Then I picked up the flask and the little bag of herbs.
“Burn the herbs at sunset on the little one’s sleeping place, and scatter the Dark Drink with the ashes over all, and it will be well with her,” said the Old Woman; and then as I murmured some form of leave-taking and turned to the steep steps and the entrance hole: “Stay. My daughter’s daughter will go with you to lead you back to your own world.”
This time I think we traveled straight, for we left the valley at a different point from our entering it and without fording the stream, and the three peaks of Eildon were before us all the way; while the distance was not a quarter of that which we had covered in the darkness. We came to the foot of the fortress hill and began the upward climb. The wind had died away, and in the warm sunlight among the broom bushes the midges danced in shining clouds. How we escaped the sight of the watchers on the ramparts that time, I do not know, save that the girl Itha was with me and I suppose something of her own cloak of shadows covered us both. I know that at the time the silence from above added to my uneasiness, until vague sounds of movement and the whinny of a horse did something to ease the fear that was still chilly between my shoulder blades. We were almost under the red sandstone walls when Itha turned aside from the deer track, saying for the last time, “This way — come.”
I had followed her so far that now I followed her unquestioningly this little way farther. She brought me to a small secret hollow among hazel bushes, not half a bowshot below the walls. Something in the formation of the hillside there must have blanketed sound, for it was not until I was on the very edge of it that I caught the least voice of falling water. It was only a small sound, even then, and oddly bell-like. The girl moved down into the tiny dell, and stooping, lifted aside a mass of bramble and hart’s-tongue fern. “See,” she said, and I saw a minute upwelling of water that sprang out between two rocks and dropped into a pool the size of a cavalry buckler, and then disappeared under the rocks and fern again. A man might pass within his own length of the water and never know that it was there.
“This is a wonderful thing,” I said. “If you had not shown it to me it might have remained hidden until we came to clear the scrub.”
“That was in my mind,” she said. “At least it will save much water carrying uphill from the burn. The water is good and sweet. . . . When you have need of my people, hang a straw garland on the branch of the big alder tree that grows above the pool for watering the horses, and someone will come.”
I was on my knee beside the water, splashing the cold sweetness of it into my eyes; and I asked, “Can I be sure of this tree? How do you know where we shall water the horses?”
“There is one place that is clearly better than all others, where the burn comes down to join the open river, close above the ford. We water our cattle there when we move them from pasture to pasture. You will know the place, and the tree.”
She had been speaking quite close behind me, but when I turned, meaning to ask her some other question, she was not there. Only, a few moments later, something flickered below me on the hillside, that might have been some wild thing passing among the hazel bushes.
I got up, and turned to the postern gateway of the fort, which I could see above me, and began to climb.
An elder sapling had rooted itself in the cracked doorsill of a ruined guardroom. I had noticed it last night, as one notices small unmattering things; and as I came up toward the gate I knew one moment of icy foreboding that I should find nothing there but an age-eaten stump, and the familiar sounds of the camp made by men whose faces I did not know.
But the sapling was just as it had been last night, and suddenly the men of the watch were all about me, and there were shouts, and someone came running, running like a boy between the ruined barrack rows, and I saw that it was Bedwyr, with the Minnow and young Amlodd behind him. The last chill of the fear that had been like a thin wind between my shoulder blades fell away, so that the warmth of the sun broke through, and in the same instant weariness descended on me so that I could barely stumble forward to meet them.
“Is it well? Is it well with you?” they asked.
“All is well,” I told them. “I think that all is very well. I have what I went for.”
“Come and eat,” they said.
But I shook my head, laughing muzzily. “All I want is a place to sleep — a corner to crawl into where no one will fall over my legs.”
THERE might have been two months more of possible campaigning weather, but after taking council with Cei and Bedwyr and the rest of the chiefs and captains, I determined against dissipating our forces at the summer’s end in an attempt to round up the broken and scattered war host of Huil. Better to concentrate on making a strong winter quarters here in Trimontium and set about turning Castra Cunetium into a strong outpost while there was time for the garrison sent out there to dig themselves in before the winter closed down on them, and get the patrols going steadily to and fro along the road between.
The first thing must be to speak with the Little Dark People again, and make sure that Daglaef the Merchant had made no mistake as to the position of the old fort; make sure also whether it was open to our coming, or in enemy hands and to be fought for as we had fought for Trimontium.
So on the third morning after my return from the Hollow Hills, I bade Flavian hang a straw garland on the broken branch of the big alder tree when he took the squadron down to water the horses. The girl Itha had been right; there was one perfect watering place where the stream that we came afterward to call the Horse Burn paused in its headlong run, and broadened into an alder-fringed pool before it fanned over the piled-up wash of centuries that had formed the ford, and then plunged down its last steep stretch to join the great river. And above the pool one ancient alder tree stood out from its lesser and younger kind as a chieftain from among his sword brothers.
He came when he brought the horses back, to report the thing done, and that evening Druim Dhu, the warrior who had shown me his arrow, walked in through the narrow northern gate, saying to the men on guard there, “The Sun Lord sent for me, and I am come.”
They brought him to me beside one of the evening fires on the old parade ground — we had not got as far as any fixed quarters yet, we were merely camping in the ruins of Trimontium as we had camped on open moor — and he squatted onto his heels in the firelight with the dignity of a wild animal, seemingly oblivious of the staring crowd about him; and with no word of greeting, fixed his eyes on my face and waited for me to tell him what I wanted.
When I had done so, he said, “As to this place you speak of, it is two days’ trail along the Great Road toward the setting sun. I know, for I have followed the trail myself at the herding; and the walls are yet strong. Whether it is empty or man-held, I do not know, but give me a day, two days at most, to send the word and receive it back again, and I will come and tell you. Oh my lord, is there no more?”
“No more if the place be empty. If it be held, then bring me the number of the men who hold it, and their strength in weapons and stored food. Can that be done?”
“It can be done.” He drew his legs under him to rise.
“Eat before you go,” I said.
“I eat only by my own hearth.”
But I knew that the trust must work both ways. “Eat! I drank by yours!”
He looked at me a long doubtful moment, then sank back beside the fire and held out his hand for the hot barley bannock that someone passed him; and ate, without taking his eyes from my face. When he had eaten, he got up, speaking no word of leave-taking as he had spoken none of greeting, but with a curious deep gesture of hand to forehead, melted out of the firelight into the dusk.