A wind had risen, and she heard the hoarse “salvé” of the forest in the night. The thousand voices of the trees seemed to call to her with a weird perpetual clamour. She saw their spectral hands jerking and clutching against the sky, and heard the creak and gibber of the criss-cross boughs swaying in the wind. Leaving the hillock, and still bearing Brastias’s sword, she held across the open, seeing as she went the dark streaks that dotted the hillside—the bodies of men fallen in the flight. She gained the trees, and was soon deep among the crowded trunks, pondering on her lodging for the night.
Wandering hither and thither, looking for some more sheltered spot, her glance lighted on a dim swelling of the ground that proved to be an ancient mound or barrow. It had been opened in times past, probably in the search for buried treasure or for weapons. Brambles, weeds, and heather had roofed the shallow cutting into a little recess or cave that gave fair shelter from the wind, and Igraine, braving the notion of barrow ghost or spirit, claimed the place as a God-send, and took cover therein.
The last crumbs in her wallet finished, she sat with her face between her palms, brooding, big-eyed, in the night, like any Druidess wreathing spells in her forest solitude. The wind was crying through the trees, swaying them restlessly against the starry sky, making plaintive moan through all the myriad aisles. Igraine listened like one huddled among her thoughts to keep out the cold. Miserable as was her lodging, her mind seemed packed with the day’s battle; the whirl and thunder of it were still moving in her brain, a wild scene towered over by a man bare-headed on a black horse, holding his helmet to the setting sun. Often and often she heard the roar of hoofs and saw the rush of the charge that had trampled the banner of Tintagel and hurled Gorlois and his men in rout from the ridge. Had it been death or life with the man? Was he with the King hearing holy mass and lifting up the wine cup to heaven under a flare of lights, or lying stiff and pinched under the mild eyes of night? It was this thought, holding hope and doubt in common yoke, that abode with her all the night in her refuge under the trees.
It was bleak enough, with a silvering of frost over the land, when darkness had rolled back over the western sea, uncovering the wreck of death that lay huddled on ridge and slope. Igraine was stirring early from the barrow. With the cold and her own thoughts she had slept but an hour, and at the first filtering of light through the branches she was glad and ready for the day. She wandered through the forest towards the open land that showed glimmering through the tree-boles, with no certain purpose moving in her mind. The future as yet was a blank to her, lacking possibilities, jealous of its secrets, saturnine as death itself. There shone one light above her that seemed to burn through the unknown; it had long led her from distant hills, yet even her red lamp of love beckoned her over a sepulchre.
Coming to the forest margin, she came full upon the incontestable handiwork of war. Under the sweep of a great pine lay the body of a knight in black harness, all blazoned with gold, while his grey horse was still standing with infinite patience by his side, nosing him gently from time to time. The man’s helmet, a visored casque, somewhat gladiatorial in type, had fallen off, and a young beardless face was turned placidly up to the blue, a white oval pillowed upon a tuft of heather. There was no blood or sign of violence visible save a blue bruise on his left temple; it seemed more than probable that he had been pitched from the saddle and found death in the fall.
Igraine stood and looked at him in some pity while the horse snuffed at her, staring with great wistful eyes as though for help or sympathy. The man was young, with a certain nobility of early manhood on his face, and it seemed to her very pitiful that he should be cut off thus in life’s spring. As she looked at him she noted that he was slim of figure, and not much above middle height. A sudden fancy took her on the instant. She tethered the horse, and kneeling down by the man her fingers were soon busy at the buckles and joints of his armour. Ungirding his sword, she drew it from the scabbard and set it upright at his head, sheathing Brastias’s in its place. Having stripped off his armour and long surcoat she covered him reverently with her cloak, slung the horse’s bridle round her wrist, and gathering up his arms and helmet went back to the barrow where she had passed the night.
The wood had received a woman in the dress of a woman; it gave in exchange a knight on a grey horse—a knight in black armour blazoned with gold under a surcoat of violet cloth. The brazen helmet, visored and hooded with mail over nape of neck and throat, gleamed and flashed under the green boughs. There were three lilies, snow-white, and a cloven heart upon the shield, and the horse trappings were bossed and enamelled gold and blue.
Igraine rode out from the trees with the pomp of a Launcelot. The grey horse’s mane tossed in the wind, the furze rippled on the hillside, the cloud-ships sailed the blue with white sails spread. The girl was aglow with new life under her guise of steel. The essence of manhood seemed to have created itself within her as from the soul of the dead knight, and she suffered the glory of arms with a pride that was almost boyish.
Holding out from the trees at a solemn pace, she headed westward down the valley along the grass slopes that slid between scrub and thicket to the sea. On the road below her a company of spears trailed eastward uphill in a snakelike column that glittered through the green. Pushing on boldly across ground where the battle had raged hotly the night before, she reached the road as the head of the column swung up at a dull tramp on their march home for Caerleon. Gruffing her voice in her throat she hailed the knight who headed the troop for news of the battle of yesterday, posing as one late on the scene, and sore at having struck no blow for Britain.
The knight drew aside, and letting his men tramp by, he gave tersely the tale of the fight as he had seen it from King Nentres’s lines.