The Mabinogion Tetralogy (Omnibus [1-4]) by Evangeline Walton

Author:Evangeline Walton [Walton, Evangeline]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9780715643716
Publisher: Duckworth Overlook
Published: 2002-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

11

The Trap

IN THE springtime they came back to Dyved, and the land lay fair and still before them, and the Three Birds of Rhiannon flew before them, their wings shining in the sun.

Once Rhiannon went apart and held up her hands and called them. They came and lit upon her fingers, and she spoke to them, in some strange sweet chirping tongue. And with chirps as sweet they answered; for the first time since that dreadful night they made sounds, although they did not sing.

But when Rhiannon came back to the others, her face was white and grave, and when they asked her if she had learned anything, she shook her head.

“Nothing that I can tell in the tongue of men. They do not know all, and I cannot recognize, in their tongue, the name they speak. It is a great name, it casts a great shadow—a twilight in the heart, and a stillness all around, as though Earth Herself, our Mother, hearing it, held Her breath and was afraid.”

“But this I know: The Birds said clearly, ‘Be watchful. Be watchful. Watchful . . .’”

The Birds left them when they came to Arberth, to that quiet palace waiting with the golden sun upon it, and its lonely chambers all dark and still within.

They built a cooking fire, and pastured the cow that they had brought with them. They tried to talk, but the silence seemed to drown their voices. Those desolate chambers seemed to have a dead feeling that they had never had before, as if the voices of all those people who had been violently swept away from their life here cried mutely from the walls. Cried for warmth and breath, and all that they had been deprived of.

Toward evening that silence was broken, shattered by a great belling of hounds.

Pryderi ran out through the palace doors and was all but knocked down by a rush of upward-leaping paws, and upward-leaping bodies, and frantically licking tongues.

“It is my dogs!” he cried. “My dogs!”

He patted this one’s head, and scratched that one under the chin, and another behind the left ear, and yet another behind the right ear. He patted and scratched and tickled, and they leapt and licked and wagged their tails as if they would wag them off.

“I have come back to you, my darlings!” he exulted. “I have come back.” And his eye beamed with tenderness and pity for them, who had thought that they had lost him.

Then suddenly he sobered; looked down upon them with an eye grown stern. “Indeed, it was not I that ran off and left you. I had not seen you for years before I went. You must have run away.”

The dogs whined. They looked back uneasily toward the dark forest from which they had come. Their hackles rose and they whined again and shivered, and crouched down as close to Pryderi as they could get, looking up at him with great troubled eyes, as if trying to tell him something.

Rhiannon said quietly, “The dogs did not run away, Son.

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