Dawn Wind (21 page)

He let Athelis push him back on to the pillow and do what she would with his burst temple; but all the while, under the sponging cloth, his eyes were on Owain as he stood by with his own sodden rags drying on him in the heat of the fire. ‘I thought at the time, that I made a good bargain with my gold piece,’ he said in a while, ‘but it seems that I made a better bargain even than I thought.’ His voice was growing drowsy, and a little after, he drifted off to sleep between mouthful and mouthful of the milk that Athelis was trying to get into him.

Three men came alive out of that wreck, and the other two were cared for in the settlement and later sent on their way. Beornwulf slept for the best part of a day and a night, and woke on the following morning quite recovered though famine-empty, and with an air of having something on his mind. He ate an enormous meal of bannock and ewe-milk cheese, hard-boiled duck eggs and smoke-dried mackerel, and calling for Golden-eye, rode off up the old road to Haegel the King in his Great Hall.

He came riding back at dusk; they heard the horse’s hooves at the gate, and the dogs barked a welcome, and Owain went out with the lantern to take Golden-eye from him. Beornwulf handed her over without a word, seemingly deep in thought, and he led the tired mare clip-clopping round to the stable, and hitched her to the accustomed ring, hanging the lantern from its hook on the low roof-beams. He slipped out the bit and gave her an armful of hay and beans to keep her happy while he off-saddled and rubbed her down. Drink she had better wait for until she had cooled off a little.

He unbuckled the belly strap, then, turning with the well worn saddle in his arms, he saw Beornwulf standing in the low entrance under the thatch, with the deepening blue of the dusk behind him.

‘I have been with the King, my foster brother,’ Beornwulf said, ‘and now that the business that took me to him is off my hands, I have time to think of my own—and yours.’ He hesitated, for he was a man who seldom found the words he wanted easily, while Owain waited, the saddle in his arms, for what was coming next. At last he said, ‘I have not forgotten my debt to you.’

‘Debt?’ Owain said.

‘Na, not debt. When a man saves your life at risk of his own, you cannot call it a debt and pay him back as simply as though for the loan of a plough-ox or a day’s threshing. It is a free gift—but you might perhaps give a free gift in return … A life for a life. Would freedom seem to you the same thing as life?’

Owain felt his breath stick in his throat, and his heart began to pound under his ribs. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Then go down to Brand at the smithy tomorrow, and bid him cut off that thrall-ring. He knows.’

There was a long, long silence. Then Owain said carefully, ‘Let me go to Brand on the day that the King’s summons comes; that for a gift. And in payment for the winter that I shall still have worn your thrall-ring, give me on the same day, a sword.’

Their eyes met, bright and coolly steady in the lantern-light. ‘Who have you been listening to?’ Beornwulf demanded at last.

‘The harper who was at the settlement two nights since.’

‘And what said the harper?’

‘That there was unrest growing in the kingdoms that border Wessex. That he had smelled the Ravens gathering before Wibbendune, and knew the smell again. That Ceawlin grows too powerful for the safety of lesser kings, and that Aethelbert of Kent, who is also powerful, had little love for him. That many small kingdoms bonded together muster more spears than one great kingdom standing alone. No more than that, he said.’

‘And you have put these things together, and made of them—a hosting in the spring?’

‘It grows too late in the year for such a hosting this autumn.’

Beornwulf was looking at him, not quite understanding, the pale bars of his brows drawn together above his nose. ‘You are not Saxon, that you should carry a sword for a Saxon king.’

‘No,’ Owain said, ‘but against one. I am British, and my father and my brother died by Aquae Sulis. I am as good a hater as Aethelbert of Kent, and I also have little love for Ceawlin of Wessex.’

For a moment longer, Beornwulf stood in the doorway watching him. Then he nodded, and brought up his hand and smote it open-palmed on the doorpost beside him. ‘Well, many a man has fought for a worse reason. So be it then, you shall have your freedom and your sword—a good sword that I had before my father died—on the day that the summer comes. Now finish with the mare.’

And turning, he strode off across the steading garth in the dusk.

Owain hung the saddle very carefully in its place, took a wisp of straw without seeing it, and started to rub Golden-eye down.

It was spring when the war-summons came: a day of wind and sun and thin shining rain, with the cloud shadows drifting across the marsh. The messenger from the King’s Hall cried it to them from the steading gate without dismounting, and then rode on towards the settlement.

Owain, hearing the beat of his horse’s hooves die into the distance, thought that it had been just such a day as this when Kyndylan’s summons had come. Then he finished what he was doing, and went across the ten foot dyke and down to the settlement himself, to Brand the Smith.

The messenger had ridden on by the time he got there, and the place was throbbing like a nest of wild bees at swarming time. Already several men were gathered about the fiery darkness of the forge mouth above the boat strand, and the ring of hammer on anvil came from inside. Most of the men who would be answering the summons had had their weapons ready all winter past, but there were always some last things to do—a rivet to be tightened, the dint in a shield rim to be beaten out—and the forge made a good place to gather and talk the thing over in short flat sentences, now that it had happened at last. Owain waited with the rest until his turn came, then went into the fire-shot gloom of the smithy.

‘I am come at last,’ he said to the big brown smith.

Brand stood and looked at him, his hands on his hips, and the curling hairs on his chest turned to a russet fleece by the forge fire. ‘Every day this winter, you could have come,’ he said in his deep soft grumble, ‘but no, you must wait and wait, and come to me at last this day of all days, when there’s work enough at my door to keep Wayland himself busy for a week.’

‘I had to wait until I had earned a sword,’ Owain told him.

‘Aye, I have heard that story. Come then, and kneel here beside the anvil.’ The smith had turned away as he spoke, and was rooting among his cold-chisels for the one he wanted, and young Horn, plying the great sheepskin bellows, looked up with a grin, as he sent the fire roaring into a fiercer blaze.

Owain knelt down with his neck pressed against the side of the anvil, so that part of the iron thrall-ring rested on it. The touch of the anvil scorched his neck, and the acrid reek of hot metal made him want to sneeze. ‘Hold still if you don’t want to go one-eared the rest of your days,’ said Brand the Smith, bending over him with the chisel in one hand and a hammer in the other.

The thing was done very quickly, though his head felt jarred loose on his shoulders, and the right ear as though it were stuffed with wool. So quickly that just for a moment he could not quite understand that he was free again, after almost eight years. He knew that it was so, but he could not feel it. He could not feel anything except a kind of quietness. He saw between the figures in the open doorway the fishing boats drawn up on the wet sand, and the hurrying cloud shadows over the marshes, and the wings of the gulls wheeling by. Then he realized that the smith was booming in his deafened ear to know if he was going to kneel there all day; and he shook his head cautiously, as though he were a little afraid that it might fall off; and got up, laughing and rubbing his neck. The men in the doorway parted to let him through, they called after him, one or two of them clapped him on the shoulder, and the sound of their voices was friendly; but he did not hear what they said, though he grinned like a fool at them.

And he headed back towards the steading to claim his sword from Beornwulf.

By evening, more detailed news, following on the heels of the bare summons, was running through the settlements like a furze fire. Ceawlin’s nephews had raised the standard of revolt, proclaiming Coel, the eldest of their numbers, as King of the West Saxons.

And Owain sat late that night beside the spitting fire, nursing his sword across his knees.

‘W
ODEN
, Father of fighting men, hear now the oath of thy sons in the time that the Ravens gather. From this hour forth, until the last warrior comes again to his own or feeds his heart’s blood to the death-pyre, all other loves and hates laid by, one band are we, one brotherhood in victory or defeat.’

It was the voice of Haegel the King; and the voices of the war-host roared up in response, ‘In victory or defeat, All-Father, one brotherhood are we.’

Again Haegel’s voice rose solitary. ‘On shield’s rim and sword’s blade—Swear!’

A ringing rustle of metal ran through the war-host, as every warrior’s hand went to his weapons, and again there came the deep slow thunder of voices: ‘We swear.’

‘On the dragon-prow of Aelle’s war-keel—Swear!’

And yet again, the deep-voiced response: ‘We swear.’

For days past they had been gathering from the furthest fringes of the South Saxon Lands in ones and twos, in whole war-bands under their chieftains; from almost every farm a father or a son or a younger brother, until now the host that thronged the vast forecourt of the King’s Place, shields on shoulders and faces turned all to the threshold of the High Hall, must number close on two thousand.

From before the dark threshold where the priests gathered behind the King, a long thin tendril of smoke curled upward towards the fading fires of a royal sunset arching overhead, and the sharp tang of blood and the stink of burning horse-hair wafted in the faces of the warriors. Owain, standing well back among the younger and lesser of the war-host, caught the thick reek of it, and felt the queasiness still stirring in his belly. Only a short while since, here on the sacred ground before the King’s threshold, they had given the God’s Horse to Frey for his favour in the coming war; the great white stallion who was at once the sacrifice and the god who dies for the people. ‘There is always a price to be paid for Godhead,’ Vadir had said, on the night that the silver foal was born. He could see Vadir now, well forward among the chiefs and the royal kinsmen and the household warriors, shorter than most of the men around him but clearly recognizable by the paleness of his hair and the way he stood with one shoulder a little up, taking the weight on his sound leg; for a moment the cold hate rose in Owain, driving out all hint of queasiness. The horse had been drugged beforehand, someone had told him, otherwise they could never have brought him to the place of sacrifice at all; but even so, he had reared up at the kiss of the knife, swinging the men who held the ropes clear of the ground, and screaming, as it seemed, not in fear or pain but as a stallion screams in battle. Owain shut his eyes, giving thanks to whatever gods might hear him, that Teitri had gone to the Kentish King; at least he would not know it, when the time came for Teitri.

‘On the white crest of the Sacred Horse—Swear!’

And for the last time, with a crash of weapons on shield rims, came the thunderous response: ‘On the white crest of the Sacred Horse, we swear.’

Owain swore with the rest, like a Saxon warrior.

The priest was scattering something with a long horse-hair switch among the war-host, something that speckled red where it fell. Most of it fell among the warriors of the forefront, but a drop splashed on to Owain’s forehead like a heavy drop of thunder rain, still faintly warm. ‘That’s lucky,’ his neighbour told him. ‘That’s a sign of favour from the gods.’ But it was a sign that he would rather have done without, though he would not betray himself by wiping it off.

They dragged the carcass of the White Stallion away to be given to the hounds. It was only a carcass now and somewhere in the King’s horse-runs a young white stallion had become the God’s Horse at the moment that the old one died. They spread sand over the blood on the King’s threshold, and the thing was done.

The close-knit mass of warriors broke and drifted apart, and made for the cooking-fires where whole sheep and oxen were roasting.

Owain took his sizzling slice of beef on the point of his dagger, and drew off to the outskirts of the throng to eat it, his back propped against the low wall of the calf fold.

Above the surge of voices he could hear Haegel’s herd-bull, angry about something, trampling and bellowing in his stable.

Slowly the light faded from the vast arch of the sky; dusk was creeping up over the level country, and in the King’s forecourt the light of the fires began to brighten, throwing a confusion of glares and shadows over the shifting figures of the warriors and the women who moved among them with the ale jars. Owain felt queerly detached from the scene as though he alone had no roots in it. He had taken the war-oath with these men, he was bound to them and they to him, and yet he was cut off from them. He was British and they were Saxon, and between the two lay all the gulf that could lie between two worlds; but dimly he realized that there was another gulf between them also. They had something to fight for; he had only something to fight against. It was a curiously desolate feeling.