There was a moment’s silence after I had sworn, and then a tempest-roar of acclamation and a drumming of spear butts on shield, such as even that night I had not heard before. But I was so tired that it boomed and roared hollow in my ears as the sea in a cavern, and when I would have stumbled down from my high place, they had pulled up the circle of swords, and from all sides the chiefs and princes and the captains were thrusting in to kneel and set their hands over my battle-fouled feet. Connory the son of old Kinmarcus, Vortiporus of Dyfed, big wild Maelgwn my kinsman who held the reins of Arfon for me and had brought my own war bands down from the hills; young Constantine, dark and blazing as his father had used to be, but burning, I thought, with a steadier flame. In cold blood he might have been my enemy in this, but caught up with the rest, he swore his faith to me with the rest, and I knew that he would keep it. And among the others came Medraut my son. He cast himself down before me with the grace of a woman or a wildcat, and made the solid, ritual gesture of faith-taking into a thing as airy and delicate as though he played with a feather. Yet there was a filthy rag bound around his sword wrist, and the blood that clotted it was as red as any other man’s, and the face he turned up to mine gray-weary, the face of a man who had spent all his fires. His eyes were without expression, not blank, but veiled over their secrets more closely than I had ever seen them before, so that one could see nothing but the blue color and the surface light reflected from the dying torches. “I fought well for you today, did I not, my father?”
“You fought well today, Medraut my son,” I said, stooping to take his hands and raise him up, and so felt him shaking again. Dear God! Why must he always shake like a nervous horse? And once again the old sense of doom was upon me, a floating down of dark wings, because of the thing I could not see behind my son’s eyes.
In the first gray light of a morning that had turned wild and squally, we returned to Badon, and heard the trumpets sounding from the green ramparts for watch setting. And those who were in the forts cheered us in through the soft rain, but we were far too spent to make a gallant entry.
The Saxon wounded had been dispatched in the usual way, and our own carried up to the hill fort and housed in the wattle huts that normally served the garrison; and cooking fires were bright in the rain under their ragged shelters of wet skins. Men came thronging around me, spoke to me, looked at me with alerted and oddly lengthened gaze, and dazed and dragged as I was with the aftermath of the day and night, I scarce thought to wonder why. . . .
Presently there would be many things to see to. Perdius came with a report of sorts, Marius hard behind him, almost before I was dismounted. I listened, a little drunkenly, while they told of Aelle of the South Seax dead among his house carls, and no sign of Oisc among the bodies, nor of Cerdic. (“Maybe his own men carried him away,” I said. I could have sworn that my blade had found the life.) While they reported on the numbers of dead and wounded both in men and horses; while around us the camp clamored with demands for news, and the news itself shouted from man to man.
I listened, and asked further details of this thing and that, the present placing of troops, the supply situation. . . . And then at last, as Signus was led away, I was free to ask, not Caesar’s questions, but one question of my own. “Bedwyr — what of my old Bedwyr?”
Someone pointed up toward the wattle barrack huts. “Up there, my lord. They have taken the wounded up there.”
For a moment I felt stupid with relief. “Not dead, then?”
“It would take more than a smashed elbow to kill that one,” somebody said. But their tone toward me was subtly changed, and they stood a little farther off, and when I turned to make my way up to the barrack huts, I heard the burst of low eager voices behind me, and felt eyes following me as I went.
The scout Noni, who came running to me before I had gone a dozen paces, was the first person to look at me with unchanged eyes since I entered the fortress; but the eyes of the Dark People seldom betray much, and his mind was full of other things. “My lord, it is the great hound — him you call Cabal.”
I stopped in my tracks. I had accepted in my heart that the old hound was dead. “What of Cabal?”
“I have him under one of the wagons. It was in my belly to hope that I might save him for you, but the hurt is too sore.” He laid a narrow brown hand on my wrist; it is very seldom that the men of the Dark People or their near kin will touch a Sun man (it is different, with a woman); but I think he must have hoped very greatly to be able to come to me with the word that he had saved me my dog. “Come now, and do what must be done.” .
I turned aside toward the wagon park, Noni moving like a shadow beside me.
The disemboweling knife had done its work too well, but Cabal knew me and tried to thump his tail, though clearly the whole hinder part of him was as good as dead, and as I knelt down beside him and touched his great savage head, he even began a whisper of the old deep throat-song that had always been his way of showing his contentment in my company. I did what had to be done with my dagger and got up quickly to go, but checked a moment to look back at the small dark brooding figure of Noni Heron’s Feather. “Who brought him up here?”
“He crawled some of the way himself — Aiee! He was a hero! The throat of the man he slew was torn clean out — and the rest of the way we carried him, one of the drivers and I.”
I thanked him, and again checked on the edge of going my way, because he still seemed to be waiting for something. “What is it, Noni Heron’s Feather?”
“Are you not going to take his heart?” He spoke with a hint of reproach. “He fought well for you; it was a great heart — worthy even of an emperor.”
I shook my head. “That is not the way of the Sun People. We believe that to each man and each hound his own courage.”
But I remembered Irach, as I went on toward the barrack huts.
The camp women were moving to and fro among them, and there was an all-pervading smell of pungent salves and torn humanity mingled with the acrid smoke of the horse-dung fires where the great water crocks were boiling, and once or twice, passing a doorway, I heard a man curse or cry out in pain. In the doorway of one bothy, I found Gwalchmai with a couple of the men he had trained to help him, laving his hands in a pail of reddened water. His face was blotchy and leaden with weariness, but he too looked at me with a suddenly arrested eye. “We laid him in your own quarters when the barrack huts grew overfull,” he said in answer to my question, beginning to dry his hands on a piece of rag.
“Is he —” I began, and changed the end of the sentence. “How bad is the wound?”
“Much as an arrow through the elbow joint usually is,” Gwalchmai said. “I have cut out the barb, and the wound itself will not kill him, unless he takes the wound fever. But —”
He hesitated an instant, and I heard myself speaking the last word after him. “But?”
“He has bled almost white — the arrow severed an artery.”
I remember noticing the little red streaks in Gwalchmai’s eyes, the eyes of a man who needs sleep and knows that he will not get it for a long while yet. I said, “Has he any chance at all?”
Gwalchmai made a small expressive gesture with his hands. “If he still has the life in him three days from now, I believe that he will live.”
I found Bedwyr lying flat under the old otter-skin rug on my bed place, surprisingly flat, not like a grown man at all, but like a young boy, or a woman who has given birth. His left arm, swathed in bloody rags and laid across his body, seemed a thing that did not belong to him at all, and his fantastic face, when I squatted down beside him, had the whiteness of something long since drained of life, fine-lined and skeletal, empty shell and sea-scoured bone, so that for a long moment not so much of grief as of a curious stillness, I thought that he was already dead.