Dawn Wind (3 page)

N
OT
much more than a mile beyond the river, the road forked, the left hand branch running south-westward to Isca Silurium, the City of Legions, and the right striking off through the hill country to join at last with the great military road that ran like a frontier north and south along the wild marches of the Cymru. Once on that road, Owain knew that he would only have to keep walking long enough, to come to Viroconium at last. So leaving the pathetic string of refugees to go straggling off down the southern branch, he turned right, and lurched off north-westward, alone save for the hound padding behind him.

After that he lost all count of time, so that he did not know whether it was one or two days later, or even three, when he awoke to the certainty that he had gone astray. It did not seem possible, not with the road leading on and on in front of him, but somehow it had happened.

He stumbled to a halt, and stood looking about him like someone who has just walked out of a rolling smoke-cloud into clear air and found himself not where he expected to be. But he knew that the clear air would not last, that was the trouble. He felt a cold muzzle thrust into the palm of his sound hand; Dog pressed against him, looking up and whining, and he rubbed the hound’s rough head without thought, as he stood staring rather desperately about him. If he held on across country he was bound, somewhere, some time, to strike the frontier road that he was making for. But quite suddenly he knew that he was very nearly at the end of his strength.

It was growing late, too, the sun low and glaring under brows of angry fire-fringed cloud, and the wind that swept towards him from the high hills of Cymru had the smell of storm in it as well as the smell of the mountains.

He was on the point of turning down-valley to try to find some sheltered corner of the woods before the storm was upon him, when a very small thing happened. A grey wagtail flew across his path. Caught by the quick movement, his eyes followed it—and he found himself looking at a little irregular corn patch on the hillside above him. It was roughly walled with stones grubbed up from the red earth of the hillside when the land was cleared; the wagtail had alighted on the wall and was flirting its tail up and down.

Where there was tilled land, the farm steading could not be far away. If he could find it, they would tell him how far he was astray; maybe if the woman was kind she would give him a drink of buttermilk—he was beyond wanting food, sick with the pain of his wound, but the thought of cool buttermilk tugged at him—and let him sleep in the barn until the coming storm was over. Perhaps from the corn plot he might be able to see the steading. He gathered up his wounded arm again, and leaving the track, began to stumble up the hillside, Dog, puzzled but willing, at his side. It seemed a long way, but he reached the plot at last, and stood clinging to the piled grey stones, while the world swam and jiggled before his eyes. But in a few moments the wind from the hills seemed to clear his head a little, and then with a sob of relief he saw the steading, which had been hidden from the track by the rising ground.

It stood at the end of a shallow combe, a cluster of two or three turf-thatched bothies and a cattle fold, all within its grey encircling wall, like any other of the small hill farms; but its house-place walls were limewashed in the Roman manner, and shone harshly white in the sunlight. Owain remained where he was for a few moments, clinging to the wall and shivering, but he knew that if he was to reach shelter he must reach it soon. He thrust off from the wall like a swimmer thrusting off from shore, and began to stumble through the fern towards the blurred gleam of the distant limewashed walls.

For a long time the steading seemed to get no nearer, and then suddenly it was there. The gap in the low stone wall was clear, and Owain lurched through. He saw the dark opening in the house-place wall, and the dim red glimmer of firelight inside, and stumbled towards it.

Something moved in the gloom, and a woman appeared in the doorway. A tall iron-grey woman in a skimpy dust-coloured tunic, with a copper cooking spoon in one hand, and her hair knotted up on top of her head as though she would stand no nonsense from it or from anything else. ‘Well?’ she began before she had time to see who or what it was on her threshold. ‘What is it? What do you want? Be quick, I can’t stand here all day.’

Owain leaned his sound shoulder against the rowan wood doorpost. ‘Viroconium,’ he mumbled thickly. ‘I—missed the road—can you tell me—tell me—‘He saw her face very clearly, a long bony face with iron grey hairs sprouting singly here and there on the chin. But something very strange was happening to it, it was swimming towards him, growing larger and larger as though to overwhelm him. His shoulder seemed to lose the doorpost, and with no more fuss and turmoil than a small tired sigh, he crumpled across the threshold.

He could not have been unconscious for more than a heartbeat of time, for dimly through the roaring darkness he heard the woman cry out sharply for somebody called Priscus, and Dog’s warning sing-song snarl, and even managed to mumble something that quieted and reassured the hound before he flew at anybody. He heard also the quick pad of footsteps, and a man’s voice asking a startled question.

Then from a very great distance, the woman’s voice again. ‘How in Our Lord’s name should I know who he is? Ceawlin of the Saxons or the Bishop of Gwynedd maybe; I can’t have him cluttering up my threshold. Take his heels, man, or do I have to carry him alone?’

‘Do but give me a moment, my dove,’ said the man’s voice. ‘It is not every hour of every day one finds a stranger lying across one’s door-sill. Where do you want him?’

‘By the fire. Where else should I want him?’

Owain felt himself lifted and carried a few scuffling steps, and laid down again on the softness of strewn bracken. He tried to open his eyes, then shut them again hurriedly because everything was spinning. He tried to tell the woman that he would do well enough if she would just let him lie still for a while, but no sound would come. Yet when the woman spoke again, her voice seemed to come from a little nearer. But maybe that was only because she was leaning over him. ‘Look now, he is only a child, after all.’

‘Old enough to be at a man’s work of kill and be killed, seemingly.’

The woman snorted. ‘He’s scarce dry from the egg for all that … Go now and draw some water and put it on to heat, while I get this stinking tunic off him. Milk too, today’s milk; and leave me your knife. I shall want it.’

The agony of having the short leather sleeve cut away from his wound acted on Owain like a douche of cold water on the face of a sleeper, making him gasp and shudder but bringing him back to the urgent business of living. He opened his eyes again. The world was still swimming, but not so wildly, and he could see the woman’s face bent over him, her lips tightly folded as she worked. She clucked sharply at the sight of the wound. He had not had his tunic off since the battle, and he supposed vaguely that it must be ugly to look at. Then she saw that his eyes were open, and said scoldingly, ‘Hold still. If you are man enough to get yourself a wound the like of this one, you are man enough to bide still while I tend it.’

And a little later, slowly and grumblingly, as though she tried not to ask the question but something dragged it out of her: ‘Was it the Saxons?’

Owain tried again to speak, and this time the words came, though thick and stammering. ‘Yes—the Saxons.’

‘Where?’ she said. ‘What happened?’ and then quickly, ‘Na na, I am an impatient old woman; let it keep for a while.’

But he contrived to stammer out an answer, all the same. ‘Hard by Aquae Sulis. We—met the Saxons there. Kyndylan is dead, and Conmail and Farinmail—all our fighting men.’ It seemed to him odd that the world had come to an end and she did not know about it; and he added accusingly: ‘They knew in Glevum.’

‘We are not Glevum,’ the woman said. ‘No one has come up the drove road for days before you came. How then should we know?’

The man she had called Priscus was back, accompanied by the rattle of a pail as he set it down, and she said to him: ‘The Princes are dead, he says, and the Saxons have overwhelmed our men by Aquae Sulis. Pour some water into the crock and set it to heat, then bring me some clean rags from the chest yonder; is it that I have to tell you everything?’

‘No, Priscilla my dove, but let us agree that you generally do,’ said the man, with what sounded even to Owain’s confused ear like a tremor of amusement.

The rest of that evening, and the nights and days that followed, passed for Owain in a queer hot dream. The storm that he had smelled at sunset broke over the hills before full dark, and the hushing of rain across the thatch and the booming of the three-day summer gale seemed to be part of his own wild unrest, while the throbbing of his wound somehow broke loose from his body and filled all the night with jagged fork-tongued flames. Sometimes the confusion rolled back a little and he was cloudily aware of lying on piled yellow bracken against the wall, of the sharp increase of pain when the wound was tended, and sometimes the woman’s long grey face and sometimes the man’s which was round and pink, bending over him; and always the brindled prick-eared shape of Dog sitting watchful at his side; the taste of milk and medicine-herbs mingling with the sour taste of fever in his mouth, and somebody pulling up the rug and scolding him as often as he threw it off because he was so hot.

Once he woke out of blackness to see the woman’s face bending over him very close and hear her saying fiercely, ‘That’s better. Now drink this, and don’t you
dare
slip through my fingers after all the care I’ve spent on you! There is no need for you to die now, and if you do it will be nothing but ingratitude to the Lord who gave you life—and ingratitude is a thing I cannot and will not abide!’

He thought, looking back on it, that that was near the end of the fiery time, and it was not long after that he woke in an early morning and found his wound cool and his head clear, and saw Dog’s anxious ears pricked against the silken paleness of the doorway and heard the dunghill cock crowing, a shining lily-shape of sound in the grey dawn outside.

After that it was only a matter of getting well again; but it took a good while. The wound itself would not have laid him by for long if it had been tended at the first, but with long neglect it had become very sick, and he had been in a raging fever when he fell across Priscus’s door-sill. Now he lay flat and silent under the striped native rug against the wall, eating whatever he was given, and sleeping, and staring up at the smoke-hole above him that showed sometimes grey and sometimes blue and sometimes had a star in, seen and lost and seen again as the hearth smoke fronded upward; scratching at the healing scar on his arm when he could do it without Priscilla noticing, while the life of the little hill farm went on around him, and slowly, day by day, the strength began to trickle back into his body.

Dog stayed with him almost all the while, sometimes sleeping with his warm chin on his Lord’s chest, sometimes sitting alert and upright beside him, his tail giving a short burst of thumps every time he moved; and every time the woman Priscilla came to tend the wound, making a small soft warning in his throat, not deep enough for a growl nor menacing enough for a snarl, as though he would say only, very gently, ‘Remember, if you harm him—I am here.’

‘So it has been since the beginning,’ snapped Priscilla. ‘I’d have driven him away long before this, or tied him up outside, but well I know that if I tried to do any such thing the brute would bite me.’ But she gave Dog the bones from the evening stew with quite a lot of meat still on them, all the same.

It was long past midsummer before Owain could get on to his feet again, and clad in an old tunic of Priscus’s, he crawled out, feeling as though his bones were made of wet leather, to sit in the house-place doorway and watch the lean pig rooting in the midden, and busy himself with the odd bits of making and mending that are always needed about a farm.

One still summer evening with the swallows flying high among the shining midge-cloud, he sat in his accustomed place, with his back propped against the doorpost, and Dog sleeping beside him flat out with his creamy underparts to the last warmth of the sun. He was making a new ox-collar of plaited straw, working a little awkwardly because his arm was still stiff, but making a strong well finished job of it, all the same, for he had always been good with his hands. Priscilla, who was preparing the evening meal, had come out to see how he was getting on, and both of them were watching Priscus, who had just brought the little black cow in for milking, and was having trouble getting her through the steading gate.

Priscilla made the snorting sound in her throat that with her passed for laughter. ‘A dear good man he is, and he never complains that this isn’t the life he was bred to. But it’s easy to see he’s no farmer.’

Owain tipped back his head and looked up at her, the half made ox-collar in his hands. ‘Not a farmer?’

‘Does he look like it? He was a master potter—the best potter in Glevum, though I, his wife, say it. But folk don’t buy fine bowls and pitchers for their tables any more.’ She sighed. ‘I miss the smells and bustle of Glevum sometimes, even now.’

Priscus had succeeded in folding the cow by this time, and in a little, Priscilla would go down to milk her. Owain took some more of the yellow straw beside him, and laid it into his braid. ‘They were pouring out of Glevum when I came through,’ he said slowly. ‘They had heard how the battle went. There was a family with all their goods and the grandmother on a hand-cart—and a girl with two doves in a willow cage. They all stared at me as though I were a ghost.’

‘As well they might,’ said Priscilla. ‘For sure enough you looked like one when you fell across my door-sill.’

Owain was silent for a while, his fingers busy with the plaited straw, his thoughts still with that pathetic straggle of refugees. ‘They were heading south-west,’ he said, ‘all of them heading south-west. Where would they go?’