“You fool!” she said, softly mocking. “Do you think that because you have not heard a child cry, none can have been born? Do you think that none of these women has ever miscounted her days? There have been three bairns born in Trimontium in the winters since I first came there. They smothered them at birth like unwanted kittens, and put them out on the hillside for the wolves. But it was Firewater Chloe who held their mothers in her knees when the birth time came upon them.“
“Guenhumara, if you knew, could you not have done something?”
“What?” she said. “What do you think they would have had me do? A bairn clinging to the breast is a heavy burden to carry in the wake of a war host. Also it is bad for trade. . . . Even I, who am the wife of the Bear and have no trade to think for, I shall not find it a light thing to carry a bairn in the wake of the Bear’s war host. I have lived in the women’s quarters of my father’s hall. But if there were no other woman in Trimontium, I should not be the first of my kind to bring her own young to birth. I have seen too many of my father’s hunting bitches whelp, not to know how to bring out a child and sever its life from mine.”
And again I yielded. If only I had been stronger then, and weaker the next time she set her will against mine. . . .
It had been a long dry summer, as though to counterbalance what had gone before, and though the birch leaves were yellowing, there had been little rain, so that from the first the dust of the dry tracks rose m a dun cloud from under the horses’ hooves and almost blotted out the tail of our little band; and the burns ran low, and whenever we could we took to the long soft moorland grass, tawny now as a hound’s coat, until heather drove us back again to the track. The grass made gentler traveling for Guenhumara. On the second day (the usual two days’ march must be made into three by slowness of the mule cart) the little wind failed us so that the land was bathed in a still golden warmth that comes sometimes in early autumn, and the last of the ling blossom was loud with bees and smelled of honey, and the sky had paled from its autumn blue to the color of curdled milk. We flung off our cloaks and strapped them to the saddlebows along with the iron caps that clanged there already. Riada, the latest in my long line of armorbearers, who besides being native to these hills like the rest of Pharic’s hundred, had a nose for weather that would have rivaled a stag’s, sniffed the air and foretold thunder and more than thunder.
The horses were restless that night, when we camped beside the high water of the Tweed, and I remember that when Guenhumara let down her hair and began to comb it, sitting by the low campfire, the sparks flew out of it as they do out of a cat’s fur when thunder is brewing. Once, in the darkest hour of the night, a little cold moaning wind blew up out of the heart of Cit Coit Caledon, and died down again, and left the world still and heavy as before.
When we yoked the cart mules and saddled up again next morning, it seemed to me that Guenhumara was quieter than usual, or rather that her normal quiet had densified into stillness, and that her stillness was like that of the world about us; a kind of long-drawn breath before the storm breaks. And she moved with a new heaviness when I helped her into the cart. I asked her if all was well with her, and she said yes, that all was very well. But I was thankful in my bones that it was the last day’s journey.
It must have been close on noon when thunder began to grumble among the hills southward; scarcely more at first than a quivering in the air that one felt in the back of the neck rather than the head; then drawing closer, a low, almost continuous muttering, then dying again to that deep distant quivering of the air. The storm was circling over the hills, but for a long time it never came near to us; even the sky swept clear to the southern rim of the Tweed Valley. And slowly, far ahead of us, Eildon, which had been no more than a shadow on the sky haze when we broke camp, was rising higher, gaming depth and substance, so that I could make out the three peaks marching one behind the other, and see where the hazel woods of the lower slopes gave place to the bare grasslands and scree above.
And then the thunder spoke again, deep and menacing, a snarl this time, nearer — much nearer — than it had been before; and from behind the hills south of Eildon, the clouds came banking up, higher and higher while we watched; a blue-black mass of cloud, teased into forward-creeping rags and ribbands at its upper edge, by a wind that we could not yet feel in the Tweed Valley. Pale wisps of vapor drifted against the darkness of it, and the heart of the mass seemed to churn and swirl as though someone, something, were stirring it over a fire; and out of the churning storm-heart leapt flashes of blue light, and the thunder came booming hollow toward us along the hills.
I was riding alongside the mule cart, and I looked anxiously at Guenhumara huddled behind the driver in the mouth of the tilt. She was sitting oddly braced, as though to resist every jolt of the wheels under her, instead of giving to the movement in the ordinary way, and her face was very white, but that might be only the strange and menacing light. “Best get back under the tilt,” I said.
She shook her head. “It makes me sick if I cannot see where I am going. See — I will pull my cloak well over my head.”
And the anxiety in me quickened sharply, but there was nothing to be done save press forward while we could.
We were heading straight into the storm, but it seemed to me that the hideous swirling vortex at its heart was swinging to our right, and I began to hope that the worst of it might pass over the hills south of the Tweed. The fringes of the black cloud were above us now, swallowing up the sky, and we rode in an unnatural brown twilight, while southward of us the storm trailed its path across the hills, dragging with it out of the belly of the clouds, a black blurred curtain of rain that blotted out everything in its passing. “Christos! There’ll be homes washed out and drowned cattle and women weeping among the hills tonight,” someone said.
Presently the storm had circled away behind us, but there was no returning light ahead; and suddenly, spinning in its path as such storms do among the hills, it was coming up on our tail — coming swiftly as a charge of cavalry! Already in the heat, the dank breath of it was parting the hair on our necks, and the long grass bowed and shivered away from the gust as though in fear. . . . “Up the side glen yonder,” I called to the men behind me. “There’ll be better shelter among the scrub.”
It was a thin shelter enough, among the half-bare birch and rowan, but better than none, and we gained it, dismounting and manhandling the cart the last part of the way, just as a second, stronger puff of wind came over the shoulder of the glen; and a few heartbeats later the storm was upon us. Stab on jagged stab of blue-white light split the gloom, and the thunder crashed and boomed and beat about our heads like a great hammer. We got the mules unharnessed lest they bolt, and then turned to the horses. They, poor brutes, danced and snorted in terror, and it was all we could do to get them edged back into some kind of shelter and keep them together there. Guenhumara was crouching back under the tilt, and I bade Cabal stay with her and left them to do as best they could for the moment, while I gave all my attention to Signus who was flinging this way and that, squealing with mingled rage and panic. And save for a confused awareness of blinding white forked light that leapt crackling from black sky to black hillside, and the ceaseless crash and tumbling boom of the thunder that seemed as though it would pound the very hills asunder, that storm, for me, was one long struggle-royal with the whirling white stallion.
At last the lightning became less incessant, and the thunder trod less swift upon its heels, the whiplash crack of it that had all but split the eardrums dulled to the rolling of great drums that throbbed and reverberated among the dark glens. And I knew that for the tune, at least, the crown of the storm was past — so far, that is, as the thunder was concerned; for after the thunder came the wind and rain. We got the horses quieted at last; wind and rain they understood, whereas thunder is a thing that no horse ever understands — nor any man either, which I suppose is why we have always given it to our highest and most angry gods.