A King's Comrade Part 42

"Holy saints!" he said; "look yonder!"

I went a pace or two up the earthwork and looked over toward the foe. Some twenty yards from the gate lay as it were a blackened heap, round which reeled and staggered men with hands to blinded faces, and from which those who were unhurt fled in wildest terror down the hill, casting even their weapons from them. Save only those who could not fly, not one Mercian was staying.

"Yonder lies Gymbert," Kynan said in a still voice. "The bolt struck him. It is the judgment of Heaven on him for that which he wrought in darkness."

CHAPTER XIX. HOW WILFRID CAME HOME TO WESs.e.x.

For a moment I looked and then turned away, with but one thought in my mind, and that was the knowledge that it was a good thing that the punishment of this man had been taken from our hands. I do not think that I took in all the terror of it at the time, for on that field there was death in so many forms--death brought needlessly by his contriving again, and in all injustice--and this end of his was to me but right and fitting. Some terrible fate the man deserved, and he had met it. Now I had my own friends to think of.

"See to Jefan!" I said to Kynan, without a word of Gymbert. "He fell at the gate, in the first onset."

"My fault," groaned the brother, "my fault. I should have waited his word before sallying out. I heard you call me back, too, and heeded not."

He called some men, and they opened the gate and pa.s.sed out hastily, while I knelt at the side of Erling. The old priest was trying to stay the bleeding from a great wound in his side; but he shook his head at me, and I knew that it was hopeless.

Erling knew it also.

"Get to the others, father," he said; "I am past your heeding."

"They will fetch me if I am needed, my son," the old man answered.

"There are few of us who cannot tend a common wound. I am but wanted at the last."

"Ay, for the one thing," said Erling, with a great light springing into his weary eyes. "For me also, father.

"Tell him, master."

The old man looked at me, and I nodded. He was a British priest, and one had been told that they and our priests hated each other and quarrelled over deep matters; but what was that in this moment?

Neither Briton nor Englishman, priest of St. David's nor of Canterbury would heed that here and thus. He rose and went hurriedly, and we two were alone.

"We kept the gate," he said.

"Ay, we kept it; and all is well."

"Jefan is not dead," he said next; "he lay and watched it all. I could see him."

Then across my shoulder he saw some one, and smiled. I turned, and there was Hilda, white and still, standing by us, and she set her hand on my shoulder. Then she bent toward my comrade.

"Ay, you two kept the gate, and all are praising you. They say that but for you the fort had been lost."

The lightning came again, and after a second or two the thunder, close still, but not so terribly so. The rain would come presently, and I longed for it, but not yet. I dared not move Erling, and there was the priest to come.

Now he came, and with him brought that which was needed; and so we two knelt, and there came one or two Welshmen, gently, and knelt also, unlike our Saxons, who would have stood aloof, with bared heads indeed, but unsharing.

I will say naught of that little service. When it was ended Erling closed his eyes and sighed, as one who is content; and we waited for them to open again, but they did not. It was the first and last sacrament of the new-made Christian.

The priest ended his words, and looked at me. Hilda took her cloak and gave it to him, and he set it across my comrade, and that was all. He was Ethelbert's first follower to the new place he had won, and that also seemed good to me.

Through the gate came Kynan, followed by four men who bore on a spear-framed stretcher their prince who had fallen.

"All well," he called up to me cheerfully. "Naught but a broken leg from the fall, and no wound."

Then the rain came, sweeping in a sheet across the open hilltop.

Hilda took my arm.

"Come," she said, "take me to the hut again. My father is well-nigh raving because he is too weak to fight. Once he rose and staggered to the door, and there fell. He cried to you as you stood alone with those savage men before you in the gate. Did you not hear him?"

So she spoke fast, and drew me away to the hut, and there Sighard bade me tell him all I might of the fight. It had been hard for him to lie and hear the din going on, to know that the battle was for Hilda and for him, and not to be able to share it. And he grumbled that the girl would not look out on it and tell him how it went.

"But I saw Wilfrid in the gate," she said, "and I feared for him for a moment, until I saw that the foe feared him; and then I was proud. But Erling has gone, father."

"A good man and steadfast," Sighard said. "I think that you and I owe life to him and Wilfrid alike. It will be long before we forget him, or before you find such another comrade and follower, Wilfrid."

More there was said of him at that time, but not too much. I had known him but a little while, but in that we had gone through peril together with but one mind. It hardly seemed possible that it was only a matter of six weeks since I took him from the Norwich marketplace.

The thunder rolled round us while we talked of him, pa.s.sing but slowly, and the rain fell in sheets, was.h.i.+ng away the more terrible stains of war. Through it came back, unarmed and humbly, some of the Mercians, begging truce wherein to take away their comrades, and Kynan spoke to them. As we had reason to think, the whole affair was the doing of Gymbert, so far as his men knew. Behind him was the hand of Quendritha, of course, but of that they had heard no more than that to take us would please her.

When the storm ended, with naught but a far-off mutter of thunder among the hills beyond the Wye to mind us of it, I went out to find Jefan. At that time there were folk from the Welsh woodlands coming up to help in any way that was needed, for a fire on the highest point of the ramparts was sending a tall smoke curling and wavering into the air, and the meaning of that was well known to them. One might see by the way in which they were tending the wounded and digging two long trenches without the ramparts, where the slain should rest presently, that such fights were no new thing to them on the marches of Mercia.

Jefan the prince lay in a hut, and he smiled ruefully as I came in.

His ankle was broken, and the old priest had set it, skilfully enough, but it would be many a long day before he could use it again. He held out his hand to me before I could speak.

"Are you hurt?" he said anxiously.

I was not, save for a scratch or two of no account. More was Kynan, and that was a wonder, or his luck, as he would have it. But Jefan said, trying to laugh:

"I would that I might see just one bout of sword play betwixt you two. I had held my brother as the best swordsman in all the West, but I saw a better in the gate. There I must lie helpless, with a Mercian across me moreover, and it was somewhat of a comfort that there was that to watch. I had seen naught of it but for the fall."

So I had not been learning all that the best men in the Frankish armies could teach me of weapon craft for nothing, and hereafter I learned that such praise from Jefan was worth having.

But as for my thanking them for this protection of us, they would have it that the whole trouble was of their own making, since they had stayed so near the border after a raid. Even now we must hence, for the sheriff would gather a levy to follow them no doubt. It needed no command from Offa for that; but he would be here anon, in leisurely wise perhaps, but certainly.

"Wherefore we must go," said Kynan. "Then, as usual, he will find no one to fight with, and naught but a few broken marrow bones to remind him that last night we feasted on Mercian cattle up here."

Now I would that Erling might have been laid to rest in Fernlea, near to Ethelbert, but that could not be. We set him in a place near the gate which he had kept so well, raising a little mound over him, and Jefan said that it should be a custom with every warrior of the Cymro who entered the camp in the days to come that he should salute him, and that the tale of his deed should be told at the camp fire here from age to age, so long as harp was strung and men should sing of deeds worth minding. Maybe that was the resting and that the honour the viking would have chosen for himself.

And he was set there with all the still rites of the ancient Church of the Briton, in the way which he had learned to love.

Alone, unmarked Gymbert lies, out of sight of the warriors against whom he came. The Mercians dared not touch him, and the Welsh would not. But Jefan bade that man who had shot at him see to him, and that was the punishment for his deed. Men say that when a storm breaks round Dynedor hill fort it is ill to be there, for then he wanders round the gate unquiet and wailing; and so he also is not forgotten, nor the evil which he wrought.

That evening we were in some Welsh thane's house, far in the folds of the Black Mountains, and there not even Offa could reach us. The people had come with litters and hill ponies, and slowly and somewhat painfully we had gone our way from the hill, gathering the cattle, and leaving men to bring them after us still more slowly.

"Hurry no man's cattle," quoth Kynan, "except when they are by way of becoming yours by right of haste homeward to the hills."

In this homestead, whose name I cannot write, we rested for a fortnight or so, while Sighard gathered his strength again and Jefan's ankle knit itself together. For me there was the best of hunting in the hills and rich forests with Kynan, who was a master of all woodcraft, and with our host. Wonderfully plentiful was game of all sorts, whether red deer or fallow, boar, or wolf, or badger in the forests, and here and there beaver as well as otter in the swift trout streams. There were the white wild cattle also; and there were tales of a bear somewhere in the hills, but we never came on his tracks, though I knew them well from having seen them often enough on the Basque frontier lands. That one chance of having slain the bear there was the only matter of hunting in which I was ahead of my hosts.

At the end of the fortnight we went from this village to the ancient city of Caerleon, travelling slowly, though Jefan made s.h.i.+ft to mount a horse, and so ride with us. Pleasant were the June days that pa.s.sed among the hilly ways, under the great green mountains, and through the forest lands, with good friends and pleasant halts by the way. And I was going homeward now in all truth.