Patrick Read online

  He gripped his head with his hands. “This is very bad.”

  “It was only one,” I said, “and a very young one.”

  “There is never only one,” he said, the whites of his eyes showing in the gloom. “They smell the sheep, and they will come for them.”

  “What should we do?”

  “We will build up the fire here and light another down at the entrance to the sheepfold. Then you must go to the ráth and tell the king.”

  While Madog and I spoke easily enough to one another on most things, there was still much I did not know, and I had little confidence that I could address the king in his own tongue. Also, there was the fact that I was possibly the last person the king wished to see; he had nearly killed me last time we met, and I had no wish to confront him again so soon—even if I could somehow make myself understood. Madog, on the other hand, had become almost garrulous; indeed, he had recovered the greater portion of his speech during our time together.

  “Maybe it would be better if you went to tell the king,” I suggested. “I do not speak well.”

  Madog dismissed this idea at once. “If the wolves came while I was gone, you would not know what to do.”

  We carried a double load of logs and branches down to the sheep enclosure and built a large heap before the opening. The walls of the pen were made of stone and topped by a rough timber palisade to keep the sheep from jumping out and predators from climbing in. Once the fire was burning strong, I departed for the ráth, taking a blazing brand for a torch to light my way.

  The path down the mountainside to the settlement is well traveled, and even in the dark I had no difficulty. On the way I tried to think of all the words I might possibly need and repeated them to myself over and over again until arriving at the ráth. The gate was closed for the night, and so I had to stand out on the rampart shouting until someone came to see what I wanted. “Faolchúnna!” I cried at the first head to peer over the top of the palisade. “Wolves!”

  The fellow disappeared, and a few moments later the gate opened and a skinny youth emerged with sword in hand. He looked at me and sneered. “Why are you making this unseemly noise?”

  To my relief I understood him clearly enough. “Wolves,” I repeated. “Madog says to send warriors.”

  “The king’s warband is at meat,” he informed me. “I will not disturb them.”

  The superior smirk on his face sent a sheet flame of anger flashing through me. I wanted nothing more than to shove my burning torch into his smug barbarian face. Instead I said, “Then I will tell them. I am not afraid.”

  He made to stop me, but I pushed past and strode directly to the hall, my face hot as the torch in my hand. The door was wooden and covered by an ox hide to better keep out the wind. Throwing aside the skin, I pulled open the door and stepped within.

  The air was thick with smoke from a large fire in the center of the hall. A long board lined one wall, with benches on one side, and these were filled with men, their shields and weapons hung on the wall behind them. Young women of the ráth knelt at the edge of the hearth with long flesh forks in their hands, roasting meat, which they brought to the warriors at the board. Other members of the king’s retinue reclined on piles of rushes covered with hides and fleeces to form large beds in nooks along the wall opposite the board.

  King Miliucc sat at the center of it all surrounded by his warriors. He balanced a drinking bowl in his hand and held it high for the serving boy who stood behind his seat. No one seemed to take the least notice of me, so I moved boldly into the room. The youth from the gate entered behind me and stood sniggering behind his hand as I walked to the board and stopped opposite the king.

  “Mo tiarna!” I said in a loud voice. “My lord.”

  He looked up to see me standing before him and rose to his feet, instantly angry. He slammed down the bowl, splattering its contents. The hall fell silent. I could feel the eyes of everyone on me, but what did I care for that?

  “Slaves are not allowed in my house!” he shouted.

  I stood to his wrath. “And are wolves allowed in your sheep pen?”

  He regarded me with a frown as my meaning broke upon him. “The sheep have been attacked?”

  “Madog says to send warriors.” Having delivered my message, I turned and walked from the hall; the youth tried to bar my way. I stopped a pace before him and regarded him with searing righteousness.

  Slightly taller than myself, he was thinner; his long dark hair hung in a thick braid from the side of his head, and he had a slim gold bracelet high on his right arm next to his elbow. “You smell like a pig,” he told me.

  I stared back at him, trying to work out what he had said.

  “I said,” he repeated, enjoying himself extravagantly, “you smell like a pig.”

  “Better the pig,” I replied, “than the pig’s turd.”

  He drew back his hand to strike. I still held the torch and would have hit him with it, but the warriors, having taken up their weapons, came clattering to the door just then. “Lead the way, slave!” roared the foremost warrior, pushing me through the door and into the yard outside.

  We hastened up the mountain track to the sheepfold, where Madog stood guard over the flock with his crook in one hand and a firebrand in the other. The warriors looked around and, seeing no wolves, began laughing at him and calling him a cowardly old woman. One of them picked up a stone. “Here, shepherd! I found a wolf!” He tossed the stone. “There, it’s gone. I chased it away.” The others, half drunk, laughed all the more.

  “These wolves of yours, Madog, where are they?” demanded the foremost warrior. He was, I realized, the same man who had prevented Cernach from throttling me when I was captured the second time.

  “They are coming, Forgall, never fear,” answered the old shepherd, speaking with a fluency that surprised the war chief. “The snow brings them.”

  As if in answer to this assertion, a long, wavering cry came snaking down from the forest, plaintive as the wail of a lost soul. The warriors fell silent, the laughter dying in their mouths. In a moment the cry was repeated, and another, more distant voice, made a long, ululating reply, echoing out across the valley before drifting off on a falling note of feral loneliness.

  “Only a dog that has lost its mate,” scoffed Forgall. But I noticed he raised his eyes to the darkling forest and held his breath when the cry came again, slightly closer. “And there is no snow.”

  “The wolves are coming,” insisted Madog. “And so is the snow.”

  “Perhaps,” allowed Forgall, “it would be no bad thing to wait a little.”

  The howls from the forest grew in frequency and number as they came closer and ever closer; I counted no fewer than eight animals giving voice from just beyond the circle of light thrown out by our fire. The sheep heard the sound and careened around the pen, bleating piteously and leaping over one another, desperate to escape the terrifying sound.

  The howling seemed to swirl around us in a weird, unseen dance. We watched and waited and listened but saw not so much as a sliver of firelight reflected in a yellow eye or the glimmer of a curved fang. Still, we waited.

  And then there came a snarling growl from behind the sheepfold. Forgall called for two men to follow him; they took up torches and ran around to the back of the pen, shouting and waving their firebrands.

  Glimpsing a dark shape moving just out of the circle of the firelight, I yelled and pointed to the place. One of the warriors cried out, “There!” as two more dark forms glided by, drifting into the light. I saw their gray-black shapes slide out of the darkness and melt away again. Another warrior shouted, and suddenly the wolves seemed to be everywhere.

  They ran at darting, glancing angles to the fire. Every time one of the phantom creatures appeared out of the darkness, a warrior would charge at it with torch and spear, and the wolf would snarl and disappear. When the sly beasts understood that they could not get us to give chase one at a time, they came at us by twos.

 
Defense became more difficult then, for the warriors had also to charge at them in twos, which drew strength from the numbers standing guard at the fire. And while we were occupied with guarding the entrance, the wolves turned their attack to the unprotected sides of the sheepfold.

  Time and again they came at the pen and were chased away. I saw a large black wolf leap up onto the stone wall and try to climb over the top. I shouted the warning, and one of the younger warriors dashed forward as the animal clawed at the timbers to pull itself up and over. The warrior took aim with his spear and let fly.

  I thought it a good throw, but Forgall rounded on his kinsman. “Hold!” he cried as the spear sliced the air just above the wolf’s shoulder. The animal jumped down from the wall and bounded away. “You do not throw at a wolf.”

  “Why?” demanded the youth angrily. “I could have hit him.”

  “But you did not,” replied Forgall. Raising his hand, he pointed into the wolf-ridden darkness. “Now, tell me, who is going to go out there and recover your spear? You, Echu?”

  The warrior looked to his swordbrothers for help.

  “Well?” demanded Forgall.

  Echu shook his head.

  “No?” said the big barbarian. “Stupid you may be, Echu, but not a fool. Get away with you. Find a torch and stand over there,” he pushed him toward the fire.

  So it went, all through the night. Never once did the wolves make an outright attack. They ran here and there, sometimes showing themselves, most often remaining out of sight. And they wailed as if to wake the moon, but we would not be moved.

  Finally, as a raw, freezing dawn leaked into the eastern sky, the howling ceased.

  When it grew light enough to see the ground, we went to inspect the tracks. Taking flaming branches from the fire, we walked around the perimeter of the sheep pen and up to the bothy and wood beyond, finding no end of tracks—so many that it was impossible to say how large the pack had been.

  “Here is the leader!” called Forgall, squatting over a paw print in the mud. Others gathered around as he held his torch near and spread his hand over it. The print was almost as big as his hand.

  “It is too big for a wolf,” said the warrior called Echu. “It must be a sídhe.”

  The others laughed at this; although I did not know what Echu meant, it seemed to me the word was spoken only half in jest.

  “It will take more than a few changeling sídhe to keep me from my bed,” declared Forgall. He rose and turned to Madog, who was leaning exhausted on his crook. “It was good for you to call us when you did,” he said. He looked at me and chuckled to himself. “You are a bold one,” he declared. “Coming into the king’s hall like that…” He shook his head as if it were a wonder he could not fathom, and I felt an unaccountable flush of pride warm me head to heel. It was instantly followed by a pang of disgust that I should exult, however trivially, in the praise of a brute barbarian.

  Some of the warriors meanwhile had gone to retrieve Echu’s errant spear; Forgall called to say that he was ready to leave, and as they started through the trees, he turned to Madog and said, “Perhaps you should bring the sheep down to the ráth tonight.”

  Madog frowned. “I will think about it.”

  The warriors departed then; Madog and I watched them descend the mountain track until they were lost in the morning mist. When they had gone, I said, “This word they used—what does it mean?”

  The old shepherd lifted his eyes to the forest that was rising like a black, bristly cloud behind us. “Some words it is not wise to speak aloud.”

  “Echu said it. I only want to know what it means.”

  “Sídhe,” Madog replied, his voice falling to a respectful whisper. “It is the name of a great and terrible race of…” He faltered, struggling for the words. “Of folk who delight in destruction and harm. They are full of spells and evil magic to befuddle men.”

  I rolled my eyes in exasperation. “Madog, these were wolves, not magical beings.”

  “Aye,” he agreed uncertainly. “That may be.”

  He would say no more about it, so we set ourselves to putting out the fire at the entrance to the sheepfold—scattering the branches and throwing dirt on the embers until only a mound of smoldering earth remained. Madog pulled aside the timber poles to open the gate and walked into the pen. The sheep knew him and came to him; they gathered around the lanky old man to have their curly heads rubbed while he soothed them with soft words.

  I went back up to the bothy and rekindled the campfire, for it would be a damp, cold day. The snow arrived shortly after sunrise, and soon a fair, even spread of white covered the grass of the high meadow. The near trees looked as if they were wearing woolen mantles, and the upper slopes became spectral, disappearing in a snow-laden mist.

  Snow had come early to Sliabh Mis, and already the wolves were gathering. It would be a long winter.

  TEN

  AROUND MIDDAY I trudged up to the high meadow and found Madog half asleep on a snow-covered rock. He started as I drew near. “Hail, Madog Wolf-Fighter,” I said, and this made him smile.

  I settled beside him on his rock and looked out at the sheep, scraping the snow off the grass with their small hooves. “Maybe we should do as Forgall says,” I suggested, “and move down to the ráth tonight.”

  “I do not like the ráth.”

  “Nor do I. But at least we can sleep, and the sheep will be safe.”

  “They will be safe here.”

  “We could ask the king to send his warriors out to hunt the wolves,” I offered. “We could come back when they have been driven off.”

  “Perhaps.” The way he said it gave me to know he had no intention of leaving his sheepfold and bothy for the safety of the ráth.

  We watched the sheep for a while. Low clouds flowed over the sides of the mountains like silvery hair, and wind gusted out of the north in cold fits, making me shiver beneath my single small fleece. “What is wrong with the ráth,” I asked, “that you should fear going there?”

  “I am not afraid,” sniffed Madog, wearing his petulance like a cloak.

  “Then why?”

  “There are too many people and dogs. It bothers the sheep.”

  “Wolves bother them more.”

  He was silent for a moment; I could see him struggling with it. His wrinkled mouth worked over the words a few times before he said, “They laugh at me.”

  “The bastards.”

  He liked this. “The bastards,” he repeated happily.

  “Let them laugh, I say. What do we care? We are noble Britons, you and I, and we fight wolves with our bare hands!”

  He laughed again. After a time he said, “Well, we can sleep in the ráth tonight.”

  The sun began to fade, drawing a freezing mist from the cold heights. We herded our sheep together and led them down the mountain trail to the settlement. As we were leaving, a thin, wailing howl arose from the forest above the bothy—as if our lean and long-legged brothers wished to let us know we would be missed that night.

  Upon reaching the fortress, Madog and I busied ourselves with penning up the sheep for the night, using a number of wattle-woven hurdles that we found behind a storehouse. We tied the hurdles together to form a crude enclosure to keep the sheep from wandering around and then set about finding a place for ourselves to sleep—not an easy thing, for, as Madog had intimated, the old slave was such an object of scorn and ridicule that no one would suffer us even to sit under the low eaves of a house.

  “We must sleep with the sheep, I think,” Madog concluded gloomily.

  “The king has horses, not so?” I said.

  “He does,” Madog affirmed. “Fine horses.”

  “Then he also has a stable full of hay, and that is where we shall sleep.”

  He hesitated, unable to hope for such a luxury, but I took him by the arm. “Come, Madog, show me this stable, and tonight you shall sleep in the king’s chariot.”

  The king’s grooms gave us an uncertain recep
tion. They would have driven us out, and Madog would have let them, but I stood behind him and made him stand his ground. “Tell them it is because of the wolves,” I urged, preventing the old shepherd from fleeing the confrontation.

  “You tell them,” he countered.

  “You are the chief shepherd, Madog,” I countered quickly, “so you must tell them. They will listen to you.”

  “What should I say?”

  “Tell them if they let us stay here for the night, we will watch the horses and they can go drink beer.”

  The old shepherd hesitated, his face rigid in refusal. “Go on, tell them,” I said, prodding him in the back.

  He drew a breath and blurted out what I had told him to say. The nearest stableman turned his face toward us, interest flickering across his bland features. He called something to his elder companion, who dropped the hank of rope he was carrying and came to stand before us.

  “So!” he challenged. “You are shepherds and know nothing of horses. What makes you think you can govern the king’s stable?”

  Madog stared back at him, his mouth open, unable to think of a reply. I whispered, “Tell him we do not presume to take his place. We only mean to watch them for one night.” Madog looked at me in dismay. “He is listening,” I insisted. “Just tell him.”

  Turning once more to the chief groom, Madog plucked up his sagging courage and repeated what I had told him to say, his voice trembling. The stableman regarded us narrowly, stroking his mustache in thought. His fellow groom had come near, and the two discussed the matter for a moment. I heard the younger one say, “It is for one night only. What harm can come in one night?”

  “That is true,” I put in. “One night only—and the horses are asleep anyway.”

  The chief groom hesitated; his companion looked at him hopefully, as did we all. Finally he made up his mind. “Let it be as you say.” He raised a stern finger. “One night. And if there is any trouble, you come for me, yes?”

  “There will be no trouble,” Madog said.

  “But if something should happen”—he walked to the door and pointed to a low-roofed hut, one of four or five dwellings adjacent to the king’s hall—“I will be in that house. You come tell me, yes?”