I stooped and slipped free the heavy chain, and rubbed his muzzle and his ears — extraordinarily soft ears, for all the harshness of his coat — and he leaned against me with a tired sigh, so that weak on my legs as I still was, I staggered and almost went down.
When we left the forecourt he walked free beside me, with his muzzle touching my hand. I took him back to the guest place and shouted for whoever happened to be near. Flavian came running. “Go and get me some meat for this bag of bones,” I demanded, while the dog stood by me, his mane stirring under my hand. “Hell and the Furies! How did you let him get into this state?”
“Amlodd told you, sir; we couldn’t loose him. There’d have been murder done; and he would not eat, chained.”
“The Lady Guenhumara —” I began.
“If it were not for the Lady Guenhumara he would have died. But even her, he would not let touch him. She tried it once, to bathe the wound in his flank. That was when she got bitten.“
“Bitten?”
“Not badly. Did you not see the tear in her arm when she came to tend you?”
“No, I — did not notice.” I felt shamed then, but was still angry. “And could you not have told me?”
He confronted me with those grave level eyes of his. “No, sir. There was nothing that you could do; you would simply have fretted yourself into another fever.”
And it was true. After a moment I admitted that, and nodded. “As you say. Go now and make love to the woman in the cook place for the meat. Then go away and keep the others away also; I have work to do.”
And so presently with my hand still on his shoulder, and a huge bleeding mass of pig offal before him, Cabal ate his fill again at last.
A few days later, when I judged that the work was far enough advanced, and when more strength had returned to me, I slipped a strap through his collar in case of trouble with the other hounds, and took him with me into the chieftain’s hall at the time of the evening meal. I was late, for I had been trimming my beard which had grown overlong while I was sick, and the task had taken longer than I had allowed for it; and most of Maglaunus’s household warriors were already gathered. They sprang to their feet as I entered with Flavian and the rest of the Companions behind me, and gave us the salute for a chieftain, drumming with their dirk hilts on the tables before them, so that Cabal pricked his ears at the uproar and growled menacingly until I spoke to him in reassurance.
“It seems that you are a conqueror in all things,” Maglaunus said, as I came up to the high seat, with the great hound stalking beside me.
Supper flared into a feast of triumph for our victory over the raiders, and I sat with Maglaunus at the upper end of the hall, on a seat spread with a magnificent red stag’s hide, with Cabal crouched alert in the strewed fern at my feet, and ate broiled bear’s hams and fine pale barley bread and ewe’s-milk curds, while Flan the chieftain’s harper sang the song that he had made in my honor because it was I and my Companions who had played the foremost part in that matter of the Scots. It was not such a song as Bedwyr would have made, but it had a good strong lilt to it like the swing of a west coast swell and the dip of oars — it would have made a good war boat’s song to keep the rowers together.
In Maglaunus’s hall they still followed the old custom of the Tribes, and the women did not eat with the men, but apart by themselves in the women’s place. But when the eating was over, they came in to pour the drink for their menfolk, while the little dark slaves who had served throughout the meal melted away or curled up among the hounds about the fire. So this evening, when the eating was done, Guenhumara came in as usual, walking up the hall with the other women behind her. She had tended me in my sickness as often as old Blanid her nurse, and far more gently, but save for those vivid moments of awareness beside the Midsummer Fire, I had never seen her at all. Nor did I seem to see her now. And yet, looking back, I can remember very clearly what she looked like, and that is a strange thing. . . .
She wore a gown of blue and russet checkers, clasped somewhere about the shoulder with red amber and gold, and the long tawny braids of her hair had small golden apples at their ends which swung a little as she walked, so that one expected them to ring like bells. She came up the hall slowly, carrying a great cup of dark green glass between her hands, and her face was so strongly painted that while she was still far down the hall I could see the green malachite on her eyelids; and the way her brows were drawn out long and dark with stibium, like the dark, dagger-sharp wings of a swift.
She came on slowly, slowly, while the hall fell quiet behind her, and mounted the step to the dais, and gave the brimming cup into her father’s hands.
Maglaunus lurched to his feet and raised the cup, spilling a little as he did so. I saw the liquid dribble through his fingers, golden and almost as thick as run honey. He turned to look at me under his russet brows. “Shlanther to Artos the Bear. I drink to you, my Lord the Count of Britain. May the sun and the moon shine on the path of your feet, and may your sword arm never grow weaker.” And he tipped back his head and drank; and when he had done so, stood holding the cup and looking at me over it with a kindling and speculative eye. I knew that something else was coming, and with a sudden warning beating in my head, I waited for what it might be.
“I have been thinking much of those things we spoke of before the raiders came — you see that I was right in that matter — but none the less, it grows in my mind that we must indeed come to stand shield to shield, even as you have said, against the Barbarians in the time that lies ahead. Therefore it grows in my mind also that there should be made a bond between us to bind our shields together; and to the bond between us, I drink again.”
When he had more than half emptied the great cup, he held it out to me — I also had risen by that time — saying, “Drink you also.”
The light of the flames on the central hearth shining through the thick glass filled the cup with a dimly golden fire as I took it into my hands. “To what bond shall I drink?” I asked, with the small clear sense of danger still beating in my head.
He said, “Why not to the bond of kinship? That is the surest bond of all. Let you take Guenhumara my daughter from my hearth to yours. So shall we be kinsmen, knit together by the blood tie of brother to brother and father to son.”
For an instant I felt as though I had taken a blow in the root of my belly. I have never known what made Maglaunus broach the matter so publicly, risking his daughter’s humiliation before every warrior in his hall; maybe he desired to put all his rejoicings together and make of the evening one grand and glorious blaze, and never thought of my refusing what he offered. Maybe he thought to force my hand. Maybe he was a gambler — or merely wiser in the ways of men and women than he seemed. Without will of my own, my startled sight jumped to Guenhumara’s face, and I saw the tide of painful color flood up to the roots of her hair, and knew too that she had had no warning, but that unlike me, she had feared in advance; and that the heavy paint of her face had been put on as a young man takes up his armor. My mind was racing, seeking in all directions for a way out for both of us that would not make me enemies where I so sorely needed allies. Then I heard myself saying, “Maglaunus, my friend, you lay great honor upon me, but you must forgive me my answer for tonight. It is forbidden, taboo for me from my birth, even to so much as think of women, in each year between the dying of the Midsummer Fires and the kindling of the Lammas torches.”