The Shining Company

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  He looked at me with hot eyes, while I waited, holding the bauble between finger and thumb. He wanted to turn away, leaving it where it was, I could tell that; but even more he wanted his earring back again. So we stood, the other four looking on. In the end he took it from me with his free hand and tossed it up, a spark of blue in the moonlight, and caught it again, as though to make light of the whole thing, but turned away with hunched shoulders which somewhat spoiled his effect.

  Someone laughed, and the thing was over, or it seemed so.

  Down on the mud flats of low tide, a curlew began calling, though as yet there was no light save that of the moon.

  In the first green light of dawn, with the shorebirds crying and calling, we stamped out the last embers of our fire, the three days and nights being over. We went down to the burn to drink for the last time. The tall stone beside the ford caught the first light on its lichened flank, but I did not touch her again, feeling that I had not the right. The men who had made for themselves the right to touch her were all gone.

  The last thing we did before leaving the ruined fort was to make our marks on the wall that we had rebuilt. We made them on the stone under the running wolf. Being best able to write, I went first, scratching my name with the point of my knife - I should have to take it to Conn for re-sharpening, before I could use it again - and after me, Dara managed his own name with the letters very small and jigging up and down. Huil could not write, but he scratched a careful pattern of interlacing lines with a strange bird’s head at the top of it which did just as well, since we were not doing it that the world might know that we had been there and re-built a wall, but for some other purpose altogether.

  Then, the other three having gone ahead of us, we set out for Dyn Eidin. I. do not know whether it is possible to sleep while walking, but certainly I found myself turning in among the outbuildings of the Royal Farm without any clear memory of how I got there.

  11

  The Champion’s Portion

  That autumn we began to go out on mounted patrols, half a troop, usually, three or four days at a time, riding the ragged fringes of Gododdin territory that were fretted by Saxon raiders. Not war patrols, just ‘showing the sword arm’, though once or twice there was a brush with the Saxon kind along the coast, and once or twice the patrols came back with a dead or wounded man lying across his saddle in their midst, the loss to be made good from among the shieldbearers. Most nights we found lodgings in some farm settlement among the birch woods and the low heather hills around the hall of some one-valley chieftain; but when that failed we slept in the open with our horses wherever we could find any kind of shelter from wind and rain. One night we camped on the lee side of Traprain Law, where only the hummocks in the ground and the traces of a trackway snaking up and round the hill showed where the old capital had been, before the Saxon menace drew too close, and the King - Mynyddog’s father, it would be - had burned it to the ground and moved his Royal Hall to the old war capital of Dyn Eidin.

  It seemed an unchancy place to camp, but Cynran who was that day’s leader demanded to know were we old women or Saxons to be scared of bogles; and certainly, though the horses were fidgety all night, we heard and saw nothing worse than the wild geese flighting down from the north, black wavering arrowheads high overhead against a scarlet sunset sky, and all night long the soughing of a wet wind through the long grass and the bramble domes.

  Winter came down upon us suddenly, closing the ways with snow that turned to slush and froze again beneath fresh falls. The patrols ceased for the while and so did the coming and going of envoys between Mynyddog and his fellow kings which had been going on all summer and autumn long; and so too did any news of the outside world. Indeed it was as though the outside world had ceased to exist, and the great ridge itself was the only thing to stand clear in a nothingness of cold and wind and drifting snow and driving rain. But in Dyn Eidin and along the Town Ridge, life went forward with such crowding purpose that the very air seemed to pulse like a softly tapped drum. All day the charcoal smoke rose from the smithies and armourers’ shops and the ring of hammer on anvil told where ancient weapons were being mended and new ones forged. Our training went on by day as usual under the watchful eye of the Fosterling and the most seasoned of the household warriors, and at night we shared feasting and harpsong in the King’s Hall and in our own hostels. The leggy two-year-olds were brought in to the horse-yards for breaking. We took a hand in that, most of us being well used to the same work among our own hills; and when the snow let up enough, we went hunting; wolves for the sake of the lambing pens later on, boar and deer for fresh meat. The music of the hounds made me think of Gelert and my father’s pack and the day when we rode with Prince Gorthyn after the white hart.

  At midwinter Mynyddog called a great three-day feast, and decreed that on each night, two of the six troops of the Companions in turn should feast with him in the High Hall. But on the first day the whole Company went up from the Royal Farm to the great Gift-making in the outer court which was for all of them together, though only the two chosen troops for that evening would remain after the horns of feasting sounded. Only a few of the shieldbearers went up to attend upon their lords at supper. The rest of us watched them away, and then turned back to our own affairs and the warmth of the fires in the long houses.

  At dusk, with the smell of our own feasting beginning to waft in from the baking pits, they returned to us, the four troops who did not feast with the King that night. They came with a flare of torches that made a golden mill-race of the driving sleet, with one of the King’s harpers to lead them striking clashing flights of notes from his harp and declaring Cuchulain’s battle in the Pass of the North - though indeed you could scarcely hear him, for they had drunk mead and were singing as they came.

  I’ll sing you seven-ho! Green grow the rushes-ho.

  What are your seven-ho?

  Seven for the seven stars in the sky

  Six for the six proud walkers

  Five for the symbols at your door …

  The singing broke up; they divided and came thrusting into their own hostels, the sleet melting dark on their hair and shoulders, tossing down the King’s gifts on their sleeping places or beside the fires. Shirts of fine ringmail that had been captured in forgotten wars, or for the younger and lesser men leather tunics with plates of horn stitched on to them in the places that would be most vulnerable to sword cut or spear thrust; shields and well-balanced lances, fine saddles and horsegear, gold torques for the necks of warriors, heavy arm-rings of gold and silver and enamelled bronze.

  Not for nothing was Mynyddog called The Wealthy.

  Many of the gifts were, of course, war gear that would have been issued to the Companions in any case when the time came; but given so, among firelight and mead-drinking and the thunder of Cuchulain’s chariot wheels, they had a potency and a power of binding loyalty that might have been less strong if they had been issued in the cold light of morning.

  The tables had been set up and the bondservants brought in the piled dishes and the feasting went forward. I mind that Gorthyn ate one-handed for the most part, keeping the other free for reaching under the table to touch the mail shirt and the bull’s-hide buckler with its bird-shaped mountings of gilded bronze which lay there at his feet. And he was not the only one.

  And when the eating, though not the drinking, was over, they must all try their new toys, struggling into war shirts on top of their festival tunics, trying the weight and the balance of weapons, challenging each other to mock combat with much laughter and shouting, while we who had barely started on our own feeding, toiled to and fro and in and out after them with our mouths full of hastily snatched up food, keeping their mead cups full and hauling them in and out of their war gear (a good ringmail shirt is almost too heavy and awkward for a man to get into unaided).

  They sobered somewhat after a while and fell to talking and dicing around the fires, plaguing the harpers for this story and that story; and we were l
eft free to finish the filling of our own bellies at last.

  At the upper fire, close to where I sat with a lump of blood pudding for company, Gorthyn and Cynan and a handful more had begun to hark forward to the time when they would be taking up their gift weapons in earnest, riding out on whatever war-trail the King might order. Questioning when the day would come, questioning where the trail would lead.

  ‘Before another turn of the year, anyway,’ someone said, thumbing the new slim spearhead that lay across his knee.

  ‘Down into Bernicia or Deira, for sure,’ said someone else.

  ‘Bernicia and Deira are not the only stretches where the Sea-wolves gather on British coasts.’

  ‘No, but their threat is the nearest,’ Gorthyn said. ‘They say that Aethelfrith and Aelle are drawing closer into alliance with every moon that passes; and if they join spears indeed, they will be as strong as all the warhosts of the kingdoms joined together.’

  Cynan smiled gently into the fire, ‘Yet men on horses count always for more than men on foot, as Arthur Pendragon showed in his day. If the King’s embassies to Strathclyde and the Piet lands bear fruit, there could be a fine hosting come the spring, and we may ride south in brave company as soon as the grass stands high enough to feed the horses.’

  Llif, the Piet, said suddenly and loudly (he was somewhat drunk - they were all somewhat drunk by that time, and it was loosening their thinking and their tongues), ‘How if they bear no fruit after all, these embassies? How if there is no warhosting in the spring?’

  The others fell upon him, banging his head on the floor to bring the sense back into it, and I mind Cynan, who had sprung to his feet, standing over the scrimmage, laughing with his arms flung out, ‘Then we shall ride south alone. The odds will be no worse than thirty or forty to one. Ten to one if you count the shieldbearers!’

  The other thing I remember about that night is that later, when the fires were smoored and the sleeping rugs spread, and Lleyn and I were hauling Gorthyn out of his mailshirt, he said, staggering a little as we heaved it over his head and shoulders, ‘The King should not be alone in giftmaking at the turn of the year.’ And he sat down on the sleeping bench and pulled up the sleeve of his tunic; and by the light of the candle in the horn-paned lantern that hung nearby, I saw the thick silver arm-ring, the King’s gift, which he had come back wearing from the High Hall, and below it and on his other arm the matched pair of enamelled bronze that he had worn there ever since I had first known him. ‘I feel myself somewhat too splendid in all this finery. So -’ He pulled off one of the gleaming things. ‘Hold out your arm,’ he bade Lleyn, and sprang it into place. Then he turned to me, ‘That for the first of my shieldbearers, and this for the second.’

  It was not the first gift I had had from him since we came to Dyn Eidin; a new cloak at the start of winter, a better dirk than I had brought from home, but those had been the things that any warrior must provide for his followers. This was different. I felt the bronze warm with his own warmth as he sprang it on to my arm, saw the quiver of his hands forcing the ends together. I felt the proud weight of it as I should feel the lightness and the lack if now, after all these years, I were to take it off.

  The next day quite a number of the shieldbearers, though not all, were wearing or carrying something passed on to them by their Lords, an arm-ring, an enamelled brooch, a dagger with a hilt of narwhal ivory. I felt sorry as from a great height for the have-nots. I felt sorry for Faelinn when I passed him with the sleeve of my tunic well thrust up so that everyone could see what lay beneath. Generally, since that night in the old fort, we had taken care not to meet each other’s eye - his ear had healed but the split lobe remained, and he did indeed now wear the blue glass drop in his other ear - but that morning in the clear snow-light, his glance caught the glint of polished bronze and flickered up to my face before he could stop it. He saw, I think, that I was sorry, and flushed crimson and looked as though he could have knifed me for the price of a broken shoestring.

  That night, the second of the midwinter feast, was the night when Cynan and his wild brothers, having received fine saddles among the King’s gifts, rode their horses into the Royal Hall, announcing themselves as the Three Battle Horsemen of Dyn Eidin of the Many Goldsmiths; up one side of the roaring and rocking hall between the long fires and the feasting warriors to the foot of the High Table itself, and down the other side of it and out again, without so much as a spilled mead jar behind them, which said something for their horse skill, for sure.

  Nay, I did not see the thing with my own eyes; it was not yet the turn of our troop to feast with the King and we had no place in the High Hall of Dyn Eidin. Nor, of course, had our Three Battle Horsemen; we missed them early from our own feasting, and knew no more than that, but later the story ran like forest fire from end to end of Eidin Ridge.

  It was the third and last night of the great feast, our night for the High Hall, that we all but burned Dyn Eidin round our ears.

  The day had been filled like the other two with hunting and sport. Down on the practice ground, softened a little by an overnight thaw, there had been a splendidly bloody game of ‘Cattle Raiding’, the pick of our horsemen against the pick of the household warriors while the rest of us yelled ourselves hoarse on the side-lines. And we had won, getting the calf’s head back through our own garlanded gateposts nine times ahead of the Teulu, and came to that night’s feasting already a little drunk with our own victory. Mynyddog himself was not in his Hall that night, but had gone, wrapped in furs and carried in a litter, to celebrate the birth of the White Kristani with the Holy Brothers according to his custom, summoning the Fosterling, the Captain of his bodyguard, to go with him; and the bard Aneirin was shut in his own quarters with the kind of fever that comes with a cough and a streaming nose. And but for our own sense of victory and for those three empty places, I think that maybe the thing would not have happened …

  It began when the great bowls of meat stew and dried salmon-char had been emptied and the first keen edge was gone from our hunger, and the sizzling carcasses of roasted boar - the fruits of yesterday’s hunting - were borne in on huge chargers, each carried by four men, decked and garlanded with holly and fir and juniper, to be the crowning splendour of the midwinter feast. The horns of feasting sounded again at their coming, and a roar of greeting went up from the warrior benches, men tossing up their mead cups as they were borne up the Hall.

  One after another the charges were set down, the full length of the High Table before the King’s empty seat, and the King’s carvers stepped forward with their long knives to break up the still sizzling carcasses. The tumult quietened somewhat, every head turning towards the High Table as the good work began. And in the quiet, Amalgoid, one of the Teulu, rose in his place and demanded the Champion’s Portion, the first slice from the left shoulder of the kill - in this case when there were more beasts than one, that must mean the first of them to be carved. I had heard of the claim being made in ancient times, as in the song of Bricrue’s Feast, but I had thought of it as belonging to the world before the Romans came. Certainly I had never known it in my father’s Hall. Maybe old customs lingered on more strongly north of the Romans’ Wall, I thought. But there seemed to be something of surprise in the moment’s stillness that greeted his claim.

  From where I was standing far down the Hall I could not see much of what was happening, but I heard clearly enough - the old dry voice of Bleddfach the King’s steward making formal reply, ‘By what right, Amalgoid, do you make claim to the Champion’s Portion?’

  ‘By this right,’ Amalgoid replied, ‘that my spear was first at the kill of yesterday’s king boar. There is no hunter like to me under the King’s roof this night. So do I claim the Champion’s Portion!’

  And the old tired voice said, ‘The Champion’s Portion is yours.’

  A murmur ran down along the crowded benches, and at our end of the Hall the Companions looked at each other. Then Tydfwlch the Tall, who always found delight i
n a battle of any kind, sprang to his feet and shouted up towards the High Table, ‘Not so fast! I also claim the Champion’s Portion, I Tydfwlch from the eagle haunts of Yr Widdfa!’

  But we knew that he made the claim as it were for all of us, out of the rivalry that was between Companions and Teulu. At the High Table by the Royal Fire, the old steward, trying to keep the thing from taking hold, protested, ‘Your claim comes too late -’

  ‘How so? It was not told me that the claim was to be made, therefore I did not make it earlier.’

  Bleddfach the steward was silent a moment, while the murmuring along the warrior benches rose and fell. Then craning, I saw him spread his hands in a gesture that was like a defeat. He said, clinging to his dignity, ‘By what right, Tydfwlch, do you make claim to the Champion’s Portion?’

  Tydfwlch was already striding up the Hall. ‘By the right that in today’s game of Cattle Raid I bore the calf’s head back for the ninth time through our gateposts, leading the Companions to victory.’

  It was as good a reason as any to put forward on the spur of the moment.

  Amalgoid began shouting a furious protest about green untried warriors laying claim to honours that were for better men. Tydfwlch countered that so far as he was aware there were no better men in the High Hall of Dyn Eidin that night, chanting his victories against boarder raiders and the Water Horse of Pwl Ddu to prove it.

  The thing was half in jest at that stage, but no more than half and the jest beginning to wear thin. Quite cheerfully, but with purpose, the Companions rose from their benches and began to move forward up the Hall towards the Royal Fire and the High Table and the shouting match that was going on there. And in the upper Hall, the men of the Teulu, backing Amalgoid, rose also and stood ready to receive them. We, the shieldbearers, pressed at the heels of our own warriors, and through the broad doorways opening on to the snowy night, others of us who had been hanging around the cookhouses and baking pits came thrusting in to join the rest as sound of what was afoot spilled out and spread abroad.