“Your own people?” She replaced the barley cake on the hearthstone, laughing a little. “Have you not? You have been long enough in the lowlands. They say that at Venta there are streets of houses all in straight rows, and in the houses are tall rooms with painted walls, and Ambrosius the High King wears a cloak of the imperial purple.”
I laughed also, pulling at Cabal’s twitching ears. This woman was not like any that I had known before. “Do not hold the straightness of the Venta streets against me. Do not deny me a place in my mother’s world because I have a place in my father’s.”
PRESENTLY the three men and the walleyed bitch came to their supper, shouldering in like oxen out of the wet, with a silver bloom of mist drops hanging in their hair and the homespun and wolfskin of their garments, and took their places about the fire, squatting on their haunches in the spread fern. I had the only stool in the place, and they looked at me sidelong and upward, knowing me for who I was, and more silent even than I judged was usual with them because I was there.
The woman gathered the hot barley cakes into a basket, and unhooked the bronze stewpot and set it beside the hearth, and fetched hard white cow’s-milk cheese and a jar of thin heather beer. Then she poured her own share of the stew into a bowl, took a barley cake, and withdrew to the women’s side of the hearth, leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves on the men’s side.
It was the most silent meal that I have ever eaten. The men were tired, and wary in my presence like animals with a stranger’s smell among them; and on the far side of the fire, the woman kept her own dark counsels, though more than once when I glanced toward her, I knew that the instant before she had been watching me.
When we had thrown the bones to the dogs, and wiped the last drops of soup from the bottom of the crock with lumps of barley bannock, when the last lump of cheese was eaten and the beer jar drained, the farm men rose, and shouldered out once more into the night, bound, I supposed, for their own sleeping places somewhere among the byres. Thinking that maybe I should go too, I drew one leg under me to rise. But the woman had risen already, and was looking at me through the peat smoke. It seemed as though her eyes were waiting for mine; and when I met them, she shook her head, smiling a little. “Those are my servants, and when they have eaten they go to their own places; but you are my guest; therefore stay a while. See, I will bring you better drink than you had at supper.”
And as I watched her, she seemed to melt rather than draw back into the shadows under the half loft. She was an extraordinarily silent creature in all her movements, silken-footed as a mountain cat; and I guessed that she could be as fierce as one also. In a while she returned, bearing between her hands a great cup of polished birchwood darkened almost to black by age and use, and ornamented around the rim with beaten silver; and I rose as she came toward me, and bent my head to drink from the cup as she raised it, my hand resting lightly over hers in the gesture which custom demanded. It was more heather beer, but stronger and sweeter than that which I had drunk at supper; and there was an aromatic tang under the sweetness that I did not recognize. Maybe it was no more than the flavor of the wild garlic in the cheese lingering still in my mouth. Over the tilting rim of the cup I saw her looking at me with an odd intensity, but as I caught her gaze, I had once again that impression that she had drawn a veil behind her eyes so that I could not look in. . . .
I drained the cup, and released it again into her hands. “I thank you. The drink was good,” I said, my voice sounding strangely thickened in my own ears, and sat down once more on the skin-spread stool, stretching my legs to the fire.
The woman stood looking down at me; I felt her looking; and then she laughed, and tossed to Cabal some dark sweetmeat that she had been holding in the hollow of her hand. “There, for a dog that is better than heather beer,” and as Cabal (greed was his failing always) snapped it up, she sank to her knees beside me and letting the empty cup roll unheeded into the folds of her skirt, began to mend the fire. She settled on more peat, and heather snarls and birch bark to make a blaze, and as the dry stuff caught and the flames licked out along the strands of it, the light strengthened and leapt up and reached to finger the very houseplace walls. A strange mood of awareness was coming over me, so that it was as though I had one less skin than usual. I was aware as though they had been part of my own body, my own soul, of the houseplace brimming with light as the great cup had brimmed with heather beer, and with the same wild sweet half-forgotten, half-remembered tang of magic; I was aware of the dark thatch like sheltering wings, and beyond the golden circle the night and the mountains and the salt mist crowding in: the very texture of the pale night moth’s fur as it fluttered about the candle flame, and the last year’s sweetness of the sprig of dry bell heather in the fern by my foot.
There was another scent, too, that I had not noticed before, a sharp aromatic sweetness lacing the mingled homespun smells of thatch and cooking, wet wolfskins and peat smoke. It came, I realized, from the woman’s hair. I had not seen her take the pins from it, but it fell now all about her, a dark silken fall like the slide of water under the hawthorn trees, and she was playing with it idly, flinging it this way and that, combing it with her fingers, so that the disturbing sweetness came and went like breath, whispering to me in the firelight. . . .
“Tell me where I may find a place to sleep among your byres, and I will be going now,” I said, more loudly than was needful.
She looked up at me, holding aside the dark masses of her hair and smiling in the shadow of it. “Ah, not yet. You have been so long in coming.”
“So long in coming?” Something in me that stood aside from the rest knew even then that it was a strange thing for her to say; but the firelight and mist and the scent of her hair were in my head, and all things a little unreal, brushed with a dark moth-wing bloom of enchantment.
“I knew that you would come, one day.”
I frowned, and shook my head in a last attempt to clear it. “Are you a witch, then, to know the thing that has not yet come to happen?” And even as I spoke, another thought sprang to my mind. “A witch, or —”
Again she seemed to read my thinking; and she laughed up into my face. “A witch, or — ? Are you afraid to wake in the morning on the bare mountainside, and find three lifetimes gone by? Ah, but whatever happens tomorrow, surely tonight is sweet?” With the speed and liquid grace of a cat, she slip-turned from her kneeling position, and next instant was lying across my thighs, her strange ravaged face turned up to mine and her dark hair flowing over us both. “Are you afraid to hear the music of the Silver Branch? Are you afraid to hear the surging of Rhiannon’s birds that makes men forget?”
I had not noticed the color of her eyes before. They were deeply blue, and veined like the petals of the blue cranesbill flower, the lids faintly stained with purple like the beginning of corruption. “I think that you would not need the birds of Rhiannon to make men forget,” I said thickly, and bent toward her. She gave a low shuddering cry and reared up to meet me; she tore the bronze pin from the neck of her tunic so that it fell loose, and caught my hand and herself guided it down into the warm dark under the saffron cloth, to find the heavy softness of one breast.
The skin of her hands was hard, and her throat brown where it rose above her tunic, but the skin of her breast was silken, full and unblemished; and I could feel the whiteness of it. I dug in my fingers, and the delight under my hand set up a shivering echo like a small flame in my loins. I was not like Ambrosius; I had had my first girl when I was sixteen, and others since; not more perhaps, or less, than most of my kind. I do not think I ever harmed any of them, and for me, the taking had been sweet while it lasted and not much mattered afterward. But the thing in me that stood aside knew that this would be different, promising fiercer joys than ever I had known before, and that afterward, for all the rest of my life, the scars would last.