Then Pharic the second son said, ‘Come up to the Dun now, Lord; he’ll not leave his master, and my brothers and I will come down again and rope him.’
‘You fool!’ I said. ‘Let you drag him off his dead master on the end of a rope, and he’s ruined forever. Now go, if you don’t want to get your own throats as well as mine torn out.’
We had been speaking at half breath, and all the while the great hound made no movement, and his eyes like greenish lamps in the flame light never left my face.
I squatted on my heels against the orchard wall, careful to make no movement that might seem to him hostile, and settled into stillness. After a while I heard the steps of the other men moving reluctantly away through the long shore grass. I could feel the blood still trickling, though more slowly now, through the fingers of my right hand pressed over the wound, and wondered how long I should be able to hold out; then put the thought away from me. Still the dog did not stir. I was striving to master his gaze with my own, and because no dog can bear for more than a few heartbeats to meet the direct gaze of a man, every little while he would turn his head aside to lick at his wounded flank; but always after a few moments he would turn it back to me again. I suppose to anyone looking on, it must have seemed ridiculous that I should spend the hours after battle in trying to outstare a hound; even to me, it seems a little ridiculous now, but it was not at the time. The thing was a battle of wills between us, that went on and on ... Dawn had come, the fires in the fisher village were quenched, the shadows of the small wind-shaped apple trees stretched far across the rough turf toward the sand, and little by little began to shorten. Once or twice the dog dropped his head to nuzzle at his lord’s body, but always his gaze came up again to my face. His eyes that had been green lamps were amber-colored now, lucent, warm with the warmth of the sun, but lost in a great bewilderment, and I knew that behind them his love for his dead master was fighting me.
The sea wind ruffled the long grass and swung the shadows of the branches, and the gulls wheeled crying above the ripple-patterned sand that the tide had cleansed of battle. I heard a movement behind me, and someone said, quiet and urgent, ‘Artos, you must come – you must have that gash dressed. For God’s sake, man, don’t you see you’re kneeling in blood?’
I said, ‘Listen, if any man comes near me or the dog before I give him leave, I swear I’ll kill him.’
The end came not long after that, suddenly, as such things generally come. It was a little like the moment in the making of horse or hawk, when the wild thing that has been fighting you with all its wild nature, fighting to the point of heartbreak for both of you, suddenly accepts, and gives of its own free will the thing that it has struggled so long to withhold. (For the thing is always in the end, in the essence, a free yielding by the beast, never a forced conquest by the man. With a dog, in the normal way, the thing is different, for a dog is born into man’s world, and tries from the first to understand.) It passed between us, the acceptance, the recognition; a two-way thing as love or hate is almost always a two-way thing. For a long moment there was no outward sign. Then I made the first move, slowly holding out my hand. ‘Cabal – Cabal.’
He whined piteously, and licked at the dead man’s neck, then looked at me again, making a small uncertain forward movement that checked almost as soon as it was begun.
‘Cabal,’ I said again. ‘Cabal, Cabal, come.’ And crouching a little, inch by inch, he came. Midway between us he checked and swung back to his dead master, and I knew now his whole shadowy soul was being torn in two; but I could afford no mercy, now. Mercy was for afterward. ‘Cabal, here! Cabal!’ He hesitated still, his great proud head turning from one of us to the other; then with a piercing whine, he came on again, crouching almost on his belly as though he had been flogged, but with no more looking back. He crept to my outstretched hand, and I began to fondle his ears and muzzle, letting him lick the blood crusted between my fingers, and all the while calling and crooning to him by his new name, repeating it over and over again. ‘Cabal – you are Cabal now, Cabal, Cabal.’
Presently, talking to him still, I fumbled off my belt as best I could, and slipped it one-handed through his broad bronze-studded collar. ‘We are going now, you and I, we are going, Cabal.’ It did not matter what I said, it was the voice and the constant repetition of the name that was forming its bond between us. I pushed off from the orchard wall, and contrived to struggle to my feet, swaying with a queer drained weakness and stiff as though I were the man lying face down in the long grass, the man whose dog I had taken from him. I turned back toward the remains of the fisher huts, and the track up to the Dun, and saw Flavian and Amlodd waiting where they must have waited all night at the turn of the orchard wall, scrambling to their feet also.
The great hound paced beside me as I began to waver toward them; yet all the while I was aware that something of him belonged still to his dead master, and that to complete what we had begun would take many careful days ... Suddenly between one step and the next, sea and shore were spinning around me; I saw Flavian’s face start forward, and then roaring blackness came up at me like a wave out of the ground.
When the light returned, it was not the cool light of the seashore morning, but the smoky yellow glimmer of a lamp. And as my head cleared a little, I found that I was lying on the piled sheepskins of the bed place in Maglaunus’s guest lodging, with my left arm, as I discovered by an unwise attempt to move, bound close to my side. A shadow that had been squatting beside me leaned quickly forward, saying, ‘Lie still, sir, or you’ll part the wound again,’ and the voice, and the face as I squinted at it, trying to focus, were young Amlodd’s gruff voice and anxious freckled countenance.
‘Where is the dog?’ I demanded. My tongue felt as though it were made of boiled leather.
‘Chained among the guard dogs in the forecourt,’ said my armor-bearer. And then as I made some movement of angry protest, ‘Sir, we had to chain him up. He’s savage. We had to tangle him in a fishing net before we could get him at all, and even then most of us got mauled.’
I cursed feebly. God knew what harm they had done, whether I should ever win the dog to me now. ‘Is he unloosed with the rest at cow stalling time?’
‘No sir. I tell you he’s savage; no one can get near him even at feeding time, save the Lady Guenhumara. Would one let a wolf run loose in the Dun? By and by, when you are stronger, if you still want to see the brute, a couple of us will strap his muzzle and get him along here somehow.’
I shook my head. ‘I wish to God you hadn’t chained him, but I can – see that you had – no choice, unless it was to kill the poor brute – outright. But since you have chained him – nobody must loose him again, excepting me.’
‘No sir,’ said Amlodd, with such evident relief that I laughed, and found that the laughter wracked my shoulder.
‘Get Flavian for me. I must send word to Cei that – I am laid by here with a spear gash in my shoulder, but that I’ll be – back in Trimontium so soon as I can sit a horse.’
‘That has all been seen to, sir,’ said Amlodd.
And a woman moved forward out of the gloom beyond the lamp, and leaned over me with a bowl in her hands, and the strong tawny braid of her hair swung forward and brushed across my breast. ‘There has been enough of talking. Drink now, and sleep again. The more broth, and the more sleep, the sooner will you sit your horse again, my Lord Artos.’
I saw that she was Guenhumara, the chieftain’s daughter; but I was sober now, and I scarcely remembered at all how I swept her into the Long Dance with me up on the moors last night; the scent of vervain no longer clung to her hair, and the only thing that interested me was the hound, and what Amlodd had said concerning her and Cabal. ‘Why does he let you near him, when – he will not anyone else?’ I mumbled, a little jealously, God forgive me, with the sleep that was in the broth already lapping its dark waves about me.
‘How should I know? Maybe a woman spoke kindly to him and gave him warm scraps from the co
oking, in his old life, and we are not terrible to him as men are, who chained him.’ She took the bowl away. ‘But even I, he will not have to touch him.’
‘There are other things than touching. Keep him alive for me if you can.’
‘I will do what I may ... Now sleep.’
I lay in the guest place as the days went by, tended by the Lady Guenhumara, and the old woman like a hoodie crow who had been her nurse; while Flavian and the rest of the Brotherhood came and went, and Maglaunus himself would come and sit on the hide-covered stool, a hand on either widespread knee, and talk of all things under the sun, asking many questions. Some of these questions concerned my own way of life, whether or not I had a wife, or a woman to share my bed, and I told him ‘None,’ fool that I was, and never saw where his questions were leading.
On the third day my head grew hot and confused, and the wound was angry despite the women’s herbs, and I remember little more with any clearness, for a while. The fever burned itself out after a time, and the wound began to heal. But the moon that had been young when the Scottish raiders came was young again when at last I was able to drag myself out, doddering as an hour-old calf, to sit in the sunshine before the guest place door, and watch the dunghill cock strutting among his drab hens by the midden. He was proud and possessive, that cock, the sun waking lights of beetle-green and bronze in the arched arrogance of his tail feathers. Presently, as I watched, he made a prancing spread-winged dash at a chosen hen; but she was just beyond his reach, and in the very act of leaping upon her, he was brought up short at the end of his tether, and tumbled, furious and undignified, in the dust. Three times it happened, before suddenly I had had enough of watching, and began to pull up brown flowered grass stems from around the doorpost, and twist them into a braid.
As soon as I was strong enough I made my crawling way to the forecourt. It was a hot noon of high summer, and the air danced in the forecourt that was empty of human life. The barn dogs lay asleep or snapping at the iridescent flies that buzzed about them. I looked around for the great wolfhound. It was a few moments before I saw him, for he had dragged the full length of his chain into the narrow band of shade along the foot of the peat stack, and the broken black and amber of his hide blended perfectly into his background. I stood still and called, not expecting any response. But he stirred and raised his great head from his paws, as though the name I had given him touched his memory. ‘Cabal,’ I called, ‘Cabal,’ and next instant he was up and straining toward me at the end of his chain, half choked, yet contriving to fling up his head and bay – a wild imploring note.
‘Soft, softly now. I come!’
As soon as he saw me coming toward him he ceased his struggling and became quiet, standing with head up and grave golden eyes to watch me, his tail beginning uncertainly to swing behind him. The wound in his flank was healed, but for the rest, he was in a grievous state, his self-respect gone from him so that he was filthy with ordure, his coat staring and every rib starting through his once-beautiful hide, his neck rubbed into sores where he had dragged and dragged against his heavy collar. I learned later that he had refused to eat almost all the while. He must have come very near to breaking his heart.
I stooped and slipped free the heavy chain, and rubbed his muzzle and his ears – extraordinarily soft ears, for all the harshness of his coat – and he leaned against me with a tired sigh, so that weak on my legs as I still was, I staggered and almost went down.
When we left the forecourt he walked free beside me, with his muzzle touching my hand. I took him back to the guest place and shouted for whoever happened to be near. Flavian came running. ‘Go and get me some meat for this bag of bones,’ I demanded, while the dog stood by me, his mane stirring under my hand. ‘Hell and the Furies! How did you let him get into this state?’
‘Amlodd told you, sir; we couldn’t loose him. There’d have been murder done; and he would not eat, chained.’
‘The Lady Guenhumara—’ I began.
‘If it were not for the Lady Guenhumara he would have died. But even her, he would not let touch him. She tried it once, to bathe the wound in his flank. That was when she got bitten.’
‘Bitten?’
‘Not badly. Did you not see the tear in her arm when she came to tend you?’
‘No, I – did not notice.’ I felt shamed then, but was still angry. ‘And could you not have told me?’
He confronted me with those grave level eyes of his. ‘No, sir. There was nothing that you could do; you would simply have fretted yourself into another fever.’
And it was true. After a moment I admitted that, and nodded. ‘As you say. Go now and make love to the woman in the cook place for the meat. Then go away and keep the others away also; I have work to do.’
And so presently with my hand still on his shoulder, and a huge bleeding mass of pig offal before him, Cabal ate his fill again at last.
A few days later, when I judged that the work was far enough advanced, and when more strength had returned to me, I slipped a strap through his collar in case of trouble with the other hounds, and took him with me into the chieftain’s hall at the time of the evening meal. I was late, for I had been trimming my beard which had grown overlong while I was sick, and the task had taken longer than I had allowed for it; and most of Maglaunus’s household warriors were already gathered. They sprang to their feet as I entered with Flavian and the rest of the Companions behind me, and gave us the salute for a chieftain, drumming with their dirk hilts on the tables before them, so that Cabal pricked his ears at the uproar and growled menacingly until I spoke to him in reassurance.
‘It seems that you are a conqueror in all things,’ Maglaunus said, as I came up to the high seat, with the great hound stalking beside me.
Supper flared into a feast of triumph for our victory over the raiders, and I sat with Maglaunus at the upper end of the hall, on a seat spread with a magnificent red stag’s hide, with Cabal crouched alert in the strewed fern at my feet, and ate broiled bear’s hams and fine pale barley bread and ewe’s-milk curds, while Flan the chieftain’s harper sang the song that he had made in my honor because it was I and my Companions who had played the foremost part in that matter of the Scots. It was not such a song as Bedwyr would have made, but it had a good strong lilt to it like the swing of a west coast swell and the dip of oars – it would have made a good war boat’s song to keep the rowers together.
In Maglaunus’s hall they still followed the old custom of the Tribes, and the women did not eat with the men, but apart by themselves in the women’s place. But when the eating was over, they came in to pour the drink for their menfolk, while the little dark slaves who had served throughout the meal melted away or curled up among the hounds about the fire. So this evening, when the eating was done, Guenhumara came in as usual, walking up the hall with the other women behind her. She had tended me in my sickness as often as old Blanid her nurse, and far more gently, but save for those vivid moments of awareness beside the Midsummer Fire, I had never seen her at all. Nor did I seem to see her now. And yet, looking back, I can remember very clearly what she looked like, and that is a strange thing ...
She wore a gown of blue and russet checkers, clasped somewhere about the shoulder with red amber and gold, and the long tawny braids of her hair had small golden apples at their ends which swung a little as she walked, so that one expected them to ring like bells. She came up the hall slowly, carrying a great cup of dark green glass between her hands, and her face was so strongly painted that while she was still far down the hall I could see the green malachite on her eyelids; and the way her brows were drawn out long and dark with stibium, like the dark, dagger-sharp wings of a swift.
She came on slowly, slowly, while the hall fell quiet behind her, and mounted the step to the dais, and gave the brimming cup into her father’s hands.
Maglaunus lurched to his feet and raised the cup, spilling a little as he did so. I saw the liquid dribble through his fingers, golden and almost as thick
as run honey. He turned to look at me under his russet brows. ‘Shlanther to Artos the Bear. I drink to you, my Lord the Count of Britain. May the sun and the moon shine on the path of your feet, and may your sword arm never grow weaker.’ And he tipped back his head and drank; and when he had done so, stood holding the cup and looking at me over it with a kindling and speculative eye. I knew that something else was coming, and with a sudden warning beating in my head, I waited for what it might be.
‘I have been thinking much of those things we spoke of before the raiders came – you see that I was right in that matter – but none the less, it grows in my mind that we must indeed come to stand shield to shield, even as you have said, against the Barbarians in the time that lies ahead. Therefore it grows in my mind also that there should be made a bond between us to bind our shields together; and to the bond between us, I drink again.’
When he had more than half emptied the great cup, he held it out to me – I also had risen by that time – saying, ‘Drink you also.’
The light of the flames on the central hearth shining through the thick glass filled the cup with a dimly golden fire as I took it into my hands. ‘To what bond shall I drink?’ I asked, with the small clear sense of danger still beating in my head.
He said, ‘Why not to the bond of kinship? That is the surest bond of all. Let you take Guenhumara my daughter from my hearth to yours. So shall we be kinsmen, knit together by the blood tie of brother to brother and father to son.’
For an instant I felt as though I had taken a blow in the root of my belly. I have never known what made Maglaunus broach the matter so publicly, risking his daughter’s humiliation before every warrior in his hall; maybe he desired to put all his rejoicings together and make of the evening one grand and glorious blaze, and never thought of my refusing what he offered. Maybe he thought to force my hand. Maybe he was a gambler – or merely wiser in the ways of men and women than he seemed. Without will of my own, my startled sight jumped to Guenhumara’s face, and I saw the tide of painful color flood up to the roots of her hair, and knew too that she had had no warning, but that unlike me, she had feared in advance; and that the heavy paint of her face had been put on as a young man takes up his armor. My mind was racing, seeking in all directions for a way out for both of us that would not make me enemies where I so sorely needed allies. Then I heard myself saying, ‘Maglaunus, my friend, you lay great honor upon me, but you must forgive me my answer for tonight. It is forbidden, taboo for me from my birth, even to so much as think of women, in each year between the dying of the Midsummer Fires and the kindling of the Lammas torches.’
Sword at Sunset Page 25
