Things there are in the world which have never loved Men, which
have been in the world far longer than humankind, so that once when
Men were newer on the earth and the woods were greater, there had
been places a Man might walk where he might feel the age of the
world on his shoulders. Forests grew in which the stillness was so
great he could hear stirrings of a life no part of his own. There
were brooks from which the magic had not gone, mountains which sang
with voices, and sometimes a wind touched the back of his neck and
lifted the hairs with the shiver of a presence at which a Man must
never turn and stare.
But the noise of Men grew more and more insistent Their
trespasses became more bold. Death had come with them, and the
knowledge of good and evil, and this was a power they had, both to
be virtuous and to be blind.
Axes rang. Men built houses, and holds, rooted up stone, felled
trees, made fields where forests had stood from the foundation of
the world; and they brought bleating flocks to guard with dogs that
had forgotten they were wolves. Men changed whatever they set hand
to. They wrought their magic on beasts, to make them dull and
patient. They brought fire and the reek of smoke to the dales. They
brought lines and order to the curve of the hills. Most of all they
brought the chill of iron, to sweep away the ancient shadows.
But they took the brightness too. It was inevitable, because
that brightness was measured against that dark.
Men piled stone on stone and made warm homes, and tamed some
humbler, quieter things, but the darkest burrowed deep and the
brightest went away, heartbroken.
Save one, whose patience or whose pride was more than all the
rest.
So one place, one untouched place in all the world remained, a
rather smallish forest near the sea and near humankind, keeping a
time different than elsewhere.
Somewhen this forest had ceased to be a lovely place. Thorns
choked it, beyond its fringe of bracken. Dead trees lay unhewn by
any woodman, for none would venture there. It was a perilous place
by day. By night it felt far worse, and a man did well not to build
a fire too neat the aged trees. Things whispered here, and the
trees muttered with the wind and perhaps with other things. Men
knew the place was old, old as the world, and they never made peace
with it.
But on a certain night a man was weary, and he had seen very
much of horror and of the world’s hard places, so that a
little fire to cook by seemed a very small hazard against others he
had run this day, the matter of a few twigs to cook a bit to
eat.
He had come and gone a great deal on the banks of the river
Caerbourne and in the fringes of this forest, for five whole years.
If there were outlaws hereabouts he knew them all by name. And if
there were other dangers he had never met them, so they failed to
frighten him, this night, and on other nights when he had come this
far beneath the aged boughs and heard the rustlings and the
whisperings of the leaves. He made his little fire and cooked his
fish and ate it, which seemed to him like a feast after his famine
of recent days. He felt home again; he felt safe; he looked forward
to a bed among the leaves where no two-legged enemy would be likely
to come on him.
But Arafel had noticed him.
She had little interest in the doings of Men in general. Her
time and her living were very much different from the years of
humankind, but she had seen this Man before as he slipped about the
margins of her wood. He was deft about it and did no harm, and
he was wary and hard for harm to come to: such a Man never
quite disturbed her peace.
But this night he took a fish from the Caerbourne’s stream
and built a fire to cook it, beneath an ancient oak. And this was
far too great a familiarity.
So she came. She stood watching for a while unnoticed in her
gray hooded cloak, in the shadows among the oaks. The Man had had
his fish, leaving only the naked bones in the fire, and now knelt,
cherishing the warmth of the tiny flame and heap of ash, cupping
his hands close above it. He was rough-looking, with a weathered
countenance and gray-streaked hair—a lean and weary Man with
the taint of iron about his person, for a sword lay close beside
his knee. She had been apt to anger when she came, but he sat so
small and quiet for so tall a Man, clinging to so small a warmth in
the great dark of the wood, that she wondered at him, how he had
come, or why, presuming so much for so little comfort. She was not
the first to come. The shadows moved beyond his little fire and
hissed in indignation. He never seemed to notice, deaf to them and
blinded by the light he clung to.
“You should take more care,” she said.
He snatched at his great sword and came to one knee all in one
motion.
“No,” she said quietly, moving forward. “No, I
am quite alone coming here. I saw your fire.”
The sword stayed half-drawn across his knee. He had heard
nothing, seen nothing until now. A gray-mantled figure showed like
a trick of moonlight in the thicket, so dim even the tiny fire
might have blinded his eyes, but he had no excuse at all for his
ears. “Who are you?” he asked. “Of An Beag, would
you be?”
“No. Of this place. I rarely stir out of it. Put the sword
away.”
He was off his balance and not accustomed to that. Why he was
sitting still at all instead of standing sword in hand was not
quite clear to him, only that there had never seemed a moment of
clear decision since the stranger started speaking. The voice was
smooth and fair. He could not get the timbre of it in his mind,
whether it was young or old or what it was even when it was just
dying in the air, no more than he could make out the figure in the
dark, but he found he had slid the sword back into its sheath, not
having clearly decided to put it back at all. His hands were cold.
“Share if you like,” he said, with a motion toward the
fire. “The warmth, at least. If it’s food you want,
catch your own. I’ve eaten all I had.”
“I have no need.” The stranger came nearer, so
silently no leaf whispered, and settled at the side of the tiny
clearing on the dead log that fended the wind from his fire.
“What would your name be?”
“Give me yours,” he said.
“I have many.”
Little by little the chill of the ground had come creeping up to
him, and now the fire between them seemed all too dun and small.
“And what would one of them be?” he asked, because he
was always a man to want answers even when they were ill.
“I have marked your coming and going hereabouts.”
The answer came so still and soft the rustle of a leaf might have
overcome it. “Other things have seen you, do you not know?
Your step was always soft and quick until tonight; but now you
settle in to stay—is that your hope? No, I think not. I do
think not. You are wiser than that.”
She saw the hardness of his face as he stared at her. It was a
face which might well have been fair once, but years and scars had
marred it; and sun and wind had weathered it, so that it was fit
for the rest of him, with ragged hair and ragged clothes and dark,
hopeless eyes. As for him, there was no knowing what he saw of her:
Men saw what they pleased to see, often as not. Perhaps to him she
was some outlaw like himself or some great mail-clad warrior from
over the river. His hand never let go the sword.
“Why do you come?” she asked him last
“For shelter.”
“What, in my wood?”
“Then I will leave your wood, as quickly as I
may.”
“There is harm outside this circle—No, it would not
be well to look just now. As for the fish and the fire, both are
costly. And what will you offer me for them?”
He gave no answer. If there was any wealth he had besides the
sword itself she could not tell it. And that he did not offer.
“What,” she said, “nothing?”
“What will you have?” he asked.
“Truth. For the fish and the fire tell me truly what you
do in my woods.”
“I live.”
“No more than that? It seems to be a hard living.
There’s a sorrow about you, Man. Is there ever
joy?”
This was baiting. The Man felt it, and felt his weariness
hovering over him like urging sleep. There was peril in that sleep,
and that he also knew. He set the cap of his sheathed sword on the
ground and leaned heavily on it, looking at the stranger, trying to
look more closely, but his sight seemed to dim whenever he looked
hardest, and some fold of the cloak was always casting a shifting
shadow just where he looked, so that he could see nothing that was
beneath it. He knew beyond a doubt that he had met one of the fair
folk, and he knew it though the moment was moonbeams and shadows
and something his eyes refused to see. He had never expected such a
meeting in his life, being occupied with his own business, but he
knew it when it was on him and understood his danger, that the fair
folk were fell and deadly with trespassers, and given to dark
mischief. But perhaps it was part of the binding on him that he
felt no reticence at all with this stranger, as if it were the last
night of the world and the last friend had come to listen. “I
have come here,” he said, “sometimes. It seemed safe. I
brought no enemy here. An Beag would never follow.”
“Why do they hunt you?”
“I am a King’s man.”
“And they have some quarrel with this King?”
The voice seemed innocent, fair as a child’s. The years
went reeling back and back for him and he leaned the more heavily
on the hilt of his sword, aching in all his bones, and laughed.
“Quarrel, aye. They killed the King at Aescford, burned Dun
na h-Eoin—now there is no king at all. Five years
gone—” He grew hoarse in telling it. It was incredible
to him that all the world was not shaken by that fall, but the
figure before him stayed unmoved.
“Wars of Men. They are nothing to me. The fish matters.
That touches my boundaries.”
A chill wandered up his back, but dimly through his remembered
grief. “So, but I gave you the truth for it.”
“That was the price I named. Now I give you good advice:
do not come again.” The shadow rose, graying into dark.
“This once I will guide you to the river, but only
once.”
He leaned on the sword and levered himself to his feet as if
it were the last strength he had; and perhaps it was. His shoulders
were bowed. His head was down for the moment, but then it lifted,
and he pointed another way with a straightening of his shoulders.
“Give me leave to go along the shore. A mile or so down the
river I can slip my enemies and I will go as quickly as I
can.”
“No. You must go as you came, and now.”
“So,” he said, and bent and patiently covered up his
fire, then took up his sword, half drawing it although in his eyes
was no hope at all. “But my enemies are waiting there, and
whatever you are, I will make a beginning here if I have no choice.
I ask you again—let me pass along the shore. I was always a
good neighbor to this wood. I never set axe to it. I beg your
courtesy this once. It is so small a thing.”
She considered him, so soft-spoken, so set upon his way. Almost
she went fading back again and leaving this Man to the dark and the
night. But there was no dark anger in him, only the sadness of
something brave that once had been. So the old stag died, among the
wolves; or the eagle fell; or the wolf himself went down. She
thought a moment and thinking on such a heart remembered a place, a
small place, the only warmth she knew among humankind.
“I shall tell you a way to go,” she said gently,
“and help you come to it if perhaps you can, a place deep in
the hills and not so perilous as my lands. But you must come with
me now step for step and never stray: Death has been very near to
you tonight. He is very skillful at stalking, more than any Man.
No, never look. Come now, come, put away the sword and follow.
Follow me.”
A second time he slid the sword back into its sheath and never
felt the doing of it; he walked as once he had walked after bloody
Aescford, out of the hills, aware first of fending branches from
his face and then that he had come some distance never remembering
any of it; and that he was lost. He was well-schooled in woodcraft
and no man could have eluded him so close at hand, but the gray
cloak melted through the thickets before him as if the branches had
no substance, and though he went as quickly as he could, he could
never come near his guide. He was panting, and his heart labored
with a beating he could hear, so loud it dimmed all other sounds.
Branches raked his face and arms. Leaves whipped past with a soft
and clinging touch.
But at last the stranger waited for him on the river bank,
standing against a very aged tree, so that the gray cloak might
have been part of the bark in the moonlight. They had come to the
widest part of the Caerbourne, where it flowed most shallowly: he
knew it, every stone along the shore.
And his guide pointed him the way across.
“This is the ford,” he objected. “And they will
be watching it.”
“They are not. Not this while. Perhaps not again for
several nights—trust me that I know. Yonder you see the
hills, and atop the first hill is a cairn; and beneath the second
as you follow the river course from the narrows below the cairn,
there go up the dale and up the farther hill. The place I send you,
you will never see it, except you come up the dell and over
against the shoulder of the Raven’s
Hill . . . do they call it that, these
days?”
“That is still the name.” He looked toward the
shadowy line of hills beyond the river, beyond the trees. The river
water danced with a light that broke beside him. He turned his head
in alarm toward his companion. There was no one there, as if there
had never been, only the fading memory of a voice of a high, fair
tone, as he had never heard it, and the recollection of a light he
had almost seen.
The world seemed dark then, and cold, and the shadows full of
menace.
“Are you there?” he asked the dark, but nothing
answered.
He shivered then, and slinging his sword at his back, waded the
Caerbourne’s chill flood up to his waist, constantly
expecting arrows from out of the dark trees on the other side,
ambush and after all, the chill laughter of the fair folk at his
back. There was no luck in faery-gifts. He doubted all his safety
now, forever.
But nothing started on that shore except a small splash that
swam away into the reeds, and he climbed out again on the side of
the river his enemies held, finding no one watching, and no harm
near him. He began at once to run to keep the warmth in his legs,
dodging along among the few young trees which grew on the naked
borders of An Beag and its villages.
He was Niall, lately called Dubhlachan and formerly other names,
who had been a lord in years gone by; but the King he served now
was a helpless babe hidden somewhere in the hills—so loyal
hearts believed. And the loyal men lived and harried the
traitors’ fields in Caerbourne vale and elsewhere as they
could, which was all they could do till the young King should live
to be a man.
Five years Niall had lived in the forest edges, under stone and
hidden in thickets, and men had followed him, but most were dead
and the rest now scattered.
So he ran, ran at last because the sun was coming, and ran
because a dream in the dark wood had promised safety. He was not
young any longer. He had lost all his faith in kings to come. It
was only a fireside he wanted, and bread to eat, and no more hunt
at his heels.
The sun came up on him and still he ran by turns, coming up into
the Brown Hills. Men called them haunted, like the wood. But he had
long had the habit of such places, where no comfortable men
would go. The rumor only gave him hope, more and more as he came
among the hills. Weariness left him, so that he ran more lightly
than he had run before, through the rough stones and the
desolation. The sun was on him. The sweat ran. He heard his steps
fall and jar the stones together, but nothing more in all the
world, as if some veil lay on his senses and the world had stopped
being what it was. If the forest had been dark, this was bright,
and the sun danced here, and the stones shone in the light.
He reached the Raven’s Hill and climbed. A strangeness
glistened under the nooning sun, under the shoulder of the opposing
hill. And so he ran, ran, ran, with a great expectation in his
heart, and if he began to die in that running, still he drove
himself with the hope of something, some barrier to cross, some
place one only got to by chance or luck or the last hope in all the
world.
It was a homely place, of fields and fences, stone and golden
thatch and a crooked chimney, and the smell of bread baking, and
the sun shining on the barley round about and on the dust.
“Come see, come see!” he heard someone call as he
fell to his knees and full length on the ground. “O come!
here’s a man come fallen in the yard!”
Things there are in the world which have never loved Men, which
have been in the world far longer than humankind, so that once when
Men were newer on the earth and the woods were greater, there had
been places a Man might walk where he might feel the age of the
world on his shoulders. Forests grew in which the stillness was so
great he could hear stirrings of a life no part of his own. There
were brooks from which the magic had not gone, mountains which sang
with voices, and sometimes a wind touched the back of his neck and
lifted the hairs with the shiver of a presence at which a Man must
never turn and stare.
But the noise of Men grew more and more insistent Their
trespasses became more bold. Death had come with them, and the
knowledge of good and evil, and this was a power they had, both to
be virtuous and to be blind.
Axes rang. Men built houses, and holds, rooted up stone, felled
trees, made fields where forests had stood from the foundation of
the world; and they brought bleating flocks to guard with dogs that
had forgotten they were wolves. Men changed whatever they set hand
to. They wrought their magic on beasts, to make them dull and
patient. They brought fire and the reek of smoke to the dales. They
brought lines and order to the curve of the hills. Most of all they
brought the chill of iron, to sweep away the ancient shadows.
But they took the brightness too. It was inevitable, because
that brightness was measured against that dark.
Men piled stone on stone and made warm homes, and tamed some
humbler, quieter things, but the darkest burrowed deep and the
brightest went away, heartbroken.
Save one, whose patience or whose pride was more than all the
rest.
So one place, one untouched place in all the world remained, a
rather smallish forest near the sea and near humankind, keeping a
time different than elsewhere.
Somewhen this forest had ceased to be a lovely place. Thorns
choked it, beyond its fringe of bracken. Dead trees lay unhewn by
any woodman, for none would venture there. It was a perilous place
by day. By night it felt far worse, and a man did well not to build
a fire too neat the aged trees. Things whispered here, and the
trees muttered with the wind and perhaps with other things. Men
knew the place was old, old as the world, and they never made peace
with it.
But on a certain night a man was weary, and he had seen very
much of horror and of the world’s hard places, so that a
little fire to cook by seemed a very small hazard against others he
had run this day, the matter of a few twigs to cook a bit to
eat.
He had come and gone a great deal on the banks of the river
Caerbourne and in the fringes of this forest, for five whole years.
If there were outlaws hereabouts he knew them all by name. And if
there were other dangers he had never met them, so they failed to
frighten him, this night, and on other nights when he had come this
far beneath the aged boughs and heard the rustlings and the
whisperings of the leaves. He made his little fire and cooked his
fish and ate it, which seemed to him like a feast after his famine
of recent days. He felt home again; he felt safe; he looked forward
to a bed among the leaves where no two-legged enemy would be likely
to come on him.
But Arafel had noticed him.
She had little interest in the doings of Men in general. Her
time and her living were very much different from the years of
humankind, but she had seen this Man before as he slipped about the
margins of her wood. He was deft about it and did no harm, and
he was wary and hard for harm to come to: such a Man never
quite disturbed her peace.
But this night he took a fish from the Caerbourne’s stream
and built a fire to cook it, beneath an ancient oak. And this was
far too great a familiarity.
So she came. She stood watching for a while unnoticed in her
gray hooded cloak, in the shadows among the oaks. The Man had had
his fish, leaving only the naked bones in the fire, and now knelt,
cherishing the warmth of the tiny flame and heap of ash, cupping
his hands close above it. He was rough-looking, with a weathered
countenance and gray-streaked hair—a lean and weary Man with
the taint of iron about his person, for a sword lay close beside
his knee. She had been apt to anger when she came, but he sat so
small and quiet for so tall a Man, clinging to so small a warmth in
the great dark of the wood, that she wondered at him, how he had
come, or why, presuming so much for so little comfort. She was not
the first to come. The shadows moved beyond his little fire and
hissed in indignation. He never seemed to notice, deaf to them and
blinded by the light he clung to.
“You should take more care,” she said.
He snatched at his great sword and came to one knee all in one
motion.
“No,” she said quietly, moving forward. “No, I
am quite alone coming here. I saw your fire.”
The sword stayed half-drawn across his knee. He had heard
nothing, seen nothing until now. A gray-mantled figure showed like
a trick of moonlight in the thicket, so dim even the tiny fire
might have blinded his eyes, but he had no excuse at all for his
ears. “Who are you?” he asked. “Of An Beag, would
you be?”
“No. Of this place. I rarely stir out of it. Put the sword
away.”
He was off his balance and not accustomed to that. Why he was
sitting still at all instead of standing sword in hand was not
quite clear to him, only that there had never seemed a moment of
clear decision since the stranger started speaking. The voice was
smooth and fair. He could not get the timbre of it in his mind,
whether it was young or old or what it was even when it was just
dying in the air, no more than he could make out the figure in the
dark, but he found he had slid the sword back into its sheath, not
having clearly decided to put it back at all. His hands were cold.
“Share if you like,” he said, with a motion toward the
fire. “The warmth, at least. If it’s food you want,
catch your own. I’ve eaten all I had.”
“I have no need.” The stranger came nearer, so
silently no leaf whispered, and settled at the side of the tiny
clearing on the dead log that fended the wind from his fire.
“What would your name be?”
“Give me yours,” he said.
“I have many.”
Little by little the chill of the ground had come creeping up to
him, and now the fire between them seemed all too dun and small.
“And what would one of them be?” he asked, because he
was always a man to want answers even when they were ill.
“I have marked your coming and going hereabouts.”
The answer came so still and soft the rustle of a leaf might have
overcome it. “Other things have seen you, do you not know?
Your step was always soft and quick until tonight; but now you
settle in to stay—is that your hope? No, I think not. I do
think not. You are wiser than that.”
She saw the hardness of his face as he stared at her. It was a
face which might well have been fair once, but years and scars had
marred it; and sun and wind had weathered it, so that it was fit
for the rest of him, with ragged hair and ragged clothes and dark,
hopeless eyes. As for him, there was no knowing what he saw of her:
Men saw what they pleased to see, often as not. Perhaps to him she
was some outlaw like himself or some great mail-clad warrior from
over the river. His hand never let go the sword.
“Why do you come?” she asked him last
“For shelter.”
“What, in my wood?”
“Then I will leave your wood, as quickly as I
may.”
“There is harm outside this circle—No, it would not
be well to look just now. As for the fish and the fire, both are
costly. And what will you offer me for them?”
He gave no answer. If there was any wealth he had besides the
sword itself she could not tell it. And that he did not offer.
“What,” she said, “nothing?”
“What will you have?” he asked.
“Truth. For the fish and the fire tell me truly what you
do in my woods.”
“I live.”
“No more than that? It seems to be a hard living.
There’s a sorrow about you, Man. Is there ever
joy?”
This was baiting. The Man felt it, and felt his weariness
hovering over him like urging sleep. There was peril in that sleep,
and that he also knew. He set the cap of his sheathed sword on the
ground and leaned heavily on it, looking at the stranger, trying to
look more closely, but his sight seemed to dim whenever he looked
hardest, and some fold of the cloak was always casting a shifting
shadow just where he looked, so that he could see nothing that was
beneath it. He knew beyond a doubt that he had met one of the fair
folk, and he knew it though the moment was moonbeams and shadows
and something his eyes refused to see. He had never expected such a
meeting in his life, being occupied with his own business, but he
knew it when it was on him and understood his danger, that the fair
folk were fell and deadly with trespassers, and given to dark
mischief. But perhaps it was part of the binding on him that he
felt no reticence at all with this stranger, as if it were the last
night of the world and the last friend had come to listen. “I
have come here,” he said, “sometimes. It seemed safe. I
brought no enemy here. An Beag would never follow.”
“Why do they hunt you?”
“I am a King’s man.”
“And they have some quarrel with this King?”
The voice seemed innocent, fair as a child’s. The years
went reeling back and back for him and he leaned the more heavily
on the hilt of his sword, aching in all his bones, and laughed.
“Quarrel, aye. They killed the King at Aescford, burned Dun
na h-Eoin—now there is no king at all. Five years
gone—” He grew hoarse in telling it. It was incredible
to him that all the world was not shaken by that fall, but the
figure before him stayed unmoved.
“Wars of Men. They are nothing to me. The fish matters.
That touches my boundaries.”
A chill wandered up his back, but dimly through his remembered
grief. “So, but I gave you the truth for it.”
“That was the price I named. Now I give you good advice:
do not come again.” The shadow rose, graying into dark.
“This once I will guide you to the river, but only
once.”
He leaned on the sword and levered himself to his feet as if
it were the last strength he had; and perhaps it was. His shoulders
were bowed. His head was down for the moment, but then it lifted,
and he pointed another way with a straightening of his shoulders.
“Give me leave to go along the shore. A mile or so down the
river I can slip my enemies and I will go as quickly as I
can.”
“No. You must go as you came, and now.”
“So,” he said, and bent and patiently covered up his
fire, then took up his sword, half drawing it although in his eyes
was no hope at all. “But my enemies are waiting there, and
whatever you are, I will make a beginning here if I have no choice.
I ask you again—let me pass along the shore. I was always a
good neighbor to this wood. I never set axe to it. I beg your
courtesy this once. It is so small a thing.”
She considered him, so soft-spoken, so set upon his way. Almost
she went fading back again and leaving this Man to the dark and the
night. But there was no dark anger in him, only the sadness of
something brave that once had been. So the old stag died, among the
wolves; or the eagle fell; or the wolf himself went down. She
thought a moment and thinking on such a heart remembered a place, a
small place, the only warmth she knew among humankind.
“I shall tell you a way to go,” she said gently,
“and help you come to it if perhaps you can, a place deep in
the hills and not so perilous as my lands. But you must come with
me now step for step and never stray: Death has been very near to
you tonight. He is very skillful at stalking, more than any Man.
No, never look. Come now, come, put away the sword and follow.
Follow me.”
A second time he slid the sword back into its sheath and never
felt the doing of it; he walked as once he had walked after bloody
Aescford, out of the hills, aware first of fending branches from
his face and then that he had come some distance never remembering
any of it; and that he was lost. He was well-schooled in woodcraft
and no man could have eluded him so close at hand, but the gray
cloak melted through the thickets before him as if the branches had
no substance, and though he went as quickly as he could, he could
never come near his guide. He was panting, and his heart labored
with a beating he could hear, so loud it dimmed all other sounds.
Branches raked his face and arms. Leaves whipped past with a soft
and clinging touch.
But at last the stranger waited for him on the river bank,
standing against a very aged tree, so that the gray cloak might
have been part of the bark in the moonlight. They had come to the
widest part of the Caerbourne, where it flowed most shallowly: he
knew it, every stone along the shore.
And his guide pointed him the way across.
“This is the ford,” he objected. “And they will
be watching it.”
“They are not. Not this while. Perhaps not again for
several nights—trust me that I know. Yonder you see the
hills, and atop the first hill is a cairn; and beneath the second
as you follow the river course from the narrows below the cairn,
there go up the dale and up the farther hill. The place I send you,
you will never see it, except you come up the dell and over
against the shoulder of the Raven’s
Hill . . . do they call it that, these
days?”
“That is still the name.” He looked toward the
shadowy line of hills beyond the river, beyond the trees. The river
water danced with a light that broke beside him. He turned his head
in alarm toward his companion. There was no one there, as if there
had never been, only the fading memory of a voice of a high, fair
tone, as he had never heard it, and the recollection of a light he
had almost seen.
The world seemed dark then, and cold, and the shadows full of
menace.
“Are you there?” he asked the dark, but nothing
answered.
He shivered then, and slinging his sword at his back, waded the
Caerbourne’s chill flood up to his waist, constantly
expecting arrows from out of the dark trees on the other side,
ambush and after all, the chill laughter of the fair folk at his
back. There was no luck in faery-gifts. He doubted all his safety
now, forever.
But nothing started on that shore except a small splash that
swam away into the reeds, and he climbed out again on the side of
the river his enemies held, finding no one watching, and no harm
near him. He began at once to run to keep the warmth in his legs,
dodging along among the few young trees which grew on the naked
borders of An Beag and its villages.
He was Niall, lately called Dubhlachan and formerly other names,
who had been a lord in years gone by; but the King he served now
was a helpless babe hidden somewhere in the hills—so loyal
hearts believed. And the loyal men lived and harried the
traitors’ fields in Caerbourne vale and elsewhere as they
could, which was all they could do till the young King should live
to be a man.
Five years Niall had lived in the forest edges, under stone and
hidden in thickets, and men had followed him, but most were dead
and the rest now scattered.
So he ran, ran at last because the sun was coming, and ran
because a dream in the dark wood had promised safety. He was not
young any longer. He had lost all his faith in kings to come. It
was only a fireside he wanted, and bread to eat, and no more hunt
at his heels.
The sun came up on him and still he ran by turns, coming up into
the Brown Hills. Men called them haunted, like the wood. But he had
long had the habit of such places, where no comfortable men
would go. The rumor only gave him hope, more and more as he came
among the hills. Weariness left him, so that he ran more lightly
than he had run before, through the rough stones and the
desolation. The sun was on him. The sweat ran. He heard his steps
fall and jar the stones together, but nothing more in all the
world, as if some veil lay on his senses and the world had stopped
being what it was. If the forest had been dark, this was bright,
and the sun danced here, and the stones shone in the light.
He reached the Raven’s Hill and climbed. A strangeness
glistened under the nooning sun, under the shoulder of the opposing
hill. And so he ran, ran, ran, with a great expectation in his
heart, and if he began to die in that running, still he drove
himself with the hope of something, some barrier to cross, some
place one only got to by chance or luck or the last hope in all the
world.
It was a homely place, of fields and fences, stone and golden
thatch and a crooked chimney, and the smell of bread baking, and
the sun shining on the barley round about and on the dust.
“Come see, come see!” he heard someone call as he
fell to his knees and full length on the ground. “O come!
here’s a man come fallen in the yard!”