Dawn Wind (25 page)

Einon Hen was silent for a moment, and then he said, ‘Aye, and such news is heavy carrying.’ He pushed off from his apple-trunk and turned back towards the steading, Owain walking miserably beside him through the rough grass. They had come nearly to the steading gate when he spoke again. ‘And so the thing is finished, and the war-oath has run out. In a few days I shall turn my face again to the north-westward and my own hills—And you?’

Owain stopped dead in his tracks. He had not told Einon Hen of his promise to Beornwulf, he had not been able to bear to speak of it to anyone, but the old man had turned, surprised that he did not answer. He must answer. ‘I bide at Beornstead a while yet,’ he said, as though it were a small thing.

‘So? I thought your heart was set to go back to your own kind, when your freedom came.’

‘Beornwulf was a man without near kin. He—when he had his death-wound he asked me to stay by the boy till he is fifteen.’

‘You having once been his thrall,’ said Einon Hen after a pause, to the night in general.

‘It was not so that he asked it. If it had been, maybe I could have refused.’

‘Maybe,’ said the old man, musingly. ‘And the boy is—how old?’

‘He was eleven in the spring.’

‘So. Something under four years.’

‘It will pass.’

‘Ah, it will pass,’ agreed Einon Hen. ‘I shall think of you as it passes—now and then. God be with you in the meanwhile, Owain.’

He turned about with a whisk of his chequered cloak behind him, and went in through the steading gate.

Owain turned back to the solitude under the apple trees, and walked up and down for a while. Then he too went in, and joined the young men who were spilling out now into the moonlit forecourt, and lay down to sleep with his cloak wrapped round him, against the pig-sty wall.

He was up again well before first light, and heading down to the picket lines. He tended and saddled Wagtail with only the last of the sinking moon to help him, and in the dawn twilight he rode out through the gate of the King’s Place, and turned southward down the old half-lost road that led to the Seals’ Island.

There had been a heavy dew, and the wetness scattered like spray as he rode by. But by the time the creek was safely behind him and he came out of the woods at the edge of the familiar Intake, the sun was up, and the open levels shone tawny beyond the paler gold of the corn-land.

The morning smoke rose blue from the house-place roof as he turned off the road towards it, and the steading was awake and going about its morning work. Gunhilda the bondwoman was coming up from the pasture with a pail of milk as he rode in through the gate—they milked in the open at this time of year—and the smell of baking barley-bannock came out to him through the house-place door. No news had reached them yet, then. Odd how it seemed as though one could be sure of that from the fact that the hearth smoke still rose upward and there was barley-bread for the morning meal. The dogs were clamouring about him as he swung down from the saddle and dropped Wagtail’s bridle over the hitching-post. The horse had not been ridden hard, and it would not hurt him to wait a little before being watered and rubbed down.

And then Athelis was in the doorway, looking towards him with a smear of barley-meal across her hot forehead; the girls crowded behind her, and Bryni came running out into the early sunlight with a couple of new puppies at his heels, while Gunhilda broke into a clumsy trot towards them, slopping milk over the rim of her pail.

‘Owain! You are back just in time for the harvest,’ Athelis said, thrusting wisps of hair back under her kerchief with a floury finger. ‘We heard that the war-host had returned to the King’s Hall. Did the master send you ahead to tell us of his coming?’ And then her eyes went past him and took in the horse standing riderless at the hitching-post, and returned to his face with a quick unspoken question, and he saw the colour drain out of her face.

‘Come back into the house,’ he said. He did not know why, but he felt that it would be better to tell her indoors—as though the roof and walls would give her some kind of shelter for her grief.

She turned without a word, and went back to the fire, the others trailing behind her; and beside the great upright beam of the king-post, swung round to him again. ‘Is he dead?’

Owain nodded. ‘Almost two months ago, at a place called Wodensbeorg, where we broke Ceawlin’s power.’

‘What do I care for Ceawlin’s breaking?’ she said, softly fierce.

She looked old—old as she had done that day last year when they brought the master of the house home drowned to all outward seeming, and laid him by the fire—the bones of her thin face all at once so sharp that it seemed as though they must cut through the tightened skin. But he saw that she was not going to make any outcry, as she had made none last year. If she wept, it would be later, and alone, and he was thankful. ‘Little enough, I make no doubt,’ he said, in answer to her question, ‘but Beornwulf cared.’

‘He knew, then? He was not killed outright?’

‘He lived the better part of the night,’ Owain told her, ‘but I do not think he suffered more than his kind reckon fair payment for Valhalla.’

The bondwoman had begun to snivel and wail, and Helga and Lilla were huddling close to their mother, though she seemed for the moment not to know that they were there. But Bryni stood apart from the rest, his eyes on Owain’s face and the green of them swallowed up in black. He said in a small steady voice, ‘Did they burn my father’s sword with him?’

It sounded wickedly callous, but Owain, who knew Bryni, knew that it was not. ‘No, he bade me take it when the death-pyres were built, for you when you are of age to carry it.’

‘Give it to me now, just—just for today.’

Owain hesitated an instant, then brought the well worn weapon from under his cloak, and gave it to him without a word; and the boy stood for a moment looking at it in the firelight, then with a defiant scowl at the rest of his family, in case any of them thought of following him, he turned, holding it close against him, and ran from the house-place. One sob tore itself free of him before he was quite through the doorway, and that was all.

The bannocks on the hearth were scorching, but nobody noticed them.

A white and silent Bryni brought back his father’s sword at supper-time, and it was laid by at the bottom of the great kist to wait until he was a man. Owain hung up his sword and his dinted buckler above the place where he slept, and the life of the farm took him back as though the wind had never risen and he had never gone with Haegel’s war-host. But his place in the life of Beornstead was a much more difficult one to hold, than it had been before. Save that he no longer carried the weight of a thrall-ring about his neck, he was just what he had always been, one of the farm men, along with Gyrth and Caedman. And yet in many ways the burden of the household and the farm, of advising Athelis and trying to keep Bryni out of serious scrapes, rested as squarely on his shoulders as though he had been the master of the house. Sometimes it made him laugh, when he stopped to think of it, though there was a bitter twist to the laughter. It was a strange trick of fate that he, Owain, son of a Roman and a British house, should find himself shouldering the care of a Saxon family and a Saxon farm, but there was not much time for thinking, except at night, and by then he was generally too tired.

They got the harvest in, and it was time to put the three lean pigs out to fatten on acorns; time for the autumn slaughtering, the smoking and the curing and the salting down. Then winter was upon them, with the dykes a constant headache, and a young colt to be broken, and whenever he could snatch a day from the ditching and dyking, Owain took the dogs and sometimes Bryni and went hunting for fresh meat. If one lived entirely on the salt stuff, which had maggots in it anyway by the spring, one got the scurvy, and if the household got the scurvy he would have betrayed Beornwulf’s trust.

Lambing came, and spring ploughing, and early summer with hay harvest and the hot smelly business of sheep-shearing. Fitful warfare had broken out again in Wessex, as soon as the winter was over, but it was only between Ceawlin and his kin, and Haegel did not call out his war-host. The barley grew white for harvest in the cornlands of the Seals’ Island, and the first of the four years that Owain had given to Beornwulf was accomplished.

News always took a long time to seep down through the Wealden forests, and reach the tongue of land between the Downs and the Seals’ Island, and it was autumn when a wandering harper—always it was a harper or a merchant who carried the tidings of the world from one settlement to another—brought word that Ceawlin was dead, and two of his four sons with him. Ceawlin, whose shadow had fallen across South Britain like the shadow of a giant; dead in some already half-lost skirmish; the harper did not even know the name of the place, all that he was sure of was that Ceawlin was dead.

But the last coasting ship to make the Windy Haven, before the autumn gales closed the sea-ways, brought later news. The news that Ceawlin’s two surviving sons had made their peace with the new King of the West Saxons, and been rewarded with a fair-sized lump of their father’s old conquests, to hold under him. Aethelbert had taken the territories of Norrey and Surrey for his share of the spoils; the thing was over and paid for, tidied up and bundled away. And Owain, standing among the little crowd that had gathered to hear the ship-master holding forth, could not help feeling that the men who made the best showing in the confused and bloody story were Ceawlin and the two sons who had died with him. It was a bitter thing to have to admit, and he went back to the steading in a vile bad temper.

Another winter passed, and another, and Owain began to look about him with a queer mixture of eagerness and regret, thinking, ‘Only once more I shall see the sheep-shearing here in the Seals’ Island, one more harvest to get in, one more winter I shall struggle with the dykes.’ And also, ‘If Beornwulf were to come back, he would see that the land and the beasts are in good heart—and that young fool Bryni has not broken his own neck or anybody else’s.’

That summer Helga was hand-fasted to the grandson of old Gamal Witterson, the Headman of the settlement, a good match for any girl, though she seemed not particularly interested.

Only the folk of the two households witnessed the actual hand-fasting over the hearth, but afterwards, when the feasting started, folk came from half over Seals’ Island. And knowing that it would be so, Athelis had made her preparations accordingly. The trestle boards were set up before the house-place door, and loaded with great piles of barley-bread, bowls of dried fish, curds and cheese and golden-dripping honeycomb, and huge jugs of the spiced bride-ale from which the feast took its name. There was even meat, for Haegel the King had sent them a young ox.

In all the three years since he gave away his serpent-sword, Haegel had not once crossed the creek. Athelis said that he had forgotten his foster brother, but Owain thought privately, that maybe he remembered too well, and the Seals’ Island no longer had the feel of home for him; and he had sent them meat before this, and corn two winters past after the harvest failed. It was a fine young ox with plenty of fat on it, and when the cold broiled joints of it were set out with the rest, Athelis, who had been afraid that Beornwulf’s house would be shamed because Owain had refused to kill the pig which was not quite ready for killing, knew that there would be no need for shame, after all.

Owain came out late to join the rest, for one of their three cows was calving, and he had not liked to leave her until all was safely over. Now he stood with a cup of the bride-ale in one hand, leaning a shoulder against the foreporch wall and looking on at the merrymaking. Perhaps because he was tired, he felt cut off from the scene as he had felt cut off from that other scene in the King’s forecourt before he took his sword to join the young warriors about the weapon stone. Afterwards he had come to feel himself one with those warriors—but it was different when the Ravens were gathering. ‘The Truce of the Spear’, Einon Hen had called it …

Dusk had come like a slow-rising tide, and already the smoke of the feast-fire as it curled upward was silvered by the rising moon. The bride and groom were seated side by side on a pile of hay, and the firelight touched Helga’s soft hair under the wreathed silver wires of the bridal crown that her grandmother and her great-grandmother had worn before her, and leapt on the blade of the sword across young Wiermund’s knees—always a man brought his sword to the wedding, though it was seldom needed now. Somewhere in the shadows, old Oswy was piping for the dancing that had just begun; a thin sweet piping that seemed to belong to the moonlight rather than the fire, and the young men and girls had caught hands and were spinning like a wheel about the fire, while the older men foregathered before the house-place and the women moved among them with the ale jar.

Between the piping and the sound of voices laughing, arguing, bragging one against another, Owain heard a whinny from the narrow close where the horses were tethered. Earlier, the boys and young men had been trying their paces against each other as usually happened when any feast gathered them together; and soon, quite soon now, it would be time for the bride-race, which had made a wild end to every hand-fasting in the Seals’ Island settlements since the first keel was run ashore and the first hut built.

The piping ceased on a falling trail of notes, and the spinning circle of dancers burst apart. They were all over the garth now, crowding round the trestle boards. And among the rest, Owain saw Bryni and Horn, together as they generally were, with Lilla between them. Padda the boat-builder who had three cherry trees in his garth, had brought a bowl of the little fruit, rose red on one side, bone white on the other, for his contribution to the wedding, and knowing that they would go nowhere among so many, Athelis had not set out the bowl until most of the serious eating was over. The dancing had been wild, and Lilla had lost her head-rail, so that when she flung the soft heavy braids of her hair back over her shoulders, the pink lobes of her ears were bare. They seemed to have given Horn an idea, for while Bryni looked on laughing at him, he was picking over the bowl for cherries whose stalks were joined together, and with the quiet concentration with which he did all things, hanging them in the girl’s ears.