They gathered to my summons, shaking off the fumes of heather beer and ancient magic as they came, and freeing their swords in the wolfskin sheaths. Many of Maglaunus’s warriors had come to the Midsummer Fire with no weapon save their dirks, according to the old and honorable custom; but we had learned the unwisdom of such custom, and paid away honor long ago, as part of the price for success against the Sea Wolves; and so the cry of Scots raiders found us better ready than it did many of our hosts.
Ahead even of the chieftain and his household warriors, we raced for the coast and the distant flames. We stumbled among the heather roots, hearts hammering within us, into the little sea wind that brought us the smell of burning ever more strongly as we plunged downward. There were two big skin-covered war currachs in the shallows below the boat strand, and dark figures leaping between us and the blazing bothies of the fisherfolk. Maybe they had counted on there being no watch kept when the Midsummer Fires were burning. They set up a shout, and closing together, swung around to meet us; and yelling with the little breath that was left in us we charged down upon them.
I remember little but confusion of what came after. Maybe that was the heather beer and the lingering spell of the past hour. To go into battle drunk is a glory worth experiencing, but it does not make for clear and detailed memory. Certain things I do remember, through a red mist of personal rage for the cutting short of wonder and beauty that I felt dimly might never come again, I remember how the heather ran out into soft sand, and the sand slipped and yielded beneath our feet; I remember the chill of surging water around our ankles when we had driven them from the keel strand to fight in the shallows; and the white lime dust of the Scottish shields turned golden by the flame of the burning currachs. I remember the uncouth tumble to and fro of a dead body at the water’s edge, and somebody crying out with a great and savage laughter, that here were two less crows to come to supper uninvited in another year. And the surprised discovery that some time during the fighting I had taken a spear thrust in the shoulder and my left arm was dripping red.
I turned landward, sober now that the fighting was done, with my lovely red rage sunk to ashes, and holding my shoulder, began to make my way back toward the Dun. One of the women would bind the wound for me. The dead lay scattered like storm wrack along the tide line, rolling to and fro in the shallows as the little waves came in. Dawn was not far off, and between the flare of burning fisher huts and burning currachs there was enough light to see by; and close under the turf wall of the orchard where Maglaunus and I had walked up and down arguing yesterday, I saw the dark body of a man sprawled somewhat apart from his fellow dead. Something else I saw, too, and halted abruptly in my tracks, looking, not at the dead raider, but at the living dog who stood guard over him. I had heard — who has not? — of the great Hibernian wolfhounds; now I was seeing one. Standing there, head up and alertly turned to watch me, he was magnificent; tall at the shoulder as a three-month foal, his coat brindled in shadow bars of black and amber, save where his breast shone milky silver in the flame light, just as Cabal’s had used to do. He must have belonged to the chief of the raiders; such a dog would be worth his place in any war party, and the gaping wound in his flank showed that he had not shirked the fight. I took a step toward him. He never moved, but he rumbled deep in his bull throat. I knew that if I took another, he would crouch to spring, and at the third, he would be at my throat. But I knew also, in a flash of certainty, as swiftly irrevocable as the moment of lost virginity, that this was what I had been waiting for ever since old Cabal died, the reason why I had never called another dog by his name.
Flavian and Amlodd were with me, and the chieftain’s three sons. I gestured them back. “Sir — what —” Flavian began.
“The dog,” I said. “I will have the dog.”
“My lord, you should get that arm tended before you start troubling about any dog,” young Amlodd urged.
“My arm can wait. If I lose the dog I shall not find his like again.” I knew how they were glancing at each other behind my back, telling each other with their eyes that the Bear was still battle-drunk or maybe dulled in his wits from loss of blood.
Then Pharic the second son said, “Come up to the Dun now, Lord; he’ll not leave his master, and my brothers and I will come down again and rope him.”
“You fool!” I said. “Let you drag him off his dead master on the end of a rope, and he’s ruined forever. Now go, if you don’t want to get your own throats as well as mine torn out.”
We had been speaking at half breath, and all the while the great hound made no movement, and his eyes like greenish lamps in the flame light never left my face.
I squatted on my heels against the orchard wall, careful to make no movement that might seem to him hostile, and settled into stillness. After a while I heard the steps of the other men moving reluctantly away through the long shore grass. I could feel the blood still trickling, though more slowly now, through the fingers of my right hand pressed over the wound, and wondered how long I should be able to hold out; then put the thought away from me. Still the dog did not stir. I was striving to master his gaze with my own, and because no dog can bear for more than a few heartbeats to meet the direct gaze of a man, every little while he would turn his head aside to lick at his wounded flank; but always after a few moments he would turn it back to me again. I suppose to anyone looking on, it must have seemed ridiculous that I should spend the hours after battle in trying to outstare a hound; even to me, it seems a little ridiculous now, but it was not at the time. The thing was a battle of wills between us, that went on and on. . . . Dawn had come, the fires in the fisher village were quenched, the shadows of the small wind-shaped apple trees stretched far across the rough turf toward the sand, and little by little began to shorten. Once or twice the dog dropped his head to nuzzle at his lord’s body, but always his gaze came up again to my face. His eyes that had been green lamps were amber-colored now, lucent, warm with the warmth of the sun, but lost in a great bewilderment, and I knew that behind them his love for his dead master was fighting me.
The sea wind ruffled the long grass and swung the shadows of the branches, and the gulls wheeled crying above the ripple-patterned sand that the tide had cleansed of battle. I heard a movement behind me, and someone said, quiet and urgent, “Artos, you must come — you must have that gash dressed. For God’s sake, man, don’t you see you’re kneeling in blood?”
I said, “Listen, if any man comes near me or the dog before I give him leave, I swear I’ll kill him.”
The end came not long after that, suddenly, as such things generally come. It was a little like the moment in the making of horse or hawk, when the wild thing that has been fighting ypu with all its wild nature, fighting to the point of heartbreak for both of you, suddenly accepts, and gives of its own free will the thing that it has struggled so long to withhold. (For the thing is always in the end, in the essence, a free yielding by the beast, never a forced conquest by the man. With a dog, in the normal way, the thing is different, for a dog is born into man’s world, and tries from the first to understand.) It passed between us, the acceptance, the recognition; a two-way thing as love or hate is almost always a two-way thing. For a long moment there was no outward sign. Then I made the first move, slowly holding out my hand. “Cabal — Cabal.”
He whined piteously, and licked at the dead man’s neck, then looked at me again, making a small uncertain forward movement that checked almost as soon as it was begun.
“Cabal,” I said again. “Cabal, Cabal, come.” And crouching a little, inch by inch, he came. Midway between us he checked and swung back to his dead master, and I knew now his whole shadowy soul was being torn in two; but I could afford no mercy, now. Mercy was for afterward. “Cabal, here! Cabal!” He hesitated still, his great proud head turning from one of us to the other; then with a piercing whine, he came on again, crouching almost on his belly as though he had been flogged, but with no more looking back. He crept to my outstretched hand, and I began to fondle his ears and muzzle, letting him lick the blood crusted between my fingers, and all the while calling and crooning to him by his new name, repeating it over and over again. “Cabal — you are Cabal now, Cabal, Cabal.”