Did Mynyddog know already? Maybe he had known while there was still time - while relief could still have reached us. There was a bitter taste in my mouth.
We hunted, during those days. There was wild pig in the forest, so our guide said, but we had not the hounds nor the spears nor the heart within us for dealing with a boar at bay. Credne had a bow and a few precious arrows, and with that and what we could improvise from our own gear, we shot and trapped through the woods about us, and tickled for char and trout in the stream and ate whatever came our way. Once it was a vixen. Fox meat makes rank eating, but it holds off hunger well enough.
The wild weather died out, though the forest was sodden and the few tracks turned to quagmires when we rode out once more on our journey. We rode in daylight now, the need for darkness being passed, up into the high blunt hills of the Penuin that were like the roof of the world; and I mind once on that first day, turning in the saddle to look away over much of the countryside that had opened to us when we had come riding down from the high moors, nine hundred of us, with Catraeth still ahead. Mile after mile of rolling forest, greener now with occasional clearings in it showing like the rents in a shaggy cloak; and far off on the edge of the world the grey swordblade gleam of the sea. But the faint blur of hearth smoke that we had seen rising here and there among the nearer woods no longer lifted into the air. That told its own story of villages left without men of working age, and women gathering up the old and the children and heading back for the coastwise settlements, leaving cold hearths behind them. We had made our mark on the Saxon kind.
‘If we got Aethelfrith - I began, as Aneirin reined in his horse beside me, looking the same way.
‘If we got Aethelfrith. Aye,’ he said, his eyes narrowed as he also searched for hearth smoke among the low wooded hills. I mind the jagged shape that his face made, cut darkly out of the sky. ‘If the Flame Bringer is gone, then the Saxon flood is stayed, here in the north, for another fifty years, as it was for Artos after Badon.’
‘I never saw him, when we made the last charge. How if he was not there? How if he was clear, to lead them again on another day?’
Aneirin was silent for a moment, his gaze still narrowed into a distance, ‘Two years, maybe three,’ he said at last.
‘So great a difference, hanging on one man’s life?’
‘I believe so,’ he said briefly. ‘The word will like enough have reached Dyn Eidin by now. We shall know soon enough.’ And he touched his heel to his horse’s flank and we rode on after the others.
At nightfall the scout brought us down into a stone-walled and heather-thatched settlement of our own kind. People who had been of Bernicia before the Saxons came spreading inland from the coast and drove them up into the hills. We told them what they asked, but they did not ask much, and truly I think that they were beyond greatly caring what happened in the world of men, so long as their own thatch was left unburned and their sheep to graze on the lean hill pasture. But they gave us what little food they could spare, and the warmth of their fire to sit by.
We rode slowly for Cynan’s sake, though indeed after the days of rest and refuge in the old posting station his wound was healing clearly under its crusted mess. Both his eyes were open, though I was doubtful of what, if anything, he saw through them. And something of his strength was returning to him. He mounted and dismounted without much need of help, and rode with the rest of us - we were careful to keep him always in the midst of our little band, where someone could instantly catch his rein. He ate the food that was put before him, and lay down between me and Conn to sleep. And indeed in his sleep, despite the half-healed wound that marred his cheek and forehead, he looked almost to be himself again, but still he seemed shut off from all that went on around him, and he never spoke. He was like one of those terrible slain warriors who, so the ancient stories tell, were put into the great cauldron of Anwn, and came out seemingly restored to life but without the power of speaking.
For Cynan’s sake we rode slowly, as I have said. But even so, on the fourth evening we struck the Legions’ road again, just south of Onnum on the Wall, and passed through the fallen gateway.
We were back among the hills that we had ridden through on the long-distance patrols last autumn.
That night we sat by the fire of a one-valley chieftain, where some of our patrols, though none that Cynan or I were on, had sat before. And that night the scout said to Aneirin, ‘From now on the way is plain for you among your own hills. Now, therefore, I turn south again to mine, in the morning.’
‘Will you not ride on with us to Dyn Eidin? It is in my mind that there will be a golden reward for you from the King’s hand.’
The scout shook his head. ‘I am a man of Bernicia; I return now to my own people. Give me the horse in reward, if you will.’
Later that night, when we had eaten and drunk, and it was time for the asking and answering of questions, and when Cynan had lain down to sleep in the further shadows with his cloak over his head, the chieftain asked, staring into his mead cup, ‘Are there more of you?’
And Aneirin asked, ‘How many but ourselves have passed this way, coming from Catraeth?’
The chieftain shook his head. ‘No others.’
‘Then there are no more of us.’
There was silence for a short while, and the hound bitch at the chieftain’s feet whimpered in her sleep.
Then it was Aneirin’s turn at the questioning. ‘A month - nigh on two months, since, did a rider bearing the Cran-Tara come to your rath?’
‘One came,’ said the chieftain. ‘The word was for a hosting at Habitancum on the fifth day. One man in every three, as many horses as might be, beef on the hoof.’
‘So few?’ Aneirin said.
‘One man in three,’ the chieftain repeated. ‘That was the summons of the Cran-Tara. My younger son went, fourteen spearmen from this rath, the flower of my stables and my cattle yard. They waited at the hosting place three days; then the King sent word dismissing the warhost, so they came home.’
There was silence again, and the chief stooped forward to fondle the bitch’s fluttering ears; mainly, I think, that he might not have to look into our faces. ‘The willingness was there; but the King - my Lord Mynyddog - dismissed them. Not upon us, the blame.’
The hound whimpered as he pulled too hard at her ears.
‘Not upon you, the shame,’ Aneirin said.
Next morning we set out on the last long stretch of our homeward ride. We did not claim guest right in any man’s hall after that, but slept rough in the ruins of old forts and signal stations, hunting as we went, as though we were still in enemy territory.
On the fourth day, towards evening, we came in sight of Dyn Eidin.
20
Ghosts
Word of the end of the Companions had clearly reached Dyn Eidin days ago. And as we rode up from the Royal Farm we could smell the stunned grieving of the town all about us; and hear the silence. No town that is not dead can ever be completely quiet, but along Eidin Ridge there was no more the ready- making for the war-trail, the smoke and clangour of the armourers, the neigh of horses, the young men and the laughter and the snatches of song. There were people about. Women spinning in doorways looked up as we rode by, men dropped whatever they were doing and turned to watch us pass, children and dogs were playing in the dust beside the cobbled way. Several times girls called out to us, asking for this one or that one of the Companions, for Tydfwlch or Madog or Morien, twice girls came running to ask for Cynan, not recognizing him. Aneirin made them some kind of reply; I do not know what. There was no welcome. Later, there might be, but not now, the news and the loss was still too raw. Only we felt eyes following us after we had gone by; the eyes of the people of Eidin, wondering why we had come back, of all those who had ridden out, less than two moons ago.
We came up past the steep horse-paddock to the gate of the Dyn, and the men of the guard passed us through into the outer court. Word of our coming must have run on ahead,
and men were gathered there to draw us in; men whose faces we knew, it seemed from another life. A knot of richer colour showed where the women of the royal house stood clustered together before the inner gate, and out of the midst of them the Princess Niamh came running to catch the reins of Cynan’s horse. She checked there, looking up at him - she knew him well enough - and I saw her face puzzled for a moment, then white and stricken. Cynan did not return her look, or seem to know that she was there at all. One of the older women came and pulled her away. Then the men of the Teulu were all around us as we dropped from the saddle, and hands came out of nowhere as it seemed, to take the reins and lead our horses away. We were back where we had not thought to be again, standing like ghosts in the outer court of Dyn Eidin.
That night, our battle-stained rags replaced by decent clothes, and the worst of our filth washed off, we sat at supper once again in the King’s Mead Hall. We knew by then that Aethelfrith was still living. The messengers had come in days ago, and the thing was common knowledge through Dyn Eidin. And the food, when it came, had a bitter taste to it.
Conn and his mates, who had not supped in Hall before, sat on the guest bench just within the main door. Aneirin was in his old place at the High Table. Cynan sat among the warriors of the Teulu at one of the long side tables - that also was his old place, but before my time - they made him welcome there, but I saw how they left a little space on either side of him, as though no one cared to risk touching or being touched; and I wondered if living men had left the same gap between themselves and the silent warriors who had passed through the Cauldron of Anwwn.
The horn sounded and the King was brought in, leaning on the shoulders of two of his household warriors, the Queen and the royal women following after, the Champion and the steward and others of the household; and among them, Phanes of Syracuse.
I had not known whether he was alive or dead, and a warmth woke in me at sight of him, though he looked ten years older than when I had seen him last, and walked stooping a little forward and to one side as I have seen men walk since, hunched over an old body wound.
They eased the King into his High Seat; the horn sounded again and the food was brought in. Food as fitting for a King’s Hall as ever we had eaten there, and yellow mead with its faintly bitter after-taste that I had never noticed so strongly before. But no harpsong; not that night; and the Hall itself was half empty. I mind the bare benches in the lower Hall that had been built on to make room for the Three Hundred, and the great roof ties naked of the weapons and armour that had used to hang there.
Cynan seemed aware of the emptiness also, the first time that he had shown awareness of the world around him. More than once I saw him lift his head and look about him as though seeking the crowding faces that he had been used to find there. Then, failing in the search, he would sink away inside himself again, and return to playing with the food before him or watching the fire.
When the eating was done, and the royal women had gone back to their own place, leaving the task of keeping the mead cups filled to the armourbearers, the King stirred in his great chair and turned stiffly to Aneirin, seeming to nerve himself for what he knew must come.
‘Now, Prince of Bards, let you tell me what there is for the telling.’
There was a sudden piercing silence all up and down the Hall. And in the silence, Aneirin told; all that there was for the telling, from the night attack on the royal steading, on through the taking over of the old fort, the raids on the gathering Saxon war hordes, the waiting for the men of Elmet and the other British kingdoms who never came.
I was watching the King’s face, and I saw how it flinched and then set into a mask when Aneirin reached that part, and how his gaunt hands gripped on the foreposts of his chair until the knuckles were like bare bones, betraying all that the mask concealed. Aneirin never paused but told steadily on; of the tightening siege and the decision to make that last desperate charge. The decision also that he himself must return living to Dyn Eidin.
The silence that closed over his words was such that if a little pale moon-moth had fluttered through the Hall we would have heard the pulsing of its wings. And in the silence, Aneirin turned his head and looked down the warrior-benches to where I stood with the mead jar in my hands. ‘There is no more that I can tell at this time,’ he said. ‘Prosper, son of Gerontius, shieldbearer to Cynan MacClydno, the rest of the telling is for you.’
I had not thought of that, though I might have done, and for a moment I felt the breath gone from me. I set the mead jar down slowly and with great care, as though a drop spilled on the trestle board would have been the end of the world. Mynyddog’s gaze was upon me. I could feel it. I could feel the eyes of every man in the King’s Hall save Cynan who sat still staring into the fire.
My breath came back to me, and I took up the story where Aneirin had laid it down. I told it as well as was in me, though stumblingly and with long gaps between, knowing that until - unless - Cynan came back to himself again, I was the only one who could tell it, just as Aneirin was the only one who could make the Great Song. I told of the last ride of the Shining Company. I told of the fighting between the river and the woods. I told of that last sight of our Captain who was the King’s son, broken and hoisted aloft on the points of spears (I thought for a moment something moved behind the mask). I told of the end of the fighting, and how Cynan was wounded among the gravestones by the north road, and how I had killed the man with the club, and of what came after until with Cynan tied on to his horse’s back, we came up with Aneirin and the others at the edge of dawn.
The story, my part of the story, was done, and I looked to give it back to Aneirin; but he left it lying, feeling I supposed that what was left did not need a King’s bard for the telling. So I took it up again. It could be told briefly enough. ‘We lay up for the daylight and rode through the night, and came down to a place that had once been a Roman posting station; a place our guide knew of, safe from the Saxon kind. We waited there several days, for my Lord Cynan to gather some strength. We rode on, by day for we were beyond the Saxons’ reach by then. We came into Gododdin territory and our guide turned back to his own people. We lodged that night with a clan chieftain known to our patrols of last year. My Lord Aneirin asked him if the Cran-Tara had come to his rath. He said that it had come and that his younger son and fourteen warriors of the rath had gone to the hosting place and waited there for three days, and that then my Lord the King had bidden them back to their own hearths. He said “Not upon us, the blame.” ‘
I heard what I had said. And I saw the King’s face show for an instant behind the mask, and there was a coldness in my belly.
Then Aneirin spoke again, in that trained harper’s voice of his that seemed to be pitched only for the King and yet carried the length of the half-empty Hall. ‘So - we have told all that is ours for the telling. Now let Mynyddog the King tell in his turn, whatever is his.’
For the time that might cover three heartbeats, Mynyddog sat looking at his own skeleton hand on the forepost, turning it so that the taperlight woke the life and colour in the great ring he wore. Then he looked up and said straightly, ‘Ask then, Prince of All Bards, and I will answer.’
Aneirin asked gently, ‘My Lord the King, why did the warhost never come?’
And the King answered, ‘Because no other of the northern kingdoms answered the call, having fears and frontiers of their own to spend their swords on; each one fearing what his neighbours would do if he sent his warriors out on such a war-trail.’
He was fighting that dry brittle cough. In the old days his son or his bard would have taken up the speaking for him; but his son was dead, and Aneirin could not speak for him in this.
‘What of the Gododdin war-bands bound by the Cran-Tara?’ Aneirin said.
The King’s voice was straining in his chest, but he forced the words out. ‘If I had sent my own war- bands, their chance would have been small indeed, against the joined hosts of Deira and Bernicia. I judged that my shinin
g and beloved Three Hundred were enough to lose. I judged also that in their going down, they would take such a Hero’s Portion of the Saxons with them that they would come thrusting no further into our heartlands until they had done licking their wounds; a few years, the lifetime of a man …’
‘Aye, we bought your time for you, a little -’
I thought for an instant of the sunlight lying across the schoolroom table at home, and the unrolled Herodotus with the mould spots on the parchment. ‘Tell them in Sparta -’
‘But after the time is up?’
‘By then I may have found a way to bind my sticks into a faggot, after all,’ said the King.
The shamed and angry silence of the Teulu was enough to set the roof beams afire, though in all the place no man moved.
‘My Lord the King,’ Aneirin said, ‘could you not have trusted us with the truth?’
The King drew a long painful breath. ‘No man should ride on such a trail altogether without hope. I was not quite without hope myself, at the outset.’ He began to cough, arched over himself, making yellow flecks on the chequered silk at the breast of his mantle.
And while he still coughed, though the paroxysm was passing, Cynan who had sat unmoving and staring into the fire throughout, got to his feet and stood swaying, then with a terrible howling cry, pitched forward across the table, scattering the remnants of the meal and oversetting the mead jar in a yellow flood.
On the King’s orders, when he could speak again, we bore Cynan to the inner palace. Word of what had happened must have run ahead of us, for the Queen herself with some of her women hovering behind her met us in the gateway to the inner court.
‘Carry him up to the women’s house,’ she said. ‘It will be easier for us to tend him there.’
So we carried him up to the women’s house that clung like a cluster of lime-washed birds’ nests to the highest point of the fortress rock and laid him on a bed-place spread with soft rugs and pillows of striped wool that showed as bright as flowers in the light of wax tapers that had already been brought in.