The moonlight broke in a silver wave against the far side of the courtyard, whitening the leaves of the rose in its great jar and casting its tracery of shadow in perfect echo on the wall behind it. The door of the atrium stood open and the lantern light spilled its yellow pool across the colonnade, together with the sound of a woman keening. Guenhumara came into the doorway, and stood outlined against the light waiting for me; but it was not she who was keening.
I had checked my headlong pace, and came across the courtyard at a walk — it seemed very wide, a vast space like an arena — and up the step of the colonnade into the lantern light. I remember trying not to hear the keening, trying not to hear its meaning in my heart and loins and belly.
“The bairn?” I croaked; and put out a hand to steady myself against the doorpost, for I was almost as near to foundering as the horse that I had ridden half to death that night. “How is it with the bairn?”
Guenhumara never moved. She said, “The bairn died an hour ago.”
GUENHUMARA was still standing in the doorway. I said something, or tried to, I do not know what, and she replied in a hoarse flat tone that had nothing of her voice’s usual beauty. “Why did you not come before?”
“I came as soon as I could, Guenhumara.”
“I suppose you had some righting to finish first.” Still the same hoarse level tone.
“Yes,” I said. And then as she never moved from the doorway, “Let me in, Guenhumara.”
She moved back quickly, before I could touch her with the hands I held out, and I lurched through into the atrium. The room seemed strange, the lantern set low so that the shadows leapt gigantic up the walls; making the blue and russet saint in the tapestry stir as though on the edge of life, and I was vaguely aware of the black huddle that was Blanid in the corner, rocking to and fro and keening as the Northern women keen for their dead, and another woman on the edge of the lantern light, who I suppose must have been Teleri.
“Where is she?” I said.
“In her usual sleeping place.”
I turned to the open doorway of the sleeping chamber, and went in, all but stumbling over Margarita, the boarhound bitch, who lay across the threshold. There was a quietness in the room that seemed to shut out the keening from the atrium, as though it had passed beyond such things. There was a scent of burning herbs, and the rushlight on its pricket glimmered like a small high star, its yellow light quenched and washed away by the silver tide of moonlight that flooded in through the window and lay across the bed. Small Hylin lay as she had always done, in her soft nest of beaver skin at the head of the bed, but straight and stiffly neat, not curled like a kitten. Why could they not have left her thumb in her mouth, I wondered dazedly, and buried her as one buries a favorite hound, in the familiar position of his lifetime sleeping? Cabal, who had followed me in, thrust forward his muzzle inquiringly, then looked up into my face and whimpered, crouching away into the shadows. Margarita had crawled to my feet, whimpering also, and pawing at the bed rugs, frightened by what she could not understand. Guenhumara stood at the foot of the bed and never moved.
The stillness seeped with an icy chill into my heart, numbing it, and I could have turned away I think without much show of my grief. . . . Then a nightingale began to sing somewhere in the tangled wilderness of the old palace gardens, and the white throbbing ecstasy of the notes pierced through the merciful numbness with a sharp sword of beauty that was more than I could bear. And I knelt down by the bed and drove my face into the soft darkness of the fur beside the little still face that no longer looked like Hylin’s, and cried.
The moonlight was graying into the cobweb darkness of day-spring when I stumbled up from my knees, and the song of robin and willow wren was waking in the wild garden. Guenhumara still stood at the bed foot, unmoving as the Nine Sisters on the moors above her father’s Dun and as remote. I would have put my arms around her, but she stepped back, saying quickly, “Na, don’t touch me, not yet.”
And I let my arms fall to my sides. “I could not come before, Guenhumara.”
“Oh, I know,” she said drearily. “All that I accepted for part of the bargain on the day that you took me from my father’s hearth. . . . It was of no great matter that you were not here, it was not you she cried for — she cried for Bedwyr and his harp, before she fell asleep.”
The blow was struck quite deliberately, and she was not a woman given to striking with such weapons. Suddenly I had a panic sense of Guenhumara’s going away from me, and I caught hold of her whether she would or no. “Guenhumara, what is it? For God’s sake tell me what you are holding against me!”
For a moment, standing there beside the Small One’s body, she put out all her strength to fling me off; then the resistance went out of her, and she said in a low wail, “Why did you leave us those three days and nights in the Fairy Howe?”
“Because you were both too weak to be carried off within an hour of bearing and being born. If I had carried you off then, I might so easily have lost you both.”
“If you had, then at least I should have died very happy, and the bairn would have escaped all that she has suffered these past months,” she said. “As it is, I think that you have lost us both, now,” and the chill of her words struck me through as the nightingale’s song had done.
“Guenhumara, cannot you understand? I left you safe among friends for three days, because I was afraid for you if I did otherwise. In God’s name tell me, is that so great a sin?”
“Safe among friends,” she flashed. “Because you were afraid? What do you know of being afraid? Oh yes, you know the tightening of the belly that comes before battle. You have never known in all your big trampling sword-smiting life, what it is to be afraid as I was afraid, those three long days and nights! I begged you — I knew how it would be, and I begged you to take us away, but you would not listen, you would not even hear — and now the bairn is dead.”
“Because she spent her first three days of life in a house of the Dark People? Heart-of-my-heart, how can you believe such a thing?”
“Everyone knows what the Dark People do to the children of men — it was in the very air of that place. And on the last night, the third night, I dreamed dark dreams and woke with a start, and they had taken the babe from my arms! That terrible old woman was sitting by the fire, holding her up and crooning over her — a little dark song that made my heart beat cold. And there was a man there, with a badger’s pelt over his head and shoulders and his face painted in badger stripes, and he was making signs on her forehead with his thumb as a potter marks clay; and Itha and all the other women were there, and they threw herbs on the fire so that it leapt up with a strange bitter smell and curled all about the bairn. I cried out, and Itha brought her and gave her back to me and said that I had dreamed ill dreams and must sleep again, and despite all that I could do, I slept as she bade me.”
“Anwylin, Anwylin, there was no waking; it was all the same ill dream.”
“The smell of the bitter smoke was still about her in the morning.”
“Then it was some ceremony of purifying. All faiths have their hidden ceremonies.”
“They were drawing her life out,” Guenhumara said. “I know. They were drawing her life out, to give it to their own sick child — it began to mend next day — and they left her not enough for three years.”