And from that, reason how I would, as we paced and turned and paced again under the small wind-bent apple trees, it seemed that I could not move him.
The day had seemed much like any other at first, save that most of the men were out rounding up the cattle for the ceremonies of the night; but when the light began to fade, a change came, the change that comes over every Dun and camp and village when the light fades on the eve of Midsummer. And when Maglaunus and I turned back to the evening meal with our arguing still unfinished, the Dun within its strong turf walls was throbbing like a softly tapped drum. In the chieftain’s hall as in every lesser houseplace, men and women ate quickly and silently, as though their thoughts were turned to another place. And when the eating was done, the women quenched every hearth fire and torch flame, so that the whole Dun held its breath in a waiting darkness; and in the darkness they went out, men and women, children and dogs, every soul in the Dun whose legs would bear them, a thin trickle at first but gathering more from every houseplace as they passed, through the gateway in the strong turf wall and away toward the moors that rose a mile or so inland.
Flavian and I and the rest of us, following Maglaunus and his household warriors, joined ourselves to the dark silent ripple of passing shadows, and went with them, no more than shadows ourselves in the deepening summer dusk.
It was an evening of warm whispering airs, when even the darkness that bloomed the earth seemed no more than a transparent wash of shadow over the day, and the sky was a vast green crystal bell still echoing with light in the north. But as we climbed higher, the night grew less clear, and faint diaphanous wisps of mist began to drift about us, the chill smell of the sea seemed stronger than it had done lower down, and the earth became an older and a stranger place touched with the same dark potency as I had sensed in Melanudragil. We came to a place where the heather swept up into a little boss crowned by a circle of standing stones; nine tall stones I counted, that seemed, with their feet in the heather and the faint mist wreaths about their heads, to have checked into stillness from some mysterious movement of their own, only in the moment that our sight touched them.
On the level ground below the circle, where the heather fell back to make a dim dancing floor, a great stack of logs and brushwood waited in darkness, as the Dun was waiting, for the Need Fire, the Fire of Life, to be reborn.
So it had been among the Arfon hills in my own boyhood, and when the crowd spread into a great expectant circle, and from their midst nine young warriors stepped out to work the fire drill, I remembered like a physical thing the vibration of the bow cords under my hands, and my father’s world meant nothing to me and my mother’s world claimed me for its own.
They made the fire at last, after the usual long-drawn struggle, the curl of smoke and the sparks that fell on the waiting tinder, the sudden miracle of living flame. A great cry of joyful relief burst from the watching crowd — odd how one always has that fear: “This year the fire will not come and life will be over.” To me it was this year — this year the dark will close over our heads, this is the black wilderness and the end of all things, and the white flower will not bloom again. . . . The small licking tongue of flame, so easily to be quenched, was a promise, not of victory maybe, but of something not lost, shining on in the darkness. And I shouted with the rest, out of the sudden hot exultancy leaping in my belly. They crowded forward to kindle torches at the wisp of crackling straw and thrust them into the dark waiting fire stack. And the inert mass of logs and brushwood woke from its sleep of darkness and roared up into the heat and smoke and leaping glory of the Midsummer Fire. The dark shadows leapt into reality as the red light touched them, and became rejoicing men and women, and as the licking flames spread farther and farther into the pile, long-drawn shout on shout of joy rose from them, breaking at last into a chant of praise that seemed to beat like great wings about the hilltop.
The chanting sank and the joy changed to merrymaking, and for a while the wonder was gone from the night. The thing became a beer-drink, as it always does, as though men, having come too near to the mystery, sought now to shut it out behind a comfortable barrier of noisy and familiar things.
When the fire had sunk low, presently they brought in the cattle from the great hill corral where they had been penned in readiness, and began to drive them through the sinking flames that they might be fruitful in the year ahead. That too was from my boyhood; the wild-eyed, wide-horned heads uptossing in the firelight, the terrified mares with their foals at heel, the torrent of bobbing fleeces, embers scattered under a smother of sharp hooves, sparks caught like burrs in the horses’ manes, the tumult of neighing and lowing, the shouts of the herdsmen and the barking of the driving dogs.
Men ran to dip branches into the scattered embers behind them, capturing the Need Fire before it was lost again, whirling them aloft until they became mares’ tails of smoky flame. Some set off running back toward the Dun, the flames from their branches streaming bannerwise behind them. Others began to caper and dance, fantastic as marsh lights in the faint mist. Men and women began to be drawn into the dancing, and suddenly there was music for them to dance to — or perhaps the music came first; I have never known.
It was a thin music, a silver ripple of piping, but strong, for it drew the dancers after it as though strung on its shining strand. And as they pranced by, two by two in a chain that lengthened every moment, weaving in and out of themselves in the ancient intricate patterns of fertility, circling always sunwise about the scattered fire, I saw the woman.
She was standing somewhat aside, strangely remote from the wild scene around her; half lost in shadows save when the whirling torchlight touched her tawny unbound hair.
I knew well enough who she was; Guenhumara the chieftain’s daughter. I had seen her again and again during the past three days as she waited on us, her father’s guests, with the other women of the household. I had even received the guest cup from her hands, but beyond knowing with the surface of my mind that she was there, I had had no awareness of her. Now, it may have been the mood of the night, the piping and the mist and the tossing firebrands; it may have been only the heather beer — she entered in at my eyes as I looked at her, and I was aware of her in every fiber of my being. It was the first time in ten years that I had looked at a woman so, and even as I looked, she started and turned as though I had touched her, and saw me.
I started toward her, laughing like a conqueror: God help me, I was very drunk, but I think not with beer alone, and caught her by the wrist and swung her into the dance. Others joined on behind us, and far ahead, drawing us on and on, rose the white piping. We were flinging the circle wider now, to noose the nine stones within it, weaving in and out between them as garland makers weave the stems of flowers for a festival, casting our noose about the glowing embers of the fire, sometimes, at the will of the leader, crossing between fire and stone circle to form a vast figure of eight, twisting, looping, on and on until the mist circled with us above the heads of the stone dancers . . . and the loose hair of the woman flung the scent of vervain in my face. . . .
The spell was broken by a far-off cry, and the urgent blaring of a horn, small with distance, from below the Dun. The dancers checked and scattered apart, all eyes straining toward the coast, where, from the direction of the boat strand, fire that was certainly not the fire of Midsummer leapt up into the night.
“The Scots! The Scots are come again!”
I dropped the woman’s wrist and shouted for my Companions. “Flavian! Amlodd! Gault-here to me!”