The Eagle and the Raven (41 page)

Autumn found them still wandering in the northwestern reaches of Emrys’s territory. The hot summer wind gave way to a sudden, deceptive calm before the howling gales of winter, and when they rose each morning their blankets were stiff with frost. Now they spoke little to each other. It was as if the mountains pressed down and around them, hanging from their necks like ugly, misshapen jewels, and each unnecessary word was an effort that made them consider twice if it were worthwhile.

Caradoc said nothing at all. In the mornings, when Cinnamus went off to hunt and Caelte laid the fire, Eurgain and Bran would exchange a few words on the weather, the cooking to be done, the miles to be covered. But Caradoc sat apart, his legs crossed and his thin hands on his knees, his empty eyes gazing at each new horizon. If they spoke to him he often did not hear them. He was reaching a crisis, though he did not know it. Bran knew it, but he also knew that he was powerless to aid. The fire must be entered, the dross burned away if Caradoc was to emerge an arviragus, even though nothing might be left but a flame-scoured hulk.

Eurgain was almost past pitying or suffering for him. In self-defence she cut the living cord of love between them and nursed the maimed stump quietly, asking and giving nothing until the time when he returned to himself. It seemed that with his utter silence a new force pulsed through his arguments to the isolated Ordovicians, as if the gathering in of his thoughts produced a more potent spell. Sitting in dark huts, on wind-swept hillsides, in the shadow of great boulders, Eurgain listened intently with her eyes on the strange families who gathered to hear him. Her clean intuition told her that they were moved, even as she was time and again, as the strong, stirring words poured from her husband’s twisted mouth and struck them all.

As for Caradoc himself, he found that all his extraneous thoughts were killed before their birth and only one thing dominated his dreams and his waking hours: the coming clash with Rome and his own calling to lead the tribes. Sometimes, in the one sweet, unguarded moment of the day when he was emerging from sleep to the consciousness of a burdensome reality, he wondered whether perhaps Bran was secretly drugging him in order to produce this screaming, mind-burning obsession. It was not an impossibility. When it came to hatred for Rome, the Druithin were ruthless. But Caradoc dismissed the idea. Bran was an old friend. Bran would have told him. Or would he?

Then one evening they broke through a stand of trees guarding the foothills to the peak they had just struggled across, wading through crisp red and brown leaves that sailed about them on the new coldness of a merciless wind, and they came upon a village. It nestled cozily with the wood to its back, and beyond it was the sea. They all paused and drew deep breaths of the salt-tanged air, and watched gray breakers curl and fold toward them. For the first time in weeks a peace stole over them and they looked at one another with an abashed, puzzled embarrassment, as if they had been in a deep dream all this time, or under a holding spell. Cinnamus sighed. “Mona, holy Mona,” he murmured. “What strange and marvelous things I have seen since I left Camulodunon!” The island lay calmly, a black, hazed bulk three hundred yards from where they rested, and Bran raised an arm and saluted it.

“Soul of the people,” he said quietly. “The heart of freedom. Come. Let us go down and find fire and food. These chiefs know me, and the village is full of my brethren. We can sleep tonight without fear.” They shrugged their tattered, faded cloaks higher on their shoulders and walked down the slope behind him.

That night they stayed in the village, resting, eating, and nursing tired bodies. The chiefs of the village were used to battered, defenceless strangers. People straggled in at all times of the year seeking the sanctuary of the holy island, beaten and hopeless, bringing nothing with them but tales of Rome’s brutality and a need for peace. Caradoc was received kindly and he spoke to the Council, telling the people of his vision, and they understood. They, unlike their ricon far away, had a very good idea of what the domination of Rome would mean to the men of the west and they gave Caradoc the first open, unstinted support he had received since he left Madoc and the Silures. He relaxed. He slept well. But he and Eurgain remained strangers, looking at each other with eyes that prisoned the sweetness of the past and could not put the key of love to the lock of a lonely, painful present. She was too proud to face a rebuff, and he was too preoccupied to care.

In the morning they crossed to Mona. The wind was high and cold, fretting the narrows into boiling white spray, and the island itself alternately gleamed green under the sun and was plunged into a brooding gloom as the big gray clouds raced over it. The fishing boat yawed and bucketed and Caradoc and the others clung grimly to the sides, their faces and hands soon slick with salt water, but within a very few minutes the two taciturn Ordovician fishermen were stepping into the knee-high shallows and the boat was beached. Cinnamus knelt and kissed the sandy, sloping shore, Bran gave his hand to Eurgain as she struggled to keep her footing in the hissing undertow, but Caradoc and Caelte strode together to where sand became pebbles and then grass. Far to the right, beyond the oak groves that pressed close to the beach, the land rose, still thickly forested, but before them lay softly undulating fields glinting golden with uneven stubble between the tree trunks. Here and there smoke rose from the roofs of many huts and houses, then was whipped into nothingness by the steady gale. From where he stood Caradoc could sense movement in the woods. The voices of children came to him, twigs crackled underfoot, the laughter of women filtered from the verges of the little fields, and he turned to Caelte.

“There is peace here,” he said. “A spell of contentment that could persuade me to forget my duty and sink under it like a stone dropping through water.”

“I know, Lord,” Caelte replied. “I feel that I should sing, but I have no song. How far away is Madoc, and Emrys, and the dark stain of Rome!”

Not far enough, Caradoc thought, his eyes watering from the sting of the wind or a long-forgotten uprush of emotion, he could not tell which, and then Bran, Cinnamus, and his wife joined him and they all followed Bran along the path that ran narrow but sure through the oaks. They did not hurry. They walked steadily, their eyes never still, for many other paths branched from the one they were treading and each seemed to beckon in friendly understanding. One track, running straight to a treed hillock, gave Caradoc a glimpse of a stone altar, a ring of wooden stakes with carved boar and human heads upon them, and another ended at a palisade, with the roofless walls of a shrine visible and the quiet, folded form of a Druid sitting before the gate. After a mile the trees gave way to more fields, and the travelers could see how, though the forest curved and swept this way and that, the gently rolling land was heavily cultivated. The crops had been harvested, and now women and children gleaned, their backs bent and their cloaks spread high in the wind. They straightened and called greetings as the group passed, and many bowed to Bran, but only Caelte answered their gay words. Cinnamus was lost in wonder, setting his feet down carefully on the sacred soil, and Eurgain marched with her arms folded and her chin high, conscious of her husband’s dour, preoccupied glare. For two miles they trudged through stiff yellow stubble, under the branches of the leafless oaks, past huts full of the homely smells of cooking and the murmur of voices, then they came to a river. It flowed slowly, a wide, green expanse of marshy, bird-clouded water, and huts straggled along both its banks to form a town. Beyond it the land continued flat and golden, but far to the northeast Caradoc saw it begin to rise, to hump, then to be lost in a forested haze. Bran halted.

The Council hut was large, wooden, and protected by a high palisade that was in turn ringed by more of the wooden stakes carved at their summits into solemn, self-contained faces which gazed out over the heads of the passers-by with stolid indifference. At the low wooden gate of the palisade two chiefs stood guard, spears upright in one hand and swords drawn in the other, and before them a group of Druids was gathered, five or six of them, hands tucked into white sleeves, listening intently and smilingly to one of their kind. He was tall and brawny. The sleeves of his tunic were folded back, revealing brown, hard-muscled arms crossed on his broad chest. His beard was a vibrant, luxurious brown, and the spasmodic sunlight flickered on a dozen bronze rings tied into brown hair that fell tousled and healthy to the middle of his white-clad straight back. As they watched him, he unfolded his arms, pointed to his head, and laughed, and his companions laughed with him. Then he saw the silent band and swung toward them, arm outstretched, teeth bared in a wide, warm smile, and Caradoc stiffened in surprise while Caelte breathed a sigh of shock and behind them both, Eurgain started. The man’s eyes were blue. Not the deep, rich flower blue of Eurgain’s own, or the green blue of the ocean, but the palest, most delicate shade, almost no shade at all, almost milky in their opalescence. They did not glitter, nor did they reflect the plays of light and shade around them, and the pupils were pale also, the gray of an overcast dawn. If Caradoc had not seen them pass quickly over the group he would have believed that this Druid was blind. Bran took three steps and bowed.

“Master,” he said, “I bring you Caradoc, his wife, and his train.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” the rich voice answered. “I dreamed of you last night, Caradoc, and the night before. I saw you sitting with your back to a rock, and it was night. I have been expecting you.” The arm tinkling with silver clasped Caradoc’s own, warm and strong, and seeing Caradoc’s shock, the full mouth parted again in mirth. “You did not expect me, though, did you, my friend? You imagined the master of Druithin to be an old graybeard like Bran, bowed with the weight of wisdom? Well, I am sorry to disappoint you!”

Caradoc looked into the young face with its old eyes, and suddenly Bran did indeed seem to him to be a wizened, palsied dotard. He wanted to bow but could not, and then the master was beckoning behind him.

“Eurgain, come here.” She walked forward, and he took her hand, stroking her cheek, her hair, then he kissed her softly. “I saw you also,” he said, “with your feet sunk in the earth and your fingers straining for the stars. I saw you at your window, suffering for the mysteries of both. You should have been a Druid, Eurgain, for then your feet would never have touched the earth and you would not be torn. Ah well.” He smiled. “Fingers are all very well, but they cannot carry the heart where it wants to go. And you.” He turned to Cinnamus and a moment of pain clouded his features, but his eyes did not change expression. They seemed to be a mirror looking only upon his inner world and reflecting back to him his visions. “The precious seed is strewn upon the ground,” he murmured, “and trodden underfoot. Yet how else shall the new crop spring up? I salute you, Ironhand. An arrow is not good enough for you.” And to everyone’s amazement he knelt before a bewildered Cinnamus and kissed his sword, but before the moment could become an embarrassment he sprang up and enfolded Caelte, laughing as he did so. “Caelte, Caelte!” he exclaimed, “Your soul is like the crystal flow of the purest forest spring! A gift to you would be like a stone flung at a mountain, for you have the greatest gift of all, and do not think that I speak of your beautiful voice!” He let Caelte go, tightened his girdle with one swift tug, then turned away. “Come into the Council hut,” he ordered. “We will eat, and laugh and talk of nothing at all, for this is holy Mona, and here you may rest.”

The hut was spacious, clean, and warm after the chillness of the wind. Even at that hour of the morning it was full. Men stood around the fire over which a cauldron sent gusts of fragrant steam to the ceiling. Women squatted or sat cross-legged on the skins that were scattered everywhere, clutching children or bundles of possessions and looking anxiously to the Druids who moved among them. No one even glanced at Caradoc and his train as they shed their cloaks and took the bowls handed to them by Bran.

“We must serve ourselves here,” Bran said. “Every servant who could be spared is threshing the grain, and as you can see, there are new refugees from Gaul. My brethren are busy.” They drew bowlfuls of hot soup and found space by the door in which to sit, and they sipped it slowly, savoring it, while one by one the newly arrived families went out with a Druid, the men swinging their children onto their shoulders, the women gathering up their few treasures and hooding themselves against the cold. Soon the crowd thinned to a few chiefs who had just returned from hunting and small groups of Druids who sat or stood and ate silently, their eyes on the master who at last came to sit with the Catuvellauni.

“You had some difficulty with Emrys, Caradoc,” he remarked, stirring his porridge with a polished stick which he then licked clean and stowed away in the folds of his tunic. “I am not surprised. He and his kin have been tucked away in the mountains for many ages and the events of the outside world have not touched them at all. They never come to the Samain court, for they never have cases to settle with other tribes, and it is a pity. They have become too proud, too sure of their own invincibility, which causes them to be vulnerable to the glib tricks of a clever speaker.”

Caradoc stopped eating and glanced at him sharply, and he smiled. “Your words to them were true, of course, but I do not think that you yourself believed them, did you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, it does not matter. You have stirred them up, and I think that I must go and stir them still further. I would like to see my cousin again.”

“Your cousin, Master?” Eurgain queried, and he nodded, his mouth full.

“Emrys is my cousin. I came to Mona when I was seven to have my dreams read, and I am still here, as you can see!” He laughed and Caradoc turned his face down to his own bowl, suddenly disappointed in this virile, muscle-bound man who laughed too much and seemed bereft of the dignity that surely ought to belong to the master of the Druithin. His feeling of depression and isolation increased and he wished that he had never crossed to Mona. He preferred his daydreams at his back, the thoughts of a powerful and mysterious figure of magic and secrecy who could weave spells against Rome while he himself wove military strategy. Now here was the master, grinning at Eurgain and scouring his porridge bowl with a piece of bread in his nimble fingers, while his bronze-ringed hair fell about his arms. Caradoc felt cheated, used somehow, and the old niggling seed of regret and longing for the past began to grow in him once more. Camulodunon, he thought sadly. My home. Why did I not surrender to Claudius and live there in peace and contentment? The master handed his bowl to a young attendant and rose. “I would like to show you the island,” he said to them. “Are you warm now? Is your hunger appeased? Good! Then let us go. Bran, you need not tire your limbs with us. Stay here.”