“Now bless your news,” the lady wept, and even Scaga’s frown was eased. Meredydd came and offered her hands to him in welcome, but he felt Scaga’s heavy hand on his shoulder, pulling him away.
“There is more to hear,” said Scaga. “This man came over the walls somehow, with no armor, no arms—unmarked through the lines outside. There are questions should still be asked, my lady, however good and fair the counsel seems. I beg you, ask him how he came.”
For a moment doubt shadowed the lady’s eyes.
“My name is Ciaran,” he said, “Lord Ciaran of Caer Donn is my father. And as to how I came—lightly, as you see; by stealth. While your enemies struck at the gates—I came another way. I shall show you. But armed men could not take it.”
He was not used to lies. He felt fouled, wounded when the lady pressed his hands. “You will show us where,” Scaga said, and gave him in his turn a bearish embrace, gazed at him with emotion welling up—hope, it might be, where hope had been scant for them before. Branwyn too came and kissed his cheek; and weapons were done away as men came at last to clap him on the back and to hug one another for joy. A cheer lifted in the hall, and there was such desperate happiness—He felt a stirring through the jewel too, a presence, a distressing realization that he had said nothing on his own which ought to have convinced them and so relieved their hearts, but that some strangeness overlay him and his words, making them better than they were.
They gave him wine, and brought him upstairs to a princely room—her lord’s when he was young, the Lady Meredydd said; and true, everything there showed some woman’s love, the fine-pricked stitchery of coverlet and tapestries, the hangings of the bed. Branwyn herself brought a warm rug for the floor, and maids brought water for washing, while Lady Meredydd with her own hands brought him bread hot from the morning’s baking. He took it gratefully, while the lady and her daughter lingered to ply him with questions, how fared Evald and kinsmen, cousins, friends, men of the hold, a hundred questions during which maids eavesdropped and men-at-arms contrived to listen on pretext of errands. Some few men he knew; sometimes the news was sad and pained him; and most often he knew only a name, or less—but it gave him joy when he could report some loved one safe and well. Scaga’s son was one, for Scaga bent enough to ask. “He is well,” Ciaran said. “He led a good portion of Caer Wiell’s men at Dun na h-Eoin, first of those that broke the shields of the Bradhaeth while lord Evald cut off their retreat. He came out of the battle well enough; he was by lord Evald when we parted, in the King’s own tent.” The old warrior did not smile to hear it, but his eyes were bright.
“He must sleep,” Meredydd declared at last. “Surely he has travelled hard.”
“I fare well enough,” Ciaran said, for he ached after human company, for noise of voices, for all these sights and sounds of humankind.
“Before he sleeps,” said Scaga, “he must show us this weak place in our wall.”
The warmth drained from him. He nodded consent, not knowing what he was to do, but compelled to go. He swallowed a bit of bread gone dry in his throat, drank a last sip of the wine and set the cup down. “Aye,” he said. “Of course. That will not wait.”
Scaga rose, waiting at the door. Ciaran took his leave of the ladies, walked with the old warrior through the hall, his heart beating hard within his breast.
“I do not know if I can find it easily,” he said to prepare his excuse, and hating the lie. “From all the turnings of this place inside . . . I cannot be sure.”
Scaga said nothing, which seemed Scaga’s way. It gave him no comfort And when they had come up on the walls, Ciaran looked about him in deep distress, seeking something to confirm his lie.
“Look east,” the softest of whispers came to him, like the touch of a breeze. “Turn east and look down.”
He walked that way along the battlement, with Scaga treading heavily beside him. He paused at a place and looked down, where the stonework of the walls was oldest and roughest, where here and there brush had rooted itself in the gaps between the stones and man-made walls thrust crazily above the jagged stone of the underlying rocks. Of a sudden his eye picked out a way, weaving from one such foothold to another among brush rooted in the wall, a peril to the hold. “There,” he said. “We are a mountain hold, we of Caer Donn. And I climbed cliffs as a lad. There, do you see, Scaga? There and there and there.”
Scaga nodded. “Aye. That does want clearing, and watching. Our eyes must have been blind to it. A man sees things too often and so not at alclass="underline" I had not marked how the brush had grown.”
“Rains, perhaps,” Ciaran said hoarsely, but in his heart he knew differently. He shivered, for his wool shirt was not enough against the wind, and felt Scaga’s friendly grip fall upon his shoulder.
“Come. Our thanks, young sir. Come in.”
He walked, glad of the wind-breaking shelter of walls on the one side of the battlements, gazed back as they walked, and suddenly down at an opening out of the walk. The courtyard was below, jammed with livestock and with village folk, a noise which welled up at him thinly, the wail of children and the listless bleating of goats. But it was a well-ordered place, Caer Wiell, and some of the men on the walls were country folk, light-armed, but goodly looking men, quick of eye and brisk about their business. Women were climbing up the inside scaffoldings which gave access to the battlements before the gates, bearing baskets of bread. There was then no hunger here, nor would there ever be thirst, because of the spring which named the hill, out of reach of the enemy. Ciaran felt much cheered by what he saw of the defense, even with the ominous smoke of enemy fires rising before the walls. He walked farther out than Scaga would have had him go, walked the wall to the area of the main gates and looked west.
Then he was less cheered, for the extent of the black ruin before the walls. The grass and fields were burned and trampled into mire. The enemy had carried away their dead and wounded; no corpse was left but the carcasses of slain horses, to draw the black birds; and beyond that trodden ground the hills were seared with fire, villages and farms burned, surely, from here to Caer Damh. The smoke rose in countless plumes from the hills, where a vast host camped, a crescent of smokes from the Caerbourne’s forested verge to the barren hills to the right, that spread itself on the winds and darkened the sky.
The attack could not have been this far advanced when he was on the road, riding from the King. He had passed one night—surely one night—in Eald.
How much of time? he asked that sometime whisper in the stone, feeling uncertainty all about him. How long did you hold me?He was betrayed. He knew it in his worst fears.
The fires would soon grow more and more, as Dryw and the King over the hills drove others into retreat. Or had it happened already? And what more had happened, and what men he just had named living might have died? And what stayed the King from coming?
Hold here.How old was the message, that Scaga was so grim, that lady Meredydd and her daughter caught so desperately at this hope he gave them? And how long had the King delayed to come?
“It seemed the fires had grown in number,” said Scaga out of his silence. “Now we know why.”
“Aye,” Ciaran said, wishing to say nothing at all.
He went back into the tower, and sat in the hall at the table by the fire, victim again of questions from those humbler folk who had not asked them before; and a few common folk who served there came only to look at him with their hopes unspoken in their eyes, and to steal quickly away. He sat there most of that long day, alone some of the hours, and sitting with Scaga in the afternoon, who brought some of his trusted men to question him at length—how great the strength of the enemy, what condition their arms, what number yet might come. He answered what questions he could as wisely as he could, hinting nothing, and was glad when they had gone away.