Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (88 page)

This did not trouble the horses. Time and time again we had had all these men out with us, and men from farms farther from Eiddin, to shout and clash metal and run about among us waving flags. Now the horses were used to it. They would stand stock still, or run quiet and steady, in the clamour of battle.

Nor were the horses disturbed at the singing of the Household. First, when we were still close to Eiddin, when the women and children still ran close to us, we sang respectable songs, the songs they expected us to sing. These were marching songs of the days of old, that the armies of the Gododdin had sung when they marched to make war on Rome, and songs too that the
Romans had sung when they marched north of the Wall to fight against Eiddin. And this, too, was proper. We were the newest Army of Rome, marching against an enemy who had never owned the might of Rome, nor served the Roman Virgin.

At last, we left behind even those who were the most loth to lose us to sight. On the flank of the Giant’s Seat, where we had hunted, and lain in the sun to dream, Gwenllian sat her horse with the little lad on her saddle-bow to wave goodbye to us at the last. Clydno was there, too. Not Mynydog. He sat his throne till we had all passed, and gone down the hill, and past his farm, and out of his sight, and out of sound, while he strained at the last to hear what could never again be heard in Eiddin, the sound of the Household. Then, I am told, he wrapped his cloak around his face, and wept, and no one dared to speak to him for the rest of the day. But these our other dearest friends sat still, where we could see them when we looked back, for hours, while our column wound up through the woods and out on to the moors.

When we had left them behind, the songs changed. The men sang newer songs, or perhaps they were older songs, bawdier songs and bloodier songs anyway, about the short-comings in bed and battle of Bladulf, and Hengist, and of the Kings of the Irish that had come into the Island before, and that we had fought before, and beaten before. These were songs they sang at the nets, and on the sheep walks. You do not sing on the hunt, only after. I thought that singing at this time was too like singing on the edge of the forest, when you may frighten the deer away. Our prey, now, we did not want to frighten away, but rather to gather together to face us. But who was I to object? I was only the Judge.

At midday, we halted to rest our horses. Now most of us took off our mail shirts and bundled them in our red cloaks to sling across the backs of our spare horses. Mail is too heavy to wear without cause, unless you are fighting or on parade. Our helmets we could sling at our saddles. While our horses cropped the grass, we filled the helms with the ripening whinberries: the blackberries were still red.

When we remounted, one squadron rode still armed, ahead of the rest of the Household, and spread out in a long line of
little groups of three or four, a mile from flank to flank. Here, so close to Eiddin, there was no real need for this, but it was good practice. The squadrons took it in turn and turn about, half a day at a time, to ride in the skirmishing line.

Owain with his Standard rode between the Skirmishers and the first concentrated squadron. In case of alarm we could see, from his waving Standard, whether we were to form line to right or to left or equally on either side of our Commander.

Precent always led the Skirmishers. I rode every day with Cynon. His squadron always kept the rear. In an alarm we were not to join the line, but to ride behind it, in the centre, as a reserve. Which is the harder, to lead an army in a massed assault, or to restrain skirmishers and bring them back into the line when they wish to scatter and pursue, or to hold a squadron ready, watching the fight, till the time is ripe to throw them in? I do not know.

This first day, however, we had no thought of battle, nor the next. We rode across the high moorlands and between the groves in the quiet valleys as if we were riding for pleasure, or for hunting. Often men let loose their hawks at grouse, or files or even whole squadrons broke from the line to ride shouting after greyhounds that had started a hare.

Time and again we passed little huts of boughs in the lee of hills or on the edge of little woods, where the youngsters spent the lazy days of summer herding the sheep. The boys we passed out on the hills in groups of two or three. They spurred their rough ponies to ride with us a little, joining in our songs. The girls at the huts looked up from their endless gossiping over the cooking-fires and the spinning-wheels to wave at us, and shout good wishes. One would have thought that huge armies like ours, six whole squadrons, passed every day, we disturbed them so little.

In the evening we came down to a lonely farm, where Precent had already stored up food for us, sides of smoked bacon, cheeses and butter, oatcakes that the people of the place had spent, all that day baking for us. Best, there was mead for all. We slept in the woods above the farm. Some of us built little huts of boughs, as we had done when we were young and kept the sheep in summer. But most of us heaped beds of cut bracken or heather, and
rolled ourselves in our scarlet cloaks. In August it was still warm enough for it to be no hardship for us to sleep with no other blanket in the open air. The horses were tethered in long lines, after they had been watered by squadrons in the stream and fed with oats.

Next day, we went on with our summer ride, under the blue sky flecked with hardly a cloud. On that morning we rode careless as before across the southern valley of the Kingdom of Eiddin, and now we climbed the hills that were the border between Eiddin and the debatable land of Mordei. In these hills, we did not see boys, or girls. The shepherds, when we met them, were grown men, well mounted and armed at least as well as the worst armed of the Household. They wore jerkins of stiff boiled leather, and capes of mail. Most carried swords. They looked keenly at us, keenly but with pleasure, because they hoped that our passing would mean that they would be free next year from this boys’ work. Under the threat of the Savages, men had to guard the sheep.

That evening, in the hot and yellow August sunset, we came down to another farm. Here again we found food and drink waiting for us and for the horses. Again we lay to sleep by squadrons in the woods, making our beds as we wished. But this was not merely a second night like the first. Tonight, it was not the boys of the farm who watched our horses, and it was not only the wolves we were afraid of. Tonight, Gwion Catseyes and his squadron watched the horses, some sleeping in their mail while others lay awake out on the wide moor, turn and turn about.

We did not light fires that night. The first night, the girls had come out from the farm to flirt with the men watering the horses. Some of them, too, did more than flirt, and slept close to our fires. But tonight we all slept alone, as well as a man may sleep alone in an army of three hundred, camped beneath the stone walls of a tower where no women live. There were worse than wolves to watch for, and these vermin no fires would frighten. The fence round the farm was not a matter of rails and posts, but a rampart of logs, seven feet high, the upper ends sharpened in the fire. This night not even Morien lit a fire, whether to cook food or to sharpen a stake: fires can be seen at night farther than smoke by day.

We did not light fires that night. The first night we had been in Eiddin. This night, there was no certainty where we were: this was debatable land.

In the misty dawn we rose to ride again. Now, too, we brought out of the barn what Precent had packed down there, load by load through the summer, to save us the trouble of carrying it ourselves. We packed more than mead now on our spare horses. Each of us had bacon and cheese and oatmeal to feed him for a fortnight. That kind of food is easy to carry: no man of the Household died of hunger.

The heat haze lay before us as we rode south through the empty heather hills. Here there were no more sheep, and no more shepherds. Sometimes hunting parties came as far south as this, but not often, and if they did, they sang about it afterwards as if it were a battle. It was too deep into the debatable land. The deer thrived there.

Still Precent led the skirmish line ahead of us: still Cynon and I led the rearguard. Any man who fell so far behind the main body as to hear
our
voices knew that he was too slow and spurred forward. We rode light enough, all of us, and no horse foundered. Now we were singing the other songs, the songs we knew were of older and bloodier wars, wars before the Romans. ‘The Hunting of the Black Pig’, we sang, and ‘Heads on the Gate’, ‘The Toad’s Ride’, and ‘Blood in the Marshes’. We were a happy confident Army, the Household of Mynydog King of Eiddin, and we did not care what Savages heard us coming. Besides, we were riding to Cattraeth, though we did not know it.

On the last morning of our approach ride, we roused ourselves in the wood on the north side of the crest; we slept there in the dead ground, while Gwion watched beyond us to the South. We had slept in our mail, let it rust or not. Our horses we had hobbled by our heads, and we fed them on the oats we carried. We poured water from our flasks into our helmets for the beasts to drink. We did not show ourselves outside the wood till it was time.

When we rode out again, it was Cynon’s squadron that, for the first time, rode in the skirmish line, and that for the same reason that it had kept the rear the other days, that it had in it the hardest and the toughest men, used to war and fighting and travel. Not all of them were like that. Precent, on the far right of the line, rode with Aidan, to cover him, as due to his Royal blood. I rode with Cynon, and we stayed on the far left, ahead of the others.

We came to the edge of the wood, and looked across the valley to the Wall. It ran before us, miles ahead, a grey line across the green country. Below the wall there was a wood. A strange wood. In August other woods were green. This wood was brown and grey, as if in winter. The woods below us, this side of the stream, were indeed green. Between the edge of the nearer wood and the stream had once been Eudav’s Hall, and the paddocks
where he ran his horses. Destruction had been complete: I could not be sure where it had been, the house where I grew up.

We walked our horses down the moorland slope, over the grass cropped now by deer, and not by sheep. I rode as one does in the scouting line, on Cynon’s left, five horse-lengths behind him. The light changed as we passed beneath the oak trees, dappling patches of shadow with streaks of sun. Hard light, indeed, to see a deer, let alone tell the points: hard light to aim an arrow or a spear. Quiet, too: I have lain, before now, in the wood, and seen five horsemen pass twenty paces from me, and if I had not been turned that way to see them I would never have known it. Therefore our heads were never still as we rode, turning and twisting to see all round us, all the time.

I knew every inch of this forest, in light or dark: I knew all the sounds there ought to be. There was not a hollow where I had not crouched to loose a bolt at deer or hare, or to watch the badgers playing in the full moon. I had ridden here with Bradwen and Precent till I knew every pothole, every soft place where a horse or a man might stumble. I knew, almost, every fallen branch that might crack underfoot, excepting only those of last winter. Our hooves hardly rustled the leaves, or broke the mushrooms, the millers and the redcaps, left to overgrow and turn gross. No civilised man had been here, or they would have been gathered. Cynon, too, had known these woods before, when they were still safe for a little girl to go out with the dawn to come back with a kerchief full of blewits.

It was hard to see deer, here in the August woods. It was hard to see men, too. Sometimes I lost sight of Cynon, or he of me, as we moved or halted by turns, passing or repassing each other.

There was no watching here for deer, or men. The deer had not gone by, we saw no droppings or the birds that would search them for undigested seeds. We would not see the deer here: we sniffed the air for them. Then I smelt it. I raised a hand to Cynon. He rode past me towards the smell of wood-smoke, halting by a hazel-bush, listening for anything that might have alarmed the birds. I came past him, a few yards farther, while he watched me.

I leant down from the saddle to see what they had left. There was a live fire somewhere ahead, but not here: these ashes were
too cold to smell of smoke. Last night’s? The night before? I rode a little farther, to where they had slept, curled up on heaps of bracken. At least a dozen of them by the space they had flattened. One had left a torn shred of cloth, half a blanket, ragged and dirty, the colour hidden beneath the crusted filth. And there was a scatter of bones too, deer bones, picked clean and polished. These had been hungry men, who had killed by chance at the end of a long and profitless day, and then gorged themselves on the meat, half-cooked, charred at best, and left nothing but the guts that the flies buzzed over. How many men to devour a small deer like that? A dozen? A score?

I moved forward, into the stench. Man droppings, not deer droppings. Fresh. This morning’s. Last night’s fire, then, lit only to cook on, then prudently dowsed. But another one, somewhere, still burning? I sat still, still as I could, looking round me, listening, sniffing. Were there eyes on my back? Were men watching me from the shadows under the trees, or from the branches over me? And if there were would they stay hidden as long as I could watch? Some men say that you can feel eyes on the back of your neck. Perhaps you can if you are expecting them. I was not positively expecting them: I merely wondered if they were there.

I waved. Cynon came forward, rode past me and halted well ahead. I did not expect eyes. But neither did I expect to find in all Britain a man so poor that he would risk his life for that filthy scrap of blanket. For the sake of that rag, he thought it worth the risk to run across behind me, from cover to cover, picking it up as he went. So fast, he thought he would not be seen. But I heard him come, and I turned to see him pull at the blanket where it had caught on a snag of a fallen branch. It held only for a moment, but it was time enough to end his life. It was an easy throw. The spear took him as he bent, in the back below the short ribs. I saw the point come out below the navel. He rolled on the ground, his knees jerking to his chin, clutching behind him at the shaft, vomiting blood, calling for his mother. There had been no mistake. This was no Briton.