The Shining Company

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  As we ate, beyond our firelight the dusk came down and deepened into the dark and the dark began to lighten as the cloud-swept eastern sky took on a faint silver wash. And suddenly the rim of the moon slid up over the black edge of the world beyond the woods and the Saxon watchfires. There began to be a silent coming and going as men left the firelight and slipped away towards the barrack-row where our wounded lay. It was time that those too sorely hurt to ride were sent on their way; for they could not be left to fall into the hands of the Sea-wolves. The last mercy, among fighting men, performed by brother for brother, friend for friend. I was thankful in the depths of my belly, even as I swallowed my last red rag of meat and turned to the mail coif that lay beside me, that both Gorthyn and Lleyn were beyond the need of that mercy from me.

  I mind now the slippery fish-scale chill of the ring mail even through the woollen cap as I pulled it on; the unaccustomed weight on the crown of my head, the way it flattened my ears inward, and the way sound came through it well enough but with the edges slightly blurred. The fine unlined mask I left hanging open for the moment, but I put on my own iron rimmed war-cap and buckled the strap under my chin, as men were doing all round the fires. So we flung on the hairy wolfskin cloaks and broached them at the shoulder, hitched at swordbelts and gathered up bucklers and lances. The men who had been in the barrack-rows came back to gather their own war gear, no man remarking on their return as no man had remarked on their going. Madog, who was now our standardbearer, brought the standard out from the little still-roofed inner room where we had lodged it, carrying the lance somewhat at the slant, to let the folds hang free, there being as yet no wind under that shining sky to set them flowing. The torches struck the blood-red colour of the dragon-coils, the only colour in a world that was becoming striped frost-grey and ink-pool black like a badger’s mask as the moon rose higher.

  ‘Time to saddle up,’ said the Captain’s voice with an oddly hollow note to it, and as he stepped out from the shadows into the torchlight beside the standard, an uncanny figure, half a head taller than his usual seeming, we saw that he had pulled on Aethelfrith’s great wolf helmet with the gilded comb in place of his own war-cap that he had given to one of his shieldbearers.

  Speaking for myself, it was in that moment that I noticed the mist. Scarcely more than a faint thickening and gilding of the air round the torches, but mist all the same.

  It was thicker down at the picket lines, thin scarves of it lying along the ground, reaching halfway up the horses’ legs and making the ruins at the far side seem to have no standing on firm ground, though if one looked upward all was clear as a crystal ball overhead.

  Such mists are common enough after dark in low country. But they seldom carry, even as faintly as this one did, the scent of burning rowan wood.

  We saddled up and slipped in the bits. I mind Shadow playing with hers delicately in the way she had, as I have seen a girl playing with a flower. I took a final look at her shoes, tested her girth again though I had but that moment buckled it, and swung into the saddle, men to the right and left, before and behind me, doing the same thing.

  Last moment orders were passed back down the picket lines from where Ceredig Fosterling who was a king’s son sat his horse under the dragon standard; no shouted commands that might reach to Saxon ears: speed was everything; we must be across the river before the sea-wolves had time to gather against us. (We saw the wisdom of this having no wish to meet a storm of spears and throwing axes as we scrambled up the further bank.) There would be no sounding the charge, no sounds of horn before we reached the further side, but we should ride full gallop from the moment that we were clear of the gates. We should kill - and kill - and kill.

  ‘Kill, and kill, and kill! A red harvest before we ourselves go down,’ said a hollow voice in the great wolf helmet.

  I pulled the mail mask across my face and made it fast. I pulled out my dirk and leaning forward, cut Shadow’s tether only a splinter of time behind Cynan; almost the instant Faelinn did the same, and the rest on beyond him, pulling clear as the picket line fell loose and lax.

  The Captain wheeled his tall bay and headed for the gates and troop after troop we followed, heeling the horses into a canter as we went. Down the broad straight track that gashed like a blade through the midst of the fort; and out through the north facing gateway where the thorn-work had been pulled aside and rotten timbers and fallen stones heaved back to give us wide passage.

  Outside, the mist that had been only a faint scarfing along the ground as we came down from the horse-lines, thickened and rose to meet us; a mist that smoked up from the marshy ground, lying in broad swathes and wafts of ghost-paleness that marked the course of the river, and glimmering in the light of the rising moon. But overhead the sky was still clear, and from the high ground at the gate we could still see the Saxon fires, before we dropped lower, and lost sight of them as the mist took us. Aneirin’s mist that could cover an army …

  Clear of the gates we quickened, troop after troop, from a canter into a gallop, heading down to the ford, past the dark shape of Gorthyn’s horse still lying where it had fallen. The standard lifted and streamed out on the wind of our going, and my ears were full of the rolling thunder of hooves over the rough ground. I snatched one glance behind me. I do not know why; it is a stupid thing to do when riding full gallop among a smother of horsemen. Maybe it was something to do with knowing that Conn would be just about mounting with Aneirin’s small band at the west gate.

  So - I turned in the saddle and looked back. And I saw the Companions on their last ride. I have never forgotten that sight, nor, I am thinking, will any of the Saxon kind who saw them coming and lived beyond that night. I saw the Wild Hunt. I saw riders with black eyesockets in glimmering mail where their faces should have been, grey wolfskins catching a bloom of light from the mist and the moon; a shining company indeed, not quite mortal-seeming, but made of another kind that might dissolve at any moment into the mist that smoked about them. Only for that bright breath of time I saw them by the white levin-light of the moon, as something in which I had no part at all. Then I faced forward and settled down to ride; a part of them once more, in a oneness that was more potent than the oneness we had come to know on Dyn Eidin training grounds. The bloom of light was on my own wolfskin, and my own mailed face, faceless with the rest.

  Faelinn was beside me, and Cynan’s crouched shoulders loomed ahead; and up beyond, the great wolf helmet, scarfed as though with smoke, showed where Ceredig the Captain rode under the wind-lifted standard.

  We took the river at the ford. The raids of earlier days had taught us where the shallows ran for a couple of spears’ lengths on either side of the paved way, and we took to the water on a broad front, sending up sheets of spray and churning the shallows till they seemed to boil.

  We reached the far side and plunged ashore with a slipping scramble that turned the bank into a quagmire before half of us were over, and among the ruins on the north bank swung left-hand on to the remains of the north road and went straight down it like a flight of arrows.

  Our horn was sounding now, not the charge, but the hunting call that sicks on the hounds when the quarry is in view. Ahead of us in the mist was a sudden urgent springing into life and movement; men snatching up their weapons and running for the stockades, and from the midst of the camp the hollow bull-bellowing of the Saxon war-horn burst out, answered and slung back by the clear yelping of our own hunting horn. ‘Tran ta ta ran tran tra …’

  If only we had the hounds with us, I thought, but the last of the mingled pack of war and hunting dogs that had feather-heeled out from Dyn Eidin with us were dead days ago. And then suddenly we were giving tongue ourselves, like a pack of hounds in full cry as we swept down upon the stockade.

  Then happened a strange thing, a few moments of wavering, a loss of purpose, at the rough defences, as the men behind them seemed gripped by something that was almost like the beginning of panic. I have learned since that the Saxons also ha
ve their Wild Hunt, though for them it is Woden himself who hunts his demon pack through the stormy skies. Maybe it was that, something of that, that they saw coming for them. A few moments more, and they had rallied and came roaring against us, armed with their long knives and the terrible swinging war-axes. But in those few moments we were through and over the breastwork and into the Saxon camp.

  We charged through them to the farmost side, and turned and charged back, leaving a red wake behind us. ‘Not to break through, but to kill Saxons,’ the Fosterling had said. ‘Not to break through, but to kill and, ah yes, we killed, that night, killed and killed, while our own numbers also bled away.

  They were coming in on us from all sides in yelling waves out of the mist, men from the further reaches of the siege-ring, crossing the river by the ford, and the shallows above the broken water, swarming in to answer the bellowing summons of the war-horn. Faelinn and I were still together at Cynan’s back, thrusting after the standard and the hunting horns; until the standard went down, until the horn fell silent in mid call.

  We were no longer one fighting force, but splitting into smaller and smaller knots of desperate struggling men. Faelinn was gone. I do not know how or when for I never saw him go; and I was no longer at Cynan’s back, but stirrup to stirrup with him, as we plunged through the red embers of a scattered fire, towards the upreared horsetail standard that marked the heart of the Saxon swarm. I do not know how many or how few we were by then, but the dull thunder of hooves on soft ground was still behind us as we crashed into the shield-mass, tearing great gaps in it, hurling it aside. But it seemed that fresh men sprang out of the ground like dragon’s teeth, two where every one had fallen. A heavy throw-spear homed in on my shield, and stuck there, making it useless so that I flung it aside. My sword hilt was slippery with blood, but the blood was not mine. A man came running low with his axe angled for Shadow’s belly. I managed to wrench her aside at the last instant, and cut him down and trampled him into the ground. She reared up with a scream of fury, her forehooves lashing, and a man with a beard the colour of hot coals went down to join him with his forehead smashed in. The last charge of the Companions had become an ugly swirling soup of fire and mist and moonlight and snarling faces, the cries of men and the screams of stricken horses, the smell of blood and filth.

  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 manage
d 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.