“Speak it, then.”
He stood with his feet apart, staring into my face, stubborn as one of his own mules. “My Lord Artos, I know something of these things, for my grandmother came from the Hollow Hills. They are not wont to lie alone, my people — my grandmother’s people. If you lay her as you have ordered, she will grow lonely, and in her loneliness she may walk. Women who die as she died are given to walking, anyway; and she will be angry, not only with those who killed her, but with us, who cast her out. But if you bury her here in the midst of the camp, she will be quiet with life going on about her and the warmth of the cooking fires overhead. Her anger will be all for those who killed her, and she will bring us luck and help us to hold the Place of Three Hills.”
Young Brys Son of Bradman protested furiously. “My Lord, do not listen to him, he will let her loose in our very midst!” And another added his word. “I’ve no wish to sleep at nights with that under my pillow!” And the refrain was taken up by others, while the mule driver stood his ground, still staring into my face, and behind him, the men who had thrust him forward muttered among themselves.
Cei demanded in his deep grumble, “Are you going to give ear to a bunch of mule drivers, rather than to your own Companions?”
“We shall still need mule drivers,” I said. And then suddenly I had the answer: not perfect, but the best that I was likely to find.
Only a few paces from where we stood, there was a deep broad pit, probably once a supplementary grain store, for mildewed shreds of the hides with which it had been lined still clung to its sides and to the remains of the timbers that had once closed it in. It could never be used again, and I had given orders that the dead horses were to be tipped into it and covered over for tonight with whatever came to hand of clods and debris and old thatch. That would be a lighter task than to drag the carcasses outside and far enough from the camp. There had not been time yet for the order to be carried out, though the first of the carcasses had been dragged close in readiness; and horses were creatures of the Sun, sacred among the Sun people once, while nine has ever been a number of Power.
“Lay her in the old grain pit before the horses go in,” I said. “Thrice three horses above her should make all safe, without keeping off the warmth of the cooking fires.” And before anyone had time to raise further objections: “Go, someone, and bring a couple of baggage ropes,” for I had no wish to tumble her into her grave as one flings a dead cat on a garbage pile; and while someone went to do my bidding and the rest stood by, few I think, even of her own kind, overeager to touch her, I flung off my old weather-stained cloak, and spread it on the ground, and lifted the poor broken body onto it. She weighed no more than a child, and some of the suppleness of life was still in her, so that I was able to lay her decently, and not in the crumpled attitude in which we had found her. Bedwyr knelt beside me, helping me to draw the dark folds close. “Cover her face,” he said; and then, “I’ll carry her.”
But she seemed in some way to be my charge. I shook my head, and got up with the small close-wrapped body in my arms, and went outside with her to where the mouth of the old grain pit gaped darkly in the torchlight. Half the camp had come thronging around by that time, but there was no sound save a low muttering as here and there men looked at each other or at the burden I carried, and made the Sign of the Horns. In the end we did not need the baggage ropes after all, for Gault and Levin, making a jest of it, but a gentle jest, sprang down into the pit themselves, and one standing on the other’s shoulders (they were much given to fooling together like a pair of acrobats) took the girl from me, and dropping clear as his friend crouched down, laid her kindly on the rough earth. We flung down fresh bracken to cover her, and the two warriors carefully wedged above her the beams that we passed down to them, so that they might keep the main weight of the horses off her. Then Levin climbed again onto his friend’s shoulders, and caught the edge of the hole and scrambled out, ignoring the hands reached to his aid, and turned about to help Gault out after him. But the depth was too great. Straining, they could just touch fingertips, but could not get a grip on each other’s hands. For the instant I saw them looking at each other, half laughing, one up from the pit that had become a grave, the other down into it, straining to reach each other. Then somebody tossed down the end of a knotted baggage rope and Gault swarmed up easily enough, and was standing among us again, panting a little.
The thing was over, and most of the weary fighting men were drifting away, while those that remained were stripping the dead horses of their gear before they went into the pit. I turned away to go and make sure that the whole baggage train had been got safely in, and find out the state of the wells. It was as I had expected; they had fallen in. There was water far down in one of them, enough for the wounded, anyway; the rest of us must do without water until the time came for taking the horses down to the river in the morning.
Morning was not so very far off, by that time, and a quiet was falling over the old red sandstone fort; dark shapes of sleeping men huddled in every corner, who stirred and cursed without moving if one fell over them; and the wind was lulling into soft fitful gusts with long exhausted stillnesses between, when I passed the old grain pit again. The last of the horses had been toppled into it, and the pit covered over with clods and half-charred thatch until tomorrow when it could be filled in properly. As I came toward it I saw that Bedwyr was ahead of me. I suppose he had checked in passing on some errand of his own. His little harp was in his hands, but I had not heard the notes of it until the moment before I saw him. He was playing very softly, fault plucked notes at long intervals, and the fitful wind was blowing the other way. He turned his head toward me (but I could not see his face for the nearest watch fire was sulking low), and went on playing, a note, and then a pause as though he listened for the next note before playing it, and then another note, spun so far apart that one could not carry the thing in one’s head as any kind of tune, only as single moments of beauty that tore at one’s heart, strung on those long dark silences of the dying wind.
“What is it?” I asked, when it seemed that the wind and the darkness had closed for good over the last note, and cursed myself for breaking the circle of perfection.
He struck another note with his thumbnail. “What does it sound like?”
“A lament — but I think not for the horses.”
“Na. Another time I will make a lament for the horses; a fine lament, set with words to the harp song, swift and shining like the wind under the sun, for the Nine Steeds of Artos, and men shall sing it around their watch fires for a thousand years. This is only a small lament for a small matter, the merest spray of blackthorn blossom crushed under heel; and see” — he struck a final descending ripple of three notes and reached for the harp bag that hung over his shoulder — “it is finished.”
Even as he spoke, I felt rather than saw his gaze go past me. He caught his breath in a snatch instantly stilled. “Look behind you, Artos my Brother. Were nine horses not enough after all?”
But I had already swung around. The fire, as a dying fire will, had leapt up as though in greeting; and on the fringe of the firelight something moved, then came forward into the full gold of the flames; a girl, a woman, though she was no taller than a fourteen-year-old child, with straight dark hair falling loose on either side of her narrow face, and huge eyes set long and slantwise in it. She was not naked as the other had been, but clad in a piece of some dark stuff — green and blue checker it was, when I saw it by the light of day, but in the firelight it looked almost black — flung across one shoulder and wrapped about her with a strap to hold it at the waist. Behind her came seven young men not much taller than herself and of the same dark, narrow make, naked save for kilts about their loins of the same dark plaid as hers or of otter or wildcat skin, and each carrying a light spear and a small bow and quiver. In the first moment of their stepping forward into the firelight, they made a strange and not easily forgotten picture, and a gasp ran through the men about me. Cei began to pray under his breath. But oddly enough it never even touched my mind that the girl was a ghost, though indeed she was white enough for one; and my first thought was to curse the men of the guard for sleeping on watch. But that was before I knew the pure-blooded People of the Hills as I came to know them later. When I did, I never again was hard on a sentry who let the Dark Ones slip through, for they move like shadows on the grass.