Hawk of May (14 page)

On the other hand, I told myself whenever I considered this, I might die by Aldwulf's hand at the dark of the moon, and the matter would not concern me at all. And I would throw myself into some other task so as not to think of it.

Cerdic did not set me any tasks in the house, which was fortunate, for I soon realized I did not know how to work as a thrall. I had not noticed how much I took it for granted that I was a king's son, even a younger and despised king's son, and that there were certain things those of a royal clan do not do. I found that I expected others to open doors, fetch things, pick things up. I had no notion of how to go about cleaning a floor or mending the thatch, and was, at first, angry when told to do some menial task. Continually I had to correct myself, and tell myself that these servants were fellow servants. I did not fool them. Coming into the stable one day I heard one of the grooms saying to a house-servant, “If he's a thrall, I'm the Emperor Theodosius. Do you know…”—and he stopped abruptly when he saw me. No; there were few tasks for me as a thrall. But Cerdic expected me to be ready to play the harp at any time of day or night, and I had my own inquiries to make. Besides that, I was attempting to learn the basics of the Saxon tongue…and then, there was Ceincaled.

Leaving the stables on my first day as Cerdic's thrall, I saw a crowd of men gathered in a circle on a hillside just beyond the Roman part of the town, and I went to investigate. Aldwulf had mentioned that he gave a horse to Cerdic to prove his power at sorcery, and Cerdic had accepted it as proof, although unable to break the horse. As I came through the circle and saw the stallion that reared in the center of the ring, I understood why.

No earthly mare had borne that horse. The steeds of the Sidhe, praised in a hundred songs, show their immortality in every line; and that horse was a lord among even such horses as those.

He stood three hands taller at the shoulder than the largest horse I had seen before, and that had been a giant of a plow-horse. He was lovely: pure white, splendid and powerful as a storm on the sea. The white neck curved like the sea's waves before they break, the mane was like foam flung up from the rocks. No seagull skims the water as lightly as those hooves skimmed the earth, and no sea-eagle struck at the ground with such fierceness or such freedom. The horse's nostrils were flared wide and red, defiant in anger, his eyes dark and savage with pride. I held my breath at the sight of him.

The Saxon who had just been thrown scrambled out of the way, and some grooms from Cerdic's stable drove the horse back to the center of the ring with whips and flapping cloaks, cursing him.

“That beast is a man-killer,” said one of the thralls, who was standing a few feet from me. “Cerdic cannot believe that he will ever tame it.”

“He is beautiful, that horse,” I said. The man looked at me, surprised and suspicious. He recognized me, shrugged uncomfortably.

“Of course,” he said, “and strong and swift. He could outrun and out-stay any horse in Britain, that one. But what is the use of all of it, since he can't be ridden? You are new here and wouldn't know, but we have tried for a month now to break him, with kindness and with blows, with riding and with starving, and we are no nearer to taming him than we were when Cerdic first acquired him. I know horses, and I say that this one will die before he obeys a man. And before he dies he will probably take some of us with him…Watch out, there! Hey, you!…Cerdic won't name him till he's ridden him, but we of his house call the beast Ceincaled, Harsh Beauty, for that, surely, is what he is.”

It took little time for me to see the truth of the man's words. The horse tried to kill every human near him. There was no viciousness in these attempts, no hatred of humanity such as one finds in an animal which has been badly mistreated, but instead a wild, pure, elemental power which could bear no subjection. He was proud, Ceincaled, not with a pride such as men have, but as a falcon or eagle is proud. He was like the music in Lugh's Hall: splendid, but not for men. I wondered what dark spell of Aldwulf's had captured the stallion and brought him from the Plain of Joy to captivity and eventual death in the lands of men.

There were times during the next two weeks when I felt a strong sense of kinship with the stallion. I was not an immortal, but my problem was similar. I was trapped, and all my efforts to escape only wasted my time and brought nearer the time set down for my death.

Cerdic had all of his large warband with him in Sorviodu-num (to use the Roman name): three hundred and twelve picked warriors, who guarded the fort. He had also an army of some five thousand—as always, the exact number was uncertain. The camp was continually prepared for war, and raiding parties left or returned nearly every day, if only from short forays. I thought of trying to slip from the camp when one of these arrived, and hung about the gate and a low spot in the walls for a while, until I was warned off the guards, who, besides being exceedingly vigilant, were suspicious. I considered the forest I had walked through, and looked out over it from the hill-top center of the fortress. I thought it must be easy to disappear into the trees. Unfortunately, though, the forest only extended towards the north-east. There were miles of open plain adjoining the town on the west, where lay the nearest British kingdom. And I was watched, even if there had been some way to cross the walls and the plains. No one forbade me to roam about the town, but some thrall or some warrior always seemed to be about. Cerdic did not wish his semi-human sacrifice to escape. It disturbed me nearly as much as the fear of death and my still unresolved fears about myself. I had always wanted solitude, and to be denied it grated against my nerves.

I prayed to the Light, but he did not respond. I began to want, and want badly, simply to draw Caledvwlch and try to splash my way out of the fort. I knew that it would be certain death to do so, but at least it would be a clean death, and a warrior's death. I was tired of being a thrall. I was trapped, and that word seemed to resound continually through my mind, all of each day. At night I dreamt of it, and I thought of it before anything else each morning when I woke. Trapped, like a hawk that had flown by mistake into a fisherman's net, who, when he beats his wings only discovers how truly entangled he is, and exhausts his strength against the ropes.

I became aware of time with a terrifying intensity, of how the sun rising in the morning splashed the sky with colors whose softness I had never noticed so clearly before; of how the shadows shortened and lengthened as the hours passed during the day. At night I watched the moon, sliding from full down into its fourth quarter, growing thinner with every night that passed. The moon was my friend, my ally. While she still shone I would not die. But she was leaving the sky, and when she had gone, all would be darkness.

Sometimes I felt that the Light had withdrawn in the same way. After alerting me to Cerdic's plan, it became as silent as the moon. Two weeks is not a long time, but those two weeks, full of the tension of waiting and the terror of the trap, seemed endless and, at the same time, seemed to be gone at once. I felt that I had been abandoned by my lord. I was left to myself, and I was afraid of myself as well. I cannot say why it so terrified me to think of myself as not human. Most men would be pleased to consider themselves apart from humanity—or they think they would be. It was not the loneliness, though that may have been a part of it, for I was accustomed to loneliness. Perhaps it was simply fear of the unknown. All fear what they do not understand, the more so when that unknown is a part of themselves.

So I watched the Saxons trying to break Ceincaled, and looked after the horse when he was stabled, to free myself from myself. The purity of the white horse seemed to defy and mock the complexity of the terrors that beset me. His battle was the one I longed for, the simple brilliance of physical struggle.

Two weeks. The moon became a sliver in the sky, a thin hair of light, and the spaces between the stars were very black. The next night there would be no moon. The next night…it was my last day, and I had decided nothing. When evening came, if there should still be no escape, I had resolved to draw Caledvwlch and try to see whether I could kill Aldwulf and Cerdic before they killed me.

I stood again in the circle that hemmed in Ceincaled and watched Cerdic try again to ride the horse, and again be thrown. Across from me, Aldwulf was chewing his beard. He had been trying some new sorcery on the horse to please Cerdic, but his spells had failed and he was shamed and angry.

“By the worm!” said Cerdic, picking himself up. “I have been cheated.”

He had. I could guess the price that Aldwulf had persuaded him to pay for the horse—a human life, the usual price in bargains with Yffern—and, while the life of some prisoner or thrall might be counted cheap for such a horse, Ceincaled was as useless to Cerdic as if he had been a lame cart-horse. Even though Ceincaled could leave behind every horse in the camp…

By the sun and the wind! Mentally I swore Agravain's favorite oath. I had been blind, looking about in the night of my own shadow, when the sun was behind me. How, I asked myself, beginning to find it very funny, how could I have ever been so stupid?

And was my other problem so simple as this? I asked myself as I edged round to Cerdic. All my questioning of my identity, would it too come clear in a burst of light when I looked in the right direction? My High King, lord…

“My lord King,” I said to Cerdic, who had noticed my approach and was eyeing me without enthusiasm. “Could I try to ride the horse?”

Cerdic gave me a furious glare, then hit me hard enough to make me stagger for balance. “You insolent dog! You slave, do you think to succeed where a king failed? I should have you whipped!” I saw that I had misjudged the degree of his anger about the horse and bowed my head, trying to think and rubbing my jaw.

“Cerdic,” Aldwulf interrupted suddenly. “You might let him try.”

“What!”

“They may be from the same land. Who knows? The boy has been caring for the horse.” Aldwulf's thought was plain. I would use magic on the horse, tame it, be killed, and the king would have both my sword and the horse. Aldwulf was smiling in a very satisfied fashion. It had been a sore point with him, I think, that his fine horse was unridable.

Cerdic looked at me, remembering what Aldwulf said I was. “Very well,” he said at last. “Try, then.”

“Thank you, Cyning Cerdic,” I said softly. “I will do my best.”

Cerdic nodded to Aldwulf. I turned back towards Ceincaled.

He had been caught by the grooms again, and waited patiently while they held him, conserving his strength for his rider. I walked over, thanked the man who held him, and took the bridle. As I held it, I suddenly doubted my ability to ride him, which a minute before had seemed so clear. I had always been good with horses, and the stallion knew me now, but that might well be no use at all. He objected not so much to the Darkness in his riders as to being ridden at all. It would take a spirit equal to his own to hold him, and even then he might die rather than accept defeat. But I had to ride him, or die that evening.

I stroked the white neck, whispering to the horse. He jerked away from me, then quieted, waiting, preparing for the battle. He was more intelligent than an ordinary horse. I had watched him fight Cerdic and knew this.

I ran my hand over his back and withers, tightened the girth of the saddle, speaking in a sing-song, in Irish, no longer caring who heard. In my heart I asked the Light to rein in that proud spirit for me, and grant me the victory. Then I placed my left hand on the stallion's shoulder and vaulted to his back.

The only way to describe what happened next is to say that he exploded. The world dissolved into a white cloud of mane, and Ceincaled fought with all his terrible strength and limitless pride. I held his mane and the reins both, gripping hard with my knees and bending down on to his neck, and barely managed to stay on.

He circled the ring, rearing and plunging, and the onlookers were a blur of flesh, bright colors, steel, and distorted shouts. I felt that I tried to ride the storm, or hold the north wind with a bridle. It was beyond the power of any human, and now that I tried my strength against an immortal I knew that I was no more than human. Ceincaled was pure, fierce, wild beyond belief. He had no master and could accept none…

And he was glorious.

I stopped caring about past and future, about thought and feeling. Aldwulf might hang me or I might fall from Ceincaled and be trampled, broken by the wildness of the power I had tried to master. But even as I saw these things they became as distant and unimportant as an abandoned game. There was a sweet taste at the back of my mouth, like mint in the middle of a rainy night. Ceincaled was leaping again, clothed in thunder, and death and life were both unreal. All that mattered was the sweet madness which possessed both the horse and me, madness which had swept on to me from within and changed the world to something I could no longer recognize, or care to. When I had drawn Caledvwlch there had been something of the sensation of light, but this was more a lightness, a blazing sweetness in my mind. I loved Ceincaled totally, and in mid-leap he felt it and returned the love, and we were no longer fighting each other but flying, dazzled with delight, filled with the same and equal fierceness.

Ceincaled reared one last time and neighed, a challenge to all the world, then dropped onto all four legs in the center of the circle and stood tensely still.

Through the battle-madness that made the world seem sharp-edged, almost frozen, I saw the onlookers staring at me in wonder, Aldwulf frowning in a sudden unease, and Cerdic, eyes alight with greed.

“Good,” said the King of the West Saxons. His voice sounded far away. “Now give me my horse.”

I laughed, and he started, flushing with anger. Aldwulf, realizing now what was happening, grabbed Cerdic's arm. Cerdic began to turn to him, an angry question forming on his tongue…