Jack Whyte - The Eagles' Brood

XII

Few struggles can be more fruitless than the bitter, silent battles that a man in love will fight with his own meagre store of words. The odes that I wrote in praise of Cassandra and the new view of life she brought to me were pitiful, but I struggled on, blind to the truth: there are no adequate words to describe what I was feeling. Cassandra, on the other hand, had no need of words at all. Hers was a world without words, a world of total simplicity in which her feelings shone clearly through her eyes and permeated her whole being.

After that first occasion when she smiled at me, I made myself stay away from the valley for a whole week. I had to be strict with myself, for each day I seemed to find a hundred and one good reasons for going there. For seven days I was haunted by a vision of those great, grey eyes. By the time I did return, the bruising had faded entirely from her face and I again found myself staring unashamedly at her, wondering how I could ever have thought her plain or unattractive. I stayed for three days on that occasion, and the happiest times of the three days were her mealtimes, when I fed her because she was still too weak to sit up on her pile of skins and eat her food unaided. She seldom looked directly at me and seemed unaware of my constant scrutiny of her face, which had now become the most beautiful thing in my world.

When I returned again, a week later, she was able to walk, although still very weak. From that time on she improved daily until soon there was no sign at all of the injuries she had sustained. Nor was there any sign of the extreme melancholy that had marked her when we first

found her crouched by what we could only assume to be the bodies of her parents. She was a complete delight to me. It was obvious that Daffyd had been her saviour. He alone had brought her back, not merely from the abyss of the injuries she had sustained, but from the mourning that had cloaked her when we found her.

And then, riding towards the valley one morning, eight weeks to the day from the time we had found her, I received the surprise of my life. I was always at pains to vary my approach to the valley. This time I had used the longest route available to me, heading out north from Camulod and swinging east and then southward in a long arc once I was safely out of sight of the walls. This roundabout approach required two more hours in transit than the shortest alternative, and I tended to use it only in fine weather, since it followed no path and called for careful passage through several stretches of low, boggy ground that could be well nigh impassable during or after bad weather. Once started on this particular route, however, I never had to worry about being seen, since my way lay far from the borders of our closest farm, and its inhospitable terrain held no attraction for casual visitors. The greater part of the path I took, apart from the low-lying, boggy areas, was heavily wooded and strewn with huge, fragmented rocks. Only as I began to approach the low hills that contained my valley and its precious secret did the swell of the land begin to breast upward through the covering of trees until I finally found myself riding among grassy slopes above shallow, tree-filled vales.

The early morning sun had grown warm on my shoulders and on my horse's back that day, lulling me until I drifted mindlessly along, paying no attention to the scene around me and allowing my mount to pick his way at his own pace. I was jerked back to awareness, however, by a sudden, half-seen flash of whiteness moving quickly in the valley below me to my right.

My reaction was instinctive, in spite of the instant chaos of my thoughts. I reined in immediately, every muscle tensed to hold myself and my mount immobile as I scanned the area in which I had seen, or sensed, the movement. Exposed as I was on the side of the hill, I found myself on the edge of blind panic, unable to decide what I should do next. I could discern no further movement in the valley below and, aware all at once of the rhythm of my heartbeat pounding in my ears, and struggling against an unreasoning terror of discovery, I fought to control my breathing and my fears. Even had I been seen, I reasoned, no harm had been done and I was still more than a mile, almost two miles, from my destination, so that I yet had a choice of three directions ahead of me, any of which would lead me well away from the hidden valley.

And then, as I hung there, agonizing, the movement flashed again and I saw a human form, white clad, in the valley bottom, running away from me, its passage masked by dense foliage. I caught only a glimpse of the runner, and it may have been the speed with which he disappeared from sight that sent me plunging downhill in pursuit, reins loose, allowing my horse to pick his own way across the sloping hillside. We were quickly down, and I pointed him in the direction of the runner, leaving him free thereafter to choose his own route swiftly and easily among the trees while I concentrated on avoiding low-hanging branches. A swing to the left around a thick-boiled oak took us to the lip of a narrow, steep-sided depression that fell away rapidly beneath us as my willing horse launched himself up the sloping edge, his great muscles bunching and thrusting easily until he had driven us upward twenty paces and more above the floor of the depression. There the ground leveled again and I drew rein, searching the cleft below for any sign of my quarry. After the thunderous clatter of my horse's heavy hooves on the rocky, sparsely turfed ground, I could at first hear nothing other than his blowing breath and the creaking of my own saddle and equipment. Gradually I became aware of the deep silence. No bird song disturbed the stillness and nothing moved anywhere. I was on the point of swinging around to ride down again to look elsewhere when I heard a distant, grunting sound that seemed to come from the only large tree in the small gorge, some hundred or so paces to my left. I looked that way and saw the most astonishing sight.

I had read in my uncle's books of creatures he had seen in Africa that lived in trees and had the ability to climb so swiftly that they seemed to fly among the branches. Now one such creature met my sight, dressed in human clothing, a brief tunic of spotless, brilliant white. Of course, as soon as I had recovered from my initial surprise and adjusted to the distance separating us I realized it was a boy, but never had I seen a boy who climbed in such a manner. As I gazed in amazement, he pulled himself up effortlessly to stand on a stout branch far above the ground, then crouched there, gathering himself, gazing upward and balancing on all fours, before launching himself in a flying leap to grasp another bough above him and swing himself nimbly onto it, spreading his legs and scissoring them to grasp the limb, then gliding flu idly, with no sign of effort, to where he sat astride the branch, at a dizzying height above the rock- strewn forest floor. There, without pausing to look around him, he repeated the entire sequence and so continued, seeming indeed to fly upward, until the limbs of the huge tree grew so closely together that he was able to use them simply as a step-ladder, practically running upward to disappear completely among the thick foliage at the apex of the tree.

Although my reason told me that this was simply a boy, when I lost sight of him at last I had to suppress a shiver of superstitious dread, an old and formless fear stirred by remembered tales of dryads and forest sprites. And then as I sat there unmoving, he descended again, dropping from branch to branch and limb to limb as though falling wildly, yet every move and every leap timed and controlled to perfection so that again I felt the stirring of goose-flesh, this time caused by incredulous admiration.

He leaped nimbly to the ground from the lowest fork of the tree and disappeared again among the bushes before I thought to rouse myself and swing my horse around to give chase.