Dawn Wind, Page 3

  And together they went off up the herding path into the next valley, on their way to worship God, leaving Branwen the short-legged cattle-dog in charge of the farm until they came home again towards evening. On the earlier Sundays, Owain had of course been left behind, but on the second Saturday after Priscus’s trouble with the cow, Priscilla came out of the inner room while the master of the house was at his shaving, carrying something blue over her arm. ‘There,’ she said to Owain, who was holding up the big copper cooking pot for Priscus to see his round agonized face in. ‘This is his second best tunic; it will do for you tomorrow.’

  ‘I can’t wear out all Priscus’s tunics,’ Owain said without looking up. ‘I’m wearing out his old working one as it is.’

  ‘And you cannot come to Service with us in that one smelling of the byres. If you think,’ said Priscilla with feeling, ‘I am going to have it said that I grudged any member of my household a clean tunic to worship God in, you are mistaken!’

  ‘To say nothing,’ Priscus murmured gravely, ‘of myself, the tunic’s actual owner.’

  Owain looked up slowly. ‘Am I to go to Service with you tomorrow?’

  He was born and bred to the Christian faith, and his faith had been dear to him. It was part of his heritage, part of being Roman and British, and standing for civilization and the light, against the Barbarians and the in-flowing dark. But now the last light had gone out, and it was as though something of his faith had guttered out too. Part of him wanted to go with Priscus and Priscilla and share in the familiar worship, but part of him shrank from it as from going back to a place where one has been happy, when the hearth is cold and the people one was happy with are dead. ‘I think I will not go; I will bide here as I have before, and then nobody will say anything.’

  ‘No one in my house stays at home on the Lord’s Day, when once his legs are strong enough to carry him to Service,’ said Priscilla simply. ‘If you come for no other reason, you can come to thank God for leading you to my threshold in your sorest need.’

  Owain said with a flash of rather dreary laughter, ‘In actual truth it was a grey wagtail!’

  ‘The Lord who knows when a sparrow falls will not find a grey wagtail too small to use for His purpose, I dare say,’ said Priscilla briefly, depositing the blue woollen tunic on his lap.

  And Owain knew that he would go to Service tomorrow.

  He washed, and allowed Priscilla to clip off the strong dark hair that had grown long about his neck. And next morning, wearing Priscus’s second best tunic, which was about the right length for him but roughly three times too wide, he set off up the green drove track, walking at Priscilla’s left hand while Priscus trotted at her right, and Dog, as usual, came padding along behind.

  It was a good distance, following the winding drove-way that linked outland farm with outland farm among the hills, and Owain, whose legs were still apt to tire quickly, was not sorry when they came down through a tangle of low-growing woods into a shallow upland valley, and saw the village half-way up the slope on the far side, and higher up, where the field plots ran out into rough pasture, a little barn-like building with the tall grey finger of a preaching cross raised in front of it.

  They were late, for Priscus had broken his shoe-thong on the way, and they had had to stop and mend it, and when they came up through the apple trees and kale plots of the village to the preaching cross, the rest of the little congregation were already assembled; maybe thirty or forty men, women, and children from the village and the outlying farms, gathered close about the grey stone shaft of the cross and the little figure in the long tunic of undyed sheep’s wool who stood at its foot.

  They looked round as the three latecomers slipped in among them, and many eyes were fixed upon the thin dark boy who had come with Priscus and Priscilla, and who wore—though he did not know it—an odd stillness on his face as though it were a mask, or a shield; but they had the courtesy of people who live very far into the wilds, and after the one look they did not stare any more, but made room for him close to the preaching cross, as though he had been one of themselves.

  The priest had already begun the service, and Owain fixed his eyes on him, trying to take in his words. The man was worth looking at, small, fierce, and fiery, with the head of a warrior prince on the body of an under-fed clerk; worth listening to also, for the fire that flashed from his dark eyes was in his voice, kindling the words of his mouth to a new aliveness. And yet Owain, listening to the familiar prayers, murmuring the familiar responses with Priscus and Priscilla, could not make them mean anything at all. The ground all round the cross and the priest’s cell was hummocky, for the dead lay buried there, but there were few stones, and the little grey hill sheep cropped the rough grass to the very walls of the cell; and Owain heard their cropping and the deep contented drone of bees among the opening bell heather more clearly than prayer or psalm or litany; and remembered it longer.

  But when the man began to preach, then it was a different matter. The preachers of the Cymru were mostly gifted with silver tongues, but it seemed that this man’s tongue was of flame. But indeed, Owain found that it was not a sermon he was listening to at all, but an exhortation, a cry that seemed to be for him personally, as for every soul gathered there. ‘Brothers, the Light goes out and the Dark flows in. It is for us to keep some Lamp burning until the time that we can give it back to light the world once more; the Lamp, not of our Faith alone, but of all those beauties of the spirit that are kindled from our Faith, the Lamps of the love of wisdom in men’s hearts and the freedom of men’s minds, of all that we mean when we claim that we are civilized men and women and not barbarians.’

  That was the message as Owain received it; it might have come differently to the hill shepherd, differently again to Priscilla.

  And listening to him, to the blazing urgency that could only have flamed up from the need of the immediate moment, and never been planned beforehand, the boy thought, ‘This man has heard something—some news that has only just come.’ And he thought, too, that the other people round him knew what it was. In a short while the service was over; the people turned to each other, no longer a congregation, but a gathering of friends and foes and neighbours, and suddenly the priest was close beside them with his hand on Priscus’s arm, saying, ‘You came late today, my dears; have you heard the news?’

  Priscus shook his head, his round face anxious at once. ‘What news is that, then, Little Father?’

  ‘None that we were not expecting,’ said the priest, ‘and quite stale by now, I suppose, but none the less dark for that, if it be true. They say that Glevum is in Ceawlin’s hands, and Corinium and Aquae Sulis have gone up in flames. The Barbarians are over all the country round Sabrina Head.’ His brilliant gaze sought out Owain, standing a little behind the other two. ‘That is maybe news that strikes nearer to you than to the rest of us, my son; for the word that runs through the hills at any stranger’s coming among us, tells that you were at the last great battle, by Aquae Sulis.’

  ‘I and the dog here,’ Owain said. ‘It was the first fight for both of us.’

  And Dog, hearing his name, flung up his head and nosed happily at the boy’s arm.

  ‘So.’ The priest’s gaze dropped to the great hound, and lifted again to Owain’s face. ‘Kneel down, my son.’

  Owain knelt, and felt the light touch of the man’s hand on his bowed head; the other was on Dog’s; and Dog, who never showed affection to anyone save his Master, nosed up under it and licked the man’s wrist. ‘O Lord,’ said the rough beautiful voice above him, ‘here are a boy and a dog who have fought Thy fight according to the best that was in them. Therefore let Thy blessing be upon them, and Thy courage bear them up, and spread over them the mercy of Thy wings.’

  The three of them walked home in silence; not one word exchanged between them until they came up between the midden and the cow byre to the house-place door. But on the threshold Priscus checked, and stood a moment looking away down the valley. ‘It would
be useless, of course—perfectly useless; I dare say I’d be no better skilled with a weapon than with a plough. I’m not very good at anything save making pots, but I could find it in my heart, just now, to wish that I was young again and had a sword.’

  ‘You were the best potter in all Glevum territory,’ said his wife bracingly. ‘I’ll say it to your face as I’ve said it behind your back, and one skill should be enough for any man. Stop blocking up the doorway now, and let me get at the stew pot if you want any supper tonight.’

  The stew, when it was ready, was a good one, but none of them seemed hungry, and silence had descended on them again. Owain, chewing his way through his bowlful without tasting it, stared into the fire. The weeks that he had spent here in the shelter of Priscilla’s kindness had had a kind of battered peace about them, like the lull in a storm; and the outside world, even his father’s death, had seemed a long way off. But now it had all come rushing back to him again, and the lull was over. He knew that even if he stayed here, the lull would still be over … He wiped the last drops of soup from the bottom of his bowl with a piece of barley crust, chewed and swallowed slowly and deliberately, and set the bowl aside. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘I must be away. I have stayed too long.’

  Priscilla was collecting the bowls, which presently she would take down to the spring for scouring, and she pushed them together with a clatter. ‘That is foolishness; you can scarcely walk as far as the village yet.’

  ‘I can, you know I can; I—must go.’

  There was a little silence, Priscilla looking at him tight-lipped. Then Priscus gently cleared his throat. ‘I think, my dove, that ill fitting though the moment seems, you had best speak now to the boy of—the matter that we discussed a few days since.’

  Priscilla’s mouth tightened still further. ‘You speak to him; it is for the head of the house.’

  ‘Doubtless, my dove; also it is a task for a woman. I shall go and scratch the pigs’ backs,’ said Priscus, and got quietly to his feet and ambled out, Branwen trotting on her short legs behind him.

  For a few moments Priscilla glared after him with the look of a woman who would dearly like to shake someone until his teeth flew out of his head; then she gave a small exasperated sigh, and turned back to the hearth. Owain could scarcely see her face now, for on these summer evenings the house-place became unbearable if one kept the fire up once the cooking was over, and candles were for special occasions. He waited for what she wanted to say to him, not wondering very much what it was, because his thoughts were turned towards setting out again tomorrow.

  She said: ‘We have never questioned you about yourself in all this while. It seemed both to my old Priscus and to me that if we waited, maybe one day you would tell us of your own choosing. But now it seems that there is no time left.’

  Owain looked up quickly. ‘I am sorry. I will answer anything you like. What did you want to know, Priscilla?’

  ‘That ring you wear round your neck—I hung it on a new thong for you while you were ill; did you notice? Was it perhaps your father’s ring?’

  Owain nodded.

  ‘Were you with your father in that last battle?’

  ‘With my father and my brother,’ Owain said, scratching the scar on his arm as he had got into the habit of doing, and staring into the embers of the sinking fire.

  ‘Don’t do that, you’ll make it sore,’ said Priscilla. ‘They were killed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You have—’ Her voice, softer than he had ever heard it before, hesitated a moment in a way that was not like her. ‘You have a mother to go back to? She will have been thinking you dead with the other two, all this while, poor woman.’

  ‘My mother died when I was small,’ Owain said, levelly. ‘I should not even know what she looked like, but my father made an outline in charcoal once of her head shadow on the colonnade wall, and kept it safe with a bronze grill over it. She had a very little neck and a lot of hair piled up high.’

  Priscilla had taken up her distaff loaded with lichen-dyed wool, and when she spoke again, her words sounded against the soft background thrumming of the spindle. ‘There’s good land down the valley foot, and Priscus would have enclosed some of it before this, if he had had a son to work it with him. We would have liked a son, he and I, but the Lord never sent us any child at all, and there’s no profit in questioning His ways. But the good land at the valley foot is still there, and there’s a son’s place empty by the hearth. If you have no one to go back to, you might do worse than bide here.’

  Owain jerked up his head and stared at her. If the suggestion had come in a year’s time, he might even have considered it—at least to come back to, by and by—but his father’s death was still too near, so that the bare idea seemed like disloyalty. He shook his head. ‘I might do very much worse, I know that, Priscilla. You have been kind to me—so kind all this while—but I must go on to Viroconium. If any of our men came through the battle and gather again, they will gather there. There’s our own farm, too. I must see if anything is left of it. But first I must go to Viroconium.’

  ‘If any gathered to Viroconium, they will have gathered and gone again before this; you have lain sick a long time.’

  ‘Maybe the people of the city will be able to tell me where they are gone, so that I can follow.’

  Priscilla teased out a few more strands of wool. ‘There will be—there will have been no gathering to Viroconium or anywhere else, you know that. Here in the Western Hills we may remain free, but for the rest of Britain, the thing is finished and the lights are out. What can you do against the Saxon hordes?’

  ‘Even Priscus wished that he was young again and had a sword.’

  ‘Priscus is a fool.’

  ‘So am I. I have no sword, but at least I am young. I must go, Priscilla.’

  Silence hung between them, filled only with the thrum of the spindle. Then Priscilla broke it with a snort. ‘A child you are, and a fool you are, and so you must go,’ and was silent again so long that he thought she was angry. At last, quite suddenly, she laid aside spindle and distaff, and let her big hands drop into her lap. ‘There’s no more to be said. Go then, in the morning. But remember always that so long as my old Priscus and I are here, there’s a place here for you, if you need it.’

  ‘I will remember,’ Owain said. ‘And maybe I will come back one day, and maybe not. But either way, I will always remember.’

  4

  Shadow on the Wall

  NEXT morning, so early that the hillside was still in shadow, Owain set out again for Viroconium.

  Priscilla had given him food and the household’s spare strike-a-light, and a good thick cloak, and Priscus had added three horse-hair snares and a good long hunting knife with a well-worn alderwood handle; and he had tried to thank them and failed completely, and whistled Dog to heel and come away. Now, as the rough hill track turned him over to the road that he had missed so long ago, he wished that he had kissed Priscilla at parting, because he thought that she would have liked it.

  But already the past weeks were growing thin and distant to him. There were plenty of other things to fill his mind. In two days he struck the great double-track frontier road, and followed it northward, keeping it in sight, but not too closely, for there was no knowing how far west the Saxons might have thrust. Dog trotted at his heel or loped on wolf-like far ahead, looking round from time to time to make sure that he was coming. It was late summer now, turning to autumn, and there were no more birds’ eggs, but he had the barley-bannocks and strong ewe-milk cheese that Priscilla had given him, and when that was gone, he had his knife and his hound and his snares, and his strike-a-light to make a fire; and they lived on the country, hunting and foraging as they went.

  For the same reason as he avoided the road, Owain kept clear of any place where men might be—and indeed the countryside seemed almost as empty of human life as the forests and marshes south of Glevum had been; and so in all that long trail north, he never heard of the S
axons, nor how things went with the rest of Britain.

  He travelled slowly, as a man must who hunts as he goes, and it was many days later when the road that he had been following along the east side of a great moorland ridge brought him out into rolling wooded lowlands, and he saw ahead of him, so far off that it seemed to have been moulded from thickened blue air, the familiar wave-lift of the Virocon, which he had seen as long as he could remember from the open end of the courtyard at home.

  That night he came down closer to the road, and found the place where Kyndylan’s war-host had encamped on their first night out. The blackened scars of their fires were still to be seen under the encroaching brambles, and he slept there with their ghosts for company, and at first light was on the road again.

  The last day of his journey started bright, with puffs of white cloud sailing across a harebell sky. But as the day went on the cloud thickened, and when at last he came in sight of Viroconium, it was raining and the Virocon rising beyond the white walls of the town seemed to have turned inwards on itself and sit brooding darkly on ancient sorrows, in its fleece of wet woods; while the Sabrina curling southward into its gorge was grey as a sword-blade, sullen and without light.

  Owain crossed the river by the paved ford, and squelched on up the last stretch of the road, his shoulders hunched and his chin driven down into the wet folds of his cloak.

  The gravestones, which were always the first things one met outside a town, were each side of the road now. They were dark with rain, and the first fallen yellow leaves of the poplar trees lay wet against their feet. He passed the turf banks of the Amphitheatre, and then the double arch of the South Gate was before him, with the road leading through. There were no guards at the Gate. The walls looked much as usual save for a reddish stain spreading up one bastion that might have been the scar of fire; but as Owain, his chin still tucked down and the weary hound at his heels, trudged in through the archway and his padding footsteps turned hollow in the enclosed space, they sounded like footsteps in a house that is empty and hearth-cold.