“Sit,” my father says, with a gentle smile. “The poultice is nearly ready. My mate will tend to you. Then you will leave us in peace.”
The men remain tense, at the ready, until the scarred Roman sits fully on the bench and lifts his mug to his lips.
My mother holds the warm poultice behind his ear until the skin grows soft, then touches the sharp point of a bone needle to the abscess. Pus shoots from the wound, and stink fills the air. The Roman sighs with relief and relaxes back onto the bench. The mood in the roundhouse calms.
My father’s eyes linger on the Roman’s chest armor. His intrigue is plain, and the Roman sees it, too. He unfastens the ties at the front of the armor and holds it open so that my father might inspect the inner workings. Eventually he crouches before the Roman, investigating the ingenuity of the design—some thirty segmented plates, all of them held together with connecting leather straps. “A marvel,” my father says, eyes shining.
The Roman appears pleased and touches the hilt of the sword at his hip. He lifts his eyebrows, asking if my father wants to see the sword. He is a man as transfixed by ironwork as any man can be, and I hold my breath as the Roman slides his sword from the scabbard.
The hilt is plain, without the enamel inlay or raised detail that might impress my father. Even so, as the Roman touches the sword’s tip to the earth and leans his weight into the hilt, the blade arcs, as though it were made of a material other than iron. My father’s brow lifts that the blade does not snap. “Tempered,” the Roman says.
Clearly he is pleased to show his Roman cleverness, to use a word we do not know.
“You know to plunge a finished blade into a cold bath?” he says.
My father nods, without hinting at insult that he might not know such a thing.
“A blade needs to be reheated afterward—tempered. With tempering,” he says, “you can alter the hardness of iron.” He continues, explaining that the more extreme the reheating, the suppler the iron becomes. A sword should be removed from the embers during the reheating once the blade warms to the color of straw. At that point, the iron remains durable but not so brittle as before that second dose of heat.
My father leans close, taking in every word. I tuck purple loosestrife into a dozen small linen pouches—a task assigned by my mother—and sew the open edges shut. While I work, my father gently taps his knuckles against his chin, and I know his mind is ablaze. Might he temper the saw blades he makes for Carpenter, add a bit of springiness to the iron? And what about the crooks he crafts for Shepherd? With the brittleness of iron, more than one had snapped, and the same could be said of the fleshing knives Tanner uses to scrape his hides. I cannot help but recall that when we first spoke about the Romans’ arrival, my father had said, “Changing wind brings new weather,” with all the optimism of a fruit tree in blossom.
Once the Romans stand to leave, my mother hands the one she assisted the linen-wrapped purple loosestrife and instructs him in caring for the drained wound. In the doorway, he turns to my father. “Your mate,” the Roman says, “she reminds me of a girl I once knew. The same grace.”
As they depart into crisp night air, my father stands in the doorway, his weight shifting toward the disappearing men, retreating, and then shifting again, caught between action and inaction, between endeavor and fear. In the end he follows the Romans into the clearing, and I look to my mother, whose palm shifts to her forehead as she beseeches Protector.
I sit on my hands at the firepit, silently count to one hundred, count a second time. When he finally returns, he looks as crestfallen as a wilted bloom.
“You followed the Romans?” my mother asks.
“Leave me be,” he says.
“But, Smith—”
“Enough,” he says with a sharpness he seldom uses, never with my mother.
She gathers the mugs in awkward silence, tilts the dregs into the fire, and I work up my nerve. “So dark,” I say, “so short, the lot of them. Do you think the claim about reheating iron is true?” I ask this even though I saw with my own eyes a blade bend under the Roman’s weight.
“Not now, Hobble,” my father says.
Fox strides into the roundhouse, his eyes bright, alive. “You”—he points at me—“over there.”
I shift to the spot alongside the firepit. Fox seats himself on the bench directly opposite me. Thighs splayed, elbows on his knees, he leans forward. “You’ll divine for me,” he says.
I say nothing.
“You’ll divine the outcome of a rebellion.”
“I can’t just . . . It doesn’t work like that.” Sweat rolls down the nape of my neck.
“Tell me, then, how it works?”
“I don’t know. I see things. They just come.”
“You’ll divine for me.” He rises.
My head wags right, left. I cannot.
He steps closer, puts his face near enough to mine that I feel the wet as he spits, “Seer or runt?”
I cannot deny a druid. I know this and yet my head continues—right, left. I am not able to lure a vision of whatever rebellion he contemplates.
His fingers coil into a tight fist. I brace for the blow that will come. But then he yanks my father’s dagger from the tabletop and touches it to my throat.
A cry escapes my mouth as I jerk back from the blade. Fox throws down the dagger. A warning, then: I am a runt and only a runt if I am unable to divine on command.
10.
HOBBLE
Six days have passed. I lie on my pallet unable to sleep, gaze fixed on the threadbare partition separating me from the firepit. The wool writhes with the light of the lapping flames, also the shadows of my parents, sitting on a bench in the glow. My father clears his throat—not his habit—and my ears prick.
“Another day without the iron trader,” he says.
The iron trader who usually takes my father’s wares to Hill Fort has not come in more than three moons. This, when the forge shelves buckle with the weight of the stockpiled ladles and small cauldrons, the three large bins of nails no trader has hauled away in his cart. This, when the stack of iron, from which my father crafts the wares, has dwindled to a measly three bars. This, when our household harbors a druid—one accustomed to plenty, an overlord who, in his oblivion, fishes the barley from the soup and snatches three of the four slices severed from a loaf.
“He’ll come,” my mother says. I cannot tell whether she believes it.
“Why come when wealth rains from the sky at Hill Fort? Why leave a marketplace full of traders supplying Viriconium?” He huffs. “I should speak to Hunter again.”
As First Man, only Hunter undertakes the trek to Hill Fort. It is his right, and he likes it that way. I have watched my father pace, after returning from the Hunter roundhouse, yet again denied permission to trade his own wares at Hill Fort’s marketplace.
“Hunter won’t allow it,” my mother says.
“Now, more than ever, he knows the advantage of keeping the tradesmen pinned to Black Lake.” I know by the shadows that my father’s shoulders rise, fall. Then his voice brims, full of promise, as he says, “I’ll petition Fox.”
“Smith,” my mother pleads, “it’s too dangerous. The Romans—”
“We’re to live on seven onions and a bit of barley?” My father, it appears, had found our storage vessel just as empty as I had when I lifted the lid.
We are desperate, yes, and that desperation propels my father to seek new opportunities. But I know it is also true that he longs to hammer something less mundane than ladles from iron and feels the frustration of living in a settlement that does not participate in Roman ways and the new prosperity brought to Britannia.
Her shadow palms open to the room. “You heard Fox say Roman warriors are in the marketplace,” she whispers.
“He said it was hearsay. And if they do squander their wages there, al
l the better for trade.”
“You know my feelings,” she says coolly.
They sit silent in their private furies a good while, until my father says, “You’re thinking of Arc, aren’t you?” and waves a shadow hand through the air. “Always on your mind.”
I imagine her pretty eyes losing their light.
“Smith”—her voice is tender now, soft—“you’re wrong.”
“You used to disappear in the evenings,” he continues, “make some excuse, and come back well past nightfall, always with red eyes and mud-caked shoes.”
I have heard the rumors—how my mother once wept and pounded her fists against the causeway’s timbers, grieving her first mate. How my heart aches that still my father feels the bruise of that earlier time.
“It’s been years—”
“You sigh in your dreams.” His voice cracks.
It makes me think poorly of my mother—that she should allow so good a man to feel as unloved as this.
“Oh, Smith.”
On the partition, I watch in silhouette as she puts a hand over his heart, as they move to the rushes of the earthen floor.
I close my eyes to their shadows. I hear breath deepening, quickening. I hear the rustle of rushes. In that unexpected tenderness, I hear an apology of sorts. An apology for the comfort too often withheld. For the aloofness that keeps my father uncertain. But I hear pleasure and love and hearts cracking open, too, a cradle song that lulls me gently into sleep.
* * *
—
As I approach the forge, my father straightens from stooping over his anvil and rolls the stiffness from his bad shoulder. His fingers prod a knot of hard muscle as Hunter comes into view with the scruff of a hare’s neck in his fist. “Smith,” he calls out, lifting the hare. “Bring home one of the these and you might have better luck expanding your brood.”
Hunter’s ridicule is without effect when just the evening before my mother had enticed my father to the rushes. Another time, though, spotting my father yawning, Hunter had called out, “You’re worn out like my mate,” and thrust his hips lewdly. Poof, and suddenly I glimpsed my father’s mind—a mind mired in thinking how there was always meat for Hunter’s mate’s cauldron, a wedge of wild boar to roast on the tip of a knife, how even Hunter’s fingers tracing his mate’s spine would be enough to entice her onto her back, her legs apart, her belly full of meat. My father pined for the same, with my mother. It was what he desired as he lay back on their pallet, her back often turned.
Should a maiden of thirteen be exposed to her father’s private longing? Might it disturb her in some way? Make her think poorly of him? I suppose I might think differently if my father yearned after someone other than my mother, but he does not. Besides, that glimpse had not corrupted me or even put ideas in my mind that I was incapable of imagining before it appeared. Buds swell behind my nipples, hair coarsens between my legs; I know without prophecy that I will soon bleed with a new moon. And like most any youth at Black Lake, with only a square of wool partitioning my sleeping alcove from my parents’, I have seen enough, have heard enough to have an idea of the act that binds woman and man as mates. I have known the sound of lovemaking, and its absence, too, all my life.
“Ready?” I call to my father. Even more so than before Fox, I anticipate our daily trek to the bog—a private interlude, a chance to learn his opinions of Fox and the Romans, to hear reassuring words. I have been reluctant to coax, but today as we cut through the woodland, he takes my hand and I find my voice. “Why has Fox come?”
My father slows, searches my face, which I make firm, insistent.
“Remember Fox saying the Romans were as thorough as blight in snuffing out the rebels?” he finally says.
“Those last holdouts against Roman rule.”
“That defeat might have made the druids desperate.”
The druids had incited the tribesmen to resist the Roman invasion; once that resistance failed, fear blossomed among the high priests. They fled the settlements and, rather than living among us, had ever since taken refuge on Sacred Isle. That small island sits beyond the highlands, just off the western coast of Britannia—the far extreme from the areas most fully inhabited by the Romans.
“First, Viriconium put Sacred Isle within easier reach of the Romans than ever before,” my father says. “And now, the conquered highlands leave it even more exposed.”
“The druids are desperate?” I say. “That’s why Fox is here?”
His lips press tight, and I know he is deliberating how much to say to a thirteen-year-old maiden.
“Tell me.”
“Look,” he says, “the other night Fox commanded you to tell him the outcome of a rebellion.” He pauses, and I force a nod. “It makes me think the druids are back in the settlements with the intention of inciting the tribesmen to rise up once again.”
I think how no tribesman is fool enough to raise steel against the Romans, how during the invasion we were throttled in two days. “Nothing will come of it,” I say and wait, expecting confirmation, but he does not respond.
“I’m setting out for Hill Fort in the morning,” he finally says. “It’s decided. I’ve got a glut of ironware and, now, another mouth to feed.”
Does desperation impair my father’s judgment? He will leave me to fend for myself?
“I petitioned Fox.”
“He agreed?”
“He wants to know about Romans at Hill Fort. I said I’d find out what I could.”
The beech and ash bordering the path have given way to the willow and alder that prefer moister earth, and I stand still, breathless, balanced on two stones, an effort to avoid soggy peat. I am to brave six days—three to walk to Hill Fort and another three to return—without my father’s watchful eyes? “But—”
“My father made the trek a hundred times,” he says. “He had commissions to deliver.”
He tells me how Chieftain once preferred the Smith forge above any other, how his father’s father’s father was trained by a long-ago chieftain’s blacksmith. It is a story I know well. Once that apprentice matched his master’s skill, he was dispatched to Black Lake to continue his trade in a place so remote that no raiding tribe would bother looting it. The Black Lake Smiths rose in stature with each brooch, each goblet, each sword produced, evermore securing the forge as the reigning chieftain’s sure choice.
My father’s face shines with ambition as he speaks—ambition that I know extends beyond trading the ironware bloating his shelves.
“Father?”
“I’ll bring along the bronze serving platter,” he says, “call on Chieftain while I’m there.”
Years ago my father showed me the platter he had crafted in his youth. As I traced my fingers over the raised swirls and inlaid red glass wreathing the rim, I asked why he had not traded it. He answered that he had not given up on Chieftain one day coming to Black Lake and, once he had seen the platter, ordering a commission.
No longer will my father stand idle, looking toward the horizon, awaiting fate. He will show his handiwork to the traders at Hill Fort. The platter he will reserve for Chieftain, who will take so impressive a piece in both hands and, full of desire, order a dozen goblets with adorned rims.
And then, on my father’s return, might the bog dwellers recall his father’s evenhanded counsel, the distinction of the Smith clan? The shift toward returned status, toward reestablishing himself as First Man, would happen simply—one day, my father would give an urn of thick soup to an ailing family; and another, parade an ox around the clearing and announce it as replacement for the ancient one. His opinion would be requested on the best day to harvest the wheat, whether the hawthorn berries were ready to be picked. He would find such satisfaction in the rise, in honoring his father, his clan, in providing amply for my mother and me, in ensuring Hunter never again dared say, “You’re worn out like m
y mate.”
My father wants more, and that want stirs the dread already roiling in my gut.
“At the very least,” he says, “I’ll trade the ironware clogging my shelves.”
“But Fox—” I blurt out.
He combs his fingers through my hair, slides his hand to the back of my head, pulls me to his ribs. And I feel his heartache—as palpable as that embrace.
“When will he leave?” I let my shoulders slump, my face hang. I know my childishness—the feeling that I want my world set right, to get my way. And yet I do not care. I want my father to stay put. “That night I showed him the cesspit—” I say, truly on the edge of tears.
He pulls back, looks at me with such intensity.
“I said the Romans would come in Hope”—I sputter out the words—“and he said liars have their tongues cut out and their mouths sewn shut.”
“Hobble?”
“He said I had eighteen days.”
His eyebrows draw inward. His lips compress.
“I know about the blind boy who was sacrificed,” I say. “Walker’s son. Lark.”
He takes hold of my shoulders. “You’ll go with me.”
I want to make the trek and fear Fox so much more than the Romans, who seemed almost like bog dwellers in their camaraderie at the firepit. I am certain, and yet I am only able to smile meekly. “But Mother?”
“The worst Roman is a lamb compared to Fox,” he says. “She’ll see that you’re better off with me.”
“And Fox? He’ll let me go with you?”
“I’ll tell him that you can follow the stars better than I.” He smiles. “It’s true enough.”
I throw my arms around his neck, and my feet leave the stones. They skitter over the slick surfaces on the way to settling into wet peat, but I am indifferent to soaked shoes.
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