A bleating cry like that of a newborn lamb came out of the gloom behind her, to answer my question before she spoke.
“The babe is born,” she said, “and it is well with them both.” She drew wider the heavy skin apron behind her, and the dim flicker of burning peat came to meet me, and the usual smell of such places, mingled with another, sharper smell that I had met with in stables when one of my mares had foaled.
I ducked under the lintel and stumbled down the steps. The place was more crowded than it had been last night, for some of the women were back, and through the throat-catching peat reek I could just make out Guenhumara lying on the pile of skins where I had laid her down last night. I would have gone to her at once, but Old Woman sat on her stool across my path and looked up at me through the fronding smoke of the hearth, and I stopped as though she had caught me by the hair, and waited for whatever it was she had to say to me, suddenly afraid.
I remembered the woman I had seen before, still crouched against the far wall, nursing the child in her lap. And I heard the child cry, not the young bleating that had reached me on the threshold, but the dim tired wailing of something sick.
“It is a girl child,” Old Woman said, and the little bright-filmed eyes went searching in through mine, to read my inmost answer. And I could have laughed aloud in relief. I believe I had never thought of it being anything but a son; but Old Woman’s news was not bad, to me, only surprising. And she saw that, and scorned me for it, with the slantwise scorn of her people; and spat into the fire. “Aiee, aiee, and so you will keep it. Now we, the Dark People, are wiser. When we have a girl child too many we put it out on the hill for the Wolf-People. It is not good to have a daughter before a son, it is a sign that the Great Ones are angry, and it should be put out for the Wolf-People. But she would not have it so.”
“She was right,” I said, “for this is not a girl child too many, but a daughter greatly longed for.”
I would have gone on, then, but her eyes still held me from the last few steps, and suddenly I saw that there was trouble in them. The words came so softly, so mumblingly out of the toothless toad’s mouth, that I could scarcely catch them. “There was a time — the Sun Lord knows it, when I made the patterns in sand and water and learned certain things concerning the Sun Lord, and forbade Druim Dhu the Young Man of my house to bring a certain word up to the Place of Three Hills, accordingly.”
I nodded, bending toward the small bright eyes. “You told him that there are taller crops than mouse grass, I think. Something of more matter than the easing of our minds?”
“So, the Sun Lord remembers and understands. . . . But there was a grayness about the Sun Lord, a mist between me and him, and I could see into it a little way, but not enough. I could not see whether the child would be of the holly or the ivy; only that there would be a child, if Druim Dhu took no message to the Place of Three Hills. But now it is on my heart that the child had best be given to the Wolf-People.”
“That is not our way, among the Sun Folk, Old Mother, and I believe that in this tiling at least, the Great Ones are not angry.” And I felt myself released and I took the last few steps to Guenhumara.
For the moment I thought she was asleep, but when I knelt down beside her she opened her eyes — enormous eyes whose grayness seemed to shadow her whole drained face. The hair on her forehead was darkened with sweat, but the work was now over. Her body lay so flat that it scarcely raised the otter-skin robe that covered her, and something moved and bleated again, infinitely small, in the curve of her arm. She put the soft covering back without a word, and showed me the babe. It was very crumpled, but the crumpling was no more than the damp crumpling of a newly opened poppy bud that will unfurl to silken softness in the sun. It was almost as red as a poppy bud, too, with a little fine dark down on its head, and dark eyes, when it opened them, that wandered as the newly opened eyes of a kitten do. It yawned, the triangular smile of a kitten, and went to sleep again, one small hand outside the otter skins, and when I touched it in the palm the thing curled around my finger seemingly of its own accord, and bonelessly as a sea anemone. A foolish whimpering delight woke in me, because my daughter was clinging to my finger in her sleep.
“How is it with you, Guenhumara?”
“I am tired, but it is well with me now,” she said, and then, “You see that it is a girl child?”
“I see; and Old Woman told me.”
“It is strange, I never thought of it being a daughter — I suppose that is because I wanted so sorely to give you a son to train up to handle a horse and a sword and be a great warrior by your side.”
“I would as lief have a daughter,” I said. I was a little drunk. “A small soft daughter to hold in my heart. She shall have a Saxon bracelet to cut her teeth on — the Saxons weave very pretty jewels out of gold wire for their women — and a white wolfhound puppy to grow up with; and a great warrior one day to sweep her into the Chain Dance at Midsummer. . . .”
Guenhumara laughed the soft shadow of a laugh. “Foolish, you are — my Lord Artos the Bear of Britain is no more than a foolish cub himself, when he is pleased!”
Neither of us said, “Next time it will be a son: next time . . .” But the contentment of the moment was enough for us, without looking forward or back to stress or strain or joy or heartbreak.
Guenhumara reached out and touched my sleeve. “You are as wet as though you had been drawn up out of the sea.”
“I have been in the burn all night with the men of the village, working to turn it back into its own course.”
“And now that is done?”
“Now that is done, and the water is sinking. There has been much damage to the grazing land, but the village is safe, and I think none of the cattle have been lost.”
“You must be weary, too. This has been a hard night’s work for both of us, my dear.”
Presently I heard the voices of the men outside, and Itha’s voice, and a grumbling as they turned away to make themselves a fire and dry off elsewhere, and the living hut began to empty as the women went out to tend their menfolk. I had forgotten that no man save myself who owned other gods than theirs might enter here again until the place had been purified, lest the nearness of a woman who had newly given birth should rob the warriors of their fighting powers. Truly, I had laid a burden on these people. Well, maybe my help and Pharic’s and Conn’s in the matter of the burn might repay a little. Later I would bring them a gift — the fort’s biggest copper pot, perhaps; and meanwhile the least that I could do was to take myself out of the women’s way as quickly as might be.
I took my finger from the small clinging grasp, and said to the enormous figure on the stool beside the hearth, “Old Woman, when may I come for her?”
“In three days,” she said. “In three days she and the child — since you are set on keeping it — will have gamed strength enough for the way, and you may take them safely. Also in three days her purification will be accomplished.”
“In three days, then,” I said.
But in the same instant Guenhumara’s free hand was on my arm, clutching at me as though I were the only thing between her and drowning; and I saw that her peace had broken all asunder and she was afraid. “Artos, you are not — Artos, don’t leave me here! You must not — you must take me with you —”
“In three days,” I said. “In only three days.”
“No, now! I shall do well enough on your saddlebow, and Pharic can carry the babe.”
I looked down at her questioningly. “What is it, Angharad, Heart-of-my-heart?”