Presently, talking to him still, I fumbled off my belt as best I could, and slipped it one-handed through his broad bronze-studded collar. “We are going now, you and I, we are going, Cabal.” It did not matter what I said, it was the voice and the constant repetition of the name that was forming its bond between us. I pushed off from the orchard wall, and contrived to struggle to my feet, swaying with a queer drained weakness and stiff as though I were the man lying face down in the long grass, the man whose dog I had taken from him. I turned back toward the remains of the fisher huts, and the track up to the Dun, and saw Flavian and Amlodd waiting where they must have waited all night at the turn of the orchard wall, scrambling to their feet also.
The great hound paced beside me as I began to waver toward them; yet all the while I was aware that something of him belonged still to his dead master, and that to complete what we had begun would take many careful days. . . . Suddenly between one step and the next, sea and shore were spinning around me; I saw Flavian’s face start forward, and then roaring blackness came up at me like a wave out of the ground.
When the light returned, it was not the cool light of the seashore morning, but the smoky yellow glimmer of a lamp. And as my head cleared a little, I found that I was lying on the piled sheepskins of the bed place in Maglaunus’s guest lodging, with my left arm, as I discovered by an unwise attempt to move, bound close to my side. A shadow that had been squatting beside me leaned quickly forward, saying, “Lie still, sir, or you’ll part the wound again,” and the voice, and the face as I squinted at it, trying to focus, were young Amlodd’s gruff voice and anxious freckled countenance.
“Where is the dog?” I demanded. My tongue felt as though it were made of boiled leather.
“Chained among the guard dogs in the forecourt,” said my armor-bearer. And then as I made some movement of angry protest, “Sir, we had to chain him up. He’s savage. We had to tangle him in a fishing net before we could get him at all, and even then most of us got mauled.”
I cursed feebly. God knew what harm they had done, whether I should ever win the dog to me now. “Is he unloosed with the rest at cow stalling time?”
“No sir. I tell you he’s savage; no one can get near him even at feeding time, save the Lady Guenhumara. Would one let a wolf run loose in the Dun? By and by, when you are stronger, if you still want to see the brute, a couple of us will strap his muzzle and get him along here somehow.”
I shook my head. “I wish to God you hadn’t chained him, but I can — see that you had — no choice, unless it was to kill the poor brute — outright. But since you have chained him — nobody must loose him again, excepting me.”
“No sir,” said Amlodd, with such evident relief that I laughed, and found that the laughter wracked my shoulder.
“Get Flavian for me. I must send word to Cei that — I am laid by here with a spear gash in my shoulder, but that I’ll be — back in Trimontium so soon as I can sit a horse.”
“That has all been seen to, sir,” said Amlodd.
And a woman moved forward out of the gloom beyond the lamp, and leaned over me with a bowl in her hands, and the strong tawny braid of her hair swung forward and brushed across my breast. “There has been enough of talking. Drink now, and sleep again. The more broth, and the more sleep, the sooner will you sit your horse again, my Lord Artos.”
I saw that she was Guenhumara, the chieftain’s daughter; but I was sober now, and I scarcely remembered at all how I swept her into the Long Dance with me up on the moors last night; the scent of vervain no longer clung to her hair, and the only thing that interested me was the hound, and what Amlodd had said concerning her and Cabal. “Why does he let you near him, when — he will not anyone else?” I mumbled, a little jealously, God forgive me, with the sleep that was in the broth already lapping its dark waves about me.
“How should I know? Maybe a woman spoke kindly to him and gave him warm scraps from the cooking, in his old life, and we are not terrible to him as men are, who chained him.” She took the bowl away. “But even I, he will not have to touch him.”
“There are other things than touching. Keep him alive for me if you can.”
“I will do what I may. . . . Now sleep.”
I lay in the guest place as the days went by, tended by the Lady Guenhumara, and the old woman like a hoodie crow who had been her nurse; while Flavian and the rest of the Brotherhood came and went, and Maglaunus himself would come and sit on the hide-covered stool, a hand on either widespread knee, and talk of all things under the sun, asking many questions. Some of these questions concerned my own way of life, whether or not I had a wife, or a woman to share my bed, and I told him “None,” fool that I was, and never saw where his questions were leading.
On the third day my head grew hot and confused, and the wound was angry despite the women’s herbs, and I remember little more with any clearness, for a while. The fever burned itself out after a time, and the wound began to heal. But the moon that had been young when the Scottish raiders came was young again when at last I was able to drag myself out, doddering as an hour-old calf, to sit in the sunshine before the guest place door, and watch the dunghill cock strutting among his drab hens by the midden. He was proud and possessive, that cock, the sun waking lights of beetle-green and bronze in the arched arrogance of his tail feathers. Presently, as I watched, he made a prancing spread-winged dash at a chosen hen; but she was just beyond his reach, and in the very act of leaping upon her, he was brought up short at the end of his tether, and tumbled, furious and undignified, in the dust. Three times it happened, before suddenly I had had enough of watching, and began to pull up brown flowered grass stems from around the doorpost, and twist them into a braid.
As soon as I was strong enough I made my crawling way to the forecourt. It was a hot noon of high summer, and the air danced in the forecourt that was empty of human life. The barn dogs lay asleep or snapping at the iridescent flies that buzzed about them. I looked around for the great wolfhound. It was a few moments before I saw him, for he had dragged the full length of his chain into the narrow band of shade along the foot of the peat stack, and the broken black and amber of his hide blended perfectly into his background. I stood still and called, not expecting any response. But he stirred and raised his great head from his paws, as though the name I had given him touched his memory. “Cabal,” I called, “Cabal,” and next instant he was up and straining toward me at the end of his chain, half choked, yet contriving to fling up his head and bay — a wild imploring note.
“Soft, softly now. I come!”
As soon as he saw me coming toward him he ceased his struggling and became quiet, standing with head up and grave golden eyes to watch me, his tail beginning uncertainly to swing behind him. The wound in his flank was healed, but for the rest, he was in a grievous state, his self-respect gone from him so that he was filthy with ordure, his coat staring and every rib starting through his once-beautiful hide, his neck rubbed into sores where he had dragged and dragged against his heavy collar. I learned later that he had refused to eat almost all the while. He must have come very near to breaking his heart.