Morgana waited for the first shocked hubbub to die down, then sent her sons with Medraut to begin packing for the journey home, and quietly took aside the young runner who'd brought the news. She poured a cup of wine for him with her own hands and guided him to a bench near the fire, gesturing for servants to bring hot food. The lad gulped almost convulsively at the wine, with a stark look in his eyes that Brenna McEgan had seen all too often, in the eyes of survivors after a bomb blast or a spray of bullets or a bottle of flaming petrol had set a block of flats alight. Both she and Morgana waited patiently for the lad to calm himself, to recover his strength and his wind, waited for him to begin eating the thick venison stew in his steaming bowl. At length, Morgana spoke, very gently. "When you are able, lad, I must know what you've seen."
He jerked a frightened gaze up to meet hers. "Isn't seemly t'tell a lady such things," he said, voice cracking with distress.
"I understand your concern. But I am a sovereign queen, Morgana of Galwyddel and Ynys Manaw, and my lands and people are also threatened. I must know the scope and depth of what our Saxon adversary is willing to inflict, before I can make decisions on how best to protect my people."
The boy thought for a moment, tears battling a hardened, old man's anger in his eyes, then he nodded. " 'Tis vile, Queen Morgana. They left alive not even one downy yellow chick in the farmyards. Burnt the fields and forests for miles, it was, and left the dead hacked into pieces. Men, women, infants in their cradles. 'Twas unnatural savage, what they did, and to every living thing that came in their way. I'd gone to the marshes to cut withies for me mother, when they came. Burnt the house and killed her and all my sisters, and me with nothing but a three-inch knife on me belt."
Tears welled up, impatiently knuckled aside. "I wanted to kill them, and would have tried, but if they were killing everyone the way they killed me mother and sisters, there would've been no one left to sound the alarm at Caerleul. So I lay in the mud with the marsh grass all round me 'til they'd gone, and ran from Long Meg to Penrith, to reach the Roman road, and everywhere I ran, there was nothing left alive save the crows." He hesitated, then asked in a voice breaking with youth and stress, "Did I do wrong, to lie in the grasses while me own family lay dying?"
Morgana smoothed the boy's lank, sweat-soaked hair back from his brow and placed a gentle kiss there. "No, lad. Hundreds of others may well be saved, because you hid in the grass to warn Caerleul. Thousands, perhaps, for once the cataphracti of the northern kingdoms begin the hunt, Cutha will be forced to fly ahead of our chargers, without taking the time to butcher every Briton whose path crosses his. 'Tis certain, God guided you to the wisest course, there in the marsh, and sent you with wings on your feet to speed the warning. Finish your stew, then, and I'll have a servant show you where to wash and sleep tonight. Were your father's people freeholders?"
The boy nodded.
" 'Tis good, then. I'll ask King Meirchion to look after you properly. If ever you need or want a place to start again, remember my name and come to Caer-Birrenswark at Galwyddel. I'll see that you receive a fine freehold."
The tears spilled over as the boy's eyes lost at least some of the starkness which had aged him so traumatically. "I'm that grateful, I am."
"And so am I." Morgana left him to finish his meal and found Queen Thaney, who was busy organizing an army of servants to help the kings and queens of Britain make haste for departure. Morgana passed along her request that the boy's courage and quick wits be rewarded suitably. Her stepdaughter's eyes misted. "Of course we'll take care of the lad, Morgana. Thank you for letting me know."
"I'll be riding for Caer-Birrenswark as soon as the horses can be saddled."
Thaney gave her a swift embrace and Morgana kissed the younger woman's cheek, then left her to her work. It was the task of only a few moments to ready her own things, find Medraut and her sons busy stuffing clothing into leather satchels, and arrange for her retainers, who rode as armed escort everywhere Morgana traveled, to prepare for the journey north. As she was looking for a servant to help carry their baggage out to the stable for tying to the packhorses, the minstrel Lailoken brushed past, murmuring, "Half an hour's ride north along the road to Caer-Gretna?"
She nodded, moving on without speaking.
When someone behind her began whistling a shockingly familiar tune, Brenna whipped around, startling Morgana with the force of her reaction. She peered into the throng of men and women jammed in the hall, unable to see who had been whistling that particular song.
What is it? Morgana wanted to know, understandably perplexed at having her body hijacked in so public a fashion.
Realizing that she might well have given herself away by her own reaction, Brenna turned quickly and headed for the door, fighting hard to disguise her distress. That particular song was engraved in her memory, sung each July during the Orangemen's parades, commemorating a battle in the bloody seventeenth century. Bloody, indeed, as Irish Catholics had been slaughtered like pigs, hunted down in the fields for sport by the conquering English Protestants, with bounties offered on Irish heads, the same hideous sort of bounty the huntsmen collected for bringing in wolf pelts...
More than four hundred years of gloating later, the Orangemen still celebrated their victory in their "marching season" with parades through Catholic neighborhoods—parades received with much the same welcome as American Ku Klux Klan marches were received in the Jewish neighborhoods they swaggered through, exercising their right to free speech and assembly to rub salt in the wounds of their favorite victims. Every marching season, violence erupted between hotheaded Catholics who refused to take it any longer and hotheaded Protestants who had not yet tired of dishing it out.
No, Brenna McEgan was not likely to forget that song.
Morgana, realizing the full horror of Brenna's associations with Cedric Banning's favorite tune, not only sent her a great wave of sympathy, she also stopped the next servant she spotted, asking softly, "Can you tell me, has anyone been singing this tune?" She hummed the melodic line in a near whisper, to keep the sound from carrying to anyone else's ears.
The woman gave her a curious stare, then nodded. "Oh, aye, that they have, Queen Morgana, all the minstrels have been singing it of late. It is a catching little tune, isn't it? I've caught meself many a day now, humming it while I work. It does make the day go a bit faster."
"Yes, I can see that it would. I was just curious, since I hadn't heard it before this week. I'd like my minstrels at Caer-Birrenswark to learn it. Thank you, I'll ask Rheged's court musicians about it."
One of the minstrels...
Lailoken himself?
'Tis possible, Morgana mused, but with so many visitors in Caerleul, who can guess where the tune was first heard and from whom? Minstrels have a quick ear for such things and it does have a way of sticking in the mind.
It certainly does, Brenna agreed darkly.
Morgana pursed her lips in thought. Would your mad Banning have needed a host somewhere close to Caer-Iudeu, as I was for your arrival?