Teirn withdrew an arrow. The missiles of the Hill Folk are short, flint-tipped reeds fletched with raven feathers, unmistakable and deadly; and Hill Folk accuracy is legendary. The tallfolk tribes in the north have learned great respect for the fragile-looking arrows and the unerring hand that draws the bow.
I bent to the bundle and took the arrow, snapping it in the centre and tucking the two ends under the rawhide belt. Then, as an afterthought, I removed the silver wolfshead brooch from the cloak and handed the bundle to Elac. 'There, take this to tallfolk camp.'
He looked at the bundle and at the camp below. 'Lugh-Sun is rising,' I told him. 'Do take it now before tallfolk-brothers wake.'
He ducked his head. 'They will see me not.' With that, he scrambled over the ledge and was gone. A few moments later we saw him running towards the camp. Creeping with all the stealth and silence of a shadow, Elac entered the sleeping camp and, in an act of impulsive bravery typical of him, carefully placed the bundle beside the head of one of the sleeping warriors.
He returned to the ledge in no time and we returned to the rath a moment later. It took everything in me to keep from looking back.
I could only hope the fact that my clothes were neatly folded and deposited in their camp would somehow indicate that I was alive and knew my searcher's whereabouts but could not come to them myself. There was every chance that my message would go awry, but I trusted the Great God and hoped I had not made things worse.
Something changed inside me that day. For in giving up my clothes, it was as if I also gave up the idea of rescue. Curiously, I became more content to stay. And although I still grew heartsick and moody from time to time, perhaps I, too, began believing my presence with the Hawk People had a purpose. After that day, I no longer contemplated escape, and eventually came to accept my capture.
I did not see the searchers again, and soon after the fire of Samhain the fhain left for their winter pastures in the north. It made no sense to me why they should come south for the summer and travel north to winter, but that is what they did.
At the time, I did not know that certain regions of the north country can be as mild as any place in the south. But I soon learned that not all the land above the Wall is the bleak, rock-strewn and windblown wasteland that most people think it is. There are corners as lush and comfortable as the best land in all Britain. It was to one of these corners that we came, riding our shaggy ponies and driving our tough little sheep before us.
A crannog is not much different from a rath, save that it is actually hollowed into the heart of the hill. It is also larger; it
had to be, for we shared it with our ponies and sheep on the coldest days. Ideally placed in a secluded glen, the crannog appears, to tallfolk eyes, as just another hill among many. There was good grazing for the sheep and ponies, and a stream which emptied into a nearby sea estuary.
The crannog was dark and warm and though the winter wind whined at night as it searched the rocks and crannies for places its cold fingers could reach, we lay wrapped in our furs and fleeces around the fire, listening to Gern-y-fhain tell of the Elder Days, before the Roman-men came with their swords and built their roads and fortresses, before the bloodlust came on men to make them war with one another, before ever the tallfolk came to the Island of the Mighty.
Listen, she would say, I will tell you of the time before time when the world was new-made and the Prytani ran free and food was plentiful to find and our parents smiled on all their child-wealth, when the Great Snow was shut up in the north and troubled Mother's firstborn not at all…
And she would begin reciting her tale, repeating in her tone and cadence and inflection the ages-old memory of her people, Unking them with a past impossibly remote, but alive in her words. There was no telling how old the story was, for the Hill Folk spoke of all events the same simple, immediate way. What a Gern described might have taken place ten-thousand summers ago, or it might have happened yesterday. Indeed, it was all the same to them.
One moon waxed and waned, and another, and one day just before dusk it began to snow. Elac and Nolo and I went down to the valley with the dogs to herd the livestock back to the crannog. We had just begun when I heard Nolo shout; I turned to see him pointing off down the valley at riders approaching through the swirling snow.
Elac made a flattening motion with his hand and I saw Nolo notch an arrow to his bowstring, crouch, and… disappear. He simply vanished, becoming one more rock or turvey hillock beside the stream. I crouched, too, in the way they had taught me, wondering whether I might be as easily mistaken for a stone. The dogs barked and Elac whistled, silencing them instantly.
Three tallfolk riders clopped up on leggy, starved-looking mounts. Their leader said something, Elac replied and then they began speaking in a much abused approximation of the Hill Folk tongue. 'We come to ask Hill Folk magic,' the rider explained in his halting, broken speech.
'Why?' asked Elac placidly.
'Our chieftain's second wife dies. She has the fever and will keep no food.' He looked at Elac doubtfully. 'Will your Wise Woman come?'
'I will ask her.' He shrugged, adding, 'But likely she will not find it worthwhile to make healing magic for a tallfolk woman.'
'Our chief says he will give four bracelets of gold if the Gern will come.'
Elac frowned disdainfully, as if to say 'Such trinkets are horse manure to us' – although I knew the Prytani vafced tallfolk gold and prized it when they could get it. 'I will ask,' he repeated. 'You go now.'
'We will wait.'
'No. You go now,' insisted Elac. He did not want the tallfolk to see which hill our crannog was in.
'It is our chief!' replied the rider.
Elac shrugged again and turned away, making a pretence of going back to his sheep gathering. The riders whispered among themselves for a moment and then the leader said, 'When? When will you tell her?'
'When tallfolk go back to their huts.'
The riders wheeled their horses and rode away. Elac waited until they were gone and then motioned us forward. Nolo replaced his arrow in the quiver and we herded the sheep together and drove them back to the crannog. The others had already brought the horses in, so Elac wasted no time in speaking to Gern.
'The tallfolk chiefs wife is fevered,' he told her. 'Four gold bracelets if you will heal her.'
'She must be very fevered,' replied Gern. 'But I will go to her.' And she rose and made her way out of the crannog at once. Nolo, Elac, Vrisa, and I followed.
By the time we arrived at the tallfolk settlement on the estuary, it was almost dark. The chiefs house stood on timber stilts amidst a handful of lesser dwellings built at the very edge of the reeking mudflats. Vrisa, Elac, and Nolo accompanied Gern; I had come to hold the ponies, but once we arrived and Gern looked around, she indicated that I was to join them in the chiefs house.
A filthy skin hung over the door. At Elac's whistle this door-flap was drawn back and the man who had come to us in the valley emerged to motion us in. The round timber hut contained a single large room with a fire stone in the centre. Wind sifted through the poorly-thatched roof and the unfilled gaps in the wattle, making the room damp and chill. The shells of mussels and oysters, and fishbones and scales lay trampled on the floor. The chieftain sat beside the sooty dried-dung fire with two women, each clutching a dirty, squawling infant to her breast. The chief grunted and gestured across the room where a woman lay on a pallet of rushes piled high with furs.
Gern clucked when she saw the woman. She was not old, but the dubious honour of producing heirs for the chief had aged her beyond her years. And now she lay in her bed aflame with fever, eyes sunken, limbs trembling, her skin pale and yellow as the fleece under her head. She was dying. Even I – who at the time lacked any knowledge of healing – could see that she would not last the night.