I turned to look at Bedwyr beside me, remembering what had passed between us a few nights ago. “No, Bedwyr, I do not love the Saxons.”
Our little dark guide, who in the first moments had seemed more frozen than any of us, made the first move. He began to go from one to another of the bodies. He checked beside that of an oldish man with amber phis in his hair, who had been run through the belly, and stooping, drew the long slender knife from his belt.
I said quickly, “Irach, what are you going to do?”
And he looked up at me with the air of someone explaining a thing, simply, to a child, his knife point already at the still breast. “I do the thing that must be done. I eat my father’s courage, that it may not be lost.”
“Your father? Then this place —”
“This was my home, and my people,” he said, and cut deeply and gently into the breast over the heart.
I looked away. My mouth was dry and my stomach crawled within me. I heard him say crooningly, “It is warm — it is still a little warm; that is good, my father,” and was aware of a dark shadow that flitted away into the heather, with something in his hands.
No one moved for a long moment. Then someone said, “My God! The little savage!” and somebody else made the Sign of the Horns quickly, to avert evil, for it was not wise to speak so of the Dark People in their own place. I swung around on my armor-bearer and bade him go and bring up some of the others. He was greenish white, and in the act of hurrying to do my bidding, crouched suddenly and vomited, then went on again.
By the time he returned with the others, we had begun to topple the poor mutilated bodies into the smoke-hazed pits that had been their homes. I laid the sheep dog myself at his old master’s feet, for the sake of Cabal, whom I would lief have had in like case to lie at mine. We piled over them everything that was loose or movable; charred beams, half-burned thatch, even the peats from the stack; anything that might serve to keep off the wolves and the scavenging mountain hare. Irach’s father we left until the last, and he was still unburied when the little hunter came back and set to work quietly beside us. Some of the Companions drew away from him in a kind of horror, and here and there men echoed the Sign of the Horns. But he had only done as the custom of his people demanded, and the act had been performed in love. When the last body had been covered over, he drew the mourning lines on his cheeks and forehead with spittle and gray ash, and scratched his breast and arms with the point of his dagger until they bled, and then turned to us with a great and gentle pride, like a host on his threshold. “It is in my heart that the Saxon Wolves will have left little behind, but all and anything that remains here is yours, and you are most welcome.”
But indeed the stouter-stomached among us had already begun hunting through the ruins in search of anything the Saxons had overlooked. There were few of us, I think, who would have cared to rout through a village of the Little Dark People in the ordinary way; but it was as though the Saxons had laid all open to the sky and the wind, and left behind nothing but the piteous wreck of human life; and maybe those of us who hunted through the ruins of Irach’s village that day lost forever the sharpest edge of the fear that the people of the sunshine must always feel for the people of the dark.
The few beer pots were empty, and the grain pits had been emptied of the little barley that would have been left in them at this time of year, all save one that they must have overlooked in their desperate haste. The gram inside it was poor wizened stuff, but better than nothing. We scooped it into the grainskins across the backs of the pack ponies; the men and women who had grown and harvested it would not be hungry for its lack, and it would help us to avenge them. We cut more meat from the carcasses of the cattle on which the flies were already beginning to settle as the smoke grew thinner. Then there was no more to do. Myself, I cut the three branches of hawthorn and laid them across where the gateway had been, and sprinkled them with salt and a little of the wine that we carried with us for the cleansing of wounds.
Then we came away, some with a great silence upon us, some cursing, some harshly merry; and left the place under its haze of still faintly rising smoke. Our guide, with the death cuts on his arms and breast still bleeding, rode beside me on his shaggy pony; and as he rode, he made a little dark moaning mouth-music that sounded as though it had been wandering like a homeless wind before ever the hills first reared toward the stars, and made the hair creep on the back of my neck.
Next day, through the gap between two tawny breasts of the hills, we caught our first glimpse of the wide blue lands that ran to Eburacum. And so at last we struggled down out of the mountains that were the roof ridge of Britain, into lowland country again. Our pace was slowing by that time. We knew it, and pushed on without mercy for ourselves or the horses. If we could fling ourselves between Eburacum and the Saxon remnant, if we could even come at them before they had had time to complete their defense, it would mean one sharp and bloody battle, and an end; once they were secure behind walls, there must follow all the long-drawn heart-rotting business of a siege; and with the North already smoldering ready to flare into flame at any moment, we could not, God knew that we could not, spare the time for a siege.
But as we left the highlands and came down into the dale country that lay green with woods under the gray and russet of the fells, a thing began to happen that acted on us like a draught of rye spirit on a man far spent. Out of nowhere, as it seemed, out of the hidden villages and the dark dale forests, men began to gather to the Red Dragon. The Brigantes had always been a wild proud lot; they had never fallen fully into Roman ways, but the Saxon yoke, it seemed, was still more unendurable; and as news of our march swept through the heather, so they came, one or two well-to-do landowners whose farms so far had escaped the Sea Wolves, each carrying Roman weapons in good condition and with a small band of household and farm servants behind them; escaped thralls scarred with their shackles, warriors still free, with the woad-stained war shields that their tribe had carried against the Legions in the far-off days. They joined us on the march and fell in, loping among our foot, or on their fiery little ponies; during the brief night halts they came to our campfire, proud as stags and with the light of battle already in their eyes, saying simply and directly as men speak in the wild places, “My Lord Artos, I am Guern, or Talore, or Cunofarinus son of Rathmail. I come with you in this thing.”
Toward evening of the last day’s march but one, we came upon a small burned-out farm with the fire still glowing dully under the charred thatch and gray ash, and everywhere about the place, the traces of a great company having been there. Irach ran about sniffing houndwise into all things, then came back to me, rubbing his hands on his wolfskin kilt. “Not half a day since they passed this way. Here they gathered themselves into one host again. Let my Lord the Bear make haste.”
I called up Bedwyr and Cei, and told them. “We shall push on with all speed while the daylight lasts; after dark we halt for an hour to eat and water the horses and let them roll. Then we shall push on again through the night, and we shall leave the foot to follow as swiftly as they may. The last lap of the race grows hot, my heroes!”
And so, save for that one break, we pushed forward through the darkness without halt, pressing the weary horses on across the softly rolling countryside, following again the metaled road; and next noon, almost within sight of Eburacum, we came up with the Saxon rear guard.