He looked at me, slantwise a little, under down-drawn brows, while the dogs — seeing that the other was a bitch, I had released Cabal — walked around each other in inquiring circles. “She is for-ever wandering away. My thanks, stranger.” The boy’s gaze moved over me appraisingly, and fastened upon the heavy gold Medusa-head brooch that clasped my tunic at the shoulder, then returned to my face. Clearly he wanted to know what a man with a brooch like that was doing alone in the mountains, but a kind of sullen courtesy forbade his asking.
I said, “I was caught way up the glen yonder by the magic mist — I am from Nant Ffrancon over the mountains. Will you give me shelter for the night?”
“The shelter is not mine to give; you must ask the woman.”
But I had turned in beside him, after the cattle. We were within the gate gap now, and a man who by his face was the boy’s father had appeared to help him close the entrance with its dry thornbush for the night. He too stared at me slantwise under his brows, while the cattle milled around us. They seemed a very silent couple.
I was in a farmsteading like many another below the mountains; a huddle of low-browed bothies of turfs and gray stone, roofed with a dark rough thatch of heather; store sheds, byres and house-place, all huddled within the turf walls that gave nighttime shelter from the wolves and the dark. But I had never been in this steading before, this steading with the white wetness of the mountain mist smoking out of its hunched shoulders. And for a moment I had the unpleasant fancy that it lay at the very heart of the mist as a spider lies at the heart of its web; and that when the mist lifted, there would be only bare hillside where the steading had been.
But even as the thought brushed across my mind, I knew suddenly that I was being watched — watched, that is, by someone other than the man and the boy. I turned quickly, and saw a woman standing in the houseplace doorway. A tall woman clad in a tunic of rough saffron wool worked about the neck and sleeves with crimson, which gave her the look of a flame. A heavy mass of dark hair was loosely knotted about her head, and her eyes looked coolly back into mine out of a face which bore what I took at that first sight to be the burned-out remains of great beauty. Yet she could not, I thought, be more than a few years older than myself, twenty-seven or eight, maybe. She stood with one hand on the leather door apron which still quivered where it had just fallen back into place behind her; yet there was a stillness about her, as though she had been standing there a very long time, maybe a lifetime or so — waiting.
This, clearly, was the woman of whom I must ask my night’s shelter. But she spoke first, low-voiced and with less courtesy than her herdboy. “Who are you, and what do you come seeking here?”
“For the one, men call me Artos the Bear,” I said. “For the other, a night’s shelter if you will give it to me. I am from Nant Ffrancon over the mountains, and the mist came upon me unawares.”
I had the odd impression, as I spoke, that something had flashed open behind her eyes; but before I could tell what lay beyond, it was as though she veiled them again, deliberately, so that I should not look in. She stood as still as before, save that her gaze moved over me, from my head to my rawhide shoes. Then she smiled, and drew aside the door apron. “So — we have heard that Artos the Bear was running among the horse herds of Nant Ffrancon. It grows cold since the mist came down; let you come in to the hearth fire, and be welcome.”
“Good fortune on the house, and on the woman of the house.” I had to duck low to pass in through the doorway, but once inside, with the thick peat reek stinging in my throat and eyes, the house-place was roomy enough to be half lost in shadows beyond the reach of the firelight.
“Wait,” the woman said, moving past me. “1 will make more light.” She disappeared into the farther gloom, and I heard her moving there, softly, as though on furred paws. Then she was back, and stooping to kindle a dry twig at the central hearth. The twig blossomed into flame at the tip, and from the flame-flower she kindled the waxen candle she had brought with her from the shadows. The young candle flame sank and turned blue as she shielded it with her hollowed hand, then sprang erect, and the shadows crowded back under the deep thatch as she reached up and set it on the edge of the half loft in the crown of the roof.
I saw a spacious living hut, the usual standing loom beside the door with a piece of striped cloth on it, piled sheepskins on the bed place against the farther wall, a carved and roughly painted chest. The woman drew forward a stool spread with a dappled deerskin to the flagged space beside the hearth. “Let my lord be seated; there will be food by and by.”
I murmured something by way of thanks, and sat down, Cabal watchful at my feet; and sitting there with my elbows comfortably on my knees, I fell to watching her as, seemingly brushing off all consciousness of me, she returned to the cooking of the evening meal. Watching her so, as she knelt in the fire glow, turning from the herb-scented stew in its copper cauldron to the barley cakes browning on the hearthstone, I was puzzled. Her tunic was of rough homespun, scarcely finer, though certainly brighter in color, than that which any peasant woman might have worn, and the hands with which she turned the barley cakes were rough-skinned, the hands of a peasant woman in texture though not in shape; and yet I could not see her as woman to the man outside. Also, the more I looked at her face in the firelight, the more my mind was teased with a half-memory like a fugitive scent that always eluded me, just as I thought I had it. Yet I was sure that I had never seen her before. I should never have forgotten that ruined beauty once I had seen it. Maybe she was like someone? But if so, who? I had an uneasy feeling that in some way it mattered deeply that I should remember, that a great deal depended on it. . . . But the more I tried to lay hold of it, the further the nagging memory slipped away.
At last I turned from it to the puzzle that could be more easily solved. “The man I saw outside . . .” I began, and left the end of the sentence trailing, for I was feeling my way.
She looked up at me, her eyes bright and faintly mocking, as though she knew what was in my mind. “Is my servant. So is the boy, and so is Uncle Bronz, whom you will see in a while. I am the only woman here, and so I cook for my servants — and for my guest.”
“And for the lord of the steading?”
“There is no lord of the steading.” She sat back on her heels and stared into my face; the hot barley cake must have scorched her fingers, but she seemed not to feel it, as though her whole awareness were in her eyes. “We are such barbarians, here in the mountains where Rome’s feet seldom trampled, that a woman may possess both herself and her own property, if she be strong enough to hold them.”
She spoke as one half scornfully explaining the ways of her country to strangers, and I felt the blood rise in my forehead at her tone. “I have not forgotten the customs of my own people.”