The Shining Company (11 page)

So, needing my knife, I headed for Fercos’s smithy myself to find out what had become of it and of Conn.

It was while I was threading my way through the stone houses and workshops that clung about the outer wall of the Dyn that it came to me, out of nowhere, how seldom Conn had gone near the smithy at home. Only a few times, and then at my heels, in the years since Phanes had passed by with the archangel dagger. And with the thought came a somewhat confused understanding of the reason why.

When I came to the smoke-blackened smithy just within the gateway, it was unwantedly quiet; no ring of hammer on anvil or rasp of grinding-stone, no clatter and gasp of the goatskin bellows; only the tired roar of the flames sinking low on the forge hearth.
Fercos the smith stood beside the anvil, a pair of tongues in one hand, looking intently down at the cooling blade which lay there. His striker stood behind him in the shadows, and on the usual bench before the door, my mended knife lying beside him, Conn sat forward, gazing in the same direction with the tranced air of someone listening to a harper’s story that has captured his whole heart. He was not aware of my coming at all, and I checked in the doorway, not speaking. Fercos was tempering a sword blade and no one speaks to a smith or makes any sound to break his attention in that moment.

The blade cooling on the anvil had passed through the hot colours before I came, the white and yellow and red, and was glowing violet, changing to blue as we watched it, and the blue deepening to the colour of nightshade flowers. Another instant and it would be dulling on the edge of black. And in that instant Fercos grasped it with the tongs and with a swift movement plunged it into the trough of water that stood ready.

There was a hissing as of a disturbed snakepit and the smithy filled with throat-catching steam. And when the hissing had subsided and the steam begun to clear, Fercos took the blade from the water and laid it back on the anvil, dead and almost black, its rainbow fires all faded, and stood looking at it with his head on one side. In a few moments more he picked it up again, in his hands now, bending it into an arc, and letting it go with a
wang
like a released bow string.

‘Reckon she’ll do,’ he said, and laid it down again.

All through the smithy the watchers let their breath go, and the tension fell slack. Conn looked up and saw
me, and scrambled to his feet, catching up the mended knife.

‘I lost count of time,’ he said.

I took back the knife and thrust it into my belt. ‘I thought that might be the way of it.’

He looked suddenly stiff and bitter. ‘I am sorry - I forgot -’

‘You forget too much,’ I said, making my voice rough, anything to stop him saying what I thought he might be going to say - something about being my bondservant.

And he shut his mouth in a straight line.

The smith looked up from the blade on his anvil and said with quiet kindliness, ‘Aye well, another day when maybe your lord can better spare you.’ He smiled a little, consideringly, his head still on one side. ‘Whether you have it in your hands or your head is another matter, but I am thinking you have it in your heart - the making of a swordsmith. We could be finding out.’

A short while later, having got him safely outside, I led the way across the crowded outer court to a certain place on the far side where the timber ramparts, ending on either side, left a gap between two black outcrops of rock, where the solid ground ended as abruptly as though sliced with an axe and fell sheer to the jagged mass of scree and rock and rough turf far below. There was some story about Epona, the Mother of Foals, having leapt her white mare from it, or maybe leapt from it herself in her mare form, in the years when the hills were new and she had raised the great rock for a fortress; and it had been kept unwalled and open ever since, in case she should
pass that way again. Men tended to keep well clear of the place, though, for the occasional accident happened and when it did, it was still said, even in these days of the White Christ, that the Great Mother had called in her price for Dyn Eidin Rock.

So the midst of the gap, well away from either side, made a good place for private talk, a thing not easily come by in the crowded Dyn.

Conn followed me, dragging that tell-tale leg a little, and sat down at my side, both of us with our feet hanging into nothingness. But when I turned towards him he looked back at me with hot eyes and a mouth still shut into a straight line.

‘Oh, don’t be such a bird-wit!’ I told him. ‘I had to stop you blurting out - whatever it was.’

‘Whatever it was?’ he echoed.

I did not answer at once. The idea that had blown into my head on the way up from the practice ground had flowered during those moments in the smithy while the sword blade cooled from violet to blue. But it was still very new; so new that I needed a few moments more to get used to it and sort it out before I passed it on to Conn himself.

‘I used to think,’ I began at last. ‘Well, I don’t suppose I thought much about it really - that you had forgotten that idea about learning to be a smith. Well, you never went near Loban’s forge at home, save when I dragged you. But you have not, have you?’

‘I knew it was foolishness -’

‘You haven’t, have you?’
I said. I had to be clear about that.

It was his turn to be silent, watching the long low tumble of hills in the westering light, half lost in the
thunder haze. Behind us the outer court was growing yet more crowded as men gathered and began to drift towards the Mead Hall. The smell of hot meat wafted from the cookhouse. It would not be very long before I had to go. He pulled his gaze back from the distant hills.

‘No, I haven’t,’ he said simply.

‘Then listen. Did you tell Fercos - have you told anybody that you were my bondservant?’

‘No. You told Gorthyn I was your body servant.’

‘That is a different matter. There are free body servants. Not many but a few.’

He looked at me, frowning, puzzled as to what all this was about; and I pushed on, ‘Don’t you see? Conn, I cannot give you your freedom - I would if I could, but you are my father’s, not mine. But if you want to be a swordsmith, then here is your chance to learn the skill, and when you have learned it - you’re free.’

‘You mean it?’ he said.

‘Of course I mean it!’

‘Supposing always that Fercos will take me.’

‘He’ll take you; you heard what he said. There’s not a smith in Dyn Eidin or along the Town Ridge who isn’t in need of all the help he can get, since the King’s hosting.’

Conn’s gaze was very level. ‘If it is forbidden for a bondman to learn the smith’s craft, then it must be forbidden for a smith to teach him. If I ask him, I must tell him what I am.’

‘No!’ I told him. ‘That’s why I had to stop you spewing it out, back there in the smithy.’

He said stubbornly, ‘To go to him and ask him to
take and train me without telling him would be a thing without honour.’

I was so exasperated I could have taken him by the shoulders and shaken him until his back teeth fell out, if we had not been sitting on the edge of Epona’s Leap; but the thing needed more careful handling than that. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘If you tell him and keep your precious honour bright and shining, he will do one of two things; either he will turn you away, and every smith of Eidin Ridge will do the like, or he will take you all the same, and may bring trouble on his head by doing it.’

‘He may have heard it anyway, from someone else. Lleyn knows.’

‘Neither Lleyn nor anyone else is likely to have been interested enough to tell him. If anyone does, he can always deny having heard it - so long as neither you nor I have told him. That way, if trouble comes, it will fall where it belongs, on my head.’

‘On mine also.’

‘No, for being a bondman you have no choice but to do as I bid you,’ I told him ruthlessly.

Conn said, ‘If I may not share the trouble, I will not share the lie.’ And I saw that there would be no shifting him.

‘So be it,’ I said. ‘If the trouble comes, I will throw you to the wolves to save my own hide. That makes you happy?’

The horns of feasting were sounding from the Hall; and we scrambled to our feet and back from the edge.

‘That makes me happy, O my brother and my lord,’ he said with a sudden warmth like laughter in the back of his throat.

I
spun him round and gave him a push between the shoulders. ‘Then go you and ask him and God speed you in your asking.’

I watched him walk away, back towards Fercos’ smithy, then turned and headed for the Hall.

I no longer had a body servant. I had never wanted one, come to think of it. I remembered my annoyance on the day my father had handed him over to me. I only had a friend. Much simpler than trying to combine the two; I have always liked things to be plain and uncomplicated.

Summer went by, and in the crop-lands below the Dyn the barley was tall and turning pale, and the birdsong beginning already to fall silent in deep-layered valley woods. Our first weeks of weapon training were over and we were beginning to work with the horses, learning the lessons of cavalry, to function together as wings and squadrons under our own troop leaders, though the leaders still changed from day to day until with time the natural leaders began to emerge. (Among the Companions no man held command because he was his father’s son, but only because he was the best fitted for it, and the son of a one-valley chieftain might have the command over the sons of the great kingdoms such as Strathclyde. The Fosterling, as yet handling us in double harness with the King’s bodyguard, saw to that.)

So, on the moors and the low heather hills around Eidin Ridge we were being tempered from the rough-riders we had mostly been among our own hills into ordered and disciplined cavalry such as Artos might not have disowned. With javelins and blunt-tipped lances we learned the opening moves of combat; we learned how to draw an enemy after us until it was too far from its own lines; how to deal with the spears of an enemy on foot; and, under the guidance of men old in the ways of horse-warfare
before most of us were born, we taught to our horses the lessons that they also had to learn, training them to stand steady in the face of a hostile crowd and brandished weapons, to use their own fore feet as weapons (that comes easy to any stallion and even the geldings, but the mares had to be taught) to charge through banks of burning brushwood, listening to their rider more than their natural fear of fire … And much of this training we took all together, Companions and shieldbearers alike, so that when the time came, no matter how the fighting went, we should each be able to bear whatever part was needful.

We learned and practised, together of course, the use of the three-man arrowhead, the warriors riding ahead as though into battle while the rest of us remained mounted and ready in the rear; the moves by which, if our warrior’s horse was slain, one of us took up his own horse to replace it, returning on foot; if the warrior was slain, one went up to take his place, the other still remaining in reserve; and if the warrior was sore wounded, both of us went up, one to bring him off, the other to take his place. It sounds a simple enough matter, but it is less simple than it sounds. To come up always on the right side to have one’s sword- arm free, to get a frightened and angry horse under control or a wounded man across one’s saddle bow in the midst of a whirlpool of men and horses, takes a good deal of practice. (Gorthyn played the part whole-heartedly, I mind, and so did those, sometimes it was the Teulu, who played the enemy.) But we got into the way of it after a while.

I saw very little of Conn in those days. Fercos had
taken him into his smithy, to work the goatskin bellows when need arose, but also to learn the craft, and the smith was a hard taskmaster. But at the odd times when we could snatch a few words together, Conn had the look of a man who has found his own path to follow. I tried to be glad of that and not to miss his quiet company.

Ah, well, I was forming other bonds, as I have said. And I had other things to think about. Towards the time of the Lammas fires, Ceredig the Fosterling devised a new kind of ordeal for us; and from then on, far into the autumn, groups of the Companions would draw lots from an age-eaten Roman helmet, three white pebbles and the rest black, and each time, those who drew the white pebbles were issued with three days hard ration of oat or barley cake, and sent out from the Ridge with orders to go where they would, hold together and keep themselves and each other from sleeping for three days and three nights. Again, it seemed a simple matter, but those of us who had ever trained a hawk and been through the three nights and days of keeping it awake which is the final point of the training had some idea of what was entailed.

It was into early autumn by the time it came to the turn of our troop; and night after night the draw was made, until Gorthyn and Cynan and Llif the Piet drew the white pebbles. They divided up their shieldbearers according to their own whim, as had become the custom. I had hoped to be with Lleyn, who had become a friend by that time, but our Lords thought otherwise, and I found myself cast with Dara and with one of Llif’s shieldbearers, Huil by name, who I scarcely knew.

The lots were drawn overnight, and afterwards we ate all that our bellies would hold, and slept like hogs; and at dawn we scattered in threes into the wilderness.

Dara and Huil and I joined the old paved road that headed north-westward towards the long-forsaken Legionary fort on the shores of the Firth. Castellum, I had heard it called. The place had an unchancy reputation, for it was said that it had been garrisoned, not by Red Crests, but by men who called themselves Frontier Wolves and had some sort of kinship with the four-footed kind, and whose ghosts still came back in wolf shape to run through the ruins at full moon. That would have seemed a good enough reason for keeping well clear of the place, especially as the moon was near to full. So why we chose to spend our three nights vigil there, I am not sure. Maybe it gave the whole exercise a heightened smell of adventure. Maybe we thought it would be something that we could crow about afterwards to less valiant souls. Also I think we played quite deliberately with the idea that the whiff of fear might help us to keep awake.