The Lantern Bearers (book III)

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  For a great lady to take a gleeman’s harp and sing before all her father’s crowded Mead Hall was a shameless thing, more shameless even than it was for a Saxon woman to appear with her hair uncovered; and yet Aquila, who had known that she was shameless in wearing no head-rail, forgot that she was shameless in this also. He only knew that she was beautiful, the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and that he hated her.

  She sank down beside the hearth, settling the harp on her knee and into the hollow of her shoulder, and remained a few moments gazing into the fire that seemed to leap up to meet her as though there were a kinship between her and the flames, fingering almost silently the horsehair strings. She looked far remote, as though she had no need to be aware of the mead-flushed faces turned towards her, for she and they were in different worlds. She began to pluck the strings more strongly, conjuring up a strange music of long silences and single, singing notes that sprang up, each separate and perfect as some infinitely small silver bird that leapt up like a lark towards the smoky rafters, and hovered a little, and was gone. Gradually the notes spun closer together until the bright shadow of a melody began to emerge; and then suddenly, still looking into the fire, she was singing.

  Aquila, watching her, had expected her voice to be hard and high and clear. It was clear, but with a clearness of depth, not height, a dark voice.

  ‘The apple tree blooms white in the Land of the Living:

  The shadow of the blossom falls across my door stone:

  A bird flutters in the branches, singing.

  Green is my bird as the green earth of men, but his song is forgetfulness.

      Listen, and forget the earth.’

  British born and bred as he was, Aquila could speak the native tongue as easily as the Latin: and though this was a dialect unfamiliar to him, he caught the gist of the song, and his pulses stirred with a strange magic. And by the light of that magic, it seemed to him that the great firelit hall, the warriors leaning forward on their benches, even the two men in the High Seat were no more than a background for the woman harping beside the fire.

  ‘The petals fall from my apple tree, drifting,

  Drifting down the wind like snow: but the snow is warm:

  And a bird flutters in the branches, singing.

  Blue is my bird as the blue summer sky, over the world of men.

      But here is another sky.’

  She had turned from the fire now, to look up at Vortigern the King, as he sat forward beside her father, his restless gaze still at last, resting on her face. Watching her under the shadow of his hood, Aquila thought, ‘She is a witch! Surely she is a witch! Flavia used to talk of a singing magic … ’ Rowena had risen, and moved, drifting as though on the slow, haunting notes of her song, to the foot of the High Seat; and sank down again, still looking up at the thin, red-haired man.

  ‘The apples are silver on the boughs, low bending;

  A tree of chiming, of singing as the wind blows by:

  But the bird flutters through the branches, silent.

  Red is my bird, crimson red as the life of my heart is.

      Will you not come to me?’

  It seemed to Aquila that the last, lingering notes clung for a long time to the smoky rafters; that they were still hanging there when the singer rose without another word, without another look at Vortigern, and went, sweeping her crimson skirts after her through the rushes, to set the little harp back in the hands that her father’s gleeman held out for it.

  Hengest sent one glance after her; it might have been in triumph, quickly hidden under his down-drawn, golden brows. But Vortigern did not see it, for his eyes also were following her. ‘They will always follow her now,’ Aquila thought, with a sudden flash of clear seeing. ‘She has crossed over in his mind from the Saxon folk, and become part of his childhood and his own hills and the songs his people sing and the beautiful crack-brained dreams they dream.’

  The silence was torn apart by the harsh scream of a peregrine, as the falcon on Vortimer’s fist bated wildly, with a furious clapping of wings. The young man rose, striving to calm the bird. He was whiter than ever as he bowed with all courtesy to his father and his host, murmuring his excuses: ‘My falcon—not properly manned as yet, it seems. I crave your pardon,’ and drew back into the shadows, making for the upper doorway.

  The spell that had bound the whole gathering, holding even the Saxons silent, was broken, and the tumult burst upward again, louder than ever. At the lower fire, Thorkel and another young warrior, both very flushed with mead, had started a bragging match that would probably end in a quarrel.

  ‘Once I fought three men one after another, and beat them all!’

  ‘That is nothing. Once I fought three men all at the same time—’

  Time to be on his way, Aquila thought. He rose, and stood taking a last look at the scene in the great Mead Hall. All these two days past he had been too numbed really to understand that tonight he was going to try to escape; that in one way or the other, this was the end of his years among the Saxon kind, and by dawn he would be either free or dead. But now, in the moment of setting out, there was a breathless tightening at his heart as he stood by the open doorway, with the smoky torchlight in his eyes and the harp-song in his ears. Then he turned, and slipped out from Hengest’s hall into the night.

  He had eaten all that came his way, not knowing when he might get the chance to eat again, and drunk little, that he might keep a clear head. But even so, his head seemed full of wood-smoke and the fumes of other men’s mead, and he stood for a few moments breathing deeply in the night air to clear it. Then he set off for the woodwright’s shop. He was surprised to find how light the world was, for he had forgotten that there was a full moon and it would be up now. A still, white night, with a faint mist rising from the water, glimmering, gauzy between the timber halls and the tents that seemed now more than ever like crouching animals. Behind him the sounds of feasting fell away, and around him Hengest’s burg lay quiet between the mist and the moon, for by now all those who did not feast with Hengest and the King were asleep or taking their ease around their own hearth, with house-place door or tent-flap drawn close against the chill of the mist.

  Once a cat ran like a striped shadow across his path, and turned to look at him with eyes that were wide and hostile in the moonlight; otherwise he met no living thing until he came in sight of the woodwright’s shop close to the shore-gate of the burg. He had made sure of the place in the daylight, a solitary spot in some waste land that seemed to belong to the marshes rather than the burg, though it was within the stockade, and easily recognized from the description that Flavia had given him. The mist was thicker down here, so near the water, wreathing and drifting like wet, moonlit smoke about the hump-backed shape of the bothie and the ancient thorn tree beside it. The dragon-head of a galley prow stood against the thorn tree, its snarling mask upreared as though some living monster were trying to crest the mist like a fantastic sea. For a moment, as he came down towards it, Aquila thought that that was all. Then something else moved in the mist, and he saw that Flavia was there before him.

  ‘You have come, then,’ she said, as he halted beside her.

  It was such an obvious thing to say, but sometimes it was better to stick to the obvious things.

  ‘I have come,’ he said, and sent a swift glance towards the stockade gate, just visible in the mist.

  She saw the glance, and shook her head. ‘There are none there to overhear us. Did I not say that I would take care of the guards on the shore-gate?’

  There was a sudden chill in him. ‘Flavia, you don’t mean—What have you done to them?’

  ‘Oh no, I am not a poisoner. They will but sleep a few hours.’

  ‘But how—?’ Aquila began, but she cut him short.

  ‘It was a simple thing to do. They were glad enough of the mead cup that I brought down to them from Hengest’s Hall. See now’—she brought a bundle from under her cloak—‘here is
some food, and a dagger, and a good sharp file that I stole. With the food, you can lie up for a day or so until you are free of that cruel thrall-ring, before you go among men again.’

  Aquila took the bundle from her, mumbling something, he did not know what. They stood looking at each other; and suddenly the ordinary things were no good, after all. Aquila said hoarsely, ‘I have seen—I have heard a singing magic tonight, Flavia. The Lady Rowena made it for the Red Fox. But she did not comb her hair. I do not think that she could comb sparks out of it in the dark.’

  Flavia caught her breath. ‘Aquila, no! It hurts too much. I never made my singing magic because I could not bear that you should—that you shouldn’t feel the same about me any more; and now … ’

  ‘Come with me,’ Aquila said—it felt like a sudden impulse, but he knew that it wasn’t really.

  ‘—and leave the babe?’

  Silence again. Then Aquila said, ‘Bring him too. We’ll find somewhere—a place for ourselves. I’ll work for both of you.’

  ‘For the child of a Saxon father?’

  Aquila looked down at the hand in which he held the bundle, and forced it to relax from the clenched and quivering fist that it had become. ‘I will try to forget his Saxon father, and remember only that he is yours,’ he said carefully.

  She drew closer, lifting her face to his. It was very white in the moonlight and the wreathing mist; and her eyes had again that look of being mere black holes in the whiteness of it. ‘Aquila, part of me would lie down and die tomorrow and not think it a heavy price to pay, if I might come with you tonight. But there’s another part of me that can never come.’

  ‘You mean, you can’t leave the man either.’

  ‘Our Lord help me! He is my man.’

  After a few moments she moved again, and held out something. ‘You must go. But first—take this.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Father’s ring.’

  Aquila made no move to take it. ‘What will he do when he knows that you have given his bride gift away, and in what manner you gave it?’

  ‘I shall tell him that I lost it.’

  ‘And will he believe that?’

  ‘Maybe not,’ Flavia said. ‘But he won’t beat me.’ How strange and luminous her eyes were, all at once, in the moonlight. ‘I am quite safe, my dear. He is a brave man in his way, but he won’t beat me.’

  Aquila put his free hand on her shoulder, and looked down at her, trying to understand. ‘Is it love, with you, or hate, Flavia?’

  ‘I do not know. Something of both maybe; but it doesn’t make any difference. I belong to him.’ Her low voice was completely toneless. ‘Take Father’s ring, and—try to forgive me.’

  He dropped his hand from her shoulder, and took the ring, and slid it on to his bare signet finger. The numbness that had helped him was wearing thin, and the black, appalling misery was aching through. Somewhere, hidden at the back of his mind, he had thought until now that she would come with him; he hadn’t quite accepted that what had happened was for ever. He said in a voice as toneless as her own, ‘If I escape by your help, and take Father’s ring at your hands, then I must forgive you, Flavia.’

  And without another word between them, they turned to the gateway. The guards lay tumbled beside it in uncouth attitudes, the mead cup between them; and Aquila was struck by a sudden fear. ‘Flavia—they’ll tell, when they wake, who gave them the mead!’

  ‘No,’ Flavia said. ‘The moon was not up then, and I took pains to change my voice. They will not know who came.’ She had gone to the bar that held the gate; but Aquila put her on one side, and raising the heavy timber himself, drew the gate open just enough to let him through. Then, in the narrow gap, he turned again to Flavia, for the last time; the last time of all. She looked very remote and still in the darkness of her cloak, with the mist smoking about her; and here in the shadow of the gateway he could scarcely see her face at all. At the last moment he made a half-movement towards her; but she made none towards him, and he checked and let his arm fall to his side. ‘God keep you, Flavia,’ he said.

  ‘And you,’ Flavia whispered. ‘God keep you always. Remember me sometimes—even though it hurts to remember.’

  Aquila made a small, harsh sound that was like a sob, and turned away into the glimmering mist that veiled the boat-sheds and the long keels drawn up above the tide-line. He did not look back, but as he went he heard the soft, heavy creak of the gate being urged shut behind him.

  There were some small fishing coracles on the tide-line, but he did not want to leave any trace of his escape route behind him. The tide was ebbing, and soon there would be no more than a narrow channel between Tanatus and the mainland; and a few miles south towards Rutupiae he knew the channels as a man knows the lines of his own hand. Simpler to swim for it. He turned southward, following the edges of the farmed land, and after some miles’ walking, came down on to saltings that he knew well. The mist had cleared and the wild-fowl were stirring. There was no hint of day as yet in the sky.

  On a spit of blown dune-sand and shingle where he and Felix had often run their coracle ashore he stripped, and making his tunic, with the things that Flavia had given him, into a bundle in his rough cloak, tied it on to his shoulders with its own ends, and took to the water. The channel had shifted in three years, but he got across without much trouble, and waded ashore among the mainland dunes, shaking himself like a dog. He untied his bundle and dragged his tunic on again over his wet body; his cloak also was wet in the outer folds, but the thick oiliness of the wool had kept out most of the water, and the food was quite dry. He bundled it up again, scarcely aware of what he did; he was not aware of anything very clearly, simply doing each thing as it came, because it was the next thing to do. And because it was the next thing to do, he set out towards the dark shore-line of the distant forest.

  The moonlight was fading and the day was coming fast, the cirrus cloud already beginning to catch light from the hidden sun; and a skein of wild duck went overhead against the high, shining dapple of the morning sky. The cool daylight of marsh country was washing over the levels behind him as he reached the first fringes of squat, wind-shaped oak and whitethorn, where the great forest of Anderida swept to within sight of the sea. He pushed in a little way among the trees, found a clearing among brambles and hazel scrub, and sitting down with his back to an oak tree, untied the bundle of food that Flavia had given him. He ate a little without knowing what it was, then took out the file and set to work to rid himself of his thrall-ring.

  It did not take him very long to realize that it couldn’t be done, not by the man wearing the thing. You couldn’t get any force on the file, and you couldn’t see what you were doing. Well, it did not matter much. By and by, when he was well clear of the Saxon hunting runs, he would go to a smith and get it cut off. Meanwhile, that left nothing to do but rest a little before he pushed on again. He thrust the useless file back into the bundle, and lay down, his head on his arm. The glints of sky through the young oak leaves were like a thousand eyes looking down at him; blue eyes, mocking him because he had prayed to God that he might find Flavia, and God had answered his prayer; and he did not think that he would ever pray to God again … He had said that he forgave Flavia, but he hadn’t been able to make the words mean anything. Just words. And Flavia knew that. He knew that she knew. He felt lost and adrift in a black tide of bitterness, and the last thing that he had to hold to was gone. No, not quite the last thing—there was still the hope of finding again the man who had betrayed his father.

  He would have given up that hope for Flavia’s sake, if she had come with him, because the quest for vengeance was a trail that no man should follow with a woman and a child dependent on him. But Flavia had not come.

  He thought about it coolly and carefully. He would go on westward until he was sure that he was clear of the Saxon’s reach, and get rid of the thrall-ring on his neck, and then turn back towards the barbarians again; because most likely, he thought, the lit
tle bird-catcher would be found clinging to the hem of the Sea Wolves’ garments. At any rate, a Saxon camp was the most likely place to get word of him. And word of him he would get, if it took twenty—thirty years.

  Had he but known it, it was to take just three days.

  9

  Forest Sanctuary

  AFTER a while he must have slept, for suddenly it was long past noon, and the sunlight fell slanting through the branches to dapple the brown of last year’s leaves. He got up, ate a little more of the food, and then, wrapping it up again, set off westward.

  There were few roads through the forest, but next day he struck one of the native trackways that had been old before the Legions’ roads were thought of; and since it led in roughly the right direction, he turned into it for the sake of easier travelling and followed it along. By the evening of the next day it had led him into higher and more rolling country, an upland world of long, forest ridges, where the ground was sandy underfoot, and the trees grew taller and more cleanly than the damp oak scrub that he had left behind. The fine spell had broken and soft, chill rain was blowing down the wind. Aquila was wet through and blind weary, for he had scarcely rested since he set out westward; if he rested, the little bird-catcher might draw farther away from him; so he kept on—and on …

  It was already dusk among the trees when, as he came trudging up the long slope of yet another ridge, he caught a waft of wood-smoke on the sodden, forest-scented air, and as he checked, sniffing, the warm saffron flicker of firelight reached him through the hazel and wayfaring trees that fringed the track. He must go to men some time and be rid of the betraying thrall-ring about his neck. Also he must have food. He had finished the last scraps in his bundle at dawn, and the emptiness in his belly drew him towards the fire. Almost without knowing that he did so, he turned to a gap in the wayside scrub, beyond which the faint gleam of fire-light beckoned.