“I — we must not be left here, the bairn and I — Artos, I am afraid!”
“Of what?” I bent close over her, and her words came muffled against my shoulder, so that I hoped Old Woman would not hear. I did not clearly hear myself, but I caught something about the babe, about three days in the Hollow Hills. And I tried to soothe and reassure her, putting back the damp hair from her forehead. “Listen, listen to me, love. These people are my friends; there is nothing here for you to be afraid of.”
“For me, maybe no — but for the babe. You heard what She said: you can hear the other one wailing now — over there against the wall. Artos, they hate this one because it is a girl child and strong, and comes of the Sun People, and theirs is a son and sickly —”
I dared not listen to any more. I kissed her and got up, refusing to see the look in her eyes. I had told her not to be afraid, but I knew that she was still afraid, though she made no more pleading; and there was nothing that I could do about it. I could not pass on to her my own certainty of friendship in this place, nor could I carry her off with me now, unless I wished to likely kill both her and the babe. A gray wave of helplessness broke over me, so that all my peace, like hers, was broken, as I turned to the entrance.
AT the appointed time, I took my gifts of gratitude to Druim Dhu’s village, and brought Guenhumara back to Trimontium.
Itha had tended her well, and she was already able to stand on her feet again and even walk a little, with my arm around her. Only she had a strange unchancy look about her eyes. She said nothing as to the three days and nights that I had left her there against her pleading; indeed for the rest of that day she scarcely spoke at all, but often seemed to be listening, and once I saw her bend her head to the babe as she was suckling it, and snuff the little warm body as a bitch snuffs the puppy against her flank to be sure that it is her own.
That night, when the lamp was out and the moon patterning the beaver skins across the bed, I remember asking her how it had gone with the sick child — for she had been waiting for me in the curve of the windbreak before the entrance hole, and I had not gone into the houseplace at all.
“Better,” she said. “It began to gather strength in the night, and Old Woman says that it will live now. Children mend so quickly. At sunrise they are in the doorway of death, and the next they are sitting up and crying for honey cake.” Her voice was hurried and breathless, the words tumbling a little over each other, running on: “So quickly — they mend so quickly — often I have seen it happen among the bairns in the women’s quarters . . .” And I knew that she was telling it to herself rather than to me, and that she was still afraid.
But when I asked her what was amiss, she only laughed and said Nothing — Nothing — Nothing, and shivered, though the night was not cold. I could feel the faint tense quivering under my outstretched hand on her flank, and wanted to draw her close and warm it away against my own body, but the bairn in the curve of her arm was between her and me.
Whatever the thing was, it passed — or Guenhumara locked it away in some inner place and buried the key; and by the ninth day, the bairn’s naming day, she seemed almost as she had been before it was born.
We called the little thing Hylin; there is almost always a Hylin among the women of the Royal House. And old Blanid, who had by then rejoined us, wept a good deal and talked of the day that Guenhumara had been named; and the whole of Trimontium demanded extra beer in which to wet the baby’s head, on promise of not burning down the fortress a second time. And I wondered if any of the women of the baggage train remembered a babe of her own, put out for the wolves. If they did, at least it did not prevent them from taking their full pleasure of the heather beer.
Indeed the last sore heads were scarcely sound again when the supply train came up from Corstopitum, bringing the whiter stores.
Bringing also, letters and news of the outside world. It was strange how, between the supply wagons, one first hungered after the world beyond the southern hills, and then almost forgot that it was there at all, until the next train got through. This one brought me letters from Ambrosius as usual, and one (he generally wrote about once a year) from Aquila; and both told the same story of increasing Saxon pressure, a new tide rising, a new wind setting from the Barbarian quarter, upon the Icenian coasts; a new restlessness among the southern settlements.
I think it had been in my mind all that end-of-summer that my work in the North was done, and now I knew it without doubt. “My plans of campaign had been turned toward the level horselands of the Iceni that the Saxons were already calling for their own Northfolk and Southfolk, before ever the sudden flare of revolt in Valentia had called me across the Wall. Now when the time for winter quarters was past, it would be time for turning south again, taking up the old campaigning plans where they had been laid down. . . . Time, perhaps, to be standing shield to shield with Ambrosius once more. . . .
On our last evening in Trimontium there was a soft growing rain that later turned to mist, and the green plover calling unseen from the skirts of Eildon. There was a certain sadness over most of us, that evening, a sense of leave-taking; and as the mist thickened, it was as though the familiar moors, knowing that we no more belonged here, had withdrawn themselves from us and turned their faces away; even the roughhewn walls and the ragged thatch that dripped mist-beads from the reed ends had lost something of substance and reality, and the fortress was already returning to the ghost camp that it had been before we came.
“It might have waited until we were gone,” Bedwyr said, looking about him as we made our way up from the baggage lines where everything stood in readiness, toward the mess hall at suppertime.
“The mist?” I said. “It will clear by dawn, it’s not the sort that lasts.” Because I did not want to understand what he meant.
We passed the mound where the girl of the Hollow Hills lay, and the horses above her. I had never known her name. The Dark People do not speak the names of the dead. It was grassed over now, and brambles arched about it, and it looked as time-rooted as the rest of old red Trimontium; the small white flower that was nameless also was in bud already, the bud of a white star among gray soft hound’s-ear leaves. And I had the sudden foolish thought that I hoped she would not be lonely when the cooking fires were quenched and there were no more voices in the Place of Three Hills.
When we got back to the mess hall, there beside the fire, having appeared out of nowhere in his usual manner, sat Druim Dhu in his best green-dyed catskin kilt, white clay patterns on his arms and forehead, and about his neck his finest necklace of dried berries and blue glass beads and woodpecker feathers.
He sprang to his feet when I came close, and stood in the firelight holding up the bow that had been resting across his knees, and conscious of his decorated beauty as a flower or a woman might be.
“Is it a festival?” I asked.
“Na, I do honor to my friends that are going away.” But the dark eyes were inscrutable as ever; and even now, though I would have trusted him with my life, I did not know whether the strange forehead patterns and the glowing necklaces had been put on in sorrow, for a kind of parting gift, or in triumph that the Dark People were left masters of their own hills once more.
When the food was ready he ate with us. Silent as usual — but indeed it was a somewhat silent meal for most of us, though from time to time the silence flared up into sudden noisy horseplay and somewhat unreal merriment — and after the meal was over and he had eaten his fill, and most of the men had scattered again to the various tasks and preparations that were still to be accomplished before tomorrow’s march, we walked together toward the postern gate above the river, and I went out with him a short way onto the track.