“So, I save one life in order that another shall die.”
“The gods have thrown their dice. They fell that way. The two ahead will soon take a different path from ours. I’ll take you to your uncle and then my debt will be paid.” He smiled and rubbed his hand over his beard-fuzzed chin. “Maybe your uncle will give me the use of his bathhouse and the loan of a razor to smooth my chin. With my people no man may grow a beard or long moustache until he is married.”
“Is there a chosen girl in your tribe that you will marry?”
“No. My cousin and I were only twelve and gathering shellfish along the shore when we were taken by sea raiders and sold together as house slaves, first to a Phoenician trader and then to my master in Londinium, where he then lived.”
“Your people must think you are dead.”
“No—the word was passed many years ago. Nor did either of us miss our freedom, for we are much alike in many ways and knew there was much to learn and a sheaf of years ahead.”
“But this cousin—”
“No more of him.” Baradoc sat forward and tossed a piece of deer meat to Aesc.
Tia, not wishing to break their talk, said, “What are the girls of your tribe like?”
Baradoc laughed. “Like all other girls. Some fat, some thin. Some beautiful, some plain. At your age many of them are long married and having children. Sometimes I see in my mind’s eye the girl I will marry.”
“Tell me.”
“How can I since the picture changes so often? Sometimes her hair is a dark flame, richer than the stag’s coat when he stands in the full light of the morning sun. Sometimes it is blacker than the raven’s wing spread against the year’s first snows. And sometimes her skin is warm and polished, brown like a harvested hazelnut, or creamier than the finest goat’s milk and blushing with the glow of a bright ember.”
Tia teased him. “Spare me. I’ve had enough poetry.”
“Aie, that is true. But there’s always room in each day for a little—otherwise living is as flat as stale wine. We’re not barbarians, my people. We have our songs and our stories, and there’s not one of our kind who doesn’t learn them from first talk and pass them on. So, even with death, they are not lost. Their magic cannot die so long as men have ears.” He stood up, sucked noisily at a fragment of deer meat lodged in his teeth, and said, “It’s time to move.”
He turned away from her abruptly and went across to the woodman’s shelter. He came back after a while, carrying an armful of bracken which he had found there, the remains of a rough bed. He bound it into a soft roll within their piece of fish netting and then wrapped it in her mantle to make a large, soft saddle. Without a word he helped her to mount.
Riding after him, Tia was touched by his rough, silent courtesy. Then, thinking of his dream of some girl waiting for him, she was amused that he had given no place in his thoughts for a fair-haired girl like herself. Maybe there were no fair-haired women in his tribe, but she doubted it. Amongst the Britons of the south and east there were plenty. Strange Baradoc, rough and kind, withdrawn one moment, then easy with talk the next.
Early the next morning they made camp beyond the fringe of the forest in a small willow grove on the edge of a clear stream that flowed down from the distant line of the almost treeless uplands which rose away to the north. They ate and then slept while the dogs kept watch. When they woke, Baradoc went down to one of the streams pools and with willow stakes fixed their piece of net across the narrow gullet through which the stream fed into the pool. Then he called to her to help him, telling her to take off her long hose and sandals, and roll up the skirt of her tunic and pin it tight with her mother’s brooch. Tia noticed that although he was concerned she should keep her leg hose dry, he seemed heedless of wet or discomfort. He just walked into the water wearing his leather short trews and his shirt. Rain or shine, wet or dry seemed to make no difference to him. A few paces abreast they waded up the pool, beating the surface with branches. The trout and grayling in it went upstream to escape through the gullet and some of them were entangled in the stretched netting. Baradoc pulled them out, killed them and tossed them onto the bank.
When they waded out together, Baradoc picked up the fish, strung them on a slip of branch through their gills and handed them to her, saying, “If you have not done it before, you cut their heads off, slit them down the belly and shake or scrape their innards out. The ones with the big fin on the back are grayling and smell of dried thyme. The others are trout. We’ll eat them before we move off.”
“Women’s work, my lord.” Tia said it with a straight face.
Baradoc nodded, unsmiling. As Tia took her dagger and started work, Baradoc went to one of their bundles and ferreted about in the pile of old rags he had found in the fishermen’s hut. He sat down and laid out a long narrow piece of cloth before him.
Tia, her hands slimy and scale-covered as she gutted the fish, asked. “What are you doing?”
“Making a throwing sling. There are duck farther downstream which I can kill and Aesc will retrieve. The fish will serve us for today. The duck we can cook and carry for tomorrow.”
He rolled the long ends of the cloth into thin grips, binding them with pieces of catgut. The center of the cloth he thickened into a pad by sewing one on top of another three squares of extra cloth. Then he gathered a handful of smooth small stones from the stream verge.
Coming back to Tia, he dropped a stone into the padded loop of the sling and said. “Watch. The top of the far stake I set up for the net.” He swung the sling gently in a circle at his side to get the feel of the weight of the stone. “It was with such as this that the first of my coutrymen over four hundred years ago gave a welcome to the Great Caesar.” He whipped the sling around and let the stone fly.
“You missed,” said Tia.
“I expected to. With a new sling one must get the feel and the balance.”
He slung another stone and this time only narrowly missed the stake. With the third stone he hit it a hand’s span from the top.
Tia clapped her slippery, fish-slimed hands and said mockingly, “O mighty Baradoc!”
Baradoc shook his head at her, smiling. “You should not be too pleased. When I come back you will have a duck to pluck and gut.” He tucked the sling into his belt, thrust a handful of stones into the front of his shirt and walked off downstream with Aesc following him. Sunset, tethered by a long headrope to a willow, cropped at the young grass. Bran flew down from a willow perch and took one of the trout heads. Cuna lay sleeping in the sun, and Lerg lay on the ground, head raised, watching the direction in which Baradoc had disappeared.
When Tia had finished the fish, she covered them with leaves against the sun and then washed her hands in the stream. She took off her tunic and spread it in the sun to dry. Wrapping their woollen blanket about her, she wandered around the willow grove collecting dried wood for the fire and gathered a small pile of dried leaves and grasses so that Baradoc should have tinder for starting a flame.
Half a mile downstream Baradoc crouched, hidden in the rushes with Aesc lying at his side. The river was broader here and ran in two channels around a long island fringed with mace reeds and low alder growths. Coming downstream, he had put up several pairs of mallard and teal, but with no chance of hitting them. This was the courting and mating season and he guessed that the island would be a favourite nesting place, for the weed-thick shallows around it made good feeding grounds. He and Aesc crouched, still and watchful, hidden in the rushes. A dog otter came upstream, rolled like a porpoise, sun and water silvering its flanks, and dived to appear in a few moments with a large trout in its forepaws. It lay on its back and let the current drift it downstream while it ate the trout. Beyond the river and the far grassland, the forest trees rose in long swelling waves of changing greens. Distantly, above the farther tree crests, Baradoc marked a thin plume of blue smoke coming from some solitary fire. He guessed it to be some hours’ march away. Now and again the smoke thickened to a dark
, breeze-ragged plume. Whoever, tended it, he thought, was well armed or foolish. These days men and women held close to their homesteads or villages for safety. The forest held only the spoiled or the spoilers. The dark face of Corvo came back to him and with it a quick stir of concern about Tia. He decided that if no flighting duck came in soon, or mating pair appeared from the island reeds, he would go back. Not even Lerg could protect her against some odds.
He smiled to himself as he thought of the way she teased him now about “women’s work” and the flashes of angry spirit she showed from time to time. He guessed that she must long for the security and comfort of her uncle’s villa at Aquae Sulis. That was her kind of life. She had lived sheltered and lived soft, her family wealthy and with servants to come to her call for all her needs. In his time with his master he had known many such families and households. These Romans, most of whom had never seen Rome, lived in the dying radiance of the empire’s glory and called this country their own. And so many of them, even now, did not understand that it had never truly been their country and that even now the strong hand of another race was closing on it. Back in the east, now far beyond Tanatus and Rutupiae, spreading north and south of the Tamesis River, encircling Londinium, their eyes looking ever westward to the rich lands of the Atrebates, to Pontes, Calleva and Venta, were the Saxons, driving forward slowly, making serfs of common folk and culls of British chiefs, Romano-British merchants and town dignitaries, all those of power and wealth who had lived soft too long. Only among the men of the north and west on mountain and moor and wild clifftop and deep riverfronts the dream still lived of dominion over all the land. It lived with him, too, like a slow peatburn waiting only the right wind and the right season to start the hidden embers to flame.
Two heavy splashes brought his attention back to the river. A pair of mallards, duck and drake, had planed in, furrowing the water as they landed. Baradoc watched as the drake began to display to the duck. Beside him he felt the faint tremble of Aesc’s body as the dog watched, too. Under the sun the drake shone as though it were a jewelled bird, yellow bill and glossy green head flashing as it bobbed and dipped, the great white and purple wing patches opening like a fan as it preened its wings and rattled its quills while the duck, head lowered, slid away pretending lack of interest, but never going far. Baradoc fingered the set of his stone in the sling and slowly stretched the length of cloth even, held in both hands at his side ready to throw when he rose. Aie! it was a pity to kill when the day was so bright and the birds moved to the dance of love. But an empty belly drove all thought of beauty and poetry from the mind. Taking a deep breath and holding it, Baradoc tensed himself for the move which would bring him upright with the long sling already circling to take the drake, his left hand already holding the second stone for the duck.
He stood swiftly, smoothly, and the slingstone hummed like a hornet as it sped across the water and took the drake with a vicious blow on the right shoulder breaking the wing joint. Baradoc whirled the sling again and aimed at the duck, which with a beating of wings and strong thrusts of its webbed feet had jumped into the air for flight. The stone narrowly missed the duck, which disappeared up the river calling with alarm. By the island the drake circled helplessly on the water, thrusting uselessly with one wing to find flight. Aesc, knowing her moment, slid into the stream and swam to retrieve the bird. She brought it back to Baradoc, who killed it quickly with a twist of the head which broke its neck. He pushed it into the front of his undershirt, looped the sling over his belt and turned to leave his cover.
As he reached out his hand to take the fish spear which he had thrust into the mud of the bank a voice said, “Touch it—and you get this through your head.”
Standing full in the center of the break in the reeds through which Baradoc had made his way to the river was a tall youth, dark-haired, his skin brown from dirt and sun, a straggling growth of beard covering his chin. He wore old, tattered woollen breeks to the knees, the rest of his legs bare. From his shoulders hung a brown cloak held tight about his waist with a broad leather belt from which hung a deep fringe of rusty, finely linked ring-mail to form a short skirt. On one side of the belt was looped an unscabbarded short broadsword, rusty and blunt-edged. Hanging from the other side was a leather quiver full of short arrows. His arms raised, he held a charged bow, the arrow aimed at Baradoc. He was flanked on one side by a lank-haired young woman with a long, ill-humoured face, an old scar deeply marking her right cheek. She wore strings of coloured beads around her thin neck, the long loops falling across a dirty, ragged, long-sleeved white stole striped with red and green diagonal bands. At his other side stood another youth, who, small and sturdy, dressed in a belted tunic of furs, heavy sandals on his feet, carried a light throwing spear.
Baradoc, making no attempt to touch the fish spear, said calmly, “You need not hold the arrow on me. I mean harm to no one. I hunt and kill for the pot alone.”
“You live around here?”
“No. I make my way west to join my people. I have been working up-country.”
“You had a master there?”
“Aye. But he is now dead. He gave me my freedom.”
The youth spat suddenly. “No masters are good. So you were a slave?”
“I was.”
The young woman said impatiently, “Leave him, Atro. Take his spear and sling if you will.” She laughed. “His clothes, too. And those good sandals and trews and the dagger at his belt. But leave him. We have better work at hand.”
“Shut your mouth, Colta.” Atro spoke roughly without looking at her. Then to Baradoc he said, “Come here.”
Baradoc moved through the reeds onto the grass and Atro stood back from him, the arrow still levelled.
Colta said, “Now what is in your mind, Atro?”
“That we have to live. That he means nothing to us. That there is no tie between us except poverty. These days that tie is a cobweb broken by a breath. So”—his mouth twisted angrily—“he is a freed slave. But who should take his word for it? There are those in Clausentium and Venta who will buy without questions—and crop his ears to mark their property. Enghus, tie him.”
But for the arrow tip a few feet from his head Baradoc would have made an attempt to escape. The iron-tipped arrow could not be denied. It would split his skull like an eggshell. Then the thought of Tia left alone stirred him to make a plea which came hard to his lips.
Baradoc said firmly, “Shared poverty holds no value these days. But we are of the same country and we have the same enemy. If you sell your own kind to slavery what can you expect for yourself when the new masters come? And come they will unless we hold together in a kinship bigger than this country has ever known since the old queen put Verulamium and Londinium to the sword and flame.”
Atro shook his head. “Now you talk big and fancy. Such talk means nothing. Old kings and queens or new ones mean nothing. Today it is each for himself. Bind him, Enghus.”
Enghus, giggling, danced around behind Baradoc while Colta knelt to a travelling bundle that lay on the grass at her feet and brought out rope lengths. She handed these to Enghus. Then, taking his light spear, she pressed the point against Baradoc’s neck, saying, “Now, Big Talker of the good times to come, put your hands behind your back and stand calm.” She scratched the tip of the spear lightly across the skin of his neck and laughed.
Baradoc put his hands behind him. Enghus bound them tight and with another cord roped his arms to his body, grunting as he jerked at the knots.
Atro lowered his bow and withdrew the arrow. He reached forward and jerked the dead mallard from the inside of Baradoc’s shirt and tossed it to Colta.
“Take it. Tonight you shall roast it at the shrine keeper’s fire. Eh, Enghus?”
Enghus gave a giggle of pleasure and, jerking his head to the west, said, “But not until we have roasted him first to make him sing. The old fool, he burns his garden weeds, filling the sky with smoke as though the whole world moved at peace.” Then he shook hi
s spear and pleaded, “But first, Brother Atro, promise, let me tease him a little with this to put him in the way of true speaking before the fire touches him.”
Atro laughed. “Maybe, Enghus, maybe. Just to make you happy, my little bloodthirsty brother.” Then, to Baradoc, he went on calmly as though there could be no hard feelings between them, “Enghus is my brother. When he was born the gods touched him with a happy madness. Even when he feels like weeping he laughs. He laughs at his own pain and the pain of all others. Now, since you know us all, tell us your name.”
“My name is Baradoc.”
Colta, now holding the fish spear, came up to him and touched his cheek and gave a sudden sharp tug to the beard growth on his chin. “If you were my slave I would beat you daily to take that proud look from your face.”
“Enough of that,” said Atro. “We move.” Then looking around, he asked, “Where is the dog?”
Enghus said, “It moved off a while ago. And such a pretty colour. I could have made myself a hood from its skin and a belt pouch from its ears.” He laughed to himself, jerking his head up and down.
Atro said to Baradoc, “Call the dog.”
Baradoc shook his head. “It would not come. It is a stray that joined me only this morning. But someone has trained it well.”
“So I saw when it took the duck. A dog like that could have been useful.”
Baradoc shrugged his shoulders and made no answer. Atro turned abruptly away and began to walk down the riverbank. Before Baradoc could move he was pricked none too lightly from behind with the point of Enghus’s spear. He began to follow Atro with Enghus giggling behind him.
Baradoc knew that Aesc would return to Tia. What she would do now that she was alone he could not guess. But one thing was certain. If he did not manage to escape from this ragged, broken-down band soon and return to find her, the dogs would leave her after a few days and come seeking him. Beyond that point he shut his mind to her fate.
Ahead of him Atro marched now with his bow slung over his shoulder, the ring-mail skirt swinging about his thighs, the rusty links making a soft whispering music, the battered old broadsword bumping at his side. The sword was Roman and uncared for, and the bow, an old one, but serviceable still, was of the kind which in the old days the Parthian auxiliaries had used, cunningly made of alternate strips of wood and bone. To have been taken by these wanderers touched his pride sharply, but he could understand how it had happened. When a man hunted all his mind was on his quarry. Lost in a hunter’s dream, he had crouched in the reeds, all his senses concentrating toward the moment of the kill, and had allowed Atro to move up behind him.
The Crimson Chalice Page 5