He roared like a gale of wind when he saw me (a great voice he had for so small a man), and came to fling his arm around my shoulders as far up as he could reach. “Sa sa sa, my Bear Cub! It is sun and moon to my eyes to see you after this long while!”
“And trumpets in my heart to hear you again, Kinmarcus my Lord!”
He boomed with laughter. “The youngster brought me your word, that you were here in Deva and would come to speak with me; but I was for hunting in this direction, and so I but carried the trail a little farther, and here I am — with the fruits of my hunting for a guest-gift.”
“A fine gift! We shall feast like heroes tonight!”
He stood with his little legs straddled, and stared about him at my men and his own as they hauled away the carcasses for jointing, his bright masterful gaze disposing of them all in one sweep. “And meantime, while the feast is cooking, is there somewhere in this buzzing hornets’ nest where a man can talk with a chance of hearing his own voice without everyone else hearing it too?”
“Come up onto the ramparts. We keep a lookout over each of the gates, but no pacing sentries between. We can talk in peace up there.”
But when we had climbed the steps to the southwest corner of the rampart walk, he did not at once begin to talk of whatever it was that had brought him (for I was sure that, friends as we were, this was no mere friendly visit), but leaned beside me on the coping, looking away toward the mountains. The storms of the last few days had rained and blown themselves out; it was a day of broken light and drifting cloud shadow; and Yr Widdfa and his bodyguard of lesser heights stood clear, dark-bloomed with drifting shadows against the tumbled sky. It seemed to me, looking in the same direction, that the light wind that siffled across the ramparts brought with it the smell of the high snows, and the chill heart-catching scent of leaf mold the mossy north sides of trees that was the breath of the woods below Dynas Pharaon where I was bred. And then, as so often happened when I turned toward my own mountains, it seemed that the whisper of peat smoke was on the same wind, and the aromatic sweetness of a woman’s hair. I wondered whether I had a son among those blue-shadowed glens and hidden valleys; a son seven years old, and trained in hate since first he sucked in the venom with his mother’s milk. . . . No, I did not wonder; I knew. One can feel hate at a distance, as one can feel love. . . . I caught back the scent of the woods below Dynas Pharaon, and clung to it in spirit as a man clings to a talisman in a dark place.
I suppose I shivered, for Kinmarcus beside me laughed and said, “What is it? A gray goose flying over your grave?”
“Only a cloud over the sun.”
He glanced at me aside; it was a stupid thing to have said, for there was no cloud over the sun just then; but he did not press the thing further. “And now, let you tell me what has passed this autumn.”
So it was to be my turn first. I told him. There was little enough to tell and the story was soon done.
“And so you are come back here to Deva, to lick your wounds, and make your winter quarters.”
“Yes,” I said.
“And what as to supplies?”
“That was among my chief reasons for choosing Deva; the grazing ground for the horses, the Môn barley for us. I sent Bedwyr my lieutenant with the baggage carts and a small escort off to Arfon this morning, to get what he can. I’d have given them a few days’ longer rest, but with winter upon us, I daren’t. We can only pray to God, as it is, that they will get the gram through in time — and that the harvest has been good in Môn.”
“And meanwhile?”
“Meanwhile, we ‘live on the country.’ I’ve paid your folk what I can. I can’t pay the fair price for our keep, there’s not enough in the war kist, there never is; and what there is goes mostly to the horse dealers and the armorers.”
“And to Arfon for corn?”
I shook my head. “That counts as tribute from my people. Some will come actually from my own estates. I am of the breed of the Lords of Arfon, as your chieftain here put it. They will let me have the corn. . . . For the rest, there’s always the hunting — the stored grain in the granary and the boar in the woods; that is the way the outposts used to live in the old days, isn’t it?”
Silence fell between us for a while, and then at last Kinmarcus said, “What thing was it that you would have come to the Dun to speak with me about?”
I turned a little, leaning one-elbowed on the coping, to look at him. “I want men.”
He smiled, that swift fierce smile that leapt into his face and out again, leaving it grave. “It is in my heart that you can gather men to you with little help from any princeling, my friend.”
“Given a free hand, yes.”
“In Lindum, the hand was not free?”
“Free enough, while the men were needed only to clear the Sea Wolves from within their own frontiers. I must have men to follow me out of the Deva hunting runs without let or hindrance from their Prince, and across the mountains to Eburacum in the spring.”
“Your hand is free,” he said. “Set up your standard, and the young men will come like June bugs to a lantern. Only leave a few to defend our own women and our own hearth places.”
“The Scots raiders?”
“The Scots raiders, and others. Maybe the Saxon wind blows across the mountains.” He shifted abruptly, before I could ask his meaning, head up into the wind that lifted back his fallow-streaked mane of hair. “What after Eburacum?”
“It is not only Eburacum, though Eburacum is the heart of it. It is the whole eastern end of the Brigantes country. After that we go wherever the sorest need calls us; southeast into the Iceni territory in all likelihood. The Saxons call all that part for their own North-folk and Southfolk, already.”
Kinmarcus said abruptly, “And yet I believe that if you are wise, you will take the way north, beyond the Wall, and that without overmuch delay.”
I looked at him quietly, aware that this at last was what he had come to say. “What is the reading of that riddle, my Lord Kinmarcus?”
And he returned my look, eye into eye. “I also have a thing to speak of and a tale to tell,” he said. “It is so that I did not wait your coming, but hunted toward Deva. If the signs and portents do not lie, by next midsummer the heather will be ablaze through half the lowlands of Caledonia; by harvest, the fire will have leapt the Wall.”
“Another riddle to answer the first. What does it mean?”
“There has been unrest in southern Caledonia for a year and more. We have felt it stirring, we who hold the princedoms of the North. Even so far down from the Wall as this, we have felt it, but the thing was formless, like a little wind on a summer’s day that blows all ways at once through the long grass. Now the thing has taken form and we know from whence the wind blows. The Saxons have called in the Painted People to their aid, promising them a share of the fat pickings when Britain goes down; and the Painted People have sent out the Cran Tara, even overseas into Hibernia, summoning the Scots, and made common cause with certain of the British chieftains who think they see the chance to break free of all bonds and stand proud and alone — the fools, hastening to set their necks under the Saxon’s heel.“
“Earl Hengest’s heel?” There was a small shock of cold in me.
“I think not. Possibly Octa has a hand in it, but it is more likely in my mind that the thing lies with the true Saxons of the north coast. Oh aye, with us the one name serves for all, but Hengest is a Jute, remember, and the Sea Wolves have not yet learned to combine.” His voice dropped to a brooding note. “If they learn before we do, then that is the end of Britain.”