Branwen showed no hint of fear. When I glanced back I saw her always serene, sitting the neat-footed mule stolidly, with an unmoved calm that held no trace of uneasiness. I have said little about Branwen, because I have to confess that I remember very little about her. Thinking back now over the span of years, I see only a brown head bent over the baby she carried, a rounded cheek and downcast eyes and a shy voice. She was a quiet girl who — though she talked easily enough to Ralf — rarely addressed me of her own will, being painfully in awe of me both as prince and enchanter. She seemed to have no inkling of any risk or danger in our journey, nor did she seem stirred — as most girls would have been — by the excitement of travelling abroad to a new country. Her imperturbable calm was not due to confidence in myself or Ralf; I came to see that she was meek and biddable to the point of stupidity, and her devotion to the baby was such as to blind her to all else. She was the kind of woman whose only life is in the bearing and rearing of children, and without Arthur she would, I am sure, have suffered bitterly over the loss of her own baby. As it was, she seemed to have forgotten this, and spent the hours in a kind of dreamy contentment that was exactly what Arthur needed to make the discomforts of the journey tolerable.
Towards noon we were deep in the forest. The branches laced thick overhead, and in summer would have shut out the sky like a pitched shield, but above the bare boughs of winter we could see a pale and shrouded point of light where the sun struggled to be through. I watched for a sheltered place where we could leave the road without showing too many traces, and presently, just as the baby woke and began to fret, saw a break in the undergrowth and turned my horse aside.
There was a path, narrow and winding, but in the sparse growth of winter it was passable. It led into the forest for a hundred paces or so before it divided, one path leading on deeper among the trees, the other — no more than a deer-trod — winding steeply up to skirt the base of a rocky spur. We followed the deer-trod. This picked its way through fallen boulders tufted with dead and rusty fern, then led upwards round a stand of pines, and faded into the bleached grass of a tiny clearing above the rock. Here, in a hollow, the sun came with a faint warmth. We dismounted, and I spread a saddle-cloth in the most sheltered spot for the girl, while Ralf tethered the horses below the pines and threw down feed from the hay nets. Then we sat ourselves down to eat. I sat at the lip of the hollow, with my back against a tree, a post from which I could see the main path running below the rock. Ralf stayed with Branwen. It had been a long time since we had broken our fast, and we were all hungry. The baby, indeed, had begun to yell lustily as the mule scrambled up the steep path. Now he found his cries stifled against the girl's nipple, and fell silent, sucking busily.
The forest was very quiet. Most wild creatures lie still at noon. The only thing moving was a carrion crow, which flapped heavily down onto a pine above us, and began to caw. The horses finished their feed and dozed, hip-shotten, heads low. The baby still fed, but more slowly, drowsing into milky sleep. I leaned back against the stem of the tree. I could hear Branwen murmuring to Ralf. He said something, and I heard her laugh, then through the murmur of the two young voices I caught another, distant, sound. Horses, at the trot.
At my word the boy and girl fell abruptly silent. Ralf was on his feet in the blink of an eye, and kneeling beside me to watch the path below. I signed Branwen to stay where she was. I need not have troubled; she had turned a wondering look on us, then the baby hiccupped, and she held him to her shoulder, patting him, all her attention on him again. Ralf and I knelt at the edge of the clearing, watching the path below.
The horses — there were two of them by the sound of it — could not be wood-cutters' beasts nor the slow train of the charcoal-burners. Trotting horses, in the Perilous Forest, meant only one thing, trouble. And travellers who carried, as we did, gold for the baby's keep were quarry for any outlaws and disaffected men. Hampered as we were by Branwen and Arthur, both fighting and flight were impossible. Nor was it easy, with the baby, to keep silent and let danger pass by so closely. I had made it clear to Ralf that whatever happened he was to stay with the girl and, at the least hint of danger, leave it to me to devise some way of drawing the danger away. Ralf had protested, mutinied, then finally seen the sense of it and sworn to obey.
So now when I whispered, “Only two, I think. If they don't come up this way, they'll not see us. Get to the horses. And for God's sake tell the girl to keep the baby quiet,” he merely nodded, melting back from my side. He stooped to whisper to Branwen, and I saw her nod placidly, shifting the child to her other breast. Ralf slipped like a shadow among the pines where the horses stood. I waited, watching the path.
The riders were approaching. There was no other sound except the crow, still cawing high in the pine tree. Then I saw them. Two horses, trotting single file; poor beasts, heavy bred and none too well fed by the look of them, careless how they put their feet, and having to be hauled up by their cursing riders at every hole or root across the path. It was a fair enough guess that the men were outlaws. They were as unkempt as their beasts, and looked half savage, and dangerous. They were dressed in what looked like old uniforms, and on the arm of one of them was a dirty badge, half torn away. It looked like Gorlan's. The fellow in the rear rode carelessly, lolling in the saddle as if half drunken, but the man in front pricked at the alert, as such men learn to do, his head moving from side to side like that of a questing dog. He held a bow at the ready. Through the rotten leather of the sheath at his thigh I saw the long knife, burnished to a killing point.
They were almost below me. They were passing. There had been no sound from the baby, nor from our horses, hidden among the pines. Only the carrion crow, balancing high in the sunshine, scolded noisily.
I saw the fellow with the bow lift his head. He said something over his shoulder, in a thick accent I could not catch. He grinned, showing a row of rotten teeth, then lifted his bow, notched it, and sent an arrow whizzing into the pine. It hit. The crow shot upwards off the bough with a yell, then fell, transfixed. It landed within two paces of Branwen and the child, flapped for a second or two, then lay still.
As I dodged back and ran for the pines I heard both men laughing. Now the marksman would come to retrieve his arrow. Already I could hear him forcing his beast through the underbrush. I picked up the arrow, crow and all, and flung it out over the edge of the hollow. It landed down among the boulders. From the path the man could not have seen where the bird fell; it was a chance that he might believe it had fluttered there, and would ride no farther. I saw Branwen's eyes, startled and wondering, as I ran past her. But she did not stir, and the baby slept at her breast. I gave her a sign which was meant to convey reassurance, approval, and warning all in one, and ran for my horse.
Ralf was holding the beasts quiet, heads together, muffling eyes and nostrils with his cloak. I paused beside him, listening. The outlaws were coming on. They must not have seen the crow; they came on without pausing, making for the pines.