Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (90 page)

There was no hiding that the might of Rome had ridden again out of the North to Eudav’s Hall. Through the three days that followed we raised a new Hall within sight of the old. Stables, cowsheds, houses were built, and for the Hall itself, oak trunks were sunk into the ground for pillars, and stout beams laid across them for roof-trees. At the last we bound reeds for thatch to the rafters. Three hundred men worked in joy to raise a house for Bradwen. For Bradwen and for Owain.

On the fourth day, Owain called us together, the noblest that is, Precent and Cynrig of Aeron and Peredur Ironarms and myself, and young Aidan out of courtesy.

‘I know that the Infantry will have reached the heights above the river at the eastward end of the Wall,’ he told us. ‘Tomorrow we will ride out and down the river to meet them. We will clear the way for Bradwen and then bring her back in triumph to her house.’

There was sense in this. In a day’s ride we could sweep the valley from Eudav’s Hall to the sea. There were no Savages for a day’s ride to the West, our Patrols had been able to tell us that, and they had not come against us from beyond the Wall, as they would surely have done if they had been watching. It would be safe to leave the new Hall unguarded.

If the Savages were between
us and the sea in force, then we would need the whole Household. So we would all ride, to meet Bradwen, who had not seen us ride out because we had already seen her ride out before us, with the Infantry and Gwenabwy the son of Gwen to guard her. When we met the Army, a hundred foot would come with Bradwen to bring her cattle to the Hall and to stay with her till Owain returned. The rest of the Foot, and the sixty horsemen who were with them, would march south with us of the Household, into Bernicia and even into Deira, and reconquer it, terrible as the wrath of God.

We rode early. We turned east, out of the valley and up on to the high and windy moors. We went parallel to the Wall over the new-blooming heather. After the first hour we crossed the road that the Romans had built to carry up their tribute to the Kings of Caledon. Every year, in those days, the King of the Romans sent the King of Caledon his own weight and the weight of his Queen, and the weight of his Judge and the weight of his Bard, in fine gold. I had seen once a piece of this gold, and it was clear that it had come from the King of Rome, because he had put his own face on it, and letters which were his name. That was for fear that the Caledonians would some day ride out of their wood and come down again into the Empire, as they had done so often before, and burn Rome about the Emperor’s head. It was the wood of Caledon that the Savages had now begun to kill.

Through the morning we veered away from the Wall, passing here and there the farms left empty, the houses falling into ruin. We followed the line of a little river that ran east and came down from the moors by a valley so well known to us in stories that it had no name of its own, but was simply referred to as the Dingle. But, name or no name, it was up the Dingle that the army would come to meet us.

Now we looked out from the edge of the high moorlands across the land of Mordei, from where the people had long fled. On either side of the stream we saw again the signs of the Savages. The woods were dead, every tree ringed with the cruel saxes, dead and withered away. The deer had gone out of these woods on to the high moors. The land was dead. The land had been killed.

We sat by the stream in the appointed place, two or three
hours before sunset. I was with the vanguard, and as soon as I had snatched a few mouthfuls of bread and mead and hot bacon I rode forward to take some to Gwion Catseyes, who was our most forward picket. He was sitting on the ground at the edge of the wood, looking across the narrow meadow to the river and across it and another meadow to the woods, the dead woods, beyond that. He was hidden behind a dead alder clump, covered with blackberry thorns. We hobbled our horses and left them a few paces behind us, and we sat and ate and chatted.

Then of a sudden we heard horses. We had never heard of a Savage who rode a horse; nevertheless, we slipped back among the dead trees and mounted again. We peered through the brittle leafless twigs of the alder and poised our spears to throw.

There were two horsemen, riding one behind the other, not quite a spear’s cast apart. That we could tell by listening. It was how we had been drilled. Good, I thought, these are the advance scouts of Cynddelig’s force. Somewhere behind them there will be the first knot of the horse, spread out well, and then a regiment on foot. After that there will be the sheep to feed us all the way into Bernicia. With them will be the cattle that Bradwen is bringing to stock her new Hall. She has black cows to give milk, so that when we return we will be met with new-made butter, and cheese: and she has a bull to service them. She will have spare horses for her shepherds, and hunting dogs and watch dogs, and pigs to find their own beech mast and acorns in her woods. She’ll live well enough through the coming winter, with a hundred men, and more when we come back, to live in the Hall and work for her, and to break new farms all through the debatable land. Next summer, the land will be full of Romans again, men who fled to the kind and wealthy North when the Savages burst in on them in years before. Next spring, their wives will come too: but for the present, Bradwen will be the only woman in Mordei.

The host would be moving, a great horde of men and beasts that would trample the grass and eat it wherever they went, leaving a trail a mile wide. And mingled with it, company by company, the men of Eiddin and the men of Mordei would march, and the last horsemen would ride the flanks or close up the rear. Here we
would be ready to meet them. Here we would take the lead, a great army of horse and foot, to regain Bernicia.

Thirty years the Savages had been in Bernicia, living and breeding. Time and again they had swept into Mordei, turning it into a debatable land, but never in such strength as in the spring of last year. Now we could hold Mordei, and sweep into Bernicia, so that at worst this year that would be debatable land. Next year, who knew, we might hunt and fish and shear our sheep as far as York, into Deira itself, as far down as the borders of Elmet, where we could talk with Christian men again.

These, I thought, will be the forward scouts. If the wind had been easterly, I would have been able to hear already the noise of all the host. There would have been the noise of the cattle, and the sheep would have baa’d my eardrums in. I listened as hard as I could, in the silence of that hot summer afternoon, and I could have sworn, from one moment to another, that I could hear them coming.

The leading horseman was almost level with us. His comrade had halted, far back, too far back for what we had been taught. I had mounted, and now I rode out of the woods to him. Gwion remained hidden, his spear couched ready to throw. But there would have been no need for that. I was near enough.

This leading horseman turned to us. For the first time I saw his face, when he lifted his head, and I knew him. Gwenabwy son of Gwen it was, to whom Mynydog had given command of the men who were to stay with Bradwen throughout the winter. He was scarlet cloaked, and his shield was white, with no badge or sign, since he said that a man who had lost his land to the Savages had no right to an identity till he regained it. Gwen’s land it was we were on now, between Eudav’s and the sea.

He rode wearily, on a tired horse. He looked like a charcoal-burner, like Morien when I first met him, because he was covered, cloak and face, horse and all, in black soot. He barely looked at me as I came down to him, only to see that I wore red and was a friend. He did not even raise his shield from crupper to shoulder, or shift his grip on his spear, or kick his scabbard free to draw his sword.

‘Well met, Gwenabwy!’ I shouted to him. ‘How far behind are the others?’

‘In the name of the Virgin, Aneirin,’ he answered me, ‘have you anything for us to eat?’

I laughed at him.

‘Why, Gwenabwy, have you eaten all the sheep? I hope that there are no more of you as hungry as this, because we cannot feed three thousand out of what we are carrying in our saddlebags, whatever the saints did.’

‘I am not jesting, Aneirin. Have you any food? There are no more of us.’

‘No more? Why? Have you been defeated? When was the battle?’

‘There was no battle.’ Gwenabwy waved back to the other rider, still sitting hunched in the saddle by a dead thorn tree. The horse stumbled forward a few steps, the way a steed does when it is dead tired and well blown: then it stopped again.

‘Who is it, Gwenabwy? Who is with you?’ He did not answer. I put oatcake and cold bacon into his hands, and left him with Gwion. I rode down the meadow along the bank of the little stream. The other horse had made a few more steps, and then stopped again; the rider still sat, his head bowed, his body still shrunken into his scarlet cloak. This is the way men sit after they have had three days in the saddle, herding the sheep away from the edge of a racing heather fire. As long as you are riding, you feel nothing, and you always look fresh, however grimed with smoke and dust. But this is the way you slouch down when the sun sets on the last day and the sheep are safe: or burnt.

I went down to this rider, weary long before sunset, on this shaggy horse, its coat caked with the mud of a dozen river crossings, and covered with black ash over that. It stood now on the edge of the stream, too tired even to bend and crop the thick grass under its nose, or even to drink. I rode close to see who this was, mail showing below the red cloak, and an unfamiliar helmet, pointed and hung with purple ribbons, and with a hanging curtain of mail protecting the face at both sides and the neck behind. I could not see the face, because of this mail, till I rode close. Then I saw. It was Bradwen.

We sat by the fire and passed round the mead jar. In the beginning of dusk, we heard the story. Bradwen told it.

‘All went well for the first days. We moved along the coast, a few miles only between each dawn and sunset. Each night we halted by a farm, and the people made us welcome. They always took me in to sleep under a roof. When we passed farms during the day, everyone came out to watch the Army go by. When the horsemen came, they would throw flowers in our path and cheer and sing.

‘Three thousand men and a thousand animals do not pass like a cat. We ate the grass from the pastures, and broke the paddock fences. We muddied the farmers’ streams, and emptied their wells and left unbearable heaps to windward of their houses. We stole their hens, and enticed their daughters. Their sons came running out to join us. One Army is like another. It could not have been worse for the people south of Eiddin if we had been a horde of Savages. They endured all the unpleasantness of war without the bloodshed. And they had paid for all this. And for nothing.

‘Each night, the soldiers sang around the fires they made from broken fences and the planks from barns and the very doors of the houses. The farm people did not miss their doors because they had come out to sing with us. They forgave us the havoc we caused because we were going to the South to fill up the empty land of Mordei. First we would defeat the Savages
that threatened them. Then we would live there as a barrier to keep them safe for ever.

‘But, at last, we crossed the river. We went out of Eiddin into Mordei. The debatable land was empty. Now we stopped where farms had been. They had been deserted. Not burnt, just left. The doors were closed, the barns cleared, the cattle driven away. They were left by people who had had plenty of warning, and who thought they would soon be back. They were the men who marched with us, the regiments of the Mordei, who had gone to fill empty farms in the North. They had left their houses here in order, the buckets at the wellheads, the pitchforks in the racks by the mangers.

‘But in a year, a thatched roof grows weeds, and in two or three winters, unrepaired, the thatch falls in and the rafters rot, and the unprotected walls crumble. The buckets were green with mildew and red with the spotted rot. The tines of the forks had rusted string-thin. Thistles and groundsel, dandelions and couch grass choked the gardens, starving out the lettuce and the carrots, the turnips and the leeks, that, self-grown, might yet have lived a few more years. Yet still, we found apples reddening on the unpruned branches: still, the rowanberries ripened at the forsaken doors.

‘A day or two farther south, we came on houses that were left in haste. They had been burnt, and fallen in heaps of rubble. You only knew where they were if someone, riding over a mound by chance, felt the difference in the tread of his mount. The Savages had not only burnt the houses and the barns. They had filled in the wells, too, and they had uprooted the orchards. They had even cut down the friendly rowans before the doors. It was now that the infantry began to turn back.’

‘The men of Eiddin cannot be trusted,’ said Owain, firmly. He looked around him, then, and hastily qualified, ‘The peasants, that is, for the nobles are as warlike and as honourable as any, as they will soon have a chance to show. But these cravens saw what the Savages had done, and it was enough to make them run away, and leave the men of Mordei to win back their own land.’

‘No,’ said Bradwen, a Mordei woman. ‘It was the Mordei men
who returned first. They had lived too long in the clement and peaceful North, where the farms are fertile and the winters mild and the land long clear. There they had pastures for the taking, and space to hunt, and they themselves lived in the houses their fathers had built. Their wives and their children were safe in the North. When they came back into Mordei, they saw what they would have to do if they wished to take their old lands once again. They saw all the work they would have to do, sweating over the sickle and the axe, trenching and clearing, building the paddock walls afresh, and raising new roof-trees. And that work, the work of years, never free from fear. All those years of working armed, their swords always at their sides, the spears hanging in their straps on cart or plough, or leaning against the stable door or in the chimney corner. They would never have a night free from fear, never a night without a watchman waking over them, and themselves never able to sleep for fear the watchman dozed. This was not what they had marched for. They went back. There comes a time, Owain, when lost land is not worth the effort of regaining it, unless it is regained for a certainty. Certainty we could not give them.’