‘He walked slowly down the centre of the hall, between the tables, until he stood before Maggrig and his daughter. Then he smiled and said, “Have you finished my breeches and shirt, woman?”
‘ “I have,” she told him. “And where have you been these last months?”
‘ “Where else should I be?” he answered her. “I’ve been building our house.”
‘I tell you, Gaelen, I would have given much to see Maggrig’s face that night. The wedding took place the following morning and the two of them stayed most of the winter with the Pallides. Caswallon would not hear of taking Maeg back the way he had come, for he had scaled the east flank of High Druin – no easy task in summer, but in winter fraught with peril.
‘Now, does that help you understand Caswallon of the Farlain?’
‘No,’ answered Gaelen.
The old man laughed aloud. ‘No more should it, I suppose. But keep it in your mind and the passing years may explain it to you. Now strip off that shirt and let me check that wound.’
Oracle carefully cut away the bandages and knelt before the bed, his long fingers prising away the linen from the blood-encrusted stitches. Gaelen gritted his teeth, making no sound. As the last piece of linen pulled clear Gaelen looked down. A huge blue and yellow bruise had spread from his hip to his ribs and round to the small of his back. The wound itself had closed well, but was seeping at the edges with yellow pus.
‘Don’t worry about that, boy,’ said Oracle. ‘That’s just the body expelling the rubbish. The wound’s clean and healing well. By midsummer you’ll be running with the other lads at the Games.’
The wound seems wider than I remember,’ said Gaelen. ‘I thought it was just a round hole.’
‘Aye it was – on both sides,’ Oracle told him. ‘But round wounds take an age to heal, Gaelen. They close up in a circle until there is just a bright tender spot at the centre which never seems to close. I cut a wider gash across it. Trust me; I know wounds, boy. I have seen enough of them, and suffered enough of them. You are healing well.’
‘What about my eye?’ asked Gaelen, tenderly fingering the bandage.
‘We’ll know soon, lad.’
Maeg place the babe in his crib and covered him with a white woollen blanket. She ran her fingers over the soft, dark down on his head and whispered a blessing to protect him as he slept. He was a beautiful child, with his father’s sea-green eyes and his mother’s dimpled chin. Tomorrow his grandfather would arrive, and Maeg was secretly delighted that the child had Maggrig’s wide cheekbones and round head. She knew it would please the fiery Hunt Lord of the Pallides. For all that he was a warrior and a man to be respected, Maeg knew that within the crusty shell was a soft-hearted man who had always doted on children.
Men walked warily round the old bull, but children clambered over him, shrieking with mock terror at his blood-curdling threats and tugging at his rust-red beard. He was a man who had always wanted sons, and yet had never made his daughter feel guilty, nor blamed his wife for becoming barren thereafter.
And Maeg loved him.
The sound of the axe thudding into logs drew her to the thin north-facing window. In the yard beyond, stripped to the waist, Caswallon was preparing the winter fuel. An hour a day through spring and summer and the logs would be stacked against the side of the house three paces deep, thirty paces long and the height of a tall man. In this way the wood performed a double service, keeping the fire fed and the north wind away from the wall, insulating their home against the ferocity of the winter.
Caswallon’s long hair was swept back from his face and tied at the nape of the neck in a short pony-tail. The muscles of his arms and shoulders stretched and swelled with each smooth stroke of the axe. Maeg grinned as she watched him, and rested her elbows on the sill. Caswallon was a natural showman, imbuing even such a simple task as chopping wood with a sense of living poetry. His movements were smooth and yet, every now and then, as he swung the axe, he twisted the handle flashing the blade in a complete turn before allowing it to hammer home in the log set on an oak round. It was almost theatrical and well worth the watching. It was the same with everything he did, Maeg knew; it wasn’t that he needed to impress an audience, he was merely creative and easily bored, and amused himself by adding intricacy and often beauty to the most mundane of chores.