The next day there was no sign of him, but on the morning after that, when the horses were brought up from watering, Flavian came and sought me out. “Sir, Druim Dhu has come in again.” He said, “I don’t see how he does it, but it gives me the prickles! We started to get the squadron back from the water, and there he was in our midst!”
I glanced past Flavian, expecting to see the little dark figure behind him, but he shook his head. “He would not come up to the fort. He just said, ‘Tell the Sun Lord that there is nought for him to drive out of the strong place we spoke of, save the hill foxes and maybe an owl or two’ — and then he was gone. Maybe he turned into an alder tree.” He laughed a little as he said it, but the laughter was not altogether easy.
“The ability to turn into an alder tree is no bad thing for a scout.”
“I suppose not. It is unchancy all the same, the way he comes and goes.” Flavian hitched impatiently at his shoulders, and looked at me with sudden gravity. “Artos, sir, are we to trust him? — Them — about Castra Cunetium, I mean? They have the name for being treacherous little beasts.”
“Nevertheless, we are going to trust them. We shall send the usual scouting party ahead lest the state of things has changed since the message was sent. But that is aE. It is in my heart that Druim Dhu and his kind will not prove treacherous to us unless we earn their treachery.”
And so a few days later, with their share of the stores, weapons and raw materials of war loaded onto their share of the baggage beasts, Bedwyr with his own squadron of fifty cavalry, a war band of spearmen, and a few slingers and light horse for scouting, took the road westward up the river gorge, to garrison Castra Cunetium.
“We shall miss his harp in the winter evenings,” said Cei, leaning beside me on the red sandstone of the west rampart to watch the little force grow smaller and smaller in the distance, until it was lost in the tawny dust cloud of the summer’s end.
But that autumn we had little leisure in Trimontium for missing anybody or anything. We cleared the bushes and scrub for two bowshots around the walls, save for a clump of hazel shading the spring that had been as it were a gift to us from the Dark People. We set about clearing and restoring one of the two wells, which looked as though it might bear water again. We made the old latrines usable after a fashion, and patched up the rampart walls as best we could; we contrived, with bracken thatched onto hurdles, to reroof several barrack rows, some to serve their old purpose, some for outhouses, storerooms and stables. We got in peat and firewood, and bracken for fodder and bedding. Most of that work fell to the foot soldiers of our auxiliaries, who grumbled incessantly, as the warrior kind generally do when they are not fighting; for there was other work in plenty for the Companions and the light horsemen. Before September was out, we were regularly patrolling the lateral road, and from the first, I used small cavalry knots for foraging among the British villages and at the same time gaining some kind of control over the countryside. The clans of central and southwestern Valentia had not been drawn into the general flare-up; they were still, for the most part, friendly, and they had assuredly no longing for the Picts and the Sea Wolves trampling through their hunting runs leaving the inevitable wake of red ruin behind them. But on the other hand, many of the petty chieftains did not see why they should submit to a war host not of their own tribe in Trimontium, let alone help to feed them with the winter coming when they would have little enough for themselves. Sometimes it came to the direct threat. “Three bullocks or we fire the thatch,” especially if Cei led the foraging party, for he could use threats with a kind of grim good humor that left few scars behind. But there was always the risk that if we pressed them too hard, the chieftains would bethink them that another way of saving their fields and cattle from the Barbarians was to make common cause with them; and so threats were not things to be used too often. And in the main we found that the coming of heavily armed cavalry, a thing that the tribes had never seen before, was at once threat and reassurance enough. For the same reason, I refused to allow any cattle raiding. Instead, we hunted. There was game enough for all in the scrubby woods around Eildon, tribesmen and war host and little dark hunters alike; especially as the wilder and younger of the war host chose to turn their hunting spears chiefly against boar or wolf, and so the better food game was left for the rest.
Late in the autumn our promised supplies came up from Corstopitum, and among the grainskins and tallow jars were the sheaves of arrows, the saddle leather and blocks of salt which I had bullied out of Eburacum’s bishop. (May God be good to his tired old soul, he was a bonny fighter against paying his just dues, but he kept his word once it was given.) And after that most of what we killed was salted down and stored for the winter.
Winter came early that year, in a flurry of sleet that turned to snow and thawed and came again, and this time did not thaw, but lay week after week among the hills, adding to the stresses and hazards of both hunting and foraging; and for long spells at a time there was no grazing for the horses, so that they must be kept stabled and forage-fed; and in the long winter nights when the icy winds yowled through Trimontium and we heard the whistle of the wild geese overhead, we missed Bedwyr’s harp, even as Cei said that we should.
In all those months we heard and saw nothing, either of the Barbarians or the Little Dark People.
But spring came suddenly and early as winter had done. There was a red flush among the alders when we went to water the horses, and the hills were loud with the crying and calling of lapwing, though the snow still lay thick on the northern slopes and the wind cut like a fleshing knife. And one evening when I brought my own squadron in from exercise — we were hard at it already getting the horses back into condition again — a shadow shook itself clear of the guardhouse door, and Druim Dhu with his little war bow in his hand was standing at my stirrup. He looked older, his eyes sunken back into his head. But then so did we all, it was the famine look, the wolf look that comes to most men at the winter’s end when the food runs low.
“My Lord Artos.” He touched my foot in the stirrup by way of greeting.
I reined aside, gesturing to the others to go on, and dismounted. “Greetings, Druim Dhu, do you bring me news?”
“The Cran Tara has gone forth,” he said.
“So.”
“To the settlements of the Sea Wolves along the land edge yonder.” Druim jerked his head eastward. “Toward the Snow” — he meant the north — “and toward the sunset to summon the tribes and the Painted People. They were scattered back to their own places, to Manann, those who could get so far, last summer’s end; and the White Shields from across the Sunset Sea wintered with them. Now the Cran Tara has gone forth, and they will be hosting again.”
“Where to?”
“Into the Great Forest yonder between the two rivers, Cit Coit Caledon that we call Melanudragil in the dark tongue.”
From that time forward, as the spring drew on, one or another of the Little Dark People appeared from time to time. Not always Druim nor even one of his brothers, but others whom I had never seen before. Once it was a little old man tough and twisted as a heather root, who materialized under the very hooves of the patrol as it came in. Once it was even a woman. It seemed that among the People of the Hills also, some kind of Cran Tara had gone out.