We had a good day’s hawking, but the thing that remains clearest of it in my mind came when Pharic had seemingly wearied of the sport; and lagging behind with him, while the rest moved on to try some pool farther up the glen, we came walking the horses up a long slope where the midges rose in clouds from the bracken as we brushed by, and over the crest of the ridge reined in and sat looking down into a widely shallow valley running to the marshes and the sea. Directly below us a small leaf-shaped tarn lay as in the hollow of a big quiet hand; and listening, I thought that I could catch the whistling call of sandpipers that always haunt such places. And between us and the pebbly shore lay all that time had left of an ancient steading, the ground dimpled with hollows and bush-grown mounds that must once have been bothies and byres and store pits, and showing here and there curved outbreaks of stones that had faced a turf wall, so that I was reminded of a village of the Little Dark People. But in the midst of the place, on ground a little higher than the rest, the stone drum of the old strong point, the chieftain’s tower still stood to almost twice the height of a man, and had a roof of ragged thatch.
“What happened to it?” I asked, after we had sat looking down in silence for a few moments.
“No fire nor sword; not the Scots this time. The place was too prone to flooding in the winter, and some forefather of mine with a misliking for wet feet abandoned the place to build the present Dun on higher ground.”
I had something of the story from this one and that. “It seems not quite abandoned, even now. So far as one may see from here, that thatch is sound enough, and someone has been cutting bracken fodder over yonder on the far side of the valley, not more than a week or ten days since, to judge by the clean yellow gleam of it.”
“The herdsmen use it at the spring and autumn herding, and sometimes in the summer, on passage from one grazing ground to another. They keep a roof on the tower for shelter, and fodder for the beasts and maybe a creel or two of rye meal for themselves stowed above the house beam. It’s a humble end, isn’t it, for a stronghold that’s known the clash of weapons and the music of the chieftain’s harper — but there’s times, even now, when the place comes into its own again for a while and a while.”
“And what tunes would those be?”
“When there is a marrying in the chieftain’s line. Always it has been our custom that when the sons of the chieftain’s house bring home their brides, they must pass the first night in the old Dun. That is for courtesy to the chieftains of the older time — to bring the incoming women to their hearth.”
I glanced around at him. “The daughters, too?”
“The daughters, maybe, though for them it is not greeting but farewell. When a woman marries she goes to her husband’s hearth.” He turned his head deliberately, and looked at me under black brows as level as his hawk’s wings when she rested on the upper air. “It is not forbidden to the daughters, too.”
We looked at each other, the horses shifting under us eager to be moving on, and the little breeze that could not reach down into the midge-infested glen behind us stirred the hair on our heads and brushed through the tawny late summer grass. “Guenhumara has told you, then,” I said at last.
“Something — it is a matter that concerns me, after all, since if she brings you a war band for her dowry, it must be I who lead it.”
“You especially?”
“It is for one of the chieftain’s sons to lead such a band. Laethrig is my father’s first son, and Sulian is already knotted in a girl’s long hair, while I — I am free, and have an itch to the soles of my feet that I shall not find easement for, here in my father’s hall.”
I looked at him in the clear upland light, the set of his head that matched that of the hawk on his fist, the hot red-brown eyes under the black brows; and I thought that he might be well right in that, and thought also that it would be good to have this frowning youngster among my captains.
“I can maybe find the means for easing the soles to your feet,” I said. “And if there is a like itching in the palm of your sword hand, I can find you a fine way to appease that also.”
“Then while my sister is your woman, I am your man. But I forget —” He flung up his head and laughed. He had a hard short laugh that when he grew older would be a bark like a dog-fox’s. “You may not speak of such matters until the Lammas torches are lit!”
“It is none so simple a thing, to be faced with the offer of a wife, all unwarned, in a hall full of strangers,” I said, “and with more matters than a bride-wreath hanging on the Yea or Nay.”
“Sa sa, I can well believe it, and a man might snatch at any means to gain him breathing space. Only when the breathing space is past, and he has made his choice, and struck his bargain, let him abide by it, remembering that hall full of strangers, who are not strangers to the woman, but her own people, and remember that among them she has three brothers, and among those three brothers, one in particular.”
I had liked the boy before, and I liked him the better for that clumsy threat. “I will remember,” I said. And I suppose I must have shown my liking in some way, for suddenly his dark bony face lit up as though in answer, and the moment of stress was gone like a plume of thistle seed on the small soft wind.
“And speaking of the Lammas torches,” I said, “the shadows are growing long — time, maybe, that we were away back to the Dun.”
He shook his head, looking back the way that we had come. “Ach, no need for a while yet. It is good out here; a good time of the evening, and we are none so far, across country. We can meet up with the others at the glen head, and send two or three of the young ones back with the hawks and the dogs; no need for the rest of us to be making for the Dun at all. We can ride straight over to the gathering place, and leave the horses in the little wood close by.”
So it was that dusk had deepened into the dark, and a blurred moon was rising over the high moors, when we dismounted and tethered the horses in the hazel thicket below the gathering place, and set our faces to the steep heathery slope beyond. The little soft wind of the day had quite died away, and the sky was overspread with the faintest rippled sheet of thunder haze, and even as we climbed, there was a flicker of summer lightning along the hills. The circle of the Nine Sisters stood above us on its shoulder of the moors, darkly outlined against the snail-shine of the moon, and about its feet the dark multitude was already gathering. We could hear the awed hushed murmur of tongues, the faint brush of feet in the grass. . . . As we stepped out from the heather onto the smooth turf of the dancing floor I saw that every face was turned inward to the circle of standing stones, and looking the same way, I saw — or thought I saw — that despite the luminous clearness of the night, a faint mist clung there still; no, not so much a mist as an obscurity that one could neither see nor see through. So must the magic mists have been, that the priests of the older world could raise for the cloaking of an army.
Pharic had disappeared, with his own lads about him, and young Amlodd, still panting with the speed that he had made from the Dun after his errand with the hawks, came dodging through the multitude to join the little knot of Companions. But he, too, kept his face turned all the while to the Nine Sisters. The tension of thunder was on us all, but another tension also, that rose and rose as the moments passed, until it reached almost to the limit of physical endurance; as certain prolonged notes of a horn will do. I heard Flavian gasp beside me. I was sweating in the palms of my hands, and it began to seem to me that at any moment now the whole night must crack wide open under pressure of this intensity of waiting.