The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson (29 page)

‘Give him the draught as often as you can,’ Angharad said. ‘That is to bring the fever down. Keep him warm and still. And tomorrow I will come. Don’t bring him out again, not in this wind. I will come.’

And the woman nodded wordlessly and, gathering her cloak close about the thing she carried, turned and walked away.

‘Would it not have been better to have kept her and the child here overnight?’ Bjarni asked, entering and dropping the fish that he had caught beside the fire.

‘Much, but nothing would make her keep it here after sundown. This way she will save its immortal soul, even if the body dies.’

And the note of forlorn bitterness in her tone made him suddenly angry, so that he wanted to hit somebody.

‘Don’t go,’ he said the next morning when she gathered her things together and flung on her cloak.

‘I must,’ she told him. ‘If I don’t, the child may die.’

‘Then I’ll come with you.’

‘No! Bide close to the house lest Gwyn has need of you. He grows weaker these days.’

He stood in the clearing to see her away, wondering why he should obey this chit of a girl in breeks as though she was the Lady Aud. And as she disappeared down the track, he heard behind him in the corner of the house-place the difficult grunting sound that meant that Gwyn wanted something. Hunching his shoulders, he turned and went to find out what it was.

The old man had had his morning stirabout, so the most likely things were that he wanted a drink, that the rushes of his bedding had got into a lump somewhere, or of course that he had fouled himself again; but it seemed that it was none of these things. His feverish gaze fixed itself on Bjarni’s face, then went straining to the doorway and back again. He went on grunting; he seemed to be trying to speak. The need was so desperate that, though it was not speech, it was more like speech than Bjarni had ever heard from him before. ‘Go.’

‘Rest easy, old father,’ he said. ‘I’m going. I’ll leave Hugin with you.’ And to the great dog who stood beside him with gently waving tail, ‘Sit and stay.’

He heard a protesting whimper behind him as he left, and turned in the doorway. The dog was half up again, tail and eyes beseeching. ‘On guard,’ he said, and the dog collapsed with a protesting sigh.

He went on through the steading gate and down past the barley-plot, then towards the rim of the valley. He had never actually been into the village before, but his hunting had brought him above it more than
once, and he knew the way well enough. In a short while, coming down a hill shoulder above alder woods, he saw Angharad only a short way away, and checked his long loping pace. He had no wish to catch up with her yet. So long as he could keep her clear in view . . .

He overtook her on the edge of the village’s in-take land. Frowning, she looked round quickly at the sound of his footfall on the turf behind her. ‘I bade you not to come, but bide with Gwyn,’ she said.

‘Gwyn bade me to come with you,’ he told her flatly. ‘I left Hugin with him.’ Suddenly he grinned. ‘Where should your hired sword be but behind you when you walk abroad?’

The small fierce moment passed, and they went together down the drift-way, Bjarni walking a couple of paces behind in the proper place for a hired blade.

The village when they reached it was much the same close scatter of turf and furze thatched bothies and a few larger house-places that he had known elsewhere, save that it was not huddled below any chieftain’s hall, which gave it an incomplete look in Bjarni’s eyes, though he knew well enough that among the Welsh the lesser folk gathered in hamlets while the chiefs and greater kindred had their garths and steadings scattered solitary over the countryside – such steadings as Angharad’s must have been in its great days that were past.

The drift-way became the village street wandering down through the turf-roofed houses and their byres and barns. The place had seemed busy enough when they came down towards it. Men were at work in the wood-wright’s yard and the smithy, someone was driving a pig up the stony street, women with their cloaks huddled about them against the thin rain were moving between house and byre and gathered bucket
in hand around the spring head, children and dogs were busy about their own affairs. But at their coming the place grew quiet, children were called indoors, and men and women melted away, or drew well back from their passing. Only the dogs came with tails wagging friendliwise, and the smith – a man of power working with cold iron and bending it to his will had no need to fear witchcraft or any other unchancy thing – worked on unheeding of their passing by. Yet Bjarni had the feeling that eyes were watching them, even where no one seemed to be.

At the next bothy, where an old cat lay dozing on the midden, Angharad turned and ducked in through the doorway, Bjarni following, blinking through the peat smoke. Yesterday’s woman sat beside the fire, the sick child in her lap. She looked up as Angharad entered, seeming for the moment to shrink back a little, then let her caught breath go, and moved to show the child. The two women spoke together, low-voiced, both looking at the babe. There was water in a crock set ready by the fire.

‘The fever is lower,’ Angharad said, her hand exploring the little creature’s head. She poured some water into the small bowl she had brought in her bundle, and while it was heating, undid the binding rags and lifted off the leaves, dry and crackling now, and wrapped the deer-skin close again.

Then she brought out more of the same leaves and dropped them into the water. The hissing and pungent steam arose, and she began again the same low murmuring that Bjarni had heard before. ‘Paternoster . . .’

To Bjarni, leaning his shoulder against the doorway, with his ears twitching for any sound from the street outside, it all seemed to last a very long time. But at last the fresh poultice was bandaged on, another vial of something changed hands, and all the other things
that must be done, and Angharad gathered her bundle together and rose to go.

The woman’s hand reached out desperately to cling to her. ‘Will he live?’

‘I think so,’ Angharad told her. ‘His fever is down and his breathing easier. If he grows worse again, send Anyl for me, and I will come.’

Gently she drew back out of the woman’s hold, and came out past Bjarni into the street and turned uphill once more.

On the way down it had seemed that Angharad had had no thought in her mind but the sick child, but now, with the thing that she had come to do safely accomplished, she seemed to have awareness for other things. Where the drift-way led through the first of the crop-land, she paused, her gaze running out over the barley paling, with its scatter of scarlet poppies. The rain had stopped, and a faint waft of sunshine ran before the wind.

‘By Our Lady’s Grace, the weather is kind; there will be a better harvest this year,’ she said, and turned to the steep track once more.

A man was coming down the drift-way towards them, a dog at his heels and a bundled fleece on his shoulder. He stopped as they drew near each other, then turned abruptly and disappeared behind a hawthorn windbreak. Angharad looked after him a moment, without checking her pace. ‘That was one of our farm hands until he drifted away last year.’

‘One of them? There were others?’

‘You can’t work a farm the size of Gwyn Coed – the size Gwyn Coed used to be – without hands. There were two more, and a bond-woman about the house.’

‘And they all – drifted away?’

‘I think maybe they were afraid to find the Horned One some stormy night sitting beside my hearth.’ She
spoke lightly, but there was a faint bitter ache in her voice that made him look at her quickly. By now they were walking side by side. She did not return his look, but walked on with her head up and her gaze lifted to the high valleys that ran toward the foothills of the snows. ‘No, it is in my mind that far back behind all things is Rhywallan, my kinsman.’

‘A poor sort of kinsman, I would be thinking.’

‘There’s only one thing he loves,’ Angharad said simply, ‘and that is land, land . . . He wants mine. He has offered me gold for it.’

‘Has he not land of his own?’

‘Plenty,’ Angharad said, her eyes still on the valleys. ‘Up that way towards the broad in-take lands. Chieftain and Lord of three valleys he is, and corn-land on Anglesey that the King gives him for services as his falconer. Still he would have mine to add to his own, and he has the King’s ear.’

They dropped over the rim of Gwyn Coed and descended through the thickets of oak and hawthorn and wild apple, and the hill flank rose behind them, shutting out the high valleys. And below them the burn came curling down through the in-take land.

‘Would you take gold for Gwyn Coed?’

‘I had sooner die.’

‘It’s in my mind,’ Bjarni said, suddenly stopping on the bank, ‘that you should let him have Gwyn Coed, you should wish him joy of it, and come away with me. I will take you back to my own settlement.’ He heard his own words, not quite believing that he was actually speaking them.

‘No,’ said Angharad.

‘There’s danger here. And you know it. Afraid you are. Come away.’

‘Of course I am afraid. Why else did I cling to you when you came out of the sea with your great
man-killing sword at your side? I’ll not leave the land that was my father’s and my father’s father’s father’s before him.’

Bjarni shook his head, baffled. ‘My kind can build their home and hearth and strike root wherever the keel comes to shore.’

‘But I am not of your kind. And there is one thing you are forgetting in all this – I cannot leave Gwyn.’

And from that, he knew that there would be no shifting her.

When they got back to the steading, all was as they had left it, the old man lying with his bright gaze turned towards the door, the great black hound sitting beside him, who leapt up and came with swinging tail to thrust his lowered head between Bjarni’s knees in greeting. And for a moment Bjarni wondered whether the whole thing was only a fancy in Angharad’s mind, brewed up by being too long alone, and in some way passed on to him. But then he remembered the emptying village street, men’s hands making the sign against ill luck as she passed . . . and he felt for the sword thongs at his belt.

THE WEATHER HELD,
and in three days’ time the barley in the crop-plot was ready for harvesting. ‘Do you know how to handle a sickle?’ Angharad asked him a little nervously and Bjarni, unaccountably annoyed at the suggestion that he knew the handling of nothing but a sword, said harshly, ‘Why not? The raiding season ends with the start of the harvest.’

But at the harvesting they made a team that worked together easily enough, Bjarni going ahead with the sickle, and Angharad following after to bind up the sheaves. In a way it was different from any harvesting that he had known before, for always the harvest had been a matter of wide fields, and the whole settlement gathering to each other’s aid. But this little harvesting, just himself and Angharad, and Hugin hunting field mice among the stooks, had an odd goodness about it that he knew suddenly he would not forget.

They got the harvest in, sheaves piled high on the farm sled drawn by the horse, Swallow, and stored in the barn ready for threshing. The last sheaf, the maiden, they brought in and bound high on the
crossbeam of the house-place for next year’s harvest. And that night Angharad made a feast; the best that she could contrive with soaked barley and meat, honey cakes and heather ale from her carefully hoarded store in a long-necked red pottery jar with a hunting scene embossed round its sides. But the thing that made it into a feast instead of the evening meal that on other nights, with the day’s work done, they had shared wearily together, was that Angharad, sitting on the women’s side of the fire, had changed her breeks and sark for a kirtle of saffron-coloured stuff, and washed her hair and brushed it out until it shone, and made herself a crown of flowers from the harvest field, moon-daisies and cornflowers and the like.

‘I have never seen you in woman’s garb before,’ Bjarni said, sitting on the men’s side and gazing at her through the peat smoke.

‘What good is a golden gown for mucking out the stables in?’ said Angharad simply. But she said it with a smile, rising to take more honey cake mushed in ale to the old man in the corner. Gwyn had been growing noticeably weaker over the past few days, spending more and more of his time in sleep, seeming less and less aware of what went on about him; but the harvest feast was for him also. Bjarni watched her kneeling beside the old man, spooning the pap into him, talking softly

He watched her come back to the fire. He had the oddest feeling that it was not only the first time he had ever seen Angharad in a gown, but the first time he had ever seen her at all. It was not only the gown; it was that for that one evening Angharad seemed to have relaxed something in herself, and laid it aside like a weapon. The string of a harp that was always too tense was slackened off to its true pitch, so that
the tune she made was good and sweet . . . A good harvest after two bad ones would maybe make the villagers not so sure now she was a witch, or that it was her coming that had made the bad harvests.