“My Lord Artos, we have taken council together and we have decided. These behind me will serve you truly in the second of the ways you offer. They have bonds of their own that cannot be broken; two of them have wives and bairns — but we three, Finnen and Corfil here, and myself, Brys Son of Bradman, we have no bond to hold us, therefore we bind yours upon us gladly. If you will have us for your Companions, then we are yours under the Red Dragon, without thought of sitting at our old hearths again.”
And another asked, “Is there an oath to swear? Whatever it is, we will swear it.”
“You have sworn oath enough,” I said.
And so the first of the gathering that Kinmarcus had foretold was well begun, the gathering that was to continue through all the dark months ahead until, when spring returned, I found myself with a goodly war host at my back.
WE had all but given up hope of Bedwyr’s return, when at last he appeared with the grain carts and the escort, looming out of a snowstorm that drove sideways in mealy drifts before a black wind from the northeast. Men and horses alike were near to the point where they drop and do not rise again; but behind him the light baggage carts were piled high with grainskins or covered with roped-down tent cloths. “It is a thing that has its uses, to be a prince in Arfon,” he said when we brought him and his fellows into the mess hall. “Even one born under a hawthorn bush,” and he staggered down beside the fire and sat there, his head hanging, while the snow thawed on his eyelashes. I think he was not more than half conscious. “They say — the harvest was good in Môn. There will be a few more cartloads in the spring, if the roads are open early enough.”
Somebody brought him a cup of heather beer, and he drank it off, and a little color came back into his ashen face. When I left him to oversee the storing of the grain, he had unslung the doeskin harp bag from his shoulders, and taken out his beloved harp, and begun to finger the white-bronze strings, making sure that no harm had come to it from the cold.
That winter we had no time to go out of condition, no time for the dullness of spirit that sometimes comes over a winter camp and must be guarded against as one tries to guard against fever and the flux. We had oats and barley in the granary now, but it had to be ground, and since if we wanted to eat meat we must get it for ourselves, some of us were always on the hunting trail. It was as I had said to Kinmarcus, we lived as the outposts had done in the old days, the corn in the granary and the boar in the woods; only with us it was mostly red deer and sometimes wolf — wolfmeat is none so bad eating, if one is hungry enough. There was much work needed about the camp, too, for the old fortress had been little but a ruin when we rode in.
There were the cavalry horses to be tended also; daily weapon practice lest the eye grow slow and the sword arm stiff; armor and gear to be reviewed, and new men and horses broken in. And on Sundays the priest who had helped Gwalchmai with the wounded on that first night of all came up from the city to preach God’s Word on the weed-grown parade ground. Most of us gathered to these services, though I think that among the ranks who stood bareheaded in the cold to listen, and afterward turned man to man with the kiss of peace, there were some who made their own prayers to Mithras or even Nuada of the Silver Hand and the remote and misty gods of their own hills. The kindly little priest would have been saddened if I had told him that, but it has never seemed to me to matter very greatly. I have always been a follower of the Christos, because it has seemed to me that the Christian faith is the strongest and best fitted to carry the light forward into the darkness that lies ahead. But I have prayed to too many different gods in my time, to set any very great store by the names that men cry out to for aid, or the form of prayers they use.
The months wore on and the months wore on, and there came no further news out of the north, by the ways that were closed by snow and mire and storm waters. But though there was no more news, I heard much, that winter, concerning Caledonia, all the same.
From Daglaef the Merchant, I heard it. He came jogging into Deva by the road from the Wall, only the day before Bedwyr and the grain carts returned from Arfon, riding a good horse and followed by a string of four pack mules with their drivers, and two couple of white-breasted Caledonian boarhounds running in leash behind him.
By and by word drifted up to the fortress that one Daglaef the Merchant had returned to his own place for the winter, after a whole summer spent, as he had spent summers before, trading in Caledonia. A great thing it is, to be one of the merchant kind, who can pass safe and welcome where a war host could scarce win through, I made haste to inquire of Lucianus, he who was chieftain or chief magistrate, as to the man’s trustworthiness, and Lucianus’s report on him being good (“I have never yet got anything cheap from Daglaef, but on the other hand I’ve never bought a pot from him that cracked the first time spice wine was poured into it, nor a cloak in which the colors ran, nor a hound that turned out to be not the one I paid for”), I sent to Daglaef himself, bidding him to sup with me.
He came, a square-built, sandy-gray man with a small bright eye that seemed always cocked for a bargain, wrapped in a mantle of magnificently dressed badger skins; and when supper was over and we drew to the brazier, began proceedings by trying to sell me a dagger of Eastern workmanship, with the ivory hilt carved into the likeness of a naked woman.
“Na,” I said, “I have already a dagger that feels familiar to my hand. It was not for your wares that I called you here.”
“For what, then? Assuredly not for the honor of my company, my Lord the Count of Britain?” He grinned at me, slipping back his mantle in the warmth, and began to play with the string of silver and coral beads at his throat, in the way that I came to know later was a habit with him.
“For your knowledge of what lies beyond the Wall.”
“That is easily summed up — hills and heather, and northward among the forests of Mannan, a people who speak a dark tongue and can seldom be trusted to keep a bargain.”
“And fire smoldering among the heather,” I said.
He ceased to finger the bright beads. “So you know of that.”
“Something of that — and I would know more. I would know also the shape of the land and the run of the roads beyond the Wall.”
“I am a merchant, and frontiers and tongues and peoples are not for me as they are for other men. Are you so sure, then, that I shall tell you the truth?”
“Lucianus says he never had a cloak from you in which the colors ran, nor a hunting dog that turned out to be not the one he paid for.”
“So.” Daglaef cocked an eyebrow at me with cheerful effrontery. “But I am very sure he told you also that he never had anything cheap from me — let alone free.”
I took a gold currency bracelet — I could ill spare it — from my wrist, and tossed it to him. “I am prepared to pay, so that the hunting dog proves to be the one I paid for.”
He laughed, tossing the bracelet between his hands, then abruptly stowed it away beneath his mantle, and thrusting aside the strewn fern with his foot, pulled a bit of half-charred stick from the fire. “The land and the roads first, then. . . .”
It was late, when at last we were done with my questions and his answers, and with his badger-skin robe already swathed about him to depart, he tried again to sell me the dagger with the hilt like a naked woman. I bought it as a gift for Cei.