That was the only time I ever had to do that particular thing.
We cut his bound hands free, then, and later, when our own dead had been laid away, we gave him honorable burial, deep against the wolves, and his sword with him. Only we raised no mound or cairn to mark the spot for a place of gathering. The wind was dying away and the rain turning soft and steady, what the folk of the Cornlands call a growing rain, as Cei and I turned away from the dark plot of newly turned leaf mold.
“It is in my heart that we shall not need to fight another pitched encounter among these hills,” Cei said. “Your sword hand is something heavy.”
“There are more wolves in Caledonia than died today.”
“Truly. But I think that they will not again face the Bear as a war host in open battle. Better from now on, to look for the ambush behind the hill shoulder and the knife in the back, Artos my friend.”
CEI was right. There were no more enemy hostings, no more pitched battles among the lowland hills. Instead, from that time forth began a different kind of war, a war of raids and counter-raids, a patrol ambushed and cut to pieces in the hill mists, a village burned out in return, a stream poisoned by having dead bodies dumped into it. . . . It was more wearying than any campaign of open fighting could have been. For one thing it never quite ceased, even in winter, and so there was never a time when one could sit back and sigh and loosen the sword belt. That first summer and autumn I was striving by every means in my power to strengthen my hold over the great boss of lowland hills that was the chief barrier between the northern wilds and the rest of Britain; gaining the friendship, where I could, of the surrounding British chieftains, putting the fear of the gods into those that needed it. Presently I must follow up Cit Coit Caledon by turning on the last coast settlements to drive back the Sea Wolves, as I had done around Lindum. But first the lowland hills must be secured. And we carried fire and avenging sword and the terror of heavy cavalry that they had never known before, among the Duns and villages and the old turf-walled hill forts west and northward even into the heart of the Pict Country.
About a month after Cit Coit Caledon the supply train got through to us from Corstopitum, bringing, besides the grain and arrow sheaves, the spearheads and tallow and bandage linen in the great leather-covered pack panniers, the money (less than had been promised) to pay the men. And not many days later the supplies from Deva arrived at Castra Cunetium, together with that year’s draft of young horses, which Cei, who had taken over the outpost by that time, sent on to me. With the supply trains came our first news of the outside world in half a year. For me the news came in a long dispatch from Ambrosius. Oisc and the boy Cerdic who had escaped from Eburacum had both reappeared in Cantii Territory. The Saxons under Aelle had captured Regnum and sacked Anderida, slaying every man of the British garrison, but Ambrosius had succeeded in hemming them into the narrow coastal strip under the South Chalk though as yet he had failed to drive them from their new hills. It did not make particularly good hearing, but it all seemed oddly far away.
For Flavian also there was news, but his came up with the Deva supplies. He took the letter off by himself to a quiet corner of the camp before breaking the thread that held the two leaves of the tablet together; and later he came to me where I was looking over the new horses, the letter still in his hand. “Artos — sir —” He was almost stammering in his eagerness, filled with a kind of grave delight.
“It is from Teleri. She has got a child!” But I had known as soon as I saw the fool’s face.
I said the due things and asked, because clearly he was waiting for that: “Is it a boy — or a girl?”
“A boy,” he said. “A son.”
“Then we will wet his head in his absence, this evening when the day’s work is done.” I set my hand on his shoulder in congratulation. But God knows how I envied him.
Autumn came, and found us well strengthened in our position, with a fruitful summer’s work behind us. Winter passed and again the alders by the horses’ drinking pool flushed red with rising sap. I had had few dealings with the Dark People since Cit Coit Cale-don; they brought us news from time to time, and in return we gave them all that we could spare from the winter grain stores. That was all. But I knew always that I had only to hang a garland on the Lord of the Alder Trees, and before night, Druim Dhu or one of his brothers would come walking into the fort, and the knowledge was good.
That spring also, I had another earnest of the Dark People, for a small plant with silvery leaves and a fragile white flower sprang up in the rough grass that now covered the place where the girl lay with our nine war-horses above her. I suppose a seed must have fallen from the dried herbs that Old Woman had given me, when I burned them for the girl’s spirit, and lain fallow for a year. I never saw that flower growing anywhere else.
In the second spring, leaving Cei now in command at Trimontium, and Bedwyr harrying the East Coast Settlements, I took Amlodd my armor-bearer, Flavian and Gault and a few others, no more than would make up a hunting party, and rode far to the southwest, into Dumnonia hunting runs. To me it felt almost painfully homelike to be in that land of heather moors and little shining lochs within the sounding of the western sea; for the tribesmen were the same breed as those of Cador’s kingdom who were my own kin. But I had not come into those western moors to savor the sour-sweet of homing hunger, but in the course of my efforts to bond together the loyal tribes and draw them to the Red Dragon.
Maglaunus, one of the greatest of the clan chieftains, proved also one of the most chancy to deal with. He was not in the least hostile, merely determined, as it seemed at one time, that I should have no opportunity of speaking at all of the matter that had brought me to his Dun, and I knew, as one knows with a shying horse, that it would be useless and worse than useless to force him willy-nilly at the thing that startled him.
On the first and second of the three days that I had determined to spend on him, we hunted by day, and by night listened to the harper in his high painted timber hall, while around the lower fire his three black-browed sons and the younger of the household warriors tussled together like hound whelps or diced or tried to fly their hawks at sparrows among the house beams; and there was no chance to speak apart with the chieftain at all.
And then on the third day — it was the eve of Midsummer — he seemed to change his mind and be ready at any rate to talk; and for most of the daylight hours we walked to and fro in the little orchard below the Dun where the fisherfolk hung out their nets to dry among the apple trees, arguing.
Maglaunus had a grievance, though he put the matter temperately enough and without rancor. “Since you burst asunder Huil’s war host, the Scots raiders have returned to their usual ways; already by last summer’s end they were slave-reeving along the coast. It is no good turn that you have done us, my Lord Artos, and if I give you this help that you press for in men and weapons, I shall but have the less with which to defend my own coast.“
“Would you rather, then, have had the whole Barbarian war host sweeping through your lands?” I demanded. “You may have that yet, Maglaunus the Chieftain, if I run short of fighting men and the wherewithal to arm and feed them.”
“That is as may be,” he said, “but the Scots raiders are sure.”