The Shining Company (6 page)

Late that night in my sleeping cell, I made sure that my three best arrows were to hand, and checked yet again that I could carry my strung bow unseen under my cloak. I had shot up in the past few months, and stood almost as tall as I do now, so that if I wore my cloak with one corner trailing a little there was distance enough between shoulder and hem for the short hunting bow to lie safely concealed - so long as I
did my hunting on foot; horseback would betray it instantly. Luckily, it was not at all uncommon for the younglings among the kindred to follow the hounds on foot.

Striding up and down and swirling the heavy folds about me, I passed on the evening’s discovery to Conn. ‘Did you see Luned in the Fire Hall after supper? She is beautiful.’

I mind Conn paused in folding away my best tunic with the crimson stripe, and said, ‘Have you only just noticed that?’ in a rather odd tone of voice, then put the folded tunic in the clothes chest, and lowered the lid, very softly.

Next morning at first light we set out on our hunting. It was a cold dawn without colour as we headed down-valley under a sky as clear and colourless as crystal, the plover calling and wheeling over the bare crop-lands. The grey hoar frost flew like spray from the bushes and brambles of the woodshore as the horses brushed through, and the hunting horns made echoes from the steep hillside above us.

I had joined the huntsmen and foot-followers according to plan, and was loping along among the hounds, I and Gelert together; but even so, I found myself after a while not far from the Prince on his raking sorrel mare, for in the early stretches of the morning, horse and foot and leashed hounds were mingled all together. And I was achingly aware all the time of what I had hidden under my cloak, not only because I was afraid every moment that the heel of the bow or the thrust of the three arrows in my belt would betray me, but also because of the thing that I
might be going to do with them. I had taken great pains with the arrows, choosing my three best, making sure that their feathers lay perfectly, that the iron heads were sharp and polished, deadly and beautiful, the balance perfect, worthy of the great white hart; but oh, my belly was sick within me at the thought of using them.

Presently the hounds picked up a scent. They were unleashed, Gelert with the rest, and for a short while criss-crossed to and fro, questing through the thickets. Then they streaked away, adding the wild sweetness of their own music to the notes of the hunting horns on an uphill line to the ridge above Nant Ffrancon; and after them men and horses skeining out like wild geese, myself among them, running with the rest, and torn between excitement and dread.

We killed twice that day, but caught neither sight nor scent of the white hart, and as the day wore on and the autumn sun came slanting further from the west, I began to hope that despite the forester’s report, the beast had left our hunting runs.

But then, with the shadows already lengthening, though sunset was as yet far away, Cabel, one of the oldest and wisest of our hounds, flung up his head and gave tongue. The pack were unleashed again, and after a short time of casting about, were off on the new scent; and again the hunt was up and away after them like wild geese through the autumn skies. A few moments before, I had known that I was leg-weary and that carrying a strung bow under my cloak all day had chafed my forearm almost raw, and that if the hounds found again there was quite simply nothing
more that I could do about it. But now, with the hound-music in my ears and the horns crying through the autumn woods, I forgot all that. I was running with the rest, panting along well up among the hounds, my heart banging high in my throat, and somewhere deep within me the certainty that this time it was the white hart that led us.

Ever since, I have remembered that hunting like something out of a wild dream.

I was running, running as it seemed the heart out of my breast, and hampered by the bow under my cloak, branches snatching at me, roots clawing at my feet, and always ahead of me the music of the hounds. By and by the land began to lift under us, and the trees thinned and fell back, the crowding damp-oaks giving place to birch as we drew up towards the open surge of the great hills; and the sky opened to us, turning wide and shining, the grey paleness of it barred with silver in the west.

We were labouring uphill towards the blunt crest of the near ridge when the music of the hounds strung out over the skyline ahead of us changed note to the eager baying that meant the quarry was in view. The horns were sounding along the ridge, mingled with the shouts of men urging their weary horses to a fresh burst of speed. Then as we swept over the crest, I saw him across the shadow-filled cwm below us, shining against the dun dead bracken of the hillside as he headed desperately for the next ridge; the white hart that we had come to kill.

The hounds were running strung-out and purposeful on a sight line, the hunt sweeping after, downhill - I remember now the chill of the mountain stream as
we crashed through it, sending up the sheeted water as we went - then upward again on the steep further slope. The hunt had split in two, the Prince and his party drawing ahead, our own people falling somewhat behind, the laws of hospitality and good manners demanding that to the guests should go the honour of the kill. But I had no time for courtesies just then. In familiar country a man on foot who knows the short cuts and the hindrances may keep up with mounted men who are strangers to it, especially if he be desperate enough. I was desperate enough and the strange feeling of being in a dream was on me, coming between me and my torn and spent body: and I was still with the Prince’s party when at last, on the high hill shoulder where the great stones of Hound Tor broke through the frosty turf, we brought the white hart to bay.

For a dazzled moment, a kind of lightning flash of time that went on and on, I saw everything caught and unmoving: the black crouching shapes of the rocky outcrop and the wind-shaped hawthorn bushes, rust- red with autumn berries, and against the darkness of them, the white hart standing with heaving flanks, his shining hide dark-streaked with sweat, his proud antler-crowned head flung back in terror, as the yelling hounds closed in. Then as the frozen scene splintered into movement again and the hounds sprang forward, I realized that I had been counting on the cover of the trees to slink off by myself and free my bow and those three precious arrows. Here in the open with only the sparse hillscrub and the hunt all about me, I would be discovered before I could nock my first arrow to the bow. I tried, all the same, making
to fling back the hampering folds of my cloak. And that was when I knew suddenly that even if I had the
chance, I could not do it.
That was a thing I was quite unprepared for. I remember breaking out in a sweat, the struggle and the powerlessness within me. Whether I should have broken through and done the thing in the end, I’ve no knowing, because in that splinter of time the miracle happened.

From out of the general tumult of men and hounds and horses, one voice rose clear. One of those trained voices that can reach across a battlefield and still make sense at the other end. ‘Off! Off, I say - the hunting is over; call off the hounds!’

And somebody was urging his horse forward into the midst of the yelling pack, leaning low from the saddle to send his whiplash curling across their backs. Gorthyn, the Prince. Others of his company had joined him, and the horn was sounding again, not the
Death
but the
Recall;
and between the horn and the whiplash the hounds, unwilling, and bewildered by the strange turn of things, were falling back, doubling to and fro among themselves.

And suddenly there was no white hart standing at bay among the thorn trees and the dark stones. For an instant there was a flicker of white among the bushes dropping away over the further slope beyond the crest towards Nant Ffrancon, and then that too was gone.

Almost at that moment Gelert returned to me.

I was looking towards the Prince on his startled and fidgeting horse, and I did not see him come, and so had no time to brace myself for his joyful onslaught, and his forepaws took me on the shoulder unawares, pitching me over backward, my cloak flying wide and
the hidden bow and the arrows in my belt laid bare to view.

I had a hand twisted in his collar and was struggling back to my feet almost in the same instant, but it was too late. One of our own huntsmen was upon me with a muttered, ‘Now what’s to do, young master?’ And I think he would have had me clear out of the way; but the boy Lleyn was upon me also, dropping from his horse with a shout. Gelert, half-strangled with my hand in his collar, had them both in check for the moment with a deep sing-song snarling far down in his throat; his hackles were up, and I knew that at any move from me he would have been at the throat of one or the other of them - which is why I stood very still.

And with a brushing and trampling through the dead bracken and half bare thorns, Gorthyn reined in his horse almost on top of us, and sat looking down. His face was enquiring, more than anything else, his thick brows quirking upward towards the headband of fine crimson leather that bound back his hair. ‘It seems you hunt after a different manner from the rest of us, this day,’ he said.

I went on standing still, and stared back at him.

He flicked a finger at my bow. ‘Or - it seems a foolish question - was that for me?’ He asked it at half-breath, for the thing was not for all men’s hearing.

I shook my head, ‘For the hart.’

‘Why?’

‘Better than to be pulled down by the hounds.’

The Prince looked at me consideringly for a few moments; then he smiled. I have never known any
other man with a smile quite like Gorthyn’s; it was not over broad, but it had wings to it. ‘So, Prosper, son of Gerontius, you too. And all because the creature has the magic of a milky hide. At least I am not the only moon-wit in your father’s hunting runs.’

And I mind that as I stared up at him across his horse’s neck, something, a kind of fealty, went out from me to him that I knew would not return to me again so long as life lasted, his or mine.

Then the thing was over. He gestured to the other two to stand back and let me be, and swung his horse to meet my father and the rest of the hunt as they came up. I bent to slip the leash through Gelert’s collar, huddling my cloak close round me once more, somehow surprised, when I looked up again, to find the world unchanged. It should have been changed, somehow, a little, because I was Prince Gorthyn’s man, but the change was only in me.

I do not think that my father ever came to know of my planned part in that day’s hunting. Tuan, our huntsman, would never have betrayed me, nor, I knew, would Gorthyn, and Lleyn and the few others who had seen what happened were the Prince’s men. But when we reached home long after torch-lighting time with the gralloched carcasses of the two roe deer slung across the backs of the hunting ponies, and no sign at all of the white hart, word of the Prince’s strange hunting must have run from kennels to cookhouse to bower almost before the horses were unsaddled; for I had barely reached my sleeping cell where Conn rose from his waiting corner without a word, and as I flung off my cloak and handed over bow and arrow and began to strip off my hunting
leathers, Luned appeared in the doorway. She was clad in her saffron gown for feasting, but with her hair hanging loose and tangled, just as she had escaped from Old Nurse.

‘Is it true?’ she demanded breathlessly.

‘Is what true?’ I asked. I knew well enough, but I needed time.

‘He called off the hounds?’

‘Yes, it is true.’

Conn turned from stacking my bow in the corner. ‘Why would he be doing that?’ he asked in that cool dead-level voice of his.

I shook my head. ‘I do not know. Maybe when he saw the white hart he felt the same as we did.’

‘That makes him not at all like most princes,’ Luned said.

‘You having met so many? It makes him a man who would be good to follow.’

There was a moment’s silence, then Luned flicked away from the subject in that minnow way of hers. ‘Gwyn will not be pleased. He has made a song about the Prince’s hunting and the slaying of the white hart. He was going to sing it tonight at the feasting.’

I pulled my best tunic with the crimson stripe over my head, and reached for my belt. ‘Gwyn will just have to change the end of the song.’

Conn said doubtfully, ‘I do not think that you can be changing the end of a song or a story like that, as though it were quite separate from the rest. 1 think the end of a story is part of it from the beginning.’

There were other songs sung in my father’s hall that night, but whether Gwyn the Harper agreed with
Conn or not, the song of the hunting of the white hart was not one of them. What with weariness and one thing and another, that is just about the only thing that I remember about that night, at all. It is the next morning that I remember, sharp-edged as a blade. The first snow of the coming winter flurrying down from Yr Widdfa; the horses brought trampling round from the stable court, and the Prince and his companions mounting for the homeward ride.

I had contrived to be the one to hold Gorthyn’s stirrup for him - not that he needed a stirrup holder, being accustomed to mount by the steed leap like the rest of us; but for any parting guest, especially one of the royal house, the courtesies must be maintained. He mounted, and I was looking up at him past his bent knee as he thanked me. I mind the fine white flakes settling on his oat-coloured thatch and the huddled shoulders of his cloak, and the quick smile that gave wings to his bony face. I smiled back, and heard myself asking the thing that I had not meant to ask, not yet a-while, but which had been in my heart to ask ever since last evening.

‘Lord Gorthyn, let me ride with you.’

His mouth straightened, but the smile was still there behind his eyes, ‘How old are you?’

‘I shall be fourteen, come lambing time,’ I said, stretching the truth a little. After all, some lambs are born late.

‘Too young,’ he said, gentling his fidgeting horse.