'Tress thinks the same. She believes the meaning of it will become clear to me, eventually."
"What was that?"
I cocked my head, wishing for the hundredth time in my life that I had the sharp hearing of my brother Ambrose. "I didn't hear anything."
"I did. There it is again. It's the others, finally."
Sure enough, moments later, I heard the first sounds of our approaching reinforcements making their way up the hillside to where we waited.
As soon as they arrived—Philip and some forty of his infantry, with Arthur and Bedwyr in the lead on horseback—we split them up into groups of six and led them into the forest, following the clear-marked blood trail of the wounded beast. Those of us who had been mounted left our mounts tethered in the clearing, safely distanced from the bloodied area where we had found Rufio. Philip walked by my side at the point of the hunt. The others, seven groups of six, spread out behind us, each successive pair of groups farther out on the flanks of those ahead, so that we formed a sweep that would have been a hundred paces wide, had we been able to proceed in order. The steeply pitched hillside, however, densely treed as it was, made any kind of orderly progress impossible.
"What's that?" Philip had seen something, and I turned immediately to see where he pointed. I saw the gleam of metal in a thicket that our quarry had charged through, arid we had found our missing sword. From the streaks of blood on the blade and the increased profusion of blood on the grass all around, it was clear that the cross- hilt had snagged in the bushes and been wrenched free as the bear passed on.
"It has to be dead," Philip muttered. "It must be. This blood's been here since yesterday and there's too much of it around for the thing to have survived. And look, when the sword came out of the wound, it must have split it wide open. Look how the blood is so much thicker here, beyond the point where we found the sword." He glanced at me. "Don't you agree?"
I nodded, and he raised his voice, shouting to his men. "Stay sharp! The animal's close by. Logic says it must be dead, but until we've skinned the carcass, take nothing for granted."
We found it less than fifty paces farther up the hill, and it had been dead for a long time. It was enormous, humpbacked—fully as large as the behemoth I had faced outside the walls of Athol's fort in Eire—and it was ancient. One of its eyes had been lost in some long-ago battle, and its thick, matted old coat, where we could see it beneath the blood that clotted it, was criss-crossed with long-healed scars and battle wounds. Its coat was hoary, almost silver with age; only its three remaining paws were still black as night.
I stood there, gazing at it as the others crowded around, exclaiming with awe. Where they saw size and incredible strength, however, I saw only mystery and enigma. I saw Ironhair, plainly, in the colour of the great beast's coat, and yet I wondered, still, at my own translation. Had I seen the bear, early in my dream, and its colour made me think of Ironhair? Or was there some other, supernatural connection? Did this bear, somehow, represent Ironhair, or the threat of Ironhair? I had no way of knowing. I had never been a believer in the supernatural, and I was loath to begin to give any credence to the matter then, at that stage of my life.
One of Philip's men had a long skinning knife and was stropping it against the tautened end of his belt as he stood gazing down at the dead animal.
"Well," Philip asked. "What do you think?"
The man grunted and leaned down, grasping a handful of the animal's thick coat and tugging at it. "Nah, this thing's been dead for almost a full day. My guess is it'll be a waste of time to skin it, though it's a pity. Too late to cure the hide—it's too far gone. The hair'll fall right off it, now, no matter what you do." He glanced up again, at Philip. "I'll go ahead, though, if you want me to."
Philip looked to me, and I shook my head.
"He's right. It's too far gone by now. Leave it to rot, and let's go home." ·
We turned and left it there, with its three fearsome sets of claws, and as we made our way back down to where we had tethered our horses, the talk among the men was all of Rufio and his chances for survival. My mind, however, was filled with Peter Ironhair.
The final and most astonishing incident in the Autumn of the Beasts occurred the very next day. Even now, recalling it once more as I have so frequently in the years that have elapsed, the memory of it fills me with wonder and even religious awe.
Much of what people regard as Fortune, whether good or ill, depends upon the recipient's being in a particular place at a specific time. I once saw a horseman killed by a lightning bolt that struck a tree beneath which he was passing. The impact of the bolt shattered the tree and he was killed by a falling limb. I had been watching his progress, for he was one of my men, on his way to me with a message, and afterwards it became clear to me that his death occurred by the merest, most random chance. His horse's gait brought him to that place at that time. Had his mount been travelling more slowly, he would have survived, but his chosen speed brought him beneath the tree at the precise moment when the lightning struck, and his horse was still rearing in terror when the limb fell.
We had begun to quarry the friable local stone from an exposed hill face above the fort the previous summer, using the material we dug out to make repairs on the most dilapidated stretches of the fort's wall and several of the corner towers. The local stone fractured easily, splitting naturally into long slabs that varied in length and width but maintained a uniform thickness, anywhere from a thumb's length to a handsbreadth in size. The entire fort of Mediobogdum had been built of this stone, save only for the main gateposts, which were of quarried red sandstone blocks shipped down to Ravenglass from farther up the coast.
The work of refurbishment, small in scale though it was, was not strictly necessary to our welfare but had been undertaken for one excellent and self-evident reason: the garrison soldiers tended to grow bored up here on our rocky platform, miles away from Ravenglass, and the hard labour of their compulsory daily stint in the quarry kept them out of mischief and in good physical shape. Rome's legions had built the great Wall of Hadrian across the north of Britain centuries before for precisely the same purposes.
Benedict's garrison troops were now the third such body to be employed in our quarry, and the scope of the work had been extended to accommodate the increased manpower made available by the additional infantry contingent. Our other communal workplace, in the forest where we had set up our timber-felling operations, lay about half a mile downhill and to the west of the quarry.
My recent decision to leave Mediobogdum in the spring had called the need for all such labour into question, but I had insisted that it be continued, reasoning that we might return here some day in the future, and that the work of repairing the walls and trimming, shaping and dry-stacking the timber baulks we had cut would fend off boredom during the winter ahead. No one questioned my decision, and the work continued in both locations.
On the day when the events I am about to describe took place, I had ridden up to the quarry with Benedict and Philip, simply to review the situation up there and to pass the time of day with our troopers, from the viewpoint of keeping up morale. It was a fine day, with the definite snap · of the first, mild frosts of autumn in the air. Philip became involved in a technical discussion with the overseer of the quarry, an engineer from his own company, concerning the effects of frost on lines of cleavage or something equally incomprehensible to us, so Benedict and I left him to it and set out to stroll together down the half-mile-long stretch of open hillside to the forest clearing, where the rest of our work parties were sawing lumber. We left our horses at the quarry and walked.
We talked about Rufio and his condition. Lucanus's extraordinary skills had given us hope that our old friend might survive a series of wounds that ought to have killed him. No one was yet making any wagers on Rufe's chances either way, but everyone was convinced that his carefully cozened survival had been little short of miraculous. His right arm and shoulder had been badly mangled, the flesh shredded from the bones by the bear's razor-sharp claws, and he had four enormous puncture wounds in his left shoulder, two in front and two behind, where the animal's monstrous canine fangs had sought to crunch clean through him. His right femur had been broken cleanly, and several of his ribs crushed, but his skull appeared to be intact and the only other wound he had incurred was a deep, clean slash, probably caused by a claw, on his right thigh.