The fear and loathing of the Saxon were upon them both. They fell into each other’s arms sobbing and crying out that Rome had done this thing to them. Rome had deserted them in their hour of need.
“The Romans taught us to love ease and luxury,” cried the boy, “and to cry out for help when we were hurt! When we had learnt our lesson well, they sailed away and left us. Then that fool Vootigern did his pretty piece of work—he made room in the nest for the cuckoo who has kicked us out of fair Britain.”
“There is little left of fair Britain now,” cried Ethne. “They have made sword-land of half of it, the other grows smaller every day—this last defeat has cut it in two. Damnonia and Cornwall, with the precious fortress, Tintagil, is severed from the rest. Men say, too, towards Caledonia there is a weak spot, where the Angles of the North are pressing closer to the sea.”
The boy’s face grew sadder. It was monstrous—incredible! The fair isle of Britain over-run by barbarians; its gentle people made food for vultures, bound in hideous serfdom or hid like vermin in the crevices of the earth. Noble lords and tender ladies herding, like animals, in caves—and filling their starving bodies with oak-flittern and beech-mast of the forest! The boy folded his arms tightly over his heaving bosom. In all the bitterness and shame that his thoughts brought him—hardest of all was the knowledge that he had not died upon the battle-field. He had fled, he said to himself—unconsciously, indeed—but, nevertheless, he had fled! Flown before the Saxons like fire—as the heathen themselves were wont to describe it.
“It is late, Cormac,” said Ethne, suddenly, looking at the shadows of the trees. “Long past noon, and you have need of meat and milk. Soon, very soon, you will be well enough to fast one day and feast the next; but we have not finished yet our work of making flesh and blood!”
When they entered their dwelling, the little round building seemed all gloom and smoke. But a bright voice greeted them and, when they were seated, a young girl brought them bowls of broth. She had been standing over the smoky central fire, stirring the contents of an iron cauldron with a ladle of yew-wood. Her eyes were red from the smoke, and her hands black and scorched from handling some half-charred nuts she had been roasting in the ashes.
Ethne and Cormac seated themselves on some leathern cushions piled on a heap of dry heather; the girl drew a low stool of yew-wood before them, and laid their platters upon it. She threw herself down, at some little distance, and proceeded to eat the nuts she had taken from the fire. An old war-hound, blind in one eye and covered by half-healed scars, dragged himself towards her and lay down with his head resting against her knee. He had previously feasted well from the bones of the soup-pot; but now he took one or two of the roasted kernels she offered him and made a show of eating them, as though to please her. It was the same hound who had followed them on their flight from Britain, whose life the girl had saved and for whom she had received wounds from Ethne; he was a wonderful creature still, in spite of his age—all muscle and fire—of the breed the Romans had admired; so tall, his head reared itself to the height of a man’s shoulder; so strong he could bear a man over bog and boulder; his one great eye, set in a cavern, seemed lit as by a spark of fire; his lean form, clothed by shaggy hair, of a weird colour, resembling the hair-like growth of ancient pine-trees.
CHAPTER IV.
“Many a branch of the race of Conn is in the land of Banba of smooth grass.”
(Book of Lecan.)