Fflewddur's method of composition turned out to be a process whereby the swing of his long strides provided the beat to which he chanted out the same lines over and over, changing a word here, a phrase there, as he searched for rhyme and meter. It was an amusing thing to listen to, particularly once Taran began to muddle him up deliberately.
"The towers crumbling down and down and the blazing o'er the trees ," the bard sang, in an undecided tune halfway between a dirge and a march, "the storm was raging in the heights, and the...hm. Hmmm. Trees. Frees...sees...cheese. The storm was raging in the heights..."
"With a blanket full of fleas," Taran offered, in a logical continuity of tune and without missing a beat. Fflewddur repeated it twice, thoughtfully, before blinking, shaking his head, and bursting into laughter. He picked up a stray pine cone from the ground and hurled it at the boy, who took it on the shoulder and pretended to be mortally wounded. Eilonwy dissolved into uncontrollable giggles; she clung to Melyngar's stirrup and wiped tears from her eyes.
Both the boy and the bard were clearly pleased with themselves at providing so much amusement, and the game continued well into midday. Taran proved surprisingly quick-witted at foiling Fflewddur, though Eilonwy suspected, as the rhymes grew ever more ridiculous, that the wily harper was setting him up on purpose. Fflewddur, for his part, maintained a straight face and feigned great indignation at every interruption. Between the two of them they kept her laughing so much, that by afternoon any remaining trace of irritation she had felt with either had been borne away.
To be sure, it was not an easy day, which made their banter all the more welcome. They kept as brisk a pace as they could manage, spurred on by the knowledge of the enemy army's relentless advance, and their concern over Gurgi kept the mood from being truly lighthearted. Eilonwy found, during one of their brief halts, that when she rose after sitting the world spun and went black for a moment. Fflewddur noticed her groping for a nearby tree trunk, and took her arm to help her up. "It comes from not eating enough," he told her. "Just get up slowly."
"Oof," she sighed, clutching his arm as the darkness cleared. "My head feels like it's floating right off my shoulders. How long does it take for people to starve?"
"Longer than you think." He patted her back. "So long as you have water. Don't worry. We'll be at Caer Dathyl long before you start wasting away, and King Math will no doubt feast us in grand style."
Taran, listening in, brightened visibly. "What are the feasts there like? Is it like the stories, where the tables are piled with venison and roast pig and baked apples?"
Eilonwy's stomach twisted and she looked at Taran reproachfully. "How can you talk about roast pig when you don't know where Hen Wen is? Suppose she's on somebody's table this very minute."
He wrinkled his nose at her and Fflewddur laughed. "Ah, yes, royal feasts, the stuff of legend." He patted his rail-thin middle. "I've made a dent in a table or two there and I won't mind doing it again. Why once, when I was guest of honor..." There was a twang from behind him and he sighed. "That is, I've been invited to a few minor celebrations, most recently for the betrothal ceremony for the son of the Chief Bard."
They had begun walking again. "There's a ceremony for betrothal?" Taran asked, surprised and a little scornful.
"Oh, yes, when you get to that level," said Fflewddur lightly. "There's a ceremony for everything. There's nothing a court likes better than a reason to celebrate, and the common folk like to see the spectacle - particularly as there's always a lot given away - toys and tools and ribbons and such-all; and food, of course, baskets and barrels of food."
Eilonwy, busy imagining the color and sound of a royal ceremony, frowned suddenly. "Don't the people have to support the royal house? I mean...isn't it the crops and livestock they've raised themselves on the king's table?"
Fflewddur gave her a sidelong look. "In exchange for his protection and beneficence, yes."
"So in a way," she persisted, puffing a little as they made their way up a brushy hill, "they're just getting their own things back. Does anyone ever think they'd maybe like to skip the spectacle and just keep more of their own harvest?"
Taran looked shocked, but the bard laughed. "Don't let them hear you talk that way at court, my dear. But there, you've hit on a point." He shook his spiky yellow head. "It's one of the things that makes ruling my own kingdom so troublesome. You wouldn't believe how much it takes just to keep my own dreary little castle running, and I've only got four servants to speak of. My Chief Steward was always telling me I should have more pomp and ceremony to please the people, and a Fflam is willing! To be honest, I think look after themselves just as well without my interference. But," he added, shrugging, "people also need merriment. A good festival in a bad year does more for morale than five good years in a row. Strange, but true."
"The Sons of Don have defended Prydain for more than a hundred years," Taran pointed out. "I don't think anyone minds paying fealty to them."
"Does Caer Dallben pay them?" Eilonwy demanded, and he shrugged, shaking his head. "I don't think so. Caer Dallben isn't part of any cantrev. Dallben doesn't need anyone's protection."
His smugness nettled her. "Then you don't know how it feels to have to give up half of what you've worked for to somebody else," she retorted, and sucked her teeth thoughtfully. "I don't know. There's something not right about it, but I can't think what, exactly."
"They don't just throw feasts and festivals with the surplus, you know," Fflewddur put in. "There are storehouses where things are preserved in case of famine and war, portions set aside for the needy, that sort of thing. And you'll be more than glad of a well-stocked fortress and a well-fed army when the Horned King and his lot arrive." They crested the hill, and before them a long, woody slope shouldered into a broad valley, at the bottom of which a silver thread slivered and looped. "Ah, there's the Ystrad. We'll be fording it in an hour."
Taran insisted on scouting ahead when they reached the plain, before they left the shelter of the trees. He was back in a few minutes, reporting a dust cloud moving on the horizon. Fflewddur brightened and clapped him on the shoulder. "We're ahead of them! Excellent. I was afraid they'd be closer, and we'd have had to wait for nightfall to cross Ystrad. We've saved half a day. If we hurry, we can be into the foothills of the Eagle Mountains before sundown."
They crept from the cover and past the sheltering arms of the hills, and presently the dust cloud Taran had seen was a sheer brown column, twisting in the air over the edge of the land like a motionless pointing finger. Eilonwy stared at it, cold fingers prickling down her spine. Taran had
described what sounded like hordes of men, but she hadn't really listened at the time. The more real and present danger of the cauldron-born had eclipsed the thought of unseen foes; the Horned King's army had sounded like something from one of her books, unreal and distant. And for the last day she had thought of the journey as little more than her own escape and flight to sanctuary. It was a nasty thing, now, to recall that there was greater trouble afoot. She glanced in Taran's direction, and saw that he also often turned his face, nervous and urgent, to gaze at the sinister column.
"Does it seem to get bigger every time you look back at it?" she asked once, voice a bit unsteady. "It does to me. I don't suppose it really is, at least not that quickly. Only I don't like turning my back on it. It makes me feel crawly, like an open door behind you that anything might come out of."
Taran said nothing, but she read his agreement in his face. Fflewddur only chirruped to Melyngar with unnatural cheerfulness, and quickened the pace of his long legs.
It was near sunset when they reached the river, running broad and shallow over its gravel bed. The sight and sound of running water would have cheered her ordinarily, but now the fording of Ystrad left them cold and dripping, their spirits much dampened. No one had the heart for any more jesting. Still, as they made their way up the opposite slope, nearing the first jagged cliffs that marked the beginning of the mountains, Eilonwy breathed deep of the pine-scented air and set her feet down with renewed determination as they regained the relative safety of the woods.
They moved on until after sundown, picking their way through the darkness, until Eilonwy saw that Gurgi, who was already slumped bonelessly over the saddle, was about to slip off entirely. She grabbed at the horse's bridle and shouted for help.
The other two hastened to her and between them they caught the poor creature, lowering him gently to the ground. He was shivering, but when she lifted his head to offer him water, the scorching heat of fever burned through his matted fur.
"We shall stop here," Taran announced - a bit unnecessarily, Eilonwy thought. It was almost impossible to keep moving in the dark, even without the extra burden of a wounded companion. The air, as they climbed, had grown crisp and chilly, and she was glad when Fflewddur suggested that a fire would be both warming and cheering. There was flint and tinder in the saddlebags, and, interested in the process, Eilonwy watched as Taran coaxed a small flame into life in the lee of a group of boulders, where they hoped it would be hidden from any unfriendly eyes in the valley below.
The crackle of the flames bounced heat and light off the boulders and created a warm pocket of shelter within the stone circle. Eilonwy fed bits of bracken to the coals and watched the sparks dance upward, fancying that they were infant stars going to join their parents in the black-velvet sky. Snippets of song played in her mind, dredged up from some buried memory, and she hummed them under her breath, until Taran motioned abruptly for silence.
She scowled, started to snap at him, then froze. A thin, lonely, mournful sound rose into the night, higher than the trees, colder than frost. It rose, and rose, then fell into silence, and the hair on her arms and neck stood up like sentries at attention. Across from her, the eyes of her companions shone wide and white in the firelight.
"Wolves," Taran whispered.
Suddenly the vastness of the night yawned around them, enormous, baring them in stark, exposed vulnerability. The noise rose again, was joined by another, in an eerie harmony. Eilonwy shrank unconsciously toward Taran, sitting at her right side. Fflewddur, who had been squatting before the fire across from them, maneuvered around to sit at her left, settling his sword over his lap, hand on hilt.
"Don't worry," he said, in a voice that sounded a bit too confident. "They're not after us. Just doing what they do, and we happen to be in their space, hearing it. If they were prone to devouring humans wandering the woods, I'd have been someone's dinner long ago." He patted her knee. "You try to sleep - both of you," he added, nodding at Taran. "Just stay within the light."
They bedded down close together, with Gurgi safely sheltered behind them against the boulders at their heads. Melyngar whickered and shifted her feet anxiously. Eilonwy, wrapped in her cloak, stared into space and listened to the wild, high music rising and falling, again and again, alien voices resonating closer, then distant, like pale echoes. The ground pressed against her elbow, her hip, relentlessly hard and cold. She shivered, despite Gurgi's feverish warmth that was radiating into the little hollow of boulders.
Taran, shifting where he lay, turned his face toward her, noticed her wide-eyed wakefulness. His eyes locked with hers; he said nothing, but after a moment his arm appeared, creeping from beneath his cloak, reaching up to where she clutched at her own, and he took her hand in a firm grip.
"It's all right," he murmured.
She knew it was rather an empty assurance. Nothing was all right, and they might be a match for a pack of wolves or they might not. But his hand was warm and solid and comforting, and she thought suddenly of all the nights she'd spent in her chamber in Spiral Castle, trembling and afraid of the noises and strange things that crept through it. Whatever happened…this was better than that.
There'd been no hand to hold, 'til now.