by Jane Stain
This started much talk and gesturing as everyone chose partners for the raid. Breth squeezed Jaelle’s side, and she looked up at him to see a question in his eyes again. She nodded yes in answer, agreeing that they would be a pair, of course.
Once the side conversations had died down, again there was one single speaker, another man. And even as close as she was to Breth, she hadn’t seen the man give any sort of signal to let breath know he wanted to speak. Her curiosity was just about killing her, but she resolved not to ask Breth about it. She wanted to figure this out on her own.
This man jumped up on top of a tree stump to be seen above everyone else and spread his hands wide with exuberance.
“To make it even more of a surprise, why don’t we start on our way there tonight?”
At this, there was a general cheer, and all Breth had to do was nod.
Jaelle got caught up in the excitement. Okay, and the feeling of his arm holding her tight.
Nineteen
Marcus slammed his fist down on the arm of his great chair, which he thought of as his throne.
“Yes, I said half the men will be on guard at all times, and that’s what I meant. All the men need to do is guard and eat and piss and sleep. There is plenty of time to do all that with half of them on guard at any given moment. I’m not doing this for no reason. Breth’s clan will attack us. It’s a fact. We know for sure they’re coming. We just don’t know when, so we must be ready at all times.”
First General put his fist to his heart and bowed his head.
“I hear and obey, Great Marcus. Will you permit a question?”
Marcus petted First General’s hair as if the man were a loyal dog — and this was pretty much the way he thought of the man.
“Very well. What is your question?”
First general allowed himself to look up at Marcus’s eyes with intelligence and amused awareness.
“Are you quite sure you won’t know when the attack is coming?”
Twenty
Breth and Jaelle spent the heat of the day in the river, alone in a secluded cove, just the two of them. They bathed well, and then Deoord came with his pot of blue clay and patiently waited on the riverbank.
This time, Jaelle was eager to be protected by the woad.
And then it was time to strap on their weapons ― and her the helmet bag ― and go.
Breth took her hand and guided her up the path to the makeshift shelter, where all the fighters waited nearby. They were similarly armed and decorated, and again it was tempting to stand and stare at the wonderful animated animals and plants that covered these naked people.
But perhaps aware of her difficulty in not staring, Breth took her by the arm and walked out in front of all the fighters, calling out behind them.
“The sooner we get started, the sooner we get our vengeance.”
There was a general cheer that sounded more like ‘rawr’, and then the large party was on its way, wearing nothing but blue clay, shoes or boots, and hip or back scabbards with weapons.
For the first five hours, Jaelle assumed they would hunt for their supper. But subtly and gradually, it dawned on her that she wasn’t getting hungry. Nor tired. Matter of fact, her muscles weren’t getting cramped, nor her lungs stinging from the unusual amount of exercise, either, the way they had on the first leg of this round-trip.
She did get thirsty, as did everyone else, and every time they came to a source of water, everyone went down to drink, careful not to remove any of the clay that decorated them.
The woad clay — or rather the druid magic infused in it — was obviously keeping the fighters in a state that at least didn’t need food or rest, if not a state that replicated food and rest.
Wow.
The druids practiced very powerful magic, indeed.
The fighters walked all night, and then when the sun was coming up, Breth changed direction. Drastically.
Jaelle was dying to ask what the heck they were doing climbing up this craggy mountain when they were supposed to be going to the Fort to kick some butt, but her gut told her not to.
And for once, her mouth listened. Maybe the clay gave her some sort of magical power over her mouth. That would be nice.
Instead of asking why — instead of talking at all — she observed the attitude of the people as they climbed the mountain. They were solemn and quiet. Reverent, but still not the least bit sleepy. Whenever her eyes met someone else’s, they looked at her in calm serenity, sure they were on the right path.
She let that be enough.
But she soon learned that she didn’t have to. The clan fighters’ reward for the climb halfway up the mountain was a hidden sanctuary in the cleft of some boulders.
From a distance, it looked like a small animal cave. But when they got closer and went around the huge round rocks, the path went down into a cave that was big enough for all forty nine naked woad warriors to fit easily, sitting or lying down at their leisure. Even better, the cave floor had been covered with fresh rushes not terribly long ago. They were long past their fragrant green state but surprisingly soft and warm against the skin. Much less irritating than the straw bales Jaelle had sat upon long ago at the faire.
But the best part of the cave was that its walls were covered in Celtic carvings of the Pictish variety.
Jaelle sat down next to Breth and stared at all the carvings in the dim sunlight that penetrated into the cave.
“What does it all say?”
With everyone else listening and sometimes putting in a detail here or giving a demonstration there, the leader of the clan fighters spent a few hours telling Jaelle all the stories that were pictured on the dome cave wall.
It started on one side of the cave with the story of how long ago, the Picts had come over the large water from the mainland to live on this island, which they found enchanting and well suited for the Pictish way of life. Mountains for hunting the great birds. Grassy valleys for stalking the great stag. Great lochs full of seafood. This was paradise.
The people were depicted carving out their small boats and then rowing over the channel in them. Only three or four people fit in each boat, usually the parents with their small children. There were pictures of older children carving out and rowing their own boats.
Another sequence showed what the Picts had brought along with them from the mainland: their swords, of course, along with all the iron tools needed to make looms for weaving the linen for their breeks and dresses, arrows for hunting the great bird and stag, axe heads for chopping wood for the planks to floor the grand fortresses they would build...
Left behind on the mainland were many loved ones depicted, related clans who didn't want to come along. They were shown among their fine homes, flocks, and fields, saying 'What place could be better than home?'
Those who did come over here to found Pictland were shown as the adventurous ones. Hunters with weapons, rather than gatherers with baskets.
There were others shown to be here on the island when the Picts arrived, but so few of them and so few Picts that they largely left each other alone. They were shown with their backs to one another.
But then new invaders came from every which way to try and take this land from the Picts. Angles, Saxons, Gaels, these new invaders from faraway Rome.
The Gaels were almost tolerable. At least the Gaels respected the clan structure. At least the Gaels only tried to take land for themselves, and only what they could use.
These invaders from Rome, howsoever, were a big concern. They weren't individuals. No, they were a collective. They acted on the mind of someone far away, and acted blindly, following without question orders which were against their own interests. That kind of thinking was dangerous. It needed to be fought.
In keeping with the celebration of individualism, the stories of many individual people were also depicted on the cave wall.
One especially pictorial story was about an early clan chief who had united what was then a record of three clans. He
had done it to fortify a hill against all the other clans. The large man, nearly seven feet tall, was pictured with each of four wives, three of them dead, and then his seventeen children ― fourteen of them sons. It was easy to see why he was so powerful.
Loyalty to parents was quite strong in this culture, which extended loyalty to a related clan chief. A clan was a family, and non-relative members were rare except in the case of marriage – and then of course, the person was joining a family.
All of the carvings in the cave made Jaelle gape in wonder and awe. What a long record of the history of the people in such a simple way.
It made sense.
All the fighters came here year after year, sometimes bringing their children just to see the stories. They didn't need to turn the pages of a book in order to tell the story. The children could lie comfortably on their backs and gaze up at the pictures, learning how to discern what they meant as the parents told the stories.
Jaelle could imagine it all happening around her as they sat, the woad painted warriors, telling the stories as if they were her parents. It was a beautiful tradition, and she felt so honored to be included.
All the stories revolved around this very cave. In fact, while Breth spoke, his brother Talorc was busy carving in one small undecorated location, of which there were only a few.
After a time though, the stories had all been told, and the group’s whispered discussion turned toward reiterating their plan and wishing each other a good battle.
Throughout this whole span of six hours or more, none of them got hungry, they passed skins of water around — and only one person was speaking at a time.
But once again, there was no visible signal they were giving, nor any visible signal from Breth to the person whose turn it was to speak. Baffling.
Jaelle had a question for Breth, but she didn’t want to interrupt this odd conversation. So she turned and looked him in the face and waited for his eyes to meet hers.
This took a while, because he was looking at the person who was currently speaking, and then he looked at someone else and they spoke…
Oh!
How simple. She felt like an idiot for not catching on before, and she slouched where she sat, deflated. But she kept looking right at him.
Sure enough, when Breth at last turned to Jaelle and met her eye, she just knew that was the signal and it was her turn to speak. She took a deep breath in order to bolster herself up enough to speak confidently, and then addressed everyone.
“I am honored to be along with you on this quest for vengeance. Thank you for your faith and trust in me. From the way you’re acting, I can tell that you all know what’s going on. But I would love to understand why we’re hiding in this cave when we could be getting closer to the fort. None of us is tired, so that can’t be it.”
Breth gave her a sympathetic look, put his arm around her, and gently hugged her, careful not to smudge the woad on her naked body.
It felt wonderful, just the balm her frazzled nerves needed.
But Instead of answering her questions himself, he turned and looked to a young female fighter sitting next to them.
The woad-decorated naked blonde woman spoke when Jaelle turned and looked at her.
“Ah, but we are only three hours’ walk away, including our hike down the mountain. We are quite close, thus our need to hide. Our attack wouldn’t be much of a surprise if they saw us or heard us.”
When the sun was done setting, they all moved out of the cave, necessarily in single file. According to their plan, they split up into pairs and went their separate ways to the same location, for two reasons. One, this way if anyone was discovered, it would just be two people. The invaders would just think it was travelers, not a retaliatory attack. Two, they had to move separately in order to surround the fort so that they could take as many Roman soldiers by surprise in their sleep as possible. They would time their attack by the height of the moon behind a certain tree they all knew as a landmark.
Jaelle and Breth were a pair, of course.
Before they got started, Breth showed her a dozen hand signals they could use to communicate silently, and while she concentrated on learning them, she was amused at the memory of movies showing modern-day soldiers doing the same thing. Once they had practiced those and she felt confident that they could communicate well, they headed on down the mountain.
It was cloudy tonight, and so barely any stars could be seen, but the moonlight penetrated the clouds and pervaded them. It made the Scottish skies look magical, while at the same time making shadows blurry so that the ground seemed less real.
Breth signaled that he was going to stop and she should catch up with him so they could have a whispered conversation.
“You’re doing a good job at being quiet, but you aren’t as practiced as the clan. Please don’t take this wrong way, but I need you to walk in my footsteps so that you don’t step on leaves or twigs. They make noise. I know my strides are longer, so I’ll shorten them for you. Agreed?”
She was already trying hard, and his words stung. She resisted wiping the tears that had sprung unbidden to her eyes.
But he did it for her, kissing them away and then holding her head tenderly.
She sat in silence for long time, letting him hold her and drawing strength from the feel of him. The smell of him.
At long last, she had her emotions under control. To show him she did, she whispered in jest.
“I suppose I can live with you being better at walking quietly, since I’m at least as good as you at fighting with the sword.”
He squeezed her hand and looked into her eyes as he whispered.
“That you are. And I was trying my hardest. Ready?”
She was.
“Yes. Lead on, Macduff.”
He looked at her quizzically.
She rolled her eyes at herself.
“It’s a saying from five hundred years before my time. I’ll explain it to you later.”
“I’d like that.”
He drew apart from her slowly and gently, then looked down at his feet and made a show of shortening his steps, then looked at her with a question in his eyes.
She nodded her agreement and did her best to walk in his footsteps.
He wrinkled his nose in a gesture that showed he was grateful, then turned and watched where he was going as he led her down the mountain and through the pass and up the hill from whose top they could peek through the bushes and see the fort below, on the other side of Hadrian’s Wall.
Twenty-One
In his favorite lookout spot at the top of the hill above the fort behind the bushes, Breth drew Jaelle close to him so that her eyes were looking as closely as possible at the same spot on the invaders’ wall where he was looking. The sun was down, but the stones shone brightly in the moonlight. Just to be sure she knew where to look, he pointed, and the woad clay flock of egrets on his arm ruffled their feathers as he extended his arm out in front of the two of them.
So as not to be heard by the twelve barbarian guards marching in formation just on the other side of the wall, he whispered breathily in her ear, nuzzling her temple with his nose while he did so.
“Do you see those decorated wall stones on the top row over there, under the Sycamore tree?”
She leaned into him, making their heads graze together gently. Making the twin dragons on her chest take flight. And making the desire to kiss her almost irresistible.
Yeah, it was irresistible.
He kissed her hungrily this time, his desire held back only by the need to keep the woad on their bodies undisturbed. He cherished the kiss for what it was ― passion in a stolen moment ― and then resolutely but regretfully backed away so that they once more stood mostly apart behind the bushes, looking at the wall under the Sycamore tree.
Her head rubbed against his as she nodded gently.
“Yes, yes I see dark lines on those stones where the moonlight hits them just so.”
He swallowed the sadness
that he felt at what he had brought up to tell her. The time for sadness was passed, and he needed to move on with the life that was before him, not dwelling on the life that was behind. That was the way.
“Those are the stone carvings of Gisa’s departed brother she was telling you about at the last wake. That’s usually where I go over the wall, because the tree gives me a bit of cover. But the last time I was here, I was seen there, and so it’s better if we go over somewhere else. I just wanted you to know that was where they were, so that if you ever got the chance you might look at them more closely. If you stay, of course we’ll teach you how to decipher meaning from the pictures. It’s very similar to the meanings of the pictures painted on our bodies right now — just not animated.”
She started to turn toward him, but he caught her and held her firmly looking that way.
“It’s better if you don’t tempt me right now. We cannot disturb the clay, and you make it very tempting to do so.”
She laughed ever so quietly, and he joined her for a moment. When they stopped, she spoke to him, still looking at the marked stones under the Sycamore tree.
“I’m staying for now, that’s really all I can tell you.”
He picked up some of her unusually thick — even if remarkably short — brown curly hair and let it spill out of his hand slowly.
“That’s really all I can ask you to tell me. I’m happy.”
She leaned her head in against his again, and they stood there with their foreheads touching, watching the wind make the Sycamore tree’s branches wave in the moonlight, making shadows on the decorated wall. Sharing this view made him feel close to her.
She tapped the back of his hand with her finger.
“How long until we go?”
The moon wasn’t quite in the agreed upon spot yet, but he would have to go more slowly than normal, with her along.
“It’s time. The way is a bit tricky, but if you stay in my footsteps, you should make it silently.”