Dawn Wind (13 page)

‘How shall I know whether she lives or dies?’ he said.

‘Unless she dies before we move on south tomorrow, you will not know,’ said the man. ‘My holding is many days from here.’

‘They will be kind to her?’ Owain said, putting the question simply as one man to another.

‘I do not know them. My horse cast a shoe, and I am but a one-night’s guest within the gates, but I think the mistress at least will be kind to her.’

Owain raised his eyes from the fire to the man’s face, and said, ‘I will come,’ as though there was a choice to be made. But he knew that there was no choice in the matter. He was a Saxon’s slave, bought with a gold piece. The choice had been in the woods, where he buried his father’s ring.

The women got some milk into Regina, and Dog was fed with the watch-dogs before they were released, and Owain had a bannock and a bowl of kale broth at supper, and a place in the loft to sleep. They were a kindly enough household. Their animals would be well cared for and their bond-folk not beaten for the mere joy of beating; he was glad of that for Regina’s sake, but he hated to admit it, even to himself, lying hot-eyed and wakeful while the wind and the rain hushed across the thatch and the long night wore away.

In the morning, when the early meal was eaten, and he had saddled his new master’s horse—reshod by the man like a bull, for in the wilds every farmer must be his own smith—and brought it round to the foreporch door, they let him go for one last look at Regina. She was breathing more easily, and her eyes were properly shut as though she was asleep, the black lashes making feathery shadows on the white of her face. He knew that he must not wake her to say good-bye. But he pulled the little worn strike-a-light bag from his belt and laid it beside her. They had taken his knife and his sling, and it was all he had; it seemed fitting that he should give it to her, anyway; from now on he would come with the slaves and the dogs to warm himself at a master’s fire; he would not have a fire of his own again. He looked at the mistress, anxiously, to make sure she understood that it was for Regina; and she nodded.

Then he heard his master calling from the doorway, ‘Boy!’

And he went out with Dog at his heels, and an odd feeling that was not so much grief as a sense of physical loss—as though he had pulled off some part of himself, and if he looked down he would find the place was bleeding.

A
WARM
west wind was buffeting across the tawny levels; there was a faint taste of salt in it, and the humming of the sea. But any wind, unless it came due from the north, had the taste and sounding of the sea in it, for anywhere in the flat lands thrusting southward from Regnum to the rocks of Cymenshore one was never more than a few miles from the sea on either side. Owain, with Dog loping at his heels, came up from the harbour—Windy Harbour, they called it—where he had been with a message to the boat-strand below the settlement; for Beornwulf his master, like most of the coastwise farmers, was part fisherman too, and had a third share in a boat. He sniffed the chill tang of salt mingled with the dry warm scents of the land that had grown familiar to him in the past year, and thought that maybe there would be rain before morning, with the sea sounding so loudly across the land from the westward.

His path dived from the open levels into the shadows of a broad belt of oak scrub that bordered the common grazing ground of the settlement. The leaves of the squat wind-twisted trees that had been salt-burned since high summer were blackened and shrivelled now, and the sea sounded louder among them than it had done in the open, as though the murmur of it was tangled in the branches. He came out on the landward side, turned up beside the narrow tidal channel that ran between banks of chalk and brushwood, and saw the steading in the distance.

One could see Beornstead from a long way off, because there was nothing save a thorn windbreak here and there to cut the view; a huddle of low roofs that seemed shaped, just as the oaks and thorn trees were shaped, by the prevailing wind; the house-reek driven sideways in a pale blur against the darkness of woods beyond. No one seemed to be about, as he came nearer on the levels, where Beornwulf’s three brood-mares were grazing with their foals beside them, but as he drew towards the gateway of the thorn hedge, he saw Uncle Widreth sitting with his back against a pea stack out of the wind, with three children and a sheep-dog puppy squatting round him in attitudes of the deepest interest.

Uncle Widreth was something of an oddity, and to Owain, he was one of the things that made life bearable. He was almost as old as the farm, for his father had been a younger son who left the settlement and struck out for himself into the uncleared land, only one generation after Aelle had run his war-keels ashore and founded the South Saxon Kingdom. The household and the other thralls (there were two beside Owain) said that his mother was a British slave-woman who had left him on his father’s door-sill as soon as he was born, and run away. But Uncle Widreth said that his mother had been a seal-woman and a princess among seal-women; one of those who laid aside their furred skins to dance and sing among the dunes of the Seals’ Island on moonlight nights, and that his father had stolen her skin and so had her in his power and made her love him. But later, she had found her skin hidden in a hole in the wall, and escaped back to her own world. If he had been born after she escaped instead of before, Uncle Widreth said, he would have been a seal instead of a man. He was perhaps not quite right in the head, and certainly he was past doing a man’s work on the family lands, but he was the best cattle doctor in eight farms, and could mend any broken tool; and he earned his keep, beside, by looking after the children whenever Athelis, Beornwulf’s wife, could not do with them under her feet.

Just now, Athelis was laid by in the Bower, the women’s quarters behind the house-place, with a squalling very new daughter; so Uncle Widreth sat in the shelter of the pea stack, telling stories to the children until the bondwoman fetched them for bed.

Owain had got into the way of going to the queer old man in his spare moments, especially when his shoulders ached more than usual under the drab weight of slavery; and though he did not particularly ache at the moment, he whistled Dog to heel and turning aside, went to join the little group in the warm lea of the pea stack.

Uncle Widreth looked up at him, his faded old eyes crinkling into a smile, then returned to the work of his hands. He did not look like a seal, Owain thought, more like a grasshopper. The children did not glance up at all; Helga and Lilla, the two little girls, were sitting on either side of him, watching what he did, with their chins almost on his updrawn knees, and Bryni, who was too young to be interested in watching somebody else do something for many moments at a time, was trying with enormous concentration to poke the puppy’s eyes out. Presently, in all likelihood, the puppy would bite him; he had a good many tooth marks in the soft brown skin of his arms and legs already, but neither he nor the puppy ever bore malice. The enchanting thing in Uncle Widreth’s hands was a bird that he was whittling from a scrap of driftwood.

‘But the silver bird said to the chieftain’s daughter, “I cannot spare you a feather from my wing, for I need them all to fly with, and I have a long way to go,”’ Uncle Widreth was saying. ‘And the chieftain’s daughter burst out weeping with temper, and stamped and threw her bannock on the ground.’ He always talked to the children in his mother’s tongue (even if she was a seal, it would have been her human tongue) which was why Beornwulf had been able to translate between Owain and the people of the farm in the Thorn Forest.

‘Was there honey on it?’ demanded Helga.

‘There was honey on it, and it fell honey-side down in the very middle of her father the chieftain’s best cloak, which was spread out to dry in the sun because it was the time for the summer washing,’ murmured Uncle Widreth sadly.

There was a gasp of shocked delight from his hearers.

Owain, looking on and listening with half an ear while he gentled Dog’s head against his thigh, thought suddenly that it would be good to be able to create something, even if it was only a foolish tale for children or a rather crude little bird of silvery driftwood that yet looked surprisingly as though it might be able to fly. Dully he felt that the power to create would be a kind of freedom …

The story was drawing to a close. ‘And so her father beat her with his sword-belt, and her mother beat her with her spindle, and she was very sore, my children, and so she deserved to be.’

‘But the bird? What happened to the little bird, Uncle Widreth?’

‘Ah now, the silver bird spread his wings, and flew home to his own mistress across the sea, who had been waiting for him all that time,’ said Uncle Widreth, and dropped the scrap of carved driftwood into the small eager hands stretched out for it. And leaving the two little girls to huddle enchanted over their new treasure, he looked up at Owain leaning against the pea stack beside him. ‘What are you thinking, way up there? Are you thinking: What a very foolish old man; surely he has lived so long that he has gone round in a circle and become a child again?’

‘I was thinking,’ Owain said, ‘that I wish I could make things. Oh, I don’t mean just things to use—I’m good with my hands; I can make or mend any farm tool well enough—but things that have life in them. I think I should not mind this thrall-ring round my neck quite so much, if I could make things.’

Uncle Widreth’s beaky old face was touched suddenly with a gentleness greater than the gentleness he kept for the children. ‘It comes hard, when one is young … I remember when I did not like to be only poor silly Widreth, midway between the farm folk and my brothers—knowing that I was my father’s eldest son.’

And looking down at him, Owain wondered for the first time whether Uncle Widreth really believed in the seal-woman mother, or whether she was just a young man’s pitiful attempt to save his pride. All at once he saw himself grown old too, and clinging to some self-made heroic story of how he had been taken in battle after killing thirty men with his own sword. And for a moment he could have howled like a dog, both for Uncle Widreth and for himself.

‘When you are my age,’ the old man was saying, ‘when you are my age, you will have learned how little all things matter. Life is fierce with the young, and maybe more gentle with the old. Only, while one is young, there is always the hope that one day something will happen; that one day a little wind will rise …’

Even as the old quiet voice droned away into silence, Owain felt Dog’s ears prick under his caressing hand, and the great hound raised his head to listen. For a few moments the sound was too distant for human hearing, and then Owain caught it too, the faint tripple of a horse’s hooves on the old paved road from Regnum.

He moved a long stride to the end of the pea stack, and looked out in the direction from which it came. A man on a red colt had appeared from the long shadows of the oakwoods and was heading towards the farm at a lazy hand-canter. It was not often that one saw a horse on that stretch of the road, for not much more than a mile northward the long curving sea-arm that made the Seals’ Island almost an island in truth as well as name, cut across it, and travellers had to rouse up old Munna who had his bothy and his boat there, to ferry them over. But at low tide the creek ran almost dry, revealing here and there the sunken stones of an old paved ford, and it was possible for a man who knew the land and the tides and the drift of the sandbanks to get across on horse-back.

Such a man was Haegel the King.

Three times before, since Owain had followed his new master south, Haegel had come, unheralded and alone, as a man may drop in to sit by a friend’s hearth and drink his ale and re-fight old battles or discuss the harvest prospects. Owain had thought it strange, the first time, but that was before he knew that Haegel, put out to foster after the way of the Saxon nobles, had been bred up here on the farm, so that he and Beornwulf were foster brothers. He knew that now, and that Beornwulf had been one of the young King’s hearth-companions in his high Hall close to Regnum. (Regnum was like Viroconium now, and they called it Cissa’s Caester, which sounded more like a sneeze than the name of a city; Cissa’s Stronghold, after one of Aelle’s fierce sons.) That had been before Beornwulf’s father had died and the time had come for him to take over the farm and marry and settle down; but still the old friendship held, and Beornwulf continued to serve his foster brother not merely as a land holder with a spear serves his King, but in other, nearer and more private ways. Owain had a suspicion that it had been some mission for Haegel that had carried him up into the Thorn Forest, a year ago last spring. And still Haegel the King came to sit by Beornwulf’s hearth with an ale horn on his knee and to laugh at ancient jests with him.

‘It is the King,’ he said over his shoulder to Uncle Widreth. ‘I must go,’ and strode off round the pea stack and in at the steading gate.

Beornwulf liked him to be there when a guest came, to take his horse if he had one, and when Athelis the mistress could not come, to pour the guest-cup for him. The bondwoman was a clumsy creature, and did little honour to a guest, but Owain had been well trained by his father, and carried himself even now like a ten point stag, which is to say like a king; and Beornwulf, had he known it, was proud of his Roman-British thrall. But Owain did not know it; he only knew that because the King had come he might not be free all evening.