I did not seek him out straight away. Let him bury his dead and clear the fortress. There was work for me down there among the wounded, and besides, there was no hurry now to give him my mother’s message. While I had sat there in the May sunlight between the robin’s song and the crash of battle, I knew that she had sickened again, and was already dead.

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER FIVE

I MADE my way downhill between the clumps of gorse and the thorn trees. The Welsh troops had vanished, long since, to a man; and long after sunset isolated shouts and battle cries showed where small parties were still hunting down the fugitives in forest and hill.

Below, on the plain, the fighting was over. They were carrying the wounded into Kaercona. Torches weaved everywhere, till the plain was all light and smoke. Men shouted to one another, and the cries and groans of the wounded came up clearly, with the occasional scream of a horse, the sharp commands from the officers, and the tramp of the stretcher-bearers’ feet. Here and there, in the dark corners away from the torchlight, men scurried singly or in pairs among the heaped bodies. One saw them stoop, straighten, and scurry off. Sometimes where they paused there was a cry, a sudden moan, sometimes the brief flash of metal or the quick downstroke of a shortened blow. Looters, rummaging among the dead and dying, keeping a few steps ahead of the official salvage parties. The ravens were coming down; I saw the tilt and slide of their black wings hovering above the torches, and a pair perched, waiting, on a rock not far from me. With nightfall the rats would be there, too, running up from the damp roots of the castle walls to attack the dead bodies.

The work of salvaging the living was being done as fast and efficiently as everything else the Count’s army undertook. Once they were all within, the gates would be shut. I would seek him out, I decided, after the first tasks were done. He would already have been told that I was safely here, and he would guess I had gone to work with the doctors. There would be time, later, to eat, and then it would be time enough to talk to him.