Dawn Wind (16 page)

Owain had heard something of that before; he had heard vaguely that there was a white horse at the King’s farm, kept apart … He had not remembered much about it, but Vadir’s words were enough to touch him with a faint chill as though a wraith of mist had drifted across his face. ‘What does that mean? Will the King take him?’

‘In his third year, yes, if he flowers into all that he promises to be, though the white horse that rules the King’s mares is young as yet.’

‘And what will—they do to him?’

Vadir glanced up, his hand still steadying the foal. ‘Treat him as a God himself, and give him many mares, until the time comes that they have another need of him. There is always a price to be paid for Godhead.’

‘And the price?’ Owain was watching the foal butting at its mother’s flank for the warm milk that meant life, and the words stuck a little in his throat.

‘Once it was a man who died for the people,’ Vadir said, ‘then it was a horse who died, every three years; but now he dies only when there is some special peril or some special need, and for the rest we make do with a lock of his mane and a few hairs from his tail at the times of sacrifice—save that he must never be allowed to grow old and fail, lest the life of the people fail with him. So one day, there comes a new white horse to fight for the Kingship, and the old King dies …’

Vadir withdrew his steadying hand, and got awkwardly to his feet. ‘But we talk of things that lie beyond the years, and for the present it is enough that we get the mare into shelter. She is far spent, and scarcely stronger on her legs than the foal is; do you stay here with them and I will ride back to the steading and bring up some of my people and a mead-laced mash to put some heart into her. We’ll get her into my stable for the night.’

Owain was feeling faintly sick at the things that the other had said, and the bond of the shared task that had held them together for a little while had snapped.

‘To a man on horseback,’ he said, ‘the ride over to Beornstead is not so much longer than the ride to Widda’s Ham. She is nervous of new places, and I do not think that Beornwulf would wish her housed in a strange stable.’

They looked at each other a long moment in the lantern-light. Then Vadir said with faint amusement, ‘You don’t trust me, do you? You may be right.’

‘There’ll be no need to rouse them out,’ Owain said, steadily. ‘The household will be waking, and you’ll maybe find Beornwulf along by the main dyke—he has a lantern.’

‘So, I’ll find him—and tell him what a splendidly dependable thrall he has,’ Vadir said. ‘Maybe he would sell you to me.’ He whistled up his horse, who had been quietly cropping the grass at the edge of the lantern-light, and setting his hands on its shoulders, mounted with the steed-leap that men use who ride bareback, lightly enough despite his twisted foot; and in the same instant, with his hounds springing forward all about him, was drumming off into the misty darkness, in the direction of Beornstead.

Owain stood looking after him, though there was nothing to see once horse and rider were through the hawthorn bushes, hearing the hoof-beats die into the distance. Then he carefully unclenched his fists. He trimmed the lantern to make it last longer, and hung it again on its furze branch, and wishing that he had a cloak like Beornwulf, pulled off his own rough woollen tunic and spread it over the mare’s back. Then he settled down, with Dog lying watchful against his thigh, to wait until someone came.

It was very quiet, now that the beat of hooves had died away; only curlew or sandpiper cried sometimes in the mist, and the air hushed in the faintest shimmer of sound through the dark masses of the furze behind him. From time to time the mare began to fidget and he spoke to her reassuringly. The foal, having drunk its fill, had lain down to sleep, its soft muzzle white-splashed with its mother’s milk; and looking down at it, he was pierced with an aching tenderness. He had begun to love the little creature because it had, as it were, come to life under his hands; and the far-off gleam of the sacrificial knife added something, a kind of urgency, to his love for the silver foal, that it might not otherwise have had.

The candle in the lantern was guttering out in a pool of wax, when at last Dog raised his head to listen; and a few moments later, Owain, listening also, heard the distant long-drawn shout for which he had been waiting so long. He scrambled stiffly to his feet, and stood swinging the lantern above his head and shouting at full pitch of his lungs. ‘Here! We’re here! This way.’ The lantern gave a last flare, and guttered out, just as the mist-blurred gleam of another lantern came bobbing between the hawthorn trees, and he heard Beornwulf hail in reply.

The sun was rising by the time Golden-eye and the foal were safely home. And a little later Owain stood beside the morning fire in the house-place, stretching the weariness out of his shoulders and smiling down at Uncle Widreth who sat with his back propped against the roof-tree exactly as though he had not moved since last night.

‘You look different, this morning,’ said Uncle Widreth, in his thin rustling voice. He was growing simple, in these days, so simple that he always said what he thought.

‘How different?’

‘As though,’ said Uncle Widreth slowly, ‘you had made something with life in it, after all.’

I
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the ordinary way there was little coming and going among the settlements. Forest and marsh made for bad travelling, and each village lived for itself in its own clearing in the wild, wove its own cloth and forged its own ploughshares and grew its own food—or starved when the harvest failed. But between the coastwise settlements of the Maen Wood and the Seals’ Island there was a certain amount of passing to and fro, for the business of dyking and draining, and clearing sand-choked channels; and keeping out the sea with turf and brushwood walls was a thing that concerned all the coastwise folk together. So the Beornstead folk had always seen more of their neighbours than was common among the Saxon kind. But after the birth of the silver foal they saw more of Vadir Cedricson than ever they had done before. He had always a good reason for coming, or had merely turned aside in passing, on his way to somewhere else; but Owain knew that he came to see the foal, to watch it growing to a long-legged colt, to a proud stallion, its coat paling from the dim grey of its birth until it was, as he had once said it would be, white as storm water on the Seal Rocks. He seemed drawn to the animal in some hidden way, so that looking back in after years Owain wondered whether he had already some instinct that his fate and the white stallion’s were knotted together.

They called the foal Teitri, which was a name sometimes given to men but seldom to horses, for it simply meant a foal; because from the first it seemed that an ordinary name such as other horses bore would be too personal a thing for this horse who was never to know a human rider. And in his third winter—it was always in the winter that they broke the colts—Beornwulf and his British thrall, working together as they did in so many things nowadays, began the task of breaking him, so far as he was ever to be broken. He was used to being handled, for they had begun gentling him while he still sucked his mother; he was friendly and trusting, for no one had ever betrayed his trust, and would come to Owain’s whistle, as his mother came. But when the breaking started, all that, it seemed, was lost. The touch of the headstall seemed to him betrayal; he was outraged and terrified and furious that the friends he had trusted should seek to impose their will on his in mastery, and he fought for his freedom like a wild thing roped and dragged in from the wilderness who had never felt a man’s hand on him before. The greater part of the task fell to Owain, for there had always been a special bond between him and the grey foal he had brought into the world, and even now it was as though he could reach him better than Beornwulf could do. For most of that winter his life was centred round the struggle with the white stallion; a struggle that went on and on through days of triumph when it seemed that they were making some kind of progress, and days of despair when a small mistake or a moment’s impatience undid all the work of the days that had gone before. It was a battle that was heartbreaking for both of them, and in the end it was not as though Owain mastered Teitri at all, but rather as though Teitri, coming to understand where before he had only raged and feared, at last gave freely what all the men with whips in the world could not have forced from him. After that the sessions with headstall and bit and guiding-rein were no longer battles but lessons, and he learned willingly and well; and so at last the thing was done—as well as a thing could be done that might not be carried through to completion.

That was a hard winter and a long one, and before it was over, starvation, which was never very far off at winter’s end, was nearer than usual to the settlements along the coast. The young and the strong went about with hollow faces and heads that looked too big for their bodies, and more than usual of the old and sickly died, and by the time Teitri had learned to move in a circle on the guiding-rein, Uncle Widreth’s place beside the hearth was empty, and there was no one to tell stories to the Beornstead household in the evenings, any more.

With spring, as so often happened after a lean winter, the grey fever-hag came prowling across the levels from settlement to settlement in the marsh mists, and as the winter had taken the eldest of the household, so the spring took the youngest. Little Gerd died on the night that the last of the grey geese flew north, and all that night they heard the dark rush of wings overhead. Her going made very little stir; death came so often to the settlements, and there was nothing to be gained by raising an outcry. Her sisters howled for a while, but if Athelis wept at all no one saw or heard her. They put the little one away as one might bury a bird that falls dead out of a hedge, and the life of the farm went on, through spring sowing and sheep-shearing—almost to hay harvest.

On an evening of early summer, with the midge-clouds dancing over the sunlit levels, Owain went down with the big wooden pails slopping in either hand, to water Teitri for the night.

Between the oakwoods and the reed-beds and saltings that fringed the harbour, a curved strip of rough pasture ran up towards the creek. Beornwulf had enclosed it in the year that Owain first came to Beornstead. A bleak enough spot when the gales blew in off the sea, but this evening the light lay long and golden across it, and the long pale grass of the saltings scarcely stirred in the salt-scented air.

Owain unhitched and lifted aside the hurdle that closed the gap in the fence, and went through. Behind him he could hear Helga and Lilla calling to each other as they went about the usual evening hunt for eggs—the mallards in particular always laid abroad—and the bleating of ewes and the lighter babble of half-grown lambs, where Bryni, with Horn, the Smith’s son, to help him, was folding the sheep. They always folded them for the night, even in summer, not for fear of wolves or wild men, down here in the Seals’ Island, but because of the dykes and channels that might claim them in the dark.

Just inside the gate-gap stood a stone trough; Owain set the buckets down beside it, and whistled, a long shaken shore-bird whistle, and the white horse grazing at the far end of the horn of pasture lifted his head and whinnied, then wheeled and came trotting towards him. How often, Owain thought, Teitri had come so, in answer to his whistle, breaking from a trot into a canter; but this evening, watching him the length of the pasture, he knew suddenly and with a painful awareness, that he had never seen, and never would see in all his life, anything more beautiful than a white stallion cantering between the oakwoods and the sea. Teitri kicked up his heels like a colt, and broke into a lazy gallop; he came up with mane and tail streaming, half circled about Owain, and next moment was nuzzling against his breast. ‘Greetings, brother,’ Owain said, drawing his hand again and again down the white nose from forelock to quivering nostril. ‘It is thirsty work, this hot buzzing day. Drink then, it’s cold from the pond under the trees.’ He took up the first pail and held it for the horse to drink, before he tipped the rest into the sun-warmed trough.

With his free hand he fondled the proud arched neck while Teitri sucked up the water, noticing that the horse was getting into better condition. He had been all bones at the winter’s end. Teitri was not a tall horse—there were dim half-legends of the great horses that Artos the Bear had brought over from Gaul to mount his cavalry, but the horses of today were seldom more than thirteen or fourteen hands—but from the pride of his crest to the sweep of his tail, he was magnificent. Nothing of his wiry, vixenish mother in him save for a flash of gold in his eyes; a creature who might have been one of the wild white horses of the sea.

Owain gave the white neck a final pat, when Teitri had drunk his fill, and stooped to pour the other pailful into the trough, while the horse slobbered wetly at the back of his neck. Dog, who had come down to the shore-pasture behind him, ducked his muzzle into the trough and lapped thirstily. Suddenly the quick pad of bare feet came over the turf, and looking round, Owain saw the two boys heading in through the gate-gap. Bryni was first, Horn just behind him—that was the usual way of it, though Horn was the elder by two years and the taller by almost a head. Bryni had been with the sheep all day, for as an outdweller Beornwulf had no rights on the common grazing land nor the shepherd who tended all the settlement’s sheep, and now that he was ten years old the task of watching them had fallen to the boy; and Horn, as happened whenever his father could spare him, had come to share it. Owain sometimes wondered if Brand the Smith ever thought that there was a stranger at the hearth when his youngest son chanced to be home for supper.