“A good hunting,” I said, when he came up.
“A good hunting.”
“Any sign of Huil?”
“None so far, but they have only just begun to go through the dead and wounded. There’s a good few of them.”
“What of our own losses?” (It might have been Eburacum over again, but after most battles there are much the same questions to be asked.)
“So far as we can tell as yet, not heavy. I lost several men getting in from the north rampart, but most of the wolf pack was faced to your blazing gate; yet it is in my mind that that charge of yours through the flames seemed more like a lightning flash than a thing that one could strike back at.” And then he said, “We’ve lost nine horses; that I do know.”
And the last of the fog lifted from my brain. (I think, looking back, that I must have taken a bang on the head without knowing it, for that kind of heaviness after battle was not usual with me.)
I looked at Bedwyr, scarcely noticing even when Arian muzzled at my shoulder. It was a worse loss than that of the same number of men; but there was no help for it, no help even in cursing. “Well, we have our winter quarters — though they stand somewhat in need of scrubbing out,” I said. Amlodd came to take Arian from me, and I handed the old horse over, and then turned to the multitude of tasks and decisions, the general clearing up, that always wait for every commander after the fighting’s over.
Gwalchmai as usual was serenely at work among our own wounded, gathered into a roofless barrack row; I heard a man cry out in pain, and his quiet voice in command and reassurance as I passed the tumble-down doorway.
Some of our men were throwing the Saxon dead and wounded alike over the ramparts at the spot where the escarpment fell almost sheer to the river; but not before they held a torch to each dead face to make sure that it was not Huil Son of Caw. Our own dead were being gathered and laid aside for burial in the long grave that their comrades were digging for them among the bushes where the ground was soft. I had made it a rule, years ago, that however hard and hot the day had been, however spent our bodies or sick our heads, however near the enemy and however little time remained to dawn, no dead body should be left unburied within the camp overnight. I do not know how it is; maybe evil spirits gather to bodies left lying so; but that way comes pestilence. I have seen it happen before, especially in summer weather. There would be no attack on Trimontium for a while and a while, and save for a few pickets, we could take the sleep we needed tomorrow.
The searchers found more than one Saxon chieftain, and a huge Pict with the blue spirals of his race tattooed from brow to ankle, and the gold collar of a noble, lying among the dead under the blood-dabbled horsetail standard where the last stand had been made. But when the last of the enemy slain had been dealt with, there was still no sign of any man who could be Huil Son of Caw.
“It is as well to have something saved for another day,” said Cei, who had discovered a store of Saxon beer jars in one of the old store barns and was inclined to take a cheerful view. “Sir, will you give the order for an issue of beer all around? I’m thinking the lads could do with it.”
For Cei was ever one to share good fortune.
“Well enough,” I said. “Get in a couple of the captains and half a dozen of the Company to see to it.”
But there was more than beer jars in that barn. A short while later, one of the Companions came to me in a hurry where I was standing with Bedwyr to see the baggage train brought in. “Sir, my Lord Artos, we have found a girl’s body over there among the beer jars. Will you come and look?” He was a veteran of many fights, hardened in the fire, I should have said, as any one of my Companions, but from the color of his face, I thought for a moment that he was going to spew.
I CURSED inwardly as I turned to go with him. It was Eburacum all over again. I seemed fated always to find myself with the body of a woman to dispose of when the fighting was done. But this was no golden witch in a crimson gown.
The men had been working by the light of a pine-knot torch, and so there was light enough to see what lay at their feet, when they moved back with an odd hush on them to let me through.
More than light enough.
A young woman, hardly more than a girl, lay there among the beer jars, in the ugly, contorted attitude in which she had been flung down and kicked aside. She was no taller than a girl of fourteen or fifteen would be among our own folk, but she was of the Little Dark People, and among them a grown woman is no taller than that. I thought, looking at her upturned face among the tangled masses of black hair, that she had once been very good to look upon, in the narrow, fine-boned way of her people; but she was not good to look upon now, though her skin was still honey soft between the bruises and clawings of the brutal handling she had received, and her contorted limbs slim and fine. She was stark naked, and from the stains upon her she had been raped not once but again and again. The man who held the torch moved his arm, and as the light shifted I looked again into the girl’s battered face. I had thought the look on it was one of torment and unutterable horror, but now I saw that beneath these things there was something else; a look of escape. She had possessed, this girl of the Old Race, the power which some birds and animals possess, when the outrage of living mounts beyond a certain point, of making the final withdrawal into the refuge of death where no tormentor can follow.
Cei was cursing in a sustained flow, his blue eyes blazing with a rage such as I had never seen in them before. “May their souls rot in Hell! By Christ! If I had the man here I’d unman him with my naked hands, and tear his living heart out afterward!”
“You’d need to unman a good few, I’m thinking — and maybe you’d need help,” said Bedwyr’s voice just behind me, still and cool as deep water by contrast with the hot rage of the other’s.
One of the men looked to me. “What are we to do with her, sir?”
I hesitated. If she had been one of our own kind she could have gone into the same long grave as our battle dead. But she was of the Old Race, the Little Dark Ones. Many of our own scouts and camp followers had something of that blood in them (I have sometimes thought that there was a strain of it in the Royal House of Arfon itself, for Ambrosius, though taller, was narrow-boned and dark as the Fairy kind), and our own people worked alongside them contentedly enough, especially since Irach; though many a time I have seen one of my own Companions make the Sign of the Horns before sharing food from the same dish with one of them. But I knew that if I ordered the girl’s body to be laid with our own dead, I should have trouble with my men, for fear that the nearness of the Fairy’s dead might harm our own in some way.
“Scoop her out a grave to herself somewhere among the bushes,” I said.
There was a sudden movement, a many-voiced murmur of dissent behind me, and swinging around I saw that a crowd had gathered, peering over each other’s shoulders at the small outraged body in the torchlight. One of the mule drivers came thrusting his way through, or was thrust by those behind him; a small dark hairy man with prick ears like a faun’s. “My Lord Artos, there is another word as to that.”