Dawn Wind (14 page)

A few moments later, Haegel swung in through the gate-gap, and he stepped forward to take the red colt from him as he drew rein. The King was darker than his foster brother, very dark for a Saxon, with level eyes set deep under his brows, and a thinker’s mouth. The evening sunlight that turned the colt’s hide to burnished copper glinted on the necklace of coral and gold beads under his beard, and the wind ruffled the colt’s mane and the breast feathers of the hooded falcon on his fist.

Beornwulf’s hounds, who knew him, ceased baying and came with Dog sniffing round the colt’s fetlocks, and Haegel swung his leg over and dropped into their midst, laughing as he turned to his foster brother who had come out to greet him. ‘Ah, it is good to be home! Some part of my heart still cries out “Home again!” whenever I cross into the Seals’ Island.’

‘And all of mine cries out “My brother is home to his own place,” for I knew it was you as soon as I heard the dogs bay,’ Beornwulf said. ‘How went the hawking?’

‘Well enough. We have been flying at the wild fowl between the Haven Marshes and Bremma’s Dyke. Now I have sent the others home with the hounds, and come to drink the bairn’s health. Son or daughter? I have heard that there is a new bairn, but no more.’

‘Another daughter,’ said Beornwulf, and pulled a wry face.

‘So? Ah well, we have each one son to carry our shields after us.’

Haegel turned towards the house-place, his arm flung across his foster brother’s shoulders.

Owain took the horse round to the stable and handed him over to Caedman his fellow thrall, then went round to the store-room behind the house-place, to fetch Beornwulf’s own drinking horn and a jar of their best ale.

When he returned to the two men they had not gone in, but were sitting on the bench by the foreporch door, their feet stretched before them, talking quietly in the way of men both tired at the day’s end. Haegel the King was making much of his falcon, drawing his finger again and again down her back so that she bobbed her hooded head and hunched her wings in pleasure. They were not talking of family matters now, and nor were they laughing at ancient jests.

‘I still think the day is not far off when we may have to defend our own,’ Beornwulf was saying. ‘It is as I told you; the West Saxon Kingdom grows over strong for safety—our safety—since Ceawlin broke the last of the British, two years and more ago.’

Owain checked an instant in his movements, then bent and set the great horn, with its copper and silver mounting, into the hand that Haegel held for it, and filled it to the brim.

‘Wass heil!’
Haegel said, and drank, and gave it back. ‘Good fortune on the house and on the newest flower of the house!’ And then, returning to the thing that they were really talking of, ‘I wonder—oh, I think with you that the day will come for calling out the warriors again; but I do not read the signs quite as you read them, for all that.’

Beornwulf took the ale horn in his turn. ‘How do you read them, Haegel the King?’ he said, and flung back his head and drank.

And Haegel put out his hand for the horn again, but when he had it, only sat with it on his knee, staring into the amber depths, while Owain, standing by with the ale jar, to pour for them again as soon as the horn was drained, felt his heart quicken with an odd expectancy, as though what passed between them had some personal meaning for himself.

‘I read them—I think—in this way,’ the King of the South Saxons said at last. ‘Ceawlin is a great war-leader; one of those whose shadow stretches far like the shadow of a man at sunrise, but it is in my mind that he abides too much by his own strength, and does not understand the hearts of men, nor even see the need to understand them … See now, his own sons and his brother’s sons alike carried their shields for him in the Great Fight, when he broke the last power of the Princes; and to Coel and Coelwulf, his brother’s sons, he has given maybe half of the new-won lands to rule between them; and to Cuthgils, the Chiltern uplands to hold. And for his own sons he has kept all else, from Londinium to the Sabrina’s Sea, and from the Mid-lands to the coast.’

‘They are his sons,’ Beornwulf said.

‘Yet his brother’s sons will surely say, “We also fought for the Kingdom, and now Wessex is great. Why then is our share so small?” and so may come trouble on Ceawlin’s threshold later. And that, I think, will be the chance of those who do not love Ceawlin—notably Aethelbert of Kent.’

‘Aethelbert?’ Beornwulf sounded surprised. ‘Why the King of Kent, more than another one?’

‘For the memory of Wibbendune.’

‘That must be five and twenty years ago. Would he still carry hatred for a worsting in battle before his beard was grown, think you?”

‘Quite easily. You know him only as a name, one of the mighty line of the Oiscings, great grandson of Hengest himself. But I am King of Sussex, and he is the High King and in some sort my Overlord, and I have sat at his table. He is not like the rest of his line, not a warrior at heart; he has the kind of cold merchant nature that hates well and hates long …’ He took up the ale horn and drained it, then handed it to Owain to be refilled, and fell to caressing his falcon again.

Owain wondered if they had forgotten that after a year and more among them he could speak their tongue; then he understood. It was because he was a thrall that they spoke so freely in front of him; a thrall who was of no account in the pattern of things, and whose word would carry less weight than a blade of grass.

‘Also he is rich with the gold that his Frankish Princess brought him, rich enough maybe, to buy his revenge one day and set himself and his Kingdom above the West Saxons once and for all—and clever enough to know when and how to make the purchase. But if ever that day comes, the gold and the skill and the cunning will flow underground, like the seven secret rivers that flow through our South Saxon Land; and above ground there will be fighting, and it is we that shall be doing it, even as you say, my brother.’

He shook his head as Beornwulf offered him the horn again. ‘Na na, I must be away before the tide drowns the ford. The red colt takes some handling, moreover; nor am I Vadir Cedricson to ride as well drunk as sober.’

Beornwulf laughed. ‘Aye well, by your reading as well as by mine, it seems that the old fiery days are back. Now that there are no more British to fight, we fight each other.’ He shook out the last few drops of ale in a dark spatter on the ground, which was instantly licked up by the dogs, and gave the horn to his British thrall, bidding him take it away.

And Owain, carrying horn and ale jar back to their places, heard the voices of the two men murmuring on, but could think of no excuse to come near enough to hear anything more that passed between them. He did not fully understand all that he had heard, for he had no knowledge of the way in which gold and the power of gold might be used in roundabout ways, to undermine loyalties or sow the seeds of distrust in men’s minds, but he knew from bitter experience that one could not feed and arm a war-host without it. And echoing in the back of his mind, as he went to see that the red colt was ready when Haegel called for him, was something that Uncle Widreth had said a little earlier: ‘Only while one is young, there is always the hope that one day something will happen; that one day a little wind will rise …’

Yet it did not seem likely that a Saxon war would raise much wind in the fortunes of a British thrall.

B
UT
two years went by, and no more word of Ceawlin’s nephews came down through the Maen Wood, the Common Wood that lay shaggy between Regnum and the Seals’ Island. No wind arose, only men and hounds grew older.

A spring evening came, when all across the marsh the hawthorn was in flower, the scent of it coming and going on the soft damp air, breathing in at the open house-place doorway to mingle with the tang of wood smoke and the all-pervading fish-reek of the eels smoking over the hearth.

Owain, sitting at the lower end with Gyrth and Caedman, the two half-bred farm thralls, looked up from the flail whose leather hinge he was renewing, and glanced about him in the light of the seal-oil lamp on the roof-beam. The whole household were gathered about the hearth after the evening food, the master of the house and his thralls alike busy with the making and mending of harness and farm gear, Athelis the mistress sitting with her stool turned to catch the best light, finishing off the hanging ends of the piece of blue and brown striped cloth that she had cut from the loom that morning, while a little behind her the bondwoman, sleeves rolled to her shoulders, ground the next day’s barley-meal in the stone quern. Uncle Widreth had been telling them a story, but it had got slower and drowsier as it went along, and now he slept, his back propped against the roof-tree, his thin grasshopper shanks drawn up almost to his chin, and his breath making little puffs in the grey hairs of his beard. The children too were asleep, like puppies tumbled with the dogs around the fire, Helga and Lilla and little Gerd, round and sweet as three brown barley-loaves warm from the bakestone, blue-eyed—when their eyes were open—and barley-haired. Bryni had abandoned his family to sleep by himself at the lower end of the fire, with his head on Dog’s brindled flank—a freedom which Dog, lying sprawled in the best place beside the fire which he had won for himself by right of conquest from Beornwulf’s hounds, would not have allowed to any other of the children. Bryni bore no resemblance whatever to a barley-loaf. The hair tumbling across his forehead was gold with a rust of red in it. It was his mother’s hair, but the devilish green glint in his eyes was all his own. Now, however, with his eyes shut and the flush of the fire on his cheek, it was hard to believe what Bryni was like when he was awake, hard to believe that only today, having been slapped for stealing honey cakes, he and Horn the Smith’s youngest son had met halfway to the settlement and decided to run away together. Luckily for them, it had been Owain who found them.

The rhythmic grinding and grating of the quern was loud in the silence left by Uncle Widreth’s half-finished story. No other sound save the small secret flutter of the flames and the cry of a marsh-bird far off, broke the quiet, until Athelis straightened from her work and shook out the cloth, folding it across and across with a snapping, capable gesture of finish. ‘There! That is done, and I might as well smoor the fire for the night. Half the household is asleep already, by the look of it, and the Old One will be nodding himself into the flames if he sits there much longer.’

She rose, and laid the gay striped cloth away in the kist with the carved worm-knots, against the gable wall; then caught up Gerd, still half asleep, under one arm, and turned towards the inner room, the Bower. The bondwoman was scooping the coarse barley-meal into its bag, and at the lower end of the fire the thralls, following Beornwulf, laid aside their work and stretched. Gyrth and Caedman grunted their good-nights, and stumbled away up the ladder to the half-loft in the crown of the roof where they slept close under the thatch. But Beornwulf himself took down one of the steading’s two lanterns that hung beside the foreporch door, and opening the horn pane, stooped to light the candle at the fire. ‘I think I will go and take a look at Golden-eye before I sleep.’

‘I’ll go,’ Owain said.

Beornwulf looked at him consideringly as he closed the lantern. Then he nodded. ‘Go then. But come and tell me at once if she’s uneasy.’

It was a measure of the place that Owain had won with him; for Golden-eye was his favourite mare, and due to foal in a few days, and most assuredly he would not have trusted Gyrth or Caedman in the matter.

Owain took the lantern from him and went out with Dog at his heels. Faint wraiths of mist lay across the levels, the thorn trees rising knee-deep out of them, but overhead the sky was clear, and the young moon floated like a curved feather above the woods, as he made his way round to the back of the steading. They had moved Golden-eye out of the usual grazing ground that morning, for it was her first foal and the other mares were inclined to bother her, and put her by herself in the little close between the steading and the curve of the main windbreak.

Among the apple trees behind the steading buildings, the mist rags drifted into his face like cool cobwebs, touched with gold by the light of the swinging lantern. He came to the narrow gap of the hind-gate, and pulled away the dead thorn branches that closed it. He stood in the gate-gap, whistled, and waited. Usually the little vixenish mare with the gleam of gold in her eyes would come to that call, but tonight there was no answering whinny, and no dark shape came trotting out of the mist. He whistled again, and then, as there was still no reply, strode out into the close, with the lantern held high.

It was only a slip of pasture between windbreak and steading, and even in the mist and darkness, a quick look round was enough to show him that Golden-eye was not there; and a torn-down place in the hedge told all too clearly the way she had gone. Owain stood for a moment, thinking. Curse the little beast; wilful and unsettled in the way of foaling mares, she had probably broken out to get back to the others. He ducked through the hole in the hedge, and headed for the grazing ground, whistling as he went. The other two mares were there safe enough, already lain down to sleep; but of Golden-eye, no sign.