The Crimson Chalice

by Victor Canning

  Straightening up as the pains left her, Tia said, “My husband, Baradoc, is down at the beach with his boat. It would be another great kindness if you would fetch him.” She smiled. “I think my child has his father’s nature and is impatient of the long wait.”

  The stranger looked westward to the sea, which ran like beaten silver to the hazy line of the horizon, and for a moment his eyes closed as though some remembered grief overpowered him. Then he turned back to Tia and, smiling, said, “All will be well with you. Your husband will come in full time. But now it is written that it is your term and there is no waiting for him. Go to your bed and I will stay by you. Yours will not be the first child I have brought into this world. You need have no fear of me, nor have any shame that a strange man helps you. I give my name, which is Merlin, freely to you and so all strangeness dies.”

  He took her by the arm, led her into the hut to the bed platform and put the milk pot down at its side. Then he turned to the hearth fire and began to fill the cauldron with water from the hanging skin.

  Tia said, “You could go to the cliff top and call my husband. It is better that he comes.”

  Merlin shook his head. “There is not time enough. Be brave and be patient. Baradoc will return and when he does it will be to be greeted by his son. Now undress and lie beneath the covers. Your son as you say is impatient like his father. He will not wait for him, for there are many who already wait for the child’s coming.”

  As Tia began to strip Merlin went out of the hut and although she could not see him, she could see the shadow of his body cast across the doorway and, without her knowing why, the sight of it was a great comfort to her.

  As she pulled the bedcovers over herself the sharp pains came again; and then began for her a time when all thought and feeling and the march of all her senses lost shape and sequence, a time when she lived in a dream through which loomed always the calm and comforting face of Merlin, and the touch of his hands on her was that of a woman, and the sound of his voice as peaceful and lulling as the rustle of aspen leaves under the breath of an idle breeze until finally, as though from a great distance, came Merlin’s voice with a high note of happiness in it, saying, “Take your son in your arms. He was hard on you in birth, for the birth of great ones makes the gods jealous of losing them to this world, but in life your son will never be less than gentle with you.”

  At the moment that Merlin placed the child in Tia’s arms, Baradoc saw the vessel bearing down on him. It came riding toward him on a freshening northeasterly wind. The great mainsail was set and curved like an arching yellow shield as the craft ran free before the wind. At the bows the white foot waves creamed, high and flared in a great spate along its sides, below the long row of lodged war shields that lined the gunwales. At first Baradoc had thought it a trader coming down from some Sabrina port, but as it drew nearer, the island from which he had long drifted low on the horizon behind it, he saw from the sail and the shields that it was no peaceful ship. As it raced down on him, already fetching a little from its course to reach him, he knew that it brought no hope. Black anger was added to the misery already in him as he sat, naked except for his loincloth, watching the ship overhaul him, seeing the long line of multicoloured shields hung over the freeboard, and clear now the two men at the long stern oar and other man in the bows, their heads all turned his way, the sun and sea glitter reflected on spears and swords, and above them, swollen and straining in the wind, the great curve of the saffron-coloured mainsail blazoned with the wingspread of a great black raven across its full breadth. From the bitterness of despair in him rose the memory of the stranger’s words … if you would leave this island safely with your woman and child put the boat not to water until the first red-gorged swallow comes winging north… What kind of black sorcery, what fine cunning with words from the gods or the stranger’s madness was this? He had put the boat to water, but not to leave the island, only to ready it for leaving … Aie, but face the truth, there would have been no waiting for the swallow.

  The great ship passed him, an order was shouted loud, ringing across the waves to him, and then it came about sharply. The high sail boom was lowered quickly and the fine leather sail gathered safely by the crew. The ship ghosted up to him and three long-handled boathooks grappled him to its side. As he looked at the men, leather-and-wool-jacketed and tightly long-hosed against the weather, they were none, he knew, of the kind he hated, the land-hungry Saxon men, but Viking sea raiders who had probably overwintered in Erin or Cymru.

  They took him aboard, cast his boat adrift, and marched him, held securely between two crewmen, to the high carved bows where stood a man he had met before, a tall powerfully built man wearing a silver-winged bronze helmet, a saffron-coloured tunic with the raven device, and a broadsword swinging from his whale-skin belt. His face was black as sea coal.

  The man looked at him unmoving for a long while as the wind whistled softly through the rigging and the waves slapped idly at the ship’s sides. The man smiled and bit his underlip with fine white teeth in pleasure, and then he said gently, “By Thor, what day of omens is this that out of the sea is thrown up an old friend, my young horse thief with the great wolfhound?” He laughed and cried mockingly for all to hear, “Have you turned then penitent and paddle now to Erin to join a Christian monastery?”

  For a moment Baradoc was silent, mouth and chin set stubbornly, and the blackness stayed sourly in him but through it came now the dim touch of hope. He said, “I go to my people beyond the point of Hercules, a few hours’sail for you. Put me ashore, Master Corvo, and you can name your ransom money. I am the son of a chief.”

  Corvo was silent, while the crew watched and the ship rolled gently. None moved except the two men at the stern oar who kept the bows dead up into the wind with their strokes. Then the man spoke and he said savagely, “The son of a chief? And what am I? The son of a black slave woman begotten by a drunken sea raider—and gold means nothing to me until we reach the warm southlands to spend what we have. But this trip death has trimmed our crew and I need men—not money.” His voice rising fiercely, he called, “Put a collar on him and chain him to the rowing benches!”

  Baradoc was led aft. As he went he saw far, far to the northeast the sun gilding the green tops of the island. He clenched his hands and bit his lip until blood flowed to hold back the anguish that engulfed his heart.

  Grief had paced out its first fierce measures, encircling her heart and shadowing her mind with the heavy folds of its sable mantle. Baradoc’s boat at the whim of the tides and the caprice of the veering winds had drifted back to the island. Merlin had swum out and brought it into the little cove where its keel had first touched water. When Tia saw it and wept Merlin told her that Baradoc still lived and would return to her, for he had seen the future in the dreams the gods gave him.

  Now with the passing days warming the rocks and all the island balmy under the touch of growing spring, the young bracken a foot high, the sea samphires and the thrift pads moving toward bloom, and the sureness of Merlin’s faith that one day Baradoc would return becoming her courage and strength, Tia found a peace and a fortitude that served her strongly.

  She lived now, for safety against sudden raiders and for human comfort and companionship, in Merlin’s cave, where Lerg and Aesc slept each night under the boulder entrance and Cuna at the foot of the child’s small wicker crib, while Bran roosted on a rock spur outside the curtained fissure opening. At night the brazier glowed like a red eye and the fat tallow candles, their light flickering in the drafts that idled through the high curtain, cast moving shadows over the rough vault of the cavern’s roof. Sometimes before she slept and Merlin moved to finger-snuff the lights she would look down at the child in the crib at her side and find him awake, watching the shadow play on the vaulted roof. She would put out a hand and gently touch the warm cheek and smooth the down of his pale, mouse-coloured hair, already flecked with the copper glints he drew from his father, and the down-soft touch under her finge
rs always brought back the morning of Baradoc’s going and she saw the rough writing on the peat floor … Returning, I will lay a chaplet of purple vetch about your hair and, kneeling, calling you queen. And she remembered again the moment when bearded Merlin leant over her and put her son into her arms, the early-born, the longed-for son, and, standing back from her, said after a while, “How shall he be named?”

  Without hesitation, for this had long been settled between herself and Baradoc, she said, “He is named after the father of his father, and is called Arturo.”

  Merlin nodded, smiling, and said, “It is a good name. A name for all men and all time.”

  And so she lived now, cared for and protected by Merlin, waiting for the time when Arturo should be grown enough to make the crossing to the mainland. She would go to the people of the Enduring Crow and claim her place among them and rest with them until Baradoc returned. So, while she waited for Merlin to name the day of the crossing, she lived with him as she had once lived with her brother, in openness and companionship. He knew her mind and learned of her past and the story of her meeting with Baradoc. But the one thing she kept locked in her mind, hidden even from Merlin, was their meeting with Asimus and his gift to them, because the true ending of that story belonged only to her and to Baradoc.

  She used from the first bathing of Arturo the silver chalice to hold the warm water with which she sponged his body and cleaned his apple-bloom cheeks. When the child was a month old, sitting cradled by her arm on her knee, his naked body shining in the sunlight through the sea entrance, the cry of the seabirds and the slow booming of the swell against the rocks echoing around the cavern, it happened that Arturo, crowing in baby delight, reached out his small fat-wristed hands and put them on the sides of the chalice. Through the water, seen only by her, the ice-bright silver of the bowl was misted and clouded with a crimson flush as pure and unflawed as the rosy gorge of the swallow which had made it nest above the cavern’s sea opening.

  List of Place and Tribal Names

  ANCIENT MODERN

  Abona

  Abonae

  Abus

  Anderida

  Antivestaeum

  Aquae Sulis

  Ariconium

  Atrebates

  R. Avon

  Bristol

  R. Humber

  Pevensey

  Land’s End

  Bath

  Weston-under-Penyard

  Middle Thames Valley tribe

  Belerium

  Land’s End

  Belgae

  West Country tribe

  Brigantes

  Tribe holding lands north of York

  from coast to coast

  Caer Sibli

  Lundy Island

  Calcaria

  Tradcaster

  Calleva

  Silchester

  Camulodunum

  Colchester

  Cantawarra

  Canterbury

  Cantiaci

  Kent tribe

  Catuvellauni

  Essex tribe also holding lands

  northwest of London

  Clausentium

  Bitterne

  Corinium

  Cirencester

  Coritani

  Cornovii

  Crococalana

  Cunetio

  Cymro

  Cheshire-Staffordshire tribe

  Brough

  Mildenhall

  Wales

  Demetae

  Deva

  Dubglas

  Dumnonia

  Durnovaria

  Durobrivae

  Durocornovium

  Durolipons

  Durotriges

  Durovernum

  Durovigutum

  Eburacum

  Erin

  Eurium

  York

  Ireland

  Usk

  Southwest Wales tribe

  Chester

  R. Witham

  Cornwall and Devon

  Dorchester

  Rochester

  Wanborough

  Cambridge

  Somerset-Dorset tribe

  Canterbury

  Godmanchester

  Lincoln-Leicestershire tribe

  Glevum

  Gobannium

  Gloucester

  Abergavenny

  Hercules’Promontory Hartland Point

  Iceni

  Ictis

  Isca

  Ituna

  Norfolk-East Anglia tribe

  St. Michael’s Mount

  Exeter

  Solway Firth

  Lactodorum

  Lavobrinta

  Lemanis

  Lindinis

  Lindum

  Londinium

  Lugovalium

  Luteria

  London

  Carlisle

  Paris

  Towcaster

  Forden Gaer (Wales)

  Lympne

  Ilchester

  Lincoln

  Metatis

  Mona

  Moridunum

  The Wash

  Anglesey

  Carmarthen

  Nemetostatio

  Nidum

  Novantae

  Noviomagus

  North Tawton

  Neath

  Dumfries tribe

  Chichester

  Ocelli

  Olicana

  Ordovices

  Flambrough Head

  Ilkley

  North Wales tribe

  Parisi

  Petuaria

  Picts

  Pontes

  Protus Adurni

  East Yorkshire tribe

  Brough (Humber)

  The Scots

  Staines

  Porchester

  Ratae

  Regnenses

  Rutupiae

  Leicester

  Hampshire-Sussex tribe

  Richborough

  Sabrina

  Salinae

  Scotti

  Segontium

  Sorviodunum

  Spinis.

  Tamarus

  Tamesis

  R. Tamar

  R. Thames

  R. Severn

  Droitwich

  The Irish

  Caernarvon

  Old Sarum (Salisbury)

  Speen

  Tanatus

  Tisobis

  Trinovantes

  Turius

  Thanet

  R. Glaslyn

  Essex-East Anglia tribe

  R. Towy

  Vectis

  Venta

  Verlucio

  Verulamium

  Vindocladia

  Vindolandia

  Isle of Wight

  Winchester

  Sandy Lane

  St. Albans

  Badbury Rings

  Chesterholm.

  Yyns-witrin Glastonbury

  Copyright

  First published in 1976 by Heinemann

  This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

  www.curtisbrown.co.uk

  ISBN 978-1-4472-3464-7 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-3463-0 POD

  Copyright © Victor Canning, 1976

  The right of Victor Canning to be identified as the

  author of this work has been asserted in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of the material reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make restitution at the earliest opportunity.

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