“Hai! Bedwyr, the chieftain would see the Black One’s paces, that he may judge of his mettle,” said the dealer, and I did not contradict him because, of all foolish reasons, I wanted to see how this young man with the surprising Celtic name handled such a horse.
The horse was of course already bitted and bridled, but not saddled. The boy swept me a swift low bow, and turning, set his hands on the great brute’s shoulders, and next instant was astride the glossy back, and catching the reins out of the dealer’s hands as the great brute began to dance and snort and sidle, swung him out onto the open trampled turf. Watching him as he put the Black One through his paces, I found myself judging the rider’s mettle as well as the horse’s, noting how lightly he handled the savage “wolf” bit, while never for one instant losing the control; and the way the Black One himself, who I was very sure would have been a plunging fury with almost any other man on his back, not only answered to his authority but seemed to enter into the thing with him as they wheeled and circled and changed paces, and came sweeping in a cloud of dust around the full circle of the open space; so that when at last they came to a trampling halt before me, I could have sworn that the horse, as well as the man, was laughing. . . .
“See, my lord, and he is not even sweating,” said the dealer’s voice in my ear; but I had to think of the long road home; above all, of the sea crossing. I longed to take this superb black thunderstorm, but if I did, he would almost certainly cost us a man’s life, or another horse’s, maybe more, to get him home.
“He is a good horse — with the right rider,” I said, aware of the man Bedwyr looking down at me under that flaring eyebrow, with a curious intensity widening his eyes, “but he is not good for my purpose.” And I turned on my heel and pushed my way into the crowd again, followed by Flavian in a cloud of mute protest, for he was still young enough to be sure that if one only wanted it badly enough, one could hook Orion out of the sky on the end of a cockle pin.
He looked back once, and sighed. “It’s a pity,” he said.
I glanced down at him, and because he looked so young and forlorn, found myself calling him by the name that had been his when he stood nose high to an otter hound. “It’s a pity, Minnow.” And felt that the pity of it included the man as well as the stallion.
But it was to be only a few hours later that I saw the man with the pale forelock again.
Every evening after the first, we had had our own small fire in the corner of the corral, for dried dung cakes cost little, and a sack of them went a surprisingly long way. And that evening we were gathered around it as usual, eating the evening meal, when a step came past the horse lines and a shadow loomed out of the crowded shifting dark, and took substance in the smoky light of the fire. The small licking flames seemed to leap up at his coming, and the pale lock of hair gave him the look of having a white swan’s feather caught at his temple; and I saw that he held in his hands a small thickset harp of black bog oak, on the strings of which the firelight played as on running water.
He came in the usual way of wandering harpers, who sit themselves uninvited at any man’s fire, sure of a welcome and a hearing and a meal for the song they sing; and making me the same swift bow that he had made in the horse ring, he folded onto his narrow haunches between Flavian and Bericus, settling his harp onto his knee and into the hollow of his shoulder before most of us were aware of him at all. We had been talking of the horses, cavalry talk, sweet and nutty on the tongue, but at his coming a gradual silence fell, and face after face was turned expectantly to the newcomer; horse talk one could have at any time, not so a harper. But having gained our whole attention, Bedwyr seemed in no hurry to begin his song, and remained for a few moments fondling the well-worn instrument, so that watching him I was reminded suddenly of a man making his falcon ready for flight. Then with no beginning, no awakening chord, it was as though he flung the bird free. But it was no falcon, and though it leapt upward in bursts and upward rushes as a lark leaps toward the sun, it was no lark either, but a bird of fire. . . .
Old Traherne was no mean harper, but I knew, even while my own heart leapt out on the winged and rushing notes, that this was harping such as I had not heard in Ambrosius’s hall.
Presently it sank and grew little, infinitely little, and sad. I watched a stalk of dry shepherd’s purse among the dung cakes catch light and glow for an instant into beauty stranger than ever it had had in life, before it crumbled into a pinch of blackened fibers. And the harp music seemed one with it, lamenting the loss of all beauty, that might fall in a single grass seed. . . . Now it was swelling again, rising to the heights of Oran Môr, the Great Music, and the lament was for lost causes and lost worlds and the death of men and gods; and as it grew, it began to change. Until now it had been sound without the limit of form, but now it was taking on a fugitive pattern, or rather the pattern was growing through the storm-rush of the music, and it was a pattern that I knew. The harper flung up his head and began to sing, his voice strong and true, with an odd brooding quality in it that matched the song. I had expected a song of the Goths and the South, forgetting his unlikely name. Instead, I found that I was listening to a song of my own people, and in the British tongue; an old nameless lament that our women sing at seed time to help the wheat to spring; for a dead hero, a dead savior, a dead god, for brightness laid in the dark and the dust and the long years rolling over. Why it should help the corn in its springing, we have forgotten with our minds, though our bones still remember; but in its way it is a song of death and rebirth. I had known it all my life, as well as I had known Ygerna’s small song of the birds on the apple spray; and as I had waited when I was a child for the wheat to spring again, for the rekindled hope of the ending, so I waited now for the promise of the hero’s return. “Out of the mists, back from the land of youth,” sang the harper, as though to himself. “Strong with the sound of trumpets under the apple boughs . . .“ I had heard that song so often ended on a crash of triumph as though the lost hero were already returned to his people; this time it ended on one clear note of distant hope that was like one star in a wild sky.
The harp song was silent, and the harper’s hand fell from the leaping strings to lie at rest on his knee. For a long moment we were all silent about the fire, and the sounds of the camp washed in upon us without breaking the stillness of our own circle. Then Owain leaned forward to remake the sinking fire, building the brown dung cakes upon each other with the grave and thoughtful deliberation that was very much a part of him, and the spell was broken, so that I was aware of the dark faces of the mule drivers gathered on the fringe of the firelight, and the angry squealing of a mule somewhere beyond; and close beside me the old merchant, . standing with his hands in his beard, and the faint aromatic smell that came from his robes as he rocked gently to and fro, his head cocked as though still to listen; and the murmur that came from him too, “Sa sa — so the women used to sing when I was a boy — singing the lament for Adonis, when the crimson anemones are springing from the rocks . . .” which was strange, for he understood no word of the British tongue.