Dawn Wind (18 page)

And he got to his feet, a little clumsy as always, and turned to speak to Beornwulf about whatever business had brought him across the Seals’ Island.

Owain got up slowly, his fists clenched at his sides. But the years of thraldom had taught him that a thrall does not avenge an insult; and that lesson was more bitter than the insult itself. One of the other men, newly returned from the fields, had come to take the master’s horse. And Beornwulf, interrupting his guest for the moment, was calling someone to spread earth over the blood and mess on the ground. Then to Owain he said, with a rough sympathy in his tone, ‘Do what there is to do with the dog, but before that, get one of the women to salve those bites.’

Then he turned into his house-place with Vadir his guest.

O
WAIN
stood where he was, looking down at himself. He was very bloody, and some of the blood was his own. He was fang-gashed and bitten in a dozen places, but he had not known it until that moment; it was only the surface of his mind that knew it now. ‘Do what there is to do with the dog,’ Beornwulf had said. When any of the farm animals died, if the flesh was not fit for man, they gave it to the dogs, but when it was a dog that died, they could not do that, for it was Taboo, a Forbidden Thing, to feed an animal on the flesh of its own kind. For a dog, then, one scraped out a hole as shallow or as deep as one had time to spare for, in the woods beyond the Intake, and pushed a little earth back over, and hoped for the best.

Still moving slowly as though he had had a knock on the head and was half dazed, he went to get a spade and the narrow wooden sledge they used for carcasses at the autumn slaughtering.

Somebody helped him to lift Dog on to it—the other he left lying: let Vadir see to his own—and taking up the ropes of twisted straw, he turned to the gateway.

Half-way along the side of the forest field, which was up for barley, he found Bryni trotting beside him. ‘Na,’ he said, ‘go home. It is time for supper.’

‘I am not hungry.’

He stopped in his tracks and turned to look at the boy. Bryni’s face, usually crimson when he was angry, showed white under his tan, and he drew his breath in little sobbing gasps. ‘I’ll kill him for this!’ he said. ‘I will! I’ll kill him!’

Owain shook his head wearily. ‘That is foolish talk. You are only ten years old.’

‘I shall not always be ten years old. One day I shall be a man, and when I’m a man, I shall kill him!’

And somehow, piercing through the dull ache of his own desolation, the certainty reached Owain that it was no empty threat made in the moment of heart-break, to be forgotten tomorrow. This was a threat that would be remembered; and something must be done about it. ‘Listen, Bryni. Vadir has many kin, and if you killed him they would demand your death or much wyr-gold. And because you are your father’s only son, he would try to raise the gold—and with no kin to help him, for remember that when a man leaves the settlement as your forefather did, though he may remain friends with the kin he leaves behind him, he loses all claim to their help in a man-slaying. The ruin of all your folk is too heavy a price to pay for avenging a thrall’s cur.’

‘Dog wasn’t just a thrall’s cur, he was one of the war-hounds of Kyndylan the Fair—you said so yourself.’ The boy’s voice broke in passionate grief, and his face was working.

‘I said it myself, and if anyone were to avenge him, it should be me. Go home, now.’

‘Let me come with you—’

Owain touched the boy’s shoulder, kindly enough. ‘Go home, I said. I shall manage better alone.’

For a moment Bryni resisted, then he turned away with a sob. ‘But I
will
kill him! I
will
kill him!’

Owain stood to watch him stumbling back towards the steading, hearing the desperate mutter that he was not meant to hear. Why had he spoken to the boy so? What did it matter to him if a Saxon whelp brought ruin on a Saxon family? Slowly he turned, and went on alone, leaning forward to the pull of the laden sledge behind him.

In a little the long shadows of the oakwoods reached out to claim him, and he turned westward along the woodshore, heading for the ruined shrine. It would be less lonely for Dog’s bones to lie where men had been, than quite away in the wild; and though he had been bred a Christian, a long time ago, Owain had some confused idea that Silvanus who was the God of flocks and herds and woodland things, to whom men had sacrificed in thanks for a good day’s hunting, would surely receive a dog kindly and cast the cloak of his protection over him.

It was not really very far, not so far as it had seemed in the darkness and the mist, when he had come that way searching for Golden-eye on the night that Teitri was born. In a while he saw the pale glimmer of broken walls through the low-hanging branches, and turning aside into the remains of the sacred clearing, stopped before the shrine. He knew now what the shadow was that he had felt in this place before.

It did not take very long to make the hole big enough—though he dug it deep against foxes—for the earth of the oakwoods was soft and crumbling, and the ground just there was free from tree roots. And when it was done he turned to lift Dog from the sledge. But he did not like to think of Dog’s beautiful brindled black and amber hide and the creamy breast fouled by the dark earth; it was fouled and draggled with blood, but that was a bright and honourable fouling; the earth would be different.

So he broke sprays of leaves from the bushes round about, and spread them in the bottom of the hole, and then on his knees lifted Dog’s body and eased it over the edge. It fell soft and still lithe, and at the feel of it, pain tore at Owain like a spear turning in a wound. He settled Dog with nose on forepaws as he used to lie, and stroked his head for the last time, then began to lay the rest of the green stuff in place, with a confused prayer to the Lord of the shrine. ‘O Silvanus—here is a hound, not a hunting-dog, but he was a good dog. They used to call you the Lord of all fourfooted things—Spread your cloak over him—’ He was pushing the earth in again, pressing it down with his hands. Now there was only one spray of leaves left to show; and now there was nothing left at all. He beat down the mound of earth hard and firm, and heaved a fallen column head across it to make it safer.

It was finished now, and there was nothing more that he could do; nothing left but to go back to the steading with no sound of Dog’s feet padding behind him. But the entrance to the shrine was before him, full of shadows; and when he got up, he did not turn back to the steading, but went forward into the shrine, as into refuge.

He had never been inside before, being held back by a superstitious fear. But there was nothing there but quietness, after all, not even the smell of an enclosed space, for it had gone back to the wild so long ago that its smell was the same as the woods outside. Owain sat down against the furthest wall, which still stood for most of its height, and drawing his knife from his belt, began to whet it on a fallen stone beside him. Dog’s blood was still on the blade, like rust, and a great patch of it, dried black now, clotted his breeks to his thigh where Dog’s head had lain.

He went on and on whetting the knife, only half realizing what he did, but going on doing it, all the same, his purpose growing like a slow black cloud in his mind. It was not only that Dog was dead, and Uncle Widreth, and Teitri gone from him, but that, quite simply, he saw no point in going on any longer. If there was anything in the distance, however far off, it would have been another matter; but there was not anything; just days, and days, and days, stretching before him. It was Vadir’s insult and his own failure to avenge it, almost as much as the loss of Dog, that had shown him that unchanging unbearable waste of days …

The westering sun, that had been hidden all day, slipped out from under the low roof of cloud, and a shaft of light fell across the sanctuary through a breach in its wall, piercing into the darkest corner where Owain sat whetting and whetting his knife. Close beside his foot, where he had scuffed the leaf-mould aside in sitting down, something gave off a spark of blue fire.

It caught Owain’s attention. Maybe it was a loose bead from a necklace that someone had left for a votive offering. Still holding his knife in his other hand, he reached out and felt about. Not a loose bead; not anything loose at all. It was part of the floor. Idly, he scratched up a bit more of the dark crumbling mould, and more of the blue came to light; blue glass cubes, used with cubes of chalk and red and yellow sandstone in the fine tesserae that must have formed the sanctuary floor. Shape and pattern began to emerge, a little bird worked out with rare skill, the blue glass forming its wings and mantle; then something under it, on which it was perching—a narrow human hand.

The act of doing something, finding something and being even a little interested in what he found, seemed to make the dark cloud draw off a little; and he scraped and scrabbled on, the loose black soil formed by the drifted leaves of a hundred summers crumbling easily away under his fingers. In a little, he had cleared a medallion surrounded by a delicate border of ivy leaves and berries, and was looking at the half-length figure of a girl with a bird in one hand and a blossoming branch in the other. Part of the border had been destroyed by the roots of something that had grown through it, but the little figure was perfect, delicately charming and full of joy. Summer, autumn, and winter would be in the other corners of the shrine—it was a common enough subject—and maybe Silvanus himself in the centre; but Owain had no interest in the rest of the pavement, only in this corner, the spring corner, which reminded him of something, someone …

The shaft of sunset light had faded, and the girl’s figure was softening into the shadows. The elusive memory seemed fading too; in another moment it would have gone from him and he would have lost it for all time. And he didn’t want to lose it, he didn’t want—something within him reached out desperately to catch at the thing in that last instant, and then he had it, like a bird cupped in his hands.

He had scarcely thought of Regina for years. Long ago it had seemed to him that she must have died, and even his memory of her had grown thin and pale so that he could see through it as one sees through a curl of wood smoke. Now, suddenly, he was remembering more vividly than he had ever remembered anything in his life before, Regina coming towards him, her thin face sparkling with a kind of grave delight, holding out her hands to him with the tit cupped between them; the jewel-blue of its cap just visible between her palms, the blue flash and the whirr of wings as she set it free.

The impression was so strong that it was like a physical touch, as though in that moment something in Regina had reached out to touch something in himself, to make a kind of life-line between them, as she had done on the night that they had found Ulpius Pudentius; but that time it had been for her to cling to; this time it was for him.

From that moment he knew with absolute certainty that even if he never saw her again, Regina was alive, and because he knew that, he could go on.

The sun was quite gone, even from the world outside, and the shadows were rising like water in the sanctuary, when Owain slipped his knife back into his belt. He scattered the black leaf-mould again over the corner of the pavement that he had cleared, hiding the girl and the bird and the flowering branch; then he got up, slowly, for his bites had stiffened on him, and went out, stepping round the mound of fresh earth and the pale column head that marked Dog’s grave, and taking up the slack ropes of the slaughter sledge, set out for the steading.

It was almost dark when, having left the sledge in its usual place in the big store-shed and washed off the worst of the dried blood, he came to the house-place door. The evening meal was over, but the family and the thralls were still gathered in the firelight about the long hearth. He was thankful to see that Vadir and his red hounds were not there; the Beornstead hounds lay among the strewing fern, still licking their wounds, but he felt nothing against them, nothing even against Fang now. They had merely followed the law of the pack, that when the leader’s strength begins to wane, a new leader takes his place. Vadir was another matter.