“How do you know all this?” I said, after a pause.
“By a mere trick of chance, or as some might say, by the Grace of God. Not many days since, a currach bound for the Caledonian coast was driven off course by a northwesterly wind and came ashore on ours. The men on board were an embassy of some kind, for they carried no weapons save their dirks, though they were of the warrior kind, and among the wreckage there were green branches such as men carry on an embassy for a sign of peace, and nowhere any sign of the whitened war shields. Only one man came alive out of the wreckage, and he had been broken senseless across the rocks. The men who drew him to land would have finished him then and there, as one finishes a wounded viper, but he cried out something about the Painted People and the Saxon kind. That was enough to make the man with the dagger hold his hand. They carried him up to the fisher huts in the hope that there might be more to be got from him — and sent word to me.”
“Torture?” I said. I am not squeamish where the Scots or the Saxons are concerned, but I have never liked the business, needful though it be at times, of roasting a man over a slow fire or slipping a dagger point under his fingernails to come at the thing he has to tell. It is not pity, but merely that I feel too sharply the skin parch and blister, the dagger point shrieking under my own nails.
“In the state he was in, if we had tried torture then, he would have found his escape by dying under our hands; so we let him bide for a few days, in hope that he might regain strength a little, and in the end there was no need. The fever took him. It was a talking fever, and he talked for a day and a night before he died.”
“You are sure that his story was not the mere raving of delirium?”
“I have seen many men die in my time; I know the difference between the raving of delirium and a man crying out in fever the secrets on his heart. . . . Besides, when one comes to think of it, the story is a likely one, isn’t it?”
“Horribly likely. If it be true, pray God they cannot get the fire blazing before we have had time to deal with Hengest in Eburacum. That must come first — it is in my mind that next year is likely to be something of a race against time.”
That night we did indeed feast like heroes, and afterward made merry, though we missed Bedwyr and his harp. And next morning after we had made certain plans and exchanged certain promises between us, Kinmarcus rode off with his companions, the little wild-eyed mare dancing under him like a bean on a bake stone.
The day that followed was a good day; one of those days that do not greatly matter in the pattern of things, but linger, comely-shaped and clear-colored in the memory when the days of splendor and disaster have become confused. I had had no time until then to spare for anything farther afield than the in-pastures where some of our mounts were already out at grass. But that morning, after Kinmarcus was away, I sent for Arian, who was rested by that time, and with Cei and Flavian and young Amlodd, rode out to look at the horse runs.
Winter, which had seemed almost upon us, had drawn back a little, and the day had the softness of early autumn; a light west wind soughing across the gently undulating levels, the sun veiled by a silver haze, and the shriveled brown leaves drifting from the long belts of oak coppice shaped askew by the Atlantic gales, that crested many of the faint lifts of land. Here and there, little dark cattle turned to stare at us with slowly moving jaws as we rode by — fewer than there would have been last month, before the autumn slaughtering — or a knot of ponies would scatter and canter a bowshot away, then turn to stare also, tossing their rough heads and snorting. Near the villages men were at the late autumn plowing followed by a wheeling and crying cloud of gulls, and the smell of moist freshly turned earth was a thing to shake the heart. A few miles from Deva we came to the huddle of turf bothies among hay and bracken and bean stacks, where the herdsmen lived; and were told by a small man with a squint to make one cross one’s fingers and the bowlegs of one born on horseback, that Hunno was out with the herd. So we headed for the long shallow valley of our own training runs.
In Arfon our breeding runs were enclosed for the most part with dry-stone walling, for loose stone is plentiful among the hills; here, too, there was some stone, but it was less easily come by, and in some places, taking advantage of scrub and coppice there already, the dry-stone gave place to hedges of roughly steeped thorn, while at the lower end, which was marshy, the valley was closed by a dike and turf wall.
We met old Hunno on a small rough-coated pony, with a stripling whom I did not know riding another behind him, jogging up from the marsh end of the valley. Clearly he had been making his daily round of the boundaries. He looked exactly as he had done when I saw him last, exactly as he had done since I first remembered him; the wide lipless mouth, the little bright eyes peering out from the shadow of the enormous sheepskin hat he always wore — 1 could swear it was the same hat, too. “Heard you was back in Deva.” He greeted me as though we had last met maybe a week ago. And then, faintly accusing, “I been expecting you any time these last three days.”
“I could not come before,” I said. “Too much else to see to. How does it go, Hunno old wolf?”
He gestured with a hand like a knotted furze root. “How does it look?”
But I had no need to follow his pointing finger. I had been looking, all the way down from the head of the valley, joying in the sight of young horses grazing by the stream, war-horses in the making, as a miser joys in the gleam of gold trickling through his fingers. “It looks well enough from here,” I said. We had never dealt in superlatives together, but we smiled, eye into eye.
“Come and take a look at closer quarters.” He jerked his chin toward the water, and we rode on together. Amlodd my young armor-bearer, who was a friendly soul, had dropped behind to join the unknown stripling, and Hunno and Flavian, Cei and I rode ahead in a bunch. Many stallions had sprung from those five Septimanian sires, three-, four-, and even a few five-year-olds; and one look at the big-boned youngsters who scattered at our coming and then turned back in curiosity was enough to tell me that the plan was working out. Not all of them were as tall or as heavy in build as their sires, but all stood at least two hands higher than our native breed.
“All broken?” I asked.
“All rough-broken. A few of the three-year-olds are not finished yet. It’s none too easy to get enough men for the task, not what I’d call skilled men, not in these fat Lowlands.” Hunno spat with great accuracy into the silky head of a seeding marsh thistle, in token of his opinion of the Lowland horsemen.
“You’ll have enough breakers this year, at all events.”
By the time that we had seen all we wished to see in the training runs, and Hunno had signaled finish to the lads whom he had called up to put the best of the young stallions through their paces, the autumn day was drawing on. And as we went up over the brow of the ridge heading for the one breeding run that we had in the Lowlands, Hunno said, “Best come up to the corral, and we’ll drive the rest for you. If you try riding the whole valley, ’twill be dusk before we’re half done, and you’ll likely miss the best of the colts.”
I nodded; we were in Hunno’s hands, and this was his kingdom, and on the crest of the ridge, among the wind-shaped thorns that grew there, reined in and sat looking down the gentle slope seaward, toward the breeding run maybe half a bowshot away. The valley before us was better sheltered than the one we had left, with thick low oak woods on the seaward side, a good place for its purpose; and at the upper end of it, among his quietly grazing mares and their foals, I could see the dark masterful shape of the stallion. The long sweep of the valley was only lightly enclosed, for there were few wolves in those parts, and if any of the little native stallions who ran free on the marshes should attempt to break into the mares, the lord of the herd would deal with him; while, with a stallion contented among his own thirty or forty mares, there was far less risk of a breakout than among the unmated youngsters in the training runs.