Dawn Wind (8 page)

Regina, glancing up from the grains of barley in her palm, seemed to notice something on the front of his tunic that she had not seen before. Then she pointed: ‘What is that?’

And peering downward, Owain saw that his father’s ring was hanging in full view. It must have tumbled through the neck of his tunic when he fell down the steps after Dog. His first instinct was to thrust it back out of sight, muttering that it was not anything in particular. But Regina had shown him the scar on her foot in exchange for his; she had not minded him seeing when she fed the birds—and remembering the wolfish way she had eaten last night, he had the sense to know how much feeding the birds must mean to her—and she had shared the blueness of the tit with him before she let it go. He slipped the thong over his head, and held it out to her. ‘It was my father’s ring. It is mine now.’

The light of the flames caught the flawed emerald and it blazed into a flake of green fire between his fingers; and she leaned towards it with a little gasp, her dirty hand darting out to take it. ‘You must have been very rich!’ she said, and her fingers suddenly looked like little brown claws. He had not thought of his father’s ring as being valuable, only as being precious.

‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s the only jewel we ever had; and look, it is flawed … There was just the farm, and it was all we could do to keep the roof on the byres.’

‘Farm? You had a farm all of your own? Where was that?’

‘Over that way, maybe a day’s march.’ He jerked his head towards the south-eastern corner of the little room.

Regina glanced in the same direction, as though she expected to see the farm in the shadows beyond the firelight. ‘The Saxons came that way,’ she said after a moment.

‘I know,’ Owain said, staring at the hare. He was thinking of the burnt-out farms that he had passed two days ago. He had been careful not to think of his own farm ever since. He knew now that he would never go back to see what the Saxons had left.

Regina was turning the ring between her fingers, her head bent over it. ‘There’s a queer fish-thing carved on it. Is it very old?’

‘That’s a dolphin,’ Owain said. ‘Yes, it is old. It came from somewhere beyond the seas—Rome, I suppose—when we did. And that was when the Eagles first came to Britain.’

But he saw that she did not know what he was talking about. He knew, because his father had told him what
his
father had told
him;
but there had been no one to tell Regina. Anyhow, it didn’t matter. It was all dead now.

‘You should take better care of it,’ said Regina, with a hint of scolding in her tone. ‘I could have cut the thong and stolen it quite easily in the night, if I had known that it was there.’

‘Thanks for the warning. I’ll sleep with my hand over it tonight.’

She looked up at him with those strange rain-grey eyes, and said simply, ‘No, you need not. It is no good stealing now. There is nothing in Viroconium to buy with gold.’

‘You could take it out of Viroconium and maybe buy a place in a boat crossing to Gaul. That’s what the people who have any gold to spend, buy with it nowadays.’

It was said half in jest, half in unexpected earnest, but either way, Regina slipped away from it as though it were some kind of menace. She pushed the ring back into his hand, and turned away to the fire. ‘Oh look!—The hare is scorching.’

O
WAIN
came to the edge of the trees that made a dark fleece about the flanks of the Virocon, a pair of wood pigeons swinging in one hand and Dog loping at his heels; and turned his steps, weary from his day’s hunting, back towards the pale gleam that was the walls of Viroconium. He shivered in the thin east wind that parted Dog’s hair in zigzags down his back, and thought of the cooking fire that Regina would have made ready.

He was hungry as well as tired, and the store-hole in the wall had been empty, so there would be nothing to eat until the pigeons were cooked. Once, he and Dog had killed a yearling roebuck—the sling he was carrying now, tucked into his belt, was made of its skin—and the three of them had gorged themselves for days. But there had been other times, especially when the snow came, when he and Dog had snared and hunted for days, desperately, without a kill and there had been nothing to live on at all save a little corn from the store under the baker’s shop. The corn, stale and fouled by rats as it was, had kept them alive; but it was getting low now, and Owain knew that it was time to be going.

He had known all along that they could not go on living in their dead city for ever. The Saxons might come back any day, the woods were full of broken men, and the hunting was not good. But every time he tried to speak to Regina of what they should do, she slipped away from the subject with a kind of silvery whisk like a minnow. Viroconium was the only place she knew, and she was frightened of what lay beyond. And then it had been winter, and one could not travel in the winter.

But now the blackthorn was in flower …

It had been a strange winter; hard and grim and hungry, but with a kind of light shining through it. They had simply lived from day to day, with not much thought to spare from warmth and food, just the business of keeping alive as the vixen who laired by the West Gate understood the business of keeping alive. But now it was over, he found himself remembering the rosemary seedling that Regina had dug up from the Palace gardens and planted in a broken crock by their doorway, and the blue flames of the burning olivewood. They had not burned it all. ‘We will keep some of it for another time. It is too beautiful to burn all at once,’ Regina had said. Owain scratched his head—there were things that walked about in his head now—and realized suddenly that he was thinking of their time at Viroconium as something that belonged to the past already; and of course it did no such thing; he still had to talk Regina into coming away. Well then, if she would not come, he’d go without her! But he knew he would not. He was not always sure that he liked her very much, especially when the beggar’s whine crept into her voice, though that did not often happen now; but he knew that they belonged together, as he and Ossian had belonged together even when they fought.

The sun had gone and the light was thickening under a stormy sky as he came up to the North Gate, and the wind ran shivering through the long grass. And in the gateway he checked, sniffing. But it was nothing so tangible as a smell that had pulled him up; it was the odd instinctive feeling one may have on entering a house that is supposed to be empty, that it is not empty at all.

Then Dog growled, soft and menacing, deep in his throat, and looking down, Owain saw the hackles rise on the hound’s neck and down his spine. And suddenly his own heart was racing, and he did not know why.

He stooped, and slipped the bit of old rope that he used as a hunting leash through Dog’s collar, and then went on. He was about a spear-throw from the Gate when he heard it; a distant splurge of voices somewhere ahead of him in the ruins that had been silent so long. He checked a second time, listening. Everything was quiet now, only a thrush singing in the gardens. And then as he stood straining his ears for any sound above the racing drub of his own heart, it came again, and mingled with it the distressful lowing of cattle.

The sounds seemed to come from the direction of the Forum. ‘Quiet now,’ Owain muttered to Dog, thankful that being a war-hound he was trained to keep silent at command; and together they turned aside from the straight main street into the gardens behind the city’s principal inn. No sense in going blundering down the open street into whatever was happening. Silent as a pair of shadows for all the speed that they were making, the boy and the hound crossed the garden and took to the maze of narrow alleys beyond, heading by back-ways and through the ruins of shops and houses in a bee-line for the Forum.

Round most of the Forum the streets ran broad and open, making of it an island, but on the north side the ruins of a tall house had fallen across the way and gave some sort of cover almost up to the side entrance against the wall of the Basilica. And in a short while the boy, with the hound still in leash, was stealing forward through the fallen timbers, into the gateway. On his left rose the wall of the Basilica like a cliff, on his right the blackened ruins of a garland-maker’s shop, and at the end of the narrow cleft between, were sounds of men and beasts and the red flicker of firelight.

Owain slipped aside, crouching, into the ruins of the shop; and next instant, as he peered out through the charred tangle of the colonnade, the whole scene in the Forum was plain before him. The light was fading fast, though overhead the storm-clouds had caught fire from the sun that was already way down behind the Western Mountains; and the great blaze that was leaping and crackling in the centre of the open space seemed to echo the gold and copper and ice-green of the sky. Upward of a score of men were gathered about the fire, a lean, ragged, wolfish crew, spears in their hands or lying beside them; and dim in the gusty twilight and the fringes of the fire, he saw the shapes of shaggy knee-haltered mountain ponies; further out still, fenced into the lower end of the Forum with a barricade of half-charred timbers, a huddle of cattle, brown flanks and wild eyes and uptossed wide-horned heads. Calves among them too, from the sound of it, and cows in milk.

‘I still think we’d have done better to push straight on and get them across the river tonight,’ one of the men was saying discontentedly, and Owain realized with a sense of shock that the words were not spoken in the guttural Saxon, but in his own tongue. Not a Saxon raiding band, but a British one; broken men out of the woods, maybe.

‘So near to dark, and with the rain that there’s been in the hills to bring it down in spate?’ growled another, a small lean man with thatch of badger-striped hair, who seemed to be a leader among them. ‘Milch cows with calves among them too? Don’t be a bigger fool than you were born to be, Cunor Bigmouth.’

‘Anyway, who is to follow us?’ said a third, in the soft leaping voice of one bred in the mountains. ‘I did not see many Saxons left when we had finished with the farm.’ And there was a general laugh, snarling and ugly with the wolf pack note in it.

They had killed a half-grown steer out of the herd, and several of them were flaying it beside the fire, the flamelight striking on their fierce intent faces and the blades of the long knives. Owain felt the whimper rise in Dog’s throat, despite his training, at the smell of the warm ox-blood, and strangled it quiet with desperate hands. He had seen all he needed to see; now the thing was to go and find Regina. But even as he drew his knee under him to slip away, he froze once more, as, with scarcely any sound of footsteps in their soft raw-hide shoes, three more men, returning probably from a foraging expedition, loomed in through the Forum arch.

What happened then was so quick that it was over almost before he realized that anything was happening at all. As the latecomers entered, there was a startled movement among the ruins of the colonnade, right in their path. One of the men pounced on it like a dog on a rat; there was an instant’s scuffle, and a burst of fierce laughing voices, and then a scream. And the man came striding on towards his fellows round the fire, with a small figure fighting like a mountain cat across his shoulder.

Owain felt sick as from a blow in the stomach; too late to go and find Regina.

The man swung her down into the midst of the group, holding her fast with her thin arms twisted behind her back. ‘See, lads, here’s something else beside cattle to carry back with us into the mountains.’

They crowded close around her while in their midst Regina twisted and wrenched at her pinioned arms. Owain caught one glimpse of her, her matted hair falling over her face, as she writhed round and doubled up to sink her teeth into a man’s wrist and hung on, worrying at it. ‘Ah, would you, you wild cat!’ someone snarled; and he heard the sound of a blow followed by a shriek and a stream of filthy gutter words in the girl’s hoarse high voice; and for the moment all sight of Regina was lost to him.

His first instinct had been to loose Dog on them and come flying out with his knife, but his brain was working cold and quick, and he knew that would be a fatal thing to do. Even with Dog’s terrible jaws to help him, what could he do against a score of armed men? And after he and Dog were dead, there would be no one left to help Regina. If he could make a diversion of some kind, that would be the thing—

The plan seemed to come to him ready-made, and next instant he was melting back into the shadows, still clutching Dog’s leash, leaving the pigeons abandoned where he had laid them down. He was slipping from one patch of dense shadows to the next, along the ruined colonnade towards the far corner where the cattle were penned; and as he went he plunged his hand into the little rawhide pouch at his belt, feeling desperately for the few sling pebbles he had left from his day’s hunting. Five or six by the feel of it; that should be enough. In his ears were the voices and the ugly laughter about the fire, but he did not waste time in looking that way again. His business was with the cattle … And a few moments later he was crouching close behind the place where they were penned. Dog was pressed against him, obedient to his orders, but he could feel the eagerness for battle, the rage and the bewilderment quivering through the great hound, as he drew out the first of his sling stones and lobbed it on to the broad back of the nearest cow.