Dawn Wind (4 page)

‘Anywhere into Southern Cymru, or across into Dumnonia; or maybe those that can afford it, overseas to Gaul to join the settlement that Maximus planted with his old soldiers in Armorica, like many that have gone before them.’ She sniffed acidly. ‘Like enough they’ll be calling it Brittany, by and by.’

‘You would not go that way?’

‘Do I not tell you it is a way for those that can afford it? It costs a fistful of gold, nowadays, to buy a place in a fishing boat making the crossing. Besides, we have each uprooted once, my old Priscus and I, and we are too old to uproot a second time and start life again in a strange land … Na na, we shall just abide here with our own fields, and trust that the Barbarians do not come so far westward into the hills.’

E
VERY
Saturday night Priscus shaved; a long and painful operation entailing the use of vast quantities of goose-grease to soften the bristles, and the heating of much water over the fire, and next day when the milking and the necessary morning work of the farm was done, he and Priscilla retired into the small inner room where they slept, and came out again in their glory, Priscus in good russet cloth, Priscilla with a crimson border to her sheeps-grey gown and a string of melon-shaped blue glass beads round her scrawny neck. ‘We are Roman citizens, and we might as well look like it, at least on God’s day of the week,’ Priscilla said with valiant pride.

And together they went off up the herding path into the next valley, on their way to worship God, leaving Branwen the short-legged cattle-dog in charge of the farm until they came home again towards evening. On the earlier Sundays, Owain had of course been left behind, but on the second Saturday after Priscus’s trouble with the cow, Priscilla came out of the inner room while the master of the house was at his shaving, carrying something blue over her arm. ‘There,’ she said to Owain, who was holding up the big copper cooking pot for Priscus to see his round agonized face in. ‘This is his second best tunic; it will do for you tomorrow.’

‘I can’t wear out
all
Priscus’s tunics,’ Owain said without looking up. ‘I’m wearing out his old working one as it is.’

‘And you cannot come to Service with us in that one smelling of the byres. If you think,’ said Priscilla with feeling, ‘I am going to have it said that I grudged any member of my household a clean tunic to worship God in, you are mistaken!’

‘To say nothing,’ Priscus murmured gravely, ‘of myself, the tunic’s actual owner.’

Owain looked up slowly. ‘Am I to go to Service with you tomorrow?’

He was born and bred to the Christian faith, and his faith had been dear to him. It was part of his heritage, part of being Roman and British, and standing for civilization and the light, against the Barbarians and the in-flowing dark. But now the last light had gone out, and it was as though something of his faith had guttered out too. Part of him wanted to go with Priscus and Priscilla and share in the familiar worship, but part of him shrank from it as from going back to a place where one has been happy, when the hearth is cold and the people one was happy with are dead. ‘I think I will not go; I will bide here as I have before, and then nobody will say anything.’

‘No one in my house stays at home on the Lord’s Day, when once his legs are strong enough to carry him to Service,’ said Priscilla simply. ‘If you come for no other reason, you can come to thank God for leading you to my threshold in your sorest need.’

Owain said with a flash of rather dreary laughter, ‘In actual truth it was a grey wagtail!’

‘The Lord who knows when a sparrow falls will not find a grey wagtail too small to use for His purpose, I dare say,’ said Priscilla briefly, depositing the blue woollen tunic on his lap.

And Owain knew that he would go to Service tomorrow.

He washed, and allowed Priscilla to clip off the strong dark hair that had grown long about his neck. And next morning, wearing Priscus’s second best tunic, which was about the right length for him but roughly three times too wide, he set off up the green drove track, walking at Priscilla’s left hand while Priscus trotted at her right, and Dog, as usual, came padding along behind.

It was a good distance, following the winding drove-way that linked outland farm with outland farm among the hills, and Owain, whose legs were still apt to tire quickly, was not sorry when they came down through a tangle of low-growing woods into a shallow upland valley, and saw the village half-way up the slope on the far side, and higher up, where the field plots ran out into rough pasture, a little barn-like building with the tall grey finger of a preaching cross raised in front of it.

They were late, for Priscus had broken his shoe-thong on the way, and they had had to stop and mend it, and when they came up through the apple trees and kale plots of the village to the preaching cross, the rest of the little congregation were already assembled; maybe thirty or forty men, women, and children from the village and the outlying farms, gathered close about the grey stone shaft of the cross and the little figure in the long tunic of undyed sheep’s wool who stood at its foot.

They looked round as the three latecomers slipped in among them, and many eyes were fixed upon the thin dark boy who had come with Priscus and Priscilla, and who wore—though he did not know it—an odd stillness on his face as though it were a mask, or a shield; but they had the courtesy of people who live very far into the wilds, and after the one look they did not stare any more, but made room for him close to the preaching cross, as though he had been one of themselves.

The priest had already begun the service, and Owain fixed his eyes on him, trying to take in his words. The man was worth looking at, small, fierce, and fiery, with the head of a warrior prince on the body of an under-fed clerk; worth listening to also, for the fire that flashed from his dark eyes was in his voice, kindling the words of his mouth to a new aliveness. And yet Owain, listening to the familiar prayers, murmuring the familiar responses with Priscus and Priscilla, could not make them mean anything at all. The ground all round the cross and the priest’s cell was hummocky, for the dead lay buried there, but there were few stones, and the little grey hill sheep cropped the rough grass to the very walls of the cell; and Owain heard their cropping and the deep contented drone of bees among the opening bell heather more clearly than prayer or psalm or litany; and remembered it longer.

But when the man began to preach, then it was a different matter. The preachers of the Cymru were mostly gifted with silver tongues, but it seemed that this man’s tongue was of flame. But indeed, Owain found that it was not a sermon he was listening to at all, but an exhortation, a cry that seemed to be for him personally, as for every soul gathered there. ‘Brothers, the Light goes out and the Dark flows in. It is for us to keep some Lamp burning until the time that we can give it back to light the world once more; the Lamp, not of our Faith alone, but of all those beauties of the spirit that are kindled from our Faith, the Lamps of the love of wisdom in men’s hearts and the freedom of men’s minds, of all that we mean when we claim that we are civilized men and women and not barbarians.’

That was the message as Owain received it; it might have come differently to the hill shepherd, differently again to Priscilla.

And listening to him, to the blazing urgency that could only have flamed up from the need of the immediate moment, and never been planned beforehand, the boy thought, ‘This man has heard something—some news that has only just come.’ And he thought, too, that the other people round him knew what it was. In a short while the service was over; the people turned to each other, no longer a congregation, but a gathering of friends and foes and neighbours, and suddenly the priest was close beside them with his hand on Priscus’s arm, saying, ‘You came late today, my dears; have you heard the news?’

Priscus shook his head, his round face anxious at once. ‘What news is that, then, Little Father?’

‘None that we were not expecting,’ said the priest, ‘and quite stale by now, I suppose, but none the less dark for that, if it be true. They say that Glevum is in Ceawlin’s hands, and Corinium and Aquae Sulis have gone up in flames. The Barbarians are over all the country round Sabrina Head.’ His brilliant gaze sought out Owain, standing a little behind the other two. ‘That is maybe news that strikes nearer to you than to the rest of us, my son; for the word that runs through the hills at any stranger’s coming among us, tells that you were at the last great battle, by Aquae Sulis.’

‘I and the dog here,’ Owain said. ‘It was the first fight for both of us.’

And Dog, hearing his name, flung up his head and nosed happily at the boy’s arm.

‘So.’ The priest’s gaze dropped to the great hound, and lifted again to Owain’s face. ‘Kneel down, my son.’

Owain knelt, and felt the light touch of the man’s hand on his bowed head; the other was on Dog’s; and Dog, who never showed affection to anyone save his Master, nosed up under it and licked the man’s wrist. ‘O Lord,’ said the rough beautiful voice above him, ‘here are a boy and a dog who have fought Thy fight according to the best that was in them. Therefore let Thy blessing be upon them, and Thy courage bear them up, and spread over them the mercy of Thy wings.’

The three of them walked home in silence; not one word exchanged between them until they came up between the midden and the cow byre to the house-place door. But on the threshold Priscus checked, and stood a moment looking away down the valley. ‘It would be useless, of course—perfectly useless; I dare say I’d be no better skilled with a weapon than with a plough. I’m not very good at anything save making pots, but I could find it in my heart, just now, to wish that I was young again and had a sword.’

‘You were the best potter in all Glevum territory,’ said his wife bracingly. ‘I’ll say it to your face as I’ve said it behind your back, and one skill should be enough for any man. Stop blocking up the doorway now, and let me get at the stew pot if you want any supper tonight.’

The stew, when it was ready, was a good one, but none of them seemed hungry, and silence had descended on them again. Owain, chewing his way through his bowlful without tasting it, stared into the fire. The weeks that he had spent here in the shelter of Priscilla’s kindness had had a kind of battered peace about them, like the lull in a storm; and the outside world, even his father’s death, had seemed a long way off. But now it had all come rushing back to him again, and the lull was over. He knew that even if he stayed here, the lull would still be over … He wiped the last drops of soup from the bottom of his bowl with a piece of barley crust, chewed and swallowed slowly and deliberately, and set the bowl aside. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘I must be away. I have stayed too long.’

Priscilla was collecting the bowls, which presently she would take down to the spring for scouring, and she pushed them together with a clatter. ‘That is foolishness; you can scarcely walk as far as the village yet.’

‘I can, you know I can; I—must go.’

There was a little silence, Priscilla looking at him tight-lipped. Then Priscus gently cleared his throat. ‘I think, my dove, that ill fitting though the moment seems, you had best speak now to the boy of—the matter that we discussed a few days since.’

Priscilla’s mouth tightened still further. ‘You speak to him; it is for the head of the house.’

‘Doubtless, my dove; also it is a task for a woman.
I
shall go and scratch the pigs’ backs,’ said Priscus, and got quietly to his feet and ambled out, Branwen trotting on her short legs behind him.

For a few moments Priscilla glared after him with the look of a woman who would dearly like to shake someone until his teeth flew out of his head; then she gave a small exasperated sigh, and turned back to the hearth. Owain could scarcely see her face now, for on these summer evenings the house-place became unbearable if one kept the fire up once the cooking was over, and candles were for special occasions. He waited for what she wanted to say to him, not wondering very much what it was, because his thoughts were turned towards setting out again tomorrow.

She said: ‘We have never questioned you about yourself in all this while. It seemed both to my old Priscus and to me that if we waited, maybe one day you would tell us of your own choosing. But now it seems that there is no time left.’

Owain looked up quickly. ‘I am sorry. I will answer anything you like. What did you want to know, Priscilla?’

‘That ring you wear round your neck—I hung it on a new thong for you while you were ill; did you notice? Was it perhaps your father’s ring?’

Owain nodded.

‘Were you with your father in that last battle?’

‘With my father and my brother,’ Owain said, scratching the scar on his arm as he had got into the habit of doing, and staring into the embers of the sinking fire.

‘Don’t do that, you’ll make it sore,’ said Priscilla. ‘They were killed?’

‘Yes.’

‘You have—’ Her voice, softer than he had ever heard it before, hesitated a moment in a way that was not like her. ‘You have a mother to go back to? She will have been thinking you dead with the other two, all this while, poor woman.’