The Shining Company (25 page)

The mist had got into my head, and when, some way ahead, I saw a battered and half-naked body wearing the great wolf helmet hoisted aloft on spear-shafts, it was a moment before I knew whether it was Aethelfrith or the Fosterling.

Indeed we never saw Aethelfrith, that night.

The pressure round us was beginning to slacken a little, but I was scarcely aware of that, my one clear thought was that I must keep with Cynan, keep with Cynan at all costs … A blue-eyed ox of a man made for me swinging a pole axe. The blow would have lopped off my sword arm if it had landed but it went astray - or I was not where I had been when the blow
started - and met my blade instead, and my sword went spinning into the mist, leaving me with an arm numbed to the shoulder by the impact.

Cynan was half a length ahead of me. He raised the battle shout, and I took it up from him, fumbling with still numbed fingers for my dirk, which was the only weapon left to me. There was no war shout behind us, no drum of hooves.

We were not far from the road where it came out from among the ruined warehouses, and the wayside gravestones were about us in the trampled grass. And outlined against the mist a huge man stood straddlelegged and howling on a half-fallen burial stone, swinging a great iron-studded club two-handed above his head. Cynan made for him, his sword upswung, which would have been madness if he had been interested in living, and the Saxon dived in under the sweep of the blade; and I heard the ringing crack as the iron shod club took my lord on the side of the head, bursting his helmet strap and sending the war-cap leaping away. I caught the man off balance as he stumbled down after his blow, and drove my dirk in under his still up-flung arm, and left him coughing his heart’s blood up into the graveside grass as I went after Cynan. He was shaking his head, then he straightened in the saddle - only a glancing blow, then, after all - and rode on as though he were quite unaware of it, and of the battle raging round us, which was strange. But stranger still, I realized slowly that there was no battle raging round us. Maybe we had broken through the fringe of it and come out on the far side. More likely, I think looking back, that somehow in the mist and the confusion, the last of the
fighting had flowed over and past us, leaving us behind.

Just the two of us.

I could hear scattered shouting in the distance; but close at hand there was the kind of half quiet that descends on a battle field when the fighting is done and before the kites and ravens gather. Only a faint blur of brightness here and there in the mist told where the embers yet remained of cooking fires that we had scattered under our horses’ hooves. There were bodies in the trampled grass, that cried out or writhed or lay still. Presently there would be torches moving over the river levels, as men went looking for their own wounded among the dead, stripping the gold and ringmail and fine weapons from our dead, our wounded. It did not do to think of our wounded, so I did not think, not then. Presently the ravens would come, and wolves of the four-footed kind.

Cynan had let the reins fall on his horse’s neck, and the poor beast had come to a weary halt. I thought that he was breathing him before he turned and rode back towards that distant shouting. But next instant, without a word, without a sound of any kind, he sagged forward across Anwar’s neck. And almost at the same instant a wild-eyed riderless horse came plunging by and crashed into the big chestnut’s rump.

Cynan’s horse had had all that he could take of fire and shouting and weaponclash and the smell of blood; he was frightened already by the sudden bewildering change in his rider; and the crash of another horse unseen against his rump was too much for him. With a shrill neigh of terror he plunged away in full gallop.

I drove my heel into Shadow’s flank and was away
after him, coming up with him just as Cynan was beginning to slip sideways from the saddle. I slammed the bloody dirk back into my belt, and controlling the mare as best I could with my knees, got an arm round him before he could slip further, and caught up the reins from where they lay on the terrified horse’s neck.

On the edge of a thicket of alder trees I got him reined to a halt at last, and he stood shivering and sweating, blowing distressfully through flared nostrils. I spoke his name softly, soothing him with hand and voice, bidding him stand; and dropped the reins over Shadow’s head to keep the two of them together while I saw what was to be done about Cynan.

He was still living. I could hear his snoring breaths, and feel his heart beating when I got a hand under the folds of his cloak; but he gave no sign of hearing me when I spoke his name. Not such a glancing blow after all. My hand when I touched his head came away sticky; and when I craned over him I could see in the cobweb light the black ooze that would be crimson in daylight, seeping through the ringmail of his coif all up and down the right-hand side.

Far off behind me I could still hear the faint last sounds of battle. If I had been alone, I think I would have gone back, not out of any false heroics, but because it would have seemed the natural thing to do. But Cynan was with me, and the training of a year was with me, and I never thought of it. We had gone into battle as an Arrowhead; Faelinn was gone, but I had brought my lord off, and now it was for me to get him away, living, and into safety if that might be.

Which would seem to mean finding Conn and the rest and joining up with them - supposing that they also had got away.

Still sitting Shadow among the alder trees, I thought, quite clearly and coolly. The mist would give us cover, and there would be no hunt out after us, so there was time to think, though not too long. I dared not try to pull off Cynan’s mail coif to see his hurt; I had a horrible fear that if I did that his head might fall to pieces; and in any case, if I got him off his horse to see it I should never get him mounted again. In the end I managed to get off his neck-cloth, and bound it round his head over the coif with some kind of crazy hope that it might help to stop the bleeding. I got him carefully balanced in the saddle, and dismounting myself, pulled off my own scarf and tore it lengthwise, and with one half lashed his wrists together under Anwar’s neck and with the other bound his feet under the horse’s belly.

When all was made safe as might be, I hauled myself back into my own saddle and gathered up both reins. And so rode away from the place where the last of the Shining Company were still dying.

I headed north, though keeping well away from the road. If I did not find the others, at least we were travelling in the right direction. There was no hunt on our tail, but I kept my ears turned behind me all the same, and held to the scrubby woods and off the cleared land as much as might be. Time and again Cynan began to slip sideways in the saddle, and I had to pause to get him righted again. But we came at last into thicker woodland fringing the true forest, and following the sound of quick water reached the bank
of a burn coming down from the high moors to join the river which we had now left far behind. The moon was swinging over towards the dark mass of the Penuin, but a new light was waking in the east, and the mist still scarfing the river valley was turning milky. I paused to let the horses drink, keeping a careful eye on Cynan to see that he did not go off over Anwar’s head, and when they had drunk their fill, dismounted to scoop up a few palmfuls of ice cold water for myself. I tried to give some in my cupped palms to Cynan, forgetting that there was no way that he could have drunk with his mask still across his face. But anyway, it seemed he was still out of his body. I did not let myself think about the time when he came back into it - if he did come back into it. I did not let myself think beyond the next thing at all; and the next thing was getting further into the safety of the forest.

I had just picked up Shadow’s reins again when a little puff of air came down to us through the trees, and Anwar pricked his ears, then flung up his head and whinnied as a horse does in greeting to his own kind. And from somewhere upstream on the edge of hearing, a horse whinnied in reply.

When the blackness that had come rolling over me cleared away, I was lying in the long streamside grass of a woodland clearing. Staring up I could see trees arching over me, and beyond them a clear morning sky.

I heard movement and a murmur of voices and a horse ruckling down its nose. I got to my elbow and then sat up; and the world spun round me, then settled. Cynan lay close by, with Aneirin and the scout crouching over him. Conn and his mates had taken our horses down to the little willow-fringed pool that broke the fall of the stream just there, and were washing off their legs. The other beasts were tethered on the far side of the clearing. Having made sure that everybody was there, I got my knees under me and moved in for a closer look at Cynan.

They had got his mail coif off him, and his head had not fallen to pieces, but a horrible black and broken place led out from under the clotted hair on his temple and down to his jaw, like over-ripe fruit. Aneirin had swabbed away the worst of the blood with somebody else’s neck-cloth, sopping from the stream, and was picking splinters of bone out of the pulpy mess where it crossed his cheek-bone, while Cynan lay seeming to feel nothing of what went on, his right eye not quite shut so that a thin line of white showed under the lid,
the left too lost in swelling and broken bruises to be sure that there was an eye there at all.

‘He has not come back to himself?’ I croaked.

Aneirin looked up for a moment. ‘No. But it seems that you have.’

‘But he will come back?’

Aneirin went steadily on with his work. ‘It is in my mind that he will come back, though something lacking in the beauty that set girls’ hearts quickening. Lucky it is for him that the heaviest part of the blow landed where it did, and not a thumb’s length further - this way, or his brains would have been like an addled egg within his skull. What was it? A club?’

‘A club, with iron studs in it. ‘ Vileness twisted in my belly and rushed up into my throat, and I rolled over hurriedly towards the burn, and threw up what little I had in me into the waterside bushes.

When I turned back, Cynan had not moved, but there was a kind of wincing in his face, and as we watched, his right eye opened. For a short while he lay staring straight upward, then forced his one-eyed gaze back from his private distance to buckle on to our faces, slowly, painfully, shifting from one to another of us. The other three had brought the horses up from the stream and we were all of us round him by that time. But the faces that he wanted were not there. He gave a long shuddering sigh, and closed his eye as though it was all too much for him, and sank away from us again.

I looked up at Aneirin in sudden fear, and Aneirin looking up also, caught the question that I could not quite speak. ‘Na, na, did I not say? He will mend in time. The strength is in him, his body will mend in
time.’ He was making fast the makeshift bandage as he spoke. Then he added as though half to himself, ‘But he needs rest. Several days of rest, and I can spare him only one. We must mount and ride at dusk, even if we bind him into the saddle again as you brought him here, and be far enough from Catraeth by tomorrow’s dayspring.’

The guide put in, ‘If we can keep him in the saddle through tonight, I can bring you by dayspring to a safe place where we can lie up for the needful days with no fear of Sea-wolves.’

So the thing was settled. Cynan seemed to have drifted into a kind of sleep.

‘Sleep is what he needs, more than all else that we can give him,’ Aneirin said. ‘But not unwatched, lest he sleep too deeply and come to harm.’

‘I will watch him,’ I said.

Aneirin shook his head. ‘You are in scarcely better shape than he is, and you also must sleep.’

‘I will take the watch,’ Conn said, close behind me.

I crouched closer to Cynan and glared up at them. ‘No!’

Conn told me after, long after, that I looked like a falcon mantling over its kill, and just as crazy.

‘You can trust me,’ he said steadily. ‘I’ll not let harm come to him ‘

‘No!’ I said again. ‘I am his shieldbearer. I brought him off: he’s mine!’

One of the others, I think it was the old scout, started to try to reason with me, but Aneirin held out a hand to halt him, and said quietly, ‘Prosper takes the first watch.’

And against Aneirin’s word there could be no protest.

‘Wake him if his sleep becomes too deep,’ he said to me. ‘Rouse me if there is any change in him.’

So I took that first watch sitting beside Cynan with my arms crossed on my up-drawn knees, while the others got some sleep and the horses grazed the streamside grass. The light grew and warmed to full day and the last of the mist wisped away in the early sunlight; and it did not seem possible that only a few hours and a few miles away the whole of my world - it seemed like the whole of my world - had died in the marshes and the croplands before Catraeth. There was a waking of birdsong among the branches, and a yellow butterfly hovered across the clearing. Those few miles away the Saxons would be gathering up their slain and building their death-fires. There would be many death-fires for the Saxon kind, wolves and ravens for the Shining Company. But none of that seemed quite real, and what reality it had was going further and further away.

I do not think I slept on my watch, but certainly I was not aware of any movement behind me, before a hand came on my shoulder, and Conn’s voice in my ear said, ‘My turn now. Sleep you.’

We had made no outcry of joy at finding each other again, both living, but his arm catching me from a headlong fall was the last thing I remembered before the swimming darkness engulfed me on the edge of the clearing, and now, with the quiet feel of his hand on my shoulder, I toppled over beside Cynan and slept where I lay, leaving him to watch over both of us.

Twilight was gathering under the trees when I woke again. The evening ration of wheat cake from the saddlebags was given out, and I made a sort of gruel with Cynan’s share, crushed and mixed with water on a dockleaf, and tried to spoon it in to him on the tip of my knife. He swallowed a little not really seeming aware that he did so, then turned his head away.