Read The Shining Company Online
Authors: Rosemary Sutcliff
The Shining Company
6 The Golden King and the Three Hundred
10 The Night of the Running Wolves
21 The Flower of an Emperor’s Bodyguard
‘I saw riders with black eyesockets in glimmering mail where their faces should have been, grey wolfskins catching a bloom of light from the mist and the moon; a shining company indeed, not quite mortal-seeming.’ Many years after King Arthur defeated the Saxons, the tribes of Britain are again threatened by invaders. Prosper and his loyal bondsman, Conn, answer the call of King Mynydogg to join a highly skilled army – the Shining Company. Led by the gallant Prince Gorthyrn, the company embark on a perilous but glorious campaign. An epic tale of battles and bravery from the acclaimed historical storyteller, Rosemary Sutcliff.
‘This is the Gododdin, Aneirin sang it.’
So spoke forth Aneirin, Chief of Bards to the King of Dyn Eidin, when he made his great song of the men who went to Catraeth. But of course he sang only of the Three Hundred, the Companions with gold torques about their necks, not of the shieldbearers who rode at their heels. Yet we also were young, with the hearts high and the life sweet within us, and our homes left behind.
The Brown Boy
I am - I was - Prosper, second son to Gerontius, lord of three cantrefs between Nant Ffrancon and the sea, of a half-ruined villa that must have been a palace in its day, of a hundred spears and many horses. My father had little caring for me, keeping what heart’s- warmth he had for Owain my elder brother. Old Nurse said that was because I was long-boned and tawny-fair like my mother who died in giving me life, whereas Owain was dark and thick-set like himself and most of the people in the valley. But truth to tell, I did not feel much lack. I had the other boys of the kindred to laugh and fight with; I had Luned, only a few months older than me, and I had Conn.
It was my twelfth name-day when my father gave me Conn for a body servant.
I was with Tydeus my tutor in the schoolroom, trying to read Herodotus’ account of the three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae, when one of the house servants came to call me to the study. A bar of watery sunlight from the window slanted across the unrolled parchment on the table, throwing up the two lines of poetry that seemed to stand clear from the rest.
Tell them in Sparta, you who read
,
That we obeyed their orders and are dead.
I did not think much about it at the time, as I got up and went hopefully to answer my father’s summons.
But I remember now …
A few moments later I was standing just within the study doorway, staring at the newcomer; a boy of about my own age, brown of skin and hair and eyes, who stood and stared back at me without lowering his head. I was angry and disappointed, for I had hoped for one of Gwen’s pups. She had had five, and my father could easily have spared one from the hunting pack. Also I knew that the boy was not a true gift. He would remain my father’s property like all the other bondfolk about the place; and I was only being given the use of him, because now that I was twelve I could not, as my father had just pointed out, expect Old Nurse to go on seeing that I had clean tunics and the like. But that was not all: my father would have made a shrewd merchant if he had not been born to the chieftaincy, and prided himself on his eye for good stock and his ability to pick out a bargain where other men saw only damaged goods. And the boy in front of me was most assuredly damaged goods, standing crooked with his left knee swathed to the size of a pudding in filthy rags.
‘It is an old hurt too long neglected; but it will mend,’ said my father. ‘He is your responsibility now. Take him down to the monastery for Brother Pebwyr to see it.’
It was the first fine day after a week of spring storms, and I could think of better things to do with it than trail my new and unwanted body servant down to the holy brother for tending, when Old Nurse could have seen to it just as well. But my father’s eye was on
me; and when he gave an order, whether it was to his son or the least among his bondfolk, he was used to being obeyed.
‘Yes, my father,’ I said, and to the boy, ‘Come, you.’ And swung on my heel and headed for the outer court and the track down the valley. And as I went, I heard the new servant’s feet padding behind me, the steps uneven because of his knee.
The sound followed me, proud and uncomplaining as a hound at my heels, through the clustered living-places of the kindred and down-stream past the mill among its alder trees and the smithy where Loban, my father’s smith, was at work on an axehead, and in through the monastery orchard where the brown-robed brothers were busy among the bee skeps under the apple trees, to the gate of the monastery itself. I was well used to the huddle of farm buildings and thatched sleeping bothies about the small wattle church, and usually I would have stopped for a word with Brother Iorwin who was lime-washing the granary wall, or to scratch the back of the Prior’s breeding sow who lay in a sunny patch surrounded by eleven contented piglets. But that day I had no thought but to get what I had come for over and done with as quickly as might be; and I headed straight through, without pausing, for the bothy on the far side, where Brother Pebwyr the Infirmarer brewed his evil-smelling salves and potions and doctored the hurts and sicknesses of all the people of the valley.
He was there now, boiling something over a small bright charcoal fire at the end of the crowded and brown-shadowed workplace. Whatever it was it must have been at a critical stage, for he did not even look
up as we came in through the low doorway, only jerked his head towards the bench just inside.
I flung myself down on it, groaning inwardly for my wasted name-day, and would have left my new body servant standing, but the thought came to me that it might not be a good idea, not on that knee. It might not help the healing: and the sooner it healed the sooner he would cease being a nuisance and begin to be of some use. ‘Sit,’ I said, and jerked a thumb at the other end of the bench.
He sat, sticking his left leg awkwardly out in front of him, and stared through the doorway to where the first swallows were darting and swooping in the sunshine.
The brew in the pot came to the boil and Brother Pebwyr threw in broad-leaved herbs from the pile beside him. There was a hiss like fiery serpents, and another smell was added to the heady reek of spices and simples that already filled the place, and the pot went off the boil. Brother Pebwyr brought it up again three times, very slowly, then drew it to the side of the fire. ‘It can see to itself for a while, now,’ he said, and looked up for the first time.
‘God’s greeting to you, my son, and who is this that you bring with you?’
‘My new servant,’ I told him. ‘My father handed him over to me this morning. But he has some kind of hurt on his knee, and so I bring him to you.’
The Infirmarer nodded. ‘So, then let us be looking what is to be done.’
He came out from his crowding shadows and squatted down beside the boy and began to loosen the knot of the clumsy bandages. He was a snub-faced
little man with not much more shape to him than an egg, but he had the kind of hands that should belong to a harper, and he used them just as surely as he loosed the stained and stiffened rags. ‘What name do they call you by?’ he asked, seeming to have forgotten me entirely.
‘Conn,’ said the brown boy, sounding as though his mouth were dry.
And I looked round at him, somehow surprised. I had been so taken up with disappointment at being given a body servant when I wanted a hound pup, that I had never even thought about him having a name, let alone thought to ask it.
Brother Pebwyr said, ‘Then, Conn, sit very still, and I will hurt you as little as may be,’ and he began to ease back the makeshift bandage.
I had got up so as not to be in his way, but I stood watching, somehow not able to look away, and I saw the crusts and the angry hole and the surrounding pale puffiness of an old abscess that had maybe started to heal and then broken down again, and my belly cringed a little.
‘How did this come about?’ Brother Pebwyr asked.
‘A mule kicked me.’ The dryness and the careful levelness were still in Conn’s voice.
‘So - and how long ago?’
‘Two months - maybe three.’
‘That is too long, but now we will start the mending.’ The little man got up, rubbing his own knees - like a lot of the older brethren he had pains in them when there was rain about - too much kneeling, I suppose - and hobbled away into the shadows beyond the brazier and began to gather up things that
lurked there. In a while he came back with fresh bandage linen and water from the big crock in the corner, and squatting down again began to bathe the place. When the bathing was over, he poured in a few drops of yellowish liquid from a small sinister looking flask. Conn drew in his breath through shut teeth but made no other sound. And Brother Pebwyr spread thick dark salve on a pad of linen and bound it over the old hurt.
‘There,’ he said by and by, gathering up the tools of his craft. ‘All’s over for one day.’
‘Am I to send him back tomorrow?’ I asked. At least the boy knew the way now, and could bring himself down.
But the Infirmarer shook his head. ‘I have other ills to tend. Give him over to the Old Nurse tomorrow, she has as much skill as I in the healing of wounds. Bring him to me once, when the healing is complete, and so all will be well in Christ’s name.’
A short while later, with Conn again padding houndwise behind me, I was heading back through the monks’ orchard, on to the old chariot tract that led homeward up the valley. It is strange how it lies clear in my mind even now, every detail of that day. The great head of Yr Widdfa away beyond the lesser hills that closed the valley, rising into the drifting spring sky, still wearing its mane of last winter’s snow; the alders above the mill already hazed with thin first leaf, and my father’s mares in the in-pastures beginning to show the weight of their unborn foals, and I remember too tipping back my head and seeing the broad out-thrust shoulder of the high moors that seemed almost to close the valley, and the blunt turf
hummocks of old defences against the sky, where the long-past chieftains of my line had had their stronghold before ever the Legions came and they moved down out of the clouds to the comfort of the valley floor and built themselves our great villa-house in the Roman style.