The Shining Company by Rosemary Sutcliff

Author:Rosemary Sutcliff [Sutcliff, Rosemary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448173679
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1990-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

12

Epona’s Leap

The winter months wore on; bitter months that brought the wolves in out of the wildwood to hunt close about the living places of men, so that men must mount guard over the sheep folds by day as well as through the long nights. Day after day the wind drove snow or freezing rain across the great whale-backed mass of Eidin Ridge; and when the snow clouds cleared for a while and the iron frosts set in, there were nights when the whole sky northward was flickering with strange lights. I had seen such lights faintly from the high hills above my home valley, but never such a show as this, that sent rippling tongues and ribbons of cold fire far up the sky. I knew now why men called them ‘The Crown of the North’ and also why it was said that they foretold great happenings for good or ill, victory or pestilence, the birth of heroes or the death of kings.

But a day came when the wind went round to the south and had a new smell to it, promising a world still there after all, beyond the lowland hills, promising afar off the return of spring.

As soon as the mirey ways were in any sort fit for travelling, while the burns ran green with thaw-water from the melting snows, before even the salmon began to come up from the sea, Mynyddog’s embassies were going to and fro once more between himself and his fellow kings of the north. On an evening of squalls and sunbursts, with the cloud shadows flying like a charge of cavalry across the moors, an embassy from Aidan of Dalriada rode into Dyn Eidin: three tall men cloaked in magnificent skins; the leader, who looked to be long past his own warrior days, the tallest of them all, with a small fierce eye and a mouth like a wolf trap.

On the day after they rode in, they were shut away in the King’s private lodging with Mynyddog himself, the Fosterling, and Cenau who was now Captain of the Teulu in his place, and Aneirin who as chief bard to the King must always be present at such meetings.

For the rest of us life went on as usual. A good part of the day was passed in practising for the great display with which we were to dazzle and impress the Lords of Dalriada on the morrow.

Towards evening Gorthyn’s big sorrel cast a shoe; and when I took him over to the shoe-smith at the far side of the Royal Farm, I heard a great bell-clashing of hammer on anvil and thought that some other horse was being shod. But when I hitched Bryth to the ring beside the doorpost and looked inside, there was no horse there, and the men sweating in the red firelight were making horseshoes to add to an orderly stack of them against the wall. That did not surprise me, for as the swordsmiths and armourers had been

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