But my hand dropped away from the sword hilt. “No,” I said. “No.”
“Why not?”
I groaned. “Because I am a fool.” I blundered past her, thrusting her aside so that she stumbled to her knees, and sprang for the door as though all the fiends of darkness were behind me. Cabal, who had roused and come to crouch against my legs, snarling and shaking his head in a way that I remembered afterward, leapt past me into the milky daylight. The steading was already astir. I heard the milch cows lowing, and the thornbush had been pulled aside from the gate gap. I plunged out through it, and behind me heard the woman laughing, a wild, wailing laughter that followed me long after I had ceased to hear it with the hearing of my body.
The mist was thinning fast, growing ragged and fitful, sometimes smoking around me as thick as ever, at others lifting to show half a hillside of sodden bilberry and last year’s heather. At the foot of the valley my feet found a track that crossed the stream and headed in the direction I needed, and I turned along it, splashing thigh-deep through the ford. Presently the distance cleared, and Yr Widdfa frowned down on me from the north, with mist still scarfing its lower glens. I knew where I was now, and turned aside into the steep hazel woods that flanked the lesser heights.
Once I stopped to vomit; but I had not eaten that morning, and though I seemed to be retching my heart up, nothing came but a little sour slime. I spat it into the heather, and went on. Cabal ate grass in an urgent and indiscriminate way very different from his usual careful choosing, and was sick also, throwing up all that was in him with the ease of a dog. It would have been the drugged sweetmeat she gave him last night. I have wondered, in after years, why she did not poison him and be done with it, especially since she must have seen that I loved the dog. But I suppose her hatred was so focused on me that she had none to spare. Maybe she even feared to lessen its power by dissipating it.
A long while after noon, I struck the hill track from Dynas Pharaon, and came dropping over the last hill shoulder into the head of Nant Ffrancon. Among the first birch and rowan trees I checked, and stood looking down. The valley lay outstretched below me, sheltered under the dark hills. I saw the greenness of it freckled with the grazing horse herds, smoke rising from the clustered bothies in the alder-fringed loop of the stream. It was all as it had been yesterday, when I turned here to look back; and the sight steadied me with its message that whatever happened to a man or a thousand men, life went on. Something in me deep down below the light of reason had been dreading to find the valley blasted and sickness already rife among the horse herds. But that was foolishness; I was not the High King that my doing should bring evil on the land. The doom was for myself alone, and I knew already that it was sure. However unknowingly, I had sinned the Ancient Sin, the Great Sin from which there is no escaping. I had sown a seed, and I knew that the tree which sprang from it would bear the death apple. The taste of vomit was in my very soul, and a shadow lay between me and the sun.
Cabal, who had been waiting beside me with the patience of his kind until I should be ready to go on again, suddenly pricked his ears and looked away down the track. A moment he stood alert, his muzzle raised into the little wind that came up from Nant Ffrancon; then he flung up his head and gave a single bell-deep bay. From below among the birch woods was a boy’s voice calling, long-drawn and joyful. “Artos! My Lord Arto-os!”
I cupped my hands about my mouth and called back. “Aiee! I am here!” and with Cabal leaping ahead of me, I went on downhill.
Below me two figures came into view where the track rounded the shoulder of the birch-clad outcrop, and stood looking up; and I saw that they were Hunno and young Flavian. The old horse master flung up an arm in greeting, and Flavian, outstripping him, came springing eager as a young hound up the track to meet me. “Sa sa! It is good to see you safe! We thought that you might be somewhere on this track.” He was shouting as he came within word range. “Did you find shelter for the night? Did you —” He reached me and I suppose saw my face, and his voice stammered and fell away. We looked at each other in silence while old Hunno climbed toward us; and then he said, “Sir — what is it? Are you hurt?”
I shook my head. “No, I — I am well enough. I have dreamed evil dreams in the night, that is all.”
I CAME down from Arfon, having settled with Hunno all things as to the new grazing grounds, and gathered the few fourteen and fifteen hand mares that I could find among my own horses. Having gathered also the best part of a score of tribesmen to swell the number of the Companions — fiery youngsters with small idea of obeying orders, but maybe I and the men they would be serving with could hammer that lesson into them; and they were as brave as boars and rode like the Wild Hunt itself.
We descended upon Venta to find that Ambrosius had ridden westward to inspect the Aquae Sulis end of the old frontier defenses, and I snatched with a sense of reprievement the delay in coming face to face with him again. There were plenty of other men that I must face and drink with as though the world was still as it had been when I rode for Arfon earlier in the spring. It was hard to believe that it was still the same spring, but I had had time by now to raise a shield of sorts, and I made a good enough showing. I think that Aquila, my father in arms and horse management, guessed that something was amiss, but he was a man with the ancient scar of a Saxon thrall ring on his neck, and too deep and painful reserves of his own, ever to poke into another man’s hidden places. At all events, he asked no questions save about the horses, and I was grateful. But indeed I had small leisure for brooding, in the few days that I remained in Venta. There were arrangements to be made for the horses, my score of tribesmen to be divided among the squadrons of the Companions, under the captains best able to handle them. Arrangements also for the Companions themselves in my absence; the question of the Septimanians’ purchase gold to be dealt with. Ambrosius had already given me Ms promised share in weighed gold arm-rings — coinage meant nothing, nowadays — but what I had been able to scrape together from my own lands and even my personal gear took many forms from iron and copper currency rings to a silver brittle bit set with coral, and a fine red and white bullskin and a pair of matched wolfhounds. And the better part of one day I spent with Ephraim the Jew in the Street of the Golden Grasshopper, changing all these things, save for the hounds, into weighed gold, and haggling like a market crone over the price. Even at the end, I remember, he tried to leave his thumb in the scales, but when I pricked it up with the point of my dagger, he smiled the soft smile of his people, and held both hands up to show me that the measure was fair, and we parted without malice.
The hounds were bought by Aquila. I do not think that he could afford them, for he had nothing but his pay from the war chest, and a wife to keep on it, even now that Flavian had become my affair. Save for his horses the only thing of value that he possessed was the flamed emerald signet ring engraved with its dolphin badge, which had come to him from his father and would one day go to his son; and there was generally a patch somewhere about him. But I would have done the same for him in a like need.
All the multitude of nameless preparations to be made for a long journey were made at last and with nineteen of the Company, I set out from Venta. So many would eat badly into our gold, but I did not see how we were to do with less, especially if we were to get the stallions overland to Armorica and so avoid the long sea voyage. The gold we carried sewn into the wadding of the thick riding pads, and wore above our elbows only an arm ring each for immediate use.