I wheeled Arian and we set off again for the stone-walled corral at the head of the valley, passing as we went the furze-roofed shelters for the mares at foaling time, and coming to the corral gate we tethered the mounts to a thornbush and Cei and Flavian and I settled down to wait, while Amlodd went off with the other two to help drive the horses.
The black stallion had been watching us ever since we came down to the edge of his domain, not uneasy, but wary on behalf of his mares; he snorted and tossed his head, his mane flying up in a dark cloud, and came up at the trot, in a wide unhurried circle to come between us and them.
“The Black One takes good care of his own,” Flavian said.
Old Hunno called out to him softly and unintelligibly as he trotted by on his shaggy pony, and the great horse ruckled down his nose in greeting. Bedwyr had been right about that one.
Hunno and his little troop trotted on, dwindling small into the distance, casting about the lower end of the valley, half out of sight among the furze and thorn scrub that dipped toward the marshes. And presently we saw the whole valley moving toward us. We heard the shouting of the drivers, and a few moments later the soft smother of unshod horses on the grass. They came up at a trot, long-drawn-out like a great skein of flighting duck, the herdsmen on their little rough ponies shepherding them on the flanks; and for a moment I was snatched back to a spring day in Nant Ffrancon, eight years ago. They were being herded in through the opening with shouts and cries, the wild-eyed mares with their colts still running at heel, the yearlings and the rough-coated two-year-olds who would be for that winter’s breaking; awkward, scary, curious as to the meaning of this thing. And among them still, a little gray in the muzzle now but still mighty, on guard over his own, the Black One. I saw Amlodd riding with the herdsmen, flushed under his freckles and bright-eyed as a girl in love; and after the hurdles had been set up at the wide entrance, he dropped from his horse’s back and came to me with the bridle looped over his arm, laughing and breathless. “Oh my Lord Artos — sir — I should have made a good herdsman if I were not your armor-bearer!”
“By the time that you are captain of the third squadron,” said Flavian, naming his own rank and speaking from experience, “you’ll have served often enough as both, I promise you.” And he tossed the knot of bright hawthorn berries that he had been playing with, into the hand that the boy flung out to catch it, and turned to the trampling mass of horses.
I went first to the Black One, who in the way of his kind had drawn out from the rest to stand a little to one side, where he could have all things under his eye. He stood with his head alertly up to watch our coming, swishing his tail behind him, but no more uneasy than he had been at first, because of the familiar figure in the old sheepskin hat who walked with me.
“If you had been Bedwyr the Harper,” Old Hunno said, “he would have come to you.”
“I wonder — does a horse remember so well from year’s end to year’s end?”
“He doesn’t forget the man that won and mastered him,” Hunno grunted. “No more than a woman forgets the man that had her virginity — it’s the same thing in a way.”
I gave him a lick of salt, which he took with aloof deliberation, accepting with it the fact that I was not an enemy; and having made that clear to him, I turned in with Flavian and Cei to see my fill of the mares and their young. We moved in and out among them, pausing to look at this one and that, examining, judging, feeling latent strength and responsiveness in slim haunches and supple neck, while Hunno forced up a head with back-laid ears or slapped aside a woolly rump to make way for us in the press. And afterward, those that seemed to me the finest were brought out to us separately, mare and foal, yearling and two-year-old, colt and filly. In all of them the same thing was apparent, the increase of height, the added weight of bone.
“God is good,” said Cei, who was a religious man after his own fashion.
Finally I beckoned Hunno over again. “The chestnut mare over there, with the white foal — bring them out to me.”
I had been noticing that mare and foal ever since they were driven up to the corral, or rather, I had been noticing the foal, but had kept him until the last, childishly enough, lest the rest of the day, coming after, should seem a lesser thing.
Hunno cut them out from the herd and brought them to me, and I had a feeling, seeing his grin, that he also had been saving this foal for the last, hoping that I would not call for him before. I set about gaining the dam’s confidence first, fondling her neck and making small love talk into her twitching ear (for with the mother’s confidence the foal’s would come the more easily), before I turned my attention to the young one. He was a rawboned stallion foal, much younger than most of his kind; indeed, I judged him to have been born at summer’s end or early autumn, as sometimes happens when a mare comes late into season or remains horsey after her proper time. He was not white as yet, but gray as a signet, yet any who had encountered such a foal before could see that by the third year he would be white as a swan. An uncommon color nowadays; but they used to say that there was Libyan blood in most of the Roman cavalry mounts, and there were many white horses of that breed, and he must have been a throwback in color through his mother to some cavalry horse of the Eagles. One could sense the promise in him already, as he stood beside his mother, uncertain of himself, torn between his desire for the reassurance of the milk that he had almost outgrown, and his curiosity as to these men he had never seen before. The fire of his mother’s race was in him, and the power and steadiness of his sire’s. He was only a very little afraid of me, especially when he saw that his mother was content to let my hand rest on her neck. Among my own hills, the foals that run wild on the mountain grasslands and are rounded up only twice a year come wild as hawks to the breaker’s hand; but those that are born of tamed mothers in the home runs, we are accustomed to handle from the day of their birth, and these “gentled” foals are always the more easily broken when the time comes. So the smoky foal was used to men’s hands on him. He was a little shy of me, because my hand was a stranger’s, but my palm to lick — there must have been the taste of salt on it still — soon won him over, and he allowed me to gentle the harsh furry tuft where his crest would be, and draw a finger down his nose to the soft muzzle, caressing him, feeling the promise of him, the small half-shy response under my hand. I knew all at once and with complete certainty that here was my war-horse of a future day when staunch old Arian should come to honorable retirement. I always rode a white horse in battle; it is not that I find them better than horses of another color, but that a white horse marks out the leader clearly for his men to follow; it also marks him clearly for the enemy, but that is a thing that there is no help for. Besides, it is not to the Saxons alone that the White Horse is sacred, else why should men, before even the Legions came, have cut a white Dragon Horse half a hillside high in the chalk above the vale that runs to the very heart of the land? It is fitting that a white horse and no other color should lead the war hosts of Britain into battle. . . .