I shook off his hand. “I must.”
“She has laid her spell on you! Don’t you understand what she is? If you go with her you’re risking your soul!”
I had thought of that, too. “I do not think so; but in any case, I must go.”
“At least let me come with you,” Bedwyr said, standing with my sword and dagger in his hands.
I shook my head, but I think I felt less steadfast than I seemed. “This is a thing for one man alone. . . . I am ready.”
We went out through the narrow northern gate, leaving a hushed camp behind us; the girl moving ahead and I following. The young warriors, silent as they had come, insubstantial now as shadows, as though they had lost all reality when the firelight ceased to touch them, moved behind me and on either hand. From the foot of the fortress wall the hillside dropped almost sheer to the river, thinly covered with broom bushes, hazel and bramble scrub. “This way,” said the girl. “Come,” and dropped from sight almost as though over a cliff. I followed, and found my feet on a faint path, half lost, narrow and precipitous as a wild-sheep track, that swooped down through the scrub.
“Come,” said the girl again; and the shadow-warriors fell back into single file behind me, as we started down. It seemed to me that we followed many paths that night, the thin faint trails made by the deer and the Dark People before ever the Legions drove their roads north. We crossed the road once, and running water at least twice — not the Tweed, but little swift hill streams coming down to join it. It seemed a very long way, but I realized afterward that the girl had led me by ways as twisting and mazy as the dance of a marsh light, and maybe my own weariness made it seem farther still, for I had ridden far and fought hard since last I snatched an hour’s sleep. And dawn was spreading up the shining wind-tumbled heights of the sky, when at last we came up by some small patches of oats and barley, over a last shoulder and the open moor, into a shallow upland hollow where three small lost valleys came together.
A little below us, toward the far side of the hollow, where I suppose there was some shelter from the wind, I saw what looked in the first moment like a cluster of small bush-grown barrows — I had seen such a barrow torn open once in my boyhood, when a stream had burst its banks in sudden spate and changed course; and in the heart of it there was the skeleton of a man crouched on his side as a child lies in the womb, and a bronze dagger and an amber necklace. But almost in the same instant as I checked, looking down in the growing light, I saw the pale blur of peat reek rising from among the bushes.
“This is my home,” said the girl, looking back over her shoulder. “I am sorry the way has seemed so long.”
And we dropped into the hollow where the newly roused little dun cattle lifted their heads to stamp and stare at us as we passed, forded the stream under its stunted moss-grown elder trees, and followed the path that led to the village or steading. Heather washed to the very foot of the turf wall that fenced it around, and even when we passed within, and the small prick-eared hounds came out yawning their pleasure at their lords’ return, the dwarfed bushes and briers that grew on the humped turf roofs still gave the place the air of a thicket. The girl made for the largest bothy, which stood, a mere turf hummock with a stunted whitethorn springing above its door hole, in the midst of the others. She ducked into the darkness under the roughly carved lintel beam, and I, following, had to crouch almost onto all fours to make my own way through the hole which was more like the mouth of an animal’s lair than a houseplace doorway. The fetid smell that came out of the gloom was animal, too, the same foxy smell that clung about the girl herself, and the thick peat reek caught at my throat and for the moment blinded me, so that if the girl had not cried out a warning, I must have plunged headlong down the four uneven steps within. As it was, I groped and stumbled my way down them awkwardly enough, and found even when I had reached the foot, that I could not stand upright under the willow spears that upheld the roof.
The young warriors and their dogs entered behind me, and with their coming the place grew very full. My sight had begun to clear, and blinking, I saw the folk who were huddled there already; a couple of graybeards and three or four youngish women, and a tumble of dogs and children about the newly awakened central fire. The warriors who had returned last seemed to be all the young men that there were in the place, and I wondered if they were indeed brothers, or if the girl had used the term simply as we of the Company sometimes spoke of ourselves as a brotherhood. I never came completely to understand the relationships of the Dark People, maybe because they do not marry as we do, but seem to hold the women in common.
The girl had gone straight to a white-haired old woman who sat or rather squatted on a low stool beside the fire; a creature obscenely fat, thick-haunched and bag-throated and panting, like an immense toad; and flinging herself on the ground before her, burst into a quick torrent of words in her own tongue. I could understand nothing of it, but I knew that she was telling the old woman of all that had passed at the fort; and the huddled men and women in the big bothy listened to her and watched me. I was increasingly aware of their eyes watching me, seeing, as it were, without giving anything of themselves in return; while the girl and the old woman spoke together, question and answer, question and answer, in that quick dark tongue that reminded me of the patter of thunder rain on broad leaves. The young women against the walls had begun to rock themselves to and fro, wailing softly in the beginning of ritual grief. The place grew stifling so that there seemed no air to breathe, only the peat reek and the stench of fox.
At last the old woman looked up, shaking the cobweb hair back over her shoulders, and beckoned to me with a crooked earth-colored finger. I came and stood before her, with my head bent under the roof, and she craned back her head and beckoned again, downward this time. “Down, kneel down, Sun Man. How may I see you, let alone speak with you, while you stand above me with your shoulders thrusting off the roof?”
“Do as she says,” murmured the girl. “She is the Old Woman.”
I knelt down, squatting onto my heels so that my eyes were not so much above hers as she sat on her stool, and she leaned forward, peering into my face with bright toad’s eyes. “You are he that they call Artos the Bear?”
“I am Artos the Bear, Old Woman.”
“So, they said that you were tall as a fir tree, and mouse-fair, and they spoke truth. They said also that you come to drive the Painted People north again, and the Sea Wolves back into the sea.”
“Who are they, Old Woman?”
“The wild geese when they fly north, maybe, or the wind through the hill grasses.” She reached out suddenly and set her hands like twisted claws on either side of my face, drawing it close to her own. Her breath smelled of wild garlic and old sick flesh, and I wanted to look away from the dark eyes with their opaque bloom of light. Even now I am not sure whether I held her narrowed gaze because I would not look away, or because I could not if I had tried. “And so she is dead, the little one,” she said at last.
“Yes.”
“And you laid her in a pit with nine war-horses piled above her.”
“If I had known that her own kind would come for her, I would have done otherwise.”
“As to that, the earth will be as warm and dark for her there, as in the Long House of the Mother.” Her eyes still held mine, and the wide toothless toad’s mouth worked a little. “How did she come to the Great Sleep?”
“As to a way of escape, at the last.” I heard my own voice saying: “She had been vilely used, and by many men, but though they would surely have killed her in the end, I think that she found her own freedom before that.”