She shook her head. “They were very kind to me, the Sisters, and even the Mother Abbess whom they all fear. But it was like being in a cage. I could not breathe or stretch my wings — and no fresh wind ever blew through the bars. . . .”
“You have always hated cages, haven’t you — cages and chains.”
“Always. I think in a way I have always been afraid of them.” She gave a small shaken laugh. “When I was fourteen, the man I was to marry gave me a pair of linnets in a wicker cage. You were supposed to hang it in a tree, and the linnet would sing to you all day long. I kept them for three days because they were his gift and I loved him, and then I could not bear it any more, and I opened the little door and let them go.”
The corner of the street hid the House of the Holy Ladies from view, and she fetched a quick sigh that sounded like relief, and turned face forward again.
I HAVE never known such an autumn for berries as we had that year. Every dog-rose tangle was flame-flecked with hips, every whitethorn looked from a little distance to be the color of dried blood, bryony and honeysuckle ramped along the wood-shores scattering their red fire-jewels among the gray seed-smoke of the clematis, and old Blanid shook her head and mumbled darkly of a cruel winter on the way. But it has often seemed to me that the threat of an especially hard winter after a big berry crop is no more than a tale that the old wives tell each other; and I paid little heed. We always made ready as best we could for a hard winter, at Trimontium, and most years we got it.
On the third day after we returned to our winter quarters, word was brought to me that Druim Dhu had come into camp, seeking to speak with me. By this time the Dark People of our nearest hills had lost much of their strangeness in our eyes. Many of our lads even forgot to cross their fingers if they stepped in a Dark One’s shadow, and the Dark People on their side had lost much of their fear of us. It was no unusual thing nowadays for Druim Dhu or one of his brothers to come and set themselves down by our cooking fires, even eat if they were hungry, borrow a hammer or a cooking pot — they were great borrowers, but more scrupulous in their returning than many churched Christians are — and perhaps leave a gift of a freshly taken wild honeycomb or a couple of salmon trout behind, when they disappeared as silently as they had come.
So I found Druim now, squatting beside the master armorer in his dark cavern of a workshop, and watching with attentive interest, head a little on one side as a dog sits beside a mousehole, while he renewed some broken links in a war shirt. He got up when he saw me coming, and came to meet me with his usual palm-to-forehead salutation. “May the sun shine on my lord’s face by day and the moon guide his feet in the darkness.”
I returned the greeting, and waited for whatever it was that he had come to say to me. It was never any good trying to hurry matters with Druim Dhu, or any of his kind. One waited for them to be ready, and when they were ready, they spoke. He watched a peregrine hovering above the fort until I could have shaken him, and then said without any preamble, “Let my lord send the horses south this winter.”
I looked at him keenly. That was a course that I had always striven to avoid. “Why?” I demanded. “We have always kept them with us in winter quarters before.”
“Not through such a whiter as this one will be.”
“You believe that it is going to be a hard one?” If he talked to me of berries, I should send him to old Blanid, and they could tell each other their old wives’ tales until suppertime.
“There will be such a whiter as there has not been since I was a cub scarce done with sucking my mother. A whiter like a white beast that strives to tear your heart out.”
“How do you know?”
“Earth Mother has told the Old Woman in my house.”
There was something in the way he spoke, something in the dark wild eyes, that chilled me suddenly. This was a different thing from Blanid’s talk of berries. “What do you mean? How does Earth Mother speak to the Old Woman in your house?”
He shrugged, but his gaze never left my face. “I do not know. I am not a woman, and not old. Earth Mother does not speak to me, though I too should look for a hard winter, taking my fore-tidings from the changed ways of the deer and the wolf kind. I know only that when Earth Mother speaks to the Old Woman, what she tells is true.”
“And so in my place, you would send the horses south.”
“If I wished still to be a horse lord in the spring. There will be no grazing-out in mild spells, this year; and the Hairy Ones, the Wolf-People, will hunt to the very gates of the fortress.”
“So. I will think upon it. Go now and get something to eat. My thanks for bringing me the warning of Earth Mother.”
I did think upon it, deeply, all the rest of that day; and when the evening meal was over, I called Cei and Bedwyr and Pharic and the rest of my chiefs and captains to my own quarters. We had a little fire of peat and birch bark and wild cherry logs in a battered brazier, for already the evenings were turning cold, and when all of us were gathered about it, I told them. “Brothers, I have been thinking; and out of my thinking, I am decided this year to make a change in our usual custom, and send the horses south for the winter.”
A dozen startled faces looked back at me in the red upward glow of the brazier. Cei was the first to speak, playing in the way he had with the blue glass bracelets on his wrist. “I thought you would as lief part with your sword arm as with the horses.”
“Almost as lief,” I said.
Bedwyr, squatting on the pile of wolfskins that sometimes served me as a bed, his harp as usual on his knee, leaned forward into the light that turned his face into a copper mask. “Then why this sudden desire for amputation?”
“Because Earth Mother has told the Old Woman in Druim’s house that this will be a winter like a white beast that strives to tear men’s hearts out. There will be no grazing-out in the mild spells, and the Wolf-People will hunt to the fortress gates. So says Earth Mother.”
Pharic’s black brows drew together. “And think you that Druim’s word and the word of the Old Woman and Earth Mother are to be trusted so much?” He broke into a somewhat scornful grin. “Oh, I doubt not that they are speaking the truth as they believe it. So is old Blanid when she babbles of autumn berries. They believe so much, the Little Dark People, but need we believe also?”
“I — think so, yes. I propose to act on it as though I did, at all events; and if I am wrong, I give you leave to point the finger of laughter at me for all time.”
Within a week the horses had all gone south, save for three or four of the hardy hill ponies that we kept against possible need of a messenger. Most of our light riders were of course needed to take them, one half directly south to the Corstopitum depot and on to Eburacum, and the other by Castra Cunetium and down to Deva. And with each, I sent half a squadron of the Companions — Flavian, as it chanced, in command. I gave orders, since there seemed little help for it, that the men were to winter with the horses, and bring them up again in the spring.
We had brought up the last of the winter supplies with us from Corstopitum, and with good stocks of meal and salted carcasses in the long store barn, we settled down to make all secure and galley-shape for the winter that Druim Dhu had promised us. We mended again the cracks in the barrack-row walls, where the autumn rams had washed out the mud of our previous repairs (we were almost as great workers with mud, by that tune, as the swallows who built every spring under the eaves of the Praetorium), we got in extra peat and firewood, melted down every scrap of fat for candles, and piled up great ricks of russet bracken for bedding and the ponies’ fodder. This being our fifth winter in the Three Hills, we must push farther afield in our foraging and woodcutting, and without the aid of the wiry little pack beasts that in past winters we had relied on to carry the loads. But with no horses to tend and exercise, we had more time than usual on our hands even so; and we hunted hard, that autumn, eating fresh meat while we could.