“To the Old Dun. Where else?”
“Do you know the way?”
“I hope so. Pharic showed me the place of it — I think in case of need.”
“You do not mind, that I told Pharic?”
“You could scarcely do otherwise,” I said, “seeing that his life also is caught into the thing.”
“Into the tangle,” she amended.
“I did not say that.”
“No, you did not say it.” She put up her hand and very gently gathered the long strands of hair that had snarled into my beard and the Medusa-head brooch at my shoulder, and took them back into her own keeping.
And we rode on, not speaking any more, for there seemed nothing more to say.
The blurred moon was still up when we came over the last wave crest of the moors, and looked down into the valley where the small upland tarn caught the glimmer of the sky. And in the soft white light, the ruins of the forsaken Dun looked more than ever like a village of the Little Dark People.
“They use the tower sometimes for a herding hut, nowadays,” Guenhumara said then, much as her brother had done, a few hours earlier. “But when there is a mating in the chieftain’s line it remembers again that once it was the chieftain’s hall.”
We rode down through the heather that had long ago engulfed the track, and in through the gap in the soft wavelike ridge of turf that showed where the gateway had once been. The heather had flowed in, washing to the very walls of the tower; and in the blurred moonlight the late harebells which drifted against the rough-piled walls of the cattle yard were shadow-white. And all the while the faint summer lightning flickered along the hills.
On a patch of open turf I dropped from the saddle and lifted Guenhumara down after me. I gave her my strike-a-light, and leaving her to gather sticks and heather snarls and get the fire going, set to unsaddling Arian and rubbing him down with a handful of grass. I took the old horse down to the tarn shore to drink, and afterward knee-haltered him and turned him free to graze where the runnels of open turf wound among the heather and bush-grown mounds, and went back to the tower.
A light as dimly and threadbare gold as fallen sycamore leaves shone out to greet me. Guenhumara had made the fire, and now she sat beside it, shaping little cakes of rye meal and honey, ready for the hearthstone when it grew hot. The round stone walls ran up out of the firelight and disappeared into the shadows overhead, so for all one could see, the ancient strong point might have been standing again to its full height; and behind her against the far wall, her shadow fell across the high-piled bracken and tumbled skins of the herdsmen’s broad bed place.
She looked up when I entered, with a faint shadow of a smile, and pointed to the black pottery jar she had set just within the doorway. “I have found their store, you see; I dare say they’ll not grudge us a wedding feast. Do you take that down to the lochan for water, and then be gathering some fresh fern for bedding.”
I took up the jar and brought the water, and then armfuls of fern to scatter over the stale stuff on the bed place, kicking aside the stinking skins. And by the time I had done, the fire was burning with a clear red heart and the honey cakes were browning on the hearthstone. I sat down on the man’s side of the hearth, my hands hanging across my knees, and sometimes looked at Guenhumara and sometimes away. And Guenhumara on the woman’s side turned her hot rye cakes and fed the fire with heather sprigs, one at a time, and never looked at me at all. And from time to time there came the faint low mutter of thunder among the hills.
It was hard and harder to believe that I had not imagined that moment of wild response in her; but I knew that I had not; it was there somewhere, waiting to be wakened again. . . . Presently the cakes were done, and we ate them, hot and sweet and crusty, washing them down with cold lochan water from the black pottery jar; and still neither of us could think of anything to say.
The uncomfortable wedding meal finished, I got up and went out to see that all was well with Arian. The night was stiller than ever, the stillness of it seeming only intensified by that faint half-heard muttering below the skyline, and the occasional summer lightning was all but lost in the milky whiteness of the moonlight. I could hear lochan water sucking at its pebbly shore, and a hunting owl cried among the bushes; that was all. And suddenly I wished that the storm would break, longing for the relief of crashing thunder and storm wind, and rain lashing down the valley.
When I ducked under the lintel stone back into the tower again, Guenhumara was already lying on the bed place where I knew that I should have carried her. She had stripped off her gown and shift, and laid them with her copper and enamel arm rings and her shoes at the foot of the bed place, and in the close warmth of the tower she lay naked on my old weather-worn cloak, with her hair unbraided and flung about her. And a little white moon-moth, drawn indoors by the fire, danced and flickered about her head. And looking at her, I saw even in the uncertain mingled light of the fire on the hearth and the low moon through the doorway, that the skin of her body was not white where the clothes had covered it, but the pale brown of clover honey. She was a tawny woman from head to heel. She turned a little, her head on her arm, to watch me as I crossed to the hearth and set down the saddle which I had brought in in case it rained later. Oddly, the strain between us had relaxed, as though we had both been holding off something, and now we had let go and opened ourselves to the inevitable.
“I left you the fire to undress by,” she said, “but I think the moon would have been light enough.” And then, as I kicked off my shoes, and freeing my sword belt began to strip, “How many scars you carry! You are fang-gashed like an old mastiff that has spent its life fighting wolves.”
And I think that she must have been seeing me for the first time in the way that I had first seen her four days ago, for she must have seen most of the scars often enough when she tended me in my sickness, and never spoken of them before.
Standing by the hearth, I looked down at the new crimson scar on my shoulder, and the white seams of old ones on my thighs and sword forearm. “I suppose that is what I am.”
“Why do they come again and again so close about the same places?”
“You can always tell a heavy cavalry man by the position of his scars. They come on the thighs below the edge of one’s war shirt — I have heard of thigh guards, but they hamper one in mounting — on the thighs and on the sword arm.”
“Why not a long sleeve?” she asked, practically. It was an odd conversation for a wedding night.
“Because it would hamper the sword swing; also because the Saxon armorers do not make their sarks that way.”
I stood by the fire, stretching, then stooped to set on the turfs that I had laid by for smooring it. As I did so, she said in the same tone of quietly detached interest, “You’re beautiful. How many women have told you so?”
I thrust the fire together and set on the sods, and the firelight died, leaving only the fading moonlight to bar the darkness. “A few,” I said, “but very long ago.”
“How long? How old are you, my Lord Artos?”
“Thirty-five. That is another reason why you should not have married me.”
“And I am twenty — almost one and twenty. We are old, you and I.”