The Shining Company (3 page)

The Master Smith turned the thing on his leather-aproned knee, and I saw that it was a dagger, and guessed that the merchant must have brought it down to have something done to it. Normally Loban would have left that kind of small repair job to one of his underlings; it must be that the merchant was an old friend, or the dagger had something special about it to make it worthy of his attention.

I drew nearer to look, Conn just behind me as usual, and saw that indeed the dagger was not like any that ever I had seen before. The slim bluish blade on which the light through the alder leaves played like water, the like of
that
I had seen before among Loban’s finest blades; but the hilt was strange to me. The hilt was a wonder. Of chiselled silver, the grip shaped like a human figure - no, not human, not mortal, that is, a fierce and austere male archangel clad in its own close-folded wings, the head with its gilded halo forming the pommel, the feet strong planted on the cross-piece.

Loban looked up as my shadow fell across his work, and said, ‘If you are minded to watch, then sit you and watch, but do not you be standing there stealing my daylight from me.’

I muttered an apology and squatted down on to my heels. Looking up at the owner of the dagger I found him watching me with a glint of amusement in his eyes. Strange eyes, bee-brown, with somehow a look of dry winds and sunshine and far places behind them. ‘This is not such a dagger ever I have seen before,’ I said. ‘Where does it come from?’

‘From Constantinople.’ His tongue had a twang to it that I knew was Greek because Tydeus my tutor had it also. ‘I bought it from a friend of mine in the Emperor’s bodyguard who was … somewhat light in his purse at the time, having wagered too heavily on the Greens at the races on a day when the Blues had all the luck.’

Something, a sort of fellow-feeling I suppose, stirred within me for the man of the Emperor’s bodyguard who had found himself so short of money that he had had to sell this dagger which must surely have been his most treasured possession.

‘If he was a friend,’ I asked (I had not meant it to sound quite so accusing) ‘could you not have bought something else from him?’

Phanes of Syracuse shook his head. ‘Nothing of sufficient value. Nothing that would teach him such a useful lesson. Don’t take it to heart - coming and going as I do along the roads and seaways of the world, there’s a good chance that I shall come sailing up the Golden Horn once more on a day when the luck of the race-course has been with the Greens.’

I only half understood, but the words had magic in them, the sound of incantation and harpsong, and I understood clearly enough that I wanted to hear more. ‘Tell about Constantinople,’ I demanded, and settled more comfortably on to my haunches as one does when listening to a story.

The merchant’s brown wind-burned face creased into a deeper smile. I suppose he had met boys eager for travellers’ tales often enough before.

‘So. I tell you about Constantinople, the Golden City,’ he said, and sitting forward, elbows on knees, he began.

I listened, sometimes watching the archangel dagger as Loban turned it to and fro on his knees renewing the worn silver wires that bound the crossguard, sometimes watching the merchant’s face, where it seemed almost that I could see the distance and the far off places, behind his eyes. Something of Constantinople I knew already from other travelling merchants. I knew that it was a city at the far end of the world, and had its name from the Emperor Constantine who had set up his capital there when the old world-striding Roman Empire was split in two; and that it was still the capital of the eastern half, the one remaining half since Rome herself had long ago fallen to the barbarians. But this was different. Maybe the man was a master-storyteller; maybe it was to do with the dagger itself, fiercely beautiful and so alien to my own world, that had come from the other end of the earth and like enough would one day be going back to the far country that it came from; maybe it was the two things coming together and gaining potency from each other … some kind of
magic was weaving itself within me; an awakening magic, so that for the first time I knew, really knew, not just with my head but in my heart’s core, that there was another world beyond the mountains; not the world of legend and faery of which the harpers sang, but a real world of living people, in which one of the Emperor’s bodyguard was at that moment lacking his best dagger because he had wagered more than he could afford on a horse race, just as I lacked my enamelled belt-buckle because I had wagered Colwen of the kindred that I would reach the top of the oak tree by the ford before he did.

When the repair work was finished and the voice of the merchant fell silent, I woke up, as though I had been dreaming, and found my own world not quite the same as it had been before.

Beside me, Conn squatted on one heel, his left leg stuck out in front of him because it still hurt to bend it right under. He was leaning forward, his gaze fixed almost hungrily on the dagger. And somehow I knew that he had been sitting like that all the while.

‘There it is, as good as though it came fresh from the hand of its maker-smith,’ Loban said, handing it back to its present owner.

Conn’s gaze moved with it. ‘What makes it like that?’

The merchant thought that he meant the hilt, and answered patiently - it must have seemed a foolish question - ‘The craftsman made it so, out of silver and his own skill.’

Conn shook his head like a horse beset by gadflies. ‘Na, na, the blade. What makes the blade so that the light slips on it like the stripes in a river current?’

Loban took up the question. ‘See now, for a good blade, one that will not betray its man in battle, rods of hard and soft iron must be heated and braided together. Then is the blade folded over and hammered flat again, and maybe yet again, many times for the very finest blades.’ He had taken the dagger back into his own hand and was showing the way of it. ‘So the hard and soft iron are mingled without blending, before the blade is hammered up to its finished form and tempered, and ground to an edge that shall draw blood from the wind. So comes the pattern, like oil and water that mingle but do not mix. Yet it is the strength of the blade for without the hard iron the blade would bend in battle, and without soft iron it would break.’ The tip of one horny finger traced out the streaks of the metal as he spoke, ‘It’s the strength of the blade, which is the aim of all this, the beauty is by the way. The beauty is by the grace of God.’

Conn put out a finger also, and touched the blade, following the wave pattern very gently, as though he were exploring a mystery.

‘And you - you also have fashioned blades like this?’ he said.

And still faintly dream-bound as I was, I realized that something was happening which was not a good idea.

‘We must be on our way,’ I said, pulling my legs under me. ‘I promised Luned I would take her to see Maia’s new foal. She is not allowed in the stable court on her own.’ I got to my feet, Conn following with the slowness of regret. ‘It has been a good hour,’ I added by way of thanks to the two men still sitting companionably on the bench. And set off home, with Conn like a loyal but unwilling hound at my heels.

We passed the mill and came to the place where the track crossed the stream, and paused as we often did to watch the flickering minnows in the clear mead-coloured depth below the ford. And watching the minnows, under the ripple pattern of the water surface, Conn said carefully, ‘If I were to go down to the smithy, just while you were at your lessons with Tydeus - if I were to ask him, would you be thinking that Loban might teach me to be a smith?’

‘No,’ I said.

There was a silence filled with the suck and ripple of the water over the stones, and somewhere away down the stream, a cuckoo calling. Then, ‘Why not?’ Conn asked. ‘I would work for him in payment.’

‘Don’t you know?’ I felt for the moment that I wanted to hit him for making me say it. ‘My father would never allow it. No bondman may learn to be a smith, or a clerk, or a bard, because all these must be free men, and so if a bondman comes by any of those skills -’

The words stuck in my throat, and the calling of the down-valley cuckoo took on a note of mockery.

Conn went slowly white under the brown of his skin. ‘He would become free,’ he said. ‘I am sorry. I did not understand.’

‘It was not me that made the law,’ I told him angrily, miserably.

Conn went on watching the minnows a few moments longer. Then he looked up with his slow, grave smile. ‘That I know,’ he said, almost consolingly.

I tried to answer the smile, but my face felt tight. I managed a crack of laughter instead. ‘We could
always run for it, one night, and join the Emperor’s bodyguard. Phanes said that there are men in it from all across the world; any man who can call himself a swordsman, Phanes said.’

‘The trouble is that neither of us can call himself a swordsman.’ The trouble with Conn was that he never, well hardly ever, winged off on any kind of flight of fancy.

‘Not yet.’ It was a good flight, and I hung to it. ‘But we could not go for a few years yet, anyway.’

And, ‘That would give us time to learn,’ Conn agreed. ‘Meanwhile we must be moving, or the little mistress will be thinking that you have forgotten your promise.’

We went on our homeward way. But as we left the ford behind us, he was dragging his left leg a little as he still did when he was tired, or sore at heart.

Other word from the outside world came trickling into the valley through the months of that summer. Not from jewelled cities at the far ends of the Earth, but from beyond the mountains, all the same … Word of the northern kings and their kingdoms, Aidan of Dalriada, Gartnait, Lord of Caledonia, word out of Strathclyde and little Elmet; word of Mynyddog of the Gododdin, foremost of them all, who men called Mynyddog the Wealthy, Lord of Dyneidin of the Many Goldsmiths; all looking with anxious eyes towards the east, where the new Saxon kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia had begun to loom like gathering storm clouds.

For almost the lifetime of a man Bernicia had been only an offshoot of much stronger Deira, only a scatter of settlements along the coast. But in the first few years under their new king and warleader, Aethelfrith, they had been spreading and gaining strength. One day they would be as great as Deira - greater - one day the two might join warhosts; and when that day came, the storm clouds would spill over and come sweeping across the land.

‘But if we - the kingdoms of Britain - also joined warhosts, couldn’t we fling them back into the sea?’ I remember asking Tydeus my tutor.

Tydeus looked up from the Herodotus unrolled on
the schoolroom table, and said, ‘Maybe, but it is a large “if”. A lesson which my own Greek states found over hard in the learning.’

And when I asked much the same question of my father’s harper as he walked under our apple trees seeking out a new song for supper, he said, ‘I am thinking that on the day that the tribes learn to stand together instead of slitting each other’s throats, the stars will fall out of the sky.’

‘It was done before,’ I said.

He drew a slow fall of notes from the little hand-harp he carried.

‘Aye, in Arthur’s time; Aidan and Gartnait and Mynyddog the Golden, they are not Arthur. Urien of Rheged tried it when your father and I were young, but Urien was slain - and that was not even the Saxons’ doing, but the work of envy and hatred among his own kind. So Urien died and after him his son, and where is Rheged now?’

It was the kind of word that merchants and wandering harpers had brought into the valley for as long as I could remember, but it had not seemed quite real before. I have wondered, since, whether the threat really darkened and drew nearer that summer, or whether it was just that I was growing older, or whether the strange and beautiful dagger, coming from far away, had somehow pricked a hole in my familiar world and let in the world outside …

But from that summer on, I began to take more seriously the hours on the training ground below the settlement, where I learned horsemanship and running and wrestling and the skills of sword and shield and spear with the other boys of the kindred, feeling
more of sense and purpose in them than ever I had done before.

Life in the valley went on as it had always done. Harvest followed seed time; hunting for fresh meat in the winter, when we mounted the wolfguard over the lambing pens and every full moon brought the threat of cattle raiders. Spring when the streams ran green with melt-water from the snows of Yr Widdfa. Autumn when they ran yellow with fallen birch leaves.

And so there came an evening a year and more after the merchant with the archangel dagger.

It was harvest time and so we were set free, me from my tutor and the training ground, Luned from Old Nurse and the skills of the women’s quarters; and the three of us had been down-valley helping to get the harvest in. We came up slowly, scratching at our midge bites as we came, a mood of deep contentment on us, for it was not so easy for the three of us to be off together about our own affairs. We would have gone in by way of the stables and the stackyard, but the trampling of horses and the voices of men in the outer court drew us round that way instead, to see what was afoot.

My brother had been out hunting with a few boon companions - which might seem strange at harvest time when the rest of us were slaving in the fields, but the deer had been raiding the ripe corn. Now they were back, and with a couple of carcasses slung across the ponies’ backs, but they seemed not best pleased, for all that.

Owain was giving tongue as he swung down from his weary horse, ‘Not a sign of the brute. Well, he can
be finding his own way home - or not, for all I care.’

‘Lost a hound?’ I asked one of our huntsmen, standing near.

‘Aye,’ he said.

‘Which one?’

‘Gelert.’

It would be Gelert, of course, born foolish and unfortunate.

The huntsman was turning away, but I grabbed his arm. ‘Where?’

He paused and looked round at me, frowning. I think he was not happy himself at coming home with a hound missing out of the pack. ‘If I knew that, maybe t’would have been easier to find him. We hunted down towards Coed Dhu and when the hunting was done and we came to whip in the hounds, he was not there. Maybe Gwyn ap Nudd took him to hunt the storm clouds with his own pack.’ He laughed angrily, but made the sign against ill luck as he said it, and pulled his arm free and was gone.