said only, ‘So – that was a trick worth ten!’ and laughed.
But in the same instant he saw the answering laughter and all traces of the drink drain out of Nuada’s face, leaving it suddenly stone-cold sober; and saw also that the harper was no longer looking at him, but up at someone standing behind his shoulder.
He glanced around quickly. A tall cloaked figure stood there on the edge of the sinking firelight. He could not make out the face in the shadow of the hood, but he scarcely needed to, the shape and the menace in the angle of the bent head was enough, even before a burst of flames as a half-burned log collapsed into the red heart of the fire woke the coldly venomous brilliance of the eyes under the hood. Eyes that there was no mistaking. Morvidd the oak priest seemed only to have checked a moment in passing; and having checked, moved on, leaving a chill on the air where he had passed.