The Last Enchantment - Mary Stewart [115]
They had gone, so small a troop to throw against the might of the final Saxon bid for Britain. The gallop dwindled into the night and was gone. Somewhere in that darkness to the north the Tor was standing up into the black sky. No light, nothing. Beyond it, no light. Nor south, nor east; no light anywhere, or warning fires. Only my word.
A sound somewhere in the blowing darkness. For a moment I took it for an echo of that distant gallop; then, hearing in it, faintly, the cry and clash of armies, I thought that vision had returned to me. But my head was clear, and the night, with all its sounds and shadows, was mortal night.
Then the sounds wheeled closer, and went streaming overhead, high in the black air. It was the wild geese, the pack of heaven's hounds, the Wild Hunt that courses the skies with Llud, King of the Otherworld, in time of war and storm. They had risen from the Lake waters, and now came overhead, flighting the dark. Straight from the silent Tor they came, to wheel over Caer Camel, then back across the slumbering Island, the noise of their voices and the galloping wings lost at length down the reaches of the night toward Badon.
With the dawn, beacon lights blazed across the land. But whoever led the Saxon hordes to Badon must hardly have set foot on its bloody soil when, out of the dark, more swiftly even than birds could have flown or fire signalled, the High King Arthur and his own picked knights fell on them and destroyed them, smashing the barbarian power utterly, for his day, and for the rest of his generation.
So the god came back to me, Merlin his servant. Next day I left Caer Camel, and rode out to look for a place where I could build myself a house.
BOOK III -- Applegarth
1
To the east of Caer Camel the land is rolling and wooded, ridges and hills of gentle green, with here and there, among the bushes and ferns of the summits, traces of old dwelling-places or fortifications of past time.
One such place I had noticed before, and now, casting about among the hills and valleys, I looked at it once more, and found it good. It was a solitary spot, in a fold between two hills, where a spring welled from the turf and sent a tiny brook tumbling down to meet a valley stream. A long time ago men had lived there. When the sun fell aright you could see the soft outline of ancient walls beneath the turf. That settlement had vanished long since, but since then some other settler, in harder times, had built himself a tower, the main part of which still stood. It had been built, moreover, with Roman stone taken from Caer Camel. The squared shapes of the chiselled stone showed still clean-edged beneath the encroaching saplings and those stinging ghosts that cluster wherever man has been, the nettles. Even these weeds were not unwelcome; they are sovereign for many ailments, and I intended, as soon as the house was done, to plant a garden, which is the chief of the arts of peace.
And peace we had at last. The news of the victory at Badon reached me even before I had paced out the dimensions of my new home. From the account Arthur sent me of the battle it seemed certain that this must be the final victory of the campaign, and now the King was imposing terms, being set on the decisive fixing of his kingdom's boundaries. There was no reason to suppose, his message ran, that there would be any further attack or even resistance for some time to come. I, not having seen the battlefield, but knowing what I knew, prepared to build for a time of peace, where I might live in the solitude I loved and needed, at due remove from the busy center where Arthur would be.
Meanwhile it would be wise to get hold of all the masons and craftsmen I should require before Arthur's own great schemes for his city began to burgeon. They came, shook their heads over my plans, then set cheerfully to