The train was not a large one, and the leather-covered pack panniers were only lightly loaded, for with the normal loads the beasts would never have got through at all. But the food that they brought would tide us over until the next lot could get through. We helped as best we could, to get the pack teams unloaded, and later — much later it seemed — we sat down all together in the mess hall to our first full meal in three moons.
“I’ll not deny,” the small red-bearded train master was saying, “that it has been a desperate business, even with the help of the Dark Folk over the last lap; and I’ll not deny that if this Levin you sent us had lived to argue, like enough we’d have argued too, and hung back a bit for the thaw. But when a man dies to bring you a call for help, why then that’s a better argument than any that you’re like to be able to put up against him.”
I looked around quickly. “Dies?” Somehow, I don’t know why, I had assumed that Levin had remained at the depot to recover strength before coming up with the next supply train.
“Aye. I’d not be knowing myself, how he kept on his feet to get through to us at all. They were pretty well rotted off him with frostbite. . . . He died the same night.”
I was silent for a while, and then I said, “But how in God’s name did he even find the way? The thaw had not come by then.”
Druim looked up from the strip of salt meat in his hands. “That was simple enough; we showed it to him.”
“You showed it to him?”
“Yes; even we, the Little Dark People, we have our uses. A party of hunters out after wolf found him already strayed from the road. They gave him meat when they had made their own kill, and set him on his road again, and then went home and made a smoke on the crest of Baen Baal to tell those to the south that he was coming and must be passed on to the next watcher, and then they made the snake pattern for him about the ashes of the houseplace hearth; for they knew that he went to his death.”
“And knowing that, they let him go?”
“What else could any of us do?”
“If you could send him on so, from one to another” (I was using “you” for the whole People of the Hills) “could you not have sent his message on in the same way? Could you not have raised one finger to save his life?”
Druim Dhu looked at me as though puzzled at my lack of understanding, and answered also for the whole of his people. “It was in his face. Also, Sun Lord, you heard what the train master said: had it been one of us who brought the cry for help, who would have hearkened to us? Besides, he would go on; he said his friend was waiting for him.”
There was a long pause, in which we heard very loudly the green trickling of the thaw. Cei broke it. “That must have been close on three weeks ago. Why was no word sent up to the fort?”
“The smoke was sited to carry its message south,” Druim said, “so we in my village did not know of the thing ourselves until a few days since. When we did, I would have come, but the Old Woman looked into sand and water, and said that the pack beasts would be here in five days at the most, and that my coming would serve no end save the lightening of your hearts.”
“Even that might have been worth doing,” grumbled Cei.
“True; and still I would have come, but the Old Woman said that there were taller crops than mouse grass and laid it upon me, upon the whole village, by the wrath of the Corn King, that we should not come.”
“And why would she be doing that?” someone asked, through cracked lips.
Druim shook his head. “I am not the Old Woman. I do not know.”
Later, I wondered a good deal as to his meaning, but at the time I was no longer listening closely. Across the fire I met Bedwyr’s bright gaze reaching out for mine. And that night he made a harp lament, the most winged and wildly haunting, I think, that he ever made.
That night, as before, I could not sleep. Life and the urgency of life had taken hold of me again; we were saved, and death that had been at our elbows drew away into the darkness. And for me, the freedom was gone: Ygerna’s power was over me again, and all was as it had been before.
No, not quite all. Two months later, when the horses had come north to us once more, when the curlews were at their mating and the furze was a yellow fire above the river marshes, Guenhumara told me that she was with child.
THAT summer, the last as it proved that we spent in the lost province of Valentia, was a time of final scouring, sharp and without ruth while it lasted, but not lasting long, a time for a last strengthening of the ties that I had labored so long to make among the chiefs and princes; and the first frosts had scarcely set the burns running yellow with fallen leaves, when I rode back to Maglaunus’s Dun. All summer I had been wondering as to the thing that Guenhumara had told me, scarcely daring to believe that she had not made some mistake; and the native tracks and ridge-ways after Castra Cunetium seemed endless to my wild impatience. But when I rode into the Dun and dismounted with Pharic and the rest of my small knot of Companions before the hall threshold, and she came out to bring me the guest cup, her thickened body was enough to tell me that she was about her woman’s work.
“So it is true,” I said.
She looked at me, half smiling, over the tilting rim of the guest cup — and it was as though touching her would be like touching something that drew its warmth and living kindness direct from the earth, like an apple tree.
“Did you doubt it?”
“All summer I have been doubting. I think I did not dare to believe.”
“Foolish,” she said. “Blanid knows about these things.”
Later, lying with my arms around her on the broad guest bed, I tried to make her see the wisdom of remaining at her father’s hearth that winter. But she would have none of it; the bairn would not be born for two months yet, and she was perfectly well able to make the journey back to Trimontium, protesting that it must be born, when the time came, under the shelter of its father’s sword, and that if I left her she would follow me on foot. She held me about the neck, even while I felt the child stirring and impatient in her body, and her hair fell all across my face in the darkness. And in the end, I yielded.
God help me, I yielded; and next morning, with Guenhumara and old Blanid in a light mule cart, we started back for Trimontium.
We traveled slowly and reached Castra Cunetium without harm done. I breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that the journey was more than half over, and now at least Guenhumara could rest a few days. But at Castra Cunetium an ill wind blew up, for on the last day of our sojourn Blanid fell down the granary steps and hurt her back. There did not seem to be much amiss, but assuredly she could not go forward for the time being.
“It seems that your journey ends here, at least for a while,” I said.
But again Guenhumara put out her will against mine. “And yours?”
“I ride on with the patrol tomorrow. I have been apart from the war host long enough.”
“Then so do I also ride on with the patrol.”
“That is foolishness,” I said, “and you know it. What will you do without Blanid to care for you, if the bairn comes to be born, before she can follow after you?”
“There are other women in the fort,” she said tranquilly.
“Yes, a score or more — the gay drabs of the baggage train.”
“Firewater Chloe, who counts herself Queen among them, knows how to deliver a child, all the same.”
“How can you know that?” I was fighting a losing battle, and I knew it, but I fought on. “There has never been a child born at Trimontium in these years.”