The Shining Company

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  The brushwood barricades across the main gateway were pulled aside and we went.

  After that, for a while there were no more fires in the dark, for the Saxons had learned the un-wisdom of showing their whereabouts in smoke by day or flame by night; but it made little difference, for the scouts brought us word of where the camps were pitched.

  But the camps grew more and bigger as the days went by.

  In some ways those raids of ours were like the cattle raids that many of us had known among our own hills, and called for the same skills and the same reckless speed. In others they were more like hunting, but a deadly hunting in which the quarry was men. Sometimes we took them on the march, coming on them out of the woods at twilight or out of the westering sun, with the thunderbolt crack of cavalry upon a rabble of men on foot. Sometimes we skirmished about the camps, beyond the firelight. All the while we cost them men and more men, of Deira and Bernicia which I have heard they call Northumberland now. But all the while, despite all that we could do, the numbers against us grew; and they cost us dearly also, in men but even more in horses, until, except when the purpose of things demanded cavalry, we took to holding the horses back and making our raids on foot.

  That called for a different kind of fighting, ringmail left behind because of the faint chime that it makes in movement; a closing in, silent as shadows, until the last moment came … That eased the drain on the horses, but it cost us yet more heavily in men.

  And still the men of Elmet did not come, nor the combined warhost of the north and west, nor even the warrior bands of the Gododdin, though the Cran-Tara must have reached many of them before we crossed the border on our road south.

  In a while - I do not know the exact tally of nights and days - the whole of the two-fold Saxon war-horde was gathered to the mustering place, and we were encircled in their midst. The Saxons built stockades across the roads to the north and south and wherever the ground was possible for a breakout. To attack the stockades would only be to lose men to no purpose, especially as escape was not among our orders; and the barricades would rise again.

  Even to get the horses watered now cost men. The time of the wild-riding sorties was over, as the siege tightened about us, and there were daily skirmishes as they sought to drive us in from the crumbling town defences. Soon we should be penned fast within the fort itself, and that would mean losing most of the horses and the best of the still surviving wells. It was on the last mounted sally, the last riding out to guard the horses at their watering, covered by our archers from the town walls, that Gorthyn’s horse was killed under him. I mind the slipping shambles as man and beast came down together, and the bright arc of an axe blade up-swung. It took him between neck and shoulder, slicing through the ringmail into flesh and bone. Lleyn’s dirk was in the Saxon’s throat almost before Gorthyn hit the ground, and an arrow from the walls took him under the arm. But that was too late for Gorthyn.

  We slung him across my saddle bow and got him back into the fort, Lleyn covering our rear. And all the while his blood spurted over my bridle arm. Once back in the fort, we got him down, and lashed his own neck-cloth and mine round his shoulder to check the bleeding, and carried him up to the barrack-row that sheltered the wounded, and laid him on the bare ground - there was no more straw nor fern for bedding - and Aneirin came and did what could be done for him. It was not much. Nearly all the salves and medicines that the Queen had sent with us, even the bandage linen, were gone by then. And in any case, he had lost more blood than a man can well lose and yet live.

  The wound sickened and turned foul almost at once. That was the way with most of our wounded, as it generally is when wounded men must lie too close together and there is not enough of anything, even water. It took him three days to die, but I think that he was out of his body for most of that time, even before the fever took him.

  Lleyn and I nursed him between us when we were free from other matters.

  We were both with him on the last morning. Earlier, he had been bright-eyed and raving, but as the light grew he had slipped into a kind of sleep that was not like true sleep. There was quiet, save for his quick, shallow breathing, in the corner of the barrack-row which we had curtained off with dead men’s cloaks strung on spear-shafts to give him a private dying-space. Such quiet that faintly, from the woods down river, I heard the cuckoo calling; the first cuckoo of the year.

  Then, almost at once after the alarm call of the hunting horn and the light flurry of sound, swelling and growing ragged, that meant the out-break of fresh fighting; another attack on the town gate. And then the hurrying of feet, and voice calling to voice as men snatched up their weapons and hurried down to join the gate’s guard. But that was all from the world outside. In the corner of the barrack-row there was still no sound but Gorthyn’s shallow breathing, growing more shallow as the moments passed.

  Lleyn’s head went up, and I drew my legs under me to be away in answer to the call. But Gorthyn’s hand, the one that still had life in it, was fast about my wrist. He had been holding it so before he fell asleep, and in his sleep had kept his hold unbroken. I checked in the movement I had begun, and looked across to meet Lleyn’s gaze; and the decision making went wordlessly to and fro between us.

  ‘Bide here,’ he said, and, ‘Your turn next time.’ And he got up, slipping his dirk from its sheath, and went out. I heard him calling back to the cuckoo: ‘Cuckoo, cuckoo!’ as he went down to join the fight.

  The flurry of sound had swelled into the full-throated roar and weapon-clash of men locked in close combat, but still it all seemed small and far off, and the only sound that really concerned me was that faint stressful rasp of Gorthyn’s breathing. It changed, and looking down through the shadows I saw his eyelids begin to twitch. They opened, and he lay looking up at me. His face had always been bony and now it looked like a skull, a young skull if there could be such a thing, with only the eyes alive in it. But his eyes were clear and awake, with the crazy-brightness of the wound-fever gone from them. And for one moment I thought that he was better, that against all the odds he was going to mend. Then I understood that the change was not that; not that at all …

  ‘Prosper,’ he said, drawing breath for the word as though it were a cart rattling over stones.

  ‘I am here,’ I said.

  And his gaze drifted away from mine and went searching into the shadows, then returned to me again. ‘Lleyn?’

  ‘Down in the gate. The Saxons are attacking again.’

  ‘Lleyn - of my own hearth-kin,’ he said. ‘Kin follows kin. But you - if I had not - come hunting the white hart in - your father’s runs, you would not be - here today.’

  ‘I would not be anywhere else,’ I said, and for the moment it was true.

  His voice was getting weaker, the painful breath rattling in his chest, but there was a trace of a smile at the corners of his parched mouth. ‘There’s glad I am - that we did not kill the white hart.’

  ‘I also.’

  His breath caught and strangled. A trickle of blood came out of his mouth and nose, and his head rolled sideways. There was no sound at all in the cloaked off corners of the barrack-row.

  I freed my wrist from his hold as gently as I knew how, and put his hand that had been alive only the moment before, with the hand that had been two days dead, together on his breast. Then I got up, freeing my own dirk, and went out and down towards the gate.

  The sound of fighting was dying down, and the struggling mass of men about the gateway thinning out, the wave of the Saxon attack streaming away towards the river, sped by a last flight of arrows from the gatehouse.

  Men were falling back, carrying wounded among them, while already others were struggling to renew the thornwork barricade. And in the gateway our newest dead lay sprawled.

  Close under the gate tower Cynan crouched over someone, something that ran red like a broached wine jar. I went to see if there was help to be given, and saw that it was Cynran. He was almost broken apart midway, by a blow from an
other of the great Saxon war-axes, part still and part writhing like a snake crushed under a cartwheel. It was horrible. As I reached them he cried out shrilly, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, finish it!’ And Cynan slipped his dagger from his belt left handed - his right arm was under his brother’s head - and finished it as calmly and competently as he might have slit the throat of a kid for the cooking pot.

  I did not look at his face. I did not dare. I turned blunderingly away: and in so doing all but fell over another body with the barb of a Saxon arrow that had passed clear through, sticking out between the shoulder blades. I turned it over, but there was no need; one does not need to see a friend’s face to know him from other men; it was Lleyn. He could not even have got into the fight; his dirk was still in his hand, but it was clean.

  I do not think that I felt anything, just then. We had grown used to the faces of dead friends, anyway. The thing I mind most sharply of that moment is that somewhere down-river the cuckoo was still calling.

  *

  After dark, we buried the day’s dead in the lower town as usual, in what must have been the gardens of temples and rich men’s houses, while others of us stood guard on the crumbling walls. They had been overgrown with trees and the in-flowing of the wild when first we made our tattered stronghold in Catraeth; we had hacked down most of it now, for firewood or shelter or barricades, or simply to clear the ground outside the fortress walls. But a little remained. An ancient may tree growing beside a fallen marble bench was just breaking into flower, and a young moon cast the shadows of its branches over the long grass and gave us light to work by.

  We would have buried them in their war-gear with their weapons beside them had we been able, but our own need was too sore. We left them their adornments, though; to each man the brooch or arm-ring or twisted golden torque that was his own. We could not spare the time nor the space for separate graves; we dug out a broad trench, deep enough to keep the wolves out, but no more, and laid them side by side, Companions and shieldbearers together. Gorthyn and Lleyn together. We laid the earth back over all.

  It was not until the thing was done and over, and I was on my way back to the fort with the rest of the burying party that what had happened struck home to me. That morning I had been one of three; and tonight I was alone.

  With the cold ache of desolation in my belly, I checked in the gateway and looked back. From the slightly higher ground of the fort, I could still see the topmost branches of the maytree in the moonlight. I could see also the Saxon watchfires. We were encircled and penned fast, and the Saxons knew that they had no need now to keep themselves dark.

  Someone was beside me; a shoulder brushed against mine in turning, and I looked round quickly, somehow for that one instant expecting it to be Lleyn, and it was Faelinn. The moon made a tiny blue spark in the glass bead he still wore in his right ear, and showed his face with the same look on it that I suppose was on my own.

  I knew that his fellow shieldbearer had gone down days ago, but I had been so deep taken with my own two beside the maytree that I had no awareness that Peredur also was among that day’s dead.

  I do not think anything was said between us. We went back into the fort together like a pair of masterless hounds. We sat down side by side at the first fire we came to, and when the lean evening ration was shared out - the last of the cattle were dead and we had not eaten meat for days - we shared one sour wheat cake between us.

  Between moonset and dawn they attacked the picket lines, the first time that they had brought themselves to face the trolls and devils within the town walls after dark. It was only a small skirmishing band of them that time, and the horseguard killed several of them before they could cut the ropes and stampede the horses, and the rest melted back into the darkness before we got down to help. It was over and done with so quickly that it seemed of little moment, not much more than a kind of wild sport. Much like our own cattle raiding. But when the troop leader passed on the Captain’s orders that the horses were to be brought up into the fort, we began to understand its real purpose: the loss of the river and then of the remaining town springs. With the horses packed within the fort walls, how long before the water ran out? Some of us muttered that it would have been better to leave the beasts out to take their chance than have to kill them ourselves if relief did not reach us within the next few days.

  But at dusk on the same day Madog got back to us through the Saxon screen. One of the look-outs brought him in, looking like a famished and storm-driven ghost in the light of our watch-fire. And those of us who saw him come knew the word that he brought before ever he told it to the Fosterling.

  ‘So the Elmet men will not be coming,’ Faelinn said.

  And the bitterness rose in me like gall. ‘I suppose they think that their forests and marshes will keep them safe enough.’

  ‘There are other kingdoms, still.’

  I doubted it. ‘If Elmet does not come, how is it different for the others?’ I said. ‘We all told ourselves that Mynyddog was Artos the Bear over again, but he’s not. The kingdoms of the north will not combine warhosts again at the call of a High Chief from beyond their frontiers.’

  That still left our own war-bands, the Gododdin within the summons of their own king’s Cran-Tara. But neither of us spoke of them. We had looked for their coming too long. And even if they came now, what could they do, the fighting strength of our tribe against the double warhost of all Deira and Bernicia, except share with us in the dying?

  17

  The Last Day

  Later that morning Ceredig the Captain called us all together in what I think must have been the mess hall of the fort. (Our numbers were small enough for that now: less than a hundred of the original Company, less than two hundred of the shieldbearers.) All of us save for the handful left on watch. Even Conn and his mates from the field-forge, and Aneirin, who had spent most of his time when he was not with the wounded sitting alone by himself in what remained of the signal tower with the fold of his old wine-coloured cloak over his head.

  Now he sat on the fallen stone that served him as a song-stool, in the bard’s proper place at the Captain’s feet, and gazed into the fire as though he were reading pictures in it. And Madog crouched at the Captain’s other side, holding on his knee the oat cake that clearly he was beyond eating, and staring into the fire also with red-rimmed eyes in a face that was so furious and shamed that it hurt to look at it.

  And there, standing between them, Ceredig the Fosterling spoke with us as a man speaks with his friends. I saw him in the flamelight across the crowding shoulders of other men, tall and raw-boned, with that mane of rough tawny hair and those strange eyes of his, one grey and the other green, shining jewel-wise in his famished face. (Indeed we all had the famine look on us by that time.) He was silent for the first moment after he stood up, his gaze raking to and fro into the furthest shadows so that when he began to speak, we all knew that he spoke to us, not only the Companions who were crowded closest to the fire.

  Na, na, I do not remember word for word, after so many years, but the gist of it, that I remember well enough.

  ‘My brothers, there is that which I have to say to you, and the time has come for saying it. The orders of Mynyddog the King, on which we rode south, you already know: to attack and over-run Aethelfrith and his war-bands, to take this fort of our Roman forefathers and hold it, working all the damage that we can upon the Saxon warhost as it gathers, until our own warhost comes to our relief, or until we are over-run. To those orders we have been true. Not Cuchulain himself in the Pass of the North could have wrought more greatly than we. But sorrow upon me, Aethelfrith himself escaped our first attack and left us with an empty victory. Even so, there are many and many of the Saxon kind who will not take blade and burning forward into our valleys, because we have laid them down here to sleep a red sleep. We have held them back by this - that they dare not move forward leaving us alive behind them. So - we have held them, playing for time; time for the tribes to join war-spears behi
nd us and come down to the fight.

  ‘But now it seems that there is no more time to play for, no such joining of war-spears behind us. Madog has returned to us from his own people-’

  There was a low muttering round the fire, Madog’s hand clenched on the bannock so that it burst and crumbled between his fingers, and a hand came round from behind him and scooped up the larger bits. We were too hungry to waste good oaten crumbs. ‘They are no people of mine any more,’ he said through set teeth.

  ‘From the lords of Elmet,’ the Fosterling said after a moment. ‘Bringing us their word that they dare not send us their war-bands, for they have hearths and women and cattle of their own to guard.’

  Someone put in, still clinging to a ragged hope, ‘The other kingdoms maybe are of a different mind from Elmet!’

  And Ceredig turned to look at him kindly, man to man. ‘If Elmet does not come, why should any other? Our own men should have been here long ere this, answering the Cran-Tara, and they have not come.’

  The words fell clear and heavy into our silence. And in the silence Cynan spoke up, I think for all of us. Almost the first word that we had heard him speak since Cynran’s dying. ‘The King has failed in this thing that he sought to bring about. But he has not failed in all things; he has not failed in the making of the Company. And the Company will not fail him, now that it is time to earn the mead we drank under his roof and the golden torques and blue-bladed swords we have had of him. We are his men - so, let you tell us the thing that we do now!’